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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 Four—Defusing Tension

            Harry turned around. Primrose had risen to her feet, her hand nearly crushing the edge of the rippling wing that her thunderrin extended towards her. She looked as though she was going to pull down towers with the force of her rage, or at least that she could. Harry started calling winds around him.

            “I’ve said nothing outrageous,” Draco said flatly.

            Primrose turned on him. Harry got the winds to the point where they encircled both his and Draco’s heads in whipping crowns, and caught Primrose’s eye warningly. If she thought she would get away with hurting Draco, she should think again. The chances were excellent that Harry would simply snatch Draco into the air before her blow could land and blast her for daring to try, and she had to know that.

            After a single, tense quiver of Primrose’s nostrils, she turned her head away as though she had never contemplated hurting Draco. Harry held his hand out without taking his eyes from Primrose. Draco stood up, and started to say something.

            Then Teddy, who had squirmed out of Harry’s arms a while ago and wandered over to Andromeda, came back. “Pick me up,” he said.

            Harry did. He knew that he probably couldn’t count on purely human reactions from Primrose and the people who had come with her, but holding a child ought to show he was no threat. And Hermione was clearing her throat now, stepping in. Harry kind of wished she had before, even though remaining silent through this stupid conversation had shown that she, at least, trusted Draco.

            And the Weasleys must, too. Not even Bill had said anything.

            “What he means,” Hermione told Primrose, through what was supposedly a smile, “is that you don’t have ultimate power here, and there’s no reason to start a war over an idea. Why would you? So you won’t have ultimate power. Does that matter? What is there on Hurricane that you need it to protect yourselves from?”

            “The likes of you,” Primrose said, and turned to Harry, as though she assumed that only one person could speak for his group, too, just the way she did for hers. “What happens if you tire of us and attack us someday?” The thunderrin rippled beside her, and small flecks of purple and green raced over its skin. Harry assumed that meant something, but so far, Primrose hadn’t been the best one to explain what.

            “So you need the power to protect you from a war that wouldn’t have started if you hadn’t come north,” Hermione said. “Power to protect you from our irritation that will only be stirred up by you talking about having power. Yes, that makes sense. Of course.”

            Primrose kept stubbornly facing Harry. “You have enough and to spare,” she said. “You could choose to share, but you choose not to.”

            Harry studied her. Primrose shuddered a little and lifted her head higher, while her hand closed hard enough on the wing of the thunderrin that Harry thought it would hurt. But the wing went on moving and melting and flowing and changing as though stirred by the wind. Maybe it didn’t hurt with flesh that rubbery.

            Will you say something? Draco snarled in the back of his head. Not stand there and muse about thunderrin.

            I don’t have to say anything, Harry said simply. Hermione is making the most sense, and sooner or later Primrose will either have to answer her or leave. I want to show that other people can defend us, and decide things, and that I’m not a leader anymore.

            Teddy turned around and hugged him. “Uncle Harry come with me,” he said.

            “I will, Teddy,” Harry said, and put him down on the ground. Draco’s hand came to rest in the small of his back. Harry smiled over his shoulder at Primrose, said, “Listen to what she says. I’ll only tear you apart if you hurt someone,” and followed Teddy towards a bowl filled with water that one of the riders had set up for him. The bowl was delicate glass, Transfigured by Ron from an old bony carcass the riders had already harvested, but it had been the rider—called Brightheart—who had shown them how to take certain kinds of water, only near the shores of the pond it was scooped from, and include some water-weeds, too.

            “Look!” Teddy said, crouching down beside Harry and pointing at the bowl.

            Harry knelt beside him and put his hands on Teddy’s shoulders. And maybe it was some property of Teddy’s wild magic reaching out to him, or the bond of love and affection he shared with his godson, or just because he was concentrating on this instead of something else for the first time in a long time, but he could see what Teddy saw. Small, delicate fish writhed and danced through the water. Some were transparent streaks of gold with two heads. Harry saw others with legs that seemed purely ornamental, since angel-like wings guided them. And the largest one, which Harry couldn’t see until his nose was pressed against the bowl because it was nearly the color of the water, was studded with silver and gleaming eyes like a necklace.

            “It’s pretty,” Teddy said, leaning back to beam at him.

            Harry leaned back, against Draco and so he could look into Teddy’s face, and kissed Teddy on the forehead. “It is,” he agreed. We forget how pretty, sometimes.

            Draco pressed again, to let Harry know that he was agreed with, or forgiven, or whatever the right word should be.

*

            “They’re gone.”

            Draco held his tongue. Of course they were gone, he and Harry weren’t stupid and the sudden departure of twenty thunderrin from the meadow was hard to miss, but Granger had to say obvious things like this. It was prat of the contract with reality that allowed her to go on existing.

