Adult-FanFiction.org : Harry Potter

Black Phoenix	By : Lomonaaeren Category: Harry Potter > Slash - Male/Male > Harry/Draco Views: 21568 -:- Recommendations : 1 -:- Currently Reading : 5
Disclaimer: I do not own Harry Potter. I am making no money from this fanfic.

Chapter List
- 14
- 15
- 16
Thank you again for all the reviews!
Chapter Fifteen—Persephone’s Flaw
            “He’s coming around. Let him wake up. It should be all right as long as we keep both of them imprisoned at the same time.”
            Harry grimaced as he opened his eyes. The last thing he wanted to think about was why he would be hearing those words.
            Then he came fully back to consciousness, and realized that there was something worse than that. He couldn’t feel Hogwarts, or any of the magic that should have enwrapped him in a protective shield.
            Harry held back the shout he wanted to give, and only clenched his hands a little. When he turned his head, he saw that he was hovering above the floor of an office in what looked like a bubble of blue air. It was so soft and smooth that he hadn’t been able to tell the difference between it and a bed. He wondered if that was a good sign, if his enemies were planning to keep him alive instead of kill him.
            Another bubble of blue air hung on the opposite side of the office, behind a mahogany desk. It held Persephone, who looked as though she was frozen instead of simply being held. Her wings were pinned straight out to the sides, and she stared motionlessly straight ahead.
            “Ah, Mr. Potter. You do present us with a conundrum.”
            Harry turned his head. Nothing hurt, he noted, although he thought he must have hit his head hard when he fell. The bubble seemed to give him no sensation at all, or maybe it permitted no sensation to reach him.
            Then Harry wanted to snort. No sensation except the voice he had just heard, he reminded himself.
            “I’m sorry,” he said to the man who had appeared outside his bubble. Harry reckoned it was the man who owned the office, since his wards sprang up around him the minute he shut the door. “I don’t mean to cause as much trouble as I have. I just thought it was a better option than letting the Ministry shut down Hogwarts.”
            “You should have paid more attention to the papers,” the man murmured, walking over until he stood between Harry’s and Persephone’s bubbles. “It was the Board of Governors who made that decision.”
            “Pushed by Tillipop,” Harry retorted, glaring at the man. He definitely wasn’t Tillipop or related to him, the way Harry had thought he might be at first. He wasn’t familiar either, though. This man was tall and had ash-colored hair, hanging loose and ragged around his shoulders as though he had better things to do than cut it. His eyes were blue and calm, but he looked at Harry and slowly shook his head, before walking over and sitting down behind the desk. When he clasped his hands in front of him, Harry could see that his skin was taut and pale. He probably spent a lot of time indoors.
            “There are certain things that it simply isn’t diplomatic to say, Mr. Potter,” the man murmured, “no matter how true they are. I’m wondering now if we should have made our move earlier, and offered you a political position the minute you finished Auror training. On the other hand, that might have been a greater headache than it would be worth.”
            “I can’t think of a political position you could have offered me that I would have accepted,” said Harry, and leaned back, and folded his arms, and stared hard at the man.
            “It would have been different, before the Ministry was your enemy,” said the man. “You know that some people thought of you as dangerous from the time you could walk, yes,” he added, as though to cut off one of the protests Harry could have made. “But they are not the only ones who thought of you, or even the most powerful ones. We discussed ways to make you part of the power structure, since it was obvious that you weren’t simply going away.”
            Harry snorted. “There’s nothing you could have offered me that would tempt me,” he repeated.
            “A say in the future of Hogwarts, before you knew about the Board of Governors closing it and felt compelled to do something drastic?” The man squinted at him. “A legitimate use for your great power? Nothing?”
            “I don’t think you would have because the Ministry never does that kind of thing,” Harry said. “You can talk all you like about different factions. The ones who thought I was dangerous would still have tried to eliminate me.”
            “Such lack of trust,” said the man, putting a hand over his heart. “In our ability to protect you if you were one of our own, I mean.”
            Harry just stared at him, and said nothing. The man glanced between him and Persephone and rattled some papers on his desk.
            “I have no idea who you are,” Harry said at last. “And even less reason to trust you, when you think about it. Why should I trust someone who shows up out of nowhere and proclaims sadly that I should have trusted him when I never knew about him?”
            “I don’t say this to offer you a way out now,” said the man, gently and with some emphasis. “It’s gone too far, the conflict between you and the Ministry. And that bird of yours, and the power you wield, and your bond with Hogwarts, make you far too dangerous.” He stood up. “But I do regret some of what we’ve had to do, and I wanted to let you know I would have made it different if I could.”
            “That still doesn’t tell me who you are and why I should care,” Harry pointed out.
            The man smiled slowly and inclined his head. “I’ve worn several names over the years, you know. It’s always best to keep your enemies off-balance and guessing—and I have to salute you for how many times you’ve managed that in the last few months. But the name I’m known by here is Edgar Gorenson. You could use that, and it would be recognized.”
