Chapter Four of 'Flare'- Walk the Path
Chapter Three.
Title: Flare (4/15)
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.
Chapter One.
Thank you again for all the reviews!
Chapter Four--Walk the Path
By the time they got to his house--small, in the middle of nowhere behind heavy wards that stayed concealed until they were needed, just the way Harry liked it--Harry was feeling a little ashamed of himself. He still didn't like Malfoy coming with him, but he reckoned the bloke was trying to help.
But it was hard to remember that when he was already struggling with the damn wings that spread wide just before he tried to enter the house. He grabbed them and folded them down, but they escaped around the sides of his arms and flapped in random directions, resisting. Harry cursed and cast a spell that contained them with an invisible barrier of hard air around his back and shoulders, ensuring they couldn't extend out further than the width of the doorway before he got inside.
When he let the spell go, in the middle of his large drawing room where he thought they couldn't cause much trouble, they spread with enough speed and power to knock over a clock Hermione had given him. Harry rescued it on the way down and stuffed it back on his shelf, cursing.
"You seem utterly opposed to letting them have the space and time that you know they need."
Harry glared back at Malfoy. "I don't plan to keep them," he said shortly. "They are not dogs who followed me home." He supposed dogs who had followed him home might be a little more trouble--at least the wings wouldn't chew on the furniture--but he didn't believe it.
Malfoy raised an eyebrow and leaned against the far wall, looking perfectly comfortable. How did he do that? Harry thought. He seemed to convert any place he was into the perfect habitat for himself. Harry knew that he didn't have that trick, even before the wings came along and screwed up any attempt to be casual. He would look like he was holding up the wall, or lurking in a corner, or waiting to interrogate a suspect--anything but that he belonged there. There was a reason the Ministry had given up using him in any work that involved secrecy and subtlety.
"I can see what Weasley meant about you being tense," Malfoy murmured. "You're acting as though the person to blame for the wings isn't dead."
Harry tried to shrug, only to have the wings collide with the mantle, the light above his head, and the carpet beneath him. Ow. Rubbing his shoulders, since he didn't want to touch the feathers themselves, he shook his head. "This is something like a wound, that came along at the wrong time and interrupted my life. The sooner they're gone, the better."
Malfoy frowned at him and cocked his head. "You really don't see them as anything more than that?"
"No," Harry said emphatically, and cast another binding spell so that he could get into the kitchen. "Did you want some tea?"
"I want you to stop avoiding the subject." Malfoy followed him into the kitchen and stood there, watching Harry as he went through his cupboard to find the materials to brew a cuppa. Well, watching Harry's bowed back and the wings that shielded it from sight, which Harry knew were really all he cared about. "Do you know how beautiful you look with those?"
"No," Harry said again, because he didn't. "Like I said, Malfoy, you'll have your chance to touch them or experiment on them or whatever it is you want to do when I cut them off and donate them to St. Mungo's. But until then, there's really no point in trying to convince me that I look better with them. I know I don't."
There was a sense of blurred movement, and then Malfoy was pressed in against him, reaching out to take hold of one wing. Harry started and tried to move away. He thought for a second that it was having someone he didn't like so close that startled him and triggered his defensive instincts--
"You're already learning some things," Malfoy said to him, voice calm and soothing, the way it had been in hospital when he spread Harry's wing out. His fingers trailed over the edge of the feathers, and Harry gritted his teeth as lightning bolts seemed to leap through his nerves. "Your wings don't like being confined. You don't like me this close to you because birds don't usually like their wings being touched or restrained." He moved his fingers to a slightly different place, where the longer feathers gave way to the smaller ones, and Harry grunted as the pleasure altered to follow him. "You recognize me and my true intentions through my touch."
"Wait, what?" The rest had sounded halfway plausible to Harry, although not things he liked to hear. He was not a fucking chicken, or a parrot, or a bloody phoenix, no matter what anyone thought. He tried to flick his wing out of Malfoy's hand, and Malfoy let him go, only to lay his hand flat on the wing in a caress a second later. Harry felt his eyes close in spite of himself, but he forced them back open and glared at Malfoy under his fringe. "What the fuck do you mean?"
"Phoenixes," Malfoy said, as if reciting from a book, "are creatures of truth, of purity, and of light. They won't come to someone who's foul in the bottom of his heart, even if he's lying to himself and thinks he has good intentions. Your wings are functioning the same way, although being wings and with you resisting them the way you have, the way they can tell you the truth about someone is limited. So they do it by touch. I know the Healers touched you, and you didn't feel the pleasure that you do from this." He curled his fingers sideways in a scratch.
Harry jutted his hips out before he could stop himself. He reached for his harshest tone in consequence. If he could get Malfoy to jump and leave the house in offense, then he might get Malfoy to forget that he'd seen Harry's face as red as that. "So the only thing these wings can tell me is who'd like to fuck me. Real useful. And you can forget about it, by the way, Malfoy."
Malfoy shook his head, his smile deepening, darkening. Maddening. "They would react far differently if I intended to fuck you over," he said quietly, and stepped closer. His hips were about an inch away from Harry's, and that was not fine. Harry would have moved away, but he was trapped between the counter and Malfoy, and the wings were fighting against the binding spell again and threatening to trip him up if he moved faster. "They would have alerted you with pain if one of the Healers working on you had intended to cast a curse. The wings are alerting you, when I touch them, to the presence of someone who wants you. Just wants you."
Harry sighed and ran a hand through his fringe. He tried not to notice that the hand was shaking, or that Malfoy's eyes were locked on it, now. Malfoy reached out and took it, spreading his fingers as he had the feathers. Harry shook his head. "You've never shown this before, so it has something to do with the wings, right?"