            Be nice, Harry said down the bond, and Draco tilted his head in concession. It was easier because Teddy had gone to sleep in his lap, one hand still stretched out towards the bowl. Harder to get into arguments of all kinds when you would wake up the little boy, and Granger’s face did soften as she looked at him.

            She’s only going to be here a short time, and I haven’t said anything yet, Draco told Harry, watching the way little muscles twitched in Granger’s cheeks. Once she begins, it’s going to be full flood.

            Harry snorted his agreement, just as the words burst out of Granger. “And she really had no idea how politics works, at all. I think she’s powerful because she bonded with a thunderrin who’s stronger than the others, somehow. Maybe the leader of the groups the thunderrin live in. But either way, it’s impossible to think that she can control all the others, and it would be stupid to try. She doesn’t even know how many thunderrin are on the southern plains. How can she control all of them?”

            Draco nodded enthusiastically, then paused to make sure he hadn’t woken Teddy up. It was easy to agree with Granger when she was talking about how stupid Primrose was.

            “She must have some way that she thinks makes sense to her,” Harry said, shaking his head. “But it doesn’t much matter. What did she say when she went away? Did she threaten to return?”

            “She said there was nothing here she wanted, except power.” Granger snorted and sat down next to them, reaching out to touch Teddy’s back. Draco hissed warningly, and she rolled her eyes at him, but pulled her hand back. “You’d think that safety would be important. That’s her real goal, behind all the longing for power.”

            “Do you think she faces some threat in the south that would make safety imperative?” Harry asked. “That’s what I kept thinking, when she was nattering on about it.”

            “I don’t know,” Granger said, with a shake of her head. “I wish that I’d been the one who tried to feel the thunderrin getting into my head.” She turned to Draco. “Was it evil, or did it just feel unpleasant?”

            “Imagine being slapped in the face with an armful of wet moss,” Draco told her. “It was like that.”

            Granger shuddered a little, but, being Granger, didn’t have the sense most people were born with. “We have to be able to find out something about them,” she said, and turned to Harry.

            Harry shook his head before she could start in again. “This new power I have is a lot more limited than you think,” he told Granger flatly. “I couldn’t tell anything for sure about the thunderrin until I saw one. For that matter, Bodiless couldn’t just learn the best way to defeat us when we appeared on Hurricane. The knowledge I have might be immense, but I had no idea thunderrin existed until today. I don’t know where they come from, how they work together or if they are, why they want to bond.”

            “But you have the best chance of finding out.” Granger was leaning forwards almost to toppling point, probably not even realizing she was doing it.

            “Why?” Harry asked her. “Because I can fly? Well, I couldn’t outmaneuver all the thunderrin in the air. And I have winds that can tell me things, but they can’t know what conversations are important all by themselves. The best I could do was spread them over the southern plains and tell them to report every human conversation they heard to me. Then I’d be busy all day doing nothing but listen to those. It doesn’t sound very productive to me.”

            Granger sat back with a little frown and her arms folded. “There must be something we can do,” she muttered.

            “There is,” Draco told her gently. “Realize that we can’t learn everything at once, and wait to see what Primrose and her people do next.”

            Granger turned her head to gape at him. “That’s not a plan. It makes us passive! We’re supposed to wait on her to do something?”

            Harry was the one who snorted, sparing Draco the necessity. He leaned further back and wrapped his arms around Teddy, who muttered and snuggled his nose into Draco’s neck. He watched as Harry smiled at Granger.

            “You were the one who was proposing peace before, speaking reasonably,” Harry murmured. “You wanted to negotiate. Now it sounds like you’re the one who’s going to bring war to us, or something.”

            “We can’t let them get away with threatening us,” Granger said, folding her arms. “I think Primrose is paranoid. If she thinks we’re weak, then she’ll attack us just to make sure that we can’t become a threat later.”

            “That makes no sense,” Draco said. “Because she also thinks that we’re more powerful than she is, and that seemed to be the thing that was making her act so mental. It can’t be both.”

            “For a paranoid person, it can,” Granger told him, voice diamond-hard. “And if you can’t see that, and you’re going to sit around smugly talking about how this is acceptable—”

            “No one’s being smug about anything, except you.” Harry didn’t even touch the bond in warning; what made Draco lower his voice and speak with force instead of volume was the thought of waking Teddy up. “I wanted to get rid of her. You were the one who stayed to negotiate with her. And now you’re acting just like her, saying we have to do a certain thing to help, or we’re wrong.”

