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

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Chapter Seven—Heart of the Summer, Heart of the Storm

            Draco hammered against the bonds of wind that he knew Harry had bound across the entrance of Andromeda’s house to keep him inside. Then he extended his claws and tried cutting the winds. Harry’s mere presence had made him stronger before, ever since the death of Bodiless and Harry becoming the gateway. Perhaps it had made Draco strong enough to combat Harry’s own wild magic, as well.

            But nothing happened. His claws, usually enough to cut the winds if they were traveling together and drop him to a lower level in the sky, only made small dents now. The cut breezes reassembled in seconds and took over the place where they had been hovering, ensuring that no piece of the entrance was ever without its guardian.

            “Where’s Harry?”

            That was the twin, from behind him. Draco answered without turning away from the door. He could see through it, a bit, but the wind created a curious blurring, as if the magic were wavering like heat. He couldn’t tell where Harry had gone, especially since most of what he could see was a blur of rushing green and the downdrive of rain.

            “He didn’t come in,” Draco said, and tossed his head back to get his hair out of his face. This was one of the first times he had wished for Harry’s power over wind instead of his own wild magic. It would have been satisfying to clear all barriers obstructing his sight out of the way at once. “He thinks that he can face the storm by himself.”

            “Why would he think that?” That was Johnson, pressing up behind her boyfriend. Draco didn’t turn to look at her. He liked her more than most of the Weasleys, but he was no more than neutral to her.

            “Because he’s stupid,” Draco said, and decided to try what the direct effect of a charge at the barrier would do. He hit what felt like foam and bounced back into the house. He scrambled to his feet and hissed at the wind.

            “He might be,” Johnson said, putting a hand on Draco’s shoulder as if she would try and restrain him. She stepped back with spread hands when Draco glared at her. “But he also hasn’t failed to come back to us yet. Try to have a little faith in him.”

            That was so hypocritical of her that Draco turned his head back to the barrier and reached out to Harry in the way only he could, so no one could chatter at him about doing certain things and being stupid in response to Harry’s stupidity. He shouted down the bond, Where are you and what do you think you’re doing?

            He received back an impression of silver static. Harry was concentrating so intently on what he was doing that he really might not have heard Draco. Draco spent a few seconds shaping a sharp emotional probe, one that would contain the extent of both his own disappointment and his fear, and then threw it back down the bond. What the fuck are you doing?

            He heard a gasp, as clearly as if Harry was standing in the house with him, and had to close his eyes. He had also considered that the silver static might have been occurring because Harry was dead.

            I’m flying, Harry said, his own voice nearly as pointed as Draco’s. And I’d like to live, if you please. So leave me alone. I need to concentrate.

            He placed a barrier in the bond, something flexible and unyielding in the same way as the winds he had placed over the entrance to the house were. Draco tried to tear through it with emotion, then words, then simple and furious effort, but nothing happened.

            He opened his eyes and said only, “He might die,” to the faces watching him.

            But if he didn’t die, Draco thought, he would have to come down again. And he would find Draco waiting for him.

            Probably not in the way he thought. But it didn’t have to be in the way he might think.

*

            Harry tucked his legs and arms in closer to his chest, and spiraled around in a wide, crazy circle. He could feel the nearest layer of the storm peeling off as he flew closer, both because some of the winds were flocking to him and falling under his control and because he was pulling on the power, investigating it.

            He would find a way to calm these storms and make sure that the humans were safe during the summer, too. And he would find out why this storm, which he had thought was safely far away, had grown so quickly.

            But for the moment, it was enough to fly.

            The winds stiffened beneath him, the air stilled, and Harry began to fall. Harry laughed and caught himself with some of his new, tame winds, shaking his head. The layer of the storm he had been in had dissolved, and now he was in what someone from the outside would probably see as the eye of the storm.

            It was mad, exhilarating.

            There was a distant bark in the middle of his mind, behind the barrier he had established that kept Draco out. Harry winced a little as he thought about that. He hadn’t wanted to. But neither had he wanted to fall in the middle of the most dangerous and intricate flying he had ever done.

            Speaking of which, he thought, as the winds whirled him around completely and tried to plaster his hair to his skull with rain, maybe he should concentrate more on the flying, and less on his (probably extremely upset) bondmate.

            He stretched his hands out in front of him and pulled them towards his body. They gathered air as they pulled, and by the time he got his arms back to his chest, Harry was clad in whirling air, in slicing air, and in breezes like blades.

