As The Phoenix--Chapter One
Title: As the Phoenix
Author: penwyn
Summary: The war is over. Now, the wizarding world needs to pick up the pieces. The Malfoy trials leave Harry Potter and Draco Malfoy wondering what they might have missed when Harry refused Draco's handshake in first-year and seek to retake what was lost.
Pairings: Eventually Harry/Draco, some Harry/Ginny, Ron/Hermione, other canon pairs.
Rating: Eventually NC-17.
Warnings: Contains homosexual and heterosexual sex.
Author's notes: This picks up where the seventh book left off prior to the epilogue. I'm approaching this long fic as canonically as possible, so Harry/Ginny will be a part of it for a while. I'm not stupidifying any characters either. This fic disregards a lot of what Rowling said happened between the end of the war and the epilogue, but this is not necessarily non-complaint with said epilogue. Any and all art contained within was done by the author.
*This is a WIP. And this is the beginning.
Chapter One-A Circle Has No Beginning
My phoenix long ago secured
His nest in sky-vault's cope;
In the body's cage immured,
He is weary of life's hope.
He had been settled on his father's knee when he learned about the phoenix.
The education of the Malfoy heir was first clinical and extremely rigid. Draco Malfoy was a very special little boy, so his father and mother said, and so he must know first the theory and the bones of a subject before he could learn the essence of it. Four years old, he was seated upon Lucius Malfoy's knee, an arm wrapped around him to keep him secure, and his eyes were fixed upon the page of the book his father held open for him. “Read this to me, Draco,” Lucius said, and he indicated a passage without illustration.
“Yes, Father.” Draco leaned in slightly and squinted at the page. “The phoenix is an herbivorous bird native to India, Egypt, and China, found nested at the highest mountain peaks. In body, it is the size of a common swan, with magnificent scarlet and gold plumage. Its tail is long and shimmers gold, and it has a long beak as well as large, curved talons.
“The phoenix possesses a number of spectacular magical abilities which make it a very coveted bird. Perhaps most widely-known is the bird's ability of regeneration, characterized by periods of health between violent burnings which consume the creature, which is reborn from its own ashes as a developing chick. The bird is also capable of vanishing and reappearing at will, of singing magical songs which strike bravery into the hearts of even the most cowardly men, and of healing physical wounds of other creatures and humans by weeping pearly tears.
“The phoenix is impossible to domesticate; however, it has been known to choose human companions, to whom it is fiercely loyal.” Draco looked up to his father as he finished reading the passage; it had contained many words which he did not understand. “Is it a Gryffindor bird, Father?”
Lucius laughed, a deep, pleasant sound of which Draco rarely heard. “No, phoenixes are not Sorted, Draco, for their colours or their attributes.” He closed the book and set the boy to his feet as the wards around the Manor pinged. “We have visitors. Run along and play in the gardens.”
Draco did as he was told, though he paused at their library en route. Small fingers slid along the bindings of books until he came upon one which looked promising: An Ornithological Study of the Phoenix in India. It was a weighty book, but he managed to get a hold of it before he dashed out to his mother's rose garden and flopped onto his belly in the warm grass. He opened to the middle and flipped several pages before a photograph caught his eye: a spectacular bird turned its back to the camera, spread enormous wings, and burst into flame.
The first time Draco got to see a phoenix in person was during his first year at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. His father was on the Board of Governors, and as such, he was to be introduced personally to the Headmaster Dumbledore during the first weekend of September. He had already failed his duty to his father in making an immediate friend of Harry Potter, and so his head was bowed as he followed the man up the spiralling staircase to the Headmaster's office.
Albus Dumbledore greeted them both with a tolerant smile, and Draco was too afraid to look up at him. His father had always said that Dumbledore was a crock, that he was the worst thing to ever happen to Hogwarts, but Draco also knew that this man was the only one that the Dark Lord had ever feared. That had to count for something. He shook his hand and resumed staring at the floor of the enormous office.
