A Dream Within A Dream
"Fear is stronger than love."
-Thomas Fuller, Gnomologia No. 1513
"It is time," the Dark Lord said with sibilant fervour, "to truly rid myself of the presence of Harry Potter. Call the last Malfoy forward."
And that one was brought before him, lithe and trembling, eyes downcast on the murky grey of the dungeon floor and echoing the colour. As one, the rest of the Death Eaters left them, master and slave, Lord Voldemort standing from his cold dais and almost floating towards Draco, who forced himself to not move backwards.
"Little Malfoy," said the Dark Lord in that slick voice that trickled chilly up Draco's spine, and lodged itself at the nape of his neck. "Will you fail me again? You have done so well to redeem yourself. You are the closest to Harry as anyone can get."
"I won't fail, my lord," Draco murmured, and Lord Voldemort released an inhuman chuckle, waving one clawed hand luxuriously. One wall of the dungeon shimmered, and became transparent, and Narcissa seemed to float in a noxious beam of thin green light, her hair waving up in an upward currrent. Draco could hear her low moans of anguish even from where he stood, and he became filled with fear. Before he could say mother, to reassure her that he was here, he would help her, Voldemort snapped his fingers. The green light glowed stronger, and Narcissa's slim body arched forward and her screams filled the room.
Another snap of the fingers, and the glow pulsed dimly; Narcissa slumped in midair, and went back to tortured groans.
"Your success is her life, little Malfoy," Voldemort said, red shards peering from under his cowl. "Do what is necessary."
Poison, Draco thought. I will poison Harry for my mother. It will work.
Lord Voldemort smiled indulgently, and the wall shuddered back into view.
"Nothing is so good as it seems beforehand."
-George Eliot, Silas Marner, Ch. 18
Draco Malfoy brought the little vial into the safehouse, tucked in an inside pocket of his black robe, right near the deep vee of the neck, where his fingers could reach in and grasp it easily. He was ninety-five percent sure that he would fail, and that green light around his mother would spindle into a sharp point, skewering into her head, drilling out every drop of her to the ground. He was sure of it.
The Aurors that were patrolling on the outside of the house, guarding Harry, would be sure to ponder his presence here on a non-reporting day, he knew that. But they let him through with short greetings, and sleepless nods. He was a spy for their side, they were aware. But oh. How unaware they were.
He was even more worried about the inner guards, his stomach clenching with the effort of keeping his face calm. If Moody was there, he would have no chance. He wondered which luck it was, bad or good, to find that this rightly-suspicious man had been called off on assignment in Scotland.
He was then quite positive that Harry would not be eating his lunch, but Harry was a creature of habit, and there he was, carefully sipping on some Weasley soup in the damp dark kitchen. He could have bet all his misbegotten trust fund that Harry would have seen the abject terror in his eyes when he spoke to him, asking how he was sleeping at nights.
"Not too good," Harry said, open and honest, swirling the spoon in absent circles around his bowl. He had a little smile on his face now, as if Draco's presence made the soup, the building, the whole flipping war better. The tower of Draco's resolve began to crumble.
"Well, we can't have our boy-hero turning into an insomniac," Draco drawled briskly, and was gratified to hear that his voice did not tremble. Harry kept on smiling, and his eyes flickered up when Draco took out the vial and held it up in front of his face.
"Draught of Peace," he murmured. "It will let you have a good night's rest." Forever.
But Harry, damn him, did not even sense this last, and merely pushed his soup over, his smile getting no wider, but seeming to push deeper into Draco's skin. Draco almost clenched back the vial, almost threw it against the wall, but he saw green light and long blonde hair as clearly as he was seeing Harry's hollow-cheeked face right now, and the crumbling tower inside of him held up for just a little more, shuddering under the weight of regret and pain.
He tipped the whole thing in, and tried to smile back at Harry, tapping into this intense camaraderie they had developed when they discovered that the differences between them were not so much differences as they were reflections. This was trust, and Draco had never really been trusted like this by anyone before. He knew he would never be again.
And he held his breath, certain that he had finally been caught when Harry took a sip and wrinkled his nose; but Harry tossed the rest of it back, and then gave the bowl a slight shove, but it seemed the bowl weighed a ton, the way he pushed at it so labouriously.
He stared at Draco and Draco stared back.
"Draco?" Harry said, blinking sluggishly. Draco waited until Harry slowly lay his heavy head on the table, nose pointing to his forlorn bowl and relaxing onto the pillow of his arms like a small child, before saying anything. Draco could see, however, that his back was still moving in slow deep respiration.
