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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
Disclaimer: I do not own Harry Potter. I am making no money from this fanfic.

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Chapter Five—To the Sea, To the Sea

            It was midday, and they were flying again.

            Draco couldn’t stop breathing the air that soared past them, the little breezes that Harry controlled and the madder ones that he didn’t. The hurricane had left Hurricane streaked and riddled with freshness, sweetness, softness, cleanliness. There was a deep smell that seemed to travel with them, and which Draco thought came from the flowers that they had harvested and that the storm had more than half-uprooted.

            And there was the smell of salt.

            Harry claimed that he had smelled it last night, when the winds had finally died and they’d rested on the side of the hill in Harry’s bonds of air, too exhausted to go any further. But Draco hadn’t been able to, not until this morning when he opened his eyes and saw the dawn bulging from all corners of the horizon, and breathed in.

            It made his mouth water. It made him remember flavors in food that he had almost forgotten, sour and spicy and sweet as well as bitter. Of course some salt had come with them, but they had to ration it carefully, not just sprinkle it on their food whenever they wanted it.

            Draco smiled. If they found enough salt in the seawater, if they could use the charms Johnson had mentioned that would purify it, they might have enough salt left over afterwards to pile on their tongues.

            They came over the last drift of hills, and there it was. The land had been sloping steadily downwards for some time now, but it was still a shock, to see the way the hills tumbled off and the grass began to wither as it approached the water. The land in front of the beach wasn’t quite sand, or pebbles, or stone, or grass, but a mixture of all of them, running into one another, in great sable and brown and white streaks.

            Draco wanted to touch it, and started to cut the winds. But Harry held his hand up, and Draco felt the tremble in his mind, and looked further.

            The ocean was dazzling.

            Of course Draco had seen the sea on Earth, and if this had been no different, it would not have dazzled him. But there was a pale blue to the water that did not reflect the sky, or the corners of the sky that Draco could see blooming with the colors above him, and there was a line of silver at the edge that meant curling foam, and there was a washed-out color nearer shore that reflected what the shore was made of.

            Draco lost his heart to it at once, and continued breathing salt until they reached the shore and Harry began to slow and lower the winds that carried them. Draco understood that he didn’t want to risk the winds that carried them out over the ocean possibly being different and wilder than the ones on land. He did understand that.

            But part of him mourned at it. Part of him would have liked to go on sailing over that ocean forever until he fell into it, dead of starvation. There would be no dying of thirst when he had those salt-soaked breezes to feed him.

            “Are you all right?”

            Harry’s voice, from beside him. Draco reached out towards him, not with his hand but with the thoughts that ricocheted back and forth inside his head, and heard Harry swallow. “Yes,” Draco whispered. “This is the reason that you should try to learn to read my mind, because you can feel and experience things that you would never feel on your own.”

            Harry was silent, but Draco felt the delicate pulse and shimmer of his emotions reflecting back at him, and smiled.

            They landed on the shore a few meters away from the water. Draco looked around, expecting a sight of the trees that Weasley had found her milk on, but didn’t see them. Presumably she had come to a different part of the beach.

            And then he caught Harry’s eye, and smiled.

            They raced each other to the water, and Draco crouched down and held his hands out, trembling. The foam licked over the backs of his fingers, so delicate, so soft, that it was like being touched by light itself. Draco shut his eyes and bowed his head.

            “It’s warm,” Harry whispered. Draco opened his eyes and turned his head, and saw Harry balancing on the balls of his feet, bending forwards so far that he was going to fall flat on his face in a minute. “I thought oceans were always cold.”

            “Maybe it has wild magic that keeps it so,” Draco said, and faced the water, readying his own magic. “Or the creatures that live there turn the water warm so they can live in it.” He wondered, for a moment, whether the ocean would have the same, almost living will that the winds of Hurricane seemed to have.

            Perhaps not. The winds seemed to be the conduits and currents of Hurricane’s wild magic, and it made sense that they would seem more alive and impressive simply because they thrummed with the tension of holding it all in.

