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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 Nine—Children of the Ocean

            Draco had done a good job of the Memory Charm, he thought, and of the murmured threats. By the time that he Apparated Rasatis to the rocks that surrounded the island, the ones Harry thought the dead man had clambered over, she was shaking and had her eyes clamped shut and her hands clamped within each other.

            That’s one skill I picked up from being the Dark Lord’s torturer, at least. I can threaten people just fine.

            Don’t put yourself down that way.

            Draco stood there for a moment before he turned his head and saw Harry hovering on a current of air so thick Draco could almost see it above the sand. The sand, and the trash and pebbles and grass that made up the parts of the beach that weren’t sand, was blowing and shifting in circles and eddies, stinging Draco’s skin.

            Thanks to the bond, though, he would have known if Harry was really trying to shut him out. He stepped towards him and tilted his head instead. Are you done having a tantrum? Are you ready to talk about this?

            There was a sharp hiss, and Harry dropped down with a rush that made Draco’s feet ache in sympathy with the way he landed. Harry didn’t seem to notice the pain, just the way he hadn’t noticed the depth of the pain he was causing Rasatis, or the fear he was causing in Draco. He strode towards Draco and reached out, resting his hands on his shoulders, his eyes so bright and intense that Draco had to remind himself of his resolution to talk to him.

            What do we need to talk about? I can feel your emotions, and you can feel mine. That’s better than words, as you keep trying to tell me.

            Draco ground his teeth, but kept his voice calm. “Even having a bond doesn’t prevent us from having misunderstandings. And there are some things that only words can do. I want to speak to you aloud.”

            Harry stared at him. Then he sat down on the beach and said, “What would you have had me do instead? I had to frighten her enough to be sure she would tell the truth, without even trying to lie. And even then, you saw how far I had to go to make sure that she wouldn’t just take back her promise later.”

            Draco shook his head. “I don’t question what you did so much as the way you did it.” Harry looked at his wand as though to remind Draco he could have done worse with curses, but Draco interrupted him. “With that cold look on your face and that flatness in your emotions. That was what frightened me, not that you wanted to protect me or punish Rasatis. Of course you wanted to protect me, but you shouldn’t have done it that way.”

            Harry said nothing for long moments, staring out at the sea. Then he said, “That’s how I have to do it. Otherwise, I—sympathize with them too much, I think. I start thinking about how they feel, trapped and helpless, and the way I would feel in the same situation. So I have to make myself cold, and I have to reach down to the part of me that still hates Voldemort and everything he stands for.”

            Draco kept himself from flinching at the name, because right now, he felt it would go too far towards proving Harry’s point, whatever exactly that was. “Is that the same part of you that you used when the reporter threatened Teddy?”

            Harry blinked at him. Then he said, “Well, no. Because the reporter wasn’t a Death Eater.”

            “But I felt your memory,” Draco said softly. “I felt it when you went cold like that, then. You can do something like that in defense of other people, but when you’re fighting for yourself, it doesn’t matter as much. You were angry because Rasatis might have killed me and might have killed Teddy if she’d followed us back to the camp, or found it. You weren’t angry because she fired curses at you.”

            Harry shook his head. “Would it somehow be more justified if I felt angry about that? Or angrier? Because,” and he fell silent, and shot a globe of humming power down the bond to Draco.

            A globe of humming anger, too, Draco realized, as he closed his eyes in order to feel it better. It was bright, and had all the real emotions and warmth that he’d been missing when Harry went cold like that. Draco held onto the globe for a few minutes, savoring it, before he opened his eyes. “No,” he said. “It wouldn’t excuse going cold. But it would be more understandable.”

            Harry rose to his feet and paced back and forth beside the waves. Draco wondered if he would fly away again, or send another answer through the bond, to save himself the trouble of answering with words. But other than a narrow glance at him when he heard Draco thinking those thoughts, Harry didn’t react with anger. He simply said, “I don’t understand why I can’t get angry enough to protect other people. You didn’t want to torture her, and you outlined the arguments against keeping her prisoner pretty well. Why is it so frightening that I get angry?”

            “You’re too strong,” Draco said.

            Harry closed his eyes for a second, as though someone had told him that before and he didn’t want to hear it. And that was enough to trigger a rain of memories from his direction that told Draco that was exactly the problem. The Ministry had told him he was too strong to leave the wizarding world and emigrate to Hurricane, because he would cause problems there. His friends had worried about the way he was depending on his wild magic and giving up his wand even before they’d emigrated. Andromeda had sometimes hinted to him, gently, that she was worried about the way his magic might act around Teddy. And even his friends had given him long, considering looks after the day when he’d frightened the reporter.

