Shield
Mrs. Cole was most unimpressed with Tom for returning to Wool’s. She had sent all the other boys away - all and more. She collected up the strays of London and sent them north whenever she was able. They were not meant to come back. Yet Tom reappeared like clockwork every year, the difficult child she could not cast off no matter how she tried.
At sixteen, he was now the oldest. Other boys his age either pretended to be old enough to enlist or pretended to be young enough to run wild in the streets with the other lost children of the war. When he knocked on the door, she took one look at him and put him to work taking care of the latest batch of collected children.
He did not argue. He would rather have a roof than no roof to sleep under. He did not like Mrs. Cole any more than she liked him. But she wouldn’t turn him away until he was too old, and he was not too old. Not yet. It was bizarre that he would be an adult by wizarding standards before he was old enough to be sent to war by muggle standards.
He went through the motions of the work Mrs. Cole demanded. Truthfully she needed a proper staff, but of course that was too much to ask even when there wasn’t a war on. He knew how it was. She seemed unnerved by his lack of complaint at the bland and scanty food (worse even than he’d known as a child), his lack of temper with the idiot children underfoot everywhere, his lack of ire at her for asking too much of him. What was the point of being angry with her? It was Headmaster Dippet he was furious with. All of the mages who didn’t care that children were dying of starvation in the streets and being crushed under rubble when the bombs fell. Not Mrs. Cole. He didn’t like her, but at least she was doing something.
The phoenix was an odd thing. It was like Mrs. Cole couldn’t see it at all. Her eyes just slid over it, unseeing. It was convenient, since she couldn’t tell him to send it away if she couldn’t see that it was there.
But the children could. They shied away from Tom and his cold demeanour, as always, but they were drawn in by the bird that traipsed around in his wake. The fool creature would play games with them. Let them pat it whenever Mrs. Cole wasn’t looking. Tom had seen it get squeezed like a teddy bear countless times now. Any normal bird would have gotten its bones crushed if you squeezed it the way the scruffy orphanage boys squeezed that phoenix. But it wasn’t harmed in the slightest. He felt rather foolish for his petty habit of dropping it now. It was far too durable to be physically inconvenienced by such a gesture.
At night, the phoenix sang. And they slept. Even the colicky baby.
When Mrs. Cole gave him weird looks at what must have seemed to her like a calming influence that extended from him, Tom just shrugged and said nothing. Let her think whatever she thought. He wasn’t breaking the Statute. If the phoenix was, well, that wasn’t his fault. It wasn’t as though she believed the others when they babbled about Tom’s sunshine bird that sang them songs and cheered them up when they were more miserable than usual.
He also learned that it was capable of eating things that weren’t food. Like ashes and charcoal and empty tin cans (which it ate by snipping them apart with its beak as though this were a perfectly normal thing to do). He had assumed that it would simply go somewhere else and find something better to eat if he didn’t feed it from the extremely limited rations, but it stayed close and scavenged from unwanted material that no one else would consider edible. He supposed it must be convenient to be a creature so doused in magic that one could eat anything one pleased and get something out of it. He also had a new appreciation for the level of risk that pair of tin snips the books called a beak presented to such things as fingers.
He continued to grouse at the creature for sleeping on his bed with him when it wasn’t singing babies to sleep. He did not need a teddy bear. He did not need to be sung lullabies. He was nearly an adult, for god’s sake.
He stopped grousing after the night the air raid sirens were late.
One moment he was asleep. The next, there was an awful noise. He woke screaming with the absolute belief that he was about to die. There was no time to react, no time to do anything, because the wall was already exploding inward by the time he opened his eyes. The wall was exploding, and there was a woman pinning him to the bed, shielding him with her wings and an astonishing amount of magic.
Stay!
He couldn’t possibly have heard the command, but he could see her mouth form the word. He stopped struggling and braced himself as debris crashed around them - around, over, beside, but not on them. He stared into her wide blue eyes in terrified confusion as the building shook like it was considering simply collapsing altogether.
Wings. She had wings. Wide golden ones that were spread like a canopy to shelter him from the blast. And she might be no heavier than a bird, but her hands were strong where they gripped his shoulders to hold him still.
Angel of justice. That was his phoenix. Also, she was naked and very female.
A cloud of dust rose up in the wake of the blast. The phoenix broke eye contact to look around, but didn’t let him up for another few seconds. His ears were ringing, but he could hear faint screams. The others - they wouldn’t have had a phoenix sitting on their chest to protect them. He looked around himself and saw that Wool’s didn’t appear to be collapsing, but there sure as hell was a very big hole in the side of the building that faced the street.
He would have died, just now.
The phoenix shook him. Apparently she was trying to get his attention.
Are you deaf? her mouth said.
“Yes,” he replied dazedly.
She put her hands over his ears and closed her eyes. For a moment he felt far, far too hot. But before he could struggle out of her grasp, she let go. The ringing in his ears had stopped, but now there was an air raid siren belatedly howling instead. There were screams and crying, too.
“Did anything hit you?” his phoenix asked, perfectly audible despite the siren.
“No,” he said, reached up to push her away, then snatched his hands back like they’d been burned before even making contact. He couldn’t touch her; she was naked.
“Get off, we have to go find out what happened to the kids,” he snapped instead.
“Good idea,” she agreed, and jumped up and folded her wings.
Barefoot. She was naked and barefoot, and apparently she was just going to go waltzing across piles of rubble like that. Then again, he supposed birds didn’t wear clothing.
He ended up going barefoot as well, because it seemed like a waste of time levitating bricks out of the way to find shoes when there were probably injured people who needed unearthing. He took his wand from under his pillow and wobbled after his phoenix, who seemed to know exactly where to look.
They hadn’t all made it, the kids. There were two sharing the room next to Tom’s who were far, far beyond help. But everyone else, his phoenix was able to mend. She walked through the ruins and pointed, and Tom levitated debris out of the way, and she pulled people from the wreckage and healed them. It didn’t take tears. She did it with her hands, like she’d done for Tom’s ears.
This time Mrs. Cole saw her. She stared and stared in numb shock until Tom took the screaming baby out of her arms - she had apparently been holding him when the bombs fell - and tried to get him to shush.
“Tom, what - what is that?” she asked.
“An angel, obviously,” he replied without looking up. “Shush, you, the bombs are done. No need for this noise.” The baby did not believe him, perhaps because he was as deaf as the rest of them. Mrs. Cole hadn't even heard him answer her question. He sighed in annoyance and took the screeching baby to the phoenix.
“He can’t hear and he won’t stop screaming, but I think that’s all that’s wrong with him,” he explained shortly.
“Oh, poor thing. It was awfully loud,” she remarked. She didn’t take the baby from him, though. She just did the thing to his ears and walked across the street, presumably to help whoever it was that was screaming over there.
It took Tom a moment to notice that the baby he was holding wasn’t crying anymore, but simply staring around confusedly.
“Well, fine,” he muttered, and took him back to Mrs. Cole. She was still too shocked to take charge of the chaos, which left him to round everyone up and count them. Once he was sure nobody was frightened enough to do anything too dumb, he went through the building with his wand and put things back to rights as much as he could. He supposed in theory he could even put the blasted-out wall back together, but that definitely counted as breaking the Statute and he was already in the soup for what his phoenix was doing wandering around out in the open. He could make sure the building would not collapse, though, and make it so that closing a few doors would separate the destroyed rooms from the rest. They were lucky, really. Mr. and Mrs. Gibbons across the street didn’t have a house at all anymore.
His phoenix didn’t come back all night. He figured she was busy with her angel duties.
Besides, he had no idea what to say to her now that he knew she had freckles on her breasts.