Burning Day


An enormous fiery pain engulfed Harry as he came to reluctant
consciousness. He felt a tremendous shattering sensation, accompanied by
slicing pain and an intense burning, as if a thousand panes of glass had
been broken inches away from him, along with all of his bones, while
someone ran an open flame up and down his skin. He decided he was losing
his mind when he realized that somehow he knew the broken
whatever-it-was was green. He wanted to scream at the pain, but he could
not move. It was several long moments before the pain slowly eased.

Having expected to never open his eyes again, he was not surprised at
the difficulty he felt in doing so. He simply did not understand why he
was thinking or feeling anything. Surely he should have either ceased to
feel anything, or he should be meeting his parents?

Exerting his will, Harry managed to force his eyes to open. They teared
up immediately, scarcely able to stand the influx of light, as if they
had never encountered it before, but even so, he could make out the bulk
of his uncle reaching the top of the stairs. His perspective was low to
the ground, which did not surprise Harry nearly as much as his own
apparent survival did. He felt only a faint gladness that his uncle was
coming to finish him off. He was more than ready to finally be able to
hug his mother, to hear her voice, to feel her love. He only hoped that
his mother and father could forgive him for leading Cedric to his death.

When Vernon continued past him, walking towards the door to his room, a
sudden terror took Harry. Hedwig, he was going to kill Hedwig, the
faithful snowy owl that had been the first real birthday present he had
received in his life, and a shining symbol of the first true friend he
had made, as well as a beloved companion, often the only one he had.

With all the heart he had left, Harry desperately wished that he could
save her. As fire engulfed him, he felt hope dying within him, so it was
a terrible shock to suddenly see, as he blinked tears from his raw eyes,
bars appear before him. Had he truly failed, had he lived so terrible a
life that he would be imprisoned for all eternity?

The sound of a door opening caught his attention, and his mind struggled
for several seconds to catch up as he saw his uncle entering through a
door that seemed far larger than it should. That his uncle, coming to
kill him, had loomed larger than life had hardly seemed surprising or
worth noticing, but why would the door appear the same?

A hoot behind him awakened him to action. Without in the least
understanding how it was possible, he realized that he was between his
uncle and his beloved friend, and that he had been granted this one last
chance to protect her. With every bit of energy he had left, Harry
shouted "STUPEFY!"

To his startlement, all he managed was a cheep. He would have cried in
despair, except that somehow, in spite of the absence of the usual blast
of red light, his Uncle crumpled to the ground.

Still confused, he nonetheless comprehended that his uncle would not
stay unconscious forever. He had to get himself and Hedwig out of here
somehow. He struggled to turn around, his arms getting in his way in a
manner that made him fear that something in his nervous system had been
damaged. They simply were not responding the way they should. To his
shock and amazement, when his eyes found Hedwig, she herself seemed to
be enormously larger, nearly four or five times his size. He shrank back
as she approached, looming larger still. He froze as her wing swept out.
It encircled him and drew him close and he realized with something of a
shock that she was hugging him.

I'm in Hedwig's cage? Harry begged mentally for someone to explain what
was happening to him, as he tried vainly to understand how he could
possibly fit in Hedwig's cage, with room left over for her. How could he
be smaller than his owl, and how did he get here?

When he heard soft murmuring in a female voice, Harry was afraid that he
was either hallucinating, or nearly dead and hearing his mother. He
needed to save Hedwig before he passed on, regardless of what else might
have happened to him. He focused his attention on the one place he felt
sure that she would be safe and well-cared for without inconveniencing
anyone.

Redness filled his vision and he held his breath, hoping against hope
that whatever force had brought him to Hedwig would do him this one last
favor. Hidden within Hedwig's wing, he could not tell if he had
succeeded or not, even after his vision cleared, but her startled squawk
gave him hope. The startled voice of a woman that sounded at the same
time made him wonder if one of the teachers had been in the Owlery
sending a letter.

Voices filled his ears, almost drowning out the cacophony of squawks
that reassured him that he had reached his target. "At least you'll be
safe here," he assured Hedwig, as his exhaustion caught up with him,
stealing away his consciousness.

---

Awareness returned slowly as voices filled his mind. To his bemusement,
he recognized none of them; to his bereavement, he could still hear the
hoots and calls of the owls. "Why am I not dead yet?" he murmured. He
yelped in surprise when his voice came out in cheeps and chirps, though
he understood them.

