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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-Eight—Entwined
            Draco turned the parchment over in his hand, and then put it down on the desk and contemplated it. Really, he almost had to congratulate Gorenson on the way he’d sent it—assuming it was Gorenson, and at this point, Draco had no other enemy that he thought would react in this way.
            The owl who had delivered it had been a snowy owl, but such a pale variety, with silver dashes at the edges of its wings and eyes that had more yellow in them than gold, that Draco knew he was looking at what some people called a “ghost” owl. They flew more silently than any normal bird, and this one had flown through Draco’s fireplace instead of his window or doors. It had dropped the parchment on Draco’s desk and soared back out again with the same utterly silent beat of its wings.
            Draco knew people that would unnerve. He wondered for a moment if Gorenson believed he was one of them, or simply chose any advantage he could to try and unnerve his enemy.
            Then he snorted. If he had to ask that question seriously, then he was the one who didn’t know Gorenson.
            He cast the usual spells on the parchment, although even when delivered by a ghost owl, he thought his wards would react if a cursed object came anywhere near them. The investigation produced nothing, and at last Draco thought it safe to pick up the letter and, in a way, admire it. It had a faint shine around it, a glow of light that Draco regarded with an indulgent eye. That was probably meant to make it look more enticing, and make someone grab it.
            Gorenson did have some good psychological tricks. It probably came from moving from identity to identity and Department to Department in the Ministry for so long.
            Draco slit the envelope open, to find not only a piece of paper but a ring inside. He cast the same spells he had used on the letter in general on the ring, patiently and attentively. Gorenson shouldn’t think that Draco would run out of patience to play this game. Draco could go for a long, long time before he got tired of it.
            The ring was a simple band of some darkish purple material. Draco’s spells didn’t show anything special about it, either magically or otherwise. Draco still laid it on the desk in front of him as he read the letter.
            Mr. Malfoy,
            I know that you, along with much of the rest of the Ministry, and indeed the British wizarding world, are convinced that the Unspeakables have hidden away many valuable artifacts and are hoarding them for themselves. I hoped to show you that, under certain circumstances, we can share them with people we deem suitable caretakers. This ring is one of them. It is the ring that was worn by Merlin, and stolen by Nimue when she confined him in the cloven oak. Or so one legend says. It is certainly ancient, and very old. It will grant you a single wish.
            Draco lowered the letter and stared at the ring, lying innocently in the center of the desk. He had heard of artifacts that had wishing magic built into them not responding to spells that would detect magic, because their makers had wanted to hide them, but…He rushed back to the letter.
            I know that you might wonder why I am sending it, when you could simply pick it up and wish me dead. But I am a gambler by nature, or I would not be in politics, and I choose to gamble that you have more important things to wish for than seeing me dead. You might choose to wish for the triumph of your lover, or for yourself to become Minister, or for all opposition to simply vanish.
            Draco gave a breathless snort. And did Gorenson really think that Draco wouldn’t include him in that opposition that he wanted to vanish?
            You should know, however, that there is a restriction on the use of the ring. Use it once, and only once. You will also have to pay a price for it. It will take away what you most love.
            I wish you luck.
            One Man.
            Draco put the letter down and stared at the ring again. There was always the chance that Gorenson was completely lying, of course, that this was just a chance to fuck with him, and the ring had no special properties, the way that Draco’s wand had reassured him that it didn’t.
            There was always the possibility. But Draco had heard of wish rings like this before, or at least artifacts that resembled it. They weren’t always rings.
            As if compelled, Draco picked up the ring again and turned it over. It sparked and shone in the pale light from the lamp. It felt ordinary on his palm, as cold as any metal would be that hadn’t been touched by human skin in a while. Or which had flown through cold night air in an envelope clutched by an owl.
            Draco tumbled the ring over once more, then dropped it on the desk and sat back, shaking his head. No. He wouldn’t think about this. He wouldn’t obsess over it. There was also the chance that that had been Gorenson’s main ploy in sending it, to distract Draco and make him less focused on the campaign and protecting Harry. After all, it was a variation of what Draco was already planning to do to him, and Draco hadn’t ever thought Gorenson was stupid.
            He put the ring resolutely in the drawer of his desk, and then locked it with another wave of his wand, and turned back to what he had been doing before the ghost owl interrupted him, which was studying the first batch of notes Rosenthal had sent him from the Ministry. He had a round dozen names that could be Gorenson’s, and at first he had thought he would pick through them for the likeliest candidates and release those. But the longer he looked at them, and the more he thought about the ghost owl and the ring and the taunting nature of the note, the more steadily a new plan took shape in his mind.
