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Reap the Hurricane	By : Lomonaaeren Category: Harry Potter > Slash - Male/Male > Harry/Draco Views: 11501 -:- Recommendations : 2 -:- Currently Reading : 1
Disclaimer: I do not own Harry Potter. I am making no money from this fanfic.

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Chapter Seven—As This Is True

            “You want to go on? You’re mental.”

            Draco had the feeling, even as he spoke, that Potter would simply disregard what Draco was saying if he didn’t feel like listening to it. And the distant, slightly amused gaze on him confirmed that feeling. Draco might be one of Potter’s important ones now, he might deserve protection, but Potter wouldn’t listen to him until he thought up better arguments.

            And why should he? The argument of his own madness is the one that people like Skeeter used against him back in the wizarding world. He’d have to trust in his own sanity by now, more than anything anyone else said.

            That could be dangerous in the future, if Potter always thought he should listen to his own instincts above the warnings of others.

            But for now, Draco was concerned with other dangers, so he put aside the notion for later and said instead, “Weasley is badly in shock, at least. And if it’s true that experiencing the wind gives you wild magic, hers might manifest at any time. Shouldn’t we go back to the camp and let it manifest on the ground?”

            Potter paused, and then turned to look at Weasley. “Ginny, what do you think? Are you ready to fly?”

            For a moment, Weasley paused in checking Potter’s broom. Her face as she looked at Draco expressed nothing at all. Draco blinked, then decided that the laws of chance and the number of children they had meant that one of the Weasleys was bound to be born with some sense, at last.

            “If you think I’m not,” she said, “then you don’t know me as well as I thought you did, Harry.” And she returned to casting spells on the broom that seemed mainly designed to polish up the shaft and smooth out the bristles. Draco didn’t know what else she would want to do. Potter’s and Draco’s brooms had come through the storm undamaged, after all.

            “That’s another point,” Draco said, when he had waited a few moments for some more sense and Weasley hadn’t displayed it. “We only have two brooms now. What does that mean, for three people?”

            Potter turned to him, and displayed, instead of sense, a brilliant smile that rushed down his face like a torrent of white water. “It means that two of them ride on one,” he said, and then a wistful expression crossed his face as he added, “Ginny and I have done that before.”

            “Better than riding on a dragon,” Weasley said, and she and Potter exchanged a different kind of smile, one that made Draco feel sulky and shut-out.

            He didn’t express that, of course. He waited until his heart no longer beat in his ears like a gong, and then he nodded a bit and said, “All right. If you wish to take the risk, then I reckon I cannot oppose it.”

            Potter shot him a keen look, and then motioned for Draco to follow him and walked away from Weasley across the springing grasses. Draco glanced at Weasley in turn. From the way she was working on the broom, she might not have noticed. Draco knew she had. It was there in the faint smile at the corner of her mouth, in the turn of her neck.

            “I know that you’re more worried about this than you just said you are,” Potter said, when Draco gave up and followed him over the next little hill. “Otherwise, you wouldn’t have spoken a sentence without contractions.” Draco started, and Potter stared into his eyes. “Do you want to continue or not? Give me your true opinion, not the one that’s influenced by dislike of Ginny or desire to go along to get along.”

            Draco studied Potter for several minutes. But the surface of Potter’s face never varied. It wouldn’t, Draco decided. This was a serious question, and Potter saw no reason to change it to a less serious one. If Draco objected, then he would at least take the objection into consideration.

            Draco’s advice weighed with him—well, perhaps the way this Weasley’s might. Not the same as that of the original, Draco had to concede.

            In a world where Weasleys swarmed, that was not a bad position. Draco let out a slow breath and responded with honesty. “If you’ve flown two together before, it should be safe. But this is Hurricane, not Earth, and the way the winds change isn’t safe. Just because we survived once doesn’t mean we will again, and this time, we have a burden that we didn’t before, in the loss of the broom.”

            Potter considered him a moment, then nodded. “It’s urgent that we learn how far the plains extend,” he said mildly. “If we can find a sea, there may be more fish in it than in the small trickle of water in the hills. And we might be able to find creatures that we can hunt, and better farmland.”