It was then that he realized that the words he was hearing were
precisely paired with the hoots and occasional squawks that he was also
hearing. Somehow, he was now able to understand owls. It was not the
same as his Parseltongue, he noted. He had not even realized that he was
speaking Parseltongue at first. He never heard the hissing sound of his
speech. It simply sounded like English to him, unlike owl-speech, which
sounded like an audio-overlay.

A pleasant sensation ran through him, much like someone running their
hand through his hair, though that itself was not a common feeling in
his memory. The odd thing was the feeling was coming from his back, and
then his arm, and not from his head.

Forcing his eyes opened, he discovered he was able to lean his head back
almost upside down as he looked behind himself, discovering that he was
being groomed by Hedwig. He was more startled by what he could see of
himself, however.

"I'm a bird?" he chirped, dumbfounded.

"My Harry is a beautiful phoenix," he heard a smug female voice intone
and he realized that it belonged to Hedwig. It fit her, he realized.
There had been many times that he had seen smugness, pride, and
self-satisfaction in his Hedwig's bearing when she had successfully
delivered his letters, or just after she plucked at his ears with her
sharp beak.

"Hedwig?"

"Yes, my Harry?" Hedwig hooted at him, turning her head back and forth,
blinking wide eyes at him.

"Why am I so small?"

An articulate voice filled with pride and possessiveness answered him.
"You have had your first burning day, young Harry, and already your
feathers are coming in swiftly. Soon you will be proud and strong!"

Harry rolled his head around to stare up at the fatherly eyes of Fawkes,
eyes that twinkled much as Dumbledore's had when he had woken up from
facing Quirrel and Voldemort.

"Fawkes?!"

"You surprised me, you know? Most of the phoenix-blooded never change,
or change only after their first body dies of old-age, and so they have
then only their phoenix body. No great loss, of course, but those who
burn in their prime . . ." The great phoenix seemed to shiver, all of
his feathers fluffing and separating before settling down again. "You
will be great, young Harry. I knew it when I first met you, and I know
it now."

A sudden thought struck Harry, as he finally accepted that he had in
fact cheated death yet again. "Is . . . is this the power that Voldemort
knows not?"

Fawkes cocked his head to the side, focusing on Harry with a single
bright eye. "I know nothing of the power of which you speak, but I know
that when you burned for the first time, you made the prophecy one-sided
and inevitable. A phoenix cannot be slain by any power on this earth,
yet only one of you can survive. There is now only one end to this
conflict, unless you give up. Embracing death by burning and not
returning is the only path to death for one of our race!"

Realizing that Fawkes probably knew Dumbledore better than anyone, Harry
could not help asking, "Do you know why Dumbledore left me there?"

Fawkes sighed, fluttering his wings as Hedwig embraced Harry once more.
"Dumbledore is a very powerful and intelligent wizard, and he does often
see more than others might, but still, he does not always know as much
as he seems to. He projects an image of infallibility because to do
otherwise would, in his opinion, cripple the wizarding community with
fear. Like you, he bears a heavy burden, for somehow it is believed that
he can singlehandedly keep Hogwarts and all of its students safe. He did
truly believe that you were safer there than anywhere else."

"Safe? They killed me! Besides, he's probably half the reason that
they're all such sheep. They all just follow along with whatever the
papers print."

"I have often wished he could understand proper speech, so I could
better guide him, but I will warn you, if you speak to him, he is far
weaker than he appears. Always he questions and second-guesses himself,
but once he has made a decision, he has great difficulty accepting it to
be wrong, for to do so would damage the appearance of infallibility he
believes is so vital." He whistled. "I must go, Dumbledore returns," he
explained, as he leapt from the long table that held the writing
supplies, which was, Harry guessed, where he had managed to bring them.
Had he actually used the phoenix's fiery apparition?

I must have, he realized, you can't apparate into Hogwarts, and I didn't
have a portkey. I certainly did not go through the Floo.

"Don't think of Long-beard, my Harry. Long-beard cannot hurt my Harry
any longer."

Harry settled back into Hedwig's hug as she began to preen him again,
wondering if this is what it felt like to have a mother.

---

Harry had still been in her embrace when food was brought that evening,
but by morning he was fully fledged and nearly full grown, and he and
Hedwig were sharing a perch.

He heard a sigh of disbelief and awe from below him. He glanced down and
his sharp eyes immediately picked out and focused on the tear-filled
eyes and awe-filled face of a house-elf.

