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Fairest Creatures	By : Lomonaaeren Category: Harry Potter > Slash - Male/Male > Harry/Draco Views: 22177 -:- Recommendations : 1 -:- Currently Reading : 4
Disclaimer: I do not own Harry Potter. I am making no money from this story.

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Chapter Fourteen—Falling into the Fire

            “We need to talk, Harry.”

            Harry stretched slowly. He’d gone to bed early, and had got an hour’s sleep once he managed to convince Draco to go back to his own bedroom and the professors to leave him alone. But he didn’t know exactly how up he was to this conversation.

            Still, he would only worry Hermione—and probably Ron—more if he said he didn’t feel well. He sat up with a yawn and said, “All right. Ask away.”

            “Come here.”

            Harry blinked, fully awake now. “I don’t know that I’m supposed to leave the school grounds.” Professor Grunnell had certainly made her opinion clear to both him and Draco when they got back from their appearance at his relatives’ house, although at least she had split the blame equally between the both of them.

            “Yes, that’s why you were in the Ministry six hours ago. Now, Harry.”

            Ron’s probably already told her that Draco’s my mate, Harry thought, as he wrapped himself in the kind of loose robe, dipping low in the back, that he needed now because of his wings, and got ready to Floo. Otherwise she wouldn’t have that tone in her voice.

*

            It was still disconcerting, once he’d gone through the uncomfortable Floo spin and landed in Hermione and Ron’s drawing room, to see her standing there with her arms folded and her glare harsh and direct.

            Harry scratched the back of his neck and resisted the urge to turn away from her eyes. “Is Ron here?” he asked, glancing around. Ron plainly wasn’t in the room right now, but he might have been in the kitchen, preparing something.

            “He went to bed. With a dose of Dreamless Sleep Potion, because he said otherwise he’d have nightmares.” Hermione smiled against her will, shaking her head, and Harry ended up smiling back. “He’s ridiculous.” Then she let out a breath that sounded as though it hurt her and straightened her back. “But it is pretty ridiculous news that he told me.”

            “I’m a Veela and Draco’s my mate,” Harry said, with a shrug. Hermione looked at him oddly, and Harry realized that he’d made the movement with his wings, more than his shoulders. He flushed and continued. “I mean, it’s not that strange when you think about it. It’s only strange because we thought nothing like it could happen when I went to the school.”

            “I’m still happier that you went to the school rather than choosing to have your wings cut off,” Hermione said, drifting over to sit down on the couch. She had a plate of biscuits waiting for Harry, which he took gratefully. “I think it would cause you too much pain, from everything I’ve been reading about Veela. But why are you and Malfoy mates?”

            “Compatible magic,” Harry said, and refrained from cramming the biscuits down his throat the way he wanted to, even though it was difficult. “It made bars of these different colors appear on our wings. The ones the Healers were arguing about?”

            Hermione nodded, listening intently.

            “Well, then I got bars around the bars,” Harry said, and shook his head when she looked at him blankly. “Like this.” He spread his wings so she could see.

            “How lovely!” Hermione took a step forwards and laid her hands on one of the black bars that surrounded the blue ones.

            Immediately a strange feeling struck him. Harry actually had to stiffen his wings so he wouldn’t promptly close them. It was—as though he thought no one should be touching them except his mate, he thought in confusion.

            But Draco was far away, and Professor Helios had touched Harry’s wings to help him when he was first teaching him the proper stances, and Harry wanted his best friends to see. He held still, gritting his teeth through the worst of the sensation, until Hermione let go and went back to her couch. She actually sat on one of the biscuits without noticing.

            “So Malfoy has black stripes with blue bars around them on his wings?” she asked, with wide eyes. She only absently cast a spell that got rid of the crumbs and crumbled bits of chocolate from underneath herself. “And what caused them?”

            “He does, and I don’t know exactly why the magic decided we were compatible,” Harry said, gritting his teeth against the temptation to answer sharply. Hermione hadn’t done anything wrong.

            Except she had, he only wanted his mate to touch his wings—

            You are being ridiculous, Harry told himself. It was a Veela urge, but so was the one to kill people who had hurt your mate, and Harry had insisted that Draco not indulge that one. He folded his wings finally and continued, “After that, I started feeling comfortable in his presence. And with the way he touched me. And my allure affects him more than anyone else. He’s teaching me how to get control of some of my powers.”

