Title: He Will Rise a Phoenix
Disclaimer: J. K. Rowling and associates own these characters. I am writing this story for fun and not profit.
Pairing: None, gen
Content Notes: Angst
Rating: PG
Wordcount: 2500
Summary: After returning from death, Harry finds himself cut off from the world—unable to feel, his friendships withering, his magic fading. Desperate, he conducts a ritual that means a different kind of return from death.
Author's Notes: Another of my July Celebration fics, but not connected to any of the others.

He Will Rise a Phoenix

Harry hauled yet another log into the pile in front of him. Then he took a step back to consider it. Fifty logs, but not big enough yet. He turned and went after another one.

He'd felled the trees in the Forbidden Forest himself, with axe and saw and other Muggle tools where necessary, and cut the logs up the same way. Now he used pure muscle to drag them. With his magic as wild as it had been since the final battle, he had no other choice.

Not if this ritual was going to work.

Harry halted with the wood resting over his shoulder and closed his eyes. His breath raced, and his hands shook. He concentrated until that stopped and his arms were steady. Then he started pulling the log again.

He had lost so much. He refused to lose the life that he should have won back after he had sacrificed it to stop Voldemort.

It had been Hermione who told him, first. She'd sat him down in the kitchen of the Burrow one day and spoken the whole time with her eyes on the floor instead of his face. Maybe that made it easier for her, Harry had thought, with a heart too full of ashes even to feel bitterness.

"Harry, you—it's like we don't feel anything when we reach out to you lately. You never want to do anything. You don't have opinions or make decisions. You didn't even get angry when Ron tried to provoke you. You act like you're perfectly content to stay here or come with us. You're like a ghost. A shadow."

Harry nodded. He couldn't dispute her words, because a thick, furry grey mantle draped across his tongue. She was right. He had noticed the same thing himself, but been unsure what he should do about it.

Hermione shot him a glance, then looked away quickly. "We can't go on like this," she whispered. "It's been months. The way you looked when Ginny brought up Fred the other day…"

"The way I looked?" A tiny ember of anger flicked to life.

"Like you didn't remember who he was, why it was a big deal that he's dead." Hermione swallowed and let air out slowly. "I'm not saying that I agree with everyone else about that. But it hurt Ron and Ginny. They need you here, mourning with them. Not distant. Not detached, the way you've been since the battle."

"I suffered, too." It was a truth, which was the only thing that let Harry speak it. The ember had already flickered out again.

"I know. But—they need you right now. More than you need them."

"So if I leaned on them and was crying all the time the way Molly does, it would be all right?"

Hermione made a soft sound, muffled by her fingers against her mouth. "Harry. You've never been cruel like that before."

Harry looked aside. He hadn't, and the thing was, he couldn't care. He sat there until Hermione, with a shudder as though a basilisk had crawled out of a pipe in front of her, got up and walked away from him.

It was, at least, enough of a push to get him to go back to Grimmauld Place and start researching rituals that might help him with the way he was feeling.

But he honestly didn't know if he would have found the strength to conduct one if his magic hadn't started to fail him.

One minute, he could wave the Elder Wand and three teacups would zip across the room to him even though he'd technically only called for one. The next minute, all of those teacups fell to the floor and shattered.

He used Floo powder, and nearly burned himself alive. One minute a Warming Charm would make his skin turn red with sunburn; then it did nothing at all. Harry tried to call water and found himself dribbling sand from his wand instead.

The results were never consistent, not even enough to be sure that he was growing weaker or stronger.

Harry threw away the Elder Wand, or tried, because his holly wand had been repaired and he should be using that instead. The next morning, the Elder Wand was back on his pillow and the holly wand broken, and of course, his desperate "Reparo!" when he used the Elder Wand only made a pane of glass in the window of his bedroom crack crazily up and down the sides.

Harry could drift away from everybody and almost not notice, because caring was so hard for him right now. But he couldn't lose his magic, the thing that made him belong to this world, and not try to do something about it.