            Granger blinked and touched her throat as though surprised by the words that had emerged. “I reckon that I am acting a little like her,” she muttered.

            “A lot like her,” Draco told her, but Teddy stirred, and this time, Harry reached out to touch his elbow, although not through the bond. So Draco sniffed and sat back, while Granger looked at Harry almost shyly.

            “You really don’t think you could use the winds or the power of the gateway to tell us how many thunderrin are on the plains?” she asked.

            Harry shook his head. “Sorry, Hermione. I can’t. I don’t know the limits of this power yet, how it works, whether I really have it.” Draco felt the thrum in the bond, and knew that Harry didn’t want to have it at all, but if he was stuck with it, ignoring it would make things worse. “When that changes and I’m able to tell you something more about the thunderrin than we know right now, I won’t keep it a secret.”

            Granger nodded and walked away, already shaking her head and muttering. The others had begun to disperse, as well, but someone paused near them and stared down at Draco. Draco looked up.

            It was Andromeda, and although she flinched from his gaze as though he’d thrown a needle at her, she didn’t look away. “I can take him,” she whispered, extending her arms for Teddy.

            “He’s comfortable right here,” Draco said, and held her eyes. She was no longer as frightened as she’d been, now that she had begun to accept her wild magic and use it to make strong shelters for herself. But he saw no reason to let her take Teddy when Teddy was sleeping soundly and Andromeda could be doing lots of other things.

            After a few seconds in which Andromeda bit her lip but didn’t start crying the way she might have, she turned away and walked towards the nearest silver house. Harry smiled at Draco and opened his mouth, but the dragon-keeper stepped forwards before he could say anything.

            “Ginny wants to know if she should take her bird up and scout,” Weasley said, studying Harry’s face. “In case they come back.”

            “Remember that I don’t make many decisions for us anymore, and that’s the way it should be,” Harry said mildly. “If she wants to scout and it won’t take time away from anything else she’s promised to do, then she should take the bird up.”

            The dragon-keeper frowned a little, but nodded and moved away. Draco settled back on the grass with Teddy and raised his eyebrows at Harry. Harry raised them back. “What?”

            “You’re taking the role of a leader a lot less seriously than you used to,” Draco told him. “Before, you thought you had to make all the decisions or the world would end. And they thought the same thing.”

            “I did tell you that I was going to try and move away from making all the decisions all the time.” Harry plucked the bond a little, so that it vibrated like a string and made Draco wince—not enough to wake Teddy up, luckily. “Did you not believe me?”

            “I thought it might be harder for you than this,” Draco muttered, ducking his head down so his jaw rested on his little cousin’s hair. He could mutter things there, and not look at Harry, and Harry would still understand him. “But I shouldn’t be surprised, not after the way you stood up to Primrose.”

            “For a certain variety of stood up, of course.” Harry smiled at him, and Draco found himself relaxing despite all the reasons to stay keyed-up. “Yes, this is what I should have been doing all along. Teaching people to make their own decisions, supporting them, and only getting ready to spring into action if there’s something no one else can do, like stop a war with wind.”

            “We might have a war on our hands anyway, if Primrose shows back up,” Draco thought he had to point out.

            Harry rolled his eyes. “Right. But until she does, I’m going to do my best to be a regular citizen.” He nudged Draco with his elbow. “And right now, regular citizens have herding duty. We asked for it together, we might as well do it.”

            Draco grumbled, but carried Teddy over to the silver house Andromeda had vanished into. She stood up warily when she saw Draco, her hands still dripping with magic that she’d been adding to the house’s walls to strengthen them.

            “Shepherding calls,” Draco said, and handed Teddy to her. He woke and yawned briefly at Draco, muttered something about “Cousin Draco” that got muffled against Andromeda’s shoulder, and went to sleep again.

            Andromeda nodded, her eyes measuring him. Draco gave her one stare, then turned away. He didn’t know whether she considered herself in a truce with them or not, since Bodiless’s attack and their journey north had taken the place of any talking to her about her stupidity in trying to run off to the gate.

            But it didn’t matter right now. Draco went to join Harry, and they walked across the green, rippling grass towards the herd of slender-legged creatures the riders got most of their food from. Draco knew there were other herds in the north and east of the meadow, watched by the riders’ beasts, but this was the only one they were responsible for. Apparently the adults were used to the beasts, but the younger ones would still kick and run away if they saw the shadows reeling. The riders would herd them on the ground as necessary, but they weren’t as fleet when running as humans were. The humans taking it over had been one of the things that made their truce work as more than words.

            Draco knew all that, but he could still resent it, and watch the animals and chase them back with spells when they strayed and dream of the life he would have lived had he stayed on Earth, in his Manor house with elves. Harry rolled his eyes at him.

