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Flare	By : Lomonaaeren Category: Harry Potter > Slash - Male/Male > Harry/Draco Views: 21800 -:- Recommendations : 1 -:- Currently Reading : 1
Disclaimer: I do not own Harry Potter, and I am making no money from this story.

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Chapter Six—More Heat Than Light

            Harry woke up sweltering the next morning, and tried without thought to lift the hot blanket off him. It lifted only a short distance before something tugged on his back, and he rolled his eyes without opening them and kicked. Sure, he’d had sex with Malfoy yesterday, but that was no reason for the arse to be so bloody possessive—

            “Ow!”

            He’d tugged on his wing, he realized finally, when it rose above his body and then collapsed back against it with a flutter and a rustle. And it made his body so hot that he thought he might literally burn up from the inside. He rolled over with a muffled oath and found that Malfoy’s arms were wrapped about him, too, and so were the sheets. No wonder he’d felt the way he had. And if the wings stayed, he might not need blankets ever again.

            They’re not staying. Get stupid thoughts like that out of your mind right now. One thing Harry had learned from the Healers was that your thoughts could affect your behavior. For example, if he went on thinking about how unexpectedly pretty Malfoy was, blinking his eyes under his ruffled blond hair and sitting up with an abstracted expression, then he might do something unforgivably stupid. Like letting him stay.

            “Want breakfast?” Harry asked. He figured he owed the git that much hospitality before he kicked him out. He’d done an awfully good job of relaxing Harry yesterday, and he’d given him some intriguing information that might or might not be truth.

            “Mmmm,” said Malfoy, which seemed to be his all-purpose response to everything, and pulled Harry in towards him with a suggestive roll of his hips that Harry tried to pretend wasn’t affecting him as much as Malfoy, from his smile, knew it was. “Want your mouth.”

            Harry felt his skin prickle with what could have been either a blush or heat from the wings. At the moment, he wasn’t in much hurry to analyze which.

            “Not possible this morning,” he said lightly, and tried to back away. The wings flared and came up between them, apparently thinking that what he really wanted was a way to stop looking at Malfoy. Harry paused, sighed, and cast a spell that disentangled them and blew them back over his head. “But a bowl of cereal would be. Or toast. I’m afraid that I don’t have any posh poached quail or whatever it is that you usually eat.”

            “You’ve seen me naked, and you wouldn’t stoop to going out and ordering quail if I asked you to?” Malfoy shook his head. He seemed endlessly amused by something. At least that meant he was taking the rejection of more sex better than Harry had thought he would. “Well. If you’ll give me a feather—humanely drawn, this time—then I’ll be on my way.”

            Harry stared at him, and tried to forget about the way that the wings were hanging above him like mops. “What? I gave you feathers yesterday. Aren’t they enough to use in potions or whatever you want with them?”

            “I’m going to analyze them to try and figure out what happened to you during Rosier’s spell, and what you should do next.” Malfoy had reached for his robes, but he paused now to run Harry over with a leisurely stare. “I hope to have something for you, if only confirmation of how much those wings differ from an ordinary phoenix’s wings, by the time that I come back tonight.”

            “You want me to meet in your office?” Harry was trying to keep up with the quicksilver mental steps Malfoy seemed to be taking, but he didn’t really see how he could. “And why can’t the feathers I gave you yesterday suffice?”

            “I want to see if there’s a difference between the bloodied ones and ones that aren’t. And don’t be silly. You should stay here, practice with the wings, and rest.” Malfoy cast a Cleaning Charm on his pants and started pulling them on. “I’ll come back here this evening and we can discuss it then. I’ll even bring dinner.”

            “Sorry to say,” Harry said, “this is the only time you’re ever seeing the inside of my house, Malfoy.”

            Malfoy flashed him a sideways, disbelieving look without stopping his dressing. “Really.”

            He was allergic to question marks. It drove Harry mad. “Yes,” he said. “The sex was fun and all, but I don’t want to do it again with someone who only wants me for my wings.”

            “Like it or not, the wings are going to affect any public perception of you for a time at least,” Malfoy said, his tone so logical that Harry had to work past it to think about his words. “At least I’m honest about what I see and what I like. Would you really want someone who pities you but doesn’t want to show it dating you? If I’m right about the nature of the wings, they would reveal that when he or she touched you anyway, and that might be a shock.”

            Harry shook his head furiously. There was common sense to be found here somewhere, even if Malfoy kept dodging it. “I don’t plan to date anyone for the next few months until I can find out how to get rid of these.”

