Adult-FanFiction.org : Harry Potter

Sanctum Sanctorum	By : Lomonaaeren Category: Harry Potter > Slash - Male/Male > Harry/Draco Views: 28253 -:- Recommendations : 3 -:- Currently Reading : 4
Disclaimer: I do not own Harry Potter. I am making no money from this fanfic.

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Chapter Thirty-Four—In Light

            And there was fire.

            Harry knew when he began to ride it that there was no way to master and collect the magic as Schroeder had been talking about, at least not for him. Perhaps Schroeder’s memories would tell him more, but he did not have time to absorb them now.

            Instead, beneath his feet there was the phoenix, and around him were the wings, and blowing and billowing around him was the flame.

            Harry smiled and reached into the center of his power, down to his magical core, and pulled out the flame that he had burning there. He wondered now if perhaps the flame had taken that form because it had known, or anticipated, that he would have to use fire magic to deal with the phoenix.

            It could have been like that. It could have.

            And then he lost himself.

            The phoenix was directly beneath him, so that his boots perched on the sleek head, and the wings flashed and flailed right next to his body, and Harry saw the feathers falling away from him down a smooth slope, and the curved red beak snapped and ground away right next to his feet. Harry fell to his knees and dug his hands into the feathers.

            They tried to burn him. They were nothing but pure fire, pure power, and Harry knew that only his own magic wrapping him in a protective cloak gave him the ability to withstand it. He hummed beneath his breath and worked his hands down, deeper, further, seeking something solid beneath the surging heat.

            He found it at the same moment as the phoenix screamed in fury, and its voice seemed to bound and rebound from the corners of the cavern. If his shields had not been in place, Harry thought, everyone still alive would have been deafened. And perhaps they had been. His flame shields had not included any provision for sound.

            But he had yet to discover that a loud screech from the phoenix would leave them with more than ringing ears, either. Until he had some evidence that it would, he preferred to act and react in the now, and trust that his shields would hold.

            The phoenix came to rest on something that might have been a ledge halfway up the cavern, or the tattered remains of its own egg, and crouched there for a moment, wings spread and draped along itself, body shuddering. Harry heard the hiss and crackle of the flames as they sought for something to feed on, and the hiss of his own magic as it fought back. He took a deep breath, delved his hands further into the heat, fed some of his power into the muscles of his arms and shoulders so that they grew sleek and large, and then heaved.

            The phoenix shifted and screeched, and flying gouts of blood came away in Harry’s hand. He tossed his right hand to the side, so that the blood struck the phoenix’s feathers, and plunged the left hand deeper, or he would have lost his grip. And the phoenix was shaking beneath him, shaking its head from side to side and its wings up and down. Harry did not know where he would fall if he was tossed. Best to stay astride, for now.

            The wings pumped up and down, the great talons that he could sometimes see flashing ruby-bright through the gold and orange flames gripped and then pushed, and then they were flying, up and up. Harry thought the phoenix probably hoped that it could smash him against the roof of the cavern.

            Harry laid himself flat along the phoenix’s head, and closed his eyes. He didn’t know where his wand was at the moment; it might have burned like Schroeder’s. But he had done this once already tonight, and he could hope that his fingers remembered.

            They did. His fingernails curved into claws again, and Harry went to work, digging into the phoenix’s face as if it were made of rock and sand.

            The phoenix went mad.

            It tossed its head from side to side, singing in a furiously high voice, wings beating and strobing now like pulses of Harry’s own heart. Harry laughed, and was a little surprised to hear the sound come out so high and shrill, as though he was a phoenix himself. He shifted to the side, and his claws found its eyes.

            The phoenix either decided to defend itself or began to die; Harry thought that his claws might have sliced into its brain behind the eyes. He dug deeper and then closed his eyes and reached into his magical core, finding everything he could there, scooping and digging and demanding that it come to him.

            And it did. The flowing magic was a cascade of warmth and power that made Harry feel as if he had been supercharged with adrenaline. And he put it to good use, surrounding himself with an inner bubble of protection much like the one he had used on Adam, and then reaching out and constructing another container like the cracked halves of the egg that the phoenix had come from, weaving it of coruscating fire.

            The magic all around him flourished and thumped in many directions, glowing and spinning and wheeling, wild—

            And Harry slammed the halves of the egg shut around it and held it, motionless.

            The magic paused for a moment, as though in reaction to feeling the cage close around it. Then it, in turn, went mad.

