lomonaaeren (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
lomonaaeren) wrote2022-11-25 08:50 pm
lomonaaeren) wrote2022-11-25 08:50 pm
Entry tags:
[Songs of the Stormy Season]: Change Comes to the Changeless, Harry/Fawkes, PG-13
Title: Change Comes to the Changeless
Disclaimer: J. K. Rowling and associates own these characters. I am writing this story for fun and not profit.
Pairing: Harry/Fawkes
Content Notes: AU starting with the last few chapters of DH, shapeshifting, angst, future cross-species relationship, discussion of past violence and character deaths
Rating: PG-13
Wordcount: 4400
Summary: Fawkes thought about leaving the wizarding world altogether after the death of Albus Dumbledore. But there is another that needs his care and has attracted his fascination. Fawkes does not intend to let Harry Potter walk to his death.
Author’s Notes: This is one of my “Songs of the Stormy Season” one-shots being posted between Halloween and the winter solstice. Luni_le_Fay requested a Fawkes/Harry story with Fawkes not allowing Harry to sacrifice himself. Hope you enjoy.
Change Comes to the Changeless
Fawkes turned in a slow circle above the Forbidden Forest. His wings rose and fell in the pattern that would make him invisible to the humans walking below. A unicorn could see him if she glanced up, but Fawkes knew the herd would never give his secrets away.
He had meant to leave. The grounds and castle of Hogwarts glowed in his memory after a century there with his companion, Albus Dumbledore, but that glow would fade. Already wider skies and other moons were tugging Fawkes away. He had never meant to spend as long as he had in this world.
But his companion had been long-lived for a human, and had granted him many calm years and much variety of experience. Albus had brought silver instruments into the office that would speak to Fawkes of the secrets of the deep earth, and portraits who let him understand the only afterlife humans would ever know.
For a creature who lived to understand everything that existed, that had been an invaluable experience.
But now there was another, another potential human companion when Fawkes had thought he would never take another of the species.
Fawkes dived silently and swooped through the trees on the outer edge of the wood. The potential companion walked below.
More than potential. He blazed.
Fawkes hung there, invisible, and watched Harry Potter. He hadn’t understood, the first time he had met the boy. Many humans, like Albus, had a fine thread of gold running through them that represented the knowledge or wisdom they could pass on to a phoenix. But Harry had shone sapphire, the color of a question Fawkes had never thought to ask. So he had silently sought the answer to that question, and sometimes invisibly accompanied Harry to class to sit on the professor’s desk, and sometimes asked the portraits whether they had ever seen someone glow sapphire before, and sometimes ventured to the hidden eyries on high mountain slopes to speak to other phoenixes, and sometimes traveled to the world of the soul in dreams to look at Harry’s soul in puzzlement.
Fawkes had learned early on that Harry had a bit of someone else’s soul intertwined with his own. But it was not possession, which Fawkes knew, and it was not the helpless merging of one telepath’s mind with another’s, which Fawkes had learned on the distant world of Alondria, and it was not the dim shine of soulmate magic, which Fawkes had understood even before his first burning day.
The bit of soul was Voldemort’s, and it should have consumed Harry’s. Yet it had not.
Fawkes needed to know why not. It was a need as imperative as the one to molt.
He had accompanied Harry silently and invisibly throughout much of his journey to destroy the Horcruxes, and waited for the moment when Harry would understand and blurt out the answer. But he never had.
Now, though, it seemed he had gone into the castle and found his answer there. And he was walking silently through the trees, a stone of such power clutched in one hand that Fawkes was wary.
He landed on a branch not far above Harry’s head, and listened and watched. He could see the shades that Harry spoke to, but only if he tilted his head and flattened his crest and flew half a step into the world of the dead without moving. This was not the afterlife that the portraits had talked to him about. Fawkes had thought that no one could summon the spirits of the dead like this, only the bodies if they wanted to make Inferi.
He did not know what Harry was speaking with. It seemed all the stranger, because he had known of the Resurrection Stone, had seen it in Albus’s possession, and Fawkes’s previous companion hadn’t managed to summon the dead.
Fawkes leaned closer, almost falling off the branch, and having to spread his wings. Harry swallowed and twisted the Stone. The shades around him faded.
But not before the gleam of sapphire in his joined souls flashed so bright that Fawkes took flight in sheer surprise.
That was it. That was the reason that Harry was able to use the Stone and unite the Hallows when Albus hadn’t been able to. The Horcrux he carried made him Master of Death. The artifacts could consume the souls of their “masters,” but Harry had more than just one human soul within him.
Fawkes had his answer. He could leave now, fly through moons and asteroid belts and seek out the strange, distant intelligences that sang to him from the night sky.
But he didn’t want to. He wanted to see what would happen, and what answer Harry had found.
He darted invisibly through the trees above Harry, and found they were heading for a clearing thick with human bodies and human souls with no thread of gold in them. Fawkes shuddered as he soared ahead of Harry and settled on a branch. He had learned all there was to know of Tom Riddle’s soul when the boy was at school, and had seen the twisted and blackened thing it had become after the creation of his first Horcrux.
But one question he had never known the answer to. Why had one of his feathers landed in Riddle’s wand? He wasn’t worthy to carry it. It would have been more appropriate if it were the feather of a midnight phoenix, save that Fawkes’s secretive Dark brethren were still more noble than to be tarnished by the association.
“I thought he would come.”
Voldemort was repeating the words to himself as he turned his wand over in his hand. Fawkes paused. That was not the wand containing his feather, which would have sung to him even after long years in a murderer’s hand.
That was the Elder Wand.
