Title: Gray Falcon
Rating: M, for violence and language and character deaths.
Characters: Harry Potter most prominently, but the plot will pick up quite a few others. I don't think there'll be pairings at this point.
Disclaimer: Harry Potter and the characters and settings associated with him are the property of J. K. Rowling. I am making no money from this fanfiction and make no claim to ownership of the characters and settings.
Summary: Will not be taking account of HBP. Harry's long road to freedom from both Dumbledore and Voldemort begins with dreams of a gray falcon falling from the sky, and continues through the beginning of the Second War. Will feature FrighteninglyRational! Harry, since he doesn't get enough screen-time.
Timeline: Picks up the summer after 5th year, so breaks from canon just after OoTP.
Author's Notes: I've been reading in the fandom for a while, and enjoying Harry-centric stories, especially when they feature an independent or slightly dark Harry. It doesn't particularly have to be a super-powered Harry, though it can. So I thought I would try my hand at a gray Harry with a new power. I know this will never happen in canon, and I can't say I'm sorry. Canon is for canon, and while I suppose it's remotely possible that the new book might have something like this story in it, I frankly doubt it. I'm playing with the power because I think it's a neat idea and I like Harry as a character. That's all.
Chapter 1: Dreams of Wings and Ash
July 30, 1996
"Godric's Hollow."
"Pardon?" Stan Shunpike's face might have managed to turn paler, but the passenger doubted it. He derived as much amusement from that as he could. He was weary, keyed-up, and doubtful that the deception that he'd put in place would last much longer. Since he didn't even know how he'd worked the deception, really, he wanted out of there as soon as possible.
"Godric's Hollow," he repeated, and dropped a handful of Sickles into Stan's shaking palm. "Surely you can take me there?" He made his voice a bit deeper, and kept his head bowed, his face hidden in the half-light from the streetlamps.
"Yes, of course," said Stan, and the Sickles disappeared. "It's just—things happened there, that's all." He went on muttering to himself as he stepped out of the way and the passenger climbed on board the Knight Bus. He took a long look over his shoulder, out the window and down the length of Privet Drive, but no one was after him.
Yet.
Harry Potter sighed and hunched down on a bed in the back of the Bus. He wanted to go to sleep. Dreams had proven a surprisingly good source of guidance for him this summer. But his mind wouldn't let him. It wobbled between the gray, grim, rational state that he retained after he'd woken from one of the dreams and that had let him get this far, and the simple, screaming fear that lurked, waiting to take him. If he got as far as Godric's Hollow without rolling around on the floor and frothing at the mouth, Harry considered, it would be a miracle.
He held on hard as the Knight Bus lurched and started moving. He still couldn't see an Order member watching the house, but that didn't mean they weren't there; perhaps a message was even now winging its way to Dumbledore. He still didn't know how he had performed the deception in the first place, but that didn't mean it wasn't holding. He still didn't know what he was doing.
Harry thought about that for a while, and then decided there was no exception to that last thought. He didn't know what he was doing.
He had just decided that he had to do it.
He leaned back on the bed and closed his eyes.
End of June 1996-July 30, 1996
The Dursleys ignored him. Harry didn't know why. It could be the Order's threat, or the look on Harry's face when they tried to talk to him. He didn't care, at first. He rose and did his chores, ate and went to sleep, in silence that winter couldn't have rivaled. He tugged the loss of Sirius around him like a blanket and refused to peek over the top of it.
He had expected to dream of the Department of Mysteries, the veil, Bellatrix Lestrange, his godfather's face as he disappeared, any and all of those. Instead, he dreamed of flight. He flew more on his broom in those first weeks of summer than he had in the last two years. And with the end of each and every dream, he fell out of the sky.
Harry ignored the dreams at first. They were a mere puzzling distraction from his grief, and not a very good one, since the moment he opened his eyes in the morning, he remembered that Sirius was gone. Then he rose and went about his supposed life in silence. He sometimes tried to reach for the rage that had driven him to destroy Dumbledore's office, out of idle curiosity about what it might be like to feel something stronger than the numbness. It wouldn't come. The rage had drowned in grayness and quiet and cold, and Harry started to wonder if the destruction of the office had happened at all.
Then the dreams altered, on the same day that a letter came from Ron saying that he was sorry, he hoped Harry was well, but he couldn't tell him anything. Harry put down the letter, and went to bed wondering why he didn't feel more upset. He imagined Ron and Hermione in the thick of Order business, eyes wide. They were trusted. They had access to all the information that might matter.
Their faces faded from his mind, and he saw a gray falcon flying.
It was larger than any bird Harry had seen before, except Fawkes. It banked and swooped and turned in large, careless circles. Sometimes it flew through clouds of what Harry thought was smoke or ash.
Then it fell.
