Adult-FanFiction.org : Harry Potter

Flare	By : Lomonaaeren Category: Harry Potter > Slash - Male/Male > Harry/Draco Views: 21800 -:- Recommendations : 1 -:- Currently Reading : 1
Disclaimer: I do not own Harry Potter, and I am making no money from this story.

Chapter List
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Chapter Ten—Like the Light

            The feather in the middle of the red potion sizzled and sparked. Harry moved backwards cautiously, in case his mere presence caused it to explode. He had had that happen before. He had got no friendlier to potions in the years since Hogwarts, except a few specific ones that he had to know how to brew for Auror work.

            (He had passed that requirement in his final training, but barely. It seemed silly to him that they’d had him brew in a “battlefield situation.” How often would he have the chance to wait ten minutes for oak leaves to simmer on a battlefield?)

            “What does that mean?” he asked, when he glanced up and noticed that Malfoy’s expression had changed slightly as he stared at the potion vial. Not enough for Harry to tell or trust what he was really feeling, of course. He thought he would never be able to do that unless Malfoy was touching the wings.

            “Um.” Malfoy blinked at him for a moment, giving the impression of someone stolen out of the middle of intense concentration. “It means that your feathers don’t share another traditional property of the phoenix’s.” He turned away and picked up a second vial of potion, this one blue, holding a second feather above it. He dropped the feather in, and the sizzling and sparking immediately started again.

            “And what’s that?” Harry leaned back against the counter, ignoring the gentle fanning efforts that his wings automatically made to keep him upright. He was starting to wonder if he should have insisted on returning to Malfoy’s lab after all. Brewing in the middle of his kitchen had sounded like a good idea at first, since he wouldn’t have to leave the house and show his wings before the planned press conference, but having Malfoy and dozens of corks and ingredients and cauldrons and vials in his space was less comfortable than he had thought it would be.

            “Shhh,” Malfoy said.

            Harry rolled his eyes and looked away, up through his window. He could hear muffled conversation from beyond the wards, since other wards funneled sound at the edges of his property through the windows. The reporters were discussing whether they ought to try and get inside; they knew only the approximate location of his house, and had no ability to see it like this, or him.

            Harry smiled grimly. Try it, idiots.

            The sparking and spluttering stopped, and Malfoy moved back from the potion, shaking his head as he stared at it. “Fascinating,” he breathed.

            “What’s fascinating?” Harry looked at the second potion, but as far as he could tell, it had had the same effect as the first one, despite the entirely different color. The feather floated in the middle of it, stirred by small currents of bubbles that seemed to spring naturally from the bottom of the vial. It looked like a burned-out cinder, without the twitching life that irritated Harry so much when they were on the wings.

            “It doesn’t react at all like phoenix feathers to potions that are meant to simulate fire.” Malfoy took a step back, considering both vials with a distant look on his face. He looked halfway handsome doing that, calm and competent and in his element. Harry bit his lips so that he wouldn’t say something ridiculous and longing and nodded as if he knew exactly what Malfoy was talking about. “Various elements of a fire, I should say, including smoke and overheated air. Phoenix feathers would have responded by growing brighter and reaching out to their natural element. These simply burned.” He turned the same look on Harry, and suddenly Harry enjoyed it less. “Does that mean that they’re ordinary feathers? Or that something about their natural magic doesn’t protect them from potions, but would in a situation where the fire is actually burning? Or would they do better on the wing?”

            “I’m not lightning myself on fire for science,” Harry said flatly.

            Malfoy blinked and seemed to return to the more responsive prat Harry had got to know in the past few days. He nodded. “Of course. My apologies.” He waited a moment, and then added, “You haven’t experienced any unusual cravings in the last few days? Hunger for strange foods? The desire to increase your warmth?”

            Harry snorted. “Not unless you count my apparent desire to sleep with a blond ferret.”

            Malfoy stood stolidly in place, staring at him, until Harry flicked the wings and folded them to his back. “Sorry,” he muttered.

            “Would you let me do one experiment?” Malfoy asked quietly. Harry had no idea whether his voice was quiet in reference to what had just happened between them, or whether he was trying not to frighten Harry off. It seemed like the latter, especially when the next thing he added was, “This won’t take long, and I’ll do my best not to hurt you.”

            “Uh,” Harry said, and tried to move away. But the counter was already at his back, and he accepted with a grimace that he didn’t want to look like a coward in front of Malfoy anyway. He straightened up and fixed him with a grim glance. “Fine. What did you want to do?”