Fawkes lifted his crest. He thought he understood, now. Albus had believed that Harry had to die at Voldemort’s hands, something Fawkes had never paid much attention to because he had believed the Horcrux would preserve Harry. And since both Harry and Voldemort carried Fawkes’s feathers in their wands, they would never be able to successfully kill each other.
But Harry hadn’t carried a wand in his hand. In fact, Fawkes hadn’t heard the song of the feather in the holly wand since Harry had returned to Hogwarts’s grounds.
And if Voldemort cast a Killing Curse at him powered by the Elder Wand—if he did it without knowing about the Horcrux and thus having a reason to preserve Harry’s life—
Harry would die.
Fawkes did not want that to happen. He still had things to learn, like why the joining of souls had blazed sapphire. And it occurred to him while he knew why Harry could use the Deathly Hallows, he still didn’t know why Voldemort’s soul-shard hadn’t consumed Harry’s.
Harry’s soul must be preserved. There were things Fawkes needed to know.
He took flight into the woods, still silent and invisible, and flew straight towards Harry.
*
Harry raised his head in surprise when a sweet swell of song rose up in front of him. He blinked, and blinked again, seeing the bright bird soaring towards him. It nearly hit him full in the chest before Harry raised an arm in sheer defense and found the phoenix perched there instead.
“Fawkes?”
Fawkes leaned forwards, trilling at him. Harry raised a hand and smiled sadly as he trailed it down the phoenix’s back.
“Have you come to say goodbye?” he asked softly. “The way you sang for Dumbledore when he died?”
Fawkes gave an impatient little jerk of his head and spread his right wing, pointing back towards the castle. Harry shook his head, not afraid that he was misunderstanding, although rationally he should have been. All seemed very clear and peaceful in his mind since he had spoken with his parents, Remus, and Sirius.
“It’s amazing that you want me to live, but I have to die,” he said. “I can’t let Voldemort win.” It was as close as he could come to revealing the real reason why he couldn’t go back to Hogwarts. There was always the chance that Voldemort had spies in the forest and they would overhear Harry saying something about being a Horcrux.
Of course, Harry was pretty sure that Fawkes would understand.
Fawkes tilted his head back and sang angrily, then stabbed his claws deep into the skin of Harry’s arm. Harry narrowed his eyes but said nothing. He had put up with worse pain than this, and just because Fawkes wanted to save his life in a way that nothing and no one could—
Fawkes stuck his head into Harry’s and warbled insistently into his face.
“Well, that’s too bad,” Harry snapped. “Because I have to go.”
Fawkes beat his wings and turned back and forth as if looking for someone to help him. Harry tossed him into the air again. Fawkes circled down and landed on Harry’s head, tugging at his hair. Harry couldn’t help but laugh.
“Phoenixes are eternal creatures,” he said, and reached up and removed Fawkes, holding him in his hands so that Fawkes couldn’t beat his wings and hit Harry with them. He looked into the bright eyes. “A little thing like death shouldn’t matter to you so much. I might see Dumbledore. Do you want me to tell him anything?”
*
Fawkes could not believe a human could be so stubborn. In that, Harry did resemble Albus, but even Albus tended to yield and go along with Fawkes in the end.
You are not to die!
Fawkes couldn’t let that brilliant sapphire vanish from the earth like this. It would have been one thing if Harry had died of old age and Fawkes had known it was coming and watched that flame flicker out. But not like this, not when Harry would die in truth.
There was only one thing to do, something he had only done with a human companion once before, when there had been no other way to save Albus’s life. Fawkes flared his wings so hard that Harry let him go in sheer surprise, and tore his way free of Harry’s hold to land on the forest floor and reached for the part of him that remembered this.
For a long moment, Fawkes thought it wouldn’t work. This was coming down into the world of time and mortality, an unnatural thing for a phoenix to do. Then his body shuddered and flowed like molten gold.
He could hear Harry say something, but not what it was over the transformation of his own heartbeat, from one that sang in tune with the cosmos to one that drove a lumbering human body. Fawkes stumbled, two-legged but no longer having wings to balance him or feathers to cover him.
“What the hell?”
Harry’s voice was hushed, something Fawkes was grateful for. He would need a minute or so to recover his balance, both physically and mentally, and to ready the fire that he would use as his primary weapon. If Voldemort’s people found them before he got that balance, they might end up killing Harry anyway.
“Hello, Harry,” Fawkes said, when he could convince his voice to work.
*
Harry’s jaw had dropped so far that it was starting to hurt.
A man was crouching where Fawkes had been. He had golden skin, although the shimmer in it was already fading, and now it looked more like bronze skin. When he looked up, his eyes were intense and golden, like Remus’s when he was angry, and his hair was a rustling mane of red feathers. Again, it was calming down and looked more like ordinary hair in seconds, short and shaggy.
“What the hell?” was all Harry could repeat for a second, but then he thought again of. Remus, of Remus lying dead, and how he had to do this so that someday Remus’s son could grow up in a world free of Voldemort. He stepped back with a shake of his head. “No, it doesn’t matter. I have to go.”
“Harry Potter!”
Voldemort’s voice rang out from deeper in the forest. Harry would have known it anywhere. He started to turn towards it, and Fawkes shot to his feet and reached out to catch Harry’s wrist with extraordinarily strong fingers.
“You don’t understand,” Harry said in a low voice, pulling against Fawkes’s hold. It seemed much stronger now than it had when he was a bird and had claws. “I have a piece of his soul attached to mine. I have to go and—”
“I know that,” Fawkes said, tossing his head carelessly. “And I know that if you go to him now, you’ll die.”
