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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 Thirty-Two—This Thing of Darkness
            At the bottom of the fire, with the embers crumbling and the pain so thick around him that it seemed the whole of his living being, Harry found himself.
            He came slowly back to awareness, to knowledge of his magical core, and then the magic, and then the power that he wielded, and then the alien spell still tangled around them, him and Persephone, and then the agony.
            All of those were separate threads, glowing red and orange in the midst of the fire. He could detect them, he could feel them, and he could decide what to do with them. He was in the middle of the pain, but it hurt neither more nor less now than it had when he first became aware of it. And he did not have to be the pain. He could step back, exile himself, think about other things.
            And when he did that, he began to see them more wholly.
            If he was a web, of braided and unbraiding magic, then so was everything else. His core was a delicate web that had always existed inside him, and now was strung from several other corners. Persephone had a black sheen and wrapped like a strangling cord around one of the same corners as his core. Yaxley’s spell hung taunting and corpse-green not far from that. The pain was a flare of disharmony in certain angles.
            Not exactly the same. Not widely separated, but with some distance between them.
            And Harry, here in the heart of the fire, because he was making and unmaking, because he had yielded everything he was to the flames, could choose what components were going to go to make him up and which were not.
            He reached out and gathered in the web of his core, stringing it up in the center, careful to dim neither its colors nor its warmth. He wove it and spun it until the distance between it and the pain was greater, and nodded. Yes, he wanted all of his magic back. Without it, he couldn’t protect Hogwarts.
            The bond with Hogwarts was there when he looked for it, coiling away beneath his feet into another world. Harry smiled. It made sense that it would, since it was linked to an object that he hadn’t burned.
            That gave him a base to build on. He stepped back and reached for the black, mocking cord that was Persephone.
            It fought him. Harry looked clear-eyed into the center of it, and saw a reflection of his own face. He paused, wondering what it meant. He hadn’t constructed Persephone as a mirror of himself. If anything, she had to be different from him, to have her own will and means of movement and a sort of soul. He reached out and stroked the black fire, and it coiled around him and somewhat distracted him from the pain.
            Then he knew what the reflection meant, and he had to close his eyes.
            Persephone had never been completely separate from him, any more than the Horcruxes were from Voldemort. She had shared his soul, after all, the way Gabrielle had told him. She had a will of her own, to an extent, but so often, it was linked to something he was doing, if only to go contrary to what he wanted. No one would so perfectly oppose him at every turn and then turn around and be compliant if they existed separately from him and didn’t always care about what he did.
            Harry took a deep breath. He didn’t want to recreate Persephone if she was going to be like that again, any more than he wanted to recreate her with an appetite for human flesh. He had thought burning away everything they were had meant he could reforge her in almost the same image. Keep her from eating human flesh, and the main problem would be solved.
            But if all he had was a slave, then he didn’t want to make her again.
            While he thought, the black fire had twined itself around his shoulders, and pressed close, and dug in. Harry turned his head and met his eyes in the dark mirror of it again.
            Now that he looked at it more closely, he noticed that the reflection didn’t look exactly the same. This one had eyes that were perhaps a shade darker green than his, and he wore black robes, expensively tailored, that Harry had never worn and would never have cared to wear. He had a smile that looked as if it might bruise his lips.
            This was a part of himself. He had pushed a bunch of his own darker, and maybe Darker, magic and impulses into Persephone. She had been a convenient container.
            Harry swallowed. He mourned—well, maybe not Persephone, but what he thought she had been. A being who could fly around him, and sometimes would do as she was told for the sheer joy of wrongfooting him, and who had her own opinions about things. A companion.
            You have Draco for that. And your friends. And Briseis. And a lot of other people in your court, some of whom would be delighted to tell you that you were wrong.
            Harry half-smiled. The reflection in the black fire suddenly frowned at him, and flung up a hand as though it was begging Harry to hold back.
            But Harry had made his decision. He reached out his hands, and gathered the serpent of black fire close, although now it struggled to escape from him and flee into some far corner of his being, and carefully picked it apart.
            It was a weave of many things: his beliefs that he couldn’t always act Dark, part of his power, the cycle that he had tried to set up when he realized he was burning alive from Yaxley’s spell, and some of his fascination with Dark Arts. He pulled it apart, and saw all the different parts of it, and nodded. Other than Yaxley’s magic, this had all come from him. This was his.
            But he had a bond to another companion, a deeper one, who would give him what Persephone could not, and accept the tribute he could offer it.
            He began to swirl the magic that was his around his head, along with the cycle. He felt wisps of it trying to catch at him, and winced. For a moment, it had felt as if Persephone was fighting to stay alive.
            But he could think of no way to make her separate from him and make her really independent. He had thought he had last time, but he’d only been fooling himself. And there was no place to get rid of Yaxley’s spell unless he took it away from her.
