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Wondrous Lands and Oceans	By : Lomonaaeren Category: Harry Potter > Slash - Male/Male > Harry/Draco Views: 10109 -:- 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 Six—On Wide Fins

            “You’re thinking about it.”

            Harry jumped. He’d been so busy watching the fire he’d struggled to build that he’d missed Draco coming up behind him, even the hum from the bond in his head that normally would have let him know. He stumbled, his hand scraped through the sand and flung it over the flames, and the fire went out.

            “Fuck, Draco,” he snapped, and leaned forwards to start it again.

            Draco flicked his wand and murmured a lazy incantation, and the fire leaped to life. Harry leaned back and shook his head, refusing to meet Draco’s judging gaze.

            “You could still do that if you hadn’t learned to rely so much on your wild magic that it destroyed your ability with a wand,” Draco murmured.

            “I could still do that if I hadn’t,” Harry agreed, and felt Draco’s eyes narrow although he wasn’t looking at him. “But I have given it up, and I have to live with the consequences of it.” He blew on the fire to help lift the flames higher, and then extended his hand. “Give me one of those fish you caught yesterday.”

            “Why?”

            Harry rolled his eyes. “Can’t you just read my mind and find out?”

            Draco stepped past him and crouched on the other side of the fire, his hands crossed almost primly at the level of his knees. The emotions churning from him had turned purple and green, and lightning bolts like the one on Harry’s forehead danced through the images he projected. Harry, meeting his gaze, didn’t care. “I’d prefer you to tell me,” Draco said evenly.

            Harry shrugged a little. “We can’t purify the fish yet, but I thought I’d see what their reaction to cooking is, anyway. Their color changed when they came out of the water. I want to see if anything else changes. Their smell, for example. If we cook them and they smell awful, we’d have trouble getting the others to eat them.”

            Draco sneered, but took out a collection vial. “Hungry people will eat anything. If they’re hungry enough.”

            “And when have you ever been hungry?” Harry muttered, his eyes on the fire again and his mind full of Dursleys.

            “Excuse me?”

            Harry glared at Draco. “You’ve lived a life with marble walls around you, and Galleons to buy anything you wanted,” he said. His voice was low and trembling, and he wanted to plant a fist in Draco’s stomach more than he had wanted to since they first began sleeping together. It didn’t help that he knew why, and that the anger was only a distraction. “You’ve lived—you’ve lived in luxury. You don’t know what it’s like to be hungry.”

            “I do,” Draco said, and inched nearer. Harry found himself wondering if Draco intended to leap across the fire at him, and decided from the look in his eyes that he was probably mental enough to do it. “Maybe not for food, but I know the desperate yearning for something. I felt it before I came to Hurricane, and when the Dark Lord was still alive, and all through Hogwarts. And I have the werewolf to teach me about hunger, if I can’t listen to you.”

            Harry shut his eyes and turned his head dully away. “Don’t call Bill that,” he muttered. “He’s not one.”

            “I thought you didn’t consider it a term of insult, given who Teddy’s father was,” Draco said evenly. There was a long, long pause, and the bond between them thrummed, and then cleared up. “Why don’t you want to talk about the mummid ritual we saw last night, Harry? I can feel the thoughts burning you like a fever.”

            Harry sighed, and rubbed his hands over his face. “It’s not you, it’s me. I’m sorry. Can you let it go if I acknowledge that?”

            “No.”

            Harry lowered his hands, blinked in surprise, and then snorted. “Well. You’re honest, at least.”

            Draco raised his eyebrows, and didn’t move.

            Harry looked at his hands. “You’re thinking already about how we might use that to have a child,” he said quietly. “How it solves the problems of not having enough partners for everyone, or at least partners who can reproduce. How we’re bonded by the wild magic, and we could do it more successfully than anyone else. At least, anyone else human,” he added, his memories still full of the mummid pair’s flowing grace.

            Draco nodded. “You’re thinking about it as well,” he repeated, and really, if he said that again, it was nothing personal but Harry would have to kill him. “I don’t understand what barrier you can raise against it if we both want it.”

            “No, you wouldn’t,” Harry muttered, but he at least owed it to Draco to explain after almost starting an argument with him over it. “Listen, Draco. Part of me does want that. I never thought I would find anyone I wanted to have children with, and it’s a little hard to conjure family out of thin air.” He met Draco’s eyes. “But I have Teddy. Can you imagine what another child would do to him? He’s trapped enough between me and his grandmother as it is.”

            Draco sat back on the sand and stared at him. Then he said, “Teddy is young enough not to be jealous of another baby in the camp. And there is the werewolf’s daughter, if you worry about him being jealous of simply the existence of another child.”