            Draco only nodded. In the old days, he would have considered this the equivalent of a defeat, but he knew better now. He waited, his hands clasped in front of him.

            “But the points you make are all good ones, and anyone can fly this mission,” Potter went on. “We’ll go back, for now.”

            “Anyone can fly this mission who is protected by the wild magic, who truly belongs to this world,” Draco murmured. “That’s the point that you didn’t mention, that we only survived last night because of working in concert. When someone goes up again, it’ll be me and you.”

            “Ginny’s the best flyer we have,” Potter began.

            “No,” Draco said, and the simple weight of the word made Potter pause. “She’s the only professional Quidditch player, which isn’t the same thing. She knows how to care for leathers and brooms, and she can train other people to fly. That’s important, but not enough. I saw you both in the air yesterday.”

            This time, Potter frowned. “All right. You and I will go.” And he spun around and made his way back towards Weasley with short, stunted steps.

            Draco followed slowly, wondering why that particular observation, of all the others he had voiced disagreeing with Potter, should be the one to give Potter indigestion.

*

            Ginny had understood when he explained it to her, though she had given Malfoy some odd glances, as though she thought he was standing behind Harry and controlling the strings. Harry made sure that he kept his suspicion of her suspicion hidden, however. He wouldn’t have wanted Ginny to think he was putting her in the same category as all those idiots who had assumed he was controlled by Dumbledore, Voldemort, or the Ministry.

            Harry worried, though, as their brooms rose, Ginny clinging behind him on his and Malfoy in front of them riding point, that the rest of the Weasleys in the camp wouldn’t understand.

            It wouldn’t do to become so caught up in the physical problems of survival, such as building their houses and having enough to eat, that they lost sight of the emotional ones, Harry thought. And he had nearly done so. He had continued to care for Teddy and comfort Andromeda, because that was second nature now.

            He hadn’t paid attention to Hermione’s warning about whether the others would resent Malfoy, and he hadn’t given enough thought to whether they were depending too much on him.

            On the flight back, as his body took over the mundane tasks of turning the broom into the wind and watching the corners of the sky for dark blue, he made the decision. Yes, they were too dependent. He needed to step back, to encourage them to make their own decisions, and he needed to do it as soon as possible.

            He knew one thing he could do, and the moment they plunged back down into the middle of the surprised encampment, he resolved to do it.

*

            “Did you find out everything you needed to know already?” That was Bill, hurrying eagerly towards him with Fleur at his side. Victoire was behind them on the grass, playing with Teddy. The sight relaxed Harry enough that he fixed his eyes there as he answered.

            “No. There was an accident with the storm. We lost a broom, but we saved Ginny’s life.” He nodded to Malfoy with his chin at the same time as Malfoy laid his hand on his chest, and saw Bill’s jaw drop open. “And now, I think, I’ll let them tell you about it. It’s a long time since I saw Teddy.” He stepped around Bill and opened his arms. Teddy flung himself into them, eagerly declaring that the fish-creatures he had caught from the water and kept were “making noise.” Harry rubbed his nose in Teddy’s hair and murmured that they would go and see them.

            “Harry come see,” Teddy pointed out, and kicked in the way that meant he wanted to be lowered to the ground. Harry did so and took his hand, and they started to set off.

            Bill’s hand caught him, and Harry turned around and assumed a polite expression. “Is something wrong?” he asked. “Only, Teddy’s waiting.”

            Bill looked at him close and hard, and the scars on his face seemed to shine more than ever. Since coming to Hurricane, Harry had noticed, they’d acquired a stone-like sheen. He had no idea whether that meant they were changing, or if the light was sufficiently different here to make them look different. He leaned in, and Harry didn’t flinch because he’d had long practice at people criticizing him for his decisions. He only waited until Bill took it into his head to start speaking, which was the real reason for the intimidation routine.

            “They’re going to explain it?” Bill whispered. “Why not you?”