            “And I’ll help you find that,” Malfoy said. “Spending time in close quarters with you would help, though.”

            “I can meet you at the office,” Harry said. “Not here.”

            The frost in his voice seemed to have finally convinced Malfoy, although he regarded Harry with a funny little smile for a bit before he nodded. “All right,” he said. “If that’s what you want.”

            “That, and the wings gone,” Harry said, reaching for a set of old robes that he generally wore after he’d had a shower. Only when he tried to put them on did he realize the problem, and cursed as he sliced off the back and left a long strip of bare skin down to his tailbone. Of course, he thought glumly as the wings settled around him again, being cold was hardly a problem. “That most of all.”

            “Then you won’t mind me coming around,” Malfoy said, and gave him a bright smile before he wandered out of the room.

            “What? No!” Harry ran after him, angry enough to spit. Malfoy was examining the kitchen as though he wondered where the breakfast Harry had offered him was. He turned around and looked at Harry peacefully as he came up behind. “I want to meet you in the office, not here,” Harry said, pronouncing each word separately so that Malfoy couldn’t pretend he hadn’t heard. “And I want you not to come back.”

            “But all the tests that we’ll need to do,” Malfoy murmured, his hands finding a place to rest on Harry’s hips. “You would really rather do them in my office instead of the comfort of your own home? You really want to spend most of your day at St. Mungo’s?”

            “Yes,” Harry said, although he wasn’t sure of it after all when Malfoy was touching him like that. He shook his head angrily at a moment later and stepped back, slapping Malfoy’s hands away. “And stop touching me. I’m not your property.”

            Malfoy sighed. “I know.” Before Harry could bristle over his regretful tone, he abruptly put on a professional mask and said, “All right. I should have all the feathers I’ll need, but you wouldn’t mind giving me one more? For comparison purposes?”

            Harry grimaced and reached up. Malfoy caught his hand. “Gently,” he said. “Or I’ll just need another one. Do you want me to pluck it for you?”

            “I think I’m the one who knows whether it would hurt or not,” Harry said through gritted teeth.

            “You don’t care about the wings, though, or the ways they’re part of you,” Malfoy said, with a chiding look that made Harry want to bite him. “You’ve proven that by the careless way you pulled out those other feathers. I think I can see—ah!”

            Harry stared. There was a tiny feather in Malfoy’s fingers, and he didn’t know how that had happened. He hadn’t felt it pulled away. He looked suspiciously at the wing, and couldn’t locate the place it had come from. He shook his head.

            “What?” Malfoy asked, and his voice was gentle, not mocking. “Is it so impossible that someone could touch you without hurting you? I thought the Healers did that yesterday.”

            “Yeah, but—” Harry shrugged. He wanted to say that he knew how best to touch his own wings, which was silly now that he thought about it, because he didn’t think of them as his. Maybe Malfoy was right about that much, at least. “Anyway. Take them away and study them. And don’t think that you need to come back here or ask me for more sex.”

            Malfoy held up one hand and smiled. “All right. I should have some preliminary results in a few hours, once I’ve seen the way they react to test potions compared to ordinary phoenix feathers. Do you want me to firecall you when I have those results?”

            “Send me an owl.” Harry folded his arms and tried to radiate menace so that Malfoy would fucking leave already. He had to concede that it was probably hard to do that when the wings were fanning lazily behind him, stirring the air and sending it spiraling around him in warm gusts. He was like a peacock, only without the excuse that the wings were anything half so natural. “That’ll be fine.”

            Malfoy nodded, and his face had become serious, though he’d been so playful so far that Harry didn’t know how he should take that. “Listen, Potter. You’re not ugly with those wings, and you’re not a freak. I slept with you because I wanted to, but there’s more to it than that. If you wind up with those wings for life, I hope that you’ll be satisfied and content with yourself.”

            “Life advice? From Potions master Malfoy?” Harry touched his chest and hoped that he could mime shock when the wings remained high. “I’m not sure that I can stand the generosity you’re pouring on me.”

            Malfoy’s smile flashed. “That’s exactly why I didn’t try to tell you that before,” he murmured, and slipped out the door.

            Harry stood watching him go, then shook his head and sighed. He didn’t know what Malfoy might find, or how soon he might do it. In the meantime, he should eat something, and then figure out how fine a control he could exercise over the bloody wings without making them part of him.

            He turned around, and one of the wings whacked into a cupboard and half-knocked it open. Harry grimaced at the small flash of pain that traveled through him.

            Yes. Control of some kind is necessary.

