Chapter Eleven of 'Flare'- Dealing With the Fire
Chapter Ten.
Title: Flare (11/15)
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 Eleven-Dealing with the Fire
“Ready?” Hermione whispered, squeezing his hand.
Harry squeezed back and nodded. Hermione tossed him a bright smile, or as bright as her smiles ever got under circumstances like these, and then pushed away the curtain that shielded the back of the platform from the front and stepped out. Harry heard the roar of voices that rose to greet her, and grimaced.
Well. He would just have to put up with it. When he had told his story, the official story of the wings, and endured some questions, then at least the Ministry couldn’t accuse him of concealing it, and could use the official story as a shield if the press turned its attention to them. That would be the beginning of living with this.
With the wings, that were part of him and could follow him anywhere and which were still awkward to sit with and stand with and sleep with and walk with. Harry thought he only truly used them when he was flying.
That was a way of life if he was a bird. Not a human being.
Harry squeezed his hands on air in random patterns, staring into the middle distance. He’d told Hermione what Malfoy had discovered, and she had caught her breath and nodded. “Yes, that makes sense,” she said when she could speak. “A change in the magical core would be needed to create changes this deep in the body-and to allow you to fly…yes…” She’d looked as gloomy as Harry had.
So she thought Malfoy was right. That meant Harry had no choice but to stick with the bloody things.
And without the help of the one Potions master that he might have trusted to resolve the problem, too.
Harry scowled at himself in the next instant. Of course that wasn’t true. There were plenty of other Potions masters who’d be willing to help him, especially for phoenix feathers as ingredients, and they would be more trustworthy than Malfoy, not less, since they wouldn’t have an investment in him retaining the wings.
Except…
Except that Harry had trusted the gentleness Malfoy showed when he touched his wings, the honest words he spoke then, not because he thought Malfoy shared his opinion about the wings and wanted them gone, too, but because it was gentleness and honesty. He had been gloomily certain even before he spoke to Hermione that Malfoy was probably right. Malfoy had seemed interested in him as a person.
That’s a delusion, and you know it. He even admitted it. Admiring you from afar and then getting up the courage to make a move when you became stupidly strange aren’t signs of real interest.
The right wing cocked forwards when Hermione opened the curtain and beckoned him. Harry pushed it back again and stepped through the gap in the cloth, but of course his wings spread wider in that defensive movement they appeared to have memorized and impeded him. He had to flap twice so the shake the curtain off them, so he was floating a bit above the ground when he came onto the stage.
The shouts and demands fell silent when people saw him, and Harry felt hundreds of greedy eyes drinking him up. He winced. At least the scar was so small that most people had to stare in its general direction, rather than at it, from a distance. His wings spread out and fanned slowly up and down as if glorying in the attention.
“What happened?” someone started, a dark-haired man in the front row whom Harry didn’t recognize, and after that it was an avalanche of questions. Hermione had to cast a firework spell, enhanced by a blue flame curling up from one of the wings, before Harry could get the silence he needed to answer their questions.
He told the story as simply as possible, with plenty of names-Hyperion Rosier’s and the names of the Aurors who had been with him-so that no one could decide that he was trying to hide someone or start referring to “nameless and resurgent Death Eaters.” He gave the name of the Healer he’d been working with and admitted that he’d singed a mediwizard with his flames. That started out a chorus of gasps and then an even more eager baying of the hounds.
“Are you saying, Auror Potter,” demanded one woman, leaning so far forwards that Harry thought she would sprawl on her face at the base of the platform, “that you’re dangerous to other wizards?”
“Only as long as I don’t have the wings under control,” Harry said, and flashed the charming smile that he’d learned to use when people wanted him to answer very personal questions about his parents. “But I’m learning to use them, and I already have them mostly obeying me now. It takes a lot of control to fly away from people like I did from you, don’t you think? And I didn’t burn one reporter there!”
That got a bit of a laugh, and after that some questions in a friendlier tone. Harry answered as many questions honestly as he could-transparency bored them sooner than anything else-and most of the ones he didn’t want to, he wasn’t sure of the answers anyway, such as whether the Ministry planned to use him in reconnaissance missions. Soon some people wandered away from the fringes of the crowd. They were in an alley off Diagon Alley, close to the publishing offices of many of the newspapers, and this was the perfect way to get the story slung to the public first.
“And what about detaching the wings?” asked Julianna Yeats, a hard woman who worked for the Quibbler and the Prophet on an insane, alternating schedule Harry could never keep up with. “Can you chop them off and donate them to St. Mungo’s, as some sources indicate you wanted to do at first?”
