Title: Wondrous Lands and Oceans

Disclaimer: J. K. Rowling and associates own these characters. I am writing this story for fun and not profit.

Pairings: Harry/Draco, Ron/Hermione, George/Angelina, Bill/Fleur, others possible.

Rating: R

Warnings: Violence, angst, bloody animal death, bonding.

Summary: The emigration to the wild magic world of Hurricane is complete, but not the settling-in process. Harry and Draco struggle to solidify both their own bond and their bonds with their family and allies—while setting out on journeys of exploration that prove there is more to Hurricane than storms.

Author's Notes: This is a sequel to Reap the Hurricane; that one should be read first. This story will probably be somewhere between twenty and thirty chapters long.

Wondrous Lands and Oceans

Chapter One—Choices and Obligations

Harry's head ached. He leaned towards the fire and massaged his brow, grimacing when his fingers caught in and scratched at the scar. Sometimes he forgot it was there until he touched it, and then he would grow irritated with it all over again.

He would have got up and left the fire, but Draco's hand was on his knee to stop him. Harry glanced at him, and Draco reached over, took his hand, and pulled it away from his scar with neat, precise movements. Then he reached behind himself—sending far too many thoughts for comfort springing and spinning through Harry's mind—and came out with a handful of green, cool salve.

Harry blinked. "I thought all of that was gone," he muttered. They had brought supplies from the wizarding world, but this had gone the fastest, an ointment that Angelina knew how to make as an apprentice Healer which would soothe cuts and scratches.

"I hoarded some," Draco replied, and pulled back Harry's fringe, half-hauling his head to the side, tracing his fingers over the lightning bolt line. Harry sighed as the salve sank in and began to soothe the irritation of his scar along with the sensation of a brain bombarded by too many flying images.

Images sent telepathically at me by a herd of magical goats, no less.

But the mummid weren't really goats, and it had taken Harry and Draco hours to explain to them what a predatory bird hatchling was doing in the humans' camp, and why they thought they could tame the bird to fly for and with them, hunting what they told it to hunt, instead of slaughtering the mummid herds the way that any other bird would. Flight, the entity these mummid made up, had had to learn the concept of domestication, and then hear about the way Ginny had fed her blood to the bird, and then make out that Harry and Draco—the ones bonded by wild magic, the only human pair that the mummid thought of as real, sentient people because they were together instead of individuals—hadn't been changed by the proximity of the bird the way that a herd would be changed and made to scatter when their natural enemies came near.

It had taken most of the afternoon. Hence the headache, and the exhaustion that tugged dully at Harry's muscles when he shifted.

Hence Draco's hand on his forehead.

No, actually, Harry thought, blinking and opening his eyes. Why are you bothering being gentle?

"Because I can be," said Draco, the same way, his hooked thoughts informed Harry, that he was speaking aloud because he could. "This is my choice. Did you think that someone bonded to you the way I was would always be harsh?" He reached out and rested his salve-covered hand on the leg of Harry's trousers. Harry rolled his eyes at him, hissed, and summoned a breeze to brush over his knee and dry the salve to particles it could blow away.

"Yes," Harry said. "Because it's you."

Draco shook his head. His face was narrow, intent in a way that Harry hadn't seen it in days. Most of the time, Draco was so content with the way their bond was going and the way that Harry gave in to him that he seemed to have decided he might as well be complacent.

I'm not giving in to him anymore. That must be the change.

"It's rather stupid," Draco said, hooking his hands under his knees and cocking his head to the side. "To think as if I couldn't access your every thought, touch your every impulse. You could ask me the answers to your questions if you wanted to know them. No, instead you babble to yourself as if nothing mattered but the responses your broken brain comes up with."

Harry felt his winds rise, swirling around his shoulders and stirring his hair, in response to the flat arrogance of that pronouncement. Draco spread his hands, and Harry felt the invisible claws on the ends of his hands—and elsewhere, since Draco could place weapons in any spot he needed them—stir and unfold.

"I don't need to be harsh," Draco said, his voice clicking like the tumble of river-stones. "I don't need to act as though our history before we came to Hurricane is the only thing that matters and the only bond connecting us. I can. We have the choice. Everyone has the choice, Harry. You can change the way that you act around me and the way you act around the Weasleys." He glanced across the fire, to the area where Harry's family sat, leaving more than enough room for Harry and Draco to isolate themselves. "But you act as though you don't want to, as though you want to go on being my enemy and their martyred leader forever."

Harry stiffened. You know that that isn't the case. You read that in my mind. I thought you finally believed me when I said that I had no desire to abandon you—

"I do," Draco said, his voice all snap and bristle under the placid surface. "But you should accept that I can change, too. It's easier that way."