He'd started reading books, because at least his glasses were purely Muggle and hadn't failed on him. And Kreacher retained the bond to him, somehow, maybe just for his own convenience, and fetched him books he couldn't reach or broke the spells that guarded them, and continued to feed him.

Harry found the rituals he needed. Several of them were beyond his grasp because he could no longer cast the spells they required. Others required blood sacrifices that part of him, maybe the same part that reached longingly after his magic, still recoiled from.

But then he found the one that only required the sacrifice of himself.

And it was perfect, symbolically, since it repeated the sacrifice he had walked to, or thought he was walking to, in the Forbidden Forest.

Maybe that would be enough.

Harry tossed the last log down and stood back, rubbing futilely at his forehead with one arm. Sweat still poured down and stung his eyes. He blinked and blinked, but still the giant pile of logs lay there, and Kreacher appeared beside him with a soundless pop, glancing at him.

"Master Harry is making this ritual happen." His voice was subdued, the way it had been since Harry first recruited him for those aspects of the process that absolutely required magic and Harry didn't have to do himself.

Harry nodded, eyes fixed on the pyre. Then he removed his shirt. Around his neck hung a necklace of phoenix feathers that had taken almost all his remaining gold. He'd taken the one from his holly wand—that hung in the center, over his heart—but he'd also had to travel from shop to shop, apothecaries and wandmakers and smugglers in Knockturn Alley, to find everything he'd needed.

The wire collar that strung them all together had taken most of the rest of his gold. Copper, bronze, gold, threaded sapphire shaped by magic, and Acromantula silk—all the colors that fire could attain—the necklace shimmered and flashed in the sunset striking through the cleared trees of the Forest.

"I'm ready, Kreacher." Harry swallowed. "Light it up."

The elf snapped his fingers at the enormous pile of logs. Harry couldn't help thinking of the time he would have been able to do that himself, but he strangled the fear. He would have that ability back in a few hours. He would. Or he would be dead.

The flames wreathed the logs, so bright that Harry covered his eyes for a second. Then he took a deep breath and kicked off his boots. According to the ritual, he could leave his trousers on, but he had to bare his extremities and his chest and his face to the world.

To the fire.

Harry started to shiver and couldn't stop. The rest of the ritual was simple, and relied entirely on his will. But he couldn't move for the moment.

"Master Harry?" Kreacher asked off to the side.

Harry turned his head and met the house-elf's eyes. They were huge and filled with reflections of the flames. If Harry stayed here, he knew, eventually his bond to Kreacher would wither, too. If all magic left him, he would be a Muggle, unable to see wizarding buildings like Grimmauld Place, unable to hold onto the Black inheritance or the Potter one.

Unable to ever use magic again.

That decided him. He turned and walked into the flames.

At first, there was only a tickling sensation against his bare feet. Then came the sensation like biting, quick and sharp, all along his arms and up to his shoulders, against his scalp and then his ears. Something with a wicked, hot tongue flicked at him, and tears poured from his eyes. But he kept walking, pushing his way into the pyre through the gaps between logs, ducking the ash and coals that cascaded down onto him.

Then came the pain.

Harry screamed as it closed around him. Fire dashed down his throat, and left him nothing to scream with, but still he thought he heard himself. There was the scent of sizzling pork everywhere, and sickening agony in his eyes, his ears, over his heart where the phoenix feathers had caught fire and burned with a higher and hotter flame.

He did not notice the moment when he went blind. It was lost in so much other, overwhelming pain that he was not sure he still had eyes. And his body only kept moving forwards because he still had his will, and the words that he whispered in his mind because he could not speak them, repeated over and over like a prayer.

Let me wield magic again. Please.

Something deep inside him burst into flames. Harry staggered and sank into the fire. He no longer had knees, no longer had feet. He wasn't sure he had a consciousness. There was only the pain, and it had become a world so complete that it might have been a cocoon. He was tumbled and rolled, and something wrapped thickly around him.

