As the Phoenix--Chapter Four
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. All art contained within was done by the author.
Chapter Four-Second Chances
Today shovels picked me up and threw me in this well.
I pace the abyss.
I descend. I am suspended.
The ashes still smoulder. They rise, surround me, then fall again,
grey dust that makes my body a sand-filled hourglass.
“I can't believe you! You made us go all on our own!”
“You left us to the dogs, Harry!”
Ron and Hermione were less than unimpressed with Harry when he returned to the Burrow that night, looking as though he'd been dragged through a gutter. They told him all about how they'd stood up in front of no less than five hundred people and given their speeches about the war, how they'd accepted their awards to general discontent about the fact that Harry Potter wasn't present at an awards ceremony which was clearly being held in his honour.
He hadn't even seen Ginny yet, and he knew that she would be less than pleased about it.
“I'm sorry,” he said as he stripped off his cloak and stared at his grimy reflection in the mirror. “I couldn't let them go and condemn Malfoy's mum without letting them hear the other side of the story, could I? Someone ought to know what she did that day. It's not fair.” He pulled off his dress robes and went to look for something in his trunk to change into. “Don't suppose you heard the verdict of the trial, did you?”
“Of course we did, Harry. It's all over...” Hermione started digging through her bag, which was plopped down at Ron's bedside. A moment later, she pulled out the evening edition of the Daily Prophet and held it up for Harry to see.
He turned to her and squinted at the paper headline across the room. NARCISSA MALFOY DECLARED INNOCENT. Beneath it, HARRY POTTER: DEATH EATER SYMPATHISER? Typical Prophet fare. He took a deep breath and nodded at them, feeling as though a spectacular weight had been lifted off his shoulders. “Good,” he said. “I'm going to go have a shower.”
He slipped out of the room and started heading down the stairs to the closest bathroom; on his way down, he saw Ginny going into her room and he grinned at her tiredly. “Hey,” he said quietly, and he reached out a hand to touch her arm-
-only to have her pull it out of his reach and slam the door as she went into her room. “What?” he whispered to himself as he watched her go into her bedroom, and he rubbed the back of his neck before he went into the bathroom with a little shrug. Sometimes women were so confusing.
Harry started his shower and took off the clothes he'd worn under his robes, letting them fall to the bathroom floor before he looked over at himself in the mirror. While moving around the country with Hermione and Ron while hunting Horcruxes, he'd got taller, his arms a little stronger. He looked down at the prominent trail of black hair leading down from his navel to his crotch; that seemed thicker than it had been before. He ran a hand over his chest and thought he could feel the first hair beginning to grow there, a light dusting across his chest. He was getting older.
He was an adult now, even. So why did he still feel like a child sometimes? He supposed that he didn't have a typical childhood, but that didn't mean that he was ready to grow up, no matter how adult his body was beginning to look.
He stepped into the shower and exhaled slowly, pushing his head under the spray of hot water and letting it flatten his hair to his head. He'd had a miserably long day, and he began to relax slowly under the persistent heat of the water. Why was Ginny upset with him? She wasn't typically someone who flew off the handle-at least, not at him-and he had no idea what he could have done to invoke her ire.
He hoped more than anything that she wasn't going to stay mad at him. When they'd played Quidditch together in the field, she'd been so happy to be with him, so happy to have him kissing her and looking down at her like she was the only thing in the world that he'd been sure that they could have a real future together. He wanted to have a future with Ginny. She was beautiful and smart and fiery and he rather idolised her for her bravery.
He thought about the look on her face as he'd pushed up her shirt and kissed her freckled stomach, remembered how soft and warm it was as she squirmed in the grass behind her house. He'd pressed his fingers against the button of her trousers, but she'd pushed them away with a shy laugh and told him, Not yet, Harry, I'm not ready yet! He wished she would be ready. He wasn't just looking like an adult now, he was beginning to feel like one, too, and that meant that he wanted to try his hand at showing Ginny the more physical aspects of his affection.
He'd seen her in various states of undress before, but he'd never seen her breasts or any other part of her that he would have really liked to see. He liked to imagine that she was freckled all over, that he could lie on top of her and trace patterns on her breasts from freckle to freckle, that her nipples were pink and would harden under his touch. These thoughts, combined with the warm rivers of water flowing over him, caused his cock to swell, and he gave it a light squeeze in his palm.
