Chapter Two of 'Flare'- Stranger Things
Chapter One.
Title: Flare (2/15)
Disclaimer: These characters belong to J. K. Rowling and associates. I am writing this story for fun and not profit.
Pairings: Harry/Draco, mentions of Ron/Hermione
Warnings: Creature!fic, angst, sex, some violence, OC character death.
Rating: R
Summary: Caught in the middle of a misfired curse, Harry is half-transformed into a phoenix, to the point of carrying wings on his back. He arranges with the Healers for research that will hopefully cure him--only to find that Draco Malfoy has a strange vested interest in him keeping the bloody things.
Author's Notes: This is a story that I've had in mind for a long time, though not always in its present form. The creature aspect is an important part of the fic, so don't read it if that's not your thing. I'm anticipating a story of about 15 parts, with fairly short chapters.
Thank you for all the reviews!
Chapter Two--Stranger Things
The visit to St. Mungo's wasn't immediately productive, but then, Harry hadn't really expected it to be.
The Healers stared at him first, then shook their heads and got down to work. Harry sat on the table they'd assigned him--seriously, it was a tradition that there were no comfortable beds in hospital, ever--and tried to keep the wings from unfolding and poking the longer feathers on them into the eyes of people who wanted to investigate them. He was a bit comforted that, while they didn't appear to have seen this particular phenomenon before, they would have seen much worse in their daily rounds.
The first Healer who spoke to him extensively, as opposed to asking what had happened with the spell and listening to his story, was a tall woman with blonde hair bound so tight around her head in a series of corkscrew braids that Harry winced. "Do you feel an increase in your magic?" she asked him, jotting down rapid notes on a bound sheaf of parchment as she examined the wings. "An increase in body temperature?"
Harry shook his head. "Should I?" he added, when he saw her frown.
She shrugged. "It means that one of my first hypotheses for why this had happened is moot. I thought that perhaps the spell had injected some phoenix magic directly into your core, and that would mean the ability to call fire as well as feel warmer--have you ever touched a phoenix? You noticed the way they always burn?"
Harry nodded. "Is there any record of a person surviving this spell before?"
She shook her head. "Either they survive unchanged, or they die. Not in this half-state." She squinted at the wings, then waved her wand. Whatever spell she had done, Harry felt no difference, but a minute later a long string of blue numbers began to unfold in the air next to the curve of the right wing that projected over his shoulder. "Hmm," the Healer said in an abstracted voice. "These are much bigger than the wings of a typical phoenix would be in relation to body size."
"I noticed that. I thought someone had covered me with curtains at first."
The Healer smiled at him and clapped him on the shoulder, above the pouches of skin that seemed to be where his hindrances began. "Anything unusual could be a clue. We'll definitely look into it and see whether their unusual size and strength has something to do with the spell."
Their bloody existence has something to do with the spell, Harry thought grumpily, but they were trying to be nice and he kept quiet.
"My name is Elena Redusson, by the way," said the Healer, scribbling one more note and then flicking her wand down sharply so the numbers vanished. "I'll be the primary theorist assigned to your case."
"Can I leave hospital and go home?" Harry craned his neck back and got a face full of feathers. He rolled his eyes, spat them out, and added, "Or did you want to keep me overnight?"
Redusson laughed. "You were already in the Forest overnight, surrounded by the ashes of your dead enemy, and nothing happened except the wings' initial growth, although you had two concerned witnesses watching you. I think that you're free to go for now, but we'll call you back in for tests on a regular basis."
Harry nodded, relieved that he had someone who agreed with him about the way that things should be done. He stood up, and then winced as his wings swept forwards and nearly knocked down both Redusson and the two apprentice Healers who'd been watching her work. "Sorry. I don't know how to control them yet."
"That might be the best thing you could do." Redusson looked at him for permission, then reached out and touched the edge of the wing. Harry shivered. It felt a tad more sensitive than the part Ron had touched back in the Forest. Redusson nodded and wrote some more. "If they won't obey you, then it means something different than if they're attached to you and are--alternate limbs, in a sense."
Harry really didn't want extra limbs, alternate or otherwise, but Redusson wasn't the one who had cast the spell and it would have been stupid to make a point of it. "I can make them fold," he said, and then ducked as another wing swished past his head. He didn't even know which one it was. He sighed. "And not even that, sometimes."
"Fold the wings on a count of three, if you can," Redusson said, watching with alert, interested eyes, and Harry nodded when he thought he had disentangled them. "One, two..."
Harry hurried them down before she reached three. They felt like collapsible tents this time, and not much more comfortable to carry on his back, though lighter. Redusson nodded again. "Then I think they're under your control."
"They won't be so good as to fall off when I tell them to, I suspect," Harry muttered, and shook her hand before he left. When he stepped out into the corridor, things looked quiet. He relaxed. Of course there was no way to prevent people from finding out about this, when he'd deliberately taken steps not to hide, but he wanted a little time to go back to the Ministry, report, and then go home and think before the rush of the press descended.
Ron appeared at the end of the corridor nearest the stairs. Harry waved to him and started forwards.
"What have you done to yourself now, Potter?"
Harry turned around with a sigh. Of course one of the first few people to see him after the bloody transformation would be Draco Malfoy, who worked as a brewer supplying Potions to St. Mungo's. Harry didn't even care at the moment that this was one of the few jobs Malfoy could find where people would react to him instead of his name. It was a damn inconvenience.
But all things considered, Malfoy was better than a reporter.
"Spell gone wrong," Harry said. "Healer Redusson is looking to help me find some way to cut them off." There. Now Malfoy would have bare facts, unadorned, the same story Harry intended to tell the papers, and nothing he could twist around.