It was the odd, warbling cry of a bird which finally lifted Draco's head, and his eyes scanned the room before they landed on Fawkes the phoenix, perched to his left and eyeing him with an expression of curiosity. Draco's eyes widened, and he abandoned his spot behind his father to approach the bird with caution-phoenixes were notoriously gentle creatures, yes, but one never knew the individual temperament of any creature. He was just reaching out a hand, transfixed, when a sharp voice broke his reverie.
“Draco!” Lucius' imperious tone cut through his trance, and he started before he turned to look at the two men who were staring him down.
“It's all right, Lucius,” Dumbledore said in his most patient tone, and he gave a nod to Draco. “His name is Fawkes, Draco, and he's quite friendly if you are.”
Draco swallowed hard, and he looked back to Fawkes as the bird lowered its head. His fingers were so pale in contrast to the startling red of its feathers, and he touched them with the greatest amount of reverence before he drew back his hand and retreated behind his father again.
He didn't remember the rest of the visit to the Headmaster. He was consumed by one, single thought for the remainder of not only the meeting, but for the rest of his first year.
I would give anything in the whole world for a phoenix of my own.
*
The war was over.
The exultant cries of the survivors were mingled with the cries of those who had survived their closest friends, their dearest colleagues, and their enemies. The Great Hall was a riot of sound, and in the centre of it sat the Malfoy family. Cast from their thrones, filthy and bloodied, they clung to one another in a sea of those who had scorned them and would have killed them on sight had the Dark Lord not been dead for less than an hour. They did not take part in the celebration, but sat as an island-father, mother, and son-in a sea of those who had survived and had something for which to cheer. Draco could feel his mother's hands on his arm, white-knuckled as though she thought he might escape her, and his father's arm at his back. They were a solidarity; they always had been.
Lucius Malfoy rose as the cheers began to quiet, and he took his wife and son by their arms. “We need to leave,” he said in a low, urgent voice. The Ministry would be arriving in full-force at any moment, and they would most assuredly be arresting the enemies who stayed behind. Narcissa and Draco were glued to his side as they escaped the castle.
Draco knew it as much as his father did-there really was nowhere to run.
*
The war was over.
For some, it meant a good night's sleep for the first time in years; for others, it meant partying and laughing and feeling free to step outside without a wand clutched tightly in hand. There were parties in the streets, filled with alcohol, party favours, and fireworks. Couples were eloping all over the country, feeling secure in making such a life decision now that the most powerful dark wizard of the age was eliminated.
For Harry Potter, the end of the war meant nothing but funerals.
“Harry.” A quiet voice at his shoulder startled him from his thoughts, and he turned to look down at Ginny Weasley, her expression solemn. She was dressed in formal black robes, most certainly hand-me-downs from someone else in the family or perhaps borrowed from a cousin, and Harry thought that she looked out of place in them. “It's time to go.”
They were burying Fred on a hill near the Burrow, where they'd all played as children. There must have been three hundred wizards and witches in attendance, most dressed in black but some-such as George, Ron, and Harry himself-had refused to come in anything but violent red. Fred would not, they thought, want to be subjected to a miserable funeral filled with weeping attendees and lamentations over his life being lost. Everything that Fred Weasley ever did was wild, showy, and downright spectacular.
The crowd gathered around the casket, and people began to speak on Fred's behalf. Harry felt Ginny's hand clasped tightly in his own, and he gave it a squeeze before he pulled his own away and cast a look to George, who met his eyes and nodded his head. Go ahead with the plan whenever you're ready.
After Molly and Arthur had spoken, Harry stepped up to the casket and lay upon it a Skiving Snackbox. “I figure you might want some of these, just in case there are exams,” he said to weak chuckles in the crowd. He reached to his side and drew his wand, and he gave a sudden, roaring shout and his co-conspirators levitated from bushes, weeds, and the backs of rocks an enormous number of fireworks. They exploded in unison, and the sky was lit up as screaming chaos rained down from above, as dragons soared and blew outrageous amounts of fire, as massive bursts of light blinded them all in celebration of a life lived.