Hedwig shuffled further down the perch when he shifted his wings. He
thrust strongly with his talons, launching himself into the air as he
snapped his wings wide. This was the best time to test his wings. If he
injured himself, the house-elf would take care of him.

He snapped his wings wide and cried aloud with joy as his wings caught
the air. He circled easily, shifting his feathers slightly to adjust his
attitude in the air. It came so easily as he glided down towards the
house elf, who was sobbing in joy at hearing that joyous speck of
phoenix song. It reminded him of his first time on a broom, the freedom
he had felt, and the ease with which he had controlled the old school
broom, as if he was born to it, but even more so. This was truly what he
was born to.

He landed perfectly, eliciting startled hoots from owls that had
expected his first landing to end in disaster. The house-elf fell to its
knees, staring at him with impossibly wide eyes, dripping tears of joy.
Its . . . no, her hand, rose slowly and came forward, but stopped just
short of his brilliant red and gold plumage. That was one aspect where
he differed strongly from Fawkes, he had noticed. The older phoenix was
pure scarlet except for his golden tail feathers, while Harry was a mix
of red and gold all over. He stepped forward, brushing his pinions
against her hand, and she slid her hand down his feathers reverently.

After nearly fifteen minutes, realizing that the house-elf would be
happy to stay there forever, stroking him, he hummed, which produced a
throaty warble, and stepped back, then launched himself back into the
air. Behind him he heard the soft pop of the house-elf disappearing,
back to the kitchens, he expected, to spread the word.

He lighted back on Hedwig's perch, feeling the desire to fly through the
open windows into the blue sky beyond, but willing to accept Hedwig's
advice and wait for his full growth, which she assured him would be
finished soon. In the meantime, she was teaching him to preen, to clean
and align his feathers, and to get rid of loose feathers. She was
surprised that he had none, but Harry was not. Phoenixes did not molt
normally, he figured. Why would he, when he would get a new set of
feathers after every burning day?

---

Later on that day, Fawkes returned to the owlery. He discussed Harry's
powers as a phoenix only briefly. Harry had already demonstrated an
ability to teleport in a burst of flame. The other powers of a phoenix
were basically inherent, requiring no effort, aside from the ability to
painlessly drop a feather. Fawkes explained that this required only
concentrating on the desire to do so, but urged Harry to think carefully
before doing so.

It was not hard for Harry to guess why Fawkes emphasized this. After
all, one of Fawkes' feathers was the core of Voldemort's wand. Harry
definitely did not care for the idea of the murderous Dark Lord getting
his hands on a wand made from one of his own feathers.

Fawkes then spent an achingly long period discussing flight, and all the
intricacies of controlling flight, performing proper banking turns,
landing smoothly, finding thermals, and so forth. Harry did not have the
heart to tell the older phoenix that he had already flown and that all
of these difficulties had simply seemed to come to him, instinctively as
it were.

He deliberately ignored the tittering of the owls as they watched him
endure this lecture on things he knew naturally. He noticed Fawkes
casting a sharp eye upward every now and then, and when he did so, the
owls instantly went quiet, but their amusement kept overcoming them and
bubbling back up.

Finally Fawkes finished his lecture and Harry had an opportunity to ask
the questions he really wanted answered.

"Fawkes, sir, how is it that I can still cast magic?"

Fawkes tilted his head to the side, looking carefully at Harry. "I don't
know, young Harry. Maybe it is because your wand came from a phoenix
originally?"

Harry shook his head doubtfully. That answer simply did not feel right.
Besides, he did not have his wand. It was still under the floorboards.
Harry felt a sadness well up in him as he realized that his uncle had
probably already torched his trunk and all of his belongings. Still, the
most critical of his possessions were beneath the loose floorboard in
his room. His Gringott's key, the book of pictures of his parents given
to him by Hagrid, the invisibility cloak that had belonged to his
father, the Marauder's Map, and of course, his wand, were all safely
concealed.

"Once I am full-grown, how will I turn back into a human? Will I even be
able to?"

Fawkes bobbed his head in confirmation. "You will be able to, I believe,
but I do not know how you may accomplish it. I think it is something
like what Minerva does."

"Animagus?" Harry considered, bemused at Fawkes referring to his Head of
House by her first name. He wondered if Professor Snape was given the
same treatment. "So, when will I get to fly for real?"