He jerked awake the moment it started to fall, that first night, his heart pounding. He savored the bitter jolt of adrenaline before he remembered Sirius and curled up under the sheets again.
Yet night after night, the falcon returned, and by the middle of July, Harry could see the place it circled over. It was a small village, or, more precisely, a ruined house near the outskirts of that village. Clouds of ash billowed from it, and the falcon had lost something important among them. It searched and hunted, its cry growing louder. Harry started to wake with that scream ringing in his ears.
His grief cracked and fell apart. What replaced it was a taste of the falcon's need, and an equal need to stretch, to move, to plan.
Harry resisted the urge for several more days. What did he need to plan? He would demand that of the urgency, and get nothing back but an echo of the falcon's cry.
Was it a trick of Voldemort's? Harry didn't see what someone who could sustain his life beyond the grave and possess his enemy would gain from sending him visions of a falcon—but then, he reminded himself, he hadn't seen what Voldemort would gain from sending him visions of a locked door last year, either. And just because the falcon didn't "feel" like a trick from the Dark Lord didn't mean it wasn't one. Harry didn't think he'd trust his feelings any more, at least not easily.
Then, on the twenty-first night of July, Harry dreamed of the falcon diving, and felt determination and triumph surge through him. It had stopped searching. It had found whatever it had hunted for. The gathering speed and power ripped its wings open and impelled it from the air.
Harry looked out through its eyes, and saw, from above and at the glorious, dizzying speed of the fall, a sign.
Godric's Hollow, he read, and came awake staring at the ceiling and panting. Before he finished shaking off the remnants of the dream, he had a second clear image in his head to match the first one, and he knew what he was going to do.
The Knight Bus slammed to a stop. Harry sat up, his heart hammering, but though an old witch climbed on, she took a bed near the front and didn't even glance at him. Harry relaxed and leaned back again. That second image blazed brightly in his memory even now.
It was an image of a boy lying asleep in his bed at Number 4 Privet Drive, his eyes closed and his face peaceful. The boy could have been Harry Potter, if one ignored the absence of a certain lightning bolt scar.
Harry accepted that he would have to convince the Order members—and, just as importantly, the Death Eaters—that he was still within the wards. He doubted they would listen to him if he explained that he wanted, based on a dream of falcons, to go to Godric's Hollow and search among the ruins of the Dark Lord's first defeat for something small and not visible from the air.
And on my birthday, he thought, and he knew that he had to be there then, on the thirty-first of July. The next few dreams, which showed him an enormous green 31 hanging in the air as the falcon fell, just confirmed it. He had to go. He had to be there. He had to make the image of the boy in the bed come true.
He had no idea how to do it.
He paged through his books. He thought about writing to Hermione, but couldn't come up with a way to ask her questions that wouldn't reveal he was planning an escape. He dreamed up the last-minute discovery of an impossible spell that wouldn't let the Ministry expel him for illegal use of underage magic.
He fell asleep early on the thirtieth, since the Dursleys were out at a dinner party and couldn't disturb him, and woke in a panic near sunset. He jumped up from the bed and paced in a circle.
Then he stopped.
The image lay in the bed, turned on its side, eyes closed and fringe hanging calmly across its forehead. Harry could make out the hand curled on its chest and the way it breathed, and had to admire the completeness of the illusion.
He didn't stop to question how he'd done it, or whether an owl was flying towards him with his expulsion in its talons. He donned his Invisibility Cloak, tucked his wand into his pocket, and walked to the end of Privet Drive, holding his breath with every step. No one shouted at him and demanded that he get back inside the wards right now, this minute. (Harry decided that the voice of his conscience, which sounded like Hermione, didn't count).
Then he reached the end of Privet Drive, took off the Invisibility Cloak while crouched behind some bushes, signaled the Knight Bus, and started this impossible journey.
Another stop. This time, Stan's voice stuttered out, "Ah, uh, Godric's Hollow."
Harry had thought he would be sleepy. He wasn't. He found himself standing, his heart beating so hard against his ribs that he could feel the skin jumping. He kept his head bowed and staggered forward so that Stan couldn't see his face.
"Pleasant journey," the man squeaked behind him.
Harry forced out a nod and stepped off the Bus. It drove away fast enough to make him stagger. He wondered for a moment who Stan would tell about the mysterious passenger on the Bus.
Then the thought fled as he felt the prickle of talons on his shoulders. Harry started and whirled around, but no one was there.
No one visible, at any rate.
Ash puffed into being on his shoulder, and a gray head nudged his face hard enough to make his glasses rock. A moment later, Harry saw a falcon shape rise and pass around the outskirts of the Muggle village, heading east.
He took a sharp breath and followed, entering the place where he had defeated Voldemort for the first time in fifteen years, as the night pressed into midnight on his sixteenth birthday.