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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.

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Chapter Twenty-One—A New Delegation
            “We haven’t managed to find the source of the poison yet,” Hermione told him, brushing her hair out of her eyes. She looked as if she’d been peering down into a cauldron that released strong fumes; her eyes were red around the corners, and her face had streaks of grime on it. “But we’re going to find them!”
            Harry half-smiled. Most of his attention was on Persephone, who sat in the middle of her perch, her head turned so that she was picking through her feathers. She felt him looking, or so he supposed, and turned around, making a crooning noise that was too sweet to be the demand it would usually be.
            “You’re still worried about her?” Hermione followed his gaze. “But isn’t it good that she’s become less impatient and angry with you?”
            “Not if Gorenson is controlling her.” Harry stood up and walked over to the perch. Persephone watched his face instead of his fingers, and while Harry would once have thought that meant she was coming up with a plan to peck out his eyes, he didn’t think it was the case this time.
            “But you don’t know that he is,” Hermione pointed out, sounding sensible and calm, in the way Harry wished he could feel. “Until you know for sure, it seems a little silly to worry about it.”
            Harry bit his lip and reached out to tickle the middle of Persephone’s back. She accepted it, even leaning into his touch. He shook his head. This didn’t feel like the same phoenix he had created out of Dark magic and fire. What was he supposed to do with her?
            Well, maybe he would send her on the mission to the new magical creatures who had approached him asking for an alliance. She had taken the message to the centaurs when she was acting far less trustworthy. Maybe he ought to trust her more.
            As far as I can ever trust her.
            “Are you up to a long flight?” he asked her, and nearly winced when her eyes brightened and she bobbed her head so hard it seemed as if she would fall off the perch. He reached back to his desk and picked up the tied scroll he had prepared, sealed with a few spells that wouldn’t open until someone of sufficient authority touched the scroll. “Then take this and fly to the Veela country in the south of France. When you get there, sing. They’ll be waiting for a message from me anyway, but I think you taking it will be an honor they weren’t expecting.”
            He held his breath, waiting for the snap or the snatch at the scroll and the ripping it to pieces that would have accompanied any order like this that he tried to give Persephone before her…change.
            Instead, Persephone gave a musical note as if she was practicing her song for the Veela already, and extended her neck gracefully, picking up the scroll delicately in her beak. She seemed afraid that her talons might rip it. She turned and flew over to the window of the office, hovering patiently until Harry Vanished the glass, rather than smashing through it. She soared off.
            Harry sighed.
            “You’re too worried over her,” Hermione said. “Until she starts acting against you, I think you can just accept that the confinement in that bubble in the Ministry changed her. Maybe it scared her and made her realize that she was better off sticking close to you.” Hermione leaned insistently forwards, making Harry turn to regard her. “Now, what was this about the Veela?”
            Harry nodded. “Some of the Veela in the south of France, especially ones who have the last name Delacour, are writing to me.” He hesitated. “I don’t know if it’s a good idea, but they want to immigrate here.”
            “To your court, or to Britain?” Hermione stood up straight, eyes on him as if this was a vitally important answer.
            “To my court.” Harry shook his head. “They gave me a story about wizards in France being unwelcoming, but I don’t know if that’s the real reason. The problem is, if they’re spies, who is it for? The Ministry wouldn’t reach out that far to find allies, especially magical creatures. Too many of the Ministry distrusts them.”
            “Unless this is Gorenson’s work,” Hermione muttered darkly. “I wouldn’t put it past him to reach out to allies wherever he could, and not really care who they were or what they were as long as they could do what he asked them to.”
            Harry smiled a little. “So he’s powerful enough to reach out to Veela in France and make them support him, but he’s not powerful enough to control Persephone?”
            “I think that he realizes he can’t control her,” Hermione said, ignoring the teasing tone in his voice. Maybe that was for the best, now that Harry thought about it. He was too upset about Persephone to have a calm argument. “But reaching out to Veela and having them at least send a suspicious letter wouldn’t take too much effort.”
            Harry shrugged. “Well, we’ll see what response they make to the message Persephone is carrying. And maybe any control he does have over her will be broken with distance, and when she returns, she’ll be more like her normal self,” he added, although without much conviction.
            Hermione gave him a jaundiced look as she stood up. “Only you would want a return to the nasty bird she used to be.”
            Once again, Harry didn’t bother responding, and Hermione left the office. Harry leaned his feet on his desk, since no one was around to scold him, and stared out the window. Sending the message with Persephone had been a calculated risk and one of the best things he could think to do, but he was still uneasy.