Harry nodded slowly. "Sorry," he said aloud. He stood up, bracing himself for something that was a lot harder than sitting by the fire and speaking with Draco: facing the Weasleys and explaining what had happened with Primrose, and the rabbit-creatures she had shown them, and the mummid.

Draco stood up at his side, and walked with him. Harry realized they were breathing in unison and shook his head in irritation.

We don't have to, Draco whispered. But we can if we want to, and there's really no reason that we need to stop.

Harry paused. When he thought about it that way, in terms of choices rather than obligations, then things made a lot more sense. He wasn't abandoning a luxurious indulgence with Draco and trying to pay attention to other people again; he was choosing to talk to the Weasleys more so that the camp would be more comfortable with them. Or else he wasn't clinging to his family because they were comfortable and turning his back on Draco because their bond made him uncomfortable; he was choosing to think and talk to him in a new way because that would allow them to be together in new ways.

Yes, Draco said, and his fingers brushed the back of Harry's hand, at the same time as invisible claws caressed Harry's nape under his hairline. That's exactly it.

Armed with pleasure and the discovery that he really liked it when Draco touched him that way, Harry went forth to battle.

Look at them. The lot of them. Huddling. Dreading.

To Draco, the clearest sign that something needed to change was that no one had tried to talk to him and Potter when they came back to camp, despite the hours they'd been gone speaking to the mummid. They had held back, and watched, and waited. If they had questions, not even Granger had dared ask them.

Draco could have put up with respect, or earned fear. This was mindless caution, and resentment of the fact that he was going to be with their precious Potter. Even speaking to Harry alone was no longer possible, not when their thoughts flowed back and forth and were shared.

Things had to change.

But Draco would be damned if he made many changes that he didn't want to. He might have to stifle some of his impulses, like the ones that made him want to haul Harry away from the Weasley girl or smack Granger across the mouth when her voice began to whine. He would live with the Weasleys.

He wouldn't let Harry deform himself or their bond or Draco in order to do it, though.

Harry halted in front of the Weasleys and watched them with soft eyes that Draco couldn't understand. What did they have to offer him that Draco couldn't? Yes, he had dated the Weasley girl at one point, but despite the way she looked at him, Draco had sensed no real desire in Harry to go back to her. He had been the first one to fuck Harry, the first one to touch him in any deep, intimate way.

I wish you would stop thinking like that.

Draco sent back a quick jab of thought that raced into the center of Harry's mind and showed Harry what he could do with his prudish impulses.

Harry returned a whirlwind that centered on the thought of the way he would get hard if Draco kept thinking about fucking him. It had nothing to do with prudishness.

Draco laughed silently, and spoke to the Weasleys on the strength of that cresting tide. If Harry could admit that Draco made him hard with random words, then Draco could admit that living with Harry's chosen family in the camp wasn't horrible. "So. The mummid did question us about the bird. We reassured them that we were still their allies and that the bird wouldn't attack and eat them."

"You couldn't promise them that." It was the Ministry lackey, the one who was sometimes on their side and sometimes not. Incredible as it seemed, Draco thought, he seemed to try and follow the rules of logic. Useless in the wizarding world, worse than useless on a world like Hurricane. "The bird might escape from our control and fly over them. It might require meat as it grows. You can't—"

"Then we lied to them," Draco said impatiently. "The same way that your brother lied to us when he told us that he was in control now." He watched the werewolf stretch from the corner of his eye, and snapped out invisible, cutting claws from his shoulder blades, which would act as a kind of armor if the werewolf came at him from behind. "None of us can know what will happen in the future. But we can try to predict it."

The lackey paused, his face a little less flushed than some of the others' would become. Draco could approve of a Weasley who didn't always turn perfect Weasley red. "Right," he said at last. "I didn't think of that. Thanks."

He means it? Draco sent to Harry, and Harry laughed and caught the thought and sent it back to him without the inflection of a question.

Apparently so.

Draco tilted his head, and Harry anticipated what he would say next and ceded the privilege of speaking the news to him. Draco cleared his throat, less because he needed to than because it meant all their attention was focused on him, hostile as that attention could sometimes be. "Primrose has left the camp. She couldn't stand being near the bird. But before she left, she showed us a source of meat."

The werewolf leaped up. The girl Weasley, who sat with her arm over the back of the hatchling cuddled against her, lifted her face, and a fragile light seemed to shine on it from somewhere. Draco wondered if she had fed the bird on her blood again, if Transfigured meat had proved insufficient.

"Where?" the werewolf demanded.

