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Wondrous Lands and Oceans	By : Lomonaaeren Category: Harry Potter > Slash - Male/Male > Harry/Draco Views: 10108 -:- Recommendations : 1 -:- Currently Reading : 1
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Chapter Three—Called to the Ocean

            “Because I don’t want to trust the winds to carry us that far.”

            Draco only looked at him. Harry sighed and ruffled a hand through his hair. “Yes, I know that the first night we spent here was windy enough to carry us pretty far, but that was all over the plains. For all I know, the magic changes drastically when it gets to the ocean. Do you want to take the chance and then find ourselves stranded there with no way back?”

            “Weasley could come with the brooms to find us then.” Draco’s hand idly traced over a bent grass stalk in the small hollow where they had taken to sleeping. Harry had asked Andromeda after the celebration that night if they could come home, but she had only picked up Teddy and turned away without speaking. “Or we could walk back.”

            “Through dangers that we don’t know a lot about, wasting time,” Harry said, and shook his head, squatting down beside Draco. “Hey. Do you want to tell me why you’re so opposed to taking the brooms to the ocean?”

            Draco stared at him again. Harry cocked his head and concentrated. But the thoughts that came back to him really were a formless boil, popping bubbles and crackling water and steam. He sighed. “I’m trying, but I can’t read it out of your head. I think that I’m too new at this, at really paying attention to you.”

            “But only a short while ago, you were thinking about what a horrible person you are because you paid too much attention to me,” Draco said, and stretched his arms over his head as though he wanted Harry to admire them. Harry watched them, pale skin on the one, Dark Mark on the other, and wondered as he answered whether Draco had wanted him to be horrified.

            “I’m confused. I’ll admit that. But both you and Andromeda made the point that I’ve been paying too little attention to things that really matter. I’m trying to remedy that. Right now, though? If you want me to understand why you think our flying the brooms away to the sea is a bad idea, you’ll need to tell me.”

            Draco recoiled, and this time his thoughts turned sharp as daggers, immediately before he said, “I haven’t given you any grounds to compare me to my aunt.”

            “You both want me to do something else,” Harry said, and sat down. “Maybe you’re right, this time. There could be a good reason for us to go to the ocean with wind instead of brooms. Will you tell me what it is?”

            Draco did some more glaring. Harry just waited. The thoughts that came to him still seemed wordless, wind that he had no way of translating, and the rustle of grasses that the mummid might make as they walked through it. Sooner or later, he thought, Draco would give up the pretense and talk to him.

*

            He could do it if he would only make the effort!

            But Harry sat there, and Draco had to admit that he would rather tell him the truth than wait for him to guess something he would never guess. He crouched down beside him. Harry tilted his head up, and Draco paused, raising a hand to stroke the hollow of Harry’s throat instead of half-strangling him the way he’d almost planned.

            Harry was trying. He didn’t seem to be deceiving Draco. And so Draco sank down beside him, and sighed.

            “We lost one broom the first time that we went out,” he said. “That could happen again. And we have a means to fly that the others don’t. They need the brooms more than we do. Until Weasley’s bird grows up, even she will.” He wondered if Harry could hear how much effort it was for Draco to keep the venom where Weasley was concerned out of his voice. He hoped so. “I would rather do this, because that way, it seems that we’re going of our own free will, and taking responsibility for anything that might happen to us, too. Not as though we’re depriving them of a resource they might need while we’re gone.”

            Harry reached out and took Draco’s face between his hands, fingers lightly smoothing over his cheeks. Draco shut his eyes in spite of himself. He narrowed all his concentration and focus down to nothing more than Harry’s thumbs and forefingers, the faint sweaty smell of them, the callus he could feel on one of the thumbs.

            “Thank you,” Harry whispered. “That is a good plan. And—and maybe if we’re away from the camp for a little while, that’ll give Andromeda a chance to think about you, and realize that you’re not harmful to Teddy, and you deserve a place in our house, too.”