            But at the same time, Draco could not bear the thought that this wonderful ocean was not at least a little bit aware of what was going on around it.

            He had to put the speculation aside, because Harry had sensed what he was going to do and moved out of the way, and Draco felt a bolt of pride at that that nearly undermined his concentration. He faced the ocean instead, and took a stern little breath, waggling his fingers until he felt the claws pop out. Then he envisioned the same sort of arrow that he used on the grasses and the beasts of the grasses, aimed at an offshore rock that gleamed as if it was entirely made of mica, and threw.

            The waters curved up and away from the impact, sheeting and sheering, revealing undertones of green and pink, blue and white, that made Draco’s heart ache. And several large bodies, too, waving like ribbons, a deeper blue and green than the air. They changed color immediately, trying to blend with the water and hide, but Draco smiled. Cleave the ocean around them, and they couldn’t do it.

            “We could hunt,” he told Harry. “We could have a hunt here that’s different from any other we’ve ever had.”

            “Except the bird,” Harry said, but his stance had altered. Draco knew he had folded his arms at one point, but now he had dropped them and was leaning forwards on the balls of his feet again. “Remember that one?”

            “We were in the air then,” Draco said, “and that’s your domain. With a little practice, I think the water could become mine. Won’t you let me try?” He realized, to his faint, horrified amusement, that his voice had become a bit of a whine. Harry raised his eyebrows in Draco’s direction, but nodded.

            “I’ll herd them, then,” he said, and flew up and out over the ocean before Draco could remind him about his fear of the winds changing there.

            The winds didn’t change, or they were enough like the winds over the land that they could at least bear Harry. Harry turned in place, his hair springing back from his face, and nodded to Draco, and Draco realized that he had caught his breath out of pure beauty. He smiled, and blinked, and then cast with both hands at once.

            The first cleft the water, and the second whipped the spear sideways, through the bodies of the creatures that glowed there. When the waves that Draco had created tried to splash back down and hide the creatures, Harry snapped out his hand, and winds circled under the water, lifting it in a fiery, sparkling fan above the surface, and holding it. Draco laughed aloud as he watched the creatures circle and try to change colors, but have to choose between the water around them and the reflections gleaming from over their heads.

            Then the ones he hadn’t killed vanished again, but Draco had the bodies he could draw into shore, by imagining that he bore those enormous claws and dipping them, carefully, beneath the floating corpses. It seemed easier than it had been in the past. Draco thought about how the very sight of the ocean had seemed to shake his bones in their casing of skin, and shivered.

            Yes. This is the way that I am meant to hunt.

*

            Harry flew down and landed beside Draco as he laid the bodies out on the shore. They kept changing color, until they were out of the sea, and then they shimmered and snapped into deep versions of the last hues they’d worn, as if they had to make up for being out of the water by representing it on land.

            Blue, and green, and deep rose. Harry let his fingers hover above that one, and wondered whether it was possible that the pink lingered under the surface of the water, the way it seemed. Or did the pink come from some reflection of the sunrise, assuming that any shone on this shore?

            “Beautiful, aren’t they?”

            Harry blinked, and then realized that Draco was looking at him, and didn’t seem to intend his question as a rhetorical one. He smiled and nodded. “Beautiful,” he echoed.

            “And delicious, I’d bet.” Draco let his hand hover on the tail of something that looked like an eel with two legs where its mouth should be, and stared at Harry. “What do you think? Should we try one now?”

            Harry shook his head. “We don’t have someone like Primrose to test them for us, I don’t know purifying charms that work the same way on food as on water, and if you’re incapacitated, then I lose someone I really have to have beside me.” He reached out, hesitated as he wondered how well Draco would take it, and then let his fingers touch Draco’s shoulder and rub up and down.

            Draco grasped his hand and murmured, Remember that you can read my mind, and that should tell you well enough whether I would welcome it or not.

            Harry nodded, but leaned up to kiss Draco instead of responding. Draco wavered, then pulled back with a laugh. “Who wants to fuck now for no reason?” he gasped, as he reached into his cloak for the collection vials and started laying them on the beach. “And there isn’t even any grass here to cushion us.”