Harry bared his teeth. He had hoped this question wouldn’t be asked, and in fact, some of the reporters were frowning at Yeats, though that might only be envy of her sources. Still, he answered. “I would have liked to do that, and no doubt, the wings would have benefited magical medicine. But it turns out that the wings are wound into my magical core, as I mentioned. I can donate individual feathers, but not the whole wing.”
“And who discovered this?” Yeats was scribbling away, her head bowed over her pad. “I’ve talked to some of the mediwizards who treated you, and I didn’t hear a whisper of this from them.”
“Potions masters working for St. Mungo’s discovered it for me,” Harry said. “I would have liked to resist the knowledge, believe me.” He flashed that charming smile again, and some of the younger women behind Yeats sighed.
Yeats wasn’t as susceptible to that, probably because she’d reported on a few of Harry’s affairs with men. She just shook her head, smirking. “A good try, Auror Potter, but I want names.”
“Why?” Harry asked, staring at her with a blank face. “I had the impression that you were a good reporter. Are you really that incompetent, that you can’t discover which Potions masters work for St. Mungo’s?”
Some laughter; not as many people liked Yeats as Harry had seen like Rita Skeeter, if these reactions hinted at the truth. Yeats flushed. “It’s a matter of integrity, Potter,” she said haughtily. “You certainly haven’t been short on names so far, and though I could discover them myself, someone might indeed wonder why you’re hiding these particular people.”
Shit. Of course someone would notice that. But Harry couldn’t show signs of a reaction, because that would make them pursue the scent. He sighed and rolled his eyes. “It was a team effort,” he said slowly. “And as you’ve reported yourself in the past, I believe, I know nothing about potions. If someone told me that a particular experiment was performed in the left-hand lab in the first right corridor at nine-o’clock in the morning in the first stage of the moon, well, I wouldn’t know whose that was and I wouldn’t know what it meant. I didn’t pay attention to the process of getting there, just to the conclusions.”
That relaxed them, although it frustrated Yeats, and there were a few more questions. Finally, Hermione stood up and gracefully called the press conference to a close, and the reporters turned their attention to her. Harry ducked back behind the curtain, shaking his head. The shirt that he was holding onto his chest with Sticking Charms was getting more and more uncomfortable. He had to figure out a better solution before he could go back to the daily round of his job. Fletcher had said so.
He was staring down at the shirt, waving his wand in idle patterns as he considered how to alter it, when Hermione ducked behind the curtain and demanded, “Why didn’t you want to name Malfoy?”
“Not you, too,” Harry told her with a groan, and sank down in the stool he’d had set up earlier. He waved his wand in earnest this time, and a glass of cool lemonade flew to him. He listened to the ice clink as he leaned back and sipped it. “I swear, there are times I think you missed your calling, Hermione, and there’s some vacant office out there with an editor dreaming of his star, bushy-haired reporter.”
“I still want to know.” Hermione plopped down in the chair next to him and scowled at him. “He did a lot of work for you. I think depriving him of the credit is going to anger him, and in this case, I can’t blame the anger.”
Harry stared at her, then snorted. “And you think that he would still want to be associated with me after what I did to him?”
Hermione hesitated. “I’m sure he understands it was an accident.”
Harry shook his head. “He didn’t, not from the expression on his face. And I wasn’t in the right state of mind to apologize then.”
“Are you ever?”
Harry rolled his eyes at her and continued. “The point is, naming him in relation to me doesn’t give him any choice. The reporters would go and hound him, and at this point, he probably wants to forget about me and regrets that he ever helped me. This way, he can speak up if he wants, but otherwise he’s well rid of someone who was ungrateful for his help and who he probably doesn’t ever want to see again.” He drank the rest of the lemonade with a long sigh and shut his eyes.
“Are you sorry?” Hermione asked quietly. “That you were ungrateful, I mean?”
Harry nodded, not looking at her. He didn’t feel like it. He was still learning how to balance on a stool, with his muscles constantly tensed because there was no chair back to lean against. He wondered if he would ever be able to relax while he was sitting down again. “I am. He did a lot for me, and I repaid him with violence. But the fact remains that I still don’t really know why he approached me in the first place, and he-he was sorry for me, Hermione, when he said the wings wouldn’t ever go away. Not the way that you’re sorry for someone who’s facing a hard fate. The way you’re sorry for a child who isn’t going to get the sweets they want. I’ve seen that before, in people’s faces, when they just look at me and see a little lost boy. He still doesn’t understand that the wings are a huge inconvenience for me. He thinks they’re wonderful, and so I should think so, too. According to him.”
“Oh.” Hermione was silent for a moment, then said, “I didn’t realize that you could read him so well.”
