Chapter Twelve of 'Flare'- In Pursuit of an Ideal
Chapter Eleven.
Title: Flare (12/15)
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 Twelve-In Pursuit of an Ideal
Malfoy’s flat was more comfortable than Harry had thought it would be, insofar as he wasted any thought on the subject at all. He had assumed he would find stiff furniture and all kinds of art that would make him feel inferior because he didn’t know anything about it and china that was for special show.
But, instead, he found a huge fireplace that was the size of the one in the Gryffindor common room, blazing out cheerful heat on the circle of chairs in front of it. There were other doors to other rooms, but Harry was taken by the fire and the colors in this one. He looked at the landscapes on the walls, all jewel-toned seas and forests and deserts, and wondered if part of the reason Malfoy liked his wings was purely and simply their colors.
Which would be…disconcerting. But then, Harry had already admitted to himself that he didn’t really understand the way that Malfoy talked to him about his wings.
He stood in front of one of the chairs, because they were all high-backed and sitting down in them would be impossible with his wings, and stared hard at Malfoy. Malfoy had sat, and was staring so dreamily into the flames that he seemed to have forgotten he had an audience who might be impatient. Then again, if Malfoy had ever thought about his audience’s needs in any special way, it was news to Harry.
“Well?” he prodded at last, when he thought Malfoy might keep staring into the flames like that forever.
Malfoy started and looked up at him, and then suddenly flowed to his feet. Harry didn’t flinch, because if Malfoy came towards him with his wand drawn, then Harry would just lash out with his wings and knock the mantelpiece down. It had framed photographs behind glass on it, and a delicate little golden plate of the kind that Harry had thought would fill the entire place. Malfoy wouldn’t want them broken.
“I was thinking about how to begin,” Malfoy said. “What I’m about to say won’t make much sense to you, because your ideals are-ideals. Abstractions. Not people.”
Harry stared at him. Then he said, “Don’t talk about shit you don’t understand. I idolized Dumbledore.” Not anymore, not exactly, but… It was hard to sort out what he felt for Dumbledore, even years later, and Harry didn’t intend to try. “I idolized my godfather.” He had to swallow and look away for a moment.
From the impatience in Malfoy’s voice, he didn’t notice. “I’m talking about an ideal. Not idolization.”
Harry frowned and looked back at him. “One leads to the other.”
“Not always.” Malfoy leaned an elbow on the mantelpiece, which disappointed Harry-it meant the mantelpiece wasn’t as fragile as he’d assumed-and studied him intently. “There are ways you could say that I’ve found my ideal in you. You stand at the confluence of many things I admire and would like to be myself. But I also don’t think you could say that I idolize you.”
“Of course you don’t,” Harry said, glad that they were back on ground he could understand. He spread the wings and fluffed them up and down. Malfoy sneezed a bit as feather dust flew around, and Harry grinned at him. “You idolize these. You still never would have given a fuck about me if I didn’t have them.”
“Not true.” Malfoy took a step towards him. “That’s what I keep trying to tell you. I didn’t know what I thought about you, not really. This…has revealed a lot to me, as well as to you. I’ve had to go back and rethink some of the decisions I made over the years, to see if I was thinking about you when I made them. And I found that I was.” He huffed and shook his head. “You think this is disturbing for you. You have no idea what it’s like for me.”
“If you don’t tell me, no,” Harry pointed out. He didn’t know why so many people found that simple lesson so hard to understand.
“I found out that you’ve affected me far more than you should have, if you were just a schoolboy rival and someone on the opposite side of the war that I could forget about,” Malfoy said, and frowned harder. “Someone like Weasley? I only thought about him if I saw his name in the papers or someone else mentioned him. But you. You were the first person who refused to be my friend for a reason that didn’t have to do with, oh, my parents hating yours. You were my rival in Quidditch, and you stayed in school despite all the things I did to try and hurt you, and you saved me, like I told you before, without thinking about who you were saving or doing it for some kind of political gain. I always thought the world worked a certain way. You were outside those expectations.”
“I thought you were long past the point of blood prejudice,” Harry said, feeling a small stab of disappointment go in home under his ribs. Once or twice he had become friends with pure-bloods who treated him like some kind of exotic pet because he could hold his own in conversations with them. He hadn’t thought Malfoy was like that, but what he was talking about certainly destroyed that perception.
Malfoy gave him another freezing glance, and then began pacing back and forth. “Still not what I’m saying,” he muttered. “What I’m saying is that you challenged me, and you made me think, and you made me develop in directions that I never would have otherwise. After the war, I almost gave up. It seemed to me that if I couldn’t have the kind of life my parents had once promised I would have, it was better to have none at all.”
Harry rolled his eyes. “The next thing you’re going to tell me is that I’m your inspiration.” He made his voice as breathy as he could.