"I am truly sorry, Harry," Draco whispered. "I couldn't even poison you properly."
He fled.
"There are two worlds; the world we can measure with line and rule, and the world we can feel with our hearts and imaginations."
-Leigh Hunt, Men, Women and Books, "Fiction and Matter-of-fact"
He got back his mother, but she seemed such a crumpled thing, a destroyed butterfly. Her mind seemed to jump between her own childhood and the time of Draco's extreme youth; once he found her pattering barefoot along the cold halls of the small manor in which they were hiding, and she was speaking in the future tense, and giggling as she pressed her thin cheek into the wall.
He had to comb her hair, untangled the knots she made in it every night as she screamed and struggled in the bed next to his. He had to dress her, trying not to weep as he saw her scarred skin and wasted breasts. He read to her, making up silly stories so that she made gurgling giggles, but he said nothing specific when she asked after Lucius; he told her that Father was on his way, and steered the conversation deftly until her battered mind lost the path of thought and went on to explore others.
And at night, Draco dreamt of Harry.
At first, it was hazy, glimpses of Harry's pale face and shocking eyes, and then more specific images, such as his bony wrist emerging from the black of his school-robes. Then, as weeks passed and Voldemorts activities became more confidently belligerent and the Ministry struggled in the war, Draco realised he was having the same dream over and over again.
He would be walking down a narrow corridor with a white ceiling and floor, and the walls were mirrors, reflecting a million Dracos. One of the mirrors would spin sideways, and he would step into a bright room to see two Harrys: one sleeping deeply on a large plush couch, the other poised over him, watching the resting face intently. Upon hearing Draco's footstep, the awake one would turn and say in desperate tones, "Draco! What have you done?'
Draco would turn his heel and speed away down the reflective hall.
One night, Draco decided to explain. He could not do this to the real Harry, so he would try appease his guilt by making his dream Harry understand.
"What have you done?" Harry wailed at him, and Draco shivered, but stood fast. It seemed as if this room they were in was mirrored as well, and all of Draco's reflections were crowded around Harry's side of the room, shooting Draco strange looks of loathing and sympathy. He stepped forward for the first time, and put out his hand, touching Harry's shoulder. To his shock, he could actually feel the texture of Harry's cotton shirt, how thin it was and how Harry's body-heat fairly oozed through it, warming over his hand and cascading down his arm. He noted such detail about Harry in this amazing dream, how his hair curled and brushed against his jaw, how his eyes were greener than he ever thought they were, and how Harry's mouth was curved down in an unnatural position.
This was real. It was all in his head, and yet it was real.
Harry pulled himself away from Draco's grasp, and pointed down at his sleeping self.
"Look," he commanded and Draco did so. The other Harry was still fast asleep, but his eyelids were fluttering rapidly, and Draco frowned; his reflections muttered around them. "I'm dreaming, Draco. That's why I'm here. Why didn't you just kill me?"
"I couldn't. I had to but-"
"I know about your mother," Harry said, eyes still rapt on his sleeping self. "Her dreams are awful." Harry looked up at him, and his eyes hardened. "You owe me, Malfoy. You find some way to pay me back, or I will never leave this head of yours."
Draco stared at him in shock, not knowing what to with this bitter, enraged Harry. He began to back away, but thankfully, Harry did not follow. He was almost at the mirrored door when Harry caught at him with a quiet, hateful voice.
"Will I ever wake up?"
Draco closed his eyes and rested against the cool door. He had made that draught so powerful, that he doubted that anyone would be ever able to rouse Harry again. He did it for his mother, he told himself, and Harry gave a short bark of harsh laughter.
"That's a no, then. Leave, Draco. I will see you again."
"Le coeur a ses raisons, que la raison ne connaît pas (The heart has its reasons, which reason does not know.)"
-Blaise Pascal, Pensées, Pt ii, art. xvii
Harry haunted Draco.
Draco was not sure how he did it, because Harry was not really dead at all, but Harry turned out to be as powerful in sleep as in wakefulness. Draco began to see his shadow trailing along ahead of him when he went to get his mother's calming potions. Out of the corners of his eye he would see a dark flash of hair around a corner, and refused to let his eyes track the movement. He began to hear strange singing in his head during the day, laughter, jokes he couldn't understand, and resigned himself to the fact that Harry was going mad in this dream-state of his, and he was going to drive Draco mad with this constant presence.
In the Room of Reflection (as he began to call it) Harry would speak with him, watching over his own sleeping frame.
He told Draco about his life at Privet Drive and how he developed a sincere fear of dark enclosed spaces.
