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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 Three—Stolen Moments
            Draco glanced over his shoulder, and then decided that wasn’t enough and cast a spell that would tell him whether Rosenthal was still in the house. He sighed when the answer came back to him, like an echo from empty rooms. No, she had gone home.
            And he was going to Harry. He had been away from him long enough. Hell, he’d hardly got to see him in the week since Harry had raised the black phoenix and broken free from that dueling circle that was meant to kill him.
            Draco smiled slightly as he cast in the Floo powder and called out, “Harry Potter’s office!” He had something to tell Harry that might cheer him up, or at least make him rub his hands together. The Ministry had refused to comment officially on the way Harry had become a Dark Lord—they had left that to the Daily Prophet and other members of the public who wanted to be hysterical—but Draco had allies who worked inside, and who would pass on word of what was happening there.
            Harry still wasn’t a Dark Lord in the sense that his father would mean the words if he spoke them, but Draco thought he would enjoy the news anyway.
            “Draco?” Harry called, an instant after Draco stepped into the office. “I thought that was you. Sit down and make yourself comfortable. I’m just making dinner.”
            Draco had glanced around the office, noting the addition of a few chairs and a bigger, flatter hearth in front of the fireplace, but he turned around gaping when he heard that. He couldn’t help himself. “What?” he asked.
            “I said, I was making dinner.” Harry glanced up from what looked like a brazier in the corner of the room. “Why?”
“You’ve got house-elves to do that for you,” Draco muttered, dropping into the chair that was usually marked as his, one with a curved back and upholstered arms that made comfortable rests. Sometimes he thought that it wasn’t their past stances on blood politics or their upbringing that really separated him and Harry, but little things like this. Harry had the power and the resources to command a bunch of people to do things for him. That he would prefer to do a mundane chore like cooking dinner for himself…
Well, Draco could think of reasons, but he sincerely doubted they were Harry’s. “Are you afraid of poison?” he asked.
Harry gaped at him for a second, then snorted hard enough to make little bits of snot fly out of his nose. Draco winced primly. “What? Of course not. I think Hogwarts would tell me if anyone even brought dangerous ingredients into the school, let alone poison. It let me know when some of the students were trying to sneak plants out of the Herbology greenhouses.”
Draco sighed. “Then why make dinner for yourself?” he asked, deciding he might as well ask. He didn’t understand, but Harry wouldn’t mind trying to help him comprehend it. “The house-elves would make it faster and better, and Hogwarts would protect you. You can eat in both comfort and safety.”
Harry turned around. He had a pan in his hand—Draco didn’t know the word for the kind it was, and he was proud of that and had no intention of changing it—and was swirling the contents back and forth by a long handle. “But I want to do it this way,” he said. “I like it.”
Draco cocked his head. “All right. That doesn’t answer my original question, though. Why make it for yourself, besides the fact that you like it?”
            Harry’s jaw set. “That I like it is enough reason.”
            Draco studied him closely. He wondered if someone had been annoying him, from the way Harry gave a little stamp of his foot a second later, and the magic blew around his head into wavering, transparent wings before it calmed down and Harry turned back to the fire. That might explain why he was doing a mundane chore, to calm down.
            “Just tell me.” Draco made his voice as soft as he could, and reached out a hand. He was too far away from Harry to touch him, even with the cooperation of Hogwarts, but Harry saw the gesture from the corner of his eye, and sighed and relaxed the way Draco had hoped he would.
            “I got this letter today,” Harry said, and a crumpled envelope floated towards Draco. Draco glanced once at Harry, and Harry shook his head. “Oh, no. It didn’t have curses or anything on it. It’s the content.” He shut his eyes and drew in a long breath.
            Draco picked it up. The handwriting looked vaguely familiar, but not until he read it did he understand.
            Dear Dark Lord Harry Potter,
            As requested by you, I am reporting the existence of an abused wizarding child. She is Muggleborn, ten years old. Registered in the Ministry’s archives, but she has not yet been visited by anyone to tell her the wizarding world is real. She lives in Essex…
            There was a Muggle address that meant nothing to Draco. Muggles had the strangest ways of naming things, as far as he was concerned. And imagine having to rely on humans who had to decipher their handwriting for delivery of letters, instead of owls. He skipped down to the next part that made sense.
            My observation indicates that her abuse is verbal and emotional, with perhaps an occasional foray into physicality. Her name is Anne Enders. A photograph is included.
            As requested by you,
            Fifernum.
            Draco sighed out. That was Blaise’s mother, working in the Ministry under an assumed identity, who had collected and sent out photographs of Harry’s abuse. Part of her punishment had been to let Harry know instantly if she found out that another wizarding child was being abused. Draco laid the letter aside and studied Harry’s tense back. He no longer wondered at the mood he was in, only that it wasn’t worse.
            “Did you already do something?” he asked quietly.
