Adult-FanFiction.org : Harry Potter

Black Phoenix	By : Lomonaaeren Category: Harry Potter > Slash - Male/Male > Harry/Draco Views: 21641 -:- Recommendations : 1 -:- Currently Reading : 6
Disclaimer: I do not own Harry Potter. I am making no money from this fanfic.

Chapter List
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Chapter Seventeen—Demonstrations of Power
            The hooded Unspeakable who had been doing most of the talking was the first one to attack. Harry cast a Wind Charm so that the hood flopped back and he could finally see who he was dealing with.
            A heavy-jawed man, no one he knew. Harry snarled and struck as hard as he could anyway, although he still had to channel his magic through the stolen wand. It was probably because most of his magic was bound up in Hogwarts, but he couldn’t simply flail around with his wandless power and destroy them that way.
            But he hadn’t been a trained Auror for nothing, and the spell crashed into the man and carried him off his feet, knocking him into the other Unspeakables piling up behind him. Harry deflected a curse coming in from the side with a Shield Charm and moved forwards, stepping over an outflung hand.
            “That was stupid of you,” Harry told the man quietly, and then cast another spell, this one a blast of wind that made other people’s hoods fly back and filled the room with little whimpers, as they twitched away from him as best they could.
            It did more than that to the head Unspeakable. It lifted him from the floor and pitched him straight into the middle of the pool of light that he had been so intent on leading Harry into.
            There was a scream that cut off as though there were now Silencing Charms around the pool. Harry kicked someone trying to stand up and stab him with their wand in the ribs, and moved silently up to the edge of the pool, staring into it.
            The light bubbled and foamed, and tiny little fountains and geysers of silver rose and danced on the surface. The man was completely submerged, his hands flailing out and his mouth opening in soundless screams. Despite the fountains, Harry could still see that much of him beneath the surface.
            The man’s limbs gradually sank. The light stopped leaping up and calmed down. Harry watched as the silver settled around the man’s limbs, sizzling, and there was an angry buzzing noise, as though someone had released a whole battalion of bees.
            The buzzing died away, and Harry realized that he was looking at a silver statue, resting in the pool as though it had been placed there like an offering.
            Harry cast a spell that would cover the mouth of the pool and prevent him from accidentally stumbling into it, then turned around and stared at the Unspeakables. Maybe it was just the way that his gaze fell on them, or seeing one of their own suffer the fate they had planned for Harry, but they backed away from him, some of them shaking their heads as though his eyes had hurt them.
            “This is what you were going to do to me,” Harry said softly. “No doubt to keep me until you could call for me, preserved and held harmless.” He felt his muscles trembling, and wondered absently if it was due to stress as he took a long stride forwards. “You were going to do this to me, and keep doing this to me.”
            Someone began talking in a feeble voice, but Harry didn’t listen to them. He still didn’t have access to some of his magic, but he was beginning to think that rage could make up for that.
            “Aguamenti,” he said, his voice so flat that it felt slippery in his own mouth.
            He saw a few smiles, as if they thought the spell was harmless. And that was what they went on thinking, right up until the point that water cascaded down in enormous cataracts from the ceiling and began to fill up the room where they were standing. Harry cast a nonverbal Expelliarmus at the same time, Disarming everybody with long sweeps of his stolen wand.
            He created a platform beneath him that would float and sealed the doors. Then he stood on his platform, which bounced higher and higher with the surge of the water, and watched in mild interest as they tried to swim.
            His magic was roaring in him. They were going to turn me into a statue. They were going to stand me in a corner, and they would have kept me as a prisoner like that forever.
            It was possible that not even Persephone could have found him, if they had done that. She had a connection to his soul, but did a statue have a soul? Did someone made of silver have a mind and magic that she could connect to and find her way back to?
            “Potter…Potter, please…”
            One of the furiously splashing Unspeakables was babbling at him. Harry thought they had been for a while, but this one he noticed more because he was treading water right next to Harry’s platform. Harry looked down at him. The water was rising so rapidly that soon it would reach the ceiling, and then the Unspeakables wouldn’t have any more room to breathe. Harry could easily create a little bubble for himself that would give him air, but none of them would be able to enter it.
            “What?” he asked.
            “I have a daughter,” the Unspeakable wheezed. With his grey robe bedraggled and clutching at his limbs, he looked like an ordinary wizard, not someone who had been about to do something horrible to Harry. “Please. Don’t let me die like this. I want to see her again, I want to be with her…”
            Harry shook his head and raised his wand. “Someone has asked me to spare his life,” he called out, and saw heads swiveling all over the room, at least where people had the ability to pay attention to him instead of struggling to swim.
            “I think that I’m going to do it,” Harry added, and cast a few spells to protect the platform he stood on, then cast the one that would unseal the doors.