Fawkes trilled, stalking around Harry, his head dipping and raising as
he looked Harry over. Hedwig hooted in excitement as Fawkes spread his
wings. "You are ready. Remember what I have told you."

Delighted, Harry launched himself immediately into the air, his wings
snapping in a powerful downstroke as he pumped his way up towards the
open windows. Behind him Hedwig followed, while Fawkes vanished in a
burst of flame, off to hide while Harry flew free, so that anyone who
saw his first real flight would assume he was the older phoenix.

Hedwig quickly began circling, and Harry followed her, warbling softly
as the air lifted him up, like a giant hand cradling him. Harry's heart
soared with him. Cedric's death, Voldemort's return, Vernon's rifle, all
seemed far beneath him now, not worthy of notice.

Breaking off from following Hedwig, he swooped, skimming the rooftops
and diving into the courtyards, pumping strongly to lift himself back
out. He felt like he was filled with an unending abundance of energy, so
different from the depressed torpor that had held him in his grip when
he returned to Privet Drive.

---

A sharp crack echoed down Privet Drive, though even had someone been
staring at the source of the sound, they would have seen nothing. Tonks
looked up from her post, and examined the new arrival.

Mad-Eye Moody, the former Auror who stumped up to her on a wooden
peg-leg, had in his day captured many a dark wizard, but he had spent
much of the last year trapped in a trunk by Bartemius Crouch, Jr., who
had been plucking his hair to use in a Polyjuice potion, a
transformational potion that allowed the wily Death Eater to assume
Moody's appearance. 

Crouch had stolen Moody's place as teacher of DADA the year after Remus'
stint. He had introduced his students to the Unforgivable curses, the
casting of which on a human was punishable by life imprisonment in
Azkaban. He had even cast the Imperious curse on Harry, only to discover
that Harry could throw off that curse more easily than most grown
wizards. He had also been responsible for Harry's entry in the
Tri-Wizard Tournament, and the time spent trapped in his trunk had aged
Moody, and left him even more paranoid than he had ever been. Tonks
could still hardly believe all the stories she had heard after joining
the Order, about what Harry had done at Hogwarts. She just wished she
could get a glimpse of him, but so far, he had not left the house.

The paranoid ex-Auror's nickname was due to the glass eye that took the
place of the one he had lost. Enchanted with powerful charms that let
him see through walls, disillusionment charms, invisibility spells, and
even invisibility cloaks, it could also look through flesh with no
difficulty, and it often spun in its socket, staring about in every
direction with little regard for where he was facing, thus earning him
the name Mad-Eye. Had he not had the eye, he would probably have been
called Peg-Leg, after his missing limb, replaced by a simple wooden peg
even though the magical community was capable of producing less
noticeable limb replacements.

Moody stopped on the sidewalk, staring at the house. They were both
under disillusionment charms, Moody having not yet been convinced to
contribute his invisibility cloak to the cause, but a pair of enchanted
cloak-pins let them see each other through the charms. Not that Mad-Eye
needed it, but it certainly made Tonks feel better.

"You see something?" Tokns hissed, staring at the house but knowing that
the chances of her being able to see whatever Mad-Eye was staring at
were slim.

Moody shook his head, glancing at Tonks. "Not what I see, it's what I
don't see. I don't see Harry."

Tonks started. "What? I mean, I know no-one has seen him yet, but I
thought he just wasn't coming out. They said he would probably be
depressed, but where could he be if he isn't in there. Is the house
empty? I mean, I saw the man drive up. Could it be the wards are
shielding it?"

"No, I see the aunt and uncle. Real thin, horse-faced woman, and an
overweight mustachioed man."

"You don't see the son? Maybe they're both at the park or something?
Harry does have an invisibility cloak, or so I heard. He could have
snuck out, especially with someone to cover for him."

"Something doesn't feel right here." Moody spun around, his magical eye
glinting as he looked farther and farther out. Suddenly he hissed in
disbelief and horror. He grabbed Tonks' robes, pulling her off-balance,
and forcibly apparated them both.

Tonks staggered, then shuddered as she felt a horrible creeping
coldness. She wished that she had found Harry, remembering what Remus
and Sirius had said about his Patronus. She did her best, focusing on
her happiest memory and casting, getting a modest silver light to shine
from her wand.

