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By the end of the night, Harry felt like a shade of himself.
There had been no time to eat. Snape had moved up their Occlumency meeting, to fit in a session before Harry's latest detention with the pink hag. And for the first time, he had noticed the mark of her attentions.
Somehow, over all the previous Occlumency lessons, Harry had managed to keep his thoughts away from what was going on in Umbridge's office. Snape saw him pummeled by his cousin, and backhanded into walls by his uncle, saw the clumsy beginnings of his relationship with Cho, saw Voldemort visions and graveyard nightmares. Pain, trauma, guilt, shame. But he didn't see… that.
Until Harry trudged in that evening, sleep-deprived, hungry, hand still inflamed from the night before, and due to be cut open all over again right after Snape finished with him. He set his bag down, Snape turned — and his eyes fastened on Harry's hand.
"Potter," he hissed. "What is that?"
Harry cursed the slip. He shook his head and tried to deflect. "Nothing," he said, grasping his wand and moving into their usual position, squared-off.
Snape rolled his eyes, strode forward and seized his wrist.
"Hey!" Harry protested. Snape squinted at the scar, silently mouthing the words. He raised an eyebrow, and dropped Harry's hand.
"Is this what you do, all those evenings with her?"
Harry stood, white and furious.
"Answer me," demanded Snape.
"Fuck you," spat Harry.
The black eyes flashed and the Legilimens hit him. Harry's vision swam, but in his mind he felt something coalesce. Snape's cold presence, flickering across the threshold, but beyond, blocking access to his deeper memories - a barrier. Even in the midst of his anger, Harry knew a brief moment of wonder. Had he finally managed it?
Then he felt Snape's assault.
Harry's brief sense of accomplishment went out like a candle as the presence in his mind formed a honed point of magic and slammed into the newly-formed wall like a battering ram.
"Ahhhhh!' He gasped in pain. Cracks of lightning tore into his defense. "Stop," Harry whispered, and his knees hit the floor.
Snape did not stop.
*
When the man had forced his way through the barrier, pushed into Harry's memories and found the ones he wanted, he looked his fill. As Harry reeled, his sight of the dungeon room around them lost, Snape turned over night after night in the lace-filled office of horrors. A riptide of hours, as Harry set quill to parchment, and pressed his lips together, and bled quietly. The deepening wounds, her hands on him, the sickening light in her eyes. The shaky walks back to the tower afterwards.
Finally, Snape withdrew, and Harry crumpled.
He came to on the cold stone, tear tracks on his cheeks. Harry looked up.
Snape stood over him, arms folded, nostrils flared. He said nothing of the barrier. He said:
"Pathetic."
Torn between the urges to pass out again, throw up or throttle Snape with his bare hands, Harry said nothing.
Snape said: "Get out."
Harry pushed to his feet, spun on his heel and left.
*
Unfortunately, a glance at his watch revealed just enough time to detour into the bathroom, try and clean himself up and find some composure, before he was due in Umbridge's office.
He scrubbed the tears from his face, tried to steady his breathing. His head pounded. Why had he never brought, you know, a bottle of aspirin or something to this torturous excuse for a school? Reliance on potions for everything was such a wizarding blind spot. Particularly when the man in charge of the potions stores was such a… was a…
Harry drew in a shuddering breath and jabbed his fingers into his temples, tried to work out the tension.
No dice. And no time. He gave one last hopeless look in the mirror, straightened his tie and walked to his next appointment with doom.
*
She kept him late that night.
Three detentions into his punishment for the Quibbler interview, and as the article continued to spread around the school like wildfire, Umbridge's anger was only growing.
Luna had told him her father was reprinting, and Umbridge had been missing at breakfast that morning. Harry wondered if she'd been called in to the Ministry to explain.
At any rate, it was a marathon session of self-torture. Harry wrote, and wrote, and bled, while the castle went quiet around them, while Umbridge drafted correspondence, and went through files, and snorted huffily over student essays, and made cup after cup of tea, and wandered in and out of the office. When she left, the kitten plates all turned their eerie gaze to Harry, and he didn't dare to stop writing.
Around four in the morning, in a haze of exhaustion and pain, he became aware of her eyes on him. Shaky, weak from hunger, vision dimming from sleep-deprivation, he nonetheless kept the quill moving over the parchment. His hand was throbbing, and soaked to the wrist in a sticky sheen of blood, which was also smeared around the desk. The searing, raw ache in his hand had, however, faded in his perception to background noise, eclipsed by the lancing pain behind his eyes. He could feel a phantom sensation of whatever Snape had done to get through his barrier. Something in the front of his mind felt… torn, singed. Or maybe he was just framing it that way. Maybe he could think something else and it would go away. Maybe he could…
Harry caught himself as he swayed over the parchment. She was watching him. He refused to look at her, but he could sense her stare. And then she got to her feet, and approached him.