            With the air cutting away all the winds that reached for him, he was falling steadily, losing height as the main body of the storm swirled around him and above him. That didn’t matter, though. Harry thought a view from this vantage could prove just as valuable as getting above the storm and looking down at it.

            And he wasn’t sure that he would be able to survive a journey up through the heart of the storm to the height where the riders and their beasts were flying, anyway.

            The barrier in his head shuddered again, and Harry wondered if Draco had sensed that thought and thrown himself against the part of the bond that separated them. Harry winced. He didn’t want to—

            But he had already promised himself that he wouldn’t think about that, and he most likely couldn’t if he was going to do anything but fall. He stretched his hands out again, but this time, he commanded his tame winds to surround the strongest wild ones they could find and herd them towards him.

            For a second, Harry hovered there, the sky turning bluer and bluer above him, more and more purple below, as though the storm had split into two halves that were healing back together.

            And then the storm screamed.

            It seemed the wild winds hadn’t liked being cornered by the tame ones and told to obey a master, Harry thought dazedly, as he found himself tumbling through space and looped his arms together around his head to take the full brunt of his fall. If he landed before he could stop himself, at least he wouldn’t slam his skull open.

            Draco snarled and broke through the barrier with an ease that told Harry more than he liked about how “easy” it was to keep his bondmate out of things. What did you think you were doing?

            Harry couldn’t respond for long minutes, since the sky seemed to have turned into a trampoline and bounced him downwards. He didn’t have any winds anymore, he thought suddenly, wildly. The storm was pulling them all away.

            He was falling.

            He could hear Draco’s shrieks, deep, full-throated things that reminded him of the sounds a wild animal would make, on bounding up to a barrier and finding itself restrained by a leash. Harry shook his head. Of course. The barrier that remained in place over the entrance of the house was preventing Draco from coming to his rescue, even assuming that he could do anything once he emerged into the storm.

            Call its winds away, Draco snarled. Then you’ll have something you can use to fly with, and I’ll be out.

            And the people who are in there with you unprotected. Harry turned himself over the way that he would if he was falling on a broom and stared up at the sky that had rejected him. The purple streaks were even deeper now, to the point that he thought they looked like torn wounds. And there was air reaching down for him, after all. Harry smiled grimly. There was a hostility around that current of wind less powerful but no less hateful than Bodiless’s. I can at least keep you safe if I’m going to die.

            And are you going to die? Because if you are, I’ll never forgive you. Draco’s words were pointed and felt like nails flung against his forehead.

            Maybe not, Harry said, and shot his hands out, raking the wind in towards him as it touched his shirt, at the same time as he effectively expanded his magical core.

            He had lost his wand magic since they came to Hurricane, giving in entirely to the wild magic and the wind magic. But that meant he wasn’t helpless, couldn’t be. He could generate his own winds as well as rely on the strength of Hurricane’s skies. He had done it before they came to this world, although here it was easier to ride the storm.

            But he called out the winds now, and used them to fling reins over the neck of the hostile power reaching for him, skeins of his own magic wreathing the power's neck. Once again, the storm tried to snatch back control, but this time, it failed. These winds were part of him and couldn’t be taken from him any more than his core could.

            The storm decided to gallop instead.

            Harry’s body swung wildly back and forth as the storm tore across the sky, and his legs jerked and flew apart, and his hair whipped back hard enough to make it feel as his scalp was going to rip free. But the point, the point, Harry thought fiercely, forcing back the shrieks that Draco was once again trying to invade his mind with, was that he could hang on. He could fly, and he could survive.

            It was hard, to the point of impossible, but he could do it.

            You would do it more easily if I was with you.

            Harry said nothing. He didn’t have to. His feelings beating down the bond, bright blue and purple as the storm’s, said it for him. If Draco was with him, he would have to watch out for two bodies instead of one, and have to defend Draco instead of spending his time on mastery of the storm.

            You haven’t mastered it yet.

            I haven’t, have I? Harry asked distantly, and flung himself sideways, his winds making a little space of clear air for him in the middle of the storm, his hands clenching down so hard that he thought he would break his fingers. Draco gasped and hissed in the back of his head, and that was in and of itself a distraction, though in many ways a welcome one.

            But Harry did it. He turned the wind he had reined the way he wanted to go. Instead of heading for the edge of the meadow, and south, the wind was now heading north, back in the direction that the storm had come from in the first place.