            Without the spell, Harry wasn’t even sure that she would be able to be a phoenix, and return to the notion of cycling.
            Another swirl of the magic around his head, and it scooped up the lingering darkness from Yaxley’s spell. Harry thought he heard someone scream when that happened, and smiled grimly. If Yaxley was watching from the afterlife and didn’t like this, then Harry would do everything he could to piss the bastard off.
            The magic was going around his head, around his body, through the pain and the rest of the fire, like a net now. Harry took a deep breath. The floor beneath his feet was still steady, the bond he had to Hogwarts linking and confirming him in the real world.
            I make this a gift to you, he thought, though as far as he knew there was no one who would appreciate or even hear that announcement.
Then he turned, dropped to one knee, and drove all that magic into his bond with Hogwarts.
There was a ripple that Harry felt in more than his bones; it went through his skull, his brain, his blood, his muscles, his meat. The voices that he had heard in the distance screamed again, and Harry winced from the noise. But he had chosen his companion, the one who was most faithful, the one that was large enough to absorb power like this, and he drove it down and down and down.
The screams sounded again. Harry felt himself beginning to unravel, this little corner of awareness and power he had fought to secure tearing apart. He had been bound to Persephone, and getting rid of her affected him.
Affects me, but does not destroy me, Harry thought, and flung himself into thoughts of Hogwarts, which had served him so faithfully, and thoughts of his court, full of people that depended on him.
They called him Lord. Hogwarts called him more than that. Comforted him, fed him, let him move quickly, protected him. Hogwarts was the reason that he had done all this in the first place.
Not Persephone, as much as he had cared for her. Not to fight Death Eaters. He was here for Hogwarts, and that meant he had to be here.
            Harry drove the magic down and down and down, and Hogwarts expanded, flexed, and then swallowed the stored strength. That was what Harry had wanted Persephone to do, to swallow it and then burn and arise from the ashes, but it had become too clear that she couldn’t do that. Her nature was too closely tied to his. She couldn’t consume or resist Yaxley’s evil spell because he couldn’t do it.
            But Hogwarts was bigger than she was, and more independent, for all that it was also intricately tied to Harry. He poured the magic into it, and all that it did was increase the well of magic available to Hogwarts. There was one more ripple, and it settled into silence.
            Use the magic well, Harry thought as he stood up again. Use it to defend my people, to make the walls and the wards stronger and the link with the grounds more extensive.
            A deep sensation answered him, not words, but more like feeling a small earthquake passing through underground. He knew that Hogwarts had heard him, and would do that with the gift he had given it. Hogwarts was protective of all its children, all its inhabitants.
            And he had bound himself to it even more strongly, by practically inviting it into his core.
            Harry snorted as he turned around and gathered up all the other strands of fire and pain around him. As if he would ever be free again, anyway. He was the Dark Lord of Hogwarts, not all of Britain, and the limits that defined him and made him free to ask also constrained him. He would be doing very little traveling in the future.
            Now, though, he had one more task to accomplish. He looked into the heart of the fire, and saw the agony looking back at him.
            There was no way out but through.
            Harry drove himself in, and down, and through in response. He had thought to burn and rise from the ashes with Persephone, and to do the same every time she burned, to join her in her burning day. He had thought that would prevent her from having to eat human flesh. But without the cyclic magic of Yaxley’s spell, there was no way to do that. He had only one chance to rebuild himself and return, and that would have to be it.
            He gathered up the fire and wound it around his limbs, then stormed through the pain. It made him scream again. He wondered for a second what the others would think if they could hear him screaming, but Hogwarts was soundproofed against that kind of thing. He had made sure of it, before he shut the doors of the Great Hall. Perhaps it was even stronger, now that he had made that little addition to the school’s strength.
            He wove flames into limbs, set up his magical core with the web again, and draped himself with a blanket of heat and colors that became skin. The pain, he had to accept. Harry had lived through pain before, and although it would never be his favorite activity, it had been necessary for many things. He wore endurance proudly.

            He could not strengthen himself, make himself a more powerful wizard or a better protector. In fact, he thought that he might be a trifle weaker than before, since he had poured so much magic into the walls and stones of Hogwarts. But he was willing to accept that loss, as long as he would have the advantages the extra strength conveyed—and he couldn’t think of any reason that he wouldn’t.
            Harry closed his eyes, and reassembled in a flash: flesh, robes, color, light, sound. He came back to himself on the floor of the Great Hall, panting as he felt the last of the pain sting and sing along his nerves and then fade away. Without Yaxley’s spell to power it, it was nothing more than the agony of transformation.