“Yes, that’s the point.”
Fawkes twisted his head to the side, a gesture that made Harry wince, imagining that happening to his own neck. “Don’t you want to live?”
“Not at the expense of everyone else!”
“Harry Potter!”
Harry braced his feet and tugged with all his strength. Fawkes’s hold broke and he stumbled. Harry turned his face away before he could see Fawkes’s groin or something—did phoenixes turned into humans even have human—stuff?—and shook his head. “I told you, there’s nothing else to do.”
“He has the Elder Wand.”
“I know that, too.”
“It will kill you.”
“I know that! Could you stop stating the obvious?”
Fawkes gave him a steady stare for a second, but also a baffled one. Harry supposed he wasn’t used to someone arguing with him.
“It will kill you,” Fawkes repeated carefully, “because it likes serving the most powerful wizard, and it likes casting the Killing Curse. I’ve seen it happen. But you have mastered the Cloak, and mastered the Resurrection Stone. You have united the Hallows. It will serve you if you command it to. Speak to it, and command it to leave Voldemort, and it will come to you, as it will view you as the most powerful wizard.”
“That’s silly.”
“It is the truth.”
“The Deathly Hallows are—a children’s story—”
“Then what was the Stone you used? The spirits you summoned?”
Harry stopped and closed his eyes.
“And you said that you knew Voldemort possessed the Elder Wand,” Fawkes said, and Harry could hear him stretching and turning restlessly past the closed barrier of his eyelids. Harry could almost picture the way he would be doing it, like a bird. “You know very well that the stories are true, Harry.”
Harry breathed out slowly. “Yes, the Deathly Hallows are real,” he said. “But that doesn’t mean the Master of Death is real. It could be—it’s not something that’s even talked about in the story the way the Hallows are.”
“You are,” Fawkes said, and his voice sounded so close that Harry started and opened his eyes. Fawkes was standing in front of him with his hands lifted, fingers curled, as if he were clinging to air the way that a bird might to the wall of a building. “You are the Master of Death, and you can escape the death that is waiting for you.”
Harry resented feeling hope, especially when it burned away like smoke. “You’re wrong,” he said harshly. “I have to die, and you know the reason why.” He reached up and tapped his fingers against his scar. “It doesn’t matter if I could escape death. It would be wrong of me to do it.”
*
Fawkes stared at Harry, aware that his mouth should probably be open. He opened it a little, but probably not far enough, from Harry’s unimpressed glance.
But…
He had never encountered a human as stubborn as this. For that matter, he had rarely encountered another being as stubborn as this. Albus in his youth didn’t count. The midnight phoenix he had courted until she grew bored and tried to freeze him to death didn’t count, not next to Harry’s determination to die.
“You can command the Elder Wand to do anything you want,” Fawkes said slowly, wondering if he hadn’t emphasized that part enough, if Harry might think that he could only command it to lie down. “You could command it to disembody Voldemort, destroy his spirit, and sever any remaining connections to the world it has left.”
Harry blinked. “You didn’t say that.”
“I thought it went without saying.”
Harry gave him a long glance, and Fawkes sighed and changed his mind. Yes, he would have to say everything around Harry, it seemed, for as long as they chose to be together.
“I don’t know that I can,” Harry said. “Dumbledore never thought of that, and he seems to have thought of everything else.” His voice was low, rough. “He thought I had to die—”
“Harry Potter!”
Harry started and turned towards the sound. Fawkes reached out and grabbed his arm. “Albus never anticipated that you would master the Hallows. He might have hoped for it, given that he left you the Stone, but he couldn’t have anticipated it. Trust me, Harry. I don’t know everything, but I know life and death. And I lived with a wizard who wielded the Elder Wand for years on years, and regularly made it do the impossible.”
Harry half-closed his eyes and stood there for a second. Then he said, “We’ll try it your way. If the worst comes to the worst, then it won’t work, and Voldemort will end up killing me anyway.”
If the worst came to the worst and the Elder Wand didn’t obey the Master of Death, Fawkes fully intended to change back to his phoenix form and fly Harry away, but Harry didn’t want or need to hear that right now. He nodded. “I’ll walk with you.”
Harry waved a hand at Fawkes without looking at him. “Can you conjure a robe or something?”
Fawkes blinked. It seemed a strange request. Then again, the last time he had taken human form, he and Albus had been fighting a dragon, and there was no time for Albus to worry about his nakedness.
Fawkes held up a hand, from which flames sprouted. They increased in number and poured smoothly down the sides of his arms, clothing him in a flowing golden robe that hardened and smoothed out into silk in moments.
“Better?”
“It’ll do.”
*
“I thought you would come.”
Harry swallowed as he stepped into the clearing and met Voldemort’s red eyes. He hadn’t anticipated this. He had thought he would walk in filled with the same serenity that had come to him after he had spoken with the shades of his beloved dead, and fall to the earth when the Killing Curse struck him with the same ease as falling asleep.
But Fawkes had broken up that peace, and when he stepped forwards and stood beside Harry, Voldemort’s gaze faltered.
“What is this?” Voldemort breathed. “Who is this?” The question, in Parseltongue, seemed to be addressed to Harry, since Nagini was floating behind Voldemort and no one else in the clearing spoke Parseltongue as far as Harry knew.
Harry decided that he might as well be childish. His heart was beating hard with terror, and he’d been dragged back into the world again, for all that he didn’t want to be. “Someone you never could have anticipated.”
Voldemort glanced at him sharply. “You should not profane the serpent’s tongue with your own,” he snapped, and his hand tightened on his wand.