*

            Several hours later, Harry leaned back against the wall and closed his eyes. Even that wasn’t comfortable, not with the wings flapping around his face and feathers crushed if he leaned too hard, but he needed to rest.

            He had tried and tried to make the wings obey him without the aid of spells. It didn’t work, except to fold them, which he had done enough times by now to find easy. They would spring open when he was thinking about something else, though, such as when he thought about Hyperion Rosier, wishing that he was still alive so Harry could kill him again, and they ruffled out with the feathers sticking up like spearheads to defend him. Or when he thought about Malfoy, and then the wings shone with a subtle light.

            He couldn’t sit comfortably in chairs, as he’d learned yesterday in Fletcher’s office. They would extend and bulge behind him, and half the time he sat on their edges. It would have to be stools until the blessed and longed-for day when he got rid of them.

            He couldn’t lie on them at all, and they got trapped in robes. He had finally managed to contrive a sort of solution by turning one of his shirts backwards and manipulating the sleeves with magic, so that they covered his arms and the shirt covered his chest, but that left the shirt prone to fall off and the wings still hanging forwards uncontrollably over his shoulders. Harry thought he’d have to use a tie around the waist to secure the shirt.

            He shed. The air was full of drifting dust and tiny particles from his wings. When he shook them at one point, trying to get them far enough away from his robes that they wouldn’t dangle, feather-puffs came loose, red and gold in color. Harry had cast a spell that Vanished them, but ten minutes later there were more. He stared hopelessly at them and wondered what the hell he should do about that, and whether any of his friends were allergic to birds.

            How could Malfoy and the Healers react so calmly when they looked at these stupid, freakish things? Well, Malfoy’s reaction wasn’t really calm, but he didn’t feel the brewing mixture of frustration and fear and anger that Harry did.

            What good were they?

            Harry stepped out of the house and stood in the gardens. At least the wings couldn’t knock everything over when he was outside. He stared up at the sky and shook his head. He was starting to see why large birds lived on the tops of mountains or out in open country where there were no trees to knock into.

            The sky shone, high and distant and blue. A few smaller birds had been chirping when he came outside, but they’d stopped, probably because they were intimidated by his wings. Or envious, Harry had to think, with his first smile since that morning.

            He kept looking up. A small cloud drifted past. From this position, it looked as if a single one of his large feathers could block it out.

            Well, why the hell not? You know you’ll always wonder. And you probably won’t get far, anyway.

            Harry tugged the wings out to their fullest extent and began to run. His garden was wide enough for him to do that for about fifty feet, and then started to narrow. Harry beat the wings up and down, not sure what result he most hoped for. If he crashed, at least that would prove to everyone that these stupid things might look pretty but were good for nothing—

            Warm wind blew around him, at the same moment as the warmth in his skin exploded up and flames blew behind him. What emerged was more light than heat, so Harry didn’t have to worry about his garden burning—

            And then he was off the ground.

            There was a single, incredulous moment when Harry understood that he wasn’t flying so much with the wings as with magic and the fire that continued streaming behind him, like a Muggle jet—

            And then he didn’t care.

            This was the kind of ascent he had felt when he was eleven, the first time he rode a broom, and never since: a smooth, instinctive rise, soaring to meet the sky without worrying about the ground under his feet or how high he was, not paying as much attention to the things that helped him fly as to the power in his own body. The wings beat strongly around him. Harry didn’t try to think about what they were doing, or the names of all the winds he was catching. Or might be catching, given that the flames and the magic were the things bearing him up.

            He was flying. He tossed his head back and laughed aloud.

            This was where the wings were meant to function. They didn’t dangle uselessly around him now. They needed to droop to cup the air ahead and the flames behind and hurl him forwards; they needed their wide extent because Harry knew there was no way they could have borne the weight of his body otherwise, even with the help of the magic. Their larger feathers ruffled out. The small feathers did the same thing, and Harry reckoned they helped somehow, though he still didn’t know how. But this was—

            This was—

            This was motion, and air, and coolness flooding him along with the heat, and flight.

            He wheeled up and around, and he looked down and saw the forest that surrounded his house spreading out in misshapen lumps of green, and the wind whipped the laughter from his mouth.

*

            Talltree-san: Draco most likely is. He can see a lot of advantages that Harry doesn’t think about right now, and he’ll reveal more in the next chapter.

            qwerty: Draco has some reasons he explains in the next chapter. Harry did think it would just be for a bit of fun.

            loveyaoi7: Thank you!

            unneeded: He’ll talk a little about that in the next chapter.

            SP777: Don’t worry or cheer just yet; that’s not going to happen.
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