            He opened his eyes and considered his hands, which had been among the first things to burn. There was skin sheathing them again, to all appearances utterly normal. Harry nodded slowly. He hadn’t been sure that he would get to come back to looking like normal when he had immolated himself like that.
            He still had to stay down and quiet for a little longer, recovering. Then he forced himself onto his feet and towards the doors of the Great Hall.
            When he opened them, there was no one on the other side. Harry stared for a moment, then snorted softly. Of course. He should have known that this was the one time his best friends and the students and the members of his court would obey him and actually get under shelter instead of waiting around or trying to spy on what he was doing.
            He wobbled his way towards the entrance hall. He would order Hogwarts to unblock the doors and windows in a second, but he wanted a short space of time to himself, when he didn’t need to defend his boundaries or borders or answer prying questions about what had really happened.
            In which he could mourn the loss of Persephone.
            But when he stepped out onto the grounds, he could hear the sounds that Hogwarts’s walls had prevented him from hearing before. A line of wizards stood outside his wards, steadily hurling magic at them. Some of them wore the grey robes of Unspeakables, and at their head stood a single strong, tall wizard that Harry knew well.
            Gorenson did stagger as he met Harry’s eyes through the gates, and Harry thought he knew why. He had probably attacked when he felt Persephone’s burning day. He had been monitoring her through some sort of magic, Harry was sure of it. He had known that she would weaken, and if he hadn’t actually caused her sickness, then he had taken advantage of it.
            A cold surge stirred into life in Harry’s stomach when he thought of that. It worked its way towards the surface, strong and unyielding, like a whirlpool, and he knew a second later what it was.
            It was anger.
            Gorenson’s wizards hadn’t paused when they saw Harry; if anything, their assault redoubled. The wards hadn’t started to crack or fall or even weaken yet. Harry wondered if that was partially because of the new strength that he had poured into them when he slammed his magic and Yaxley’s into the stones. But he wondered that with an abstract part of his mind, one small and distant from the roaring anger.
            Gorenson had kidnapped Harry. He might be indirectly responsible for Persephone’s death, the need to unbind the magic and unmake her. He was definitely either responsible for the assassination attempts on Draco or had let them take place with his knowledge and approval.
            And he hadn’t expected Harry to come alive out of this, or he wouldn’t have attacked the court like this. The expression of shock was fading from his face now, but it had been there. He had planned to attack the wards when they were at their weakest, and storm through Harry’s court, and take his people.
            Harry had had enough.
            He lifted one hand. There was a soft, distant sound in the air above his head, as though Persephone was alive out there still, flying and calling to him. Harry clenched his fist, and magic rose out of him and streaked over the walls like a comet.
            He might not be able to attack most people who didn’t stand on his grounds. And he had learned his lesson about venturing off them. And anyway, he didn’t actually know if all the wizards behind Gorenson had his same level of guilt.
            But by God, he was tired of this one.
            The magic, formed of pure rage and fatigue, glowing Dark, torn from his magical core and not from his bond with Hogwarts, soared straight and true at Gorenson, who didn’t Apparate away. Afterwards, Harry was never sure if that was because he couldn’t move fast enough, and knew it, or if he was simply arrogant enough to think he could meet it. Gorenson tilted his head back and laughed as the comet landed on his face.
            That probably indicated the latter.
            The laughter faded. The light of Harry’s comet, which had been blue-green, turned black. It crouched there, glowing, and the Unspeakables and other wizards who had been helping Gorenson attack Hogwarts backed away in terrified silence. Harry smelled burning grass, but it was off Hogwarts’s grounds, so he couldn’t feel its pain. He could only grieve the necessity of it. Or he would, when he could feel grief again.
            He stood there with his arms folded, and the light faded. In the center of the scorched ground was a pile of blacked bones, placed neatly in a pyramid, with the skull at the top. They looked as if they had been charred in a fire hundreds of years ago. At the foot of the pile lay the halves of Gorenson’s broken wand.
            The audience turned, as one, to stare at Harry.
            Harry gave them a wide, nasty smile. Maybe he would regret this later, maybe not, but right now, he was tired and his phoenix was dead, and he had come back from the fire, and he could see smoke rising from the roofs of Hogsmeade, which meant Gorenson had attacked even more people he was sworn to protect.
            “I am the Dark Lord, ladies and gentlemen,” he said, and lowered his voice. “Do not fuck with me.”
            The pops of Apparition sounded as Harry turned and began to walk, slowly, painfully, with fire-renewed muscles hurting him every step of the way, along the castle wards, to where he would be able to direct water from the lake to help Hogsmeade.
*
Ciara_D: Not that long!
Meechypoo: That was actually Harry’s plan, but without that cycling spell, he can’t do it completely.
BAFan: Nope! And not even a cliffhanger on this one.
SP777: Thanks!
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Black Phoenix