Travelling with Ron and Hermione hadn't given him any privacy to wank, and sleeping in Ron's room was no better. Warmth surged through his body, and he let his mind wander to what he might do if Ginny weren't angry with him.
He'd get out of his shower and sneak into her bedroom, where she'd be curled up in bed trying to sleep. He'd take off his robe and crawl into bed with her, pressing his hips up against hers She'd moan quietly and turn to look back at him, and he'd kiss her while he slipped his hands downward along her side, smoothing over the curve of her hip and sliding down her panties. She'd be wet already, and he'd push his fingers up inside of her and fuck her with them until she was begging him to do it with something else.
His grip on his cock tightened, and he leaned back against the cool tile wall of the shower, stroking it slowly and trying to keep his breathing under control. When he smoothed his thumb over the tip, his hips gave a little jerk, and he leaned his head back with a quiet groan as he thought about what it might feel like to push inside of her. The sound of his name on her lips would drive him mad, and he'd fuck her as fast as she'd allow until she was coming and he was doing the same.
“Fuck,” he gasped, his hips giving another jerk before his cock twitched in his hand and he was coming all over his fingers and onto the floor of the shower. Breathing laboured, he struggled to get control over himself again before he grabbed the soap and began to lather up, the tension gone from his shoulders.
She'd come around; he'd talk to her in the morning and figure out what he'd done to piss her off. In the meantime, he really had more pressing things with which to concern himself-namely, the Malfoy trials. Narcissa had been declared innocent, was likely waiting now to be released and get back to her life. He'd done a good thing today, going to defend her and then going to see Malfoy in Azkaban.
Malfoy. Why had he cried? He didn't blame him so much, he thought, since he was being contained in the most horrible prison that Harry could think of, even when there weren't dementors there. He didn't deserve to be there, either, even if he was a great git and needed to be taken down a few pegs.
He looked as though he'd been taken down a few already. Harry was concerned about how much that bothered him.
Harry got out of the shower once he'd scrubbed the feel of Azkaban from his skin, and he dressed in his pyjamas before he headed back up to his and Ron's room. The moment he opened the door, he grunted and closed it again-Ron and Hermione were wrapped around one another on Ron's bed, and he didn't want to interrupt. They had taken seven years to get this far, after all, and if someone was going to get laid, well. He really was in no position to interrupt that.
He headed back downstairs to the sitting room, and he smiled when he saw that Molly was sitting in a recliner, working on her knitting. “Hi, Mrs Weasley,” he said as he flopped down on the couch and stretched out, lying his head back against one of the overstuffed pillows. “Did you have a good day?”
“Hello, Harry,” she said with a smile, and she lifted her head to look over at him. “I did. Is something bothering you?”
He hesitated before he nodded his head. “Yeah. I'm just thinking about the Malfoys.” He chewed on his bottom lip; he knew that the Weasleys and the Malfoys hardly got along, but he thought that if anyone understood, then Molly might.
Molly set her knitting aside and folded her hands over her lap. “You did the right thing today,” she said with a nod of her head. “I never thought that I would agree with defending any of the Malfoys, with all the trouble they've given Arthur at the Ministry. Still...I don't think that Narcissa ought to be in prison for her husband's crimes. It's easy to just damn the whole lot of them for their last name, but that's not fair, is it?”
Harry rolled over onto his side and looked at her as she spoke, curling an arm under his head. “You think so?” he asked, as though he'd been questioning himself over it even though he had been sure that it was the right thing to have done. “What about her son?”
Molly paused when Harry asked about Draco, and she leaned back on the couch while taking a sip of her tea. “I think that...he's getting older, Harry. Children are products of their environments, and of the way they were raised by their parents. Sometimes, though, children will surprise you and turn out completely differently than they're raised to do.”
“What do you mean, Mrs Weasley?” Harry sat up then, and he looked curiously over at her.
She met his eyes and smiled at him. “I think, from what you've told me about what happened in Malfoy Manor when you lot were caught, and from what I've heard about what happened with the Malfoys while you were travelling, that Draco might be deviating from what he was taught. A lot of children of Death Eaters defected during the war, did you know? It turned out that they didn't have the stomach for the types of things they were expected to do. Draco was forced to do more than any of the others, wouldn't you say?”