"Expecto Patronum!" Moody shouted, silver flowing from his wand to join
the light shining from Tonks' wand as they advanced on the tall figures
cloaked in flowing black robes. As the figures backed away, Tonks spied
the figure that had caught Moody's attention, a portly youth cowering,
his face pale and covered in sweat, his eyes wild and unseeing.

The Dementors, for that is what the figures were, finally drew away,
giving back before the formless Patroni cast by Tonks and Mad-Eye. They
lifted into the air and vanished into the night.

Tonks hurried forward, her hand fumbling in her robe as she put away his
wand and withdrew the large slab of chocolate that Lupin had convinced
her to carry. She forced the Muggle boy to eat some of it, while Moody
stumped around them, staring out in all directions, searching for any
sign of the fourth inhabitant of #4 Privet Drive. He saw no sign of
Potter, so he kept one ear focused on Tonks' conversation with the
Muggle boy while he watched out for Death Eaters, Dementors, or other
dangers.

"Come on, eat up, it'll make you feel better." The boy hardly needed the
encouragment. The first bite of the chocolate had seemed to revive him,
and he had snatched the entire block from Tonks' hand. Tonks felt her
stomach turn at the disgusting slobbering of the grossly fat boy.

"Where is Harry?" Tonks asked him, repeating the question until the boy
finally looked up.

"Harry?" he asked, finally. "He ran away, his first day back."

"What?!" Tonks jerked to her feet, blood rushing out of her face,
leaving her pale. Harry . . . had run away? Why would he do that?

They had discussed, briefly, the effect recent events might have on the
Harry and the general consensus had been that he would be deeply
depressed for a few weeks. They had been instructed to watch for
suicidal tendencies, not an active runaway!

Moody stumped up behind the boy. "Best you run home and not go out at
night again, boy!" He looked at Tonks as the fat boy scrambled to his
feet and ran away, puffing heavily. "We better get back to
you-know-where and let Dumbledore know."

"Right," sighed Tonks, focusing her attention on apparating cleanly to
Grimmauld Place, and trying not to think of how Sirius and Remus would
react to this news.

Standing on the street between two of the houses, she ran through the
address in her mind, and magically, the houses seemed to slide further
apart, a new house appearing between them. She and Moody were quick to
get off the street and into the house. It vanished from the street as
soon as they were inside.

---

As Harry swooped and dove around the castle, feeling more free than he
ever had in his life. He was also learning about Pheonixes, or perhaps
merely about himself. Though his first impression of Fawkes had been of
a sickly looking red chicken, a physical impression given by the long
neck and short, pointed beak, along with the crest, he was quickly
learning that it was not entirely accurate.

Where chickens, to the best of his rather limited knowledge, consumed
seeds, insects, and grubs that they scratched the ground to find, his
vision seemed more suited to a bird of prey. Flying high above the
castle, he could still make out every detail of an individual blade of
grass on the front lawn, and his eyes seemed preternaturally swift at
catching and focusing on motion.

Furthermore, in spite of having a body that looked like it would be
ungainly, he felt remarkably graceful in the air, and was readily able
to catch the wind and soar like an owl. Of course, that particular set
of preconceptions had already been destroyed by Fawkes in his second
year, when the older phoenix had brought him the Sorting Hat, and with
it the sword of Godric Gryffindor, one of the school's four founders, he
had also carried Harry, Ginny, Ron, and their mindless git of a DADA
teacher that year, Lockhart.

Still, it was one thing to see that such a body could be graceful and
elegant in flight, and entirely another to live it. As much as Harry
loved his Firebolt, little though he had gotten to fly it, with
Quidditch giving way the year before to that horrible Tournament, it
could not compare, he decided, to the freedom of flying under his own
power, lifted through the air on his own wings, with no chance of being
thrown from his broom.

Hedwig hooted to him from a distance, and he banked in a wide turn to
head in her direction. His heart leaped as he realized that she was
heading out over the Forbidden Forest. Once he caught up with her, she
began explaining the challenges involved in flying in a forest. They
were not yet doing so, of course, being well above the trees, but they
were close enough for her to point out concerns.

Once she felt confident about his understanding, she swooped into the
tree canopies, skirting the branches and Harry dove to follow her. She
led him on a high-speed chase as they winged through the wood. She was
quick to chide him and chivvy him back when he split away, distracted by
a glint of light in the woods. She warned him of traveling too far
within the forest proper. The acromantula, the great spiders, children
all of the spider Aragog, once Hagrid's pet, could weave webs and
netting thick enough to catch large birds, and their portion of the
forest held many webs, both active, and remnants of torn webs that could
still snag a wing and trap a bird that struggled in panic.