            Harry shook his head. “We couldn’t create one now. How long would it take us to master that dance the mummid did? Oh, yes, I think we can eventually do it. But in the meantime, Teddy would grow up, and he’ll need me more and more as he grows.”

            “Us,” Draco said.

            Harry paused, and then nodded. He couldn’t be so stupid as to pretend to ignore that. “He would need us, yes,” he said. “Both of us. And if we were busy devoting our efforts to another child? Or to creating another child? I don’t want that to happen. You said that I’ve changed because I don’t just think about protecting Teddy anymore, and that’s true. But I think more about him than about some hypothetical future child who might never exist.”

*

            Draco leaned back on his heels. He hadn’t expected this opposition from Harry, at all. He had thought Harry, longing for a family who would be his in a way that Teddy and the Weasleys couldn’t be, but bonded to Draco—

            And I would never let him sleep with someone else, no matter how much he wanted it.

            —would leap at this chance. It was the only one he would have, more than likely, to create that family.

            But he understood more as he thought about it. Harry still saw Teddy at the forefront of his obligations, with Draco and his friends probably right behind. Teddy and his friends were the only ones he had bothered to tell that he was leaving the camp, the only ones he’d bid a personal farewell to, unless one counted Andromeda in the good-bye that he’d given Teddy.

            And he wasn’t willing to do something that Draco wanted if there was the slightest chance it would disoblige his godson. Which showed that Teddy still belonged in Harry’s heart ahead of Draco.

            Harry rolled his eyes, catching his thoughts. “Not that way. What I mean is—Draco, you want to do this, after seeing the mummid do it.” He leaned forwards and linked his fingers in front of him, the way that some of Draco’s more annoying professors at Hogwarts had. “But do you want a child, or do you want to do something that would give us more mastery of the wild magic?”

            Draco narrowed his eyes. “I had wondered what would happen to me when I left our world and went to Hurricane. I wanted an heir. I wanted a child.”

            “With no Manor and no vaults to inherit?” Harry asked him quietly. “I didn’t know that. You want a child completely independent of everything the child would have inherited back in the wizarding world?”

            Draco rustled his fingers through his hair. For once, Harry was the one making the bond between them as clear as stagnant water, and Draco was the one with his emotions buzzing around in his head like maddened bees.

            “I want to do what they did,” he said. “I want to perform that dance. And it solves the population problem, you know that. I’d looked at the number of men and women in the camp—and my aunt and the matriarch are probably too old to have more children—and wondered what we were going to do.”

            Harry’s smile didn’t reach his eyes. “I wanted a safe place for Teddy to grow up. I never wanted a particular kind of colony. I always assumed that, if we didn’t have enough numbers to survive on our own, we’d find and join up with the other people who came to Hurricane. We might have done that already if not for this.” He swept his fringe aside to tap his scar.

            “So you would be all right if everyone died?” Draco said.

            “I would be all right if we don’t become a self-sustaining population on our own,” Harry said, staring at him. “I want kids, yes. I have Teddy.”

            Draco rose to his feet and circled around the fire. He handed one of the creatures he’d killed to Harry. Harry took it, his hand closing around the brightly-colored body and squeezing a little, as though he wanted to wring water from it. His other hand closed around Draco’s wrist and squeezed it with some of the same pressure.

            “If you want to do it, later,” Harry said quietly, “when you’ve thought about it, and whether you want a child or just to do the magic, then I’d be willing. But right now, I think we’re too confused and I worry too much about Teddy.”

            Draco looked down at him. “Have you considered that he doesn’t need that much protection?” he asked, the words arising from his frustration as much as true belief. “That he has an aunt and a cousin and the rest of the camp?”

            “Yes, I have,” Harry said, and his mind didn’t change.

            Draco forced the fish into his hands, and stalked away. Without Harry, he couldn’t fly, but he could cut the water and the sand and the grass on the cliffs that reached down to the edge of the ocean, and that would be enough.

            Harry, wisely, let him go.

*

            Harry leaned back and waved a hand in front of his nose. Phew. The smoke from the roasting fish turned pink and purple as it rose into the air, and had a certain oily tinge to the fumes, but Harry could have lived with that. When he’d mixed medicinal potions for Teddy’s bad fever last year, not trusting the Healers to do it correctly when so many of them were in the pay of the Ministry, he’d had to deal with worse concoctions, and grease covering his hair and robes that made Snape look like a model of cleanliness.

            But the smell. It was worse than oil. It was worse than fish, for that matter. It penetrated into his nostrils and reached out as though trying to tug his brain through them. Thick, rotting, like burned milk and outdated eggs and curdled cheese all at once.

            “That experiment wasn’t a success.”

            Harry blinked and looked up. Draco stood next to him, head bowed as he studied the fire. Harry shrugged and floated the fish off the fire, laying it carefully down next to the ashes—Draco would probably still want to save it—as he called breezes to blow the smell away.

