Adult-FanFiction.org : Harry Potter

Wondrous Lands and Oceans	By : Lomonaaeren Category: Harry Potter > Slash - Male/Male > Harry/Draco Views: 10108 -:- Recommendations : 1 -:- Currently Reading : 1
Disclaimer: I do not own Harry Potter. I am making no money from this fanfic.

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Chapter Four—On Wings of Wind

            “Slow down.”

            Draco had said that a few times, but the wonderful thing about being connected with the bond, as Harry discovered now, was that they could tell what the other person meant when they concentrated enough. At least, Harry could with spoken words. Draco could probably do it with Harry’s unconscious thoughts, and soon he would be predicting his dreams.

            Draco gave an annoyed hiss. Harry shrugged back at him across the miles of air, and touched his mind again. Yes. It glowed golden and a faint peach color, like dawn in a distant land. Harry grinned. He thought he had the right to feel smug. Dangerous as this was, and under his control as it was, Draco liked it.

            Draco lashed him back with visions of all the things Harry had done that he hadn’t liked, and Harry rolled his shoulder and continued plunging ahead, wreathing Draco with visions of clouds and light and wind.

            The winds came to play with him here, dancing in the storm-blue sky that tinted to twilight at the edges with the evening coming on. They’d been flying all day, and still they had seen nothing but golden waves of grass, sometimes waving as the mummid danced and jumped across them in glimpses of white, but mostly bowing to the wind.

            Harry wondered what the Unspeakables who had explored these magical worlds had thought, when they first set foot here. Did they value the world as much as Harry did? Did they tilt their heads back to the magnificent breezes and think about them blowing on a very different kind of wizard, one who would live here in harmony with the landscape and not as an enemy to it?

            They were idiots for not feeling the wild magic in the wind. And the Ministry always wanted to control everything. They wouldn’t be able to imagine someone wanting to live in the way that we do.

            Harry tilted his head, for a moment wondering if that was Draco’s thought or his own, and then nodded agreement. Their minds tilted and balanced and clashed, and then Draco’s thoughts slid free and resumed their track that complemented Harry’s but wasn’t the same thing. Harry smiled into the distance. He could guess that independence of mind—not forsaking the bond, but also not mixing up which thought belonged to who—was as important to Draco as it was to him.

            I’ve been wondering why so many people jumped at the chance to leave the wizarding world. I know the Ministry wanted to get rid of trouble-seeking elements and wanted to get rid of critics, but they couldn’t have anticipated that as many people would want to leave as did. And the more I think of it, the more I think it was a stupid plan, because their really dedicated critics wouldn’t leave and give up the chance to keep criticizing them.

            Harry turned over on his back and watched the darting, flat, thin clouds as he replied. They wanted to distract attention, that’s all. They could have done this in the past if they’d put the magic and resources behind it. But they did it when they did to create a media spectacle and take some attention off the trials.

            Draco remained silent as the clouds for long moments, while they wheeled and ducked and dived. Then he said, That makes more sense than I wanted to imagine. Then who were the people without the personal reasons to emigrate that we did?

            Harry flipped over and did a looping circle the way he used to do on his broom, closing his eyes. This was better than flying on anything but the Firebolt Sirius had given him, and since that one’s shattering, it was better than anything. People who were tired, like we were. There were more of them than you’d think. The Ministry has the power to ignore the opinions of people who are apathetic or leaving, but the ones in power are a small group. We could have overwhelmed them if we wanted to. The problem is…we just didn’t care enough about the wizarding world.

            For a moment, his mind clouded, but Draco sent the clouds fleeing with another derisive sniff. You saved them once. You did more than enough.

            Harry nodded. And the other part of it is the war. That tainted the wizarding world for a lot of us, fairly or unfairly.



            He was silent for some time, and then Draco said, You have changed since you came here, you know. Guilt over what you left behind wouldn’t even have occurred to you when we arrived. You were focused then on protecting Teddy, and I don’t believe that anyone could have talked you out of it.

            Harry nodded, but kept his eyes fastened ahead. That doesn’t mean I’ll ever not want to protect him.

            The disgusted sigh could probably have made a lot of the hair on his head go flat, if Draco had wanted to expend the breath to make the sound aloud. That’s not what I meant. Of course you’ll want to protect him. No one would ever try to make you not want that.

            Harry said nothing, but Draco could pick up on the suspicion well enough. No, not even me. Not even in the times when I was the most obsessed with you. I think it helps that he’s my cousin. That’s a relationship that I can—accept, in a way. It makes sense to me that you would want to be with him.

