Harry Potter - Series Fan Fiction ❯ Harry Potter and the Ashes of Hope ❯ Chapter 7: Urn ( Chapter 7 )

[ T - Teen: Not suitable for readers under 13 ]

By now you should know I don't own Harry Potter...Please read Chapter 1 for the rest of the disclaimer....

Chapter Seven

Urn

Upon awakening, Harry opened his eyes and beheld the sight of darkness. Surprised by the grey, he tried to move, or rather, squirm free. It was at this moment that he noticed he could not breathe. No, it wasn't that he couldn't breathe, but rather that the powdery grey substance would not let him. Now, both choking and disoriented, Harry flailed helplessly until his small, fowl head poked through the surface of the ashes.

His erratic breath slowed down and he slowly came to observe his surroundings. The first thing he noticed was that he was in some dark little enclosing that he did not recognize. Secondly, he noticed that it was indeed ashes in which he was imbedded. With this new information, Harry began trying to make out what in Merlin's name happened.

He began by asking himself the basics.

What did he last remember?

Being in prison?

No! He was in a ministry holding cell, he remembered. Okay then, in that case, what happened next? He remembered Remus telling him to complete his Animagus transformation… “That's it!” he thought suddenly. He had been trying to complete his Animagus transformation, and he had mentally transformed when… when… he was kissed!

With frightening alarm, Harry realized he should have been dead.

“I was kissed!” he kept repeating in his head over and over. For some reason though, he wasn't dead. “Why not?” he asked himself. It was then that he realized what had happened. The mental Animagus transformation had protected him from the dementor's kiss.

But then again, it made sense.

Dementors only affected humans, not animals. That's why Sirius had been able to escape… and that's why Harry, who had completed half his transformation (albeit the unobservable part), managed to survive the dementor's kiss. He also bitterly noted that surviving the dementor's kiss was yet another unprecedented and supposedly impossible feat that would be added to the list of accomplishments of “the-boy-who-lived.”

“Okay, so I survived the dementor's kiss” Harry thought. Then he… then he… was put into a crematory. And yet here he was, apparently alive. “How in Merlin's name did I survive that?” he asked himself. The answer came to him not a moment later: he had completed the Animagus transformation. Which would mean…

He was in that form right now!

Instinctively, he tried to look down at himself but failed to discern anything with all of the ashes and darkness. However, he now noticed how different his appendages felt and the moment of senselessness left him. He had wings. He was a bird. Not just any bird, but a phoenix.

“I thought magic Animagus transformations were impossible?” Harry thought to himself. After all it had been instilled in him thanks to those lessons from Sirius and Remus.

Harry sat still in thoughtless silence for a second, letting the discovery wash over him. “I did it!” he then thought happily. “I'm an Animagus! And aphoenix of all things!” Suddenly, surviving a crematory made sense… especially when he had undergone his Burning Day in this said crematory.

In that moment of contentment, he thought of how proud Sirius would be. He thought of how proud Remus would be. Then an inextinguishable sorrow overtook him as he remembered that all of his old acquaintances still believed him to be some merciless killer. The memory of sitting in the courtroom, admitting under Veritaserum to all of those crimes he did not even commit, came back to haunt him.

Harry's despaired reverie was broken as the whole room began to shake. It felt as if the room was moving haphazardly in one direction so that he had to struggle with his newfound wings in order to avoid being swallowed by the waves of ash crashing against the walls of this odd enclosing. After a few minutes, Harry could no longer endure it and resolved to escape the confinement once and for all.

Harry knew enough about Fawkes to know that phoenixes could essentially teleport in a burst of flames from one place to another. Of course, Harry had absolutely no idea how to do this and after several minutes of vain effort he let out a frustrated trill. It seemed whatever force had been in charge of disrupting the room was somehow affected by the phoenix's cry and Harry soon found himself propelled into the ceiling of the room, drenched in ash. As abruptly as he found himself on the ceiling, Harry found himself laying on one of the side walls as if the entire room itself was rotating. Before the room could even steady, Harry found himself wishing he was anywhere else… and a little park outside of Surrey was the first image that came to mind.

The ministry official carrying the urn full of Harry Potter's ashes jumped when he heard the muted chirp reverberating from the pot. Consequentially, he lost his grip on the container and nearly let it shatter on the ground. Luckily for him, good reflexes saved the pot before it made contact with the stone floor and he gripped the urn tightly as if expecting it to jump out of his hands anyway. Curiosity overtook the ministry worker so he undid the cover on the container and peered in. All he saw was ashes.

Never realizing if he had looked only seconds earlier, his own belief in the guiltiness of the youth whose ashes he had held would be sorely shaken.

After all, how often is it you see a phoenix a sign of all that is good, in the ashes of a killer?

-8-8-8-8-8-8-8-8-8-8-8-8-8-8-8-8-8-8-8-8-

With a burst of small flames, Harry appeared in the middle of a park, a few meters away from a nearby playground. It was still early in the morning and no one was around to see the ugly little phoenix stranded helplessly. When Harry tried to stand up and walk a few steps, he quickly lost his balance as his weak little legs failed beneath him. Again and again, Harry fell down and nobody heard his desperate little trills.

Despite being miserable and frustrated, Harry did not give up. Figuring that a baby phoenix body was not sufficient for taking care of himself, he decided to transform back into a human. Changing back was quite similar to changing into an animal in the first place: you had to first transform mentally and then physically. Thankfully, the burning sensation Harry first felt did not reoccur. Unfortunately, Harry's human form apparently mirrored the age of his phoenix form…

Harry Potter was now less than a day old and the naked little infant crying in the park was no better off than he had been as a phoenix.

“Well this was unexpected.....”