            “I’m not hungry enough to eat it right now, no.”

            “You know something about hunger.” Draco scraped the fish up from the sand with a neat motion of those invisible claws, and deposited it in a pouch that he appeared to have conjured from nowhere. Perhaps he had, Harry thought. He could still do things like that, having control of his wand magic as he did.

            “Yes.” Harry met his gaze evenly. “A lot of people do.”

            Draco seemed as if he would respond, but then he simply pinched his lips together and shrugged. “So you don’t want to argue about the mummid’s ritual right now, and you don’t want to roast fish. Let’s go explore the ocean.”

            Harry grinned and stood up, knocking more sand over the fire. “You have the best ideas. Well,” he had to amend, thinking of some of the ones that Draco had come up with in the last little while they’d been bonded. “Some of the best ideas.”

            Draco punched him sharply in the shoulder, and Harry staggered, still grinning. Then he called the winds. They came to him at once, unlike the way they had responded when the mummid were using them for the ritual.

            That made Harry wonder. If there was a finite amount of wild magic in an area, and it all depended on what winds were blowing at the moment, what might they be able to create during a storm, if they could stand up to the punishing force? Or near the sea, where the winds were stronger and where the mummid had come instead of remaining in the grasslands?

            Or during a storm near the sea?

            Harry would have to think about it later, though, because the breezes came dancing in, prancing like badly-trained horses, and he had to give most of his attention to controlling them, and ignoring the way that Draco watched his back.

*

            He has strange ideas about what Teddy would mind. And about what I want.

But because he could hardly start the argument again right now, when Harry was all that held him suspended above the waves, Draco turned his attention to the ocean instead.

The wonder, the hunger, the joy, was only waiting for him to do that. It burst forth again, inside his heart like a flower, and Draco held out his weapons and swept them down, watching the glittering colors that poured from them as they briefly punctured the water, the small and intense fountains. This water was thicker than Earth water, he decided, and more reluctant to move out of the way when one wanted to put something in.

Something to keep in mind if we ever want to build ships and sail on it, he told Harry.

Harry sent back a burst of confused acknowledgment. He was aiming towards a large shape off-shore, Draco saw when he looked up. He had assumed it was a rock when he first saw it, but from the shadow it cast on the water and the gold that covered it, it was an island, overgrown with the same kind of grass that made up the plains.

Draco watched the coast, which was rocky, and entertained himself by thinking that it bulged like his Aunt Andromeda’s nose, and maybe she would like to have an island named after her. Then he saw something else.

Harry?

            The same absent-minded burst. Draco stared at the shadow racing on the waves, the shadow that was not them, and was no giant bird in the air above them, either, which the winds would have warned Harry about.

            But it was keeping pace with them.

            Harry, Draco said more firmly, and measured the distance between the water and his body with a careful glance. For the first time, he regretted that he could only cut winds and drop lower, most of the time, instead of fly upwards.

            Then the shadow swirled towards the surface, and came out.

            It jumped out, with a powerful flick of its tail, and its body was long grey sleek skin and coils and wildness. Draco, dazed, stared at the fins that expanded from its body, unfolding and unfolding and unfolding. Now they were the membranes of a dragon’s wings, chopping at the air and carrying the creature higher. The body in the middle was narrow, pointed, with an arrow-shaped, flat face that expanded on the bottom, too.

            Into teeth.

            It was like a cross between a giant shark and a giant snake, and it was headed straight for him.

            Draco lifted his hands, still with the shock thundering in him almost too hard for remembered defense, and then a cyclone slammed into the creature and sent it flying backwards into the sea. It hit hard enough to cleave the surface almost down to sand, but it bowled over and charged again, sliding easily through the water, and was up in a few seconds, its wings once again unrolling from its fins.

            Harry’s wind hit it from both sides at once this time. Draco, perforce hovering because the wind that carried him had stopped moving forwards, turned his head.

            His mouth dried up. He got to stare, and got to watch, as Harry Potter went forth to battle for him, for the first time.

            Harry skated around the creature, upright but with his body twisting in ways that it wouldn’t on a broom, his feet braced on one invisible hump and then another. His hands moved, and moved again, and Draco could coordinate their movements with the blows against the shark-snake by squinting a little. Harry couldn’t cut the way Draco could, but he could wield blunt instruments, and he did it with marvelous efficiency.

            The shark-snake was by now completely focused on Harry, trying to thrash its way towards him, the winds creaking up and down with the effort. Draco shook off his wonder and thought it a good time to strike.

            His hands moved in a complicated pattern that felt like spells he had learned so instinctively that he could only show them to someone else in slow motion, not explain them. That particular trait had frustrated Pansy quite a bit when he was trying to tutor her in Charms.