            He wished he could be with Draco at the moment, although considering what Draco was doing today, that might have been more than a little inconvenient for Draco’s Ministry campaign.
*
            “You agree with me that attacks on the freedom of the press cannot be tolerated?” Skeeter’s eyes were kindling as she leaned towards him.
            Draco looked down at his own meal and toyed with it a bit. He and Skeeter were meeting in the back of the Hog’s Head. Skeeter had ensured that she would get there without being seen, and Draco knew she was more than capable of it, so that had left him with the responsibility to cast a glamour over his face—not the one he had perfected before, since everyone now thought Louis Downe was Harry’s lover—and find his way into Hogsmeade via unremarkable Apparition. He wondered if there really were no anti-Apparition wards around the place now, or if they had simply let him through because of who he really was.
            “I agree with you that attacks like that shouldn’t be tolerated,” Draco said. “But I have to admit, I’m equally indignant about the attacks on me.”
            Skeeter sniffed a little, as if to say that being interested in themselves was a common failing of politicians. “The problem is, none of the investigations I’ve launched so far can give me a real name. It seems as though there’s a whole network of people running around, all of them with different names and expertise in different Departments, but I know that can’t be true. They would have attacked before now if they had that much strength.”
            Draco looked up sharply, or started to. He controlled the abrupt motion of his neck and turned back to his meal instead. He wasn’t about to show too much interest in Skeeter’s statement, lest she interpret it the wrong way. He was afraid that his voice shook with excitement anyway when he spoke, though.
            “What if I could tell you the name of the man who’s behind that? The man who uses different names and moves between different Departments in the Ministry? The one he’s currently using?”
            Skeeter eyed him narrowly, one hand curled around her glass of nameless ale as if she didn’t know whether he was about to try and spill it. “I would want to know how you found out that name.”
            “He did something unwise,” Draco said. “Exposed himself on a different flank while he was trying to guard against this one. I’m almost positive he was the one who tried to kill us, the one on the roof.” Even here, he thought mentioning the name of Malfoy Manor was a stupid thing to do. “He’s going by the name Edgar Gorenson.”
            It was a pleasure to watch Skeeter’s eyes slowly widen, and see the way her fingers twitched around her glass.
            “You mean…” she whispered. “The one who tried to kidnap the Dark Lord? I heard rumors about that, from people who thought they recognized him in that vision Lord Potter’s phoenix showed, but nothing definite.”
            Draco nodded. “That’s him.”
            Skeeter groped for a second at the side, as if looking for a quill. Then she shook her head and pulled one from the opposite side of her robes. “It’s wonderful,” she said. “If we can take down two enemies with one blow, I mean,” she added, perhaps seeing from the narrowing of Draco’s eyes that the idea of someone trying to assassinate him was not a wonderful one.
            “I don’t know how much revealing his name will do,” Draco warned her. “He has so many that he might just melt away and take up a new one.”
            “There are ways and ways to become a new person,” Skeeter said, and her smile narrowed and gleamed until Draco would have felt sorry for Gorenson if he hadn’t tried to actually kill Draco and kidnap Harry. “And ways and ways to spy someone out.”
            Draco smiled back at her. He had no idea how many contacts she had in the Ministry and how many ways into it, how many places she could hide as a beetle and where she would have to talk and go slowly, and he found that he didn’t much care for having more definite knowledge. She would do as she wished, like she always did, but this time, Skeeter’s beetling about might help them.
            “And that was the sum total of the information you have for me?” Skeeter was still raptly searching his face. “There’s nothing else that you want to surrender?”
            Something horrible and wonderful at the same time occurred to Draco. He ducked his head and let his cheeks flush. He shrugged a little and picked at the skin of his wrist. “There’s something that you could help me with. But I don’t have anything to pay you with. I just gave you the most important information I had.”
            Skeeter smiled. She probably knew that Draco was playing her, and Draco knew she knew, and she knew that Draco knew she knew, and altogether it was a game that both participants could play quite cheerfully if they understood each other. “Tell me anyway,” she coaxed. “I might be able to do myself a good turn if I hear what it is.”
            Draco stared up at the ceiling for a second, then brought his head down and faced her. “I wondered what they might do next, if they were working at killing all the people at the press conference in my gardens,” he said. “That spell wouldn’t have done damage to just one person, if it had succeeded. I wonder if I’m not more of a threat to the Ministry itself, and not just to Tillipop.”
            “That lightning bolt was aimed at the press,” Skeeter said.
            “At everyone there,” Draco corrected gently. “It was so wild, and cast with more power than skill. It could have killed a great many people.”
            Skeeter paused. Draco saw her rewrite that to whatever she needed in her head so she could accept both Draco’s conclusion and her own, and then she nodded. “All right. What are you saying?”