Wands were raised to the sky, and the attendees contributed their magic to sending Fred Weasley off in the loudest, most raucous way possible. After, when the band played, they danced under the stars until dawn, and they lifted their glasses in toast.
To Fred Weasley. To mayhem, to havoc, to chaos!
None of the other funerals were so memorable. Harry only knew that he blamed himself for every single one of them.
*
Hermione Granger was standing in the living room of a house she'd never stepped foot into, dressed in Muggle clothing and carrying an armload of encyclopaedias. She had come alone, telling Ron and Harry both that this was something that she initiated alone, an so she must finish it on her own. Her stomach had been twisting in knots when she walked up the street, pulling a rolling bag which was filled with more of the books, and she'd half-expected no one to answer the front door when she knocked.
Her father's curious face had greeted her, and it was all she could do to keep from flinging her arms around him. “Hello,” she'd said instead. “I'm Hermione Granger, and I've got the newest release of medical encyclopaedias which I've been sent here to discuss with you for your practice.” They were, after all, dentists, and she knew that her father's collection was outdated. To her great pleasure, he had let her into the house.
That brought her to her current problem, however, which required her to work up the nerve to reverse the powerful memory charm which she'd placed on them a year ago so they might be spared, should Death Eaters come knocking. Her mother and father were staring up at her, awaiting her sales pitch, and she set the books down on the coffee table before she reached into her rolling bag and hesitated. Her fingers clasped around her wand, and she nodded to herself before withdrawing it and pointing it very quickly at her parents, who froze in anticipation of violent attack.
“Finite incantatem.”
The spell was hardly gone from her lips before she flung herself at the couch and wrapped her arms around her parents, tears stinging her eyes as they turned in towards her. She buried her face in her father's shoulder and wept for the first time in days, all of her bottled tension rushing out of her in an instant as familiar arms wrapped around her and she gasped against her father's soaking shirt, “W-we survived.”
They would never understand from where their bookish daughter summoned up all of her courage, and as she recounted the harrowing tale of war, of battles and death and of love coming to light, they were never so happy to have been born without the curse of magic.
*
They buried Severus Snape under a tree near Spinner's End. Harry had seen the place in the man's memory, a place where he and Lily had spoken together in hushed tones about their future, where they would secure their places amongst the greatest witches and wizards in history. It was this very tree that had dropped a branch upon Petunia Evans' head when she'd been spying upon the pair, as though the tree knew that they would be fast friends and no one should come between that. Harry knew that Snape had caused the branch to fall, whether intentionally or not, and he felt a rush of affection for the man he had hated so much.
Little had he known before that fateful battle how much Severus Snape and his great sacrifices for love and redemption would mean to him.
Not for the first time in recent history, Harry stood at the funeral of someone he'd known and thought that he deserved more than this. Dumbledore's funeral had been vast and beautiful, and here he stood with no one at his side but a reluctant Ron Weasley and the man lowering the coffin into the ground. No words were spoken at this funeral. There was nothing that Harry could say; there would never be words to express his mixture of emotion for the man he would never be able to thank for everything he did for him, for Dumbledore, for a little girl named Lily Evans.
It wasn't fair.
Here lay a man who had been a truly spectacular double-agent, so in possession of magical skill that he could deceive the greatest dark wizard in known history. Here lay a man who had made a mistake and spent the rest of his life atoning for that which he could never change. Harry wondered whether that fateful day when James Potter hoisted Severus up by his ankle and Severus had called Lily a Mudblood had changed the course of history. Had he never let his tongue slip, would Harry be looking down a hooked nose at the grave of his father?