            Harry smiled at him. “Because you’re becoming too dependent on me” was what he wanted to say, but hardly acceptable as an answer.

            What he said instead was, “Because they were there, and I miss Teddy, and they’ll explain it better than I can. When I start acting, I just rush ahead and miss the why of what’s happening half the time, you know that.” He lowered his voice as he spoke, and that seemed to have the usual persuasive effect. Bill nodded as if he remembered multiple instances of that, although Harry had had better plans ever since Hogwarts and honestly didn’t think he reacted without thinking much anymore. “They’re more subtle.”

            He turned away with Teddy saying, “See fish! See fish! See fish!”, his version of whining, and nodded. “Yes, we’re going to see the fish now.”

            And as he left, Malfoy and Ginny were beginning their recitation, and Harry didn’t think he felt more than one or two people glaring after him.

            Make other people the center. Hand decisions and important actions to them when he could. Retire from the spotlight. Stick to using his wild magic for the hard work that no one else could do and cease to use it merely to make himself look impressive. Even if he hadn’t meant to, that was the final effect, a lot of the time. He looked impressive, and people assumed they couldn’t compete.

            That was the last thing he wanted from his family. They were his family. Not his fans.

            “See water now,” Teddy said in satisfaction, trotting along beside him.

            Harry rested his hand on Teddy’s hair and kept walking, wondering why he needed leadership or wild magic when he had this.

            And he was able to admire Teddy’s fish-creatures, now drifting inside a conjured china bowl, with all due ceremony and real regard, because they were beautiful, and it meant he was with his godson instead of out in the middle of things.

*

            Draco let Weasley begin the tale. She was the one they would listen to, their sister or daughter or sister-in-law, and Potter had walked away. If the Weasleys’ regard for him was hostile enough, Draco knew he might not last long without that shield.

            But then Weasley turned towards him and said, “I wasn’t the one casting the spell that saved me. What did you do, Draco?”

            The shock of the name pinned him to the ground. The suspicious eyes of the others turning to him didn’t make things much better. Especially when the Weasley with the scars shining on his face muttered, leaning in like a werewolf for the throat, “Yes. Why don’t you tell us, Draco?”

            Draco lifted his head. He would not let them see that they could intimidate him.

            Besides, could they? He could chop their bodies into thirds, if they angered him. He could open the ground beneath their feet, and slam the dirt walls together above their heads. He could cut off their fingers and go on slicing the detached flesh into smaller and smaller pieces before their horrified eyes.

            The sucking sensation inside him, the release from fear, was dizzying. He stood there quietly breathing, one hand held before his eyes and one on his chest, and ignored the Weasley’s insistence until he leaned forwards and jammed his jaw into Draco’s face once more.

            “I asked you a question.” The man’s voice had deepened and settled. Draco reckoned he knew what would happen if he went on being quiet.

            But he can do nothing to me, even if he is a lycanthrope. I would stop his charge long before he reached my throat.

            Draco looked the Weasley in the eye. The youngest Weasley, he saw, watched him with emotions twisting like tattoos over her face. Well. She was the one who had called him by his first name and aroused the anger of her family. She couldn’t blame Draco if the situation escaped both their control.

            “Yes, I saved her,” he said. “I chopped the wind holding her apart, and kept on cutting clear air so that she could fall. Potter was the one who caught her at the bottom with wind.” He kept it as simple as possible, and saw faces tighten behind his immediate audience’s shoulders. The only one who looked happy with the news was Delacour-Weasley, because she had some sense. She gave Draco a faint smile and picked up her little girl, who at least hadn’t inherited the trademark red hair. Draco wished her long life and strong blood. Perhaps she could produce enough silvery children that they would have a chance at beauty.

            “How could you chop that way?” the Weasley matriarch asked, all brash red hair and red face, shoving her way forwards. Draco tried to repress the memory of the distaste his mother had used to watch her with in King’s Cross Station, as all those brats tumbled around her. “We’ve seen your magic. You can cut the earth.”