Too far in another direction and he would encounter the hunting grounds
of the centaurs of the forest, experts with the bow and arrow. They did
not shoot at owls, but most other birds were fair game. Harry knew
several centaurs by name, though only one had ever behaved pleasantly
towards him. He did not believe that they would hunt phoenixes,
particularly so near to Hogwarts. They had to know that Dumbledore kept
a phoenix. He also had to agree, however, that it was unquestionably
better not to test that theory.

Finally, Harry watched as Hedwig demonstrated her hunting skills. She
could not hunt properly during the daytime due to her night-focused
eyesight. The spells on post-owls made them well-able to travel in the
daytime, when they would normally prefer to be sleeping, but they were
not strong enough to allow proper hunting.

Almost unable to contain his enthusiasm, and feeling hungry after his
vigorous exertions, Harry undertook to put Hedwig's teaching into
practice. With a focus on silent flight, on moving through the air
without even a whisper, he swept from perch to perch, from one tree to
the next, pausing to search the ground below. It did not escape his
mind, as he spied a vole and entered a steep dive, careful to avoid the
wind whistling through his feathers, which would alert the vole to his
approach, that the more skilled he became at hunting small rodents, the
better would be his chances of catching Wormtail, the erstwhile friend
of his father's that had betrayed his parents to Voldemort, causing
their death, and had then framed his godfather, Sirius Black, leading to
Sirius' imprisonment for twelve years for Wormtail's crimes. Wormtail
was, after all, a rat Animagus.

Harry might have hated Voldemort for killing his parents, but that was
more an intellectual hate, a knowing that he had been responsible, but
it lacked the visceral feeling of having watched Sirius and Wormtail
together, of knowing, when Wormtail's escape ended his hopes of living
with Sirius instead of the Dursleys, that he had failed his godfather,
and that Wormtail was responsible.

His talons caught the vole in the neck, snapping it instantly with the
force of his plunge. Though he knew that an owl would have eaten the
critter whole, it seemed too large for that to him, and he had no desire
to experience coughing up a pellet. Besides which, he did not even know
if he could.

Holding the vole in his claws, he thrust himself back into the air and
beat strongly, rising quickly to settle on a wide branch, the vole
pressed to the branch beneath one claw. Feeling his hunger surge at the
sight of the vole, and not feeling one whit of the nausea he had
anticipated, his neck flashed down and his beak plunged into the skin.
Getting a good grip, he tore off a bit of the skin, then spat,
displeased at the taste of feel of the hair. That he should find the
meat distasteful, as a phoenix, normally an herbivore, not to mention a
rather non-aggressive bird, did not occur to him, nor did he notice the
changes in his bill, as it came to more strongly resemble that of an
owl.

With a sudden burst of insight, Harry employed a spell Hermione had made
him learn for potions, that plucked, skinned, gutted, and deboned small
animals. It was safer to use than manually separating them, especially
when the potion called only for bones, or only for fur. Manual
preparation could result in the accidental addition of an uncalled for
ingredient and subsequent failure of the potion, potentially in an
explosive manner. Once he had learned it, Harry had wondered why it was
not part of the curriculum, before noticing later on that the Slytherins
also seemed to use the spell, and realizing that this was merely one
more example of Snape's bias against the other houses, Gryffindor
particularly.

Left with four clean piles, Harry sidled down the branch, dragging the
now pure pile of meat away from the other elements of the vole. Hedwig
hooted at him in confusion, but Harry hardly noticed the sound now, his
hearing tuning it out and focusing on the English words that he heard at
the same time, and he grinned at her question. "Just a spell, Hedwig."

The raw meat seemed to settle nicely in his stomach as he flew back with
the white owl. As they swooped back into the owlrey, to a cacophony of
gossip and questions, Harry could not help but marvel at the drastic
change in his circumstances that had come about in such a short time.

Perhaps he should be feeling Cedric Diggory's death still more keenly,
since he now realized that he could possibly have survived the curse
had he been able to intercept it, but he was not. Instead, he was
feeling a sense of hope that he had never really experienced before, a
lightness of heart that he had felt only for a short while, the few
times prior that he had heard phoenix-song. He finally believed that he
might someday be able to defeat Voldemort, that Cedric's death would not
have been in vain.

