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Here to Live and Die	By : Lomonaaeren Category: Harry Potter > Slash - Male/Male > Harry/Draco Views: 5833 -:- Recommendations : 1 -:- Currently Reading : 2
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Chapter Three—The Thunderrin

            “I went a long way south when I left you,” Primrose said, hunching over a little as one of the thunderrin nearly dripped juice on her from the slice of meat it was holding. Draco smiled in spite of himself at that—well, all right, not really in spite of himself, but in spite of the quelling look that Harry directed at his back. “I didn’t want to go anywhere near the places where the birds hunted, and I had noticed they often flew north when they turned away from human camps.”

            Harry blinked behind him, Draco could tell. Nice of her to tell us that, Draco remarked down the bond.

            Hush, Draco, Harry said, but Draco knew that he was reconsidering some of the things he had believed about Primrose. That was all to the good, Draco thought. If she thought she could show up to face an unknown enemy and find someone weak there, something that would allow her to remain the ultimate power on Hurricane, then she deserved to be discomfited and made to think again.

            It won’t do us any good to quarrel with her.

            I think we should merely remind her that we deserve to be considered as real, too, and a challenge to her power, Draco said innocently. He saw Harry roll his eyes before he turned away, but Draco was confident that he had made his point.

            “I saw a thunderrin a few days out from your camp.” Primrose’s voice hushed, and she reached back to put one hand on the wing-flap of the one she’d ridden. “I didn’t know what it was at first. It looked like a cloud, and I thought there must be a light behind it to make it shine that way. But then it turned towards me, moving across the wind, and—” She straightened her shoulders. “I’m not ashamed to admit I ran.”

            Really? Draco asked Harry. She looks ashamed to admit it.

            “The thunderrin followed me,” Primrose said, and her tone had become so dreamy, her eyes so unfixed, that Draco didn’t think she noticed the way Harry poked him in the back. Draco rubbed the small of his back and sniffed. If Harry wanted to be that violent in front of their new allies, then Draco reckoned it was his prerogative. “That terrified me more. Now I know that it could sense my mind and wanted to know what it was. I was the first thinking creature it had seen—the first one that wasn’t a thunderrin, I mean.”

            “They can sense your thoughts?” Harry asked, raising his eyebrows. “For something more than creating illusions to match your fears, I mean? I wasn’t sure, they seemed so silent.”

            Primrose smiled thinly. “It’s true that they can’t make sounds aloud, the way that your riders can,” she said, gaze passing briefly over Open Wings. Draco wondered if she knew how unpleasant she sounded when she talked about “your riders,” as if the beasts they rode were in fact Harry and the other humans in the camp. “But they know, yes. If you haven’t felt the touch of their minds yet, it’s probably because they don’t recognize you as thinking beings.”

            “But they recognized you right away?” Draco muttered. He could not have helped himself if Harry was standing ready with a spear to poke into his back. It was an inconsistency in Primrose’s story, anyway, that the thunderrin had felt her thoughts but couldn’t sense the thoughts of any other human.

            Somehow, although her nose wasn’t very long or prominent, Primrose looked down it at him. “They recognized someone who was paying attention to them,” she said coolly. “And someone who could bond with them. It’s possible that your own bond shuts your mind to the touch of their thoughts.”

            Draco grinned at her. “Well, let’s see.” He turned to the great, billowing creature “seated” beside Primrose. “Can it reach out and touch my mind now, if I’m trying to leave my thoughts open to it?”

            Primrose glared a little, but Draco didn’t care. They were the ones who had come north as invaders, expecting to find someone else here, since they had felt the destruction of Bodiless. They were the ones who had been arrogant enough to think they would always have the advantage in every situation. They deserved to be punished a little for that arrogance.

            And Draco still found it creepy that they hadn’t heard a sound out of either the thunderrin or the humans who had ridden this far on their backs. Surely the bonding hadn’t taken away the humans’ tongues. What kind of people were they, the ones who would trust Primrose to lead them and not even try to contribute their own stories of how they had bonded with the thunderrin?

            “I suppose it would be a worthwhile experiment,” Primrose finally said, when it became clear that Harry wasn’t going to stop Draco and no one else was moving forwards to interfere in either capacity. She laid her hand on the thunderrin’s wing and glanced up with the first expression of trust and hope and love Draco had ever seen on her face, presumably asking it to try and speak to Draco. Draco thought her sickening.

            Harry poked Draco in the back again at the same time as Draco felt something creeping along the outside of their bond, something thick and slimy, like mold dripping down the wall of a bathroom. He flinched once, then tried to hold himself still and receptive.

            It must feel different to Primrose, he told Harry. No one could endure this sensation all the time if they felt it the way it really is.