            “And lots of other things,” Draco said softly. “Though I own that my ability to slice through the wind of Hurricane was a surprise to me, too.” His power could do many things, but not make his neighbors live with him in peace, he reminded himself. It only kept him from having to fear the Weasleys. It didn’t mean they were going to be friends without effort.

            The Weasley matriarch exchanged a glance with her husband, and went on with the same granite determination in her voice. Draco thought it a shame that they couldn’t cut her stubbornness apart and use that for building material. “If it’s true that you saved Ginny, we owe you a life-debt.”

            Draco smiled, and they flinched. But he wasn’t trying to make it a terrible smile on purpose. He suspected the sheer amount of glee on his face was enough.

            “Oh, it’s such a stupid thing, as Potter would say, to keep track of debts in a new world,” Draco murmured. “I only want to live in peace with you. Shall we say that the debt is forgotten if the past is forgotten?”

            He got grimaces for that, and no wonder. It was asking to have the debt repaid in a different way. The Weasleys would have to have civil tongues and couldn’t make jabs at the old feuds and crimes without showing contempt for their daughter’s life.

            The Weasley mother gave another glance at her husband, though Draco didn’t know why. It was like asking a monkey to make decisions for a charging bull. “Very well,” she said at last. “Provided that you remember the peace of the settlement should be kept between everybody. Of course.”

            “Of course,” Draco said, and knew that he looked more gracious than the Weasley woman doing it. He even swept her a little bow, scraping to her on the surface, really driving the point about his greater politeness home. “We’re in a strange world, and we can’t all depend on Potter to survive.”

            Delacour-Weasley, and the surviving twin, looked stricken at that as he turned away. Draco hoped they did. He didn’t hang on Potter like they did, but Potter’s strength might one day be all that stood between Draco and one of Hurricane’s storms, which meant Potter needed to spend more time practicing it and less time attending to the petty little needs of his adopted family, however very human those needs might make them.

            Draco thought about that as he left them behind. His father had wanted to suppress human needs, he thought, or at best use them as weapons against other people. He had no flaws on the surface that were not carefully crafted traps for enemies who thought they could tempt him or probe a weak point. Of course, that left many other flaws that Lucius wasn’t aware of, and which Draco saw with clearer eyes as he got older.

            His mother had said simply that everyone was human and you might have to understand them, but on the other hand, being human was nothing special.

            Draco flared his fingers out in front of him and thought about invisible claws extending from them, then snapped his fingers shut. He heard a distinct snick, and a tiny cut opened in the ball of his thumb, right where the claw on his second finger might have cut the flesh if it existed.

            Draco smiled. We will be better than human.

*

            “They’re pretty!”

            Teddy stood with a clutch of golden creatures in his hands and turned around to face Harry. Harry, who had guarded both their hands and skin with air the way he had when the white creature came, bent down and gravely examined the little animals. They were the ones with the gills along their sides and the thrashing movements that made them look the most like fish out of any of the creatures Teddy had caught so far.

            “They are,” Harry said solemnly. “But they might have grandmothers and godfathers to miss. Are you going to put them back in the water?” Teddy had kept a few of the other creatures he caught, but everybody had to use bowls and water, and there wasn’t a lot of room on Hurricane for pets.

            “Put them back,” Teddy said, nodding, and turned around to drop his hands into the water and let them go. The next moment, he cried out. Harry swirled to his feet, fearing something had bitten him, but Teddy had pulled something else out, a jolting, wriggling silvery thing that Harry could barely see, like a strand of living water that jerked against his fingers. “Uncle Harry, look!” He held it out.

            Harry stared. The form was like a snake’s, but two heads blossomed from each end, complete with the kind of flat eyes that the other creatures Teddy had caught tended to have, and the whole form shifted and changed with every change of light. That would be the snake’s camouflage, Harry thought; it was hard to see even when he was looking at it, and should have been impossible to glimpse under the surface.

            Which made him wonder how Teddy had caught it.

            He started to ask, but the snake wriggled around until all four clear heads faced Harry, and it hissed.