            The water flooded out, bounding joyously, into the rest of the Department of Mysteries, where the Unspeakables had stored all sorts of dangerous and illegal magical artifacts and the documents that talked about them.
            Harry ducked down low and rode the board as it leaped through the low doorway and out into the middle of the corridor that stretched beyond that. The current of the water was mostly forwards, certainly on the cresting wave he rode, although he could see some of the torrents running into different rooms. He heard glass breaking, wood splintering, paper tearing. He laughed.
            He had to cast a few hasty spells to keep himself from slamming into walls, but that didn’t matter; it just meant he could continue moving, and when he got to the end, he was tossed out on the floor of a large room that seemed to hold nothing but a pile of gleaming eggs, enclosed behind a sparkling wall of wards. Harry didn’t break the wards, on the theory that there had been enough destruction already, and the eggs might hatch something dangerous if the wards had managed to repel the cascade of water.
            Harry looked around and spotted a few washed-up Unspeakables crawling on the floor and coughing. Harry stepped up to the nearest. She froze and stared up at him. Harry didn’t know her, but she had a commanding height and ash-blond hair that he thought ought to make it easy to remember her. Maybe she had high rank and would be listened to, as well.
            He would have sought out someone with higher rank, but he didn’t want to take the time.
            “Inform them that if they attempt to take me from Hogwarts again, they will be dealing with worse than the destruction I’ve caused here,” he said pleasantly, and watched as her head bobbed fearfully. Then he turned and strode out of the room with the eggs, in the direction of the entrance to the Department of Mysteries.
            His wandless magic returned with a sudden snap the minute he got into a broad corridor that had a staircase at the end. Harry paused, then smiled. He supposed that it was reassuring to know that his enemies could only block his magic by wards on specific rooms, instead of simply being able to do it at will.
            “Mr. Potter.”
            Harry turned around. Gorenson wasn’t far away from him, leaning against a doorway that led into a room with a cold, quiet noise of running water trickling out of it. Harry held out a hand and conjured his own blue bubble on it, rapidly growing.
            “I won’t come near you,” Gorenson said. “I simply wanted to let you know that I won’t give up, no matter how much fear and property damage you caused today.”
            He bowed his head and disappeared back into the room beyond him. Harry slowly let the blue bubble lapse, and cocked his head.
            Then he reached out and began to rend the wards apart that blocked Apparition. He was sick of this place.
*
            “Why should we trust you?”
            Draco hissed between his teeth. He hadn’t anticipated this being so hard. He had intended to come to Weasley and Granger and tell them what had happened to Harry, revealing his identity. They already knew that he was involved with Harry, and disapprove as she might, Granger would follow him to war before Persephone could get this far north, he thought.
            Or so he had thought, until he ran into this opposition. It seemed that Granger was distrustful of his glamour, and Weasley stood back, frowning, not ready to commit to either side yet until he’d had more time to think about it.
            “Because I’m telling the truth,” Draco said. He touched his wand to his temple, and then looked around the office. He’d been sure that Harry had a Pensieve, but he didn’t see it anywhere around here. “Do you need to look at my memories? Because that can be arranged, if you have a Pensieve.”
            Granger squinted at him harder than usual.
            Exasperated, Draco turned and hauled hard at Harry’s desk, looking for the Pensieve behind it. There was no revelation there, so he cast the Summoning Charm, and waited for the bloody thing to fly to him.
            Before it could get there, Briseis opened the door and stepped into the office. “We have a problem.” Her eyes passed over Draco without any curiosity. Draco wouldn’t put it past her to already know about his disguise, maybe because Rosenthal had contacted her.
            “I know,” said Weasley. “Harry went out to fight those Aurors, and he didn’t come back.” At least he believed part of Draco’s story, Draco thought, his stomach churning. But in the meantime, anything could be happening to Harry, including his death or the loss of his magic, and they were just standing here.
            “I was referring to the demands,” said Briseis, and held out the parchment in her hands, so that Draco could make out the flowing scroll of letters at the top of it. It bore the Ministry seal at the bottom, and the letters were done in purple ink, more than large enough to be read at a distance.
            SURRENDER OF DARK LORD HARRY POTTER AND HIS COURT
            Draco caught his breath. He ought to have known the Ministry wouldn’t be satisfied with simply killing Harry. They would want anyone who had associated with him, and thus become outlaws, to show they were submitting to the Ministry.
            “They want us all to come to the Ministry by noon tomorrow,” said Briseis grimly. “There are at least a hundred copies of this floating around Hogwarts now, rained down from the air by Ministry owls.” She turned the parchment around as if she needed to check the wording and make sure of what it really said. “There are people who will be panicking and who think that we ought to surrender, I’m afraid. It’s inevitable.”
            Draco ground his teeth. “We could go after Harry and free him,” he began.