Malfoy whirled around and came in close, bearing Harry down even with the warning way that the wings arched above his head. “Will you be still?” he hissed. “I’m trying to tell you the way it is, and you continue to mock me.”
“Say something reasonable, and then I’ll stop mocking you.” Harry folded his arms and stared at the bastard.
Malfoy muttered something under his breath, something that sounded like, “I’m trying,” and then turned away and continued walking up and down, half-sighing to himself, half-grumbling. Harry watched him, and was reminded of the time that he’d spent half forever trying to come up with a way to tell Ron and Hermione that he liked blokes as well as birds. In the end, it hadn’t been that important to them, or only because it was important to him, but he had felt the words twisting around in his throat like a fishhook, and he hadn’t been sure that anyone else would understand them.
Maybe that was what was happening here. Maybe. He smoothed a few of the feathers, but retained their sharp edges in case Malfoy tried something else.
“All right,” Malfoy said. “It’s like this. I could have given up after the war. I looked at the articles about you, the way you entered Auror training right after you took the NEWTS, and I knew I couldn’t.”
Harry shook his head despite himself. “So I’m your ideal who you want to spite. I still don’t really understand that, but okay.”
Malfoy shot him another intense look. “You did it,” he said. “So I was going to do it. It wasn’t to spite you. As far as I knew, you’d never give me a second glance. But I had something to prove to myself. Do you see that? You became a metric for me. No, I don’t know why. I don’t know why it was so important for me to compete with you, to challenge you, when I didn’t say anything about it to you and you’d never be in the same field with me again. But it does mean that I owed you something, something strange.
“Then you showed up with the wings. We were back in contract, and I had the chance to prove myself to you in-other ways. Not as a rival, this time. As someone who could help you, maybe, since I could work on a potion for the wings. I was willing to do that before you asked,” he added. “You didn’t have to bribe me.”
“And you could have said so,” Harry said, holding back the wings when they wanted to rise in front of him. The problem with defensive, shielding gestures, he was learning, was that they told Malfoy he was defensive. “Not accepted the Galleons and the contract and made it seem that working on a potion to get rid of the wings was the last thing you wanted to do.”
Malfoy bared his teeth. “I didn’t want to get rid of them. Because I thought I could show you that I found them beautiful, when other people would stare at you and giggle or gawk or snap pictures. I find them beautiful. I want to sleep with you. That was the way they would matter to me. But I wanted to matter to you. If I showed you that I could be a good lover, a creative lover, that was another way to live up to me, to live up to you, and to answer the challenge your very existence sends me.”
Harry put his hand over his eyes and shook his head. The wings rose and fell, this time, and when he looked up, it was to see Malfoy watching them, some complicated mixture of anger and yearning and lust in his eyes.
“You’re fucked-up,” Harry told him. “I shouldn’t matter that much to you, not when we’ve led separate lives for so long.”
Malfoy’s eyes flickered to him, and a lizard-like smile, darting and bright, came and went on his face. “You were expecting me not to be fucked-up after a bloody war, Potter?” he asked. “You’ve completely recovered and you’re normal and there’s nothing in your life that ever reminds you of it? How wonderful you are. How different, in the way that you seem to deny you want to be.”
Harry thought of the anger running through him when he chased Rosier, the way that killing or capturing the last Death Eater would feel like finally putting the war behind him. He had chased the other Death Eaters much the same way, full of anger that they still existed, and when he heard about some of them, like the Lestrange brothers, dying in prison the anger had become a soothing coolness and he’d spent the evening celebrating.
He shook his head. “I don’t go around wanting people to keep stupid wings because of it,” he said.
“I’ve told you the truth,” Malfoy said. “You can think it’s fucked-up and inadequate and horrible all you like. No, I’m not in love with you. Nor do I just want to sleep with someone who has wings. Your friend Weasley with the same wings would do nothing for me. Nor would any of the other Potions masters I work with-and several of them are my friends. It’s you, Potter, this particular combination, these particular circumstances, that makes me want you.” This time, his smile was more like a shark, surfacing suddenly in the middle of what Harry had thought was a normal conversation. “It’s always been you.”
Harry hissed at him, and hated the shrill edge to it. Had he always sounded like that, so-bird-like? He didn’t think he had, but he didn’t want to stop and think about it right now. “I don’t feel the same way about you.”
Malfoy snorted. “And you don’t think I realized that long ago? You would have come more often to hospital or not worked to save me if you did. What I can do is try to matter to you. Not always in the same way. But to be important.” He gave Harry a leisurely look that spent as much time on his body as on the wings. “I’d say that I’m important enough for you to give me wounds on the chest twice in my life, at least. There can’t be many other people who can claim they’re Harry Potter’s favorite victim.”