            You could have stayed, you know. It’s not like we knew each other then. You have no idea what you would have been missing if you had stayed.

            Draco shook his head as he saw one of the creatures—like winged antelope, but in the young ones the wings weren’t fully-developed—trying to sneak away. He cast a spell barrier in front of it, and it stood there, staring at the magic, then bleated in terror and ran back to the herd. You know why I wanted to come here.

            I know. Harry leaned against him. And no one said that you weren’t allowed to grumble. But why regret house-elves specifically?

            Draco turned his head to eye him. Really? Servants that do whatever you want?

            The kind of servant I was to the Dursleys?

            Draco winced and scowled. Trust Harry to bring that up. He had told Draco enough about his childhood, although only in images pushed down the bond, that Draco reckoned he should have been able to predict it was coming. But they hadn’t discussed it before this. It had been a short burst of intensity in the middle of everything else, their struggle with Bodiless and their hunt for Andromeda and their attempt to defend the camp and explore Hurricane without putting someone else in charge of the task.

            Now they had the time. Now they had what Draco had been dreaming of since Harry had told him that, the privacy and silence to discuss it. But he didn’t know how to begin.

            After a few moments of sitting there and doing nothing but directing wind against one of the creatures who leaped up to try its wings, Harry sighed and started. No, I can understand what you mean, and it’s not the same. I served them, because it was that or have stupid things happen to me, but they weren’t able to order me to punish myself. I didn’t have the same compulsion that an elf like Dobby did.

            Draco grunted. The comparison still troubled him, but once again, he had to fumble around with words. At least Harry knew why he stayed silent and didn’t bother him, instead calming the winds in the area so that the grass wouldn’t sway too much and bother the antelope. They were stupid creatures who would start even at shadows at this age, nothing like the calm and rational mummidade.

            I feel bad, Draco said at last. Knowing that happened to you, and no one else ever did anything about it.

            Harry laughed soundlessly, his eyes so bright that Draco was able to relax a little and smile at him, too. It’s not like you knew. And before we came to Hurricane, why would you have given a fuck? He rubbed Draco’s back. You’re being too hard on yourself. Just don’t say the part about house-elves around Hermione. You really don’t want the lecture you’ll get.

            Draco shook his head a little. I want to do something to help you get over what they did to you.

            I don’t know that there’s any way to do that. Harry lounged on the grass now, his head tilted back and his hands folded beneath his head as he watched the sun dart in and out of patches of cloud. I’ve lived with it this long, and you suspected something was wrong, but you didn’t know what until I told you. So that should be a sign that I can live with it if I want to. It just doesn’t always please me.

            Draco sat up and stared at him. Harry met his eyes back, raising his brows a little, and switched to speaking aloud, the way he always seemed to when he didn’t really understand the way Draco had reacted. “What? You’re practically making the bond buzz with your disapproval, but that was what happened to me all those years. I didn’t like it, but I lived with it. What makes you feel you have to do something about it now?”

            “Because, you idiot,” Draco said, coming close to shaking him and having done with it, “I didn’t know about it and it bothers me.”

            Harry picked up his hand and kissed it. “That it bothers you is more of a tribute than anything you could do about it is,” he murmured.

            Draco snatched his hand back and ignored what he was feeling down the bond, because he knew it would probably make him dissolve if he listened to it. “So I’m supposed to be happy about what happened in my lover’s abusive past?”

            Harry winced, but kept meeting his gaze. “No. I’m just glad—that things are so different now. That you want to do something. It’s the absolute proof of how much things have changed, when at one point you wouldn’t have cared if you’d found out.”

            Draco had to nod, acknowledging that. “All right. Then do you want me to do something about it?”

            “What could you, when it all happened far away and long ago, on Earth?” Harry leaned against him, letting Draco put his arm around Harry’s shoulders. “Let it go. We faced down Primrose and made her leave without starting a war. We should rejoice in the peace and the sunlight while we have it.”

            Draco nodded again and did as Harry advised, though it took him long minutes before he relaxed, with anger pinging in him like the plucked string of a harp. But Harry ignored him, still breathing lightly and steadily, and in the end, Draco found his thoughts lulled with the breeze, Harry’s breathing, the movement of the herd.

            Other things can wait.

*

            Sasunarufan13: Thanks! Primrose has become a little drunken with power by going unchallenged. The others were quiet because they trusted Draco and Harry, but Hermione does take over, as you see here.

            SP777: Thanks!

            If you mean “water planet” as in “has oceans,” then yes. If you mean “covered with water completely,” no, it has some pretty massive continents.
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Here to Live and Die