Harry shrugged wearily. “He told me some of that himself, and after that it wasn’t such a stretch to realize what he felt based on the emotion in his eyes.”
“And you couldn’t have misjudged him?” Hermione asked gently. “The pity couldn’t have been the kind that you’d accept, but you mistook it for the other kind because you wanted an excuse to shove him out of your life?”
Harry glared at her from the corner of one eye. “I said I was sorry for pushing him into the table. That doesn’t mean I wanted him gone as soon as possible, or that I wanted to give him an excuse to hang around. What are you implying?”
“That you should give the apology to him yourself,” Hermione retorted, and stood up. “You could fly to St. Mungo’s, or else he has a small flat less than a kilometer from here. And you could Apparate or fly there in a few seconds.”
Harry grunted, and said nothing. But he sat there thinking about it for a long time after Hermione had gone to chase the last few lingering reporters away.
And in the end, he decided to go to Malfoy’s flat. Not because he hoped he would be there, or because he was tormenting himself with unfulfilled longings about Malfoy, the way Hermione seemed to suggest he was. Purely and simply because Malfoy deserved the apology, and Harry thought he should give it face-to-face.
*
Harry grimaced and tried to keep his wings folded behind him as he leaned in to pull the small bell attached to the door. He had found the flat easily enough, on the second floor of a tall, slender building humming with wards, because of the MALFOY carved on the window glass in what looked like diamond-sharp letters. But there was no handle, and the wards increased when he moved his hand closer to the door, so he didn’t want to knock. It was pull the bell and see what happened.
He saw the shadow of movement behind a window, and tried not to hope. He shouldn’t be hoping, anyway. It wasn’t that late in the afternoon, Malfoy was probably still at work and busy-
The door opened. Malfoy stared at him with a face gone so still that Harry winced even before he began the apology. He doubted Malfoy would accept it.
“I wanted to say I’m sorry,” he began. “For pushing you into the table and, uh, shattering the crystal thing on you.” He tried subtly to see if Malfoy was carrying bandages across cuts beneath his shirt, but then again, Malfoy was a Potions master. He’d probably taken a healing potion as soon as he got home. “You had to give me bad news, but it wasn’t your fault. I should have taken it better.”
There was silence freezing enough that Harry was grateful for the warm presence of the wings at his back. Then Malfoy said in a low voice, “And that’s really all that you’ve come to say?”
“Uh,” Harry said intelligently.
“What about an apology for keeping my name out of your press conference?” Malfoy moved a single smooth, graceful step forwards, looking like a stalking leopard. “What about an apology for convincing everyone that other Potions masters helped me, instead of revealing I was the one who did everything? Or are you too good to name a former Slytherin that way?” His mouth was twitching with rage.
“I tried to protect you!” Harry snapped, and his wings flared out around him. Trust Malfoy to misinterpret me trying to be considerate. “I wanted you to have the opportunity to disassociate yourself from me, since I didn’t think you’d ever want to see me again and even this apology was going to fail-”
“So you only came to me because you thought it would succeed?” Malfoy was slinking forwards, and Harry had to shake away the impression that he was doing it exactly the way that a cat would stalk a bird. “Will you be angry at me if I refuse and send you away, or will you acknowledge that I have the right to do that much, at least?” His hands flashed out and caught Harry’s wrists, dragging him closer.
Harry kept his wings folded, because he didn’t want to hit Malfoy again and he probably would right now if he lashed out. He tried to hold his breath, in fact, and act as calm as possible. This was-this wasn’t the way he’d thought it would go. Malfoy would accept the apology and shut the door in his face, or grandly order him off. But not this dragging, so close Harry could smell the scent drifting off him.
“I thought you would send me away,” he said. “I’ve hurt you and ignored your advice and distrusted you. There’s no reason, through all that, for you to give me another chance.”
Malfoy stopped moving. Because Harry wasn’t sure what he had said to encourage that reaction, he remained still, one cautious eye on Malfoy.
“You’re right,” Malfoy said, though his voice was as low as if he was talking to someone else. “Why would I give you another chance? Except for the reasons that you don’t have a reason to know because I never told you about them, and so you don’t stand a chance of figuring them out on your own.”
“I’m not that stupid!” Harry tried to protest.
Malfoy merely gave him a dark smile and shook his head. “I’ve made my decision,” he said. “Coming to apologize means something, but I get to be the one to decide what I want it to mean.”
“Er, all right,” Harry said slowly, when Malfoy was watching him with an evil glint in his eye.
Malfoy’s grip tightened. “Come on, then,” he said, and pulled, leaving Harry with little choice but to follow him inside.
And try his best not to feel like the fly following the spider.
Chapter Twelve.
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