            “This,” Malfoy said, and whispered a long charm that curled up at the end in what almost sounded like a verbal question mark. Harry didn’t recognize the words no matter how hard he listened, and he had got pretty good at identifying Latin. He wondered if St. Mungo’s knew that Malfoy was using another language for his spells.

            Not that it mattered. The hospital was the one place Malfoy had been able to find decent, honest work, for all that he was a good Potions master. Harry wouldn’t tell them anything that might ruin that chance for Malfoy. There was petty vengeance like the ferret insult, and then there was this.

            The spell seemed to buzz around Harry like a cloud of warm, invisible bees. He felt the warmth, felt it probe into his chest and down, deeper. Harry twisted, because the sensation was coming to feel like the moments when Rosier had first cast the spell that warped him, and he didn’t want to feel that again—

            “Hush.” He glanced up to see Malfoy standing with his hand on the right wing, his eyes fixed on the air above Harry’s chest. “I promise, this isn’t going to hurt.”

            That’s not what you implied a moment ago, Harry thought, but the air wouldn’t work right in his lungs to form words when he tried to open his mouth and complain. He coughed instead, and something dark and flaring flew out of his throat and into Malfoy’s hands. He cupped his fingers tenderly around it and took it back to a cauldron that Harry had thought was empty, dropping it in.

            Harry forced his mouth to work, but it was difficult. He finally snorted a load of air out through his nose and demanded, “Did you just drop my heart in that potion?”

            Malfoy stared at him with some disdain. “Of course not,” he said, and turned back so that he could stir something into the potion. Thick foam appeared above the side of the cauldron, and Harry stared at it, but it remained white, not the red that he would have expected. “If I had, you wouldn’t be alive.”

            Harry clapped his hand over his chest, and yes, his heart was laboring there still. He shook his head, recovered his mental balance, and then snapped, “Well, what the hell was that, then?”

            “Shhh.”

            Harry slumped back against the counter again and stared at the ceiling. He wondered how many other Potions masters Malfoy worked with, and whether any of them had ever felt this intense impulse to murder him.

            Malfoy labored over the cauldron for another ten minutes, tossing in flakes of mysterious powders that he’d brought with him, muttering to himself and shaking his head whenever Harry glanced at him. Finally, he stepped back from the cauldron and reached into it with both hands. Harry stared at him with his mouth open, stunned at his hypocrisy. The first thing Malfoy had told him when he turned Harry’s kitchen into a potions lab was never to reach in with bare hands, that he should always use a vial.

            Harry didn’t get the chance to mention the hypocrisy, though. Malfoy turned around and showed him something wondrous in the middle of his clasped hands.

            When he came closer, Harry thought it looked like a crystal helix with two loops of color running through it, rather like the genetic model of DNA that Hermione had showed him pictures of once. One loop was red, the other gold. They told Harry nothing, of course, just like the charts of notes and numbers in hospital, but they were pretty. He raised an eyebrow at Malfoy, silently demanding an explanation.

            “This is the image of what your magical core looks like right now,” Malfoy said, and turned the helix around. “The spell I used was a seeking spell, which dived deep and brought up this image.”

            Harry felt his mouth fall open. “I never heard of something like that,” he said at last. “Why did it hurt so much?”

            “You aren’t whimpering or bleeding, stop complaining,” Malfoy said absently, staring back into the helix. “Anyway. Of course it hurt a little. It was pulling the image directly from your magical core, and that’s not meant to interact with ordinary spells most of the time. But I had to see how deeply embedded the phoenix magic was in you. If the spell had simply imprinted a pair of oversized phoenix wings on you, then we should see the feathers interacting with the potions I’ve used like normal phoenix feathers. But they aren’t.”

            “All right,” Harry said, and tried to ignore the eerie feeling that was creeping up and down his spine, brushing him with cold fingers. He was sure that he wouldn’t like whatever news Malfoy gave, but that was his business, wasn’t it? He was the one who had wanted Malfoy to help him. “But what is the answer? What do those two colors that are mixed into my core mean?”

            Malfoy looked at him, and his eyes were less clear than the helix, with specks of blue and grey that Harry had never noticed before. There was something else there, too. Harry leaned forwards and stared.

            Then he pulled back and slammed his hand into the counter, because otherwise he was going to hit Malfoy. “Don’t you dare pity me,” he snarled at him. “Don’t. You. Dare.”

            “This is never coming out of you,” Malfoy said quietly. “I should have realized it before. The wings aren’t attached to your body in any ordinary way, and there’s no reason for you to have only a few phoenix traits—the wings, the tears, the fire—and not others, such as the ability to immolate in fire. As I learned when I tested the feathers, they can’t regenerate all at once. They can renew themselves, so that you’ll never lose the wings, but you won’t go up in a ball of fire and stop aging.”