            Harry tilted his head in a slashing motion. “Briseis kept me from going right away. She was afraid that I would be angry enough to kill her parents. And I might have been. We sent Hagrid on a thestral instead. He has Anne in a safe place tonight, and he’ll bring her to Hogwarts tomorrow. If anyone can make her feel at home, he’s the one.”
            Draco arched his eyebrows, but decided it was unlikely a Muggleborn would have the same kind of fear of giants that a pure-blood child would have. “And her parents?”
            “I will deal with them.”
            The voice made several of the stones near Draco suddenly crack and craze as if with frost. Draco hissed between his teeth and rubbed at the gooseflesh that had appeared on his arms in the wake of that intense wave of magic.
            “Sorry,” Harry muttered, turning to stare at him. “Shit. Sorry,” he repeated, and went back to shaking his pan.
            “It’s all right,” Draco said, pitching his voice to soothe. He knew that Harry’s anger was already gone; otherwise, the room would have been cold, still. “I know you didn’t mean to upset me, and it’s understandable that you would be angry at the thought of another child being hurt the way you were hurt.”
            “I don’t know if her parents abused her because she has magic,” Harry whispered, staring into the fire. “I don’t know if it was anything like what I went through, or if it was worse. I sent Hagrid because I kept dreaming about someone coming to rescue me, my parents or someone who would tell me that I was a secret prince or anyone. And Hagrid is fierce, but he would put Anne first. He would want to take care of her instead of frightening her parents.”
            “You would have, too.”
            Harry turned around, and Draco caught a glimpse of the savagery on his face that made his own tongue dry up. At almost the same moment, Persephone dropped from the ceiling onto his shoulder and sang a light trilling note, rubbing her beak against Harry’s face.
            “That’s the friendliest I’ve ever seen your phoenix,” Draco said, deciding that they needed to talk about something else to dissipate some of the tension in the air.
            Harry laughed dryly and lifted one hand to touch the middle of Persephone’s back. She ducked her head, though, and after a hesitation that Draco could feel in his bones, Harry reached up to stroke one finger against her neck instead. “She’s acting this way at the moment because I’m thinking about destroying something,” he muttered. “Or someone. She wants to encourage me.”
            Persephone picked up her head and gave another little trill. She was close to Harry’s face, but all she did was, very gently, take one of his eyelashes between the ends of her beak and start nibbling. Harry caught his breath, but did nothing else, and a second later, she released his eyelash and crooned at him, looking towards the window.
            “She really wants you to go and hurt them, doesn’t she?” Draco asked quietly. “She’s not trying to comfort you because you’re hurting?”
            “Anne’s the one who’s hurting,” Harry said automatically. Persephone jerked her head up and gave a little hiss like a snake, and Harry rolled his eyes and turned back to whatever he was cooking. “No, she can sense that I’m on the brink of losing control, and she’s trying to make me lose it.”
            Draco stared at the bird again. She was lovely, the firelight catching her feathers that at first seemed plain black and starting all sorts of other colors to life: blue, green, violet, coruscating indigo. “I didn’t realize having her was so hard on you,” he murmured.
            Harry started to shrug, and then seemed to remember he had a temperamental black phoenix on his shoulder and didn’t. “I would rather have her than not have her, considering what could have happened when she came into being,” he said. “But she’s the dark and the Dark part of me externalized, Draco. What she wants isn’t the best guide for my conscience.”
            Draco sat back and studied Harry. Harry gave a final shake to whatever was in the pan and opened the lid, laying it down. “You want some?” he added over his shoulder, picking up a plate that lay off to the side and starting to pile food on it.
            “Yes,” Draco said. He didn’t know what it was, and it might be more of the thick Muggle sludge Harry had already tried to feed him a couple of times before, and which Draco had mouthed his way through. But he didn’t need to eat it, just to pretend.
            And right now, he had the feeling Harry needed someone to accept him. All of him, or as much as they were willing to take.
            Harry smiled at him over his shoulder and began taking out the thick pieces of toast inside the pan with a long fork, examining them critically for a second before he placed them on a plate and sent the plate skimming over to Draco via a controlled air current. Draco studied the toast cautiously before he took a bite. It looked thick, and as though it had the gleam of melted butter on it, but no worse than that.
            Then he took a bite, and almost choked. Sweet. There was butter soaked into the toast, but also sugar, and something deeper and sweeter that might have been a spice of some kind. Draco groped with his hand for a cup of water, and Harry laughed and handed him one as he came over to settle into the chair opposite Draco.
            “Sorry,” he said. “That was Dudley’s favorite, and I like to make it because I never got to have it when I was a kid. I always forget how it’ll strike someone who didn’t grow up with it, though.”
            Draco glanced at him sideways, wondering if he had meant to reveal that bit of information about never getting to have something his cousin ate constantly, but Harry was too busy trying to coax Persephone to accept a tidbit of toast to notice his look. Persephone considered it with her head on one side. Then she lifted it and flew regally away from Harry’s shoulder, landing on the perch that sat beside his desk. When she began to vigorously clean her breast feathers, Draco snickered.