The Elder Wand. Harry looked at it and found that it was as Fawkes had said; he knew that wand. It connected to him, dragged at him. He shivered a little with the feeling of something snapping into place inside him, almost the way he imagined the Horcrux might have settled into his soul on that night at Godric’s Hollow.
Except that this was right, and something that had been a long time coming.
Harry shook off the thoughts, and smiled at Voldemort. “Don’t worry, I won’t snog any snakes and profane their tongues with mine.”
Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Fawkes frowning at him. Harry raised an eyebrow. If the phoenix hated jokes, then this wouldn’t be a long—friendship, or time-spent-with-a-human, or whatever this was. Harry had sometimes thought of Fawkes as the Headmaster’s pet, but it felt a little sickening to imagine that of someone capable of turning into a human.
“Pay attention,” Fawkes muttered under his breath.
Harry snorted and looked back at the Elder Wand, which Voldemort was drawing back to strike. It felt as if he were moving part of Harry’s body, and Harry stepped forwards with a newfound confidence and snapped, “Do you hear me?”
Voldemort’s arm froze. No, wait, his muscles were straining, so he could move, but the wand wasn’t. It looked as if it had been simply caught in the air, frozen in place.
“Come to me, please,” Harry said, as calmly and commandingly as he could. The clearing was utterly silent, the Death Eaters staring back and forth between him and Voldemort. He hoped this would be resolved before one of them decided to interfere.
The wand tore itself free of Voldemort’s grip and soared over to him. Harry grinned in exhilaration as his fingers closed around it and it sparkled at him. There was a joy to it that he hadn’t expected.
“What is the meaning of this—”
Voldemort was screaming, but he had never seemed less important. Harry touched the side of the Elder Wand gently, and felt it reaching towards him in gladness.
And he knew in that instant that the wand’s nature had been misunderstood. Yes, it wanted to serve powerful wizards, but that was because its nature would take the imprint of theirs. It would be powerful and cruel in the hand of someone like Voldemort. What it could be in the hand of someone like Harry…
It could be compassionate. The wand thought it might like to try that, after centuries of the other way.
“Give me that back, Potter!”
Harry raised his head. He could see some of the Death Eaters edging backwards into the Forbidden Forest. If they ran because they thought Voldemort was pretty weak to be disarmed without a wand, that was fine. It just meant that Harry probably wouldn’t have to face them.
“I don’t think so,” Harry said, and aimed the wand at Voldemort. It sang in his hand, and power welled up within him, seeming to drip down from his scar like the blood that Voldemort had so often drawn forth from it. “I think that this is going to happen instead. I’ll ask you to sever him,” he told the wand. “Destroy him utterly, and every tie he has to Earth. Please.”
The wand sang, and power spread forth from it. It was the glinting white of a unicorn, and it soared straight for Voldemort.
Harry thought there was still the chance that Voldemort might Apparate away from it. But he stared at it uncomprehendingly, probably not thinking that anything Harry could do would affect both him and the Horcruxes.
The magic slammed into Voldemort, and he screamed as it did. Harry saw most of the rest of the Death Eaters running away now. He made himself watch, though, as the power unraveled Voldemort’s body in a spray of blood and flesh that disappeared as it fell, and popped the protective bubble Nagini was in and dismantled her the same way.
Honestly, Harry was half-prepared for the magic to strike at him, too, and pull the Horcrux out of him, an experience he might not survive.
Instead, a deep, singing shudder ran through his soul.
*
Fawkes stared with wide eyes, human in form but far more than human in power, unable to believe what he was seeing. There was no analogue for this, and Fawkes had seen sunrises on planets built of methane.
The power of the Elder Wand traveled in two directions. The first strike did indeed hurt Voldemort and his snake and take them apart, and sear and tear apart the spirit that tried to flee as it flew.
The second surge struck Harry like a backwash, and—
The sapphire inside him spread all through his soul, consuming the Horcrux and transforming it. Suddenly it was part of Harry, joined with a visible scar to the rest of his soul, but still part of him.
But sapphire.
Fawkes did not know that could happen. He had thought the Elder Wand would simply keep Harry alive, perhaps by expelling the Horcrux, although that would have made Harry far less interesting had it happened. Instead, it seemed that the Elder Wand had obeyed Harry’s directions literally, severing the tie that bound Voldemort to the Horcrux and making it Harry’s, instead.
Fawkes’s hands shook. He had no idea what this meant. He had no idea what the future consequences would be. He—
He wanted to stay. He wanted to stay with Harry and see what happened.
And he wanted to—
It had been centuries since he had walked in a human form. It had been useful sometimes to gain access to libraries and spells, but Fawkes was a phoenix, and a form clad in feathers and bearing wings was his natural state.
So he had thought.
But even more than that, his natural state was as a seeker of knowledge, someone who must understand everything that existed. This was something he did not understand, and thought he would probably never experience again. If that meant staying human for a while and being Harry’s friend, that was what he would do.
Harry turned to him with a grin. “Hey, you were right. Thanks.”
Looking into Harry’s eyes, seeing the soul beyond it that still glowed sapphire with an unanswered question, Fawkes thought that perhaps he would be more than Harry’s friend. After all, the best way to experience souls, like the one he wanted to understand, was with intimacy and laughter and love.
And there was something else buried in Fawkes’s soul as he reached out and took Harry’s hand, which he did not allow himself to voice. Legends said the Master of Death was immortal. Legends granted the Elder Wand untold power, and the one who could ask that wand to do things might perform feats far more wondrous than by commanding it.
Powerful enough to transform into a phoenix, perhaps. Powerful enough to endure forever despite having been born human.