            He used the knowledge that Harry had rolled his eyes to strengthen himself as he tried to crack his instinctive defenses and open them to the thunderrin. One long, slimy tendril dipped inside and brushed against his thoughts.

            What Draco encountered was speed, thoughts like ripping winds, brief access to a mental sky full of racing clouds and strange colors that had no names. He gasped aloud, and felt the brief exhilaration that he sometimes did when Harry’s winds were first lifting him off the ground, the shudder in the middle of his thoughts that combined the fear of falling and the sure knowledge that Harry wouldn’t let him fall.

            Then the sensation vanished. Draco opened his eyes slowly, luxuriously, taking his time. Primrose still sat with one hand on the wing of her thunderrin, staring at him.

            “I felt you,” she whispered. “He was the one who touched you, but I felt you in the middle of our bond.” She shivered and huddled a little closer to her thunderrin.

            “Maybe that will remind you that you’re not the ultimate power here,” Draco said. He would have said it silently most of the time, but he saw no reason to let Primrose rest on her confidence, and the best way to address that was now, when a crack had already appeared in it.

            Primrose tilted her head back, biting her lip ferociously. “I didn’t think it would be like that,” she said. “And…I think I felt some of your bond at the same time.”

            “Oh?” Harry asked mildly, clasping the middle of Draco’s neck. Draco became aware that he had started to rise to his feet. He didn’t even know what he would have done. His impulse was to punch Primrose, but he couldn’t, not in front of her people and not with that giant, rippling thunderrin there. But he sat back down and growled at her only a little.

            “Yes,” Primrose said. “How can you stand that? The feeling of being bound to someone with cords that tight? Every emotion, every thought sensed and shared. You might even pick up on things the other person didn’t intend you to feel.”

            “Isn’t your bond like that?” Draco asked. He couldn’t say, from his brief glimpse of it, but most of the bonds they’d met on Hurricane, including the one between the riders and their beasts, and between Ginny and her bird, seemed to be connected closely enough that of course they felt and thought what their partner thought and felt. The mummidade were close enough to become one person when they joined new individuals to an already existing pair.

            Primrose shook her head furiously. “They invite us into their sky,” she said. “Into the place where we can understand them. We can go there or leave again any time we want. And it’s the same with the rest of us,” she added, finally jerking her head back at the other humans who had come with her as if she was just now deigning to notice them. “We don’t need to speak aloud when we’re with the thunderrin, because we can understand their silence, and it’s comfortable for us.”

            Draco grunted a little. That was less creepy than some of the explanations he’d imagined for their silence, including that they were essentially puppets for the human who had bonded to the leader of the thunderrin. But although Primrose might have seized the lead, he thought, studying the calm faces staring at them now, perhaps that was less important than she thought.

            “Do the thunderrin live in groups?” Granger asked. Draco became aware of her quill scratching for the first time, and rolled his eyes. Of course she was writing it all down. He wondered if she had been all this time and he hadn’t noticed, or if she’d had to wait until quill and parchment could be brought to her.

            “Yes,” said Primrose. “And no. They come together when they sense that there’s danger.” She looked pointedly back at the thunderrin dotted all over the meadow like trapped clouds. “They also want to talk to each other sometimes and help each other, the way any humans would. But they usually eat apart, and now that they’ve bonded to us, they feel less loneliness than they used to, so there are fewer pure thunderrin gatherings.”

            “Why do they bond?” Granger asked, voice as crisp as though she was asking someone about a new Potions recipe. “Is that something they did before you found them, and did they bond to others of their own species? Do they want to bond, or did it happen naturally when they discovered a human mind they liked?”

            “I don’t know all the answers to those questions,” Primrose said, and her small scowl had come back. “But I do know they bond because they like the feeling of our minds. I don’t think they need it for safety, or they would have done it before now, when this creature that you destroyed was existing and could have destroyed them.”

            Well, that’s encouraging, isn’t it? Harry asked Draco. She at least knows that bonding would have kept them safe against Bodiless, and no one had to tell her that.

            Why are you so determined that she be good? Draco asked, exasperated almost beyond his endurance. Even the glimpse of the thunderrin’s mind that he’d shared with Harry wasn’t worth Primrose’s arrogance and the way she constantly tried to change things so that they were centered back on her. We got along fine without her. We would get along fine without her and her new allies now, or we could fight them if we had to.

            I’m so tired of war.

            The avalanche of emotions that came pouring along with that made Draco wince. Weariness like mud, and bleak despair like mountain tops crumbling, and anger like Bodiless itself. Draco swallowed, and wondered if perhaps Harry could have used more time to recover from the war against the Dark Lord before he went chasing off to Hurricane to face the challenges here.