Harry nodded his head and looked down at his feet, fiddling with his hands. “Yeah. He never looked...very happy about it. I told you about him crying in sixth year, right? When I really hurt him?” It was hard to talk about what had happened when he'd cast Sectumsempra on Malfoy, though he knew that Mrs Weasley knew all about it. It had been all over the school, and he was sure that Dumbledore had written to Molly about it. “I think he was overwhelmed by that job he had to do. Fixing the Vanishing Cabinet. I don't think he wanted to do it.”
Molly smiled sadly at Harry. “Did you ever ask him?”
Harry leaned back against the back of the couch, and he shook his head. “No. I didn't.”
“Maybe you ought to, then.”
Harry looked up at her for a long time before he looked away and nodded his head. “Maybe I will. If I can save Mrs Malfoy, surely I can do something for him, right? That would be the right thing to do, wouldn't it?”
Molly rose to her feet, gathering her knitting before she moved over to Harry and patted him on top of his head. “I think you have to decide what the right thing to do is in this case, Harry. I also think that it would be a shame for Draco to go to prison if he didn't deserve it. Sometimes we all make mistakes. The pictures of the little boy I saw in the Prophet weren't pictures of a killer-”
Draco, you are not a killer...
“-but of a scared little boy who made some mistakes and was punished enough by being forced into following in his parents' footsteps. I'd be interested in seeing where he might go, now that You-Know-Who is gone.” She leaned over and kissed his forehead. “Good night, Harry.”
Harry exhaled softly and leaned back, smiling sleepily at her. “Good night, Mrs Weasley.” He lay down on the couch and covered up with the blanket, watching her as she paused in the doorway and looked back at him.
“You ought to talk to Ginny about it. She's not very happy that you're helping out the Malfoys, but I think she can be talked down. Let her sleep on it, though. Things are always better in the morning.” Then, she slipped out of the room, leaving Harry to his thoughts.
*
Narcissa Malfoy stepped into her home and closed the large door behind herself, her wand gripped firmly in her hand as though she expected someone to come out of the corridor and attack her. Instead, she was greeted only by the echoing emptiness of the home she shared with her family.
Lucius had been in prison before. She could deal with that. She knew that she could survive and make it while her husband was away, and that a number of Galleons in Ministry pockets would be able to ensure his timely release even if he was sentenced to life. It would be a quiet thing, kept out of the papers, but even the reformed Ministry couldn't deny the hefty donations made by the Malfoy families, not in this time of need.
She could not, on the other hand, handle the thought of her only son, her little boy, locked up in there. The sounds of him screaming and sobbing in the cell next to her before she'd been moved to another floor had ripped her to pieces, and it was all she could hear when she closed her eyes.
Harry Potter was her son's only hope. He had to help Draco, just as he'd helped her. Surely, he would help him.
Please help him, Harry Potter.
She sank to her knees in the empty foyer and cried for her only son. Where had they gone wrong? They'd fallen so far, and she didn't know if anyone was going to be at the bottom to catch them.
*
Harry didn't get to speak to Ginny for a whole week. They were sitting at the breakfast table with Ron, Hermione, George, and Charlie when Hermione spotted several owls flying in from the horizon, and she pointed at the window just before they soared into the kitchen and dropped their letters on the table. “Look!” Hermione said as she snatched up the one addressed to her, and Harry reached out to take his own.
He recognised McGonagall's penmanship, and he lifted an eyebrow before he broke the seal on the letter and unfolded it to read.
8 July, 1998
Harry Potter
Order of Merlin, First Class
The Burrow
Mr Potter,
I hope this letter finds you well. I am writing to you to invite you to attend Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry beginning 1 September for your missed year of schooling. Attendance is not compulsory; however, as you were unable to attend last year during the war and have not yet registered with the Auror department at the Ministry of Magic, I thought it prudent to extend the invitation to you to attend and further your magical education.
Should you elect to attend, you will continue in your NEWT-level courses and take your examinations in June 1999 prior to graduation. Your list of required texts are enclosed with this letter, and I urge you to let me know as soon as possible what your decision is so I may note you as Quidditch Captain (should you desire to maintain your position).