"Mr. Potter," she said sweetly. He gritted his teeth and fought a wave of nausea. She reached the desk.
"Mr. Potter, I want you to look at me when I'm speaking to you," she said. When he did not immediately comply, Umbridge reached out with stubby fingers and grasped his chin. Revulsion swept him, and he wrenched his face from her grasp, but met her gaze. Her face turned stormy.
"Still ungrateful and defiant, I see. Such a shame. Hold still while I inspect your work."
His pulse thundered in his ears as she deliberately took hold of his hand, much as she had that other night. She seemed untroubled by the patina of blood, and pressed a finger to the open incisions. Harry locked his muscles down and refused to flinch. But his pulse roared, and as her right index finger traced the wounds, her left hand, holding his fast, curled around and dug into his wrist. His heart hammered in fury, stuttered in fatigue and pain. She smiled.
"Well, practice makes perfect. Until tomorrow night, then." She glanced at the clock and then tittered. "Oh dear. Or tonight, now." Umbridge turned and bustled back to her desk.
Harry told himself not to show weakness as he got to his feet and left.
*
Drifting the corridors, Harry passed no one but the odd ghost. He felt like one himself. His mind ducked out and returned to find himself staring blankly at a stretch of wall. What was he doing here? Where had he gone astray?
He wandered back the way he had come. Somehow he'd ended up on the ground floor. Beyond the thick glass windows, he could see the faintest hint of the coming dawn.
Fuck it.
He turned towards the massive front doors. Leaned both palms against them, then his forehead. Silently, they opened. He passed out into the inky quiet of the grounds.
*
Beneath the shelter of a tree, Harry sank to his knees in the grass, wet with the cold dew of March. He sat silently, as the sky lightened imperceptibly. Everything was numb, except somewhere in his battered mind, was the sketch of a thought trying to be born. It was important to have this thought, if he could just keep his eyes open to look at it. If he could just…
… know why.
He turned over the word 'why' as the first birds began to chirp.
His mind ached, and his hand throbbed, and his body grew cold, and he thought about Snape's scorn, and Umbridge's… he would not think the word, 'lust'... and Dumbledore's refusal to look at him.
He thought of Petunia's hate, and Vernon's rage, and Dudley's fists. His hope, his idle dream, his long-suppressed fantasy, of being rescued. His joy in finding Hogwarts.
He thought of broken bones, and blood, and flames, and the bruises that never left his knees, these days.
He thought of darkness standing over a cradle.
He thought of its hands on him in the graveyard. Of fire coursing through his veins as he screamed. He thought of Lucius Malfoy's laughter.
He thought of Dumbledore beside him in the hospital wing. His hand on his shoulder, his voice warm with sorrow, and what had felt like… pride and affection.
And his headmaster's refusal to look at him.
He felt an ache in his heart like a terrible ocean. In the chilled, steely depths moved the incomprehension of a little boy, locked loveless in a cupboard. Above hung a glorious, awful sunrise, and the sunrise was the color of phoenix feathers, blazing with the light of devotion and longing. On the face of the waters moved a wind that whispered the word why.
He sat like that, heart full of the terrible, unspeakable weight, until the phoenix found him.
*
When Fawkes alighted before him, Harry needed a moment to come back to himself, to realize the reality of the sight. The firebird seemed to materialize from his thought, from all the things he couldn't name. But he was real, and making indents in the wet grass, and observing Harry with dark, compassionate eyes.
"Fawkes," Harry whispered. The phoenix looked at him, and suddenly Harry felt all too aware, and naked. His head still aching from the mental assault, his hand crusted in blood. And beyond that… the taint of the connection to Voldemort, that he was still too weak, too undisciplined, too tempted, too compromised to close down. Every inch of mind and body stained, corrupted, unworthy of the bright thing in front of him, which just like its chosen human, undoubtedly saw too much and found him lacking. Any moment now, the phoenix would turn away in disgust.
Instead Fawkes shed a pearly tear. It was Harry's undoing.
"I can't…" he choked.
The phoenix radiated aching love, and the answering ache in Harry's heart swept him under like the tide.
"Why?" he gasped.
Fawkes shook his head.
Harry gazed hopelessly at the creature that, more than anything, was a symbol of the Light, of goodness, of love and loyalty, of Dumbledore himself.