            Harry searched his memory, and found nothing. Well, it was always possible that Gorenson didn’t work in the Department of Magical Law Enforcement. In fact, Harry thought he probably would have noticed if the man did. He’d always noticed competence in that Department, it was so rare. “You’re an Unspeakable?”
            “I’ve sometimes been associated with that Department.” Gorenson gave him a severe look. “But I told you, I’ve worn several names. I move from place to place, doing what’s needed. You could have been the same, if you had only held off for a little while and given us more time to see whether you were suitable.”
            Harry laughed. Gorenson stared at him, looking surprised for the first time since they had started talking. Harry liked that. If he didn’t have his magic or his connection to Hogwarts or his phoenix, at least he would have his capacity to surprise.
            “I never would have accepted the position you offered me,” Harry said quietly, shaking his head. “Moving from Department to Department doing the Ministry’s dirty work? Because let’s face it, that’s what you do. Controlling people who wanted to change things? One of my best friends wants to change house-elf slavery. There’s no way that I would consent to that. You think that just because I’m powerful, I must want power. I don’t.”
            “You do, or you would have stopped using your magic when you realized how strong you were,” Gorenson said slowly. “I don’t understand you.”
            Harry snorted. “That’s bloody obvious. But no, you couldn’t tame me and fit me into the nice little confines of the Ministry. I would have blasted you for trying.”
            “Then you won’t let us try to fit you into the world in any way now, either?” Gorenson’s eyes were steady. “It has to be death?”
            “I don’t think that you can kill me,” Harry said. “So many people have tried and not succeeded, after all.”
            “I think that you are rather far from allies here.” Gorenson glanced over to Persephone, still pinned and silent in her blue bubble. Harry had to accept that she was unconscious or Stunned or something similar. He would have seen some movement from her by now if she could move. “Once we figured out that the secret of your immunity to our weapons came from your phoenix, it was easy to remove you as a threat.”
            “You think that you can disable her and disable me?” Harry asked, but his heart was pounding, and he thought of the way that the curse cast on Persephone had sent him into unconsciousness when he was facing the Aurors.
            “I know that I can.” Gorenson folded his arms and watched him with patience. “I was rather impatient that no one had theorized it before, but when you move around like I do, you acquire an expertise that makes you invaluable to the people who remain behind. I simply have more experience with more aspects of magical theory than they do.” He leaned in. “And I know what that phoenix is to you.”
            “Do tell,” Harry said.
            “A familiar in the old sense of the word,” Gorenson said. “Not a trained cat, or an owl who can deliver your post. But an animal bound to you at the level of the soul, so that part of your soul is in it.”
            Harry blinked. He hadn’t considered that, but then, he didn’t know much about familiars or magical theory, and the way that he’d acquired Persephone wasn’t like going to Diagon Alley and buying an animal at the Magical Menagerie.
            “You don’t know that,” Harry said. “How can you actually prove that there’s a link between my soul and hers?”
            “Not that she has a soul,” said Gorenson. “But that she has a bit of yours, yes.” He leaned against the wall and smiled at Harry. “And if anyone should know about sharing bits of souls, then I’d assume it would be you, Mr. Potter.”
            Harry blinked again, and said nothing. He’d never told anyone about Voldemort’s Horcruxes, but he supposed that people who moved around a lot and studied lots of different subjects could have put it together, the same way that Dumbledore had managed to with enough clues.
            “No defense to offer?” Gorenson sighed and stood up. “Perhaps that was why you were able to create her, in fact. Someone whose soul is inherently unstable because he’s been sharing a bit of someone else’s would be able to extend his own soul to a familiar more easily.”
            “You’re not going to persuade me to join your side,” Harry said, because he felt that was the point most worth emphasizing in this.
            “I know that, now,” said Gorenson. “I was only speculating on what might have passed, before everything turned so difficult to resolve.” He clucked his tongue and shook his head at Harry. “You’ve gone too far, but I wanted to offer you a sort of vision of what could have been. I thought it might make you regret your actions.”
            “You’re wrong,” Harry said, and then he launched as hard an assault on the blue bubble containing him as he could, with all his strength, physical and magical.
            There was a tremble in the shell of the bubble, and a few sparks fell to the floor. But there was no other change, and although Gorenson retreated a cautious step, he came back up in the next second and looked hard at Harry. “You would have done better if you hadn’t done that,” he said. “These bubbles keep your familiar from reaching you, and they keep your magic the same way.”
            “I’ve never heard of anything like that,” Harry said. “In the meantime, what are you going to do with me? You can hardly murder me without it being all over the news.” He spoke as calmly as he could, trying to keep his mind off both the failure of his efforts and the sweat trickling down his sides and soaking the bubble under him.
            “Oh, we want it all over the news,” Gorenson said. “And when the Ministry kills a proclaimed Dark Lord, as we have the right to do under the Dark Lords Act, it’s called execution, not murder.”