Of course, his wings chose that moment to bulge out again. Harry calmed them by twisting the edge of one until pain shot through him for the first time since that morning, and finally managed to get them settled on his back once more.
Malfoy was still standing in front of him when Harry looked up again. But the expression on his face was so odd Harry raised his eyebrows, wondering if he was about to faint.
"Only you, Potter," Malfoy said, but his tone of voice didn't match the way he stared at Harry. "Only you would do something so..." He gestured, seeming unable to find the right adjective. "To yourself."
"And survive it," Harry had to add. Maybe if he gave Malfoy this extra juicy little detail, he would remember who he was and what their respective roles to each other were, and leave Harry alone. "The man who used the spell on me burned to death around me. I lay in his ashes until morning."
Malfoy shuddered. "A Death Eater?" he asked.
Harry nodded. "Hyperion Rosier." Good. Now he'll remember that he was one, too, and clear out of here because he thinks I'll do the same to him.
"Good," Malfoy said, making Harry blink at the echo to his thoughts. He blinked again as Malfoy moved closer to him, instead of away. "He's gone? You're sure?" Malfoy's eyes were roaming all over the wings. Harry rolled his eyes. Probably figuring out some way to make a potion that mimicked the colors.
"Yes," Harry said. "When I slept in his ashes, it's kind of hard not to be sure." He pointedly turned away from Malfoy to greet Ron, who had stepped up beside him and was giving Malfoy a sharp look. "The Healer said that she'll have to have me come back for tests, but the wings don't seem to be a danger to me right now. We should go to the Ministry."
Ron nodded, sneered at Malfoy, and turned away. Harry followed him with a little smile. Ron had discovered the value of a sneer like that at anyone he wanted to put down. They didn't expect such a cool and sharp expression from a man they automatically dismissed as a big, violent lug, and they were left wrongfooted.
"Potter! Wait."
"No," Harry said, without looking back or stopping. "I'm not going to work with you on an experimental potion unless you pay me extremely well, I'm not going to burn down the building, and I'm not going to listen to anything about how the wings make me look like an enormous chicken. Maybe the Healers will give you a chance at the wings when they cut them off. I plan to donate them."
"Potter, wait," Malfoy insisted, and Harry heard the quick click of his boots as he moved after them. Harry exchanged a glance with Ron and they both sped up without talking about it.
Except that Harry still hadn't managed to wrestle the bloody wings under control, and that meant they bulged out around Harry's head again and the trailing edges got under his feet. Swearing, he stopped and reached out so that he could disentangle the damn things. He didn't particularly care about the wings, but showing up with the edges bedraggled and dirty wouldn't make a good impression on his superiors, who would already be annoyed about his decision to go to the Healers first.
"You're going to fall," Malfoy snapped, sounding annoyed, probably because he imagined that Harry would crack his head and he would be the one who had to clean up the mess of blood and brains, and reached out so he could catch the edge that Harry was trying to wrestle into position.
His hand must have landed in a different place than the ones either Ron or Redusson had touched, because the firm grip of his fingers on the feathers, to the point that he crumpled them, made Harry hard in seconds.
Harry bent at the waist, gritting his teeth, and hoped both Malfoy and Ron would think the redness of his face came from anger and nothing else. "Get off," he snapped, and tried to rip his wing free.
"You're going to hurt yourself." Malfoy was in his face, lifting the wing up and spreading it. His fingers felt good everywhere as they spread across the center of the wing, and Harry shuddered. No one so far had touched that part, he was convinced. They had only gripped the edge to help extend it. "There," Malfoy said softly, his voice gone into the kind of lulling voice that Harry assumed he used with patients who had allergic reactions to his potions. "Isn't that better? Look how beautiful it is when it's spread out like that."
Harry turned towards him, hissing curses in Parseltongue. Bloody bastard just was convinced that he was welcome everywhere, including the places he'd been told not to enter, not to touch--
Malfoy's eyes were wide and glassy and locked on the wing, the part where the fine colors sheered into one another and overlapped like spreading pond ripples. His hand stroked over it again and again, delicate touches that barely brought his fingertips into contact with red, yellow, orange, blue, white, amber. Harry had to lock his tongue into place when he started imagining what a firmer touch could do to him if a bare brush could make him feel so good.
This was weird, though, and so not the way he'd wanted to find out the wings were sensitive. Harry tried to rip his new limb free of Malfoy's grip, and Malfoy's eyes locked on his face this time.
Harry didn't like what he saw in those eyes. At all. If Malfoy had some kind of wing fetish, then he would just have to indulge it far away from Harry. Harry ripped frantically, and Malfoy let him go at last and stepped back. The wings went up and curved towards him, and Harry thought it was probably a defensive reaction.
He concentrated, hard, on the way the wings had felt against his back when they folded, and finally they did. Stupid bloody things. It didn't help that he was weirdly cold and hot at the same time; the Healers had created a kind of panel of cloth that could be attached to his chest to cover it in place of a shirt-front, but the wings radiated shimmering heat against his back.
"You're," Malfoy said. Just that. He didn't have to say anymore, not with his eyes conveying it.
"Desperately unlucky, sick of you, and going away now," Harry said, and marched off. Ron scuttled beside him, looking at his face occasionally but having the good sense not to say anything. Harry cast a subtle spell, and finally his erection went down.
This was stupid. This was weird. Harry wanted the stupid and weird wings gone as soon as possible.
And he'd been wrong about Malfoy not being worse than a reporter. At least a reporter would only look at him that eagerly because he was fodder for a story, not as if he was a...
Something beautiful.
Chapter Three.
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