"Warrens," Draco said. Keep it simple, and they would have to less to misunderstand and therefore less to blame him for. "The creatures are like rabbits, except that they can vanish away from the touch of a hand. Thin to shadow, was the way that Primrose put it. She had captured several of them and killed them and dried the meat. She told us how she did it, too. And she tested the meat, and found it safe."

"We need to go and find some of them." The werewolf was making random little motions with his hands as if he and not Draco was the one with claws. "Now."

"Primrose only saw them in the daytime," Draco said, glad that he had foreseen this objection and had the right tone of indifference in his voice. He stood still and watched the werewolf, who sat down again after a moment. "But she showed us where one of the warrens was. Hard to find in the long grass, but we can find the way back to this one."

He felt the slight push of a question from Harry, and pushed right back. Yes, he was sure that Harry, at least, could track down where they had been with a wind, and make sure that they wouldn't lose the location.

Harry sat there radiating strange black-red clouds of shock that Draco would actually praise him and his wind magic for something. Since that shock took a lot of deliberate ignoring of the past, Draco ignored him right back.

"This could be the end of most of our food problems," Granger said, closing her eyes as if she was the only one the problem had overwhelmed. "If we had a regular source of meat—and fur?" She opened her eyes and looked at Draco. "Did Primrose say anything about how soft the skin is?"

Draco shook his head. "She created a glamour of one for us, and we saw the meat. We didn't see any of them alive."

"I'll make sure that we do," Granger said, and stood up, and wandered off into the night. Draco watched her go for a moment, wondering if she had heard what he said about the warren not being active in darkness. Then he shrugged. Knowing her, she had decided to plan an elaborate strategy that would lead to the capture of the rabbit-creatures, somehow.

"Primrose wouldn't stay?" That was the Weasel mother, and she was so clearly asking Harry that Draco faded back behind him and let him take over. Besides, so much interaction with people who wanted to destroy him had exhausted him. From here, he could touch Harry's back and admire his arse as he needed to, to relieve his shattered feelings.

Harry gave a push of wind that nearly knocked Draco off his feet, but answered the woman. "No. We tried to reason with her, and point out that her chances of survival on her own aren't nearly as good as if she stayed with us. But she was too frightened of the bird. At least…at least, this way, there's a good chance that she can live, if she knows those spells that purify water and food."

"I don't know the specific ones that the Ministry used, but I can work out what some of them must have been," the Healer said, sitting up and drawing her wand down her wrist as though writing the incantation in her dark skin. "If you give me some time."

Harry smiled at her, and the Healer sat up some more and took in a deep breath. All of them responded that way when he gave them attention, Draco thought. He thought he saw how the unhealthy dynamic between Harry and the Weasels had endured for so long. It was hard not to feel that he should give them that attention, when they hung so desperately on it. Harry would think that a little attention was all right, and then a little more.

And before long, you ended up with a camp where no one led themselves, where they looked to their savior the way they always had during the war, and where the savior worried constantly about what effect his actions had on other people.

I'm here now, to help you judge, Draco thought to Harry, stroking his shirt gently enough that it didn't tear under his claws.

Thank Merlin for that.

Not even Draco's insight into Harry's emotions could tell him, for certain, whether that last sentence was sarcastic or not.

Harry leaned against the door of their house and sighed. The conversations with the Weasleys had gone on until Hurricane's three small dots of moons had risen and then nearly set, and his legs trembled now. He wanted nothing more than to go in and flop down on a pallet, or even a dirt floor, and simply sleep.

But there was a problem standing in his way.

Andromeda.

She hadn't been sitting with the others beside the fire, which Harry hadn't thought much of at the time. He had assumed that Teddy was sleepy and she was staying in the house with him. Or else that she was tired and wanted time to herself. Andromeda still found the world too much for her in random flashes, which, considering how many people she had lost in the war, wasn't surprising.

Her face was pale the way it got when the world was too much for her, but she didn't move out of the way, and Harry knew he wasn't the reason. The reason stood behind him with invisible claws coming out of his hair and watched with an unmoving expression of patient interest.

"Andromeda, please," Harry said quietly. "I'm tired and I want to go to bed."

"You can do that," Andromeda said, and smiled at him for a moment before she turned back to Draco. "Without him."

Draco didn't say anything. Harry wondered whether to be grateful for the forbearance or not. He knew that quality of silence had a tendency to explode.

"I don't think he'll hurt Teddy," Harry said, promptly approaching what he thought would be the greatest source of her objections. Andromeda stared at him, and Harry snorted a little. Sometimes, people reacted to the direct approach as though he was hurting them. He didn't understand why. He wished more people had used it around him, beginning with Dumbledore. "I've trusted him with his care several times. And you and Teddy are the only family that Draco has here."

Draco ran his claws lightly over Harry's shirt again, not tearing the seams.