            “Glad to know that it’s true, then,” Harry said, without inflection, the feelings in the bond between them thinning and flattening and vanishing again, as he hunched his shoulders and walked away to turn a pebble over with his boot. “After all, you have access to my mind and you know the way I think and feel and react, so if you think I’m too dangerous ever to get angry, then it must be true.”

            Draco groaned. Harry turned and looked at him. His face had gone that way Draco hated again, distant and cold, and he looked as if he would listen to Draco without giving a fuck about what he said.

            “I didn’t mean it that way,” Draco said. “I’m talking more about—about the way you roared at her, at the end, and the way you forced yourself to do something I know you hate—” He stretched out his hand in spite of himself, because Harry was withdrawing without moving a muscle. “No, I didn’t mean that, either. I’m not afraid of you.”

            “Yes, you are,” Harry said softly.

            Draco grimaced. Futile to try and hide from someone who knows everything I feel the minute I feel it.

            Yes, it is, Harry snapped back. I’m surprised you tried it, because most of the time, you’re more sensible than that.

            Draco rolled his eyes. If he couldn’t find relief for one set of feelings, then he would find it for another. “I mean that I’m not frightened you would pick me up and drop me from a thousand meters, or press your drills of air into my ears,” he said. “I’m not frightened of you losing control around me, or Teddy. And I think my aunt is stupid for fearing that. You’ve done everything for him.”

            “What, then?” Harry had at least taken a step towards him, and looked a little more interested.

            “It’s,” Draco said, and searched his mind, and found nothing, so blurted out the first words that showed up in his mind and meant something. “I’m afraid that you can shut yourself down like that and you’re trying to be the calm and perfect leader the rest of the time. I think you ought to take a holiday, and show your anger in less extreme situations so you feel more like a human.”

            “Thus losing my ability to threaten our enemies,” Harry pointed out, with impatience that danced down Draco’s back like spider legs. “Some people have the talent for torture. You don’t, and that probably makes you the better person. But if it protects other people and protects the camp, why does it matter if I use it?”

            “Because it affects you,” Draco whispered back.

            Harry blinked. “I don’t like having to do it, if that’s what you mean.”

            “Yes,” Draco said, glad that he had found what he wanted to say, even if he didn’t think Harry would take it the way Draco wanted him to. “I don’t like the way it affects you, and I don’t like the fact that you feel you have to wrap yourself in that cold shroud anyway.”

            Harry frowned and looked at the waves again. The emotions playing inside him had diminished, but not in that frightening way they had while he was torturing Rasatis, so Draco kept quiet and watched. Harry was trying to understand, he thought, picking his way through the various emotions Draco sent flowing his way and thinking about them.

            “You think being cold like that harms me.”

            Draco snorted. “You want to prove that you’re still better than I am by rephrasing my thoughts?”

            Harry rolled his eyes at him. “I know you know I don’t believe that. But you believe the first thing I said.” He fell silent, and gnawed at his lip until a small trickle of blood ran down and Draco hissed in annoyance. Then he said, “If I told you that I don’t mind, that I can do that to protect you and Teddy and my friends and everyone else I love?”

            Draco smiled because Harry had said his name first this time, and got a glare in return. But he nodded. “I don’t care if you don’t mind. You didn’t mind the way that everyone else leaned on you when we came here at first, either, until I pointed out what a bad idea it was. But going cold is still a stupid idea. It’s still something that I think you don’t need to do. We can deal with our enemies in a different way.”

            “Name one other thing that we could have done with Rasatis.”

            “Promised alliance to her and then Obliviated her once she had told us more about where her group was and how big it was,” Draco said promptly.

            Harry blinked at him. “You didn’t come up with that when I was torturing her.”

            “Not at the time, no,” Draco said. “But we could have waited. You had her secure in a prison of wind. What did push us to make up our minds so quickly?” He was thinking, trying to remember why he had thought they needed to eliminate or do something else with Rasatis immediately, but the thought process was clouded by his memories of what Rasatis had turned into immediately after.

            “I don’t know,” Harry said, his mouth drawing down. “Yes, that was a possible solution. I’m sorry I didn’t think of it on my own.”

            Draco made a rude noise that he’d last heard when Harry refused to let Teddy stay up past twilight. As Harry pivoted on his heel to stare at him in astonishment, Draco glared back, and also sent thoughts sizzling down the bond between them that made Harry stagger. You idiot. You’re taking on more guilt over something you didn’t do. If you should have thought of it, so should I. You said that a minute ago. Why are you taking it back?

            Harry reached over his shoulder to scratch a place in the middle of his spine that Draco knew for a fact didn’t itch, but he didn’t take his eyes off Draco. “If I set myself up as a leader, then I ought to act like one, don’t you think? That includes accepting the blame and doing something about it.”