You are dead. This is the end.

His will, his voice, were the only things he still had, and they woke against that.

No. I am free. If I am dead, then I am still free, from the failing of my magic and my friendships and the expectations of the Elder Wand.

But he was down at the bottom of something, a tunnel or the like. He didn't know why it should bother him, but it did. He was down at the bottom, but he wanted something still, that voice speaking in him.

I will rise.

He reached out things that were not hands and were not fingers, and crumbled the tunnel apart. It fell all around him, the way he vaguely imagined the logs falling to ash. He raised his will like a blade, and rose.

He soared.

Suddenly there was light around him, tearing through the thick darkness, the cocoon or the blindness that had wrapped him. Harry could see it, the colors of the necklace that he had worn into the pyre and that he suddenly remembered: copper, bronze, gold, sapphire, silk. All the colors of flame.

I am free.

Something else thick tore beneath him, and he thought he heard a tormented shriek, a cry like a Dementor's when it was driven back by a Patronus. Harry laughed to complement it. Yes, he was on fire, but he was no longer in pain.

He raised his arms, remembering when he had them, and feathers unfolded with a soft, fragrant rustle. He smelled smoke and the clean scent of a fire that burned only wood.

I have wings.

Harry beat them. He was soaring, ascending, spiraling up a current of hot air. Beneath him, the destroyed trees lay as embers. He laughed, and the sound was a hawk's shriek, melting into the last notes of a song that he knew so well.

He was reborn. He had triumphed over death.

Harry folded his wings and circled once, then divided abruptly. It was a faster, freer movement than he had ever achieved on a broom, and he saw Kreacher's stunned face coming at him, too rapidly but still in enough time to pull out of his wild swoop and lift again. He beat his wings, and fire flashed away behind him, a corona of trailing sparks that fell harmlessly into the clearing.

I am…

Harry circled down again, and landed on the end of a log that had not entirely burned away. He shook himself, and for a second feathers settled against his neck, then for a moment hair. When he reached up, feathers tangled in his fingers and then vanished. He looked down. The necklace he had worn was gone.

I am a phoenix.

He was human again, naked now entirely, his clothes burned away by the cleansing fire, crouched and vibrating on the edge of his perch. He tossed his head back and laughed. His voice was returned to him, deeper and more resonant than it had been before it was burned away.

"Master Harry's wand?"

Harry looked down. Kreacher stood below him, holding up the holly wand—no, the Elder Wand. Harry had thought it was his holly one at first because it had cracked cleanly down the middle, the core hanging tattered out through the end.

Harry burst out laughing again, and reached down for the Elder Wand. The minute he touched it, it fell apart in his fingers, the thestral hair thinning away to nothingness, and the elder wood—

Burning.

Harry leaped down from the log. Kreacher backed away, his eyes a little wary. Harry spread his arms. He would have to get a new wand, he knew, silently, in the back of his mind. But in the meantime…

He concentrated as hard as he could, and a bolt of lightning leaped from the sky to touch the pyre, and new flames ignited. Harry laughed aloud again, this time for joy rather than glee.

His magic had done exactly what he'd told it to do.

Harry turned and smiled at Kreacher. He could have ordered the elf to bring him new clothes, he knew that, but at the moment, he didn't see any reason to do that. He would watch until the fire was dead, and then…

"I'll meet you at home in a little while."

Looking hopeful for the first time in months, Kreacher nodded and vanished. Harry turned around and sat down in the grass and weeds, uncaring of how they scratched his bare skin, just watching as the flames settled and shifted the immense weight of wood on top of them.

He felt corresponding warmth spring up inside him at the thought of seeing Ron and Hermione. Now he cared about the things Hermione had been saying. Now he could explain it to them.

And he would get a new wand. And he would cast spells, and he would turn back into the normal wizard that mastery of the Deathly Hallows had kept him from being.

But most of all, he would remember that he had wings to fly when he wanted, and that he had been reborn from the fire.

The End.