[From Samhain to the Solstice]: Truth is Wilder, gen, 6/7

[lomonaaeren]

Thank you again for all the reviews!

Part Six

Harry unwraps the box slowly. He didn’t get a lot of presents last year, but that was fine. Even a few are more than he ever got when he lived with the Dursleys.

This present is from David, though, and Harry has to admit he’s a little curious to see what his brother thought good enough to send along.

When he opens the box, there’s a smaller box, made a lacquered dark wood, and a note from David. Harry unfolds it, but it doesn’t really explain much.

Happy Christmas, Harry! I know that you don’t need one of these, but I met someone who insisted that it was the one you would have had if you’d been a wizard. I thought I’d send it along in case you could still use it.

Even more curious now, Harry puts down the note and opens the black lacquer box. There’s a wand inside.

He lifts it up and turns it back and forth. He hasn’t learned a lot about different kinds of wand wood, but this looks like ebony, like the wand of a young werewolf named Marcia Harry sometimes studies with. He has no idea of the core, but he doesn’t suppose it matters. The wand is a curiosity, not something he’ll actually use. But it’s interesting to see what he could have had if he was a wizard.

His magic materializes at his feet and stares up at the wand with sharp eyes.

“It’s not a threat to you,” Harry points out to his magic. “I’m not going to use it. I can’t even cast with it.”

His magic flows up his legs and encircles his waist for a long moment, bristling with random feathers and horns, attention still on the wand. Harry shakes his head. “I promise that I’m only holding this because it was a present from David,” he tells the magic. “Not because I want to leave you behind.”

His magic sticks out a tendril and pokes the wand.

“That’s not going to do any—”

Poke, poke, poke.

Harry sighs and tries to take the wand away. It’s probably going to be like the owls that he sometimes gets. He’ll just have to put the wand in a safe place until his magic calms down and realizes that Harry isn’t replacing it.

But suddenly his magic flows into the wand. Or part of it. A lot is still outside, and the wand is stuck like a quill into a bristling black spine. Harry stares at it, and then tugs on the wand.

It’s firmly embedded. His magic lifts its head and snarls a little at him.

“You can’t possibly use that.”

The magic curls around the wand and waggles it back and forth, like it’s a kid that’s gone to Ollivander’s shop and found the wand for its own.

“No, really, you can’t do that.”

The magic ripples around the wand, and down to the bed, and around Harry’s feet. Harry reaches out slowly. His power is bringing the wand towards him, but Harry isn’t sure what it wants him to do. Surely it can’t want him to use it? Harry has long since decided that he gets along fine without a wand, and he doesn’t really want to be a “usual’ wizard who would need one.

His fingers come into contact with the smooth ebony wand.

There’s a sharp sizzle down his arm, one that makes Harry cry out in pain. Something leaps out of the wand like it’s been expelled, and his magic promptly lets the ebony wood drop and races after that thing.

The core, Harry realizes, staring at it, as the magic holds it up and parades around with it. It appears to be a hair of some kind, but about the only thing Harry can tell in the dim firelight of his room is that it isn’t a unicorn hair, because it would be shining a brighter white.

His magic pools around it, and winds into it, and then seems to—

Take the hair into itself. Or become part of it. Harry doesn’t know exactly what he would call it, but his magic spirals towards the ceiling, singing, in the form of a black phoenix, the song breaking around Harry like fire.

It lands on his shoulder and rubs its beak against his face. Harry reaches up uncertainly, caressing his magic. He wonders if it will feel differently now that it has incorporated the wand core, whatever the hair really was, into itself.

The feathers do feel a bit different, but it takes Harry time to realize why. Then he gasps as they brush against his fingers, and one breaks away and drifts down like a regular feather.

The wand core made his magic more substantial. The forms it takes more real.

“You can manifest in even more ways now, can’t you?” Harry asks it softly. “Help me mimic even more spells, or do things that no normal wizard with his magic stuck inside his body could do?”

His magic spreads its wings and croons, and the sound of what seems to be real phoenix song fills the room. Harry tucks his chin into the phoenix’s breast feathers and closes his eyes with a smile.

I’ll have to tell David that this was a great Christmas present.

*

“Are you sure that you can’t write to Harry and get any more specifics?”

David hushes Ron with a wince, glancing back over his shoulder to make sure that no one else is in the corridor with them. The twins’ map said there wasn’t, but it’s been ten minutes and the twins haven’t come back from the end of the staircase that led down from another secret passage. The twins said they never saw the staircase before.

They’re close to the bowels of Hogwarts, and David can feel his hair standing on end on his arms and his tongue prickling. It’s pretty much the sensation of intense magic in the air that Harry described.

