Disclaimer: J.K. Rowling owns Harry Potter. I own myself, and a computer.
Summary: Portkeyed to a savage northland wilderness, Draco and Harry must survive. Draco becomes inexorably bound to the wild and to Harry. Slash.
Author's Note: This is a quiet sort of story. I very much hope you like it. Please constructively criticize it – I would like to improve my writing more than anything.
"The land itself was a desolation, lifeless, without movement, so lone and cold that the spirit of it was not even that of sadness. There was a hint in it of laughter, but of a laughter more terrible than any sadness – a laughter that was mirthless as the smile of the Sphinx, a laughter cold as the frost and partaking of the grimness of infallibility. It was the masterful and incommunicable wisdom of eternity laughing at the futility of life and the effort of life. It was the Wild, the savage, frozen-hearted Northland Wild."
– Jack London, White Fang
Aurora
Chapter One: Infancy
Draco stared down Harry Potter in the uncharacteristically dry September heat. The feel of the desiccation on his skin was liberating. His hand cut through the air; everything felt sharper. Where humidity clings and muffles intensity, dryness releases.
Parched wand wood stung his neck where it rested. The wizard on the other end was tight, controlled, serene even. He hovered on his broom, higher than Draco, watching him with furious patience.
"Sirius Black was more talented and more noble than you will ever be." Harry's tone was rich and angry and final. Draco's eyes slit. He believed him.
The desolation of the day was made noticeable by the morning sky, so grey and even like a solid sheet of steel stretched industrially over the hills and turning the grass a sickly green.
Harry's wand was still there, still cold, still yielding the effect of a thousand tiny splinters piercing his ivory skin. He smiled crookedly. Cock it up to naiveté; any other wizard in his position would realize that Potter had no intention of engaging in word play, nor was he of the mind to grant Draco a mercy sneer.
"Noble." Draco tilted his head contemplatively. "Yes. How did he die? Oh, right. He fell through a curtain. How very noble indeed."
Draco thought that no silence had ever been so motionless.
"That's an awfully long-winded death wish."
A sharp breath of air escaped Draco's lips. "Could you?"
The air hissed with static and Harry inched forward on his broom. Draco moved back. The dark glint in Harry's eyes – he'd seen that in only one beast before. It thrust him into the rude reality of the situation. They hovered miles above any other soul, one wand between them. Draco's had fallen from the sky along with any hope of victory.
And Harry was so far beyond rage.
"Potter..." Draco whispered, frightened to break the tension.
"Avada –"
Draco's eyes grew large. He couldn't. "You can't," he mouthed. Harry's eyes widened and something more human took up residence among the flecks of emerald. Draco choked out a laugh. "No. You could never."
Provoked hatred. At that moment, a streak of gold jetted past their eyes and floated some fifty feet below them. Quidditch. Seconds before, Draco thought his life would end. But no, it was only a game.
Draco dived his broom towards the snitch, the air crackling through his hair and ears, a loud vortex that pushed the rest of the world far away. Harry was quick on his heel, but Draco was faster; it seemed as if he might actually grasp it.
He was still in a hard dive when he felt a jerk on his boots. A swift rearing of his head confirmed the fact that Harry had grabbed him and was slowing him down. But it was too late for the Gryffindor seeker: Draco's hand found the snitch.
The lurching sensation that followed was not what was typically defined as a feeling of success. The grey clouds fell away from him and one word melded instantly with the sudden sickness of understanding. Portkey.
Terrified and violently cold, Draco let himself fall.
- - -
Draco thought blindness would be darker. He though blindness was an absence of light, a complete loss of sense. But this blindness was searing and bright and so very, very frozen.
His eyes swam through the sea of white until it met with another form, a blotch of gold and ruby. He wiped tears, lured from his eyes by the cold, away from his face and wrapped his robe more tightly around his shoulders. It was snow, he realized when the nausea and disorientation of the portkey had vanished. It was crystalline, soft, bitter snow that blanketed the world as far as he could see.
The snitch was still in his hand, but the magic was lost from it. Then the more terrible awareness: they did not have their brooms. There was no return ticket, no way of getting back to Hogwarts.
Harry's quick intake of breath alerted Draco to his wakefulness. Harry's head was thrust upward to the sky, his eyes dark and scrutinizing the horizon as if he could still see the seam in the atmosphere they fell out of. His expression was panicked, and as soon as he noticed Draco he turned his frightened eyes on him.
"What did you do, Malfoy?" There was a sharpness in his voice, an edge to it of thinly-veiled horror.
Draco's voice shook with fear and the cold. "I d-don't know. I – nothing. I didn't do anything."
Their silence was magnified by the barrenness of the landscape and the whistled howl of the wind as it whipped around them. Draco watched Harry, watched his black hair grow white with snow. He watched as Harry's eyes dropped, sullen, to the blank ground, watched as his shoulders trembled then slowly fell, watched him wrap his cloak delicately around them and sat there, quiet, for endless moments.
As to what Draco was feeling, he couldn't quite tell. He was certain the snitch was sent as a portkey by a Death Eater, but to what avail? To strand them in this bitter climate? To hope The Boy Who Lived simply froze to death? It was just like Potter to drag Draco to his demise. Draco was far too young to become an ice block; he was far too important not to be rescued.
And if he wasn't rescued? Draco imagined a crew of wizards searching for his body, traveling these snow-crested hills (How would they find him? How would they know?) and stumbling upon his corpse, glacial and emaciated. He imagined his mother's face as she identified him – "Yes, it's my son. It's Draco Malfoy."
He imagined nobody ever finding him.
Suddenly Draco felt very sick, and he vomited into the snow.