            Harry nodded back, in the slow way that Draco probably wanted him to fly. Thank you. Sometimes I thought that no one else would understand that. My friends know that I love Teddy, but they still thought I was tying myself down and taking on too much responsibility too early.

            If that was all you did, then I would agree with them. But you also hunt and use your wind magic to defend the camps and fuck me. So that’s a variety in your activities.

            Harry laughed aloud, and it sounded strange. But he held a hand back to Draco, and Draco cut one of the winds that Harry had sent to hold him up and fell to a height that meant he could touch Harry’s. He had no claws on it this time, and his fingers brushed gently up and down Harry’s palm, thrilling Harry with the sense of muted power.

            You love the wild magic. Although you don’t admit it much.

            “Yes,” Harry said, again aloud, not because he had to but because he thought the words deserved that kind of weight. “I do.”

            Their little bubble of privacy and silence encircled them for some minutes before Draco twitched away again, and Harry sent wind to support him. They flew on, the grass of Hurricane tossing beneath them, the plains rippling away into the golden distance.

*

            They slept one night on the way, in a deep hollow sheltered among higher hills. Draco watched the small stream that splashed down and formed a large pool in the bottom of the hollow, and thought this might have been where they should have chosen to make their camp.

            Harry only shook his head when Draco suggested that. “There might be reasons to move our camp closer to the ocean,” he said. “Depending on the kinds of food and other resources that we find there. But this hollow is too small to hold everyone. Someone would have to build on the outside of the hills, and there goes our best defensive resource.”

            Draco sniffed. He could have said something biting about precious Weasleys and their precious privacy and how they didn’t appear to realize that they were living in a world that didn’t have as many luxuries now, but he didn’t.

            Besides, he was just as happy to have some distance between himself and the rest of them when he wanted to be alone with Harry.

            They flew on, and around mid-afternoon—or so Draco thought; sometimes it was hard to make sense of Hurricane’s days, with fewer hours of daylight but a much longer dawn and twilight—Draco pulled up, staring down. Harry, who’d been occupied into staring dreamily ahead into the blue as always, pulled up and looped back when he noticed that Draco was no longer keeping pace with him.

            “What…” And then even Harry’s voice trailed away when he saw the flowers in bloom.

            They flew along in silence above them, those fields of flowers that rippled up and down as though someone was beneath them and blowing on them, although Draco knew it was only an effect caused by the wind and their very light and feathery petals. They looked as tall as the grass they had replaced, and their color was a sort of white-silver that had made Draco pause at first, because he had thought it might be the foam shining on the edge of the ocean. He stared, and he shook his head, and he wondered what he could say.

            “Ginny didn’t mention this,” Harry murmured. “I wonder why not?”

            As much as it would have cheered Draco to hear that Harry was beginning to share his suspicions of Girl Weasley and how bloody gracious she seemed all the time, he knew this wasn’t the sort of thing that should make him suspicious. Draco shook his head. She was flying too high. She never reported those ranges of hills we saw yesterday, either.

            Harry nodded, his greedy eyes still fastened on the flowers. “We have to go down and gather some of the heads and seeds for Hermione,” he said, and dived.

            Draco followed because the wind tugged him in that direction, but he did manage to say, And because it might be useful to feed the rest of the camp, too, and keep the rest of us alive.

            Harry waved a hand back at him to say that he understood that reason but wasn’t impressed by it, and pulled up like a diving hawk not far from the tops of the flowers. Draco watched, and swallowed back the saliva that would otherwise have flooded his throat. They didn’t have time for that right now.

            Harry, at least, shot him a brilliant smile accented by a blush, to say that he understood and was flattered, and then went to work pinning and examining the flowers with his winds before he gestured to Draco to cut them. The basic shape of the flower-head was a sort of star, Draco thought, four large silky petals, as transparent as gauze, pointing a little off true to the four points of the compass. In the middle were much more numerous but smaller petals, a little thicker in color and texture, making the flower spark and shine white and silver. Draco reached down and caressed one before he cut the stem, and it felt like true silk against his skin. That made him wonder if they could harvest them for clothes. The mummid certainly weren’t going to give them any wool.

            We can think about that, said Harry, with an approving caress of wind, and then Draco went to work cutting the flowers.

            By investigating beneath the heads, they found that seed pods were carried in tightly curled leaves under the petals. Draco wondered how they reproduced, if the seeds were pollinated yet or not. Perhaps they were, and the flowers simply opened at some point and threw them all to the winds. The storms of Hurricane would carry them far enough.

            Harry abruptly jerked his head up beside him. Draco frowned at him, wondering if one of his thoughts had triggered Harry’s fears about betraying his friends, or leaving them behind, or something. That seemed to be what he feared most at the moment.