            I don’t want another war, Harry said, and modified the pressure he was putting on the bond a little, so that now it was just like looking across a flat and pounded grey plain of mud. That’s all. Pandering to her pride for a little while is worth it if we can get her out of here without starting a conflict.

            Draco shrugged. After what Harry had just handed him, he would be a fool, in a way, if he disagreed. But he did wish there was some way of preserving Harry’s pride, along with Primrose’s.

            “I learned about others who had bonded with the thunderrin after I had bonded with mine,” Primrose said. Her eyes were traveling back and forth between Harry and Draco’s faces as if she sensed that they were upset, or at least that one of them was, but didn’t yet know what to do about it. “I didn’t know what to say to them at first. Should we band together? Would it be better to go on existing apart?

            “But I needed other humans as companions, too, so in the end we started living together. It wasn’t easy, but I found people who knew what plants of the plains were edible, along with me knowing how to catch those shadow-rabbits. We worked together, pooled our knowledge. In the end, we started to form a society that can eat well.”

            “Would you mind sharing that knowledge with us?” Harry asked. “We still don’t have much in the way of plants that grow on Hurricane that we can eat. Most of our food comes from Earth plains, or the meat that the riders are good enough to harvest and share with us.”

            Primrose had a stiff little smile that Draco didn’t remember seeing on her face when she was sheltering with them in their camp to the south. Of course, she had spent most of the time that she was with them terrified out of her wits, which Draco reckoned probably had something to do with that. “What will you give us in return?”

            “I have no idea what you would need.” Harry kept his stance relaxed, easy, open, and the way he leaned forwards to look at Primrose was confiding in the extreme. “Do you need more meat? The secrets of bonding with different species? An introduction to the mummidade, because they might help you in the south if you know more about them?”

            “You said that we can’t have what would be most valuable,” Primrose said, raking a hand through her hair and leaning her arm on the wing of her thunderrin again. “The knowledge that we’re the supreme power.”

            Harry half-closed his eyes. Draco thought he was praying for patience at first, but the thrum that came through the bond didn’t resemble that.

            And soon, he knew.

            All around him and Harry, the whirling winds began to rise. They encircled Harry, singing in Draco’s hair, too, until he thought the pressure would make his eardrums burst. He winced as he covered his ears.

            “When Bodiless died,” Harry said, without raising his voice or getting up from where he sat, “we discovered that he was the gateway through which the magic of Hurricane flows. It comes from somewhere else. He wasn’t its source, just the door that it was using to get into the world and reach the other various species.” He opened his eyes and turned his head, focusing so hard on Primrose that Draco flinched reflexively for her. “I inherited that position as the gateway, maybe because I was one of the people in the primary bond that played a part in defeating him.”

            Draco snorted a bit. It was at least comforting to see that Harry would claim credit for himself if it meant defeating Primrose’s pretensions.

            Harry kicked him a little down the bond, and continued, “I don’t think there is anything on Hurricane more powerful than that. Than that position, I mean, not that something else couldn’t be more powerful than me. If you wanted it, then you should have come up here earlier and defeated Bodiless.” He smiled fiercely at Primrose. “As it was, you came north too late. Sorry.”

            Primrose stared at him in silence. Draco didn’t think it was the silence of disbelief, especially with the way she leaned against her thunderrin and closed her eyes for a second. Then she snapped her eyes open again and shook her head a little. “You understand that I want some confirmation of this?” she asked.

            Harry shrugged. “I don’t know what confirmation I can give you that you’d believe or accept,” he said, lounging back against Draco as though Draco was his own thunderrin. Draco considered that for a second, and decided that it wasn’t as bad as it could have been. “You’ve already seen my wind magic, and I haven’t increased in power. What would convince you?”

            Primrose sat silent, staring down at the meat in her hand that she hadn’t finished. Her thunderrin nudged her with one rippling part of its body that looked like a wing at some times and like a part of its back at others, and Primrose started and handed up what remained of the food. The thunderrin ate it with a gulp that was audible, the first noise that any of them had made except the booming and flapping of their wings on the wind. Draco concealed a snicker. At least someone in their partnership was concerned with something more valuable than keeping the ridiculous amount of prestige Primrose had apparently decided should be hers.

            “You must know something about magic if you’re the gateway,” Primrose said, looking up. “But you were surprised when the thunderrin came here.”

            “I hadn’t seen them before,” Harry said calmly. “I have to interpret what I’m getting in terms of what I’m familiar with. It’s like trying to describe a color that you’ve never seen before in terms of blue and green. You could show it to people once you knew it, but you can only give unsatisfactory descriptions of it until then.”

            Primrose nodded. “But now you know what the thunderrin look like, so you ought to be able to describe them.”

            “Maybe,” Harry said. Draco could see the way his eyes narrowed, and sent back a pulse that he hoped warned Harry to be cautious. He didn’t know what Primrose wanted any more than Harry did, but it was suspicious that she had suddenly thought of a test that would satisfy her.