Harry nodded to Ron, and they turned away from the grave to begin heading down the hill, away from the tree. A flash of blond to their left cause them to pause, and Harry turned to watch Draco Malfoy trudge up the hill. “They're going to arrest the Malfoys, you know,” Ron whispered to him. “Maybe we ought to hasten the process. We could call an Auror to come fetch him.”
Harry shook his head, watching Malfoy kneel at the edge of the hole containing his godfather for a moment before he turned away and motioned for Ron to follow him. “Don't,” he said in whisper. “Not today, Ron.”
Draco Malfoy was tense at Severus' grave for a moment, sure that Potter and Weasley were going to call someone in to arrest him. The Ministry was, after all, rounding up all known Death Eaters, and his family was definitely high on that list. When he heard a crack of Apparition, he turned his head to greet his Auror and was instead rewarded with the sight of an empty hill. They'd left him.
He reached into his robes and pulled from them an old teddy bear, ratty with age. He lifted it to his lips and kissed it before he dropped it into the grave, remembering the day that his godfather had gifted it to him when he was a child. “Rest well, Severus,” he whispered, and he nodded to the gravedigger to fill it in before he turned and left.
*
Ginny Weasley was lingering in the garden, pruning her mother's flowers by hand as she waited for Harry to come back to the Burrow. He'd been staying there since the final battle, and she hardly had to guess why-even if his scar wasn't bothering him, he was still having nightmares. They had watched their friends and family dying around them in the battle; there was no way he wasn't having the same dreams that she was.
Everyone had been so subdued since they'd returned home a few weeks before. They had buried Fred, Remus, and Tonks, along with seemingly countless others, and the funerals seemed to run together. Finally, they were over, and maybe life could start getting back to normal now. She certainly hoped so, for everyone's sake. For Harry's sake.
Now his scar meant nothing save for serving as a reminder of battles past, of him having been the Chosen One, of losing friends and enemies alike. She worried about him, because adjusting to being allowed a normal life after having led an extraordinary one prior would no doubt be excruciatingly difficult for him. Jobs had been offered to him from all over the Ministry, but he hadn't responded to any of them yet, and she was glad for that because he needed now, more than ever, to truly recover.
They hadn't yet had a chance to talk, just the two of them. He was so busy getting everything in order, and she was busy with her family, but she knew that a talk was coming soon. She thought fondly of a time when she would be able to go to him and lay her head on his shoulder in silence, when they could be a proper comfort to one another, and she suspected that it would come sooner than she thought.
It was mostly a matter of working up the nerve to approach one another. She was too nervous to go to him yet, nervous about shooing her brother away so she could have a moment alone with him. She hoped he would come to her. Surely, he would come to her, because they had time now. They would never have to break up because of impending war again, and they could be together as they had planned.
The Prophet was fat with stories of the Auror office's captures of Death Eaters and supporters throughout England, and Ginny read it every day to see who had been caught. The Carrows had been caught first, and she had felt a thrill of excitement reading that particular article; she'd clipped it and put it in a scrapbook. They had routinely tortured her under their tutelage at Hogwarts during her sixth year, to the point that she had become quite resistant to the effects of the Unforgivable Curses. That was undoubtedly an unintended consequence. Crabbe had come quietly after the death of his son; that had been too much to bear, and he hadn't run far. Theodore Nott's father was captured, though his son was shown to be clear of the Dark Mark. Then came Yaxley and Rowle and finally-to date-the Lestrange brothers, who had put up such a fight that they sent two Aurors to St. Mungo's before being captured.
She couldn't wait for Lucius Malfoy to be caught. She had a special page in her scrapbook waiting for his article.
*
The sky was awash with strokes of navy blue and peach as the sun set over Malfoy Manor that evening of June 5, 1998. It had been a day of quiet celebration in the warmth of the early summer sun, with the three wizarding inhabitants of the manor spending the day in the gardens and on the lawn. Now, as night began to settle in, Draco Malfoy stood by himself on his old tree-swing in the orchard, hands clasped around spelled-clean ropes as he stared at the odd pattern of clouds across the sky.