He discovered from Draco about the terrifying acts of the Dark Lord, how the destruction of the muggle-trains were blamed on the tracks, how the crashed planes were put to pilot error.
He let Draco know the reason for his deep love of flying, because it was the polar opposite of a cupboard underneath a staircase.
Draco found out one day that he had invaded the dreams of Granger and Weasley, and even some of the Aurors, but they never reacted as strongly as Draco did. He did not have such a stronghold in their minds as he did here.
"It's because of your guilt," Harry had said, moving closer to Draco, and Draco bit his lip, still not getting over the tactile facet of his dreams with Harry. He could feel everything, from his own teeth worrying the chapped skin of his lips, to the way Harry's breath brushed against his cheek. He closed his eyes and felt the warmth of Harry's mouth pressing against his, and parted his lips in invitation; Harry's tongue slipped in slowly as his hands roamed up Draco's back, moulding them closer, and Draco let Harry take as much as he wanted, because it was his due.
As dreams tend to do, this one skittered ahead, and Harry was in him, filling him roughly, long hot sliding moves inside Draco as they lay on the smooth floor. Harry was whispering why didn't we do this when I was awake? but Draco was too busy crying out to give him a good response. He didn't think he had one, anyhow.
"You're going help me kill Voldemort," Harry panted as he thrust, electrifying Draco with every movement. Draco could hardly understand what he was saying, his body arching and clenching, legs tight around Harry's waist. "I can't get to him like this, but I've figured out how. You will," he moaned, as if Draco had told him no. "You will."
Draco awoke with bands of bruises around his wrists, and a solid ache where he thought he did not have a heart.
"All that we see or seem
Is but a dream within a dream"
-Edgar Allen Poe, A Dream Within A Dream
Draco left his mother at a muggle institution where they cared for people with shattered minds as hers. He did not want to do it, but he thought she would be safe there, doubly so with the wards he placed around her. She was almost unrecognizable, because she had taken to the habit of tearing at her long silvery hair, so that there were bloody patches on her scalp. She had no use for the rest of the world now, and Draco saw that she did not seem overly upset to be in a strange new place.
The last Malfoy Apparated to the stronghold of the Dark Lord, and in his mind he carried the essence of the person Voldemort had tried to destroy for nearly nineteen years. He could feel himself literally vibrate with the raw strength of Harry's magic, and he found that if he waved his hand just so, Death Eaters would either go hurtling to the walls, or fall choking to their knees. It was almost anti-climatic when he stepped into Voldemort's inner sanctum and Voldemort seemed unsurprised to see him.
"Young Malfoy," he hissed, moving his grey hands up to remove his cowl. "How is your mother?"
"His is as dead as mine," Harry answered through Draco, and then murmured two words conversationally, and it seemed as if green light shot out of Draco's eyes and mouth, burning his throat and lungs so that he would have problems talking and breathing for months afterwards. His fingertips tingled as well, and he could barely see behind the veil of light that Harry was pushing out of his body, using him as a human wand. He heard screaming, and could not discern if it was himself, Voldemort or Harry.
When it was finally over, Draco slumped and nearly fell face-first into the pile of dust that had been the Dark Lord, and noted with alarm that he could not feel Harry in his head at all.
Let us now praise famous men
-Apocrypha, Ecclesiasticus xliv, 1
They placed Harry in repose on a large raised dais in the heart of the reconstructed Ministry of Magic, covered by glass and faint whispers of magic to keep his body alive and ever-young. His arms were folded across his chest, and he was dressed in glowing red robes, trimmed in gold-dyed fur; Draco had respectfully asked that they charm his viewing-room to look as if it was a forest, with tall thick trees and hints of sky. There were even times it seemed as if there had been a slight rainstorm minutes ago, and Harry's room would then have the sharp fresh tang of water. At the base of the small platform, there was ostentatious lettering that Draco knew Harry would not like: Harry the Eternal. He gave his soul to save our lives.
They let Draco visit him once a month, as a reward for good behaviour. The court had decided that since Harry was technically not dead, there could be no murder charges. It made no difference to Draco.
He would only go in the night, after the crowds had dispersed for the day, and got a chair as near to him as the magical barriers would allow. He would watch Harry's chest rise and fall steadily and saw how his lashes were still against a pale cheek.
"Harry, wake up," he would whisper, knowing the impossibility of his request. Harry lay still.
"Harry, I miss you," he would admit, longing to hear even Harry's constant muttering in his head, and how strange his own mind seemed without him. The Room of Reflection was empty and dark in his dreams. It had even lost the mirrors.
"Harry. I love you."
Harry went on breathing slowly.
fin