            You're still trying to do something other than land.

            Draco's voice was flat and heavy and resigned, and Harry shook his head and flung it off him the way he would fling off a plane of lead that Draco had tried to hand him to carry. Yes, I am, he said, when Draco clung and refused to be shaken off. Because I want to find out why that storm rose so suddenly when I thought there was ample time for us to get under shelter. Maybe we didn't destroy Bodiless completely. Maybe we have another enemy out there.

            Draco said something, but Harry couldn't concentrate on it because the wind was bucking beneath him, and all his attention had to go to it. He envisioned it as a flying horse, or a broom, and it was easier. The winds snarled around him, just beyond his control, but the ones in his control surrounded and shielded him the way that he had imagined the other beasts shielding a central one. Harry kept the currents he rode heading north, the way they should be, and the sky around him deepened to black.

            You won't survive, Draco was saying again when Harry deigned to pay attention to him. You're going to die, and that'll leave me to carry the burden of leading the rest of them and explaining your death.

            Harry laughed breathlessly as the wind rose beneath him, stealing him into the realms of the sky where there was nothing beneath him, nothing above him, but height and magic and will. If I can get out of the burden of leading them, somehow I imagine it'll be less than nothing for you.

            Draco snarled at him, silently, and still the wind rose, and still Harry had to pay attention to it instead of to Draco, the way he knew Draco would have preferred. He was surprised that he could keep breathing the air at this altitude, but that probably had something to do with his magic.

            Of course it has to do with your magic, you gigantic moron, Draco raged and snarled at him. Do you think you would be acting this way if you were sane?

            Harry didn't see what the issues of magic and sanity had to do with each other, and said so. The wind beneath him curved down, and for a second a rippling mane of power appeared, and then it did some spirited kicking. Harry still rode it. The wind halted, eddying back and forth. Harry clasped his legs even closer, sitting as upright as he could, instead of trailing behind it like an unwanted saddle.

            Does it matter, the way you look when you ride it? Draco's sarcasm was harsh enough that Harry winced, even though Draco wasn't up here to cut him with his claws. Does it matter, the way that you ride it?

            I think it does, Harry said, tilting his head back and taking the chance to gulp down a few brisk lungfuls of air. He could still breathe, but any moment, the wind might take him somewhere he couldn't. It gives me more confidence, and when I'm handling something that runs away like this, confidence is the important thing.

            He never knew what Draco would have said in response, because the wind took off again, and this time, it took him somewhere he had never been.

            The sky around him blazed black, and then blue, the kind of pure, heartless blue that Harry had seen sometimes in Hurricane's dawn skies. It never stayed for more than a second, advancing in front of a tidal wave of other colors that always washed over it and killed it. But here, it lingered, and Harry wondered for a mad moment if this was the place it came from, if one could speak of colors coming from anywhere.

            Through the blue threaded a hard crack. Harry blinked and stared at the darkness in that crack, and at the same moment, writhing tendrils reached out of it towards him. The tendrils had the form of lightning, he saw when he looked at them properly, and the whips that cracked around them had the form of rain.

            Harry gasped aloud as the rain spun around him, stinging his skin and trying to force his eyes closed. The lightning hit around and beside him, never exactly at him, because Harry's winds kept him turning and wheeling just ahead of it. Harry had no idea how they were doing it, if they were sensing it somehow or he was, and his instincts operated so fast that he didn't feel them doing it. He only knew that he couldn't keep it up forever, that sooner or later the lightning would strike him.

            Harry! Harry, bring me up.

            Harry cursed in startled shock, and then had to shut his mouth as he almost drowned under the tide of the rain. Draco! he snapped back. Where are you? What are you doing?

            Coming after you, Draco said coolly. You needed all your power to defend yourself, and you drew the barrier away from the door.

            Harry cursed mentally this time. No matter how intent he was on surviving, he should have wanted to protect Draco even more. He should have left the barrier in place no matter what happened in his corner of the sky.

            What about the others?

            They're huddling against the far wall. Draco didn't sound concerned, even though Teddy was in there, and he had admitted caring more about Andromeda than he used to. I don't think the storm is interested in them. It hasn't even touched me since I stepped outside. Not a breath of wind. It's focusing on you, the way you're focusing on it. You can spare some wind to bring me up so I can join you. Do it.

