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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 Eight—Designing the Truth

            “You do look more comfortable with them.”

            Harry stared at Healer Redusson, then sighed and dropped his head into his hands. “Well, fuck,” he muttered. He heard the gasps and titters of half a dozen young mediwizards, but he ignored that. It was good practice for them to get used to someone cursing now, since they would hear a lot worse than that at the bedsides of people they were treating for emergency wounds. “You said that would make it harder for me to get rid of them in the end?” He leaned back and looked at the Healer again.

            She gave him a rueful smile. “Yes.” She made another chart appear, one full of numbers and notes that Harry understood no more than he had the chart Malfoy used. Harry stared at it, then shrugged. Redusson seemed to realize it did no good and banished it with a little wave of her wand. “The fact that you flew with them means that your body is taking account of them as alternate limbs. And, well—exercise strengthens them, as it does every group of muscles that you work with. It means that you can fly with them more easily, and that you can wield them in other ways, too. Try to fold them down now.”

            They did it with hardly a thought, Harry found as he focused on the wings and tried to imagine them collapsed against his back. And they didn’t stick over his shoulders as much, either. He frowned at Redusson. “They haven’t shrunk, have they?” If he was lucky, then they would just get smaller and smaller until they vanished altogether.

            “No,” Redusson said, though Harry appreciated that she cast a spell to check before she assured him of that. “I’m afraid, Auror Potter, that they’ve simply folded up more efficiently. You’ve been learning.” She paused. “Now, spread them, but try to stop short of touching the walls with the edges.”

            Harry focused on his wings, and tried. He didn’t like the sensation that moved down his spine when he did, though, as if he was on the verge of a sneeze that was trying to come out through his back. After a few moments, the wings extended and shot out, then trembled to a stop. Harry shook his head. There was, indeed, several inches of space between the outer primaries, or whatever they were, and the wall.

            “That can’t be right,” he whispered. “I was knocking over things a few hours ago.” He had told Redusson that Malfoy was helping him, because she had to know, just the way she had to know that he had flown, but he didn’t see the need to tell her that he’d been here, in the bastard’s private lab.

            “But you weren’t trying consciously to control them,” Redusson said, and made another quick note. “That’s the difference. When you try, they’re there according to your body’s nervous system and brain, and you can perform tasks with them. When you decide that you want to ignore them, then they get in the way and trail behind you and trip you up.”

            Harry shook his head stubbornly. Not that he wanted to deny her conclusions about the wings, because they might be the only things that would help him get rid of them, but she sounded as though—“They’re not alive. They don’t care what I think of them.”

            Redusson laid her hand along the edge of the wing. It didn’t hurt, the way it had when he pulled out feathers, but he didn’t feel that intense pleasure he did from Malfoy, either. It was neutral, just a touch. Harry reckoned that was because she wanted to help him, but didn’t care about fucking him, the way Malfoy had. “They are alive in the same way any part of the body is,” she said quietly. “And I have seen cases like this before. People who came in with tails, for example. They could control them when they thought about them, and eventually that conscious control became unconscious. But when they resented them and ignored them, then they had problems with them, yes.”

            “So what you’re saying,” Harry said, after a moment of tense silence in which he thought about it and Redusson watched him, “is that I can either live with these wings as part of my body and control them.”

            Redusson nodded. There was a faint smile pulling at her lips, as if he had done something that made her proud of him.

            “Or I can go through life tripping over them.” Harry folded his arms over his knees and leaned forwards. “What about getting rid of them?”

            Redusson’s smile vanished, and she sighed. “I think it’s already too late for that, Auror Potter, to be perfectly honest.”

            “Really?” Harry didn’t want to sound as though he was going to bite off her head—or, perhaps, that was the way he wanted to sound. At least it made her eye him with more respect. She’s only trying to help. And she can’t lie to you just because you don’t want to hear the truth. “So taking a knife to them wouldn’t help?”

            Redusson stood up tall and looked him directly in the eye. “Taking a knife to them would create large wounds that would meant you bled out, exactly as if you cut off an arm or leg,” she said. “Unless you had someone next to you who was experienced in treating those types of wounds, you would die. I hope that you aren’t going to tell me you would prefer to do that rather than live with the wings, Auror Potter. I would have to refuse to help you, and I’d prefer not to do that. There are Healers who would help you, but all of them have extremely poor reputations.”

            Harry realized that he was breathing as though he was about to have a panic attack, and that was probably the reason that Redusson and so many of the mediwizards were looking at him with white faces. He bit his lip and concentrated on his breathing the way he had on his wings, until he thought it was under control and he could continue. “I don’t believe this,” he whispered. “I can’t. I really can’t.”

            “Why not?” Redusson touched his wing again. Again the touch felt neutral, but at least, if Malfoy was telling the truth, Harry thought he could trust her to be honest with him when she was touching him. “I am sorry this happened to you, especially as it distresses you, but if you want another Healer to work on the case—”

            “What would happen if I cut them off and did have someone there who was experienced in treating that kind of wound?” Harry asked abruptly. “Would that mean that I could survive the experience, and the bloody things would be gone?”

            Redusson hesitated and blinked. “I don’t know,” she admitted a moment later. “It isn’t something I’ve thought about.”

            “Why not?” Harry braced his hands on the table and wondered if he could rise off it. But then his wings bulged around him and ruffled out so that the feathers were pointing at Redusson, and he subsided with a muffled curse. “You know that I want them off. You’ve thought of the dangers of that procedure. Why not the advantages?”

            Redusson paused, then sighed. “I must say that it’s refreshing, in a way, to have a patient like this so involved in his treatment,” she muttered. “The people with tails sometimes want them gone so badly that they won’t speak to a Healer on the topic at all; they want us to come up with a miraculous solution and simply implement it.”