Fawkes had never found a mate, among phoenixes or any other species he could transform into.
For the chance, he would gladly stay with Harry.
“You’re welcome,” he said softly, and smiled back.
The End.
Disclaimer: J. K. Rowling and associates own these characters. I am writing this story for fun and not profit.
Pairing: Harry/Fawkes
Content Notes: AU starting with the last few chapters of DH, shapeshifting, angst, future cross-species relationship, discussion of past violence and character deaths
Rating: PG-13
Wordcount: 4400
Summary: Fawkes thought about leaving the wizarding world altogether after the death of Albus Dumbledore. But there is another that needs his care and has attracted his fascination. Fawkes does not intend to let Harry Potter walk to his death.
Author’s Notes: This is one of my “Songs of the Stormy Season” one-shots being posted between Halloween and the winter solstice. Luni_le_Fay requested a Fawkes/Harry story with Fawkes not allowing Harry to sacrifice himself. Hope you enjoy.
Change Comes to the Changeless
Fawkes turned in a slow circle above the Forbidden Forest. His wings rose and fell in the pattern that would make him invisible to the humans walking below. A unicorn could see him if she glanced up, but Fawkes knew the herd would never give his secrets away.
He had meant to leave. The grounds and castle of Hogwarts glowed in his memory after a century there with his companion, Albus Dumbledore, but that glow would fade. Already wider skies and other moons were tugging Fawkes away. He had never meant to spend as long as he had in this world.
But his companion had been long-lived for a human, and had granted him many calm years and much variety of experience. Albus had brought silver instruments into the office that would speak to Fawkes of the secrets of the deep earth, and portraits who let him understand the only afterlife humans would ever know.
For a creature who lived to understand everything that existed, that had been an invaluable experience.
But now there was another, another potential human companion when Fawkes had thought he would never take another of the species.
Fawkes dived silently and swooped through the trees on the outer edge of the wood. The potential companion walked below.
More than potential. He blazed.
Fawkes hung there, invisible, and watched Harry Potter. He hadn’t understood, the first time he had met the boy. Many humans, like Albus, had a fine thread of gold running through them that represented the knowledge or wisdom they could pass on to a phoenix. But Harry had shone sapphire, the color of a question Fawkes had never thought to ask. So he had silently sought the answer to that question, and sometimes invisibly accompanied Harry to class to sit on the professor’s desk, and sometimes asked the portraits whether they had ever seen someone glow sapphire before, and sometimes ventured to the hidden eyries on high mountain slopes to speak to other phoenixes, and sometimes traveled to the world of the soul in dreams to look at Harry’s soul in puzzlement.
Fawkes had learned early on that Harry had a bit of someone else’s soul intertwined with his own. But it was not possession, which Fawkes knew, and it was not the helpless merging of one telepath’s mind with another’s, which Fawkes had learned on the distant world of Alondria, and it was not the dim shine of soulmate magic, which Fawkes had understood even before his first burning day.
The bit of soul was Voldemort’s, and it should have consumed Harry’s. Yet it had not.
Fawkes needed to know why not. It was a need as imperative as the one to molt.
He had accompanied Harry silently and invisibly throughout much of his journey to destroy the Horcruxes, and waited for the moment when Harry would understand and blurt out the answer. But he never had.
Now, though, it seemed he had gone into the castle and found his answer there. And he was walking silently through the trees, a stone of such power clutched in one hand that Fawkes was wary.
He landed on a branch not far above Harry’s head, and listened and watched. He could see the shades that Harry spoke to, but only if he tilted his head and flattened his crest and flew half a step into the world of the dead without moving. This was not the afterlife that the portraits had talked to him about. Fawkes had thought that no one could summon the spirits of the dead like this, only the bodies if they wanted to make Inferi.
He did not know what Harry was speaking with. It seemed all the stranger, because he had known of the Resurrection Stone, had seen it in Albus’s possession, and Fawkes’s previous companion hadn’t managed to summon the dead.
Fawkes leaned closer, almost falling off the branch, and having to spread his wings. Harry swallowed and twisted the Stone. The shades around him faded.
But not before the gleam of sapphire in his joined souls flashed so bright that Fawkes took flight in sheer surprise.
That was it. That was the reason that Harry was able to use the Stone and unite the Hallows when Albus hadn’t been able to. The Horcrux he carried made him Master of Death. The artifacts could consume the souls of their “masters,” but Harry had more than just one human soul within him.
Fawkes had his answer. He could leave now, fly through moons and asteroid belts and seek out the strange, distant intelligences that sang to him from the night sky.
But he didn’t want to. He wanted to see what would happen, and what answer Harry had found.
He darted invisibly through the trees above Harry, and found they were heading for a clearing thick with human bodies and human souls with no thread of gold in them. Fawkes shuddered as he soared ahead of Harry and settled on a branch. He had learned all there was to know of Tom Riddle’s soul when the boy was at school, and had seen the twisted and blackened thing it had become after the creation of his first Horcrux.
But one question he had never known the answer to. Why had one of his feathers landed in Riddle’s wand? He wasn’t worthy to carry it. It would have been more appropriate if it were the feather of a midnight phoenix, save that Fawkes’s secretive Dark brethren were still more noble than to be tarnished by the association.
“I thought he would come.”
Voldemort was repeating the words to himself as he turned his wand over in his hand. Fawkes paused. That was not the wand containing his feather, which would have sung to him even after long years in a murderer’s hand.
That was the Elder Wand.
Fawkes lifted his crest. He thought he understood, now. Albus had believed that Harry had to die at Voldemort’s hands, something Fawkes had never paid much attention to because he had believed the Horcrux would preserve Harry. And since both Harry and Voldemort carried Fawkes’s feathers in their wands, they would never be able to successfully kill each other.