            “Get to the bloody point, Malfoy.” Harry tried to shift and straighten up again. He hated that his voice sounded so dead.

            “What happened,” Malfoy said, “is what I only half-suspected when I told you that you have some traits of a phoenix, most notably the fact that you returned from beyond death. The magic entered your core, a blast of fire with just a touch of phoenix magic—it’s a very old spell, but no longer based purely on the power that we took from the phoenixes—and mingled with your power. You’re strong enough that your core kept you from dying, but it couldn’t keep you from changing. Instead, you acquired those phoenix traits that match closest to traits already in your character.”

            “I never wished for more attention,” Harry snapped, and flailed the wings at him.

            “I know.” Malfoy didn’t move away from the wings, but he kept his eyes fixed on Harry’s face instead of them, which was unusual. “You have the wings because you like to fly, I would imagine. You have the healing tears because you like to help others. You have the fire because of your temper and because you have a lot of need for defensive magic, in the job you work.” He took a deep breath. “You’re not a part-phoenix. Not really. Nor are you someone with wings on his back. The tears and the fire hinted that it had gone deeper than that. You’re someone who was enough like a phoenix to make a transformation when that spell hit, and acquire just the phoenix gifts that would most help you, and channel the power of the spell into creating them, rather than generating a fire that would burn you to death. But you don’t wish to be immortal, you’re not afraid of death, so you don’t have that. I’m sure there are other things that you’re missing, but I don’t know what they are right now.” He took another deep breath. “You can’t get rid of the wings without also excising your magical core. Which would kill you.”

            Harry could have absorbed that. He could have got through that and done something about it in a calmer mood. He could have. He was sure of that.

            But—

            The pity in Malfoy’s eyes.

            It stung and flayed him as even the interest Malfoy had shown in the wings had not. That was at least excusable, wasn’t it? People showed interest in Harry for all sorts of things that he didn’t appreciate all the time. He had learned to live with it when it came to Voldemort and the part he’d played in the war, because, yeah, that was never going away. So he granted interviews and press conferences when he had to, tried to keep the attention mostly on his present Auror work as much as possible, and protected his privacy most fiercely where it counted, at home. People could stare at him, as long as they did it in public and he could retreat when it got to be too much.

            But these wings followed him home. The changes in his magical core followed him home. He was never going to be the same.

            He couldn’t live normally. He never would be normal. He could have accepted that, but not his inability to escape. He had felt the same way about the Horcrux when he realized it was inside him and he had to carve it out. His walk into the Forbidden Forest had been, in part, desperation to have it gone.

            But this time, he was older. He had more to live for.

            He just hated the way he would have to live right now, and that meant he needed time alone, and that meant he needed time away from the pity in Malfoy’s eyes.

            “Get out,” he said, and his wings came up in a surging wall that barred Malfoy from a sight of his face.

            “Harry,” Malfoy said. Harry heard him set something down with a clink, probably the crystal sculpture, and move a step forwards. “I don’t think you should be alone right now. You need time to adapt—”

            “Yes, fine, you’ve done what you said you would do, you found it out,” Harry interrupted in a clipped voice. “It’s fine. Go away.”

            “Harry—”

            Harry lashed out with his right wing, for the first time trying consciously to hit something with it rather than avoid hitting it. He felt the gathering power in the arc of motion, but still had no idea how strong it would actually be until he heard a splintering smash and a curse break from Malfoy’s mouth.

            He lifted his wing and stared. Malfoy was in the middle of the remains of the kitchen table, the crystal helix shattered next to him. Bits of the solidified image had cut into his chest, and lazy trails of blood fell down it. A mad giggle broke from Harry’s lips before he could stop himself. How would he tell someone that he cut himself on my magical core?

            But the laughter died when he met Malfoy’s eyes. He turned away from what he saw in them, and walked towards the back of the house, shutting doors behind him as he went.

            He heard Malfoy picking up splinters, cleaning up after him, picking up cauldrons. He wanted to call out an apology, wanted to make Malfoy stay.

            But his voice was stuck in his throat, just like the wings were stuck on his back, just like the magic was stuck in his core, until the moment he heard the door slam behind Malfoy.

            I don’t know what to do.

*

            unneeded: Harry can bring them under control by working with them. Of course, for various reasons, he doesn’t really want to do that.

            cloudseraphim: Thanks! As for Draco having wings, then I think I’d have to say no, but Draco will have the chance to explain himself—and so will Harry—in future chapters.

            SP777: He may have no choice now, but he probably would look into ways of at least hiding them.
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