Harry beat his wings in agitation, and the fire bowed, then stretched out to him as if it wanted to embrace his feathers. Harry turned sharply away. The last thing he needed now was more strangeness, and one that he couldn’t even predict based on his resemblance to a phoenix. He didn’t think ordinary phoenixes affected ordinary fires. “You’re not that,” he said. “You’re nothing to me.”
“So much nothing that you came and apologized to me.”
“I apologized for hurting you,” Harry said, wondering when the self-centered git would realize that. “That’s different from apologizing to you because I like you, or because you matter to me, or because I really want to keep the wings. I’m going to confirm the news you gave me with someone else, and if it’s true-” He had to pause and lick his lips. He hated thinking about what his life would be like if it was true. “If it is,” he finished, as firmly as he could when he wanted to scream, “then I’ll learn glamours to cover the wings up. And if it isn’t, then I won’t feel like I ever need to see you again.”
Malfoy moved forwards and gripped his wrist. Harry didn’t deign to look at him. From what Malfoy had told him, he thought that kind of ignoring would drive him mad more quickly than anything else.
“I want to know if you would accept help on a different kind of potion,” Malfoy breathed. “You didn’t give me the chance to say this the other day, because you didn’t give me the chance to say anything the other day-”
Harry almost turned to look at him, and then reminded himself that he was ignoring Malfoy. He kept his head turned to the side.
“But what about a potion that would enable the wings to retract?” Malfoy’s hand traced up the side of his shoulder and settled along his skin there, fingers stroking. “They aren’t attached to you in any normal way, and they haven’t replaced your arms. There are these pouches on your back, where they begin. I thought at first that was an effect of the magic that changed you, but now I think it simply happened because the place where the wings begin is fragile and needs to be sheltered from the wind and the flame and the power when you fly. What if I came up with a potion that could enable the wings to retract into those pouches?”
Harry shifted his balance and tried not to look as if he was listening. But Malfoy must have seen signs of it in his face, because he paused for a single, breathless moment before pressing confidently forwards.
“You aren’t answering me. You must be thinking about it. I won’t be denied this much, Potter. I won’t be denied some acknowledgment.”
“Why not?” Harry snapped, swinging around to face him. “You’ve told me the truth now, but I could as easily think that was pathetic. I could tell you to go away and get yourself a life that doesn’t focus on me.”
Malfoy shrugged with one shoulder. He didn’t seem inclined to remove his hand from Harry’s wrist in the way that shrugging with both shoulders might have required him to do. “I’ve told you the truth. And you haven’t told me to do that so far. You haven’t really reacted to my suggestion, in fact. What do you say?”
Harry licked his lips. If Malfoy was telling him the truth, then this might be the best solution he would find. And he could trust Malfoy to offer it in a way that he didn’t trust him to brew a potion that would remove the wings. After all, Malfoy wanted the wings to stay. Hiding them was different from taking them away.
If what Malfoy said is true.
He had practically accepted it, or thought he had, when he was talking to Hermione that morning. But he found himself shaking his head now, moving back. “I need time to think about this,” he said. “I need to seek out another Potions master who doesn’t have any interest in this and can tell me whether what you’re saying is true.”
Malfoy gave him a smile like a razor. “Good luck finding someone like that. The Potions masters you know will all have some investment in you. If only the investment of wanting the fame that will come from treating the famous Harry Potter.”
Harry curled his lip at him. “Which you’ll have when I tell the press it was you.”
“It’s more than that, with me,” Malfoy said. “Believe me or don’t. I have no other words to offer you.”
Harry snorted and stood there a little longer, thinking about it. The retraction potion might not work, but it still sounded like the best chance he would get. And going to someone else first would help his pride, even if it dented Malfoy’s.
“Fine,” he said. “If everything you told me turns out to be true, and there is no way to get rid of these ugly little bastards.” He swatted one of the wings, and it bent under his hand. That gave him a grim satisfaction. If they weren’t invulnerable, then he might not have changed that much. He could still be hurt like a human.
“They’re not little,” Malfoy said quietly. “They’re beautiful.”
“And I’ve told you that I don’t think so, and if you can’t accept my words, then I don’t know what I can say to you,” Harry retorted, taking great pleasure in turning Malfoy’s decaration back on him, and sought the door. Malfoy followed him, and Harry could feel the man’s eyes on his back as he felt the heat from the wings.
Well. He had some thinking to do. He had some people to contact, and he had a job to see about retaining.
He paused at Malfoy’s door for a moment, then shook his head and walked away.
He had thought about flying, unfolding his “beautiful” wings in Malfoy’s sight, but he didn’t know what point he would have been trying to prove if he had, to either Malfoy or himself.
Chapter Thirteen.
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