But Harry hadn’t carried a wand in his hand. In fact, Fawkes hadn’t heard the song of the feather in the holly wand since Harry had returned to Hogwarts’s grounds.
And if Voldemort cast a Killing Curse at him powered by the Elder Wand—if he did it without knowing about the Horcrux and thus having a reason to preserve Harry’s life—
Harry would die.
Fawkes did not want that to happen. He still had things to learn, like why the joining of souls had blazed sapphire. And it occurred to him while he knew why Harry could use the Deathly Hallows, he still didn’t know why Voldemort’s soul-shard hadn’t consumed Harry’s.
Harry’s soul must be preserved. There were things Fawkes needed to know.
He took flight into the woods, still silent and invisible, and flew straight towards Harry.
*
Harry raised his head in surprise when a sweet swell of song rose up in front of him. He blinked, and blinked again, seeing the bright bird soaring towards him. It nearly hit him full in the chest before Harry raised an arm in sheer defense and found the phoenix perched there instead.
“Fawkes?”
Fawkes leaned forwards, trilling at him. Harry raised a hand and smiled sadly as he trailed it down the phoenix’s back.
“Have you come to say goodbye?” he asked softly. “The way you sang for Dumbledore when he died?”
Fawkes gave an impatient little jerk of his head and spread his right wing, pointing back towards the castle. Harry shook his head, not afraid that he was misunderstanding, although rationally he should have been. All seemed very clear and peaceful in his mind since he had spoken with his parents, Remus, and Sirius.
“It’s amazing that you want me to live, but I have to die,” he said. “I can’t let Voldemort win.” It was as close as he could come to revealing the real reason why he couldn’t go back to Hogwarts. There was always the chance that Voldemort had spies in the forest and they would overhear Harry saying something about being a Horcrux.
Of course, Harry was pretty sure that Fawkes would understand.
Fawkes tilted his head back and sang angrily, then stabbed his claws deep into the skin of Harry’s arm. Harry narrowed his eyes but said nothing. He had put up with worse pain than this, and just because Fawkes wanted to save his life in a way that nothing and no one could—
Fawkes stuck his head into Harry’s and warbled insistently into his face.
“Well, that’s too bad,” Harry snapped. “Because I have to go.”
Fawkes beat his wings and turned back and forth as if looking for someone to help him. Harry tossed him into the air again. Fawkes circled down and landed on Harry’s head, tugging at his hair. Harry couldn’t help but laugh.
“Phoenixes are eternal creatures,” he said, and reached up and removed Fawkes, holding him in his hands so that Fawkes couldn’t beat his wings and hit Harry with them. He looked into the bright eyes. “A little thing like death shouldn’t matter to you so much. I might see Dumbledore. Do you want me to tell him anything?”
*
Fawkes could not believe a human could be so stubborn. In that, Harry did resemble Albus, but even Albus tended to yield and go along with Fawkes in the end.
You are not to die!
Fawkes couldn’t let that brilliant sapphire vanish from the earth like this. It would have been one thing if Harry had died of old age and Fawkes had known it was coming and watched that flame flicker out. But not like this, not when Harry would die in truth.
There was only one thing to do, something he had only done with a human companion once before, when there had been no other way to save Albus’s life. Fawkes flared his wings so hard that Harry let him go in sheer surprise, and tore his way free of Harry’s hold to land on the forest floor and reached for the part of him that remembered this.
For a long moment, Fawkes thought it wouldn’t work. This was coming down into the world of time and mortality, an unnatural thing for a phoenix to do. Then his body shuddered and flowed like molten gold.
He could hear Harry say something, but not what it was over the transformation of his own heartbeat, from one that sang in tune with the cosmos to one that drove a lumbering human body. Fawkes stumbled, two-legged but no longer having wings to balance him or feathers to cover him.
“What the hell?”
Harry’s voice was hushed, something Fawkes was grateful for. He would need a minute or so to recover his balance, both physically and mentally, and to ready the fire that he would use as his primary weapon. If Voldemort’s people found them before he got that balance, they might end up killing Harry anyway.
“Hello, Harry,” Fawkes said, when he could convince his voice to work.
*
Harry’s jaw had dropped so far that it was starting to hurt.
A man was crouching where Fawkes had been. He had golden skin, although the shimmer in it was already fading, and now it looked more like bronze skin. When he looked up, his eyes were intense and golden, like Remus’s when he was angry, and his hair was a rustling mane of red feathers. Again, it was calming down and looked more like ordinary hair in seconds, short and shaggy.
“What the hell?” was all Harry could repeat for a second, but then he thought again of. Remus, of Remus lying dead, and how he had to do this so that someday Remus’s son could grow up in a world free of Voldemort. He stepped back with a shake of his head. “No, it doesn’t matter. I have to go.”
“Harry Potter!”
Voldemort’s voice rang out from deeper in the forest. Harry would have known it anywhere. He started to turn towards it, and Fawkes shot to his feet and reached out to catch Harry’s wrist with extraordinarily strong fingers.
“You don’t understand,” Harry said in a low voice, pulling against Fawkes’s hold. It seemed much stronger now than it had when he was a bird and had claws. “I have a piece of his soul attached to mine. I have to go and—”
“I know that,” Fawkes said, tossing his head carelessly. “And I know that if you go to him now, you’ll die.”
“Yes, that’s the point.”
Fawkes twisted his head to the side, a gesture that made Harry wince, imagining that happening to his own neck. “Don’t you want to live?”