            Draco rolled his eyes again. They were starting to hurt from being mistreated, but what else could he do when Harry was playing the idiot? You are trying to move away from that, he said, still speaking through the bond because that would give him more intimate access to Harry’s mind, and remind Harry of what he felt without any possibility of disguise. I know that. I’m glad. But that means you can’t become the lone and suffering martyr, either. Unless those are the only two roles that you know how to play?

            I’m also a good godfather, Harry snapped back. And a good friend, and a good warrior, and excellent with wind magic.

            None of those roles includes taking on guilt until you collapse under it, Draco said. You don’t have to do all the hard things, all the time, because you think there’s no one else to do them. Most of the time, you don’t give anyone else the chance to do them. I’ll concede that I didn’t want to be the one to do something about Rasatis, but if we’d waited and thought it out, we could have come up with something together.

            And from the way Harry paused, Draco knew he’d found the right words, at last.

*

            Harry passed a hand over his eyes, and wondered if Draco knew what a relief the words were to him, how much he had wanted to put his burden down and find some way to live normally.

            I know now.

            Harry turned and smiled at him a little. “You do,” he said. “Thank you.” He hesitated, then added, “And do you think I can use my magic to protect you and Teddy without it bothering you, or do I need to pick my wand back up?”

            Draco gave him the same kind of complicated grimace he had already worn several times during Harry’s explanation. “I think you need to control your magic better,” he said. “And remember that you can frighten people as much with show as with the actual substance of the magic itself.”

            Harry nodded. “I’ll remember that. Thank you.” He was beginning to feel a little silly with the simple words, as if he could find something deeper, something that would express what he was feeling better than he had so far. Draco simply sat and watched him, his legs crossed beneath him. Harry coughed and cleared his throat. “Is there anything else you wanted to talk to me about?”

            Draco shook his head. “I Obliviated Rasatis. I don’t think the information we could gain from her is worth going back and finding her again, or disrupting the Memory Charm.”

            “Obviously not,” Harry said, staring at him, only to receive another snort. “Okay. So I’ll try to restrain my magic, and I’ll concentrate on important things.” A thought almost made him leap then, and turned him towards the island. “I never told you about the eggs I found there.”

            “What eggs?”

            Harry grinned in sympathy at the strained note in Draco’s voice, and pulled the smashed bit of pebble that he’d found out of his pocket. “Look at this,” he said, holding it out. “I know it’s shaped like a pebble, but doesn’t the yellow stain on it seem like yolk to you? Look, it comes off if I flake it.”

            Draco stared at the bit of shell, and then swore creatively and reached out to take it. Harry let him turn it over and sniff at the yolk on the inside of it the same way Harry had. When Draco looked up, his face was grey.

            “I had thought it best if we moved our camp nearer the ocean,” he murmured. “Here, we would have water, and the desalination charms that Johnson mentioned didn’t sound as though they would take that long. But if there’s creatures like this hatching near there…”

            Harry nodded. “Not to mention that the snake-sharks might come nearer the shore in order to take prey. We don’t know that much about their habits yet.”

            “And we aren’t likely to learn, if they devour all of us the minute we move here.” Draco looked again at the piece of egg, and then handed it back to Harry. “If that one attacked us because we approached the island, it could also mean that they protect their nests, and we could end up with another one chasing us if they laid eggs and we didn’t know about it.”

            Harry nodded again. “Not to mention that they can fly. They might be able to lay eggs on the island and then leave again, and if they came at night, there’s no reason we would know it. But they would, and start attacking us again. You and I have the ability to survive something like that. Someone like Ginny on her bird might, too. But Hermione, or Ron, or Teddy, on a broom? No.”

            Draco frowned and bent down over the sea again, letting the sand run through his fingers for a moment. Then he straightened up and turned around. “I’m hungry. Do we still have enough of that rabbit meat that we could make a meal?”

            Harry was surprised by the hunger that stirred in his own stomach, until he remembered they had barely eaten since that morning. He nodded, and turned towards the place where he had made the fire to test how the fish smelled when it cooked. It seemed so long ago, but then, they had made enough discoveries today to weary someone with a heart more inclined for adventure than his was.

            Really, he would have been content to stay quietly in the camp by this period of his life, but he needed to know the creatures of the world and the dangers they presented if he was going to keep Teddy safe.

            This period of your life, Draco said, making it silent to sting. As if you’re a doddering old man and Teddy’s your grandson. A pause. As if you didn’t have the possibility of more children of your own.

            Harry pushed back rejection, and then paused and looked around. The winds had died. He wondered for a minute if the mummid herd they’d seen dancing the young one into being had come back and required the magic again for another ritual.