He could hardly wait to be told that he had obtained his full growth.
Though he enjoyed spending time with Hedwig and Fawkes, he needed to
become human again, he needed to recover his supplies from the Dursley's
home, and he needed to let people know that he was still alive. He
wondered briefly whether anyone even knew that he was no longer at the
Dursley's, and if so, what they had done with Vernon. Surely shooting
the Boy-Who-Lived through the head would not go unpunished, however much
they had ignored Vernon's earlier mistreatment of him.

After resting for several hours, Harry noticed a general agitation
arising amongst the other owls, and with a start, Harry realized that
feeding time must be coming around again. He looked up at the window to
the outside, but knew that he was too exhausted from both his exertions
and his rapid growth to take another flight, but the thought of having
to deal with another hysterical house-elf, not to mention the increased
chance of drawing professorial attention if they noticed increasing
agitation amongst the house-elf population, made him increasingly
uncomfortable.

If only he had been an owl instead of a phoenix, he would have fit in
here perfectly, and gone completely unnoticed. Of course, had that been
the case, he and Hedwig would both be dead, but still, what he wouldn't
give to be an owl right now, to be totally unnoticeable. He wished he
knew how Dumbledore turned invisible without a cloak, an ability Harry
had learned about in his first year at Hogwarts, when he had encountered
the Mirror of Erised with the aid of his father's invisibility cloak. He
heard startled squawks around him, but when he looked, he saw nothing
more than the house-elf that had just appeared in the room with a crack.

That is odd, he noted. They did not react so strongly when the other one
showed up, and it was behaving unusually! This one is acting normal . .
. wait! Why isn't this elf reacting to my presence? Harry fluttered his
wings nervously, not really wanting to attract the elf's attention, but
unable to quite contain his curiosity. He held his breath when the
elf's large eyes drifted over the assembled owls, but they did not even
flicker as they passed over Harry, before it vanished with another
crack.

Harry tried to look down at himself, wondering why the house-elf had not
reacted in the same manner the first one had, but discovered to his
shock that he could hardly turn his head down at all, nor could he tilt
his head back, when he tried that. He could turn his head left and right
with no difficulty however. He stretched his wings out and looked to the
right, and saw brown and gray speckled feathers, with a white underside.
"I'm an owl!" Harry yelped, emitting a hoot, and Hedwig hooted with
gentle laughter.

Filled with a sense of elation, Harry turned himself back into a pheonix
with what he felt was surprising ease. Just a moment of concentration,
and the brown and grey wing was once more gold and red. 

Harry swooped down off of his perch and landed lightly on the floor.
Focusing on his self-image, Harry concentrated on becoming human. His
heart fell when nothing changed. "No! I won't believe it's impossible, I
won't!"

Needing comfort, Harry forced his tired wings to pump, lifting himself
back up and out of the owlrey windows. He soared down to Hagrid's hut,
knowing the gentle half-giant would love the chance to pet a phoenix,
and desperately needing that human touch. To his dismay, the hut was
closed up tightly. He fluttered at the window, pecking at it as owls had
done so often at the window of his room on Privet Drive, but there was
no movement inside.

Suddenly Harry remembered overhearing Dumbledore mentioning Hagrid's
mission to the giants. No wonder his hut was empty and silent. Harry
fought off the feeling of loneliness with difficulty, and alighting on
the thatched roof of Hagrid's hut, he gazed up at the school. Fawkes'
behavior made him realize that Dumbledore was probably in the castle,
but he did not want to face the Headmaster, who had a way of looking at
you as if he could see all of your secrets. Harry shivered, remembering
the several times when the Headmaster had given him a penetrating glance
just before asking if he had anything to tell him.

He supposed Snape might stay on over the summer, but he had no desire to
end up as potions ingredients. Filch, the caretaker, might or might not
stay around, but again, he had no desire to come in contact with the
always-angry man.

Losing his internal battle, Harry sank into loneliness, his awareness of
the world around him fading. He was startled when he realized that in
this state of depression, he could feel something pulling at him, a
tugging that seemed to be pulling at his heart rather than his feathers.
He remembered the way that Fawkes had come to him in the Chamber of
Secrets, and wondered if this was the same situation. Was someone
defending him? Showing him true loyalty, as he had shown Dumbledore,
according to the Headmaster, to be able to draw Fawkes to him?