            “So tell me how many thunderrin cross the southern plains,” Primrose said. “That would convince me that you can reach out and feel them, feel their magic.”

            Harry rolled his eyes. “And do you know how many there are?” he asked. “You said that the thunderrin don’t even stay together all that often. Yours might not be able to tell you the number. And what about the ones who’ve moved and are over the ocean or in the eastern plains? And south of what? The camp we were in? The place you came from?”

            Primrose’s lips pinched shut. “Why should I trust what you say, if you can’t prove it?” she asked.

            “Come up with a test that I could fail or pass, and I’ll be happy to tell you anything you like,” Harry said, although Draco heard the brittle breaking in the back of his voice. He didn’t blame Harry at all. It seemed as though it was impossible to get Primrose to shut up and leave, and this would be another failure.

            “I can’t,” Primrose admitted, after a few minutes of tapping her nails against the ground and apparently thinking, although Draco didn’t think the activity in her head ran to any great purpose. “Every time I think of something, there’s always a possible objection.” She frowned and peered at Harry. “What convinced you that you were the gateway?”

            “I can strengthen other people when I’m nearby,” Harry said. “And change the way that the power flows, maybe.” He would have said more, but Draco rested his hand on his arm. Harry paused, then said down the bond, You’re right. I do think that I could weaken people as well as give them new gifts if I altered the flow of the magic enough, but there’s no need to give Primrose ideas.

            What you said might already be enough to do that, Draco said, with a wary glance at Primrose, whose face shone.

            “Can you?” Primrose asked. “That’s marvelous. It means that you could give us weapons when the storm comes.” She glanced into the meadow, her eyes lingering on what Draco thought for a second were Granger’s greenhouses, but when he turned his head and tried to look as she was looking, he saw that she had focused on Andromeda’s silver houses. “Or places to shelter. Or weapons against the birds.” She cocked her head at Harry. “You’re right, I didn’t want to believe you at first. It means that we’re less powerful, and I promised my people and the thunderrin that we would be the strongest so we didn’t have to be frightened ever again. But if you can give us the means of being strong…”

            “I don’t know exactly how it works,” Harry said. “When I was around Draco before, he cut holes in the wall of a tent, but that’s—I didn’t intend for him to, exactly. I still need to learn my way around this, and figure out what’s possible and what’s not.”

            “But that’s the nature of the bargain you could make with us,” Primrose insisted, and this time she leaned near enough to almost fall in Harry’s lap. Draco bristled, but Harry reached out and ran his hand up and down Draco’s arm from the shoulder, which Draco had to admit was soothing. “If you want us to leave. Promise that you’ll help strengthen us the way that you’re helping to strengthen the camp.”

            Harry stood up stiffly. Draco thought he was the only one who knew the turmoil in Harry’s mind, much less its cause. Harry hadn’t wanted to be the leader, had hated it when Granger told him he was the gateway to the wild magic because it might put him back in charge, and now here Primrose was forcing that view on him.

            “Stop it,” Draco told her harshly.

            Primrose stared at him. “Stop what? What do you mean?”

            “Stop acting as though you have the power to force us to do anything,” Draco said. The bond between him and Harry was as tough as strung silver wire, but he didn’t think that Harry would turn around and stop him. Good. Draco could say what everyone else was too cowardly to. “You’re saying that Harry has to help you so you’ll go away. Or what? You’ll stay here? You’ll fight us? What right do you have to do that?”

            “I was part of your group, once,” Primrose began, her voice soft in the way Draco had heard his Aunt Bellatrix’s go when she was plotting murder.

            “And now you’re not,” Draco said. “You walked away of your own free choice. We let you go. Why do you get to come in and tell us how we should live? Why do you get to threaten to bring war on us with your thunderrin? What’s wrong with you going back south and living the way you want to live, while we stay here and do as we please?”

            Primrose’s face was changing in complicated ways. Draco wondered if she was in communication with her thunderrin, and wished he could listen in only because he wanted to know what mad thing she would do next. He really didn’t care to feel that slime in his own mind again. “Because we are together, and armed,” she said at last.

            “With magic,” Draco said, leaning forwards enough that Primrose reared back a little. “The same way we are. Are you really going to turn this into a war? Will you insist on that? Because we fought a war with Bodiless, and we’re bloody tired of antics like yours.”

            And that was how they sat, with Primrose staring at them, and Draco knew the next moment could turn into a battle that would harm them. But he had said his words, spoken his mind, and through the bond came Harry’s soft, tense whisper of gratitude.

*

            HarryDracoSeverus: Thank you!

            SP777: Well, now Draco has challenged her to prove it.
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Here to Live and Die