The sense of contamination surged within him like dark bile. Every twisted thing, every indignity, every violation, every assault, everything done to him for reasons dark and labyrinthine, everything he'd never asked for, never wanted, never consented to. This whole life since the last embrace of his mother's arms, and every shadowed stumbling stone on the path ahead.
Against the darkness, the weight of the terrible love, even if it wasn't returned, even if he didn't deserve it, even if he'd never know why.
If he was never to know, and never to be absolved, still he could lay his endurance like a gift at the feet of the man he'd resolved to follow into any fight - his desire to be worthy of the Light. And his acceptance of the terrible, senseless price.
It passed between them in the stricken light of dawn, and Harry knew that Fawkes had seen the tumult in his eyes, and understood. The firebird grew more radiant, and magnificent, and seemed to smolder around the edges, just a little. Harry drew breath like a silent sob, shoved his right sleeve up, and knelt down in the grass. Forehead to the earth, arm outstretched.
*
Harry felt the talons trace and wrap around his inner forearm. Cold at first, they warmed and began to burn as wings draped over him, encircling his head and back, bowed to the earth. The fire poured into him, clear and pure as the bird's song and tears. Harry opened himself to the radiant pain, and let it chase away the darkness.
*
He awoke, an age of the earth later, or maybe just minutes. The sun had still not cleared the mountains. Fawkes was curled around him in the grass, and on his right arm, a brand, faintly luminous and healed already to golden scar tissue. Harry's eyes stung with tears, and he embraced the phoenix. "Thank you," he whispered.
The phoenix hummed and trilled contentedly. They watched the sun rise together.
*
Harry had passed beyond the realms of weariness and shock into some sort of transcendent euphoria out of reach of pain or want or startlement, or so he might have thought, if he were still forming much in the way of thoughts.
Still, when Dumbledore himself showed up on the grounds, Harry startled.
The wizard wasn't there, and then he was, robes sweeping behind him and catching the early morning light. He seemed to be searching for his familiar, and was equally unprepared to find the phoenix cuddled protectively around a battered Harry.
Dumbledore recovered himself with aplomb, launching into a benevolent "Harry, dear boy," even as his eyes began their now-habitual dodge of Harry's own. Unfortunately, the evasive maneuver led him straight to Harry's arm, and the golden phoenix brand, shimmering with its own faint light. His mouth opened. "What…" the mage trailed off, stunned.
Finally, finally, he looked into Harry's face.
Harry was wrung out. There was nothing left. He couldn't hide any of it.
Dumbledore's gaze snapped back to the brand. He looked incredulously at his familiar, and whispered, "Why?"
Why? It was too ironic. Harry couldn't contain it, half-sob, half-laughter.
Fawkes quavered a note, and Harry felt it in his bones like some precious cordial of borrowed strength. What did it matter now? He might as well say it, while the man was still acknowledging his existence. He grasped for words.
Looking into his face again, Dumbledore seemed to see the weight of his struggle. He sank to his own knees in the grass beside Harry and Fawkes, and repeated his question. "Harry, why?" he asked, urgently.
Harry remembered the shape of the things that had swept over him before Fawkes' gift, and tried to find names for them. His throat felt raw, he struggled to speak.
"Because," he breathed at last. "Because I'm…" He closed his eyes and tried again.
"I don't know what I did," he said quietly. "I thought… but I guess it doesn't matter. I just couldn't, anymore…"
The events of the previous evening broke through the surface of his serenity. He looked at Dumbledore.
"I don't know if you know. But it's been…" Harry trailed off, and Dumbledore's eyes flickered past the brand, to his bloody hand. The headmaster's breath hissed between his teeth, and he leaned forward. Harry shook his head. "That's the least of it. Or, I don't know. These god-awful Occlumency lessons with Snape. Last night he…" Harry looked away. Tried to marshal some courage.
"What he did to my mind, it felt like, like…" he couldn't say it. "And then I went to her." He looked back at Dumbledore. "I don't know if it ever ends," Harry whispered. "But beyond this there's just him. And I thought I could face that, when you…" His throat closed, and he stared fiercely at the sky, willing his eyes not to well up. "But it doesn't matter," he whispered hoarsely. "Because you're still my general, and I'll still follow your orders into the mouth of hell or wherever else. Even if I'm contaminated. Even if you can't look at me anymore."
The corners of his eyes spilled over, and he felt Fawkes press his plumaged head to his heart.
A moment of terrible silence, and then Harry felt the archmage's arms around him, around them both.
"Darling boy," he whispered brokenly.
Harry shuddered in his arms, then gave in and wept.