            Harry didn’t think that sounded like an answer to his question, so he waited, eyes on her.

            Redusson made a patting, pushing motion at the air. Harry didn’t know what to make of it, but she followed it with words a moment later. “The problem, Auror Potter, is that we’re usually cutting off pig tails, or donkey ears, or monkey fur. And even then, it’s not the preferred method. We use potions to wither them, or Vanishing spells that are precisely tuned to the person involved.”

            Harry nodded choppily. “Then what’s the problem with my wings? You’re acting as if I have no choice but to stick with them, but if everyone else has the chance to remove those stupid bloody things a spell may have given them—”

            “Because of the particular nature of your wings,” Redusson replied quietly.

            Of course. Harry cast a glance of bitter hatred back at the wings. They started to flutter, but when he thought about it, he didn’t want them to, so he snapped them viciously shut on his shoulders. It hurt. He welcomed the pain, because it still meant that they were alien, not so much a part of him, if they could hurt and he didn’t know why.

            “They are phoenix wings,” Redusson said, as if he might have managed not to understand that. “It’s possible that they’ll—”

            “Regenerate,” Harry finished. He felt as if he might throw up.

            “Yes.” Redusson moved closer to him, looking keenly into his face. “Auror Potter, could you help me understand why, exactly, this upsets you so much? The wings are useful to you in that they can keep you warm and enable you to fly. They may be an unchangeable fact of your biology by now, to use the Muggle terms that many of my colleagues are fond of. In all that, why do you seem so upset that they are there?”

            “Because I finally had the life that I wanted,” Harry said. “Friends and work and everything. Even the last of the Death Eaters was finally going to be captured, once we finished the Rosier case. But now this could cost me my job, and I can’t sit down normally, and I always have to think about what clothes I’m going to wear, and I can’t conceal them, and everyone will stare at me even more than they already do—”

            He clamped his teeth down on his tongue. Otherwise, he might start whimpering, and while he might have been willing to talk to Redusson about the other things brewing in his head, he hadn’t decided that he should talk about such things to the mediwizards with her.

            What he wanted to say was: I got used to being the Chosen One. I can handle that kind of fame and pressure now. But now I’m going to be famous for something else, and always stared at and always pointed at, and always the center of attention. It’s going to take years for people to accept me like this. Maybe they never will. I want to be normal. That’s all I want. I’d finally achieved it, as much as I ever will, and now these wings come along and take it away.

            But he couldn’t say that. He shook his head, leaped to his feet, and began to dress. He couldn’t take more of this right now.

            “If you’d give me the name of a Healer who’s worked with some of these cases where they did cut something off?” he asked tightly, head averted. “Someone you trust. Or someone who brews potions to remove them.”

            “Auror Potter.” Redusson’s voice was hesitant. “Are you sure that you’re all right? Do you need a Calming Draught?”

            “No,” Harry said, and then saw a gout of flame curling out of his wing from the corner of his eye. He snatched at it hastily with one hand, and felt his fingers pass through it as if it were no more than a cloud, or they were. But it was real enough to catch the hair of one young mediwizard on fire, and he screamed and clutched at his head, ducking. The others hurried over to him, and Redusson drew her wand as though she assumed that she would need to defend him from Harry.

            Harry turned and ran from the room, not bothering to put on his robe. There was nothing exposed that his wings couldn’t cover, anyway.

            And I hate using them that way.

            He blurred through the corridors of the hospital, past staring faces and gaping mouths and reaching hands, and emerged out the entrance—

            Only to find several reporters gathered there. Harry slammed to a stop, and saw the cameras flashing and heard the murmur of excited voices.

            “Auror Potter!” shouted someone who sounded like Rita Skeeter, or else her apprentice. “What would you say about the claims that you’ve become a dangerous monster who needs to be confined for the good of others?”

            “Mr. Potter!” Someone hopping up and down in the second row, waving a hand. “Did you really murder Hyperion Rosier? What do you say—”

            “What kind of spell changed you?” Someone else scribbling away, not looking up at him for more than a second at a time. “Could you share it with others so that they might receive the same benefits you did?”

            It was too much.

            Harry spread his wings.

            There were more camera flashes, but most people cried out and fell back. It was a natural reaction to a large object unfolding in front of you, as Harry had discovered and used to his advantage in Auror training when he’d tossed a cloak over one of his instructors and beaten him in a duel that way.

            He rose from the ground without running, this time. After all, if flame powered his flight, then he shouldn’t need the space to gain up the power, the way that a swan had to run across a lake to take off.

            More people gaped at him. Harry didn’t care. He pulled his wings in and beat hard, scattering wind and fire around him. Then he was up and soaring, high enough that he reeled and wheeled and felt the air grow thin in his lungs. That was all right. His wings warmed it for him.

            He was too high to be seen by Muggles, high enough to escape camera flashes, but not high enough to escape the memory of hurting the young mediwizard. Not high enough to escape the wings that had carried him there.

            Harry went home.

*

            luvdreams: Well, he now thinks that Draco is telling the truth, but he still doesn’t want someone whose main concern is the wings.

            Via: Your criticism isn’t very specific. I do think my stories make sense, or I wouldn’t write them this way, and this story is a deliberate try at a more casual relationship rather than a fraught one. But I would see it that way because I’m closer to them. What do you think doesn’t make sense?

            Talltree-san: Which wasn’t at all what Harry wanted to hear, of course.

            SP777: Most of the time, the spell would just kill, and it would be a painful death. Rosier wanted to murder Harry.

            Yeah, Harry wonders about that, too.
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