“Not at the expense of everyone else!”
“Harry Potter!”
Harry braced his feet and tugged with all his strength. Fawkes’s hold broke and he stumbled. Harry turned his face away before he could see Fawkes’s groin or something—did phoenixes turned into humans even have human—stuff?—and shook his head. “I told you, there’s nothing else to do.”
“He has the Elder Wand.”
“I know that, too.”
“It will kill you.”
“I know that! Could you stop stating the obvious?”
Fawkes gave him a steady stare for a second, but also a baffled one. Harry supposed he wasn’t used to someone arguing with him.
“It will kill you,” Fawkes repeated carefully, “because it likes serving the most powerful wizard, and it likes casting the Killing Curse. I’ve seen it happen. But you have mastered the Cloak, and mastered the Resurrection Stone. You have united the Hallows. It will serve you if you command it to. Speak to it, and command it to leave Voldemort, and it will come to you, as it will view you as the most powerful wizard.”
“That’s silly.”
“It is the truth.”
“The Deathly Hallows are—a children’s story—”
“Then what was the Stone you used? The spirits you summoned?”
Harry stopped and closed his eyes.
“And you said that you knew Voldemort possessed the Elder Wand,” Fawkes said, and Harry could hear him stretching and turning restlessly past the closed barrier of his eyelids. Harry could almost picture the way he would be doing it, like a bird. “You know very well that the stories are true, Harry.”
Harry breathed out slowly. “Yes, the Deathly Hallows are real,” he said. “But that doesn’t mean the Master of Death is real. It could be—it’s not something that’s even talked about in the story the way the Hallows are.”
“You are,” Fawkes said, and his voice sounded so close that Harry started and opened his eyes. Fawkes was standing in front of him with his hands lifted, fingers curled, as if he were clinging to air the way that a bird might to the wall of a building. “You are the Master of Death, and you can escape the death that is waiting for you.”
Harry resented feeling hope, especially when it burned away like smoke. “You’re wrong,” he said harshly. “I have to die, and you know the reason why.” He reached up and tapped his fingers against his scar. “It doesn’t matter if I could escape death. It would be wrong of me to do it.”
*
Fawkes stared at Harry, aware that his mouth should probably be open. He opened it a little, but probably not far enough, from Harry’s unimpressed glance.
But…
He had never encountered a human as stubborn as this. For that matter, he had rarely encountered another being as stubborn as this. Albus in his youth didn’t count. The midnight phoenix he had courted until she grew bored and tried to freeze him to death didn’t count, not next to Harry’s determination to die.
“You can command the Elder Wand to do anything you want,” Fawkes said slowly, wondering if he hadn’t emphasized that part enough, if Harry might think that he could only command it to lie down. “You could command it to disembody Voldemort, destroy his spirit, and sever any remaining connections to the world it has left.”
Harry blinked. “You didn’t say that.”
“I thought it went without saying.”
Harry gave him a long glance, and Fawkes sighed and changed his mind. Yes, he would have to say everything around Harry, it seemed, for as long as they chose to be together.
“I don’t know that I can,” Harry said. “Dumbledore never thought of that, and he seems to have thought of everything else.” His voice was low, rough. “He thought I had to die—”
“Harry Potter!”
Harry started and turned towards the sound. Fawkes reached out and grabbed his arm. “Albus never anticipated that you would master the Hallows. He might have hoped for it, given that he left you the Stone, but he couldn’t have anticipated it. Trust me, Harry. I don’t know everything, but I know life and death. And I lived with a wizard who wielded the Elder Wand for years on years, and regularly made it do the impossible.”
Harry half-closed his eyes and stood there for a second. Then he said, “We’ll try it your way. If the worst comes to the worst, then it won’t work, and Voldemort will end up killing me anyway.”
If the worst came to the worst and the Elder Wand didn’t obey the Master of Death, Fawkes fully intended to change back to his phoenix form and fly Harry away, but Harry didn’t want or need to hear that right now. He nodded. “I’ll walk with you.”
Harry waved a hand at Fawkes without looking at him. “Can you conjure a robe or something?”
Fawkes blinked. It seemed a strange request. Then again, the last time he had taken human form, he and Albus had been fighting a dragon, and there was no time for Albus to worry about his nakedness.
Fawkes held up a hand, from which flames sprouted. They increased in number and poured smoothly down the sides of his arms, clothing him in a flowing golden robe that hardened and smoothed out into silk in moments.
“Better?”
“It’ll do.”
*
“I thought you would come.”
Harry swallowed as he stepped into the clearing and met Voldemort’s red eyes. He hadn’t anticipated this. He had thought he would walk in filled with the same serenity that had come to him after he had spoken with the shades of his beloved dead, and fall to the earth when the Killing Curse struck him with the same ease as falling asleep.
But Fawkes had broken up that peace, and when he stepped forwards and stood beside Harry, Voldemort’s gaze faltered.
“What is this?” Voldemort breathed. “Who is this?” The question, in Parseltongue, seemed to be addressed to Harry, since Nagini was floating behind Voldemort and no one else in the clearing spoke Parseltongue as far as Harry knew.
Harry decided that he might as well be childish. His heart was beating hard with terror, and he’d been dragged back into the world again, for all that he didn’t want to be. “Someone you never could have anticipated.”
Voldemort glanced at him sharply. “You should not profane the serpent’s tongue with your own,” he snapped, and his hand tightened on his wand.
The Elder Wand. Harry looked at it and found that it was as Fawkes had said; he knew that wand. It connected to him, dragged at him. He shivered a little with the feeling of something snapping into place inside him, almost the way he imagined the Horcrux might have settled into his soul on that night at Godric’s Hollow.