            He leaned back and studied the paper. Rosenthal had included the note at the top that none of these were the names of real people, as far as she could determine, simply the names of people who weren’t currently on record as working at the Ministry, but were on the files as having existed at one time. Some of them might be the identities of Aurors working undercover or spies instead of Gorenson.
            But either way…
            Why not release all of them? The flood of information, which would probably include at least some of the real thing, would put Gorenson off, tease him, tip him off-balance, the way he was trying to do to Draco with the ghost owl and the ring. Those to whom such tactics were a good idea were often vulnerable to the same thing themselves.
            With a smile that even he suspected was sadistic, Draco sat back to write the perfect letter to Rita Skeeter.
*
            “I’ve never seen a soul so sick.”
            Harry fought not to close his eyes. He had to be strong for Persephone’s sake, bedraggled and shivering on her perch under Gabrielle’s gentle touch. To Harry’s relief, Persephone showed no sign of trying to eat her, maybe because Gabrielle wasn’t fully human.
            Or it could be that Persephone was too weak even to snap. Harry was really afraid that it was the last, especially with the way that Gabrielle had spoken her last, solemn words.
            “Can you see what I need to do to make her better?” he asked.
            Gabrielle glanced at him, and then went back to circling around Persephone’s perch. So far, she hadn’t touched Persephone, instead just hovering her hands and letting her fingers barely brush the air over Persephone’s feathers. “I think I know one thing,” she said. “But you aren’t going to like it.”
            “Let her eat human flesh?”
            Gabrielle was astonished enough to drop her hands and turn to face him. “How did you know…”
            “The centaurs told me.” Harry sighed and sat down behind his desk. Letting Gabrielle investigate hadn’t been a bad idea, but she had told him nothing he didn’t already know. “They said that she had fed on human flesh not long after the moment of her creation, so she had to do the same thing now. But it won’t be until her burning day. That means that I have some time to study how to survive.” He gestured to the books on his desk. Gabrielle followed his gaze, but still looked puzzled, so Harry elaborated. “I’m going to cut the flesh off myself. I can’t ask someone else to do it.”
            “But you can’t.”
            Harry looked up, and let his magic flare. Gabrielle spread her hands as if she might fall, although the floor had only rocked slightly.
            “Do you think you can tell me what to do?” Harry asked, shaking his head. “Believe me, I’m fully aware of all the consequences of what could happen. That doesn’t mean that you get to tell me that I can’t do it. You’re only living here on sufferance so far, and while I think you’re genuinely trying to help me, that’s not true of some of the other Veela who came with you. So lay off.”
            Gabrielle swallowed and stepped back, gaze so wary that Harry did feel a little bad. But she didn’t retreat. “I just wanted you to know that consuming your flesh won’t help her,” she said.
            Harry lowered his hands, and his magic. In fact, everything went so quiet that Gabrielle glanced around as though she thought that might mean her destruction was imminent. “What are you saying?” he whispered.
            Gabrielle focused on him. “She’s your creation, made mostly of your magic. She can’t eat you. It would be like eating herself. It would weaken her rather than strengthen her. She would use up more energy taking from herself, and you, than she would gain from the consumption.”
            Harry turned away and walked to the far side of the room. He had to look out the window of the office, and remind himself that people who brought him bad news weren’t always out to hurt him. “What do you mean? How can you know this? The centaurs didn’t mention anything about this.”
            “I don’t know if they thought that you intended to feed her yourself.” Gabrielle’s voice was thin and angry. Then she paused and added, “But they also might not have known how to look for it. Most Veela wouldn’t, either. I only saw it because I have experience tending the tree-souls, and I’ve seen sick ones before.”
            Harry shut his eyes. “Explain it to me.”
            Gabrielle’s voice stumbled a little, but she sounded as if she was doing her best. “It’s—a Veela has a soul in multiple parts, outside their bodies and inside. One part is inside the mate, which is how a Veela recognizes a mate in the first place. It’s a soul-connection, but not to the whole soul. And part of our souls comes from the places where we live, and the trees. It’s like the whole soul is only made when all those things are in place, and until we meet our mates and establish our homes, with the trees, then we only have part of a soul.” She paused. “I’m not explaining this well.”
            “I’m familiar with the theory of split souls,” Harry muttered, his shoulders tightening the way they so often did when he remembered Voldemort. “What I don’t understand is how you can still be sane and normal like that.”
            “Oh, well, for a Veela it is normal.” Gabrielle sounded relieved, as if she had assumed that he was going to ask her something else. “For a human, it isn’t. Even if they’re a Veela mate, they’re carrying an extra piece of soul around, not lacking one.” She hesitated. “And that’s part of the reason Persephone is sick.”