I should note that attendance this year will include organised reconstruction of the school by the upperclassmen, and as such, you will be helping rebuild what was damaged in the war as part of your curriculum.
Congratulations on receiving your Order of Merlin. I anticipate your owl.
Minerva McGonagall
Headmistress of Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry
The table erupted with noise.
“Reconstruction?”
“Is she barmy? Like I'm going back so I can take tests.”
“Oh, I can't wait!”
Hermione looked so excited about her letter, and she pulled out the textbook list to have a look at it, eyes shining. She was very nearly bouncing in her chair. “I can't believe we get to help rebuild the school! We'll be learning all sorts of warding magic; isn't that wonderful?”
Ron, who had been the one to voice his displeasure during the initial roar, blinked at her, and he looked down at his letter hesitantly. “I....reckon so....Hermione, we don't have to go...”
“Ronald, you ought to! You don't want to go into Auror training and not have any idea what you're doing!”
They began to row, and Harry tuned them out as he looked over to Ginny, who was staring at her letter, as white as a sheet. “What is it, Gin?” he asked quietly, almost afraid to ask given their silence over the past week. She looked up at him, then reached under the table and pressed something smooth and cool into his palm. He looked down at it curiously.
It was a Head Girl's badge. His eyes widened, and he looked over at her for a moment before he grinned and moved a little closer, daring to wrap his arm around her shoulders. “Congratulations,” he whispered in her ear. “You'll be a damn good one.”
Ginny bit her lip before she turned into his chest, hugging him back, and Harry thought that, in that moment, everything was just fine with the world, and he wouldn't miss going back to Hogwarts for anything.
“I just don't like that you're helping out the Malfoys, Harry.” They were walking through the garden, Harry and Ginny, their hands clasped together tightly as though they were both too afraid to let go. “After what Lucius did to me in my first year...”
Harry sighed softly at her, and he bumped her hip with his own. “I know, Gin, but Narcissa and Malfoy didn't have anything to do with that.” He squeezed her fingers. “You know I wouldn't help Lucius, not after what he did to you. The rest of them, though, they don't deserve it. I owe them life debts; I can't just stand idly by.”
Ginny sighed up at him, and she came to a stop just short of treading on a gnome. “I...all right, Harry. Just promise me you won't try to help Lucius? Promise me?” She took his other hand and looked imploringly up at him. He hadn't ever seen anyone so perfectly beautiful.
“I promise, Ginny.” He pulled her up for a kiss, butterflies in his stomach.
*
Draco shuddered when his prison garb was ripped back from his face, and he lifted bloodshot eyes up to the warden, who was standing over him. A sharp kick was aimed for his ribs, and he coughed bitterly onto the stone floor, tasting copper. The warden hated those associated with Voldemort, and Death Eaters were frequently subjected to such treatment.
“Your trial's set for the middle of August. You understand?” The voice was harsh, unforgiving. Draco nodded his head as best he could. “Good. Then I get to keep you forever. I don't think your forever will last very long, do you?”
The warden threw two envelopes to the floor in front of Draco, right into the crusting pool of vomit he'd expelled after finding maggots in his lunch. They were trying to break him. “You've got letters.” The warden kicked him again, and he spat up blood onto the ground as the man took his leave of the cell.
Trembling, Draco reached out to take his letters, and he stared at them. There were three: one from his mum, one from the Ministry of Magic, and one, inexplicably, from Minerva McGonagall. His mum wished him good luck, wrote of her innocence and told him how Harry Potter had promised to help him. The Ministry wrote to him the date of his hearing.
The letter from McGonagall made him scream and dig his nails into the walls until they were worn down and bleeding. How dare she give me hope.
Draco dreamt of flying, but he didn't have a broom. He spread glorious red and gold wings in the sun, and he rose so high that he couldn't see the ground any more. Like Icarus, he rose until the sun grew so hot that it began to melt him, but instead of falling back to earth, he combusted and burned brightly in the sky, consumed with the beauty of his own death.
*
Notes:
- Poem excerpt from The Rising of the Ashes [Before], by Tahar Ben Jelloun.