            Harry shook his head. “I didn’t want to fuck right now. I just wanted to show you how much you mean to me.”

            Draco paused and eyed him, then looked at the nearest animal, one that Harry thought resembled a fish, but with long fins, exactly the same length, displayed at exactly the perfect ratio of angles around its body. “Are these bodies shedding fumes that I haven’t smelled?” he murmured. “Who are you, and what have you done with the Harry Potter that hates doing things like this?”

            Harry shook his head. His pulse was pounding in his mouth. It seemed important that Draco listen to him, and if that was a side-effect of the fish, or the wind over the ocean, or something else, then Harry could only thank it. “I don’t—Draco, I want you to know that you do mean a lot to me.”

            Draco went on staring. Then he said, “Accept that I’ve accepted that. Was there something else you wanted to say?”

            Harry thought it over. For a moment, he had wanted to persist, ask questions and push his revelation on Draco so that Draco would react in some way that said he thought it was an honor, not an annoyance.

            And then Harry had to swallow a laugh of his own. He had thought the bond was an annoyance in the beginning, one that Draco was far more interested in than he was. He’d fought it back and fought a sulky Draco when he’d insisted that Harry should be honored by his attention and the fact that Draco had chosen him as his partner.

            “Never mind,” Harry said, catching Draco’s hand and rubbing it back and forth again, then releasing it before Draco could force it free. “We’ll say that you’ve accepted it, then. But I did mean the point about the purifying spells for food. I think it’s best that we continue to collect these, and eat the food we brought with us, for now.”

            Draco watched him, then shrugged. “As I was doing,” he said, and set about forcing bodies to fit in the vials, mincing some when that was necessary, and shearing the long fins from the fish that bore them so he could put them in a separate vial.

            Harry faced the water, and smiled. This was a situation he couldn’t have envisioned himself in five months ago, or even five weeks ago, when they’d already been on Hurricane. He’d thought his whole purpose then was to guard Teddy, and he hadn’t known Hurricane had oceans—

            But most of all, he really couldn’t have envisioned Draco beside him.

            He sought out Draco’s hand again, and Draco let him, this time, until he really needed it to balance all the vials.

*

            Draco opened his eyes. They had spent hours wandering up and down the beach, and Harry had taken him on a flight over the ocean that was both exhilarating and wonderful. They’d spent hours lying on a more sandy part of the beach, too, watching the way that night came in over Hurricane’s waves.

            Draco didn’t think he would ever forget that bath of burning gold being poured on the water, or the way the sky had turned to black with a clap when the sun sank beneath the surface. Technically, they had come east, and they were watching the sun set in the east, when it had seemed to set in the west near their camp, but then, Harry had pointed out, yesterday dawn had come from all points of the compass, so the wild magic near the water was probably doing something to their vision here.

            Still magnificent, nonetheless.

            But now something else had awakened him, and Draco remembered that there could be land predators who would come to the water to drink, or birds, or possibly herbivores who lived on those flowers and could be dangerous when they saw creatures they didn’t recognize.

The noise repeated, a kind of grunting moan. Draco reached out and probed Harry awake with quick kicks and tangles of thought. Harry sat up and looked around, panting a little as though he didn’t know what Draco was about.

Then he heard the sound. At once he turned to face it, and his body was as graceful in tension as it had been in sleep. Draco smiled lazily as he sat up. Now that Harry had finally noticed that Draco existed as a person in his own right, and one that he might like to spend time with when they weren’t fucking, Draco had his own permission to think thoughts like that.

“What is it?” Draco whispered.

Harry swallowed. He said, “Mummid.”

Draco leaned around him, and saw that Harry was right. There was a ghostly procession coming down to the water, plunging from the downturned cliffs and falling easily on their feet like the goats they resembled. Draco nodded. “Maybe they can tell us things about the ocean, then. We should go greet them.” He started to stand up.

“Don’t,” Harry hissed, reaching out and capturing his wrist before Draco found his feet. “The winds say it’s not a good idea.”