            “Explain,” Harry told the window. He hadn’t practiced speaking like a cold, evil Dark Lord, but at the moment he thought he sounded like one.
            Luckily, Gabrielle wasn’t too frightened to speak. “She’s part of your soul, stretched outside your body. That’s not a natural state for any human. She’s fighting to come back to you, but at the same time, she’s fighting to draw the rest of your soul towards her. It’s this…cycle. I don’t really understand it. I can see it, but it’s like the energy is always flowing back and forth, and sometimes it belongs more to her and sometimes more to you. It can’t meet in the middle since there is no middle. Maybe that’s why we have three parts of our souls. It’s more stable than two, and so we can flow back and forth and rest in different parts if something happens to us. But you don’t have three parts like anchors, you have two…”
            Harry turned around when she didn’t go on, and she swirled one hand in the air. “What do you call it when there are two things, they’re separate, things travel back and forth between them? The word?”
            It took Harry himself a while to decide what she was talking about, but finally he asked, “Poles?”
            Gabrielle nodded vigorously. “That’s what it’s like. You are drawn to each other, and repel each other.” She sneaked a glance at Persephone, who was crouched down in the middle of her perch with her feathers so fluffed out around her that it looked like she’d doubled in size. “And I don’t know what to tell you to get you back to normal. It’s not stable. Feeding her your flesh won’t help.”
            “Thank you,” Harry said.
            Gabrielle turned to him again. “I’m sorry it’s not good news,” she said. “If you would let me stay a little longer, then I could try to look at her again, and you again, and see if there’s something that would help. But I can’t see it right now.”
            “Thank you,” Harry repeated, and this time, she finally seemed to take note of the dangerous undertones in the word. She flushed a little, inclined her head to him, and scampered out of the office. Listening through the stones in the floor and walls, Harry could tell the moment when she burst into a run.
            Which left Harry alone with Persephone, and his problem.
            He crossed the distance between his desk and her perch, and reached out to stroke the feathers in the middle of her back. Persephone opened one eye, but even that made it seem as if she was struggling against an enormous weight. She snapped at him weakly and bowed her head again, neck swaying like a pendulum.
            Harry couldn’t have seen it himself, not without Gabrielle’s special talents, and he didn’t know that he would have been able to describe it the way she did even if he could. But he knew exactly what this was.
            He had created Persephone out of the cycle of his own magic trying to destroy him. Yaxley had cast a spell that turned Harry’s own magic against him. Since Harry was so powerful, that had meant that pulling on his magic to defend him was only fueling his own destruction. But he had managed to set up a cycle by channeling a lot of that power into Persephone. She was a creature who burned and died in a cycle, and that had seemed the best solution to the problem.
            But now that he thought about it, he must have put more than his magic into Persephone. He had probably put part of his soul, too, which was the reason she had her own thoughts and will and moved about independently of his desires. So it was no wonder that the whole situation was unstable. The cycle couldn’t turn in circles, the way that Harry had thought it would. It was just wavering back and forth between him and Persephone, the magic that should have cycled fighting the stretched piece of soul that kept trying to come home, and the whole thing was a mess.
            Gabrielle was right. Trying to take pieces of flesh off his own body wouldn’t work. It would be like calling up his magic to fight Yaxley’s spell had been. All that would happen was tossing more kindling on the fire, only this time all the kindling would burn up instead of coming back to him.
            Then Harry paused.
            It was hard to remember those moments in the fire of his own magic, when he had tapped into the Dark Arts spell that Yaxley had cast and flung it back and forth like a ball tossed from hand to hand, when he had come up with the idea to create Persephone. But he remembered that thought about the cycle, and the way that the best thing to do would be to create a phoenix.
            He had done the wrong thing by letting Persephone eat Yaxley immediately afterwards. He had caused all this.
            But there was something to those ideas…
            Harry walked over to his desk and moved some of the Arithmancy calculations that Hermione had helped him with out of the way. Then he settled down and reached for one of the books on phoenixes that Hermione had pulled from the library. They had helped not at all with the idea of a phoenix that ate human flesh, because there had never been one before.
            But there had been lots of information about burning days and cycles in there.
            Harry opened the book, and began to read. He was trying to be cautious, gentle, not frightening away the idea he’d had before it had the chance to mature.
            But inside him, hope had begun to beat like a heart.
*
SP777: Blackthorne is still there! But he hasn’t been able to help Harry with Persephone or the werewolves, so we haven’t seen him around much lately.
Ciara_D: Yes, they’re much more attached than they were even a few months ago, in-story.
CareLessLover: No, but she did spark one.
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Black Phoenix