Storm clouds churned under starlight. His eyes waxed and waned beneath exhausted lids that quarreled with the chance of sleep versus the everlasting dissonance of the waking world as the storm bellowed above Godric's Hollow.
Still now, as his body was paralyzed and only his eyes dare open, he could feel and smell the breath of Voldemort. His voice in his ear, and the cold vacuum of the dementors that pulled him from this sleep like his soul had been carved from his very lips.
He pulled himself from the nightmare to sit up and assess the world around him. To gather his scattered thoughts from the broken cage of his past. His side of the bed had an oak nightstand with his wand, glasses, and a picture he couldn't see without them. He reached from the horn-rimmed glasses to see better after he wiped the restless sleep from his eyes and let them sag beneath his lids in a heft pocket, saved for later.
Thick glass covered his eyes and the dark world emerged again in the bluish grey hues of night. The veil darkness lifted from the blurry world of his eyes, he was started by a bright white light that gathered, or pooled, or crumbled at the foot of the bed. Which one, he couldn't tell, but he took his glasses off and wiped them clean.
The light was gone as the world blurred into a hazy mess of blue and black.
When he caught a second glance, the jumbled remains looked like that of a person twisted, gnarled and mangled, almost as if they had been beaten and broken by a Womping Willow, but the sight before him was not a massive dent in the earth, but a rattled cage of human deformity.
The white entity seemed to climb the foot of the bed like a child might, its one good hand curved over the wood and nearly tickled Harry's wife's feet as it pulled its mangled remains up in a gasp, in a great struggle of human strength.
Ginny stirred.
Frightened she had wakened, and unsure himself of what had crawled toward him, Harry reached for his wand. What spell to use, he did not know, but he couldn't find the words to speak to it either, for he saw no mouth and no eyes to look into, to crave that human connection.
As she sat up, his wand pointed at their feet where the white light had instantly faded.
"What is it, Harry?"
Ginny reached for him with her eyes, to pull him from this stupor. This was not the first time she had seen him like this, nor would it be the last.
"Nothing."
He shrugged it off. As always, it was usually nothing but a nightmare, he'd say. This time however he stayed awake as she turned back to her pillow, to the comfort of her dreams.
Harry felt the icy chill of the white entity that had crawled over the foot of his bead still crisp and crinkle his toes and ankles. He stretched and cracked them and felt the icy grip of a child's hand as if it had printed its bony grasp onto him.
This was no ordinary terror, and no ordinary moment caged in the world of post traumatic stress. This was something far worse that the haunting of the dark lord in the twisted alleys of his nightmares.
This was the beginning of something far worse, but of what, and to what end, he had no clue.