"It has nothing to do with Teddy," Andromeda said. "It has to do with you."

"We can promise not to have sex in the house, if it bothers you," Harry said harshly. He would have added that Draco preferred to fuck under the open sky, anyway, but there was a limit to how far he wanted to push Andromeda right now.

You've taken over the burdens, Draco said into his mind, a murmur like a distant brook. You've taken care of Teddy most of the time. You were the one who arranged the emigration. She didn't have to make her own decisions. She's inexperienced at it, I would imagine, since my uncle and my cousin died. That's what this is about. She thinks that she's losing you to me, and she wants to keep us apart in at least one place.

Harry sent back amazement at the spectacular insight, and Draco bit the back of his neck in response. Harry wondered if Andromeda had seen that, because she took in a breath and shook her head.

"You can't sleep here," she said. "Not together."

"I can promise that sleeping is all we're doing," Harry said. His body ached and pounded and hurt. Political negotiation had always taken more time and toil and resources from him than actual battle.

Draco snapped his fingers, but he would have to live with it. Harry had had sex with him just a few nights ago. They could go somewhere and fuck in the morning, but right now, getting into the house and sleeping was the most important thing on Harry's mind.

Surprisingly enough, Draco stepped away from him. Harry wondered if it was the exhaustion that had convinced him—exhaustion he would be able to sense in his own muscles—or the look on Andromeda's face.

"I don't care," Andromeda said quietly, her breath puffing out so forcefully that Harry took a step back. "This stops now. You are not going to be here, under the same roof as Teddy. He doesn't deserve to see you with someone who was on the opposite side of the war that cost him his parents."

And I don't want to see it, either. Harry didn't have to think hard to know what the conclusion to Andromeda's sentence would have been.

Harry closed his eyes for a minute. He had wanted to rest beside Teddy, the godson he loved, the godson he had given up so much in the wizarding world for, the little boy he had taken to Hurricane because he thought a wild, dangerous magical world would be better to grow up in than the corrupted place the wizarding world had become.

But Teddy was okay, and he would be all right without Harry for one night.

"Come on, Draco," he said, and turned his back on Andromeda, because he might punch her or rage at her if he continued standing there. "Let's go somewhere else. We've slept under the open sky before."

There was a long, crystalline moment that seemed to fill the air between them with starlight. Then Draco was walking beside him, one hand on Harry's hip, and Andromeda was catching her breath behind them.

"Should I just tell Teddy that you aren't coming back, then?" Andromeda's voice wavered and broke like splashed water.

Harry rubbed his forehead. Fuck, he didn't want to deal with this. He thought he'd defused the confrontation, and Andromeda leaped straight into another one.

"Don't be ridiculous," he said, staring at the darkening downs. Hurricane's long twilight had finally faded, and the moons were falling, too. Darkness sounded wonderful, darkness he could just bury himself and sleep in, and people would quit trying to wake him up and ask him questions. "I'm just doing one thing you wanted. It doesn't mean I'll never see Teddy again. I'll see him, and you, in the morning."

He walked away, although given the winds swirling around him, he could have flown. But with his luck, the blast of rage would have only lasted long enough to raise him to an impressive height, and then his fatigue would have taken over again and dashed him to the ground. Harry calmed the wind and walked until he thought they were in the middle of a sheltered hollow that would be out of sight of the camp.

Only when he lay down did he realize Draco was standing over him and staring at him.

"What?" Harry asked wearily, propping himself up on his elbow. "Do you think I should have forced the issue?" He could have read the answer out of Draco's head if he concentrated, but his own head was pounding, and frankly, he just wanted a straight response from Draco's words for once. A straight response from anyone would be nice.

Draco had to say the words. Harry was too far gone into a ringing darkness that propelled gong-like echoes through Draco's mind.

"You chose me," Draco whispered. "Over her."

Harry gave a little shudder-shiver from head to toe. "Not over Teddy."

"You chose me over pleasing them," Draco said, and knelt down in front of Harry, splaying his fingers over Harry's nose and forehead. Harry blinked back at him, and rubbed his scar. "You didn't even think about acceding to what she wanted and telling me to stay outside."

"I couldn't do that," Harry said.

"Because of your nobility?" All of Draco's feelings trembled in suspension, between the anger they would tumble into if that was the truth and the wonder that he would feel if something else was.

"Because I want you with me," Harry said, and rolled over and buried his face in the grass as if that would shut out the world.

It was up to Draco to conjure pillows, to lift Harry's head so he could put his face on one, and then to Summon a blanket that draped over them. Draco lay down with his hand on Harry's shoulder and his head on the pillow beside him and listened to his heartbeat.

He chose me. He did.

Yes, it was the wonder.