            “If there’s trees near the ocean,” Draco said, opening his eyes, prompted by a deep, pale desire to go on dazzling Harry, “that means we might be able to build our own house. Of wood, no less, and with less effort than the ones we’ve constructed so far. Then we would have a place that Teddy could visit and where my aunt wasn’t welcome, in turn.”

            Harry half-smiled. “I can see the reason for that impulse, but don’t you think we should concentrate on who’s welcome rather than who isn’t?”

            Draco pushed his frustration at Harry, and Harry’s smile faded again as he nodded. “Yeah, all right. It makes sense. I’ll talk to Andromeda again before we leave; maybe I can bring her around.” He rolled away on the grass and scowled up at the sky. “I never wanted to cause a breach between her and Teddy, you know? Or make her feel like she had to defer to me. I don’t know how I drifted so much into taking care of Teddy, it just happened.”

            “That part,” Draco said, lying down so that he could splay his hand over Harry’s stomach and admire the way it looked, “is not true. I know from some of the memories I’ve seen in your head, and from the way that you defended him when we first came to Hurricane. He matters more to you than simply someone you protected by accident. Do you want to try telling me the truth?”

            Harry’s mouth tightened for a second, and then he reached out and took Draco’s hand, dragging it roughly towards his mouth. Draco rolled with it, but otherwise let his arm be extended, let Harry clasp and hold him.

            “I wanted to protect Teddy the minute I realized Remus and Tonks had died,” Harry whispered. “But I thought I would die in battle with—him, so I knew I couldn’t.”

            “Thank you for not saying the name,” Draco whispered, because he could say that aloud in return for Harry’s consideration.

            Harry looked at him, mouth tight and eyes dark the way they had so often been when they first came to Hurricane, and then nodded and looked away again. “You’re welcome,” he mumbled. “I just—I knew that I wanted nothing more than that when I came back. I wanted to give him the childhood I never had.”

            “In the wizarding world?” Draco asked delicately.

            Harry’s mind snapped out tendrils of purple and wound-green, but he nodded. “That, and in other ways. No one was going to tell him that they didn’t know who his parents were. And Andromeda can talk about Tonks, of course she can, she’s her daughter, but I don’t know how well she knew Remus. I’m the one who tells Teddy stories of his father.”

            “You’ve lived with Teddy and Andromeda for two years now,” Draco said quietly, and breathed down the side of Harry’s neck. Harry stirred, but didn’t turn his head away, so Draco smiled and spoke his next words into the same place. “Why don’t you know how well she knew Lupin?”

            Harry was silent. Draco did some more breathing and waiting, and Harry finally reached out and ran his fingers through Draco’s hair, so light and scratchy that Draco arched in spite of himself. Harry arched right back, and kissed him.

            Draco returned the kiss with some smugness and more joy—it was the first time Harry had acted as if the sexual side to the bond was something he could initiate, too—but pulled away and shook his head. “Don’t think that you’re actually getting out of talking about why you and my aunt aren’t close.”

            “I know,” Harry said, his voice deep and his eyes swirling with what looked like a dozen complicated emotions. Draco touched his mind and had to pull back, because it felt armed with knives. “But—the answer is that I don’t really know her. She vanished into her grief, and I would ask her to do things, and sometimes she did them.”

            “So you don’t know her as a person.” Draco rolled on top of Harry and pinned his hands to the ground because he could. Harry turned his fingers and ran them up the insides of Draco’s wrists, and Draco bucked down at him, his erection rubbing and rutting against Harry’s. “You didn’t try to know?”

            “I didn’t want to push her,” Harry said, and turned his head so that he could bite the side of Draco’s knee.

            Draco laughed a little, breathlessly. He was literally thin skin over hard bone there, and it wasn’t like Harry could manage to get a good grip. Sure enough, Harry pulled back without drawing blood and glared at Draco.

            “I went through some grief like that myself,” Harry muttered. “For Fred, for Tonks, for Remus. For Sirius and Dumbledore. Only not as close, because I never lost three members of my family, and all at once.”

            Draco slid downwards until their chins touched. “You could have pushed,” he whispered. “But you didn’t want to be the bad person. The evil one.” Harry’s body tensed beneath him, and Draco listened to that for once instead of the melee in Harry’s mind. At the moment, he didn’t know if Harry himself realized what he felt. “The Death Eater.”