            Draco held his eyes until Harry had to face him, instead of ignoring the squirming of how stupid Draco thought this was in the back of his mind. “The winds,” Draco said, and loaded his mind with images of the grass and the ocean and how they felt alive, but weren’t, not really, and Harry was being stupid to imagine that the winds could talk with him.

            Harry shook his head. “I mean it, Draco. They danced in celebration at the birth of the bird, and when the storm started to come. Now they’ve fallen completely silent. I don’t understand it. I would have trouble raising a breeze right now if I wanted one.”

            Draco hesitated. He knew that the mummidade saw them as a united being, and one worth speaking to, because of their wild magic. What would happen if he and Harry tried to speak to them when only one of them could prove that he had the power? Come to think of that, Draco’s own magic might be less without the winds blowing over him.

            And at the very least, it would be embarrassing to have the mummid ignore them and continue attending to whatever they had come here for.

            “Well, I’m not just going to ignore them and pretend they don’t exist,” he said. “I want to see what they’re doing.”

            Harry nodded, and reached into his robes, coming out with a handful of starry nothingness that he shook. It reformed into a Cloak.

            Draco stared at it. Of course he recognized it. It was the Cloak that Potter had worn when he’d thrown mud at Draco in third year. Strange to think that that boy had been Potter, and this was Harry, standing beside him and breathing with him now.

            “Why did you bring that?” he asked. “You didn’t mention it.” And he had picked up thoughts from Harry’s direction a few days earlier that he wanted someone else to have the Cloak to hide under, if they needed to hunt while he and Draco were gone.

            “I decided, at the last minute, that there might be things at the ocean we needed to spy on, who wouldn’t suspect this,” Harry said softly, and draped the Cloak around his shoulders, reaching out to Draco with one arm. “It’s going to be a tight fit, I mostly hid under it with Ron and Hermione when we were kids. Do you want to?”

            Of course he wanted to, with a longing so powerful that it made Draco shiver as he stepped up to Harry and wrapped his arms around him, leaning his head on his chest so Harry could drape the Cloak over both their heads and pull them closer. He hadn’t known part of him was still wounded and wanting that way, that part of him even now resented the laughter Harry had shared with his friends at Hogwarts.

            I’m sorry. Harry’s thoughts brushed over him, as light and rippling and tentative as the hands that he was using to stroke Draco’s shoulders and hair.

            Draco shook his head a little and demanded, Are you really sorry? Would you have said that at the time? Or do you just think that you should say it now because we’re closer and you wish you could make up for the past?

            Harry blinked, his bafflement moving in slow, thick eddies through Draco’s mind. Then he said, The latter. I’m sorry because I wish we could have become friends earlier.

            And that eased an even different, tighter band of pain, one that had wrapped around a portion of Draco’s heart when Potter first rejected his hand. But he tightened his fingers in Harry’s shirt and said, I want to remember the past, not forget it. Don’t say sorry now. Say that you want me with you.

            Always, Harry said, his emotions blooming in bright wind-patterns in Draco’s thoughts, and Draco relaxed in spite of himself as they began to creep along the beach after the rustling, moving mummid.

*

            Harry felt the winds begin to move again as they neared the mummid and the small space of sand they seemed to have decided was the right place to begin. The winds’ dance was strange, though. It was small, and slower than usual, and focused on that tight patch of sand in the middle of the mummid ring, not anywhere else. Harry knew he wouldn’t have felt it moving at all—there was no ripple against his body, no touch of a breeze against his cheek—if his magic hadn’t attuned him to motions in the upper airs, away from his immediate area.

            It wasn’t magic as wide or wild as some he had felt on Hurricane, but it was more intense and focused. Harry shivered and reached out with one hand as though he could capture it.

            He saw the edge of his hand emerge from under the Cloak. Draco grabbed his arm at the same time as the warning thundered through Harry’s head, and Harry pulled it back and nodded. He thought they should keep even their mental communication to a minimum around the mummid right now. After all, the wild magic was part of the bond, and the bond was how the mummid around their camp identified them as individuals.