            “What are the others?”

            Hermione, in the excitement of learning something new, didn’t seem to notice how Harry had hidden the colors from her again. Harry smiled at her—in gratitude, although she didn’t have to know that. “I can use what Draco calls the Shriek. My voice sharpens and knocks him backwards.” He frowned as he realized it had never once occurred to him to use the Shriek when Draco was attacking the Dursleys. Why not? It probably could have stunned him even more effectively than the net had.

            Because he’s my mate. And I wasn’t close enough to catch him in time, the way I was when I fell from the cliff. I don’t want him to get hurt.

            With a little sigh, Harry put away the silly instinctive part of himself, and focused on Hermione. “I don’t know any other special ones, at the moment. Draco said the Shriek was rare, though.”

            “I know it is.” Hermione nodded as though answering some private internal questioning. “So are you glad that you chose to keep your wings and stay a Veela?”

            Harry hesitated. Finally he said, “I wouldn’t want to be in pain. And when Draco isn’t being a pain in the arse, it’s pretty great.”

            “But that’s not an unqualified recommendation,” Hermione said, frowning a little as if she had hoped to hear one.

            “No,” Harry said. “I don’t know where the changes are going to stop. And I don’t know if they’ll even let me be an Auror with wings.”

            “Of course they will.” Hermione’s eyes had a slightly frightening look in them now. “Or I’ll want to know why not.”

            Harry grinned. “Thanks, Hermione. But I think they might worry about me using Veela allure on innocent people. Or using Dark magic.”

            “Veela aren’t Dark by nature.”

            “No,” Harry agreed slowly. “But we can command people to confess their deepest secrets to us, and want to fall at our feet and profess undying devotion, and I’ve heard some ignorant people calling that Dark. What?” he added, because Hermione was beaming at him proudly.

            “You said ‘we,’” Hermione murmured. “Like you were a Veela,” she added, because Harry continued to stare at her without understanding.

            “Oh.” Harry shrugged his wings again. “I suppose I am becoming more that way. It’s just—I was always able to envision a future for myself, you know? Even when I thought there was a really good chance that I would die at the end of Voldemort’s wand. At least that was a kind of future. Not the one I wanted, just the one that was there. But what happens when all the visions are gone?”

            Hermione stood up and moved behind him. Her fingers were gentle on his shoulders, and Harry closed his eyes and leaned his head on her hand. She knew how to touch around his feathers instead of on them, which was good. Harry didn’t know if he honestly could have borne anyone but Draco touching his wings right now.

            “You’ll still have the life you want. I think Malfoy probably wants you to have that, not hold you back from it. Veela are deeply affected by the unhappiness of their mates. And you would be unhappy if you couldn’t be an Auror.”

            Harry nodded. Despite the press and the danger from Dark wizards and so on, he still wanted to be an Auror more than he wanted to be anything else. He wanted to help people survive the darkest terrors of their lives and go on, and especially the terrors that he’d coped with. Someone stalking them. Someone wanting to murder them for no reason. Someone trying to destroy their lives just because they were annoyed.

            The fact that he couldn’t see himself doing that as a Veela—

            Harry shivered. He would find a way past it, that was all, and into this vision.

            Hermione walked around in front of him again and patted his hand soothingly as she sat back down on the couch. “Do you think it would help to talk to Malfoy about this explicitly? Have you?”

            “A little bit. He knows now that I never wanted to be a Veela because I’m sick of fame, and I don’t need fans falling over me even more than they already do.” Harry hesitated again, but in the end, he had to face up to this the way he’d had to face up to being a Veela. “We don’t get the Daily Prophet at the school. What have they been saying?”

            “That you were in an accident that changed you.” Hermione shrugged. “That’s all anyone will confirm so far, with the Healers and Aurors keeping quiet. But since you stormed into the Ministry with wings this afternoon, I don’t think it will take people long to make the connection.”

            “Shit,” Harry mouthed quietly. Well, he had needed the net. And he had put up with lots worse. Things that weren’t even true.

            “They won’t let non-Veela into the school, though,” he said, thinking of something that made him cheer up. “Not just because of me. They wouldn’t want people falling victim constantly to allure. I hope that means I’ll be safe for a while.”

            “And if not, Malfoy will protect you?”