            Harry shoved at him with his knees. “Are we going to fuck or not?”

            Draco kept murmuring things that Harry didn’t want to be as he conjured the lube onto his fingers, because it made Harry writhe, although Draco knew that was a combination of the words and his tone, and not all the writhing was the good kind. “The villain. The anti-hero. The one who took charge. The leader. The one who offered some kind of hope. The caretaker. The responsible one.”

            “Yeah, sometimes I don’t want to be that, although you’re wrong about the rest,” Harry said, and spread his legs so Draco fell down between them. “Come on.”

            And he kept his voice yammering as Draco entered him, his head whipping back and forth, his legs squeezing around Draco’s waist hard enough to make Draco bend down and gasp when Draco was finally inside him.

            “Hero,” Draco whispered as he began to move, shoving inside and feeling Harry gasp beneath him, more than he heard it. “Always the bloody hero, no matter what you do, no matter where you are—”

            He lost the words into a moan as Harry slammed his hips home, and he could feel Harry grinning up at him. “Who’s fucking, and who’s talking?” he demanded.

            Draco closed his eyes and gave himself up to the demands of his body. It felt so good, this steady dance with Harry beneath him and their joined breaths racing through their bodies and exploding out their lips, and when he reached out to Harry’s mind this time, it was smooth and full of light, and blazed in his hands for the moments before Harry reached orgasm and it simply exploded, flooding Draco with white light and tremendous heat.

            He slowly drew himself out of Harry when he realized that he was sprawled across him, and that his head and hands were dangling limply on Harry’s chest. He panted and licked his lips, and stared some more at Harry, who was starting to turn his head slowly back and forth, touching his lips as if he wondered why they were bloodied.

            “Someday,” Draco said, but then he couldn’t think of a good way to end that sentence, and lay down beside Harry, his arm curving over him instead. He could have performed Cleaning Charms, but he didn’t want to.

            Harry grunted, and closed his eyes. Draco lay there, thinking of all the many things they were and weren’t, until sleep claimed him, too.

*

            “That idea at least sounds a little less mad now that you’ve shown us you can fly.”

            Harry smiled at Hermione, and nodded to Draco. “It was Draco’s idea to show that we could do that,” he said, and felt the sweet, brief flash of light from Draco as he responded to Harry giving him credit. “The main thing I was concerned about was—well, do you think that it’ll make people worry about being undefended, if we leave like that?”

            “Not as much as it would have before we found the rabbits.” Hermione nibbled her hair as she drew it over her shoulder. Her face was streaked with sweat and dirt, but that wasn’t unusual, when she had been working in the greenhouses. Draco and Harry had worked there for a while beside her before Harry told her about their plan of going to the ocean, so at least no one could say they were skiving off. “And Ginny finding the ocean will help, too. Someone has to go explore it. I wish I could.”

            Harry traded rueful grins with her. Hermione had never been the best flyer, and it would take longer than the risk could justify for her to walk there.

            “We’ll bring back our memories, if nothing else,” he said. “And more plants, animals if we find them.”

            “I still have some of the vials that I could collect Potions ingredients in,” Draco said quietly. “I haven’t used them. They were more for sentimental value, since I doubted I would get the chance to brew here. But we can use them to preserve what we find.”

            Harry blinked at him, then reached out and put his hand on Draco’s knee. Draco covered Harry’s hand with his without looking away from Hermione.

            “That will limit the size of what you can collect, but it’s the best solution,” Hermione said, after a pause that all of them seemed to be waiting for to explode. “Well. Tell the others that you’re going, at least.”

            Harry nodded and stood up. “After you, Ron’s next.” They were going regardless, but he hadn’t spent much time with Ron lately, and he had the feeling that Ron would appreciate knowing almost first of all.

            Hermione abruptly flung her arms around him. “Be careful,” she whispered into his ear, while Harry was still choking on the hair thrust into his mouth. “We can’t lose anybody, but you—just be careful, Harry.” She stepped away, took a deep breath as though stepping off a cliff, and thrust her hand out towards Draco. “You too, Malfoy.”