The most magical place in Hogwarts.

It reassures David, a little, to know that Dumbledore’s office is apparently the second most magical place. Dumbledore ought to be able to take care of the Chamber and the creature, whatever it is, when they find it.

If he will do it.

David still can’t understand why the Petrifications are happening and no one is doing anything. Other than them, anyway. People are creeping around in fright, and the professors just gave them an earlier curfew, like the students are the ones doing something wrong!

David doesn’t think very highly of Dumbledore or Professor McGonagall right now. Or anyone, really, but it’s new to think of the others with the same disdain that he thinks of Lockhart and Snape.

There’s a noise at the bottom of the staircase. David grips his wand tightly and recites a few jinxes to himself.

But it turns out to be Fred, grinning up at them with dirt on his face. “You will not believe this!” he singsongs. “Come down and see!”

Hermione is visibly nervous as she takes the stairs, and Neville is worse. Ron glances at David once before he walks down. David stiffens his spine. He has to be strong for all of them and make sure that they can walk into whatever chamber, or other place, the twins have found.

Oddly enough, this kind of fear is easier to deal with than the all-consuming fear he dealt with last term when he thought of facing Voldemort.

Whatever this is, he’s pretty sure it’s not Voldemort.

*

“Fascinating,” Madame Delacour said the first time that Harry told her about how his magic absorbed the wand core, but she didn’t say much else about it at the time. They just kept working together, and Harry got good enough at seeing through his magic’s eyes and extending his senses that he can send it quite far away now, snatch objects larger than his magic should be able to carry, and manifest as a feeling of fear that would scare some enemies away before they can even come close enough to be sure of what he is.

Today, though, Madame Delacour is sitting up in her chair, her eyes glittering. Harry sits down in front of her and waits obediently for whatever the lesson is going to be.

“You said that your magic took the shape of a phoenix immediately after it swallowed the wand core.”

“Yes, Madame Delacour.”

“And that it has been stronger and more solid since.”

Harry nods.

“I wonder,” says Madame Delacour, her eyes resting thoughtfully on the coil of blackness next to Harry’s side, in the form of a snake today, “if your magic could allow you to take the forms of the beasts it assumes.”

Harry starts. That’s not something he ever thought about. “Isn’t that sort of what I’m doing when I grow claws on my hands?” he asks. “Or even when I fly with the magic in its—body?” It’s sort of odd to talk about his magic as having a body, but, well, it really is like that when it’s in a solid enough shape.

Madame Delacour shakes her head. “You are acting then as someone with a familiar bond might, taking on some of its traits. But you do not transform your own body.”

“No. I just—add on to it?”

“Yes, that would be perhaps the best way to describe it.” Madame Delacour regards him in a way that makes Harry squirm. He doesn’t think she sees him as just an experiment—she would have shown that before now—but it’s a little uncomfortable. “Do you think that you can fully transform?”

“I never thought about it.”

His magic surges up and wraps its coils around Harry. “We could do it,” it says in that voice like flickering flame and shadow. “We could do it. We could do anything when we are together.”

Harry smiles and strokes down the long dark neck, but his thoughts are elsewhere. No, he hasn’t thought of this before. He’s read about Animagi, and sometimes thought he might like to become one, and he’s read David’s letters about James Potter and some of his friends being Animagi. But this?

This would be even better than what they could do, because he would be able to turn into more than one animal.

And better than the werewolves, too. Harry likes most of the werewolf children, except Patrick, but they do tend to talk about their strength and their ability to transform under the full moon as if it makes them better than he is.

He leans forwards. “Tell me what you were thinking about, Madame Delacour.”

*

“This has to be the Chamber of Secrets.”

David nods, overwhelmed. He and Ron and Hermione and Neville and the twins are standing in front of a huge pair of double doors covered with emeralds and twining snakes. They came out at the bottom of the staircase into a tunnel filled with the bones of countless small animals and the skin of a giant snake.

It’s a basilisk that’s been Petrifying people after all.

“We need to go back and get someone,” Hermione whispers, sounding lost and alone. “We—we have to, David. There’s no way that we can fight a basilisk by ourselves.”

David agrees with that. At the same time, he knows from the glances the twins are exchanging that that isn’t going to be the end of that.

“Who said anything about fighting a basilisk?” George asks, sure enough.

“We just want to go in and have a look around,” Fred says.

“We came all this way—”

“And we’re going to say that we turned around and walked away without even attempting to see the legendary Chamber of Secrets?”

“Pretty poor-spirited.”

“Pretty cowardly.”