"They were what made me notice you." In the dim shadow cast over them by the way that Harry's right wing arched, Malfoy's eyes looked dim, too, cool with a light that Harry had never seen before. He flipped Harry's hand over and sucked hard at a vein there, making Harry close his eyes and catch his balance against the counter. "I don't know if I ever would have without them."
Harry almost smiled. Malfoy was being a lot more honest than Harry had thought he ever would. Of course, his conception of Malfoy's honesty didn't include "saying that he wants to fuck me in the middle of my kitchen."
Then he shook his head and strong-armed Malfoy backwards, bringing the wing down as a barrier between them when Malfoy looked like he was going to insist. "Thanks, but no thanks. I'm not interested."
Malfoy smiled. It might have looked charming, but Harry thought that the lessons he'd taken years ago in How to Smirk had rendered him incapable of that. It was sinister, and that was all. "Did I mention that phoenixes encourage honesty because they're honest creatures themselves?" he murmured. "Your reactions have their own truth, Potter. Would you have responded this strongly without some level of interest in me?"
Harry shook his head with a grimace. He'd slept with a few blokes, now, although that wasn't something he was always eager to tell other people, what with the Prophet on the hunt for new and titillating material concerning Harry Potter. He'd also dated women. He'd wondered if that made him bent or bi or what, but as work got more demanding, he'd thrown the whole question in the bin of "things I don't have time for."
"I'm interested in the way that I'm interested in chocolate cake even when I know that I shouldn't have any more," he said, and fended off Malfoy's hand as it attempted to make a play for his mouth. "But not more than that, no. Not when the person only wants me for my wings."
Malfoy moved away from him fast enough that Harry felt as though he'd fallen. He braced himself with a flutter of his wings--
Fuck! Bloody stupid things, I don't want to get used to using them--
And watched as Malfoy considered him from the distance of the kitchen doorway, his eyes tilted up at the corners with the force of his stare. A moment later, the corners of his smile rose to match them.
"You have no idea how you look, Potter," Malfoy whispered, and his voice seemed soft and hot and intimate even though he was no longer standing right beside Harry. "It started with the wings, but it's the whole package that interests me."
Harry shut his eyes and rubbed one hand over his flushed face. He was remembering what Ron had said to him right before they left the Ministry, that he was having a delayed reaction to the shock of surviving Rosier's spell and waking up half a phoenix. He should rest, he knew. He should close his eyes and try to get a grip on how much his life had changed.
He should not even be considering sleeping with Malfoy, the way it seemed he was.
"I would make it good for you. So good." When he looked again, Malfoy had come a step closer. His eyes were open, quivering with light, the lashes practically vibrating. "You have no idea how I could make you feel."
"Yes, I do," Harry felt compelled to point out. "I've felt the way you touched my wings."
Malfoy made a soft sound, and then crept forwards several paces more. "And the rest of your body? I'd like to touch your hair. There aren't any feathers growing in it, did you know? And that means that it would feel different. I want to taste your mouth, and your skin. I want to count how many scars you have. The St. Mungo's staff say it's a lot, but the papers say they're lying. No way to find out for myself except by counting. And I want to watch you spread those beautiful wings and--"
Harry interrupted at that point, because it was do that or be consumed by his own burning lust. "That's another problem. We couldn't have sex easily with those damn things flopping everywhere."
Malfoy paused and gave him an odd half-smile. "You mean that you haven't come up with solutions for that? I have."
Harry resisted the temptation to wrap his wings around himself. For one thing, he wasn't cold, thank you. For another, he wasn't going to get used to them as--as anything. As protection, or blanket, or anything. They weren't staying.
And he didn't need to hide from Malfoy. What he said was tempting, but it couldn't overpower Harry's reason if he didn't let it. He considered Malfoy, and yeah, he was good-looking enough, now that he didn't spend all his time sneering about how poor Harry's best friends were. Harry would have been reluctant to trust him normally, but Ron knew he was here. If Malfoy left the house and something suspicious happened to Harry, even two months later, Ron would hunt Malfoy down and take him apart. Competently.
And a feeling of reckless curiosity was stirring in Harry despite himself, a curiosity that he'd had no time to indulge during the last few months of tracking the last Death Eaters, listening to reports, going on wild careening chases through forests and bogs and across moors, punishing informants who turned on them. It had been ages since he'd had a bit of fun.
"Why not?" he asked, and held out his hand. Malfoy's eyes widened as though he hadn't expected that, and he stood perfectly still. Harry took the time to absorb him in silence. Malfoy's hair was white-gold, bound neatly back. His brewer's robes of acid-green weren't designed to flatter anyone, but Malfoy pulled it off. He had bright eyes, full lips, a bit narrower face than Harry usually found attractive but different enough now to be intriguing.
And he was blinking, hesitant, caught off-guard. Harry thought he'd like that.
Besides, wings shouldn't interfere with us sucking each other off.
"You mean it," Malfoy said, and licked his lips.
Harry nodded, and the wings lifted above his head and arched out to either side as if they were fans. He ignored them. He probably looked like some bloody bird-of-paradise showing off for Malfoy, but that would have to be Malfoy's problem, not his. "Yeah. Now get over here before I change my mind."
Harry had never seen anyone cross a room so fast. In less than a second, Malfoy's hands were on his cheeks and he was bending down to take Harry's mouth.
Harry met him with a surge of challenge, of curiosity and mischief and daring. Let's see how this goes.
Chapter Five.
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