            Why do we want to spy on them in the first place?

            Harry shivered. Because they were still strangers, even if they were also allies. And because their alliance with the mummidade was meant to help defeat the birds, not allow them access to something like this.

            And he wanted access. From the stillness of the wind, from the depth of the night around them, Harry knew that this was personal, but also important.

            Something that might impact human survival on the planet, perhaps.

            Two mummid stepped away from the others and faced each other. They both had golden horns and brown eyes and sloped bodies, which left Harry thinking they were both male. He wondered if they were seeing a fight for courtship rights.

            The mummid didn’t charge each other, though. They both scraped their left forehooves in the sand, then their right forehooves, and so on all around the body. Then both fell to the ground and pressed their knees and the part of leg between knee and hoof into the pebble-streaked sand. Then it was their chests, bowed and knocked, and their necks, laid on their sides, and their horns, rubbed into the dirt.

            It’s like a dance, Draco said, less words than an image of whirling partners and bright colors that was the analogue of the Yule Ball in his mind.

            Harry nodded, and watched as their impressed their back knees, and their spines, and their hips, and every other part of their bodies. He wondered if they were creating images in the yielding part of the ground, but they rolled over on top of them so often that he didn’t think so. Any “images” would have been trampled and obliterated by now.

            It was more like they wanted to bring every part of their bodies into contact with the ground, and to do it in perfect mirror image style. Of course, if they were a pair, that was possible with them. The mummid really weren’t individuals apart from each other.

            The mummid finally both surged back to their feet at the same time, and underwent one more bow to each other, horns brushing.

            And that intense, focused magic, which Harry had almost forgotten about in the pleasure of watching the mummid’s movements, descended on them.

            There was nothing like it that Harry had ever experienced, no analogue for what happened just then. The hammer blow made the sand fly, and caused the other mummid around them to fall to their knees, and made the Cloak whip back. Harry would have lost it if he wasn’t gripping it in such a death hold. He fell to his knees, too, though, with Draco trembling and incredulous in his arms, and Harry not much better.

            “What was that?” Draco whispered. “What the fuck was that?”

            Harry only shook his head, not sure what he could say. He had felt it, he could still feel the echoes ringing in his bones, and the way that sparks of magic rose and fell in the winds around them like scattered embers from a fire. But he didn’t know what they had seen happen.

            The ground shuddered and rolled beneath them, like waves coming in from the ocean. Then the mummid all floated to their feet again, with the same grace that they used to vanish among the grasses. Harry tried to stand, but Draco pulled him back down before the knocking of his knees could give them away.

            “Look,” Draco whispered. “Look.”

            And Harry did, and that was how he saw the small, white, gleaming thing in the center of the mummid’s circle. The herd pressed close, staring at it, and it lifted its head and looked back at them, then stumbled to its hooves.

            It was—

            It was a newborn mummid, a young one, with the stubs of horns on its head and its fur all sleek and shining and close, like a shorn lamb’s. It wobbled up to the pair that had danced and rubbed against them, and Harry felt the magic wheeling around them, making them a unit of three, a new unit.

            Then the little one turned and greeted the rest of the herd, and all around them, flowing and dancing, forming and drifting apart, Harry felt the magic, felt the new threesomes or pairs forming, new individuals, because that was the way the mummid felt. Their “people” were groups, and the addition of someone new changed every group.

            “They created it,” Draco said, in a small, chiming voice from the other side of realization. “They created a child.”

            Harry couldn’t speak. The winds were still moving in their lazy way around him, but picking up in a milder version of the dance he remembered from the hatching of Ginny’s bird, and his chest was tight, and his mind was alight and flaming with wonder.

            It continued to do so, long after the mummid had become a stream of foam wavering into the grass, the youngster running with them as well as any of the adults.

            And beside him, Draco burned with the same delight, the same unspoken desire.

*

            SP777: The wild magic of Hurricane affects living things. I think it’s not that far-fetched that it would also make them act like living things, sort of.
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Wondrous Lands and Oceans