            But then he saw the eyes watching them from the edge of the ocean. He moved back towards Draco, his hand reaching out to brush Draco’s. Draco gave a shallow nod, and Harry knew from the slight bristle against his back that Draco’s hands had grown those necessary, invisible claws.

            The eyes were blue-green, the color of the turquoise beads that Tonks had left Teddy as one of her treasures. They floated nearer the shore. Harry couldn’t see anything around or under them, and that made him wonder if this creature was part of the water.

            The waves leaped up silently in the next moment, and answered his question. Yes, the eyes were like stones floating on top of the water, but another body was rapidly shaping under that, one that had foam for hair and long, wavering edges of ripples for limbs. In a moment, the figure had formed into one that looked human, and it stood on the sand with its feet slapping into and out of the water, and stared at them.

            Harry clenched his fists. Had the Unspeakables who’d come here made a mistake after all? Had they missed human inhabitants of the planet, perhaps Hurricane’s own version of wizards?

            But then he shook his head. He thought the creature was only forming a body in imitation of them, beings it hadn’t seen before. Even as he watched, the bend of one elbow became sharper, straighter, instead of the smooth curve it had been so far.

            “Yes,” Draco whispered back to him, and then moved forwards. His hand swept out. Claws sliced the human-looking body in half at the waist, and the water leaped up, splashed, and came down exactly where it had been before, with only a small interruption. The blue-green eyes shifted to Draco, but Harry could make out no recognizable human expression in them.

            “What did you do that for?” Harry snarled back, and tried to call the winds towards him, to surround them both with a protective, rotating cocoon. The creature took a step back into the sea at the gesture, but didn’t seem any more afraid or upset than it had when Draco cut it. “What were you thinking?”

            “I wanted to see how it would react,” Draco said, and smiled at him. “Isn’t it nice that it doesn’t seem to be aggressive?”

            Harry stared at him, then shook his head and faced the creature again. He wondered if it could communicate with them along mental bonds, the way that the mummid had learned to do. He tried to push his magic towards it, in some way that didn’t involve loosing his winds, tried to think of it as having a mind. Could he locate that?

            There was nothing there when he reached, though. No notion of a paired mind, the way all the mummid had to have before they could call themselves a person and begin to speak. No stir of wind in response to his wind, which he might have thought would happen because of the way the winds had died when the creature appeared. No chance of—

            Harry narrowed his eyes, and used some wind to splash the water near the creature’s heels.

            The creature turned around at once, broke the surface with fingers that elongated easily, in a creepy way, and splashed some more water back at him.

            Harry grinned. So the key to communicating with it lies in the sea.

            I don’t know if we want to, Draco said back to him, along the bond. If it imitates whatever we do, then at some point it’ll probably try to fly, or have sex with us, or kill people.

            Harry had to roll his eyes at that. As if I wanted to have sex on the beach, anyway. Sand would get up my arse and leave you no room to put your cock in.

            There isn’t that much sand around here.

            The sea-creature had spent the time they were communicating looking back and forth between them, and now it stepped out of the sea again and came towards them. Harry stiffened the cocoon of wind. Draco laughed, which made the creature stop and consider them again. I thought you were the one who was insisting that it was practically harmless?

            I never said that. I just don’t want it trying to touch us and maybe accidentally drowning us. It might.

            Draco tipped his head, and then looked at the creature and formed his mouth carefully around the syllables of the word, “Hello.” The creature leaned forwards, focused on the movements of his lips, and Draco repeated it. The creature flowed towards them this time, its “feet” moving like tractor treads across the beach, and tried to send a tendril of water through the wind shields and down Draco’s throat.

            Draco choked and spluttered and jerked his head back, which was the first time Harry really realized that the attempt he’d made to shield them was futile. The creature’s water had flowed right through the wind, as if it was ordinary air.

            Harry must have made some motion that the creature didn’t want to imitate, because abruptly there was nothing in front of them but a few drying spots and some wet sand, and a gust of water had leaped back into the sea. Harry watched it fountain up and swallowed.

            “See,” Draco said mildly. “That’s an example of a time when you might want to restrain your temper for the sake of everyone else.”

            Harry bowed his head in response.

*

            unneeded: If she knows her destination, she can Apparate. The main reason no one’s been using Apparition so far is that they don’t know where the place they’re going to looks like. But Draco could Apparate to the rocks, and Rasatis can Apparate back home.

            SP777: Draco doesn’t want Harry cutting loose, though!

            I think I’m weak in description of emotions and in just plan, uncomplicated plots. I write too many words where a few would do.
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Wondrous Lands and Oceans