            Draco took her hand as if it was a dead fish and dropped it immediately afterwards, but Harry knew Hermione didn’t care about that; she was beaming because he had touched her willingly in the first place. “I’ll keep him safe, Granger,” Draco said, expressionlessly, but with his mind going off in fireworks for Harry to feel. “He’s important to me.”

            Hermione nodded and turned back to her work. Harry glanced around the camp, but his winds, gamboling and bringing him sounds as they blew back and forth across the hills, had already told him Ron was over by the pool, practicing with some of the water purification spells Angelina had told them about. He started in that direction.

            “While you have your task,” Draco said suddenly, “I have mine.”

            Harry turned around and stared at him. Draco wasn’t eager to visit Ron, of course, as Harry could tell by the sullen churning in his emotions, but he hadn’t said that he had something else to do, either. “What do you mean?”

            Draco shrugged a little. “Every time we’ve talked to my aunt, you and I have been in company. I was thinking she might be a little more susceptible if I talked to her alone.”

            Harry bit his lip. He had nothing to say against the plan, because he knew Draco wouldn’t hurt Teddy, and Andromeda was unlikely to be much affected by anything Draco could say, except positively. “But what she’ll say to you…”

            “I wouldn’t have said anything about it unless I was willing to risk it,” Draco said, his mind snapping with violent purple bolts of lightning. “And you’re awfully tender of my honor now. Where you haven’t been before.”

            “I’m trying to pay more attention,” Harry snapped back. “If you hadn’t freaked out just now…”

            They spent a moment glaring at each other, and then Draco grunted and gestured with one hand to indicate that he was done with this silly argument if Harry was. “Go to your friend. I’ll talk to my aunt.”

            Harry squeezed Draco’s arm once, and walked towards the pool again. He might have made an excuse to come with Draco and see Teddy again, but he would say goodbye to him before he left, and Draco was right that so far, they’d been together every time Andromeda said insulting things to Draco.

            Thank you, Draco said, bright blue and gold clouding the emotions that he projected in Harry’s direction now.

            Harry blinked, shook his head, and found himself smiling long before he got to the point in his walk where it would have made sense to do so so that Ron could see him.

*

            “Aunt Andromeda.”

            Draco watched the way all the muscles in her back locked when he spoke. Of course, who did she have to call her that? Teddy was her grandson, and Narcissa hadn’t had contact with her for years before Draco’s birth, to hear her tell it.

            Andromeda was sewing a rent shut in a small green shirt, while Teddy played half-naked on the floor of the house, with a few clacking wooden pieces that the surviving Weasley twin had made into a puzzle for him. He squealed when he saw Draco and ran towards him with the puzzle. “Hi!” he said, and spent a moment looking around before he said, “Draco!”

            Draco picked Teddy up and held him close. He thought he could come to like being called “Draco,” even more than “Cousin Draco.” It meant that his relationship with Teddy was different than the one Teddy had with Harry.

Teddy grabbled and held him back, and gave him a sloppy kiss on one cheek. Draco put him down and opened his mouth, about to ask Teddy what he’d been doing.

“I hate it when I see you near him.”

            Draco tilted his head back and met Andromeda’s eyes deliberately. She looked nothing like his mother, he decided, except for some of the delicate bones in her face and the general heaviness of her hair. Much more like Bellatrix. He wondered how much she would hate the comparison if he made it, and decided to save it for a moment when he really wanted to irritate her. “Why don’t you go play, Teddy?” he asked.

            “You come play.” Teddy tugged on Draco’s hand with both of his, and succeeded in staggering Draco a little; he wasn’t expecting it. He saw the faint smile on Andromeda’s face before she bent over the sewing. Well, perhaps that was a good thing. Perhaps it would make her see him as human.

            “In a little while, Teddy,” Draco said, and patted him on the shoulder. “Go take apart your toy for me.”