            Persephone fixed him with a freezing look, but Draco wasn’t concerned. She wasn’t his phoenix. Besides, she must know that he would encourage some of Harry’s tendencies that she probably wanted urged along.
            And, too, Harry would never forgive her if she attacked Draco.
            Feeling a bit calmer than he had when he first came into the office, Draco turned back to Harry. “It seems so long since I’ve seen you,” he murmured.
            Harry looked up at him and smiled. “Well, it isn’t so long since you swore me that vow.” He took a few hard bites of toast, crunching them between his teeth as if they had personally offended him, and then laid the plate aside. “I meant to ask you,” he said softly, leaning forwards, while the fire highlighted his face and made Draco want to touch him. “Why did you swear it?”
            “Because I had the chance, and the chance might never come again,” Draco answered easily. Of all the questions that Harry could have asked him, that one startled him a little. “There I was, and I was disguised, and no one except Rosenthal knew. It was a gesture that wouldn’t hurt my campaign the way swearing under my own name and face would.”
            “Yeah, but,” Harry said, and fell silent. Across the room, Persephone looked at him, but a second later turned her back. Draco couldn’t read much from that gesture.
            Draco reached out to take Harry’s hand. “What?” he added, when Harry looked at him with a painful, yearning uncertainty that made Draco’s heart throb a little. “Tell me.”
            Harry’s hand closed around his hard enough to make Draco’s wrist ache. “I want you to be free,” Harry whispered. “I want the people around me to be able to do what they want. I mean, within reason. I would still turn against someone who said they served me but wanted to shut the school down. But what does it mean that you decided that you would rather swear to me than not? Why would you want anyone else to control your life? I thought part of the reason you wanted to become Minister was to have the control that Voldemort stole from you during the war.”
            Draco blinked. He had never considered that particular interpretation of his decision, but he supposed it made sense. He wondered if that was one reason his parents hadn’t objected to his decision as much as they could have. Lucius could have cut off the money that Draco received from him, or disinherited him. He never had, despite all his complaining.
            “I swore to you because I wanted to,” Draco said. “I wanted to be under your protection. I want to fight with you. I want to serve you. I understand all the reasons that we have to keep our connection secret for now, and I agree with them,” he added hastily, while Harry raised his eyebrows. “I know, I know. It wouldn’t look good for either of us.”
            “It wouldn’t look good for you,” Harry corrected. “They would think you were my pawn. But it could only look good for me to have a skilled and competent lover.” He raised Draco’s hand to his lips and kissed it.
            Draco let his eyelashes flutter for a second, enjoying the surge of magic and power through the kiss, but just for that second. Then he shook his head and firmly put it aside. “You think I’m your pawn because I swore to you?”
            “It wasn’t as binding a vow as it could have been,” Harry said. “But, yes.”
            “I want to be with you,” Draco said, and stood to cross the distance between them, leaning against Harry and half-crushing him back into the chair. “I want to stand at your side. I can’t do it openly, and maybe I wouldn’t know what to do if I could. I am still a Slytherin, after all.” He made Harry smile, and that was success enough to embolden him to continue. “But that just makes me more determined to have the kind of connection that we can have.” He ran his hand down Harry’s shoulder and tugged a little at his hair. Harry closed his eyes and let his head fall back against the cloth of the chair.
            “I want you,” Draco said. “For my lover, for my friend, for my ally.” He swallowed and spoke the last words, the ones he hadn’t said aloud before, because Harry would almost certainly take them the wrong way. “For my Lord.”
            Harry’s eyes opened, and he looked at Draco for a long, still moment. Then he reached up.
            Draco reached back and down, dizzy with relief and pleasure. Harry was past the moment when he might have rejected that. Maybe he had been ever since he created Persephone. He knew that he was a Lord now, and he accepted it much more easily than he ever had.
            Their lips met, and another desire than just being with Harry and being his sprang to life inside Draco. They had kissed before, they’d touched, but someone or something had always interfered when they might have gone further.
            “Lock the door,” Draco breathed into Harry’s mouth, drawing back enough to say that. “Cast any warding spells that you have to. Just make sure that we’re not interrupted, again.”
            Harry’s eyes flared, and he whispered into Draco’s neck, “Yes,” the instant before the shadows around the room deepened, stones grew over the door, and Persephone took flight with a startled squawk. She soared out the window and disappeared.
            Draco had an instant to laugh before Harry kissed him again.
            And lots of things—like awareness of the outside world—disappeared.
*
AlterEquis: Harry will have to do something else, then. The centaurs would be tricky to have mad at him.
SP777: Well, Persephone might be a little bugger, but she’s not going to stay around for the buggering.
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Black Phoenix