            Harry could never relive the next moments in a way that made any sense. He was tumbling, and he was spinning, and he was dancing with a partner made of sharp-edged flames that wielded a sword against him instead of dance movements, and he was—

            He was rising on a jet of fire, and the magic that came from him contended with the magic that came from the phoenix (the absorbed magic that Schroeder and Moonstone had hoarded, he understood now, because it was better to have it all released in one glorious explosion and absorb it that way than pluck it by one by one from the chest of any number of children), and his magic was winning.

            But at a cost. Harry could feel it draining him, absorbing him in turn, drawing more and more power from him so that it could continue to contend, and he knew that the chances he would survive this were remote.

            But he wanted to. For Adam’s sake, for Draco’s, for the sake of the other children that might exist in the vision Plumm had seen. And he bent himself to the task, winding more magic around his core, using it to bolster himself in ways that he barely understood, holding and cradling and valuing himself in ways that he would never normally have done, ways that Draco had taught him to do.

            He used the memories of sucking Draco, and Draco fucking him, and Draco sucking him, as warmth of their own. He draped himself with blankets and tapestries of power and what he wanted to survive and go back to, and all around him was the greater force of the hammering magic.

            Harry held up to it. He stood up to it. He resisted it, and he resisted, as well, the temptation to try and take it into his core instead of merely caging it. He could be so strong that way, said the voice of temptation, and not have to worry about how much strength it was taking him to hold the phoenix’s magic—

            That was the temptation Schroeder and Moonstone had faced, and succumbed to. Harry shook his head and continued rising, continued holding, continued caging. It was fighting on defensive and offensive fronts both at once, and it was tiring. But he had chosen his course.

            There was a long, low snarl that seemed to vibrate both inside and outside himself, and Harry felt the course of the magic change and turn, as though it had found another way out of the trap he had designed for it. He raised his head—it was the first time in a long time he had been aware of having a head—and stared around warily.

            The magic was sneaking out of the shell next to him, in trailing streamers of gold and red. Harry reached out and began to clamp the halves of the shell once more, concentrating so that he could forget his weariness and pain, his small chance of holding the trap he had designed like this, and even his fear of death.

            Harry.

            The words were in his mind, but seemed to come from deeper than that, perhaps from his own deep thoughts and subconscious impulses that Draco was able to hear. Harry hesitated, wondering if this was another trick of the magic. It could very well be, if it would try anything to escape from him and rage through the cavern.

            But, just for a moment, he opened himself to it, and awaited the consequences.

            Draco’s cool thoughts enfolded him, a gentle blizzard that quenched some of the burning. He felt his skin smoothing out, relaxing under the pounding of the snowflakes, and Draco’s thoughts murmured, You soared up so high that I thought you would break out of the cavern. But I can see no trace of the phoenix, and no trace of Schroeder. Can you come back to us now?

            Harry swallowed and nodded, and remembered that he had wanted to live. I think I can, he said, and found that his mouth wouldn’t work when he tried to speak the words. But he could say them in the back of his head, and Draco was as likely to hear them there as elsewhere. But I don’t know if I can manage to come back unchanged.

            Simply come back.

            Draco’s inflexible murmur in his ear made Harry smile. He found himself rising to his feet, his hands extended in front of him, his eyes closed. And the magic poured out of his core, and the shell next to him expanded and turned and gathered up the escaping power again, the power that had been the phoenix’s, that had belonged to wizards at first, that had been changed to give cores to Muggle children.

            Schroeder and Moonstone had not cared who they hurt, what they had to do, in order to gain power.

            But Harry did. And he had killed as many people as he wanted to kill, as many as he would kill again unless he had to do it in defense of Draco, or Adam, or his friends.

            For the moment, he did something else. He turned the magic inside out, gave it a purpose, and asked it to find him the children who needed him, the ones shrouded in the flame-globes who, like Adam, could not immediately return to the Muggle world.

            There was a long, silent moment when flames flickered around Harry and he wasn’t sure the magic would listen to him. But then it turned, and then it curled around his shoulders, and a series of small voices sang in chorus in his head, saying, This way, this way, this way.

            Magic, it seemed, was more than happy to work in partnership with someone who was not trying to steal it.

            Harry hopped off the unclear thing he was standing on—which turned out to be a ledge up near the ceiling of the cavern—and forged his way awkwardly through what felt like ankle-deep mud over to the side and down. At one point he realized that he was walking in air and not on stone. He hushed the realization and put it away like he had Moonstone’s magic. He had no use for it right now.

            Then he was in front of the hanging nets of flame that he had used to conceal the children from the explosion of magic, and he reached out and parted the nearest veils. The children inside stared at him.

            The magic shot out and curled like crowns on the heads of a girl and two boys. Harry saw the girl, who was older than the rest, shift to look at him, and the sight of those grey eyes and that blonde hair troubled him. For a moment, he thought it was only because she could have been Draco’s daughter in resemblance.