            “What is it?” he asked, when Harry’s mind remained murky and reaching out to him got him nothing but a sharp reprimand.

            “Don’t you hear the winds?” Harry turned his head to face him, and Draco recoiled a little before the glaze of his bright eyes.

            “No,” Draco snapped back. “That isn’t my sort of magic, and you know it.” He gestured with his hand down his body; he was hovering on an eddying current at the moment that kept him basically in the same place, with little bobbing motions, and it wasn’t like he could have created that himself.

            “The winds,” Harry whispered. “The winds are moving.”

            A moment later, before Draco could even think the word, Harry nodded. “Storm coming,” he said, and set about stuffing the pods and the flower heads they’d gathered in the empty pouches some of the Weasleys had given him for collecting fish.

            Draco moved as rapidly, his gaze going in all directions before he spotted the dark blue that indicated the storm. It was right above them, and lowered like a cloud as he watched. “Are they supposed to do that?” he demanded, staring.

            “Come down from above?” Harry didn’t look up from the flowers he was continuing to gather. “Not exactly. But in this case, I can hear the winds singing. They’re celebrating it. The worst storms come when they’re high in the sky like that.”

            Draco grimaced. “Celebrating,” he said flatly. “The way they did at the birth of the bird.”

            Harry gave him a wry grimace. “The winds don’t have the same view of consequences that we do,” he murmured, bowing his head and raking his fingers through his hair as though thinking about it this way was giving him a headache. “They don’t want to do anything but blow.”

            “Sometimes I might like you better if you thought like that,” Draco said.

            Harry got the joke after a moment, and nodded to him. “I know, but this isn’t the kind of thing that we can survive in the air.” He reached out for Draco’s hand. “Do you trust me to find a place that can shelter us?”

            Draco looked around, about to suggest that they stay in the field of white flowers, but the words dried up on his tongue when he saw the way the flowers’ heads rippled up and down, endlessly bobbing. They wouldn’t provide much protection, and it was better to find a place where they could discover that.

            If such a thing exists.

            It does, Harry said back to him, in a calm, normal voice, and then they were flying, faster than Draco had dreamed of going, over the flowers and up again, but not too high. Draco could feel the magic hammering at their backs, the huge punishing blows that were soft by the time they got to them, either because Harry was holding them at bay somehow or because the storm was still too far away to deal a harder castigation.

            But it was enough to make Draco glad that he had someone else with him who would help him survive. Someone to whom he already owed enough life-debts that acquiring another one wouldn’t matter.

            We don’t think of each other like that, any more, Harry whispered.

            Draco would have argued, but then, he made a point of not arguing with people who could read his mind, a truth that Harry hadn’t always learned. He tightened his hand on Harry’s in answer, and held on as they fled.

*

            The hell of it…

            Harry tossed his head back and tasted the air. It blew past him, cold and sweet and alluring and dangerous. The storm was already cooling things, although the daytime temperature on Hurricane was almost never too hot anyway, and traveling in the upper air made things colder. The breezes that brushed past him made Draco rock, and Harry channeled the wind he controlled to protect him more effectively.

            And meanwhile, the magic yanked and sang at him and whispered promises so dense in the back of his mind that Harry wasn’t sure he understood. But he could follow the susurrus of those promises if he wanted to, yes.

            The hell of it was, Harry was tempted to stay out of hiding and ride the storm.

            And he thought he might survive it.

            But he had Draco with him, and Draco meant more than the chance to ride a storm that he wasn’t sure he could survive, as exhilarating as that would be. He held Draco’s hand, and they skid and skittered ahead of the storm, the winds that roared and shouted in Harry’s ears, the pressure that he could feel descending from the sky to cap the entire plain of flowers and hills and grass.

            The ground abruptly dropped away from in front of them, and Harry heard the steady roar that he had expected to hear before now. Yes, Ginny must have flown too high to see the flowers or any other landmarks like the small hollow where he and Draco had spent the last night. There was the ocean, curling in a line of blue-silver up and down in the distance, as hazy and beautiful as the flowers.

            Draco gasped something out beside him. Harry wasn’t sure what it was, but he felt the panic from Draco’s direction, as sharp and bitter as nausea.

            Harry dived and wrapped his arms around Draco, pulling him close to his chest. Draco struggled against him for a moment, as though he assumed that Harry was going to smother him, or he couldn’t stand not to be in control the way he was during their fucking. But Harry ducked his head until their chins collided and whispered a harsh command to be quiet, while his winds smothered them all around in close-moving, cool air.

            The storm struck.

            Harry heard the scream of the winds, building and rising, the lordship of the air asserting its control over the planet. And then that great wind hit their cocoon.