            Briseis stared at him. “Why do you call him by his first name?”
            She must not know who he was after all. Draco opened his mouth to explain, yet again.
            The Pensieve came barreling through the door then; Harry must have stored it quite a distance away. At the same time, the sky over the Forbidden Forest lit up with purple radiance. Persephone had arrived.
            Weasley and Granger ran to the window to look out. Briseis didn’t bother. Apparently the parchment demanding the court’s surrender was enough for her. She did look bleakly at Draco. “I’m still waiting for an answer to my question.”
            From the expression on her face, Draco knew why. She was hoping against hope that he might be someone with a solution to the problem.
            Draco dropped the Pensieve to ring on Harry’s desk. It would be useless to show his memories now that Persephone was showing hers. “I’m Candidate Malfoy under a disguise, and I want to know if we’re going to rescue Harry or not.”
            “He’s in the Ministry?”
            Draco nodded. He didn’t know if she was making a good guess or if she had seen Persephone’s little light show, and he didn’t care. “The Aurors took him there. Someone talked to him about how they were going to kill him and they were holding him in a bubble that prevented him from using his magic. Maybe he couldn’t even use all of his magic, since so much of it is bound up in Hogwarts. Either way, Persephone escaped, and came to help find help for him. Can we go, now?”
            Briseis was frowning, but she put down that stupid parchment the Ministry had sent about the surrender of the court and nodded. “We should. I know a few passages into the Ministry that aren’t exactly secret, but they’re not common knowledge, either. I think we can get into it quickly.” She raised her voice. “Are you coming with us, Granger, Weasley?”
            They turned around from the window. Weasley’s face was tight and pale. Granger was frowning, with a scowl so ferocious that Draco raised his eyebrows.
            “We need to go get him,” said Granger decisively. “They had no right to do that.”
            Draco blinked, then shrugged. If she needed to see Harry as a victim in order to go help him, that wasn’t really Draco’s problem. What mattered was that they could get moving. “Fine. We should get to one of your Ministry entrances, then.” He turned to Briseis.
            Persephone abruptly burst in through the window. Draco ducked, even as part of him noted that at least he wasn’t the only person whose windows she went around shattering.
            Persephone looped around in front of them, crooning. She spread her wings and flicked her tail up and down, and then dived down and stood on the floor in front of Draco. Draco stared. He didn’t think he’d ever seen her do that before, only fly and perch on someone’s shoulder or on the special perch that Harry had created for her.
            Persephone glanced up at him, head cocked winsomely. Black and purple flames were shimmering into being around her shoulders, and Draco wondered if she was going to show them another vision.
            Then Persephone took off again and flew around his head, trilling and crooning. Her voice modulated past the point where Draco would have expected to hear her normal squawks, and then into pure and perfect phoenix song, ringing with bells and darker, shimmering tones that Draco hadn’t heard before.
            “I didn’t know she could sing like that,” Granger breathed.
            “Neither did I.” Briseis was staring up at Persephone with wide eyes. “I don’t think she would sing like that unless some destruction had happened, or unless someone had died, or…” She trailed off, and rushed over to the window in turn.
            Draco went with her, although by now he thought he already knew what he would see.
            Harry was striding towards the front gates. Draco thought he could simply have appeared inside Hogwarts, if he wanted, but perhaps he was worried about disrupting the wards if he did.
            Or perhaps he wanted to make a dramatic entrance for anyone watching. People were crowding out of Hogsmeade to do that.
            Persephone sang one more time, and then a flicker of fire reached out from her tail like a whip and coiled around Draco. Before he could do more than gasp, they were flying through space. Draco saw the square of the broken window looming ahead of him, vast but too small for him to pass through without injury, and shut his eyes.
            But no glass touched him, and because he had his eyes closed, he never did get to see how Persephone did it. Instead, he felt a cool passage through the air, and by the time he looked again, Persephone was setting him down on the ground in front of Harry. Then she perched on the grass between them and stared expectantly back and forth.
            Harry stared at him, his mouth gaping. “Who…” he breathed.
            Draco remembered he still wore the glamour. Which meant that he could do what the impulse of his pounding heart and his tightening throat told him to do, instead of what was political or practical.
            He reached up, cradling Harry’s face in his hands, and swallowed his mouth in a kiss.
            Harry caught on fast, because he stopped the little movement of resistance and grabbed Draco’s shoulders, almost bending him backwards with the force of his response.
            Overhead now, beyond the sound of their meeting tongues and Harry’s soft moans and the murmurs of the crowd, Persephone went on singing.
*
CareLessLover: Well, that particular Unspeakable won’t be begging for his life anytime soon.
Meechypoo64: Exactly. You can see that in how she made the decision that Draco would be good for Harry right then.
SP777: Sorry, no rescues, but I hope it was galore anyway?
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Black Phoenix