            And the shark-snake fell into three neat sections, head and middle with the wings and coiling tail, chopped apart by invisible guillotines.

            The blood bathed Draco, and created a floating, moving spot on the water so thick that it didn’t shred apart under the waves for long minutes. Draco laughed, and licked his lips to get the taste out of his mouth, and laughed again, a noise that sounded like the howl of a werewolf to him.

            When he had managed to bat the drops out of his eyes and shake his head, he saw Harry floating in front of him. Some blood had got on his shirt and chest, Draco saw, but otherwise, he had escaped. Well, of course, he hadn’t been flying as close to the creature at the time.

            Harry reached out and drew his fingers slowly through the blood on Draco’s forehead, smoothing it back into his hair as though it was a new kind of gel. Draco tilted his head into the touch, riding with it, not letting Harry withdraw even when he showed signs of wanting to wipe his palm off.

            “Wow,” Harry whispered, and nothing else.

            Draco leaned forwards and kissed him with the taste of copper still strong in his mouth. Harry kissed back, snaking his tongue around like the coiled body, and Draco glanced past the edge of his mouth down at the chopped pieces of meat that still floated. The head had sunk, but the wing-fins and the tail, perhaps because of the magic that made the creature able to fly, had stayed on the surface.

            “We should take that back with us,” Draco whispered. “As proof of our adventures.”

            Harry didn’t ask how they were supposed to do that and keep it from rotting, or why they would need proof when the Weasleys already knew what their sister had found. He raised the winds instead, and the body and tail floated back to the beach.

            “Do you want to go on to the island?” he asked when that was done, his gaze on Draco somber and gentle, as though he was still living through the moments when the creature could have bitten Draco in half. “Or back to the shore?”

            Draco smiled. “I used my magic to kill the thing, but your magic makes me fly. Are you too tired to support me?”

            Harry grinned back fiercely. “No.”

            Draco nodded. “Onwards, then.”

            And they went, with the winds, Draco thought, if it wasn’t his imagination, playing more closely around them than before. Well, perhaps the winds liked victors, things they could celebrate, Draco thought tolerantly.

            He could have asked Harry and made the perception perfectly clear to himself, but he preferred to keep his delusions, if this was one. Surely he was allowed some reward for what he had just done.

*

            Harry knelt down in front of the stone and narrowed his eyes. He could hear Draco on the other side of the island, stripping some more of the silver flowers that they’d found. Harry reckoned the seeds had blown across the water to land here.

            Most of the island was covered with grass, although rocky beneath and on the sides, with only a fragile layer of soil that could grow things. Harry had wondered if perhaps they should move their camp here, because an island would offer more defenses than hills, but there would be the problem of building ships and taking them across the water when there were creatures like the snake-shark lurking in the sea.

            But these rocks…

            They were shattered and crumbled, as though something heavy had stepped on them. Or glaciers had ground them, Harry decided, remembering Muggle science classes from long ago. On the other hand, this was Hurricane, not Earth. Perhaps there had never been glaciers here.

            Harry picked up a small pebble, lying beside a pointed shard of stone, and sniffed it. Then he scraped at something dried and golden on the inside of it. He’d thought the gold was just a thread of mica or ore buried in the rock at first, but he no longer thought that. There was a raised and clinging strip of it above the grey rock.

            It came undone when he scraped at it, and he sniffed it again.

            Shit.

            It smelled like yolk.

            Harry stood up and stared around, remembering the way the shadow hadn’t started to follow them when they took off from the shore, only when they approached the island. What if this was the place that snake-sharks hatched? The last thing Harry wanted was to be standing in the middle of a rookery.

            “Harry.”

            That was a summons intertwined on the mental level and aloud, and Harry jumped before he began to run. Draco wasn’t far away, and Harry thought he should save his flying strength to get them off this island.

            Draco was crouched down near the waves, on the one place Harry had seen so far where the island came gently down to meet the water instead of falling in small cliffs, and he moved back when he saw Harry. His face and mind were both pulsing and pale.

In the water in front of him drifted a severed human hand.

*

SP777: Well, Harry and Draco certainly think it is!

unneeded: Thanks! I thought it was a pretty neat solution to the fact that the mummid wouldn’t really form mated pairs that were any closer than other pairs they could form.

And the winds celebrate all uses of magic, though births are probably the most possible.

RRose: That’s one of the things Draco wants to study and find out.

Mehla-Seraphim: No, I haven’t. It wouldn’t exactly be mpreg, though, because it would presumably create a fully functional human baby, not a pregnancy.

TalisRuadair: Given what happens in this chapter, moving the camp might be a dangerous affair.
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Wondrous Lands and Oceans