            Teddy ran back to do that, and Draco turned and sat with his legs folded beneath him, facing Andromeda. Her hands were already gathering clumsily, and she ducked her head and flinched when Draco spoke.

            “You don’t like me,” Draco said. “That’s fine, actually. But you don’t get to take my cousin away from me, or Harry.”

            Andromeda ripped a stitch. Then she said, in a voice so low and filled with fury that Draco found himself liking her better already, “You weren’t here for the first two years of his life. You don’t know how I raised him.”

            Draco smiled at her. “From what Harry said, he was the one who did most of the raising. Oh, not that he phrased it like that,” he added, courteously, as Andromeda’s hands tightened on the thread and needle even more. “But it was perfectly obvious around the corners of his words. If anything, Harry doesn’t give himself enough credit for his own good efforts.”

            Andromeda shook her head. “I’m still Teddy’s grandmother. Harry—he’s helped, enormously, and Teddy would be devastated if you took him away.” She smoothed down the shirt she held and looked up.

            “Where was your side of the family?” she whispered. “When did you want to visit Teddy, talk about him, or even express sympathy that my daughter was dead? You wouldn’t have cared Teddy was alive if you hadn’t happened to come to Hurricane with us. There’s nothing you can do to make up for those years of neglect. Those years and years.”

            “I didn’t know you or my cousins were alive, no,” Draco said. “My mother didn’t talk about you, and we wouldn’t have dreamed of visiting. But isn’t the point of coming through the gate to let go of old grudges? You’ve seen the way that Harry and I have managed to do that, rather spectacularly, I might add.”

            Andromeda hunched her shoulders. “You’re going to disrupt it,” she whispered. “We were fine, we were happy, before you came along.”

            Draco shrugged. “Maybe you were. I don’t tend to trust what Harry says about it, because Harry would think he was happy no matter what, as long as he got to be with Teddy. I know how much part of coming to Hurricane was him thinking that it would be better to raise Teddy here than in the wizarding world. But now I’m here, and I want a relationship with my cousin.” He paused delicately, but Andromeda never looked up. “I want a relationship with my aunt, come to that, if she’ll give me one.”

            Andromeda did look up then. “All I see when I look at you is your father,” she said, “telling me that my daughter deserved to die, the one time that we ran into each other by accident after Nymphadora was born. All I can see is your mother, telling me that I could still use a slow poison on my husband and no one would suspect, that she could help me.”

            Draco blinked. He hadn’t known about either of those things. Active prejudice was going to be harder to work on than the passive prejudice against Muggleborns that he had assumed his parents were projecting.

            “Neither of them is here,” he said at last. “I am. Neither of them will ever come through the gate. I did. You might consider how much good you’re doing by denying the blood connection I have with Teddy and the bond I have with Harry.”

            “You still sneer his name,” Andromeda told her sewing. “Even when you’re caressing it. It’s awful to listen to.”

            Draco sighed and stood. “Then don’t have a relationship with me, if you don’t want to. But I want you to know that I won’t accept being blocked from Harry and Teddy. And I don’t think Harry will accept it, either.” He paused, then added, “You might consider that you’re going to drive Harry away far more effectively than I will.”

            More hunching. Draco came out of the house shaking his head, and waved goodbye to Teddy, who was still trying to figure out how to take his puzzle apart.

            I’m sorry, came Harry’s voice from the other side of camp.

            Draco sent a shrug in that direction, too. It’s fine. Why don’t you take me up while you say goodbye?

            Wisely, Harry didn’t question that. He sent a wind instead, and Draco stretched his arms up, let it scoop him away, into the sky and the future.

*

            SP777: Using their wild magic does turn out to be a good idea. At least some other people have it now, so they aren’t so unique that they’re frightening the others more than anything.

            unneeded: They have to control it, more than anything. Being conscious of the changes lets them notice when they’re happening.

            Yes, Ginny is making contributions!

            The Ministry didn’t send them out as colonists. These are emigrants—people the Ministry didn’t really want to convince to stay, except for Harry, because they saw them as troublemakers. They’re indifferent as to whether they succeed or die.
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Wondrous Lands and Oceans