            And then he knew, and flinched, which made the children flinch, too. They were the faces of the children in Plumm’s vision, the one she had told him was a vision of the future, the children Harry had seen in the garden of that distant house where he and Draco sat side-by-side.

            But not quite as old, he realized after a moment. The two boys in particular were younger than he had thought they would be. That meant—that meant some more time had to pass before the vision came true, then. And he didn’t know why these children needed him and couldn’t be allowed to return to the Muggle world, yet.

            Then the girl moved so that she was facing him and raised her hand, and Harry found out.

            Several small flames surged towards him, and wouldn’t retreat when Harry glanced at them. Harry had to shield his face and then call up a few shields before they would stop. Even then, the girl kept motioning as though she was trying to push them towards him.

            Harry leaned back and stared at her, shaking his head. The girl seemed to accept after a moment that his gesture wasn’t hostile, and dropped her hand, but never took her eyes off him. In her face was a glimpse of the same darkness that Harry had seen in Adam’s. Maybe a little worse, since the Healers must have changed her more than they had him. Adam had Parseltongue, a single gift.

            This girl had wandless magic.

            The boys, too, maybe, Harry thought, glancing at both of them. They huddled together, watching him.

            And that was the answer. That was why he was going to wind up taking care of these children. Because he had to, because there was no one else. He was the only wizard in the country—perhaps the world—who could speak to Adam right now, and he was a powerful wizard who had, in his time, had his magic swirl around him and respond in much the same way that these flames responded to the girl. Most people would be afraid of her, or want to Obliviate her and shove her back into the Muggle world, no matter how dangerous that would be for other people, simply to eliminate the problem. Harry could face her power with his, resist it if that was what he had to do, and teach her how to control it.

            More responsibilities. More choices. Harry wondered briefly how Draco would cope with it, if Draco would really want to stay with him.

            Then he half-shrugged. He suspected that Draco would fight to stay with him no matter what, and that meant putting up with the children. He might even enjoy the chance to see the living embodiment of Galen’s notes using their powers, and seeing what both Galen and Schroeder and Moonstone had done wrong.

            I only hope that he can accept all of this.

            What are you nattering about, Harry? Come back to me.

            Well, so far he had put up with Harry’s hesitations and madness and thoughts in the back of his head, and not killed him. Harry took a deep breath and nodded to the children.

            “It’s going to be all right,” he said, and then concentrated on the image of a snake and repeated the words in Parseltongue, for those who might understand only that. One of the two younger boys uncoiled and stared at him, and Harry smiled tentatively back at him. “I’ll get you out of here. The people who hurt you are dead. They won’t be coming back anymore.”

            The boy who had reacted when he began to speak Parseltongue shook his head and said, “They will. They always have another whip.” He stared at the flames as though expecting them to change into whips immediately.

            Harry controlled his anger at the words. They told him a little about what life had been like for these children, and he wished it could have been different, but the time and place to make it different was in the future, not now. He held out his hand. “Will you come with me? Some of you will be able to go home now, and the rest can at least find safe places.”

            The girl was the first one to move, reaching out and grabbing his wrist as though she thought he wouldn’t be able to hit her that way. Once again, Harry held in his immediate reaction and waited until she switched her grip from his wrist to his hand and then crawled towards him. He put his arms around her shoulders and arched his eyebrows at the others.

            The boy who spoke Parseltongue came next, and then the others started asking questions about how they were going to get to the floor when Harry was holding the girl, and what held them up, and what had happened, and where their parents were, and when they could go home. Harry murmured answers to the ones he felt he could reply fairly to, and then stepped backwards and turned towards the cavern floor.

            Because there was the cavern again, and the bodies of the dead Healers, and the crack in the floor where the phoenix had hatched out. Harry stirred his hand and made flame billow up and swallow the Healers’ bodies. He didn’t want those lingering to hurt the minds and memories of the children.

            Draco stood near the place where the bodies had been, the shield around him dissipated, looking up.

            Harry didn’t think his eyes widened in recognition when he saw the girl in Harry’s arms, but his face did go pale, and he nodded, once. Harry smiled at him, and murmured in the back of his mind as he created tiny sleds of flame for the children to ride to the ground, You’ll come with me? All of us, as the vision showed?

            All of us, Draco’s thoughts echoed, which was less of an answer than Harry wanted, but which he certainly wasn’t about to reject. He sat down on the largest sled with the girl still in his arms, and the little boys who would become his right beside him, and they coasted to the ground.

