Ascension of the Wings
Rated T for now for language and references to sexual themes. May be changed to M later.
Set after OotP
Harry has come into a mysterious inheritance, one that hasn't been recorded for over a thousand years. Draco is a dangerous half-breed searching for his mate. What neither of them expected was finding the other.
Chapter 4: Leads to Power
"Hello, Madame Pomfrey. I'm sorry to trouble you, but I'd like you to have a look at Harry here."
Harry's head swam in nausea after the sudden rush of Apparating. He heard Dumbledore's voice, and when he looked up from clutching his stomach he saw the school nurse bustling towards him. She grabbed his arm and hauled him over to a bed, ordering him to sit while she grabbed some things from her office.
The raven-haired teen was not recovering well. Usually after Apparating there would be a moment of feeling ill, but it went always went away quickly. Harry's head was still pounding and his wings ached for some reason. He had a gut feeling that phoenixes were not supposed to be transported like that. Pomfrey returned with a length of parchment in one hand and her wand in the other. She frowned upon seeing Harry.
"Still feeling sick from the travel?" She asked. Harry could only nod. Her frown increased and she waved her wand over Harry, muttering a spell as she did so. Words and numbers appeared on the parchment as she cast, the whole ordeal only taking a minute. Then she stepped away from the teen and read the results aloud.
"Harry James Potter, standing 5 feet 4 and ½ inches, weighing…" Here she stopped and squinted at the sheet. "This can't be right. 53 pounds?" She brought out her wand again to redo the spell, but Dumbledore interrupted her.
"Please continue, Poppy."
She looked hesitant, but nodded. "Age 16 as of yesterday. Happy birthday, dear." She glanced up at him for a second. "Eye color: Amber. And you have protrusions on your back as a result of a magical outburst that occurred exactly 14 hours ago." Pomfrey looked between the headmaster and the boy on the bed. "What is this?" she demanded.
Dumbledore gave a long-suffering sigh. "Show her, Harry." Pomfrey watched with much curiosity as Harry slipped off the bed and shrugged off his robe, turning around to display his plumage for the nurse. Pomfrey inhaled sharply. Then she quickly scanned the rest of the report, eyes coming to rest at a sentence at the bottom of the page.
"Blood status: Phoenix and mostly pure-blood. Phoenix?" She repeated the last part quietly, her eyes darting over the wings twitching on Harry's back.
Dumbledore nodded gravely. "It appears so, what with the information Harry has given me." He relayed what the teen had told him.
Harry turned back around and listened to the two adults conversing. He noted that he should have felt colder, what with no shirt on and the infirmary always kept colder than the rest of the school, but he wasn't. He actually realized that he felt warmer than he had ever felt before, but it wasn't at all uncomfortable. "What's my temperature?" he blurted out.
Pomfrey's eyes narrowed at him and she looked back at the parchment she still held. Then her eyes widened again. "105 degrees. Much too warm for any normal wizard to function at, but you're not quite so normal now, are you?"
Dumbledore chuckled. "Phoenixes have fire properties, Harry. That will probably be your normal body temperature from now on." He paused. "I wonder…"
"What is it, Headmaster?" Harry was genuinely curious to see what else the phoenix in him had done.
Dumbledore settled comfortably into a chair he had conjured at the foot of the bed before beginning to speak. His eyes twinkled with their usual merry light. "You know that phoenixes are born from the ashes that they create when they burn up at the end of a life cycle? Well, I was wondering if something like that might happen to you." Here Dumbledore looked grave. "Phoenixes are immortal, Harry. If something should happen to you, you will either die, or be born again like a phoenix."
Harry gasped and sat down hard on the bed. He might be immortal? How could that even be possible? He wasn't a true phoenix anyway; he just had the eyes and the wings. And the temperature. And the…
"So what about my weight?" he interjected again. "What does that mean?"
Pomfrey shrugged. "My best guess is that because you are part avian, your body had adapted to better be able to fly. May I do an in-depth analysis to see if that's true?" Harry nodded. The nurse performed a similar spell to the one she had done before, except that this one was several minutes longer and the results filled two feet of parchment.
"Ah," she said, looking over the document. "You have somehow grown an extra lung, which now rests behind your normal two, and all of your bones have become completely hollow. Your eyesight has drastically sharpened, so much so that you may not even need those glasses anymore." Harry took off his glasses and looked around, realizing that indeed, he didn't need the dreadful spectacles anymore. She continued. "You also have special glands that will keep your feathers in their proper condition, as well as heightened reflex reaction time."
Harry looked down at his hands in amazement. So much had changed in and around him, and he had never felt better. Until he realized that he would now be even more of a freak than he had been.
Dumbledore noticed the teen's sudden shift from awe to down-cast. "What is it, my boy?"
The avian wizard swallowed and kept his eyes fixed on the cold tile of the infirmary. "Everyone is going to think I'm more of a freak now. No one else has bright wings the color of fire and eyes that practically glow. What will Ron and Hermione think?" He mumbled the last bit to the floor, concerned that he would lose the little friendship he actually had in this world to his new-found appearance.
"I'm afraid I can't conceal the wings, but they should be unnoticeable as long as you wear your robe or a long cloak over them. As for your eyes, I can cast a spell that will turn them back to their green, but it will wear off every few days. And if your friends find out and they dislike you for what you've become, maybe they aren't real friends anyway."
Harry smiled at Pomfrey's speech. "Yes, please change my eyes. And I'll keep your words in mind," he promised. In a second Pomfrey had her wand out and was speaking the simple charm to change Harry's irises to their usual vibrant green.
"I think that will be all, Madame Pomfrey," Dumbledore said, rising to his feet. "Come with me, Harry; there's something I want to show you."
Harry said his thanks to Madame Pomfrey before slipping his robe back on and following Dumbledore out of the infirmary. He smiled as he walked down the familiar corridors and past the many statues and portraits lining the halls. After a while they arrived at the entrance to Dumbledore's office, the two gargoyles on either side separating to admit headmaster and student. Once they were both comfortably seated and Harry had been offered the complementary lemon drop, Dumbledore began to speak.
"You may not know this, Harry, but the Potter's are an extremely powerful wizarding family. Their line goes back quite far, as most pure-blood families do. It really doesn't surprise me that a magical event like this has happened to you. This may be an inheritance that has happened before in your line; or maybe not. I'm inclined to believe that this is an isolated event - that whatever happened last night doesn't really have a correlation with your blood status. From what it looks like, Fawkes gave some of his powers to you, and whenever he shows up again and we'll try and get some answers from him.
"Harry, you must understand that this is not a normal happening. From what I remember of my work with phoenixes, the hybrid of a wizard and a Phoenix has only happened a handful of times throughout wizarding history. The last recorded instance of a Phoenix wizard was over 1000 years ago; a powerful Viking chieftain who called himself Nikolai the Scorcher."
Dumbledore watched Harry carefully as he took in this new information. The boy's wings shifted around constantly, even though he was trying to sit still. He'd have to work on that if he wanted to keep a low profile. The age-old wizard continued.
"Because species like you are so few and far between, I worry that if word got out the press would become an almost unbearable nuisance to you, even more so than it already is. You must promise me Harry," and here the headmaster looked unusually stern, "that you will try your hardest to conceal the Phoenix side of you from everyone, even your friends if you must."
Harry looked down at the floor, his shoulders slouched as if the weight of his burden had suddenly become too much. He already knew what his answer would be.
"Yes sir."