            Harry started. The words slid and halted and tried to droop off the edges of his mind, but he thought he understood some of it. The word help was there, and nest. Harry shook his head, hard, and listened as it hissed again, a sound like a bubbling sulfur pool, but nothing else came clear.

            “How did you catch him, Teddy?” he asked, when he could forget about the distorted Parseltongue. “He’s awfully hard to see.”

            “See him,” Teddy said, and shrugged. “I see him.”

            Harry abandoned that as unprofitable to ask for right now, and nodded to the water. “Well, the snake wants to go home. I can hear him talking, and he’s lonely for the other snakes.” That was his best guess for what the Parseltongue meant. “Can you put him back?”

            Teddy nodded at that, and let the snake slip back from his hands. Harry watched carefully, but even knowing exactly where that watery body entered the pool, he still couldn’t see it the moment it merged with the water. He shook his head, then knelt in front of Teddy and reached out, delicately, with his wandless magic, the way he had reached out to Malfoy when they were flying. Teddy was just a baby, and there was no one they needed to try and rescue this time.

            He sensed a soft glow of responding power, and he reached out and ran his hand lightly over Teddy’s face, making him laugh. The glow was strongest near his eyes. Harry touched Teddy’s eyelids, and Teddy closed them and giggled and said, “Still see you!”

            The wild magic of Hurricane seemed to have affected Teddy’s sight, then. Harry thought he should have suspected it earlier, when Teddy was catching all the small and fast things that no one else had managed to grasp.

            He pulled his hand back and spent a moment watching Teddy, who was splashing in the water and watching out for the next creature, chattering to himself in half-formless words about what they did when they were under the surface. So far, it didn’t seem to have done Teddy any harm. And Harry had to expect that the wild magic of the storms would affect all of them, or some, or none.

            It didn’t make him any happier.

            “At least it makes his sight keener, not duller.”

            Harry glanced over his shoulder. Malfoy stood behind him. Harry waved in greeting, but had to ask, “How did you know what I was looking for?”

            “I can feel it when your magic reaches for something,” Malfoy considered him through lazy eyes. “Since we were connected, at least, and when you touch someone else gifted with the wild magic.”

            Harry nodded. “I didn’t know it would affect someone so young,” he said. He hadn’t meant it to come out in a whisper, but it did. “I thought…maybe Hermione next, or Ginny, since she fell through the storm. Not Teddy.”



“It may have been there since the first day we arrived,” Malfoy said, voice not indifferent but cool. “He was catching some amazing things, fast and small, that I couldn’t see when I first took him to the pool.” He reached out, and his magic tingled along the side of Harry’s in a light, fast brush.

“We’ll need to live with it.”

Harry relaxed. “Yes, we do,” he said. That was reality, and he found reality far more interesting and comforting than platitudes of the kind that Hermione might have uttered.

They walked back to the camp with Teddy between them, and Malfoy didn’t talk about what had happened with the Weasleys and Harry didn’t talk about his fears, while Teddy talked enough for any three people. It was a comfortable thing to do.

*

SP777: Thank you!

They aren’t actually going to build inside the hills, since they don’t want to live completely underground, but they are building in the shelter of them, for something to break up the wind when it comes sweeping over the plains.

moodysavage: Yes, I liked writing that scene. And they’re kind of in tune at the end of this chapter in much the same way, I think.

The houses are going to be fairly low to the ground, just not level; a rolling roof is more practical than a flat one for shedding the rain and snow that Hurricane is probably going to get hit with in the winter. It’s not only wind that they have to worry about.

elementalwitch: The feedback is definitely great, and reassures me that I’m going the right way with my story.

Draco made a start at showing the others how to be independent here. Maybe.

bendinthewind: Thank you. The grass actually is pretty tall, but they’re near the hills now, where it’s shorter, and they’ve flattened it so that they can see in their immediate area. And other times that they’ve seen it, it’s been from above.

silverkitten: Thank you! A government structure, if any, is probably going to be for the sequel. (I’ve resigned myself to the fact that nineteen chapters is not long enough to capture the full story).
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Reap the Hurricane