Disclaimer:
Still not mine, still very weird.Warning:
Still hints of incest slash.Dedication:
This is for Allison, for claiming I'm 'great' because I carry a picture of Alan Rickman around in my wallet.Author's Note:
Wow! A new chapter! ;-) I'm getting back in the swing of things folks. Here's a new chapter to what is actually one of my favorite stories. It was just a weird little experiment in writing, but I'm highly enjoying it. I hope you are too. :-)The Hollow Men
Chapter Three
"Not that final meeting
In the twilight kingdom"
The boy-he of the green eyes and haunted look- could take it no longer. He needed to speak to someone, needed some sense of clarity. Private as these dream visions were, he knew there was at least one person with whom he could share them, one whom he was rather certain would not simply laugh or turn him away.
"Professor?"
The title was courtesy, not reality. The man who sat in the library, tawny head bowed over an ancient tome had not been professor for two years now, but old habits died hard.
"Harry." Joy at the name on his lips, joy upon seeing the green eyed boy standing before him.
"I need to speak with you." Reluctance. He still feared to speak of these strange dream-visions. They were strange and foreign to him, despite their needed familiarity.
"Of course." Old book put aside, all things put aside in favor of this green eyed boy, the one who was so haunted and pale.
"I've...been having weird dreams." the words sounded like such nothings. So silly, needless and unworthy of utterance. He bowed his head, wishing he had no come. What was he thinking, hoping that knowledge or solace would be found here. He chanced looking up to meeting concerned and amused golden eyes, tiny fine lines crinkling about them, looking foreign in the tanned and youthful face.
"It must run in the family." An indulgent smile. "Your father used to have strange dreams as well."
"Really?" His father. A vague thought. He knew he had had a father, once. Before the dark lord came, before the world ended for him. And a mother as well, but it was his father he had found himself thinking on lately. He had only one or two pictures, taken before his death. They told him nothing, showed him little. What sort of man had he been? What had he sounded like?
"Yes. He told me about them, he didn't quite understand them." That smile. So polite. It hid so much. Harry-for that had been revealed as the boy's name-wondered what would happen if this kind and tired man ever stopped smiling?
"See...these dream's were really weird." Harry continued, words sticking in his throat. It would be good, to talk of these things.
"As were your fathers." A nod. "He couldn't remember them that well, that's why he talked to me about them."
A fleeting sense of something, crossing the plane of his mind. It was gone in a flash, leaving nothing but searing wonderment, searching for the answer that had escaped.
"I...couldn't remember mine either. Until I took a potion..."
"Yes." Another affirmative nod. "I wonder if some trace of the sight is in your family...your father's dreams were always the same. It was almost as if...I sometimes wondered if he wasn't dreaming. If he had somehow stumbled into the dreamrealm, accidentally. He was not alone in his dreams. They were the damndest things..."
"Really."
Pale. Frightened. That fleeting white sense was blazing across his mind again, dropping thought children and apprehensions. "Tell me about them." He needed to know.
"I'll tell you what I remember. They were...er...erotic in nature, these dreams. And I think they disturbed your father very much. But that's really all I know. He took a potion, to remember them, and he was...odd, after he awoke."
"Really." Dry-mouthed assumption. Heart quickening. There could be little doubt. He was having his father's dreams, somehow. But where they really dreams?
"Yes." Another nod. It was as though something was not being said. "Would you like to talk about your dreams, Harry?"
"Maybe." Harry-green eyed one-nodded slowly, cautiously. Now he was afraid. Confused. His heart was a bird, his chest a cage against which it fluttered. "You said something about a dreamrealm? What's that...?"
"It's sort of...well, another realm of existence. I'm sure you've heard of astral projection? It's akin to that. No one really knows exactly what it is, it's never been studied in depth. Our thoughts have a powerful effect there, I know that much. And it's a way of communication that has no boundaries. Time, space, dimensions..." A sudden light, slowly dawning. The end of the sentence is left trailing. A thought has begun, and Harry can tell. He fears the worst.
"But it isn't as though you an get there by accident or anything."
"Not entirely true." Muted sunlight dances through dark golden and silver hair as he shakes his head. "Most only find it through accident. Many witches and wizards have experimented with various potions and incantations to send themselves there, but only a select few manage it. Do you think...?"
"How real is the stuff that happens there?" A bitter taste of tang and bile in the back of his throat. It was...a non-place. Existing only in the mind, in the thoughts, perhaps in the soul, but not in the flesh!
"I don't know Harry." Hands splayed in silent apology. It was a pale offering, and needless. So what if he had indulged in debauchery with his own father? He who made him, gave him flesh...it had not happened in the world of the living, the waking. James was dead, long dead and buried. He had no flesh to mar, no innocence to tarnish. And what proof had he of this dreamworld? They were dreams, nothing more. His sleeping psyche, putting forth tendrils of desperation. His subconscious longed for what it had never had, a fathers love, and those tricky and troublesome synapses simply confused it, mingled it with adolescent longing. "I'm afraid I can't help you."
"Can I...can I control, what I do there?"
"If all I've read is true, then yes."
"Okay then." That was all he need do, then. He would stop this, one way or another. Though part of his mind still denied outright that any of this was plausible. It was a trick of his mind, that deceitful inner being. He would sleep again, and he would take the potion, and he would force the course of events to his liking...
"This is the dead land
This is the cactus land
Here the stone images
Are raised, here they receive
The supplication of a dead man's hand
Under the twinkle of a fading star."