            “I think that someone is trying to take me out of the running before I become Minister. You know it’s likely I will, now?”
            He phrased it as a question, but from the contemptuous glance Skeeter gave him, he might as well not have bothered. Skeeter could follow the reality of politics as well as he could. She played with her glass for a moment, then nodded.
            “Assassination isn’t a tool that many sitting Ministers have countenanced,” Draco continued smoothly. “It could too easily be turned against them. Yes, there was that time under Bungo the Unfortunate…but so many other things happened during his term, it’s no wonder that one doesn’t get addressed much. It makes me wonder if someone else is behind Minister Tillipop’s campaign. Someone more interested in seeing me dead than him elected.”
            Skeeter was quiet. Draco didn’t think that meant she was going to refuse to listen to him. It meant she was listening, and probably already running several headlines and picking among them for the most scandalous. He sipped and said nothing, ready to let time and Skeeter’s greed for a story do the work.
            Skeeter looked him in the eye. “You think that this Gorenson fellow controls the Minister as well as doing everything else?”
            Draco shrugged a little and looked down at the tabletop. “I don’t think it’s the only explanation. But there’s a lot of coincidences added up. How many people are that powerful in the Ministry? So powerful that they would think they could kidnap a Dark Lord without consequences? It’s worth looking into.”
            “And if someone should look into it, it’s me.” Skeeter rose to her feet and gave Draco a vicious grin. Draco was just as glad that she was likely to be on his side this time. “I think I can promise you the protection of many curious eyes at the next press conference you deign to give.”
            Draco saluted her with his tankard and watched her leave. Glamour or not, he would allow some time to elapse before he followed her. He thought it would give anyone who was watching them fits, trying to decide whether to follow him or Skeeter.
            And in the meantime, he could sit there and contemplate the hopeful possibility that he had created chaos and confusion for their enemies.
            It couldn’t happen to a nicer lot of people.
*
            This time, at least Harry had warning from his bond with Hogwarts the minute a whole bunch of strangers crossed the line of the wards. It was sharp enough to bring his head up from the desk and make him step over to the window before he consciously thought about what he was doing.
            The window glass was in the way, so he Vanished it. That left space and room for Persephone to circle in and land on his shoulder, singing. She fluffed out her wings and bowed to an imaginary audience, then turned her head and nuzzled his jaw with her beak.
            “Have you recovered now?” Harry asked hopefully, petting her back. If she had enough sense to be proud of herself and interested in showing off, then he thought she had. He waited for a snap at one of his fingers. He wouldn’t let her eat one, of course, but he would come closer than he otherwise might, if she was recovered.
            Persephone looked at him with eyes that he could only describe as melting, if he could ever apply that to the hard, bright gaze of a bird, and then bowed her head so he could pet her neck.
            Harry rolled his eyes and looked out the window. His bond with his phoenix was profound, enough to distract him for a second from his bond with Hogwarts, but now the castle was pushing at him insistently, reminding him that there were people out there waiting for some kind of acknowledgement.
            They came slowly across the grounds of Hogwarts, looking around as if they expected traps to spring out of the ground and consume them. They looked like ordinary men and women, although taller and paler than some of the wizards Harry had dealt with, until you glimpsed their silver hair. Then he knew they were Veela, if in fully human form.
            Harry muttered under his breath and stepped out the window, sending Persephone flapping off his shoulder in what he knew wasn’t fright, because she was better than that. He slid down the side of the wall the way he had when he was dancing with Ombershade, and onto the grass in front of them.
            The nearest Veela paused and lifted her hands to her eyes, as if peering through her parted fingers at him. Harry looked calmly back at her as a concentrated blast of her allure hit him. She probably wondered why he wasn’t on the ground panting at her feet.
            “I rule here,” he said, as the allure drained away from him like water into the ground. “That means that I command the performance of permissible magic inside the bounds of Hogwarts. Are you going to tell me what you’re doing here, or not?” He wove a barrier as he spoke, a curtain of colored light and cloth that seemed to billow and ripple around them. It would prevent the Veela allure from traveling beyond it and affecting any members of her court.
            The two Veela in the lead glanced at each other. Then a third one stepped forwards from behind them, and bowed to Harry. Harry looked her over quickly. She was an old woman, or so he assumed from the silvery-white sheen of her hair and the way she stood barely as tall as his shoulder.
            She gave him a faint smile. “The French Ministry has driven us out of our homes,” she said. “So we have come to you, you see, for sanctuary.”
*
Meechypoo: Yes, he did, and yes, Harry is learning.
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Black Phoenix