From the way that Ron’s chin is coming up, David knows that the twins have convinced him, at least. But he turns around and looks at Neville and Hermione, and they’re both so white-faced that he thinks they might actually faint.

“No,” he says firmly. “I don’t care how much you want to see the Chamber of Secrets. You’ll have to do it without us. I don’t even know how we would get in there.”

“How does the Heir get in there?”

“How should I know? I’m not the Heir of Slytherin!”

“Well, someone has to be letting it out,” Fred says, and the lines of his face are so stubborn that David wonders if he’ll have to Stun him to make him leave the door behind. “I doubt they drag open these huge doors all the time. So there has to be a secret password or something like that.”

“We just need to find it.” George nods.

“Good bloody luck,” David says flatly. “I’m going up to talk to Dumbledore.”

“The same Dumbledore who’s done nothing about Finch-Fletchley and Creevey and Mrs. Norris getting Petrified? You think he’s going to do something now? Why would this be any different?”

“Because I’m going to tell him that I’ll tell the entire school if he doesn’t.”

George blinks. Then he and Fred exchange thoughtful glances.

“That might be worth seeing,” they say together, and step away from the doors into the Chamber.

David sighs as they turn away. Hermione smiles at him, even though her lips tremble, and Neville squeezes David’s hand before he turns and bolts up the stairs. Ron grumbles under his breath, but David is sure that he made the right decision, since even the twins follow without a murmur of protest.

It is a basilisk, and no matter what David tells himself about the battle training he’s received, there’s no way that he’s going to go into the Chamber and face—that thing.

The Headmaster will have to do it.

*

“Are you ready to try again?”

Harry nods determinedly. His first attempt to meld with his magic and transform was—well, call it what it was, a disaster.

Everything seemed to be going well up until the point when he actually flowed into the phoenix body of his magic. He was able to spread his arms and feel them as wings, and his magic surrounded him like a Cushioning Charm. Then he flapped his wings and tried to fly off the edge of the bed.

And he crashed, and his flesh crawled and writhed, and he screamed, because it seemed that he was bleeding out of himself into his magic and losing everything that made him Harry, fading, no longer having a body—

His magic ejected him, and he landed on the floor, and he was all right. But the dreadful sensation of fading just went on and on, until Miss Miranda had to Stun him. Harry still flushes when he thinks how terrible the fuss was.

At least he did it in private, and only Madame Delacour and Mis Miranda saw. Starfire came to check on him when Harry missed her class, but she didn’t see the actual attempt.

“Are you sure?”

“Yes, Madame Delacour. I’m sure. I’m ready. I promise.”

She eyes him once more, and then nods, sitting back. “I will be ready to restrain you if necessary.”

Harry’s magic growls, but Harry soothes it with a gentle touch to its back. It’s a phoenix again, because that’s the form it seems to prefer since it took the core out of the wand David sent him, and Harry has to admit that being able to fly and sing phoenix song and things like that seems pretty cool.

“Ready,” his magic says, and its tail lashes, a snake for a second’s, before turning back into a feathered dark mass.

Harry leans forwards, and lets himself flow into the phoenix.

This time, he goes slowly and concentrates on the sensation, rather than thinking about what it will be like to fly with his own wings, which he was thinking about last time. He lets his body flow like water, and reassures himself again and again that his magic is part of him, that he isn’t going to just bleed away, that everything is present here to cradle him and hold him—

I am, says his magic, so brilliant in his head that Harry opens his eyes with a gasp.

It might be a mistake. Everything in the room is flame-edged and dancing back and forth like a flame itself, and Harry doesn’t know what that means. It’s hard to distinguish the bed from the floor, and his own wings from anything. He awkwardly flaps them, then gasps again. His wings extend further than his arms, but he can still feel his arms under them, but not everything, as if someone’s torn pieces of his flesh out—

“Harry!”

I am here.

Madame Delacour and his magic speak at the same time. Harry manages to focus on her, and he nods choppily when she leans towards him with a concerned face. “I’m—I’m all right, Madame Delacour.”

“I am glad.”

Her voice is a little strained. Harry wonders why, but then decides he doesn’t want to know. Maybe right now he’s a human head on a phoenix body. That’s the way it feels. He resolutely resists the urge to look down.

I am here, his magic says again, hovering around him and winding through him in what feels like a trail of sparks.

“Do you think you can complete the transformation?”

“I’m going to try,” Harry says, and then he turns inwards and concentrates as hard as he can. He can do this, he reassures himself. He has his magic with him, and it’s truly with him, not his enemy the way it was when he was younger and still at the Dursleys’.

I was never your enemy.

Yeah, but it felt like it when you were always getting me in trouble with my aunt and uncle.