Harry didn't stir. Draco kicked snow over the mess and stood, scanning the horizon. Far in the distance, several grey jagged points jutted from the land. The sky was amazingly blue. It was a hue deeper than the ocean and clearer than anything he had ever seen before. The constant rich shade made the starkness of the land seem more severe, more awful, and more vast, and made Draco in comparison the smallest and most insignificant part of it. The sky stretched forever, a brilliant azure nothingness that haunted him and awed him every time he stole a glance at it.
He trudged a few feet in each direction, then gave up, falling back into the snow. It was halfway to his knees, and the top layer was crunchy with ice. Beside him, the rise and fall of Harry's cloak proved little comfort to Draco.
"Potter," he barked harshly. "Potter, do a goddamned warming spell or we really are going to freeze to death right here."
A muffled voice piped from the mound of cloth. "I don't have my wand."
"You what?"
"It fell when I grabbed your boot."
"Oh, Christ," Draco swore. "Oh, fuck. Hell. Damnit. Shit. Fuck, fuck, fuck."
"Is that making you warmer?"
Harry's eyes had peaked over his cloak. They were red and blotchy and made Draco tremble inside because if Harry was that scared than they really were damned.
Draco glared at him, his lips tight. "We need to get somewhere."
Harry tucked his head under his arms again. Anger raged through Draco, anger at Harry for doing nothing, anger at the world for bringing him here, and anger at the restless confusion and hopelessness that had beset him. Well. Fuck Harry.
With a growl, Draco stamped off through the snow, away from Harry and into something unreservedly treacherous.
- - -
He wasn't letting himself think. He walked across the landscape, chilled but not as bad as he would be were he not wearing his Quidditch uniform. The leather boots warmed his legs, and the thick cloak and trousers were made for high altitudes where the wind was thin and bit like a viper.
After crawling from the shallow valley he arrived in, Draco was able to see a dark line in the horizon. As he walked closer it made itself out to be a rugged line of trees whose branches were iced with snow that caused the green limbs to arc towards the ground with their heavy burden.
Draco had never been north before; he'd never had any urge to. Right now he didn't know how far north he was, which continent he was on, or which bloody hemisphere given the possibility that he was incredibly far south, and he didn't much care, because Draco wasn't thinking. Not about that, at least. His mind whirled around the events of the previous week, month, year. Sixth year, Hogwarts was different. Not the good kind of different derived from a position on the Quidditch team or a new cut of robes or a new dorm mate because the other one had inexplicably blown himself up. His father was in Azkaban. There were no new robes or brooms. The students feared him less; he could no longer defend himself with his father's good name. There was only one person to blame, really; only one person to lunge all of his anger and discontent at.
Draco Malfoy focused on Harry Potter as his face became burned and his eyes grew sore from the blinding white of the sun-reflecting snow. That year, their hatred had become more silent, more mature, more based on slight glances and pithy words instead of messy dueling. It became less public, more inward drawn; more intense and scathing and frigid in its wrath. It was perfect. Each, to the other, optimized everything they were against. And it had all accumulated to a single moment, in the sky, when Harry turned his wand on Draco's neck.
A shadow of a tree hung over Draco and he fell against the trunk, gazing back over the land he covered. Draco fancied Harry still crouched around himself, weak and unable to summon the energy to stand. How the mighty have fallen, he might have said if Crabbe or Goyle stood behind him. But there was nobody, just the cold breath of wind, the sentinel trees, and the ice, silent and bitter.
The pain of losing his wand gnawed at him, stung him through the cold, made everything seem more intense. Draco was an aristocrat. He couldn't hunt or find shelter or survive without magic. But he couldn't fathom death. It loomed impossibly in the future and nothing, not the distant mountain peaks or the bleak blue sky could nudge it any closer. It simply couldn't happen.
He sunk down and ate a handful of snow. It barely soothed his thirst but it took the edge off, as well as the smart of his panic. He decided to rest there for no longer than a half hour, at least until the sun reached higher in the sky and warmed the places between the dark forest shade.
Closing his eyes, he thought he saw Harry wave to him from far below. The boy was standing on the base of a mountain, smiling melancholily as Draco turned his back on him.
- - -
"You're such a bastard, Malfoy."
Draco's eyes opened to find Harry peering down at him, his face a rigid mask, his hands crossed over his chest. "Yes, undoubtedly. I see you've decided to get off your arse."
"Fuck you," he spat.
"Ouch." Draco stood, brushed the snow off his silver Quidditch gloves, and took several steps further into the forest.
"You don't expect to do this without me, do you?" Harry asked, emotionless.
Draco paused in his stride and turned slowly around. "Do what, exactly? Do you have a plan, Harry? Do you know how to get out of this one? Do you know where we bloody are?"
"Somebody will find us. Until they do, we just need to survive."
Draco scoffed. "I see you've thought this through."
"We're in no immediate danger."
"Right. That explains your post-portkey breakdown. 'No immediate danger' – what does that even mean? That we get to survive as long as our stomachs last us and our body temperature doesn't sink too far?"
Harry shut his eyes and tightened his lips, and for a moment Draco thought he resembled the arctic, a man chiseled out of ice, wholly unmoving.
"I hate you, Draco," he finally breathed, his breath smoke in front of him. "But right now, out here, we'd be fools not to stick together. Don't talk to me. Don't even acknowledge my presence, but don't leave me behind, because despite all, we're both scared and stranded and in danger of everything."
Harry opened his eyes. All malevolence was gone from Draco's features, and his expression was as strict and unblemished as the frost. His life wasn't worth their rivalry. He knew that. So cautiously Draco nodded, and cautiously Harry stepped forward into the spruce forest, and together they walked into the wild.
Not Complete. More Soon. Have A Nice Day.