            By then, the shields he had woven around Ron and Hermione and the Blood Bubble were gone, and his friends came slowly out to meet him, while the Blood Bubble snapped towards him on the edge of its tether. Harry smiled at Adam and stood up, placing the girl and the boys close beside him before he turned to make sure that the other children were getting down safely.

            Adam watched him intently, his hands against the side of the bubble. Harry wanted to let him out, but he wasn’t entirely sure that the threat was done with. More Healers might show up in a short time.

            And there was the fact of Moonstone, waiting for Harry to determine his final fate, asleep back in Grimmauld Place.

            Harry grimaced and rubbed his hand over his face. You think that you’re abandoning everything you ever knew for a different life, and it turns out that there are a whole bunch of things you have to think about before you can do that, after all.

            I will never give you license to be thoughtless.

            Draco. Harry stuck out a hand without looking, knowing that Draco would find it, and sure enough, Draco’s hand was there. Harry took a moment to enjoy his smooth palm and the lines winding over it, between his fingers and down to the heel, before he turned to face Ron and Hermione.

            Hermione shut her tear-bright eyes and swallowed. Ron stood beside her, his arms cradling her in much the same way that Draco had cradled Harry when they were under the Disillusionment Charm watching Schroeder and the Healers, and swallowed, too, when Harry caught his eye.

            “You killed them all,” he whispered. From the corner of his eye, Harry saw the little girl look up. Draco watched her with a strange mixture of emotions on his face that smoothed over into blankness a second later, as if he didn’t want to show too much in front of Harry’s friends or the other children.

            “Yes, I did,” Harry said. He felt the enormous empty place in him where the flame had burned earlier and sighed, rolling his head back on his neck. “And if more people show up and try to do the same thing, I’ll kill them, too.”

            “Don’t you have a bit of regret?” Hermione whispered. “I know that you took his magic away from Moonstone because he was the immediate threat, and you had to kill Schroeder, maybe, but don’t you have a bit of regret for the Healers who were tricked into this?”

            Harry shrugged. “I don’t know who was tricked and who wasn’t. What matters to me is what they did. And if they helped with this torture, then they deserve to suffer and die.”

            “Including Oakum?” Hermione looked back towards the entrance of the cavern, where they had left the net holding their Veritaserum-drugged spy.

            “He helped us, too,” Harry replied, after a moment during which he considered the question and Draco stood silent and passive at his side, indicating he would abide by whichever decision Harry made. “He can live.”

            Hermione gulped this time, and glanced at the children, who were starting to ask questions again, and stare, or who stood with heads down and eyes empty and fists clenched, or who watched Harry carefully and looked as though they wanted to stay next to him, in the case of the girl and the boy who spoke Parseltongue. “I wish that you weren’t making decisions like that,” she whispered. “I wish things were different.”

            “You mean you wish that things were different because it would make you more comfortable,” Harry corrected her harshly. “I can’t wish they were different, Hermione, because that would mean that Schroeder and Moonstone and the others who tortured them were still alive, and that’s not good enough. Nothing but their deaths will ever be good enough.”

            “For you,” Hermione said, looking him in the eye. “Not because anyone else asked you to do this.”

            “Yes, that’s right, for him,” Draco broke in, long before Harry had expected him to do so. “Who else should he be judging by? Who has the ability to decide Harry’s actions for him, and why do you think you can?”

            Hermione turned her head away. Ron stood beside her, looking anxiously back and forth between them, and not looking as though he understood what to do next.

            Harry shook his head and turned his back to kneel down beside the other boy who spoke Parseltongue. He would begin asking the questions needed to get the children back to their homes, or determine why they couldn’t go back, with this child, so that he wouldn’t feel as left out when the others began speaking English.

            “Are they all gone?” the boy asked, staring at him.

            Harry nodded. “What’s your name?”

            “Emery,” said the boy, and gave him a hesitant smile.

*

            SP777: I think the reference to the wizarding world is right, if that’s what you mean, although I don’t usually capitalize it.

            moodysavage: Thank you! I have read The Last Herald-Mage Trilogy, and while I don’t think this story is anywhere near as tragic, I can see why it reminds you of it.

            unneeded: Are you talking about Moonstone? Because Harry just liquefied Schroeder.

            LeaniaSTL: Thanks! Although it didn’t last long, I think an even more important fight was Harry’s against temptation: he could have been even more powerful with that magic, and had to resist it.

            Makoto_Sagara: Harry’s main fear is that Draco won’t accept the children as willingly as Harry does.

            And Harry’s flames did strangle the Healers, yes.

            Sablesilverrain: Sorry about that! But after this, there are only two more chapters, so there won’t be much longer to wait.

            dominique1: Don’t worry. Although it didn’t last long, I think Schroeder being smashed into liquid was exquisitely painful.
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