Except that this was right, and something that had been a long time coming.
Harry shook off the thoughts, and smiled at Voldemort. “Don’t worry, I won’t snog any snakes and profane their tongues with mine.”
Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Fawkes frowning at him. Harry raised an eyebrow. If the phoenix hated jokes, then this wouldn’t be a long—friendship, or time-spent-with-a-human, or whatever this was. Harry had sometimes thought of Fawkes as the Headmaster’s pet, but it felt a little sickening to imagine that of someone capable of turning into a human.
“Pay attention,” Fawkes muttered under his breath.
Harry snorted and looked back at the Elder Wand, which Voldemort was drawing back to strike. It felt as if he were moving part of Harry’s body, and Harry stepped forwards with a newfound confidence and snapped, “Do you hear me?”
Voldemort’s arm froze. No, wait, his muscles were straining, so he could move, but the wand wasn’t. It looked as if it had been simply caught in the air, frozen in place.
“Come to me, please,” Harry said, as calmly and commandingly as he could. The clearing was utterly silent, the Death Eaters staring back and forth between him and Voldemort. He hoped this would be resolved before one of them decided to interfere.
The wand tore itself free of Voldemort’s grip and soared over to him. Harry grinned in exhilaration as his fingers closed around it and it sparkled at him. There was a joy to it that he hadn’t expected.
“What is the meaning of this—”
Voldemort was screaming, but he had never seemed less important. Harry touched the side of the Elder Wand gently, and felt it reaching towards him in gladness.
And he knew in that instant that the wand’s nature had been misunderstood. Yes, it wanted to serve powerful wizards, but that was because its nature would take the imprint of theirs. It would be powerful and cruel in the hand of someone like Voldemort. What it could be in the hand of someone like Harry…
It could be compassionate. The wand thought it might like to try that, after centuries of the other way.
“Give me that back, Potter!”
Harry raised his head. He could see some of the Death Eaters edging backwards into the Forbidden Forest. If they ran because they thought Voldemort was pretty weak to be disarmed without a wand, that was fine. It just meant that Harry probably wouldn’t have to face them.
“I don’t think so,” Harry said, and aimed the wand at Voldemort. It sang in his hand, and power welled up within him, seeming to drip down from his scar like the blood that Voldemort had so often drawn forth from it. “I think that this is going to happen instead. I’ll ask you to sever him,” he told the wand. “Destroy him utterly, and every tie he has to Earth. Please.”
The wand sang, and power spread forth from it. It was the glinting white of a unicorn, and it soared straight for Voldemort.
Harry thought there was still the chance that Voldemort might Apparate away from it. But he stared at it uncomprehendingly, probably not thinking that anything Harry could do would affect both him and the Horcruxes.
The magic slammed into Voldemort, and he screamed as it did. Harry saw most of the rest of the Death Eaters running away now. He made himself watch, though, as the power unraveled Voldemort’s body in a spray of blood and flesh that disappeared as it fell, and popped the protective bubble Nagini was in and dismantled her the same way.
Honestly, Harry was half-prepared for the magic to strike at him, too, and pull the Horcrux out of him, an experience he might not survive.
Instead, a deep, singing shudder ran through his soul.
*
Fawkes stared with wide eyes, human in form but far more than human in power, unable to believe what he was seeing. There was no analogue for this, and Fawkes had seen sunrises on planets built of methane.
The power of the Elder Wand traveled in two directions. The first strike did indeed hurt Voldemort and his snake and take them apart, and sear and tear apart the spirit that tried to flee as it flew.
The second surge struck Harry like a backwash, and—
The sapphire inside him spread all through his soul, consuming the Horcrux and transforming it. Suddenly it was part of Harry, joined with a visible scar to the rest of his soul, but still part of him.
But sapphire.
Fawkes did not know that could happen. He had thought the Elder Wand would simply keep Harry alive, perhaps by expelling the Horcrux, although that would have made Harry far less interesting had it happened. Instead, it seemed that the Elder Wand had obeyed Harry’s directions literally, severing the tie that bound Voldemort to the Horcrux and making it Harry’s, instead.
Fawkes’s hands shook. He had no idea what this meant. He had no idea what the future consequences would be. He—
He wanted to stay. He wanted to stay with Harry and see what happened.
And he wanted to—
It had been centuries since he had walked in a human form. It had been useful sometimes to gain access to libraries and spells, but Fawkes was a phoenix, and a form clad in feathers and bearing wings was his natural state.
So he had thought.
But even more than that, his natural state was as a seeker of knowledge, someone who must understand everything that existed. This was something he did not understand, and thought he would probably never experience again. If that meant staying human for a while and being Harry’s friend, that was what he would do.
Harry turned to him with a grin. “Hey, you were right. Thanks.”
Looking into Harry’s eyes, seeing the soul beyond it that still glowed sapphire with an unanswered question, Fawkes thought that perhaps he would be more than Harry’s friend. After all, the best way to experience souls, like the one he wanted to understand, was with intimacy and laughter and love.
And there was something else buried in Fawkes’s soul as he reached out and took Harry’s hand, which he did not allow himself to voice. Legends said the Master of Death was immortal. Legends granted the Elder Wand untold power, and the one who could ask that wand to do things might perform feats far more wondrous than by commanding it.
Powerful enough to transform into a phoenix, perhaps. Powerful enough to endure forever despite having been born human.
Fawkes had never found a mate, among phoenixes or any other species he could transform into.
For the chance, he would gladly stay with Harry.
“You’re welcome,” he said softly, and smiled back.
The End.