            They went bowling and rolling away, so many times over and over that Harry had no way to stay their flight and no way even to be sure where they were going. There was the sky, the horizon, the ocean—there was too much sickening sensation for him to keep track or control. He hid his eyes against Draco’s hair, breathing in great gasping gulps. He knew he wouldn’t be able to breathe if not for the wind that was wrapped around them, either.

            “Harry,” Draco whispered, his mind jabbing and hitting, so uncoordinated that Harry knew how afraid he was.

            “Shhh,” Harry whispered back, because he needed to give as much of his concentration as he could to flying, so that it wouldn’t dump them on their backs and hurt them. Or smash them down and leave them in parts all over the ground, Harry thought. There was that disadvantage if he stopped paying attention, too.

            They tumbled and rolled, and at last they came to rest against something hard and huge. Harry didn’t know what it was, and he didn’t care. There were no animals on Hurricane who wouldn’t have started running once they hit them, and anything else, any land formation, was a protection against the wind.

            He turned and held out his hands. Winds outside the cocoon—he could feel them acting only by the thrumming of his magic in his blood, not by the way they moved, given the storm that was all around them and taking precedence—shot past them and hit the formation. A hill, Harry thought, from the solidity with which they struck it. They kept moving in bands that rippled the grass, tracking the same eddy-pattern again and again, and also curled around his arms in bands of air. It was the closest Harry could come to holding them still until he dismissed the cocoon of air.

            He lowered his head and whispered into Draco’s ear at the same time as he did it into his mind, “Do you trust me?”

            Draco’s head nodded furiously. It took a moment to do so, but Harry understood that. He would have hesitated for more than a moment himself, if he was in this position and Draco was the one whispering to him.

            Harry turned so that he was as flat against the hill as he could be, clutched Draco to him with his legs as well as his arms, and let the cocoon of air fly away from them.

            For a moment, just a moment, he was choking on the storm, feeling tendrils of hair literally whip his cheeks, his eyelashes fraying from the force of the wind, his mouth open in gasps that hurt. There was too much wind in his lungs, too much wind on his face, too much wind everywhere. Everything ached, and he was close to letting himself dissolve into a creature that could live in the air simply because it would hurt less.

            But Draco’s weight anchored him, and so did the responsibility he had to care for Draco. Again he bowed his head forwards and kept guard over Draco that way, his chin surfing up and down over his hair as he threw his own winds frantically, binding them to the hill, sending air into every tiny crack in the earth and break in the stone that he could, holding them there.

            Then he spun the cocoon again, this time in a huge dome that covered both them and the wind-bonds that anchored them to the hill.

            And the storm went back to battering the outside of the dome.

            Harry opened his eyes, gasping. He reached up and felt gingerly around his face, but found only a few drops of blood. Well, at least the storm hadn’t damaged his ability to see, he thought, and shook his head.

            “How did you do that?”

            Harry looked down. Draco was heaving himself up in his own bonds of air—they were flexible enough for that—and glaring at him from a few centimeters away. He reached up and put his hand on the side of Harry’s head, and Harry cringed before he realized that the thoughts coming from Draco’s mind didn’t include slapping every bit of nonsense out of him.

            “I knew that I could hold us here,” Harry said cautiously, and moved his arm to demonstrate the way that the invisible rope of air rippled his sleeve and his hair. “But I had to take the cocoon away to do that. Otherwise, the ropes would have had to go through the cocoon, and that would have left holes that the storm could come in, too.”

            “But you were tempted to fly away and leave me.”

            No use lying, not when Draco was intimately involved with the way that every thought in Harry’s head moved. Harry nodded. “I didn’t give in, but I was tempted.”

            Draco’s face, astonishingly, melted into a smile, and the emotions coming from his mind were a delicate mix of peach and rose-gold again. “Good,” he murmured, and let his head rest on Harry’s chest. “I wasn’t sure that you could be tempted. That you could ever want power the way I want it.”

            Harry nodded, blinked, and put his hands on Draco’s shoulders and the nape of his neck, holding him close, while outside their cocoon the storm sang and vibrated and shook the whole of its planet.

            And the breezes that blew past them had a salt-sea tinge.

*

            SP777: Andromeda will have to come around in her own way and at her own time.

            My bird is fine. Thank you for asking!

            The stories are posted, so cringing would be pointless. There are definitely ones that I would write differently if I was doing them now, however.

            RRose: Well, I think even Draco gets tired of drama sometimes.

            And thank you.

            unneeded: Some more about the Ministry in this chapter, which might interest you.

            And Andromeda is holding a grudge against Draco, but it’s hard to blame her, even so.
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Wondrous Lands and Oceans