            “You can’t,” was the only thing Harry could think to say, but he said it anyway. The story couldn’t end like this, he thought. He had become Lord of Hogwarts and created Persephone and become Draco’s lover and welcomed Hermione and other people into his court, and…this was the only thing that his efforts amounted to?
            “We can,” said Gorenson, and nodded a little to him, sadly. “I do wish that we didn’t have to, you know. We could have used your strength to do so many things. I wish we had known about it before you found out about the closing of Hogwarts, and then you might have been too busy to do anything when it came time to close the school. Or you might have agreed with us that it was for the best.”
            “Why did you think it was for the best?” Harry asked. He was groping for straws, for chances. The only thing he could think of was that, as long as Gorenson was talking to him, he wasn’t making arrangements for Harry’s execution.
            I can’t die. Too many people are depending on me.
            “Because what they taught students was a mess,” Gorenson said. “Did you know that fully three-quarters of the students who left Hogwarts since the war can’t perform basic fourth-year spells competently? Too many of the students were only learning the magic for the exams and then forgetting it again the instant they could. They concentrated only on the NEWTS and OWLS that they needed for their eventual future careers. They need to do more than that. Britain was falling behind in international ways of measuring.”
            “I thought it might have had something to do with the opinions expressed about your lot since the war,” Harry muttered. His head hurt with the amount of thinking he was trying to do, to escape this predicament.
            “That had something to do with it, too,” said Gorenson levelly. “But closing down the school for long enough to find out the best way to teach different things would have obviated that problem.”
            “You’re talking about ending a lot of things I was prepared to give my life for,” Harry snapped. “Forgive me if I appear upset.”
            “You can appear upset all you like.” Gorenson looked back and forth between him and Persephone. “But these bubbles restrain your magic, and your familiar. That means that you’d better get used to not having access to either of them anymore.”
            Persephone!
            Harry reached out along a road he hadn’t known was there, an invisible cord pulled taut between them. Maybe it was what Gorenson had said about Persephone being his familiar that made him do it. He just knew that he wanted her as close to him as she could get, and he wanted to test Gorenson’s assertion about the bubbles and how strong they really were.
            The bubble around Persephone turned the color of ice, instead of blue. Gorenson stumbled back with a startled cry. Persephone flexed her wings, and opened her eyes. The bubble shattered.
            Harry called to her again, and he thought he was doing it with his mouth this time, as well as his mind and magic, although he couldn’t hear himself over the sheer racket of blood in his temples.
            Persephone spun in place in midair for a moment, as though she was going to dance with her tail the way she had in the middle of his office. Then she turned and soared straight out through the wall of the office, the flames from her wings melting the stone and making it drip down. She escaped as easily as though Harry had opened the wall of Hogwarts for her.
            That left Harry, panting, alone, and with the feeling that Gorenson was staring at him harder than ever.
            “This is why you should never make a pet of a Dark creature,” said Gorenson, his mouth and voice both tight. “She abandoned you. What makes you think that she’ll come back?”
            “I don’t know that she will,” Harry said, and shrugged. It would be best if he could hide his rapidly beating heart and his joy from Gorenson’s stare. “She always does the opposite of what I want. She might decide that it’s best for her to get as far away as possible.”
            “We can still destroy you without her,” Gorenson said, after a few more seconds of watching Harry.
            Harry heard the waver in the back of his voice, and leaned forwards and smiled wickedly. “But you’re not sure, are you? She got away, and she has part of my soul, and you aren’t sure if you can do this or not. It would be like trying to destroy someone who had split his soul into a Horcrux and hidden the Horcrux away. Wouldn’t it?”
            “You did not split your soul, precisely,” said Gorenson. “You share it with her.” But his eyes were still dark.
            “You don’t really know about these things, with all your knowledge.” Harry shook his head sadly. “You should have thought about it in more detail, before deciding that you knew.”
            “But we still have you, and we can restrain your access to your magic,” Gorenson said, finally drawing his wand. “We will make sure that no mistake like you releasing your phoenix happens again.”
            The Stunner passed through the blue bubble as if it wasn’t there, and Harry had only enough time to notice that apparently it didn’t keep anyone else’s magic out before he sank back into silence.
*
streakerboi: Well, it depends on what you mean by “ruthless,” but yes, Persephone is by no means finished.
Kain: Yes, I know that some of the tension goes away, but hey. It doesn’t mean that Harry and Draco are perfect, either.
And thanks for the comments on Draco. No, Draco will never become Minister out of the goodness of his heart, and he will always be looking for the next best chance to paint himself as the good guy.
BAFan: Sorry! At least you didn’t have to wait long.
SP777: They don’t have as much respect or fear of Harry as they did of Voldemort.
Well, but it was a clever low-down dirty trick, right?
CareLessLover: Yes. He’ll be more careful in the future.
- 14
- 15
- 16
You need to be logged in to leave a review for this story.You need to be logged in to leave a review for this story.
Report Story

Black Phoenix