            I'm hardly surviving here, Harry said, his head rocking back as water smacked him in the face. What makes you think you can help me?

            Because two is better than one.

            Harry shook his head, although he didn't know whether it was all because of his own will or because the wind was urging him to do so, and he had no real way to resist. Well, if you think that you can...

            I know I can.

            And there's that famous Malfoy overconfidence. But Harry didn't think that Draco would lie about the storm ignoring him and the others, and if the barrier he had used to protect them was gone, the best thing Harry could do was end this storm as soon as possible. He reached down, curving an immense arm of wind around Draco's waist, finding him without trouble due to the bond that hummed between them. He lifted him into the air.

            For long seconds, the storm seemed to pause, as though reevaluating the threat that Harry had raised against it. Then it screamed.

            And the biggest lash of power yet came down towards them.

            But Harry wouldn't let it touch Draco. He would break it, defeat it, if it took him out of the sky. He batted back with his own wind, all the power in his core directed into that single blast, and the storm recoiled with a cry that sounded almost human. Harry reminded himself that it wasn't, though. The wild magic of Hurricane didn't have a conscience or mercy, and it would be foolish to ask for it.

            Harry used the long moment of peace to pull Draco up to his side, and settle him on the back of one of Harry's winds. Draco sat easily, his legs on either side of the invisible mount, and only smiled at Harry's confused lift of an eyebrow. All the Malfoys grew up riding both brooms and Abraxans.

            Of course, Harry said, a second before he felt the power unwinding from another layer, reaching down towards them. That proved he had been right, that the storm was composed of successive fabrics of power, towering miles high but not all joined.

            But the revelation didn't cheer him up. So it worked that way. So what? All it meant was that when one wind had been unraveled and exhausted, the storm had about two million others ready to back it up.

            Have you gone senile? Draco snapped at him. You use what you already thought about doing, of course. You find the heart of the storm and pull out the layer that joins them all. These winds have to have something to keep them together. They aren't naturally herd animals.

            They aren't animals at all. Harry settled himself more firmly as the wind beneath him bucked again, more power flooding this portion of the sky as the storm turned its attention more fully on them.

            Precisely my point.

            Harry shook his head. He wanted to do what Draco had suggested, but it seemed impossible, especially with the wildness brewing around them, blocking any way that he could reach up to the heart.

            He gasped as Draco razored his mind up and down with contempt, fear, and the utter exasperation and near-hatred he'd felt when Harry had left him caged up behind wind and risen into the sky as though their bond meant nothing. Of course it didn't mean nothing, Harry tried to protest without words, and Draco roared back at him without them, too, flinging images of standing behind the barrier and the silver house shaking from the blows of the storm, the fear coiling inside him that he would know of Harry's death only with the sudden snapping of the bond--

            It was the exasperation, and the realization that there was a whip of air right behind Draco, as much as any desire to be done with this, that made Harry surge up with a great cry of defiance, aiming at the heart of the storm as he hadn't since he first left the ground.

            There was a knot there, a knot of gathered magic, so tied with raveling threads of wind that Harry didn't know how he would manage to untie it.

            But Draco laughed in his head, not exasperated there but wild and real, and showed him the obvious solution. Harry gave a thin smile.

            If he was the gateway, the point through which wild magic could flow into Hurricane, the way Bodiless had been...

            He clenched his hands down into what felt suspiciously like fur, but was only the thickened wind of the strand beneath him, and for the first time, tried consciously to use the gateway, reversing the flow of the power through it.

            The storm, or the fragment of the power inside his mind represented by the storm, struggled madly for a second. Then Harry found the center of that great knot, and focused on it, and the knot began to loosen and flow, moving towards him.

            Harry seized and juggled the winds, braiding them through his tame ones, adding them to the breezes that he and Draco rode, spinning them out into the depths of the sky where they could blow unhindered. And when nothing would do but destruction, Draco was there, to swish his claws through them again and again, until they were tattered, tiny pieces that would never be able to come back together.

            They floated, inside seconds, in the wild, calm blue of a late spring sky on Hurricane, with Harry's body and magic aching, and Draco laughing in his mind, and their bond and Harry's winds swarming around them with triumph.

*

            Sasunarufan13: I think you will be satisfied by the scolding in the next chapter!

            SP777: Oh, I see what you mean.

            Thank you. I mostly want to write fantasy novels, which don't always work well with such a high dose of romance as I write.
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Here to Live and Die