            “He was going to kill my relatives.” Harry shook his head. “I couldn’t let him do that.”

            “Just let me know if you ever change your mind. And tell Malfoy I’ll help.”

            Harry stared at her. Hermione gave him a little smile that didn’t conceal the ferocious depths beneath it.

            “I’ve thought for a long time that they got off too lightly. During the war, I understood why. You had bigger enemies to focus on. But now.” Hermione’s smile widened. “My only objection is that one person shouldn’t have all the fun.”

            “But you’re—”

            “If you say I’m not your mate, then I’m going to assume that you’ve gone deeper in your understanding of Veela culture than you’d revealed to me.”

            “You’re moral,” Harry blurted out.

            “Tell that to Marietta Edgecombe. They still,” Hermione said, with great satisfaction, “haven’t found anyone who could get the pimples off her face.”

            “Um,” said Harry, and hid behind the plate of biscuits. He wasn’t sure what to do with having someone else willing to kill for him. Or, well, maybe hurt, not kill. Hermione hadn’t said—

            But she had sure implied it, when she had told Harry that he should let her know if he ever changed his mind about killing the Dursleys. And she didn’t have the kind of vengeful Veela instincts that Draco’s willingness to kill the Dursleys could explain away.

            Maybe she doesn’t have vengeful Veela instincts. Maybe she just has vengeful ones.

            “I mean it,” Hermione added. “I don’t think you’ll ever change your mind, but stranger things have happened.” For an instant, her eyes lingered on his wings.

            “I shouldn’t be saying this,” Harry said, after he’d swallowed a piece of dried fruit stuck in his mouth. Hermione looked at him attentively. “But it really does make me happy when someone is willing to protect me. Even if I’d never let them.”

            “Good,” said Hermione. “As long as it isn’t the same kind of happiness that Malfoy brings…”

            Harry gagged on a biscuit piece that he didn’t think had been there a moment ago, and Hermione laughed and swatted him on the back.

            “Good.”

*

            “And, as you should all know by now, the right of a Veela to defend her—or his—mate is sacred.”

            Harry grimaced a little. Professor Testig’s Veela Mate Culture class had turned into a special presentation, suddenly, on the laws that defined the rights of mates to take revenge for each other. He knew exactly why that had happened. And Testig hadn’t even tried to be subtle. She had been the first one to come investigate Harry and Draco yesterday to make sure they were all right, and the only one to say nothing, only studying them with a sharp expression on her face.

            Now, though, she was talking with relish about all the times in that past that someone had kidnapped a Veela’s mate and got killed for it, or broken a mate’s arm and been hanged (from a Veela’s claws) in consequence. Since this was all for his “benefit” anyway, Harry decided he might as well ask a question that was more beneficial for him.

            He raised his hand. Testig immediately broke off her latest gruesome story and nodded to him. “Yes?”

            “What if the harm isn’t happening right in front of the Veela?” Harry asked, keeping his voice syrupy with innocence. “What if it happened a long time ago? Does the Veela still have the right to take revenge for their mate?”

            Testig gave him a bloodthirsty smile. “I’m so glad you asked that, Mr. Potter. Statistically, of course, certain kinds of harm are more likely to happen when a Veela’s mate is a child. Abuse, for example, or neglect.”

            Harry just stared straight back and said quietly, “I had a case a month ago where a man found out his wife had been abused by her first boyfriend. When she was at Hogwarts, twenty years ago. He stormed the first boyfriend’s house and tortured him to death with the Cruciatus, and told us that he shouldn’t go to Azkaban because he was avenging his wife’s pain. We still put him in prison. And now his wife has to visit him there. I think she’s worse off than she would be if he’d never found out. That’s the kind of case that I’m always going to arrest someone for. You can’t decide it’s a good idea to use the Unforgivables just because you’re filled with righteous anger.”

            “Of course not,” said Testig.

            Harry stared at her, and she stared back, raising her eyebrows a little.

            “Not Unforgivables,” Testig continued. Harry felt Draco’s wing arching over his shoulders and tugging at him, but he didn’t lean against him, or look at him. Right now, he thought Testig deserved his whole attention. “Veela use their own instinctive magic, or claws and teeth. There’s a loophole in the laws for us. A treaty created when Veela first started to associate with wizards. The Veela of those times demanded it, or they would never have come forwards at all.”