They did not deserve good behavior from us.

Harry forces himself to move on from the conversation. Arguing with his magic now will only distract him. He looks carefully at the image that’s in front of him right now, a trail of sparks and the rising figure of a phoenix, reflected in a private, inner mirror.

I can be that.

We can be that, his magic corrects him.

Harry reaches out, and his magic reaches to meet him halfway, and there is the sensation of a hand/wing clasping his wing/hand—

The whole world dissolves in a glittering flash, and Harry opens his eyes with a sharp gasp that becomes a chirrup. The world has changed. He no longer sits on the bed, but stands on two legs that are not like his human ones, and he has wings made for flight, and there is fire in his bones, and he is—

He cannot die. He does not know how to die.

It is so strange that for a moment he wavers and reaches back towards his lost human mortality. His magic checks him with a quiver in his legs, traveling up into his wings.

No! We are not human right now!

That’s right, Harry reassures himself as he draws his mind back from the brink of what would probably have been another disaster. He’s not human right now, but he can go back to being human at any time. He’ll get there. He just has to experience being a phoenix first.

Is it such a chore?

No, it’s not such a chore, Harry has to admit. He takes a step forwards, and his wings fan out to catch him, and before he can even acknowledge Madame Delacour’s warning to be careful, he’s leaping from the bed and soaring across the room.

The wall comes quickly towards him. Harry turns at the last moment, light as fire or light, and skims back across the room in front of Madame Delacour. He lands on the perch that she conjured an hour ago, even though she said there probably wouldn’t be a need for it today. She didn’t believe Harry would manage a successful transformation any more than he did.

Harry feels his feet clench around it, and knows how to perch. He laughs, which comes out as a trill.

Sing.

The voice is the voice of his magic and instinct and his new form all at once, and Harry opens his beak and sings.

Madame Delacour is on her feet, her hands clasped against her heart and a smile lifting the corners of her mouth. She told Harry already that anyone who listens to the song of a phoenix is almost forced to be happy about it.

Harry knows what she means now. This is the best thing he’s ever heard. It’s the best thing he’s ever done, this pouring of joy and light into the world. He tilts his head back and continues singing, and only when Madame Delacour speaks his name for probably the third or fourth time does he look at her again.

“Harry? I think that’s enough for today.”

Harry doesn’t want to stop. He wants to be a phoenix forever. He wants to remain in the embrace of his magic, not because they’re bound together the way that an ordinary wizard and his magic would be, but because this is so wondrous.

But he also wants to be human again, and hold his purring magic in his arms. So he carefully leans back, in some way that he probably can’t explain in words, and the blackness wells and drops away from him.

He falls off the perch.

His magic slides underneath him as the coils of a great snake and cushions him from hitting his head on the floor. Harry sits in the middle of those coils and laughs for sheer joy.

He isn’t a phoenix anymore, and some things are rapidly fading from his mind, like the awareness of his own immortality. Of course he’s going to die, and now he remembers what that feels like. But some things are still there, like how he felt when he was singing.

“That was,” Madame Delacour says, and lapses into French. But Harry thinks the word is “magnificent.” It sounds pretty similar.

“Was it?” he asks, finding himself shy. He’s never felt shy about showing off his magic in front of Madame Delacour before, and she knows more of what it can do than anyone else (although he’s going to tell Miss Miranda and Starfire). But this is something else, and all he can think is that there must be wizards and witches out there who would find what he did terrifying.

They force Animagi to register with the Ministry, after all. And look how they treat werewolves, who only transform once a month.

“Yes,” Madame Delacour says, returning to English. She smiles at him, a smile that runs all across her face and makes it glow. “There is no other in the world who can do that, I am certain. Not wizard or witch or werewolf or goblin or Veela. Transformation into magical creatures itself is very rare, and like this? To transform so smoothly and return to the self as smoothly? To be able to fly and sing?”

“I think I could be reborn in fire, too. I forgot what it was like to die.”

Madame Delacour’s eyes widen. “Wizards and witches have sought for means of immortality for centuries. Nearly all have their drawbacks, but transformation into a phoenix…perhaps you may be.”

Harry finds himself kind of hoping he is and kind of hoping he isn’t. On the one hand, it would be brilliant. On the other, he would have to keep living in the world long after all the people he knows are dead, and deal with stupid wizards and witches.

“I am very proud of you, Harry.”

Harry smiles at her and gathers his magic close in his arms, which at the moment is a black cat with the wings of a golden phoenix. He does feel a twinge. It should be his mum and dad saying they are proud of him.

But they aren’t, and Madame Delacour is brilliant, so it’s fine that it’s her.

I can’t wait to tell David.