It looked like one of his mother's paintings from when he was younger. She had loved to paint landscapes, and he had watched from her elbow, eyes wide as she mixed her colours and created what were for her only son masterpieces. The vibrancy of her colour selections made him need to restrain himself from swiping his finger over the thick oil deposits before tasting them, they looked so much like icing on a birthday cake.
From the orchard, he could see the Manor and through the open windows on that side of the house, and a glance in that direction made him smile. The drapes in his father's study were pulled apart, and he could see his parents standing close to one another in the centre of the room. Lucius leaned in to whisper something in Narcissa's ear, and she laughed before nodding, and he watched as his father swept her into a flawless dance to music he couldn't hear. He didn't want to hear it; this was their moment. They surely had so few left like this.
Draco slid down the ropes of his swing and sat down on the old plank of wood, fixed with a cushioning charm to keep splinters and sore thighs at bay. This was his time to be a child, something he'd never really had the chance to be when he was younger. Being a Malfoy was all about proper manners, about learning to keep a large household with a large bank account. It was politics and schmoozing and making friends you didn't like because those friendships would bolster you later.
Since the war was over, there hadn't been any social events, any dinner parties. Draco and his parents were just enjoying their time together, revelling in their good fortune that the Dark Lord had not decided to kill his hostages for sport. The wizarding world was piecing itself back together, which meant that families had to do so as best they could in the process, and the Malfoys were no different.
For all of the speculation and snickering behind hands at Hogwarts, Draco had never known anything but a great deal of love from his parents. They loved each other, and they loved him, and in this way, he knew that he was spoiled. They presented themselves as firm and harsh in public, but his mother had never been anything but doting, his father a patient and kind teacher, for he would pass on the family legacy. Their futures rested on the shoulders of that tow-headed little boy who had grown into a man with conviction and bravery far greater than they had ever hoped. Draco was capable of doing great things, no matter the definition of great.
Draco swung higher and higher on his old swing, and at the peak of his swing, he felt his old childish desire to let go and soar through the air rush through him. He swung back again, and this time when he came forward, he released his swing and leapt through the air. The firm thud of his feet on the grass was, as always, a reminder of reality, and he smiled to himself before he turned back towards the Manor.
The wards pinged. They had visitors.
He watched his parents break apart in the middle of their dance, his father turning to the door and his mother retreating to her husband's desk. A procession of robed wizards made their way up the lawn, wands drawn, and Draco wanted to run. He looked wildly around himself and thought that he might be able to slip deep into the orchard and never be found.
The robed wizards opened the front door without knocking, and Draco hid himself behind a tree as he watched his parents in their study. His mother was crying, and Lucius turned to her. He kissed her firmly on the mouth, and he took from her the only wand they had between them before he cast it to the floor. Words were exchanged between them, and they arranged themselves in the centre of the room, hands extended forward, palms upward.
The door to the study opened.
Draco ran for the house, his heart pounding in his ears, and just as he reached the front door, the Aurors strode out with his parents in tow, magically bound. Lucius held his head high, and he regarded his son. “Come quietly, Draco.”
“Come, Draco.” His mother's voice was thin, and there was a note of terror there.
Bindings whipped around his wrists and compressed Draco's magic, and he wanted to gasp for air and cry out, to fight it. Instead, he fell into place behind his parents, and he looked up at them, admiring not for the first time the strength of will it must have taken for Lucius to lay down their wand.
They knew that it couldn't last forever. It had lasted a month and three days before the Ministry took them into custody and placed them in Azkaban to await their separate trials as Death Eaters.
It was Draco Malfoy's eighteenth birthday.
*
Notes:
-
Poem excerpt from The Phoenix by Hafiz, as translated by Ralph Waldo Emerson.
-
Information Draco reads about phoenixes references Fantastic Beasts and Where To Find Them.