            “Then they cared more about revenge than finding their mates among wizards.”

            “Professor Stone is a gifted teacher,” said Testig, in that polite kind of voice that suggested the exact opposite. “But she is wrong that everything important in a Veela’s life can be traced back to a mate.”

            “Sounds like this can be.”

            “It’s of the most vital importance to maintain our laws among an alien people—”

            “Who you can mate with,” Harry pointed out. He could feel frustration prickling at his skin, harder than the talons Draco was now driving into his arm. “Who you can be transformed from. Everyone keeps telling me that Veela and humans are so different, and I’m not human now because I have these instincts, and I need to just accept it. But it seems to me that you aren’t so different. You just want to do whatever you want without any kind of check from the law, and at the same time get mates from humans and be treated like humans.”

            “Harry,” Draco hissed into his ear.

            “Honestly,” Harry went on, lifting a wing so that he could brush Draco’s hand away, “it sounds to me like you keep changing your definition of Veela. I shouldn’t think of myself as human because I’m transformed. But I should obey these little exemptions and loopholes in the law that Veela are so proud of having. Well, to me, you know what it seems like when you set up little exceptions and snicker to yourselves for having an excuse to literally murder other people? It sounds like a petty, human thing to do to me.”

            “Harry.”

            “You don’t think we should break the law?” Testig’s eyes were narrowed, little sparks of blue sometimes showing between the lids.

            “I’m a sodding Auror. Of course not.”

            “You would, perhaps, suggest that ancient treaties should be overturned because you don’t like them?”

            “It doesn’t matter how ancient they are, if they’re stupid.”

            “Someone who kidnaps or abuses a Veela’s mate,” Testig breathed, “is not innocent.”

            “Then you give them a proper trial, the way you would a Veela who was accused of using their allure on someone and raping them. You can’t just decide that some people get a proper trial and some people don’t. That’s not the way justice works. Unless you’re going to decide there’s one kind of justice for Veela and another for humans, and that’s apparently what you’ve decided.”

            “I am only explaining reality to you,” Testig said. “You should not blame me.”

            “But you think it’s praiseworthy for a Veela to act like a wild animal and disembowel someone.” Harry stood up and whirled away from the wing Draco tried to spread in front of him. “Why is that okay to do, but the Entrail-Expelling Curse wouldn’t be? You sound gleeful about the way that that one Veela you described killed all those people for being in the same room as her mate.”

            “If you are implying that I am—”

            “A vigilante. Yes. And stupid.”

            Testig threw back her head, while her wings flared up and around her. They formed a silvery circle that came down slowly, aiming like twin scimitar blades straight at Harry.

            “I can challenge you to a duel for that,” she whispered. “For the insult, for implying that I am not a good Veela. And I will.”

            Harry laughed. Apparently, that wasn’t the response anyone had expected, because Testig paused and all the other students, even Draco, who had moved up beside him, blinked.

            “Right, another rule no one bothers to explain to me until I trip over it,” Harry said, and moved his wings in the same gesture. It was surprisingly easy, as if it had been waiting for him to make. “Then I accept. And I think someone should remind you that I dueled Voldemort himself and won.”

            “This is not the kind of duel you’re used to,” Testig hissed back to him.

            “I. Don’t. Fucking. Care.”

            For an instant, she stared at him, and then she took wing, reminding him of a hawk as she swooped towards the doors of the classroom. The other students followed her.

            “She’s going to fight you right now,” Draco said, his voice dead. “Outside. And she’ll have the choice of weapons. Even if you get the choice of ground, and you can fight wherever you want and with any extra objects you want that aren’t weapons.”

            Harry shrugged, and reached out one hand to caress Draco’s cheek. “Don’t feel so bad. You tried your best to keep me from it. I’m the one who chose to go ahead.”

            Draco grabbed his hand. “But she could kill you.”

            “I don’t think so.”

            “Why not?”

            Harry winked. “Because you said that I get the choice of ground. And there’s nothing saying it had to be on the ground, and nothing saying I have to fly with wings, either.”

*

            SP777: Thank you!

            Skybee: Well, I’m sorry he didn’t get a chance to croon in this chapter. Maybe the next one.

            Jester: Well, I don’t know if I’d call snogging a new skill, but. ;)
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