Chapter 3 - Slide
----- Ron -----
With insomnia, nothing is real. Especially when it's someone else's insomnia.
Maybe 'insomnia' isn't quite the word I'm looking for. Harry's sleeping, he's just sleeping badly. He's turned restless tossing into an art form, up one side of the bed and down the other in a tangle of sheets and flailing limbs. And if he doesn't sleep well, I don't sleep at all. Just the way it is and I don't have to like it.
Harry looks like lukewarm death at the breakfast table and I was too chicken to glance in the mirror at the circles under my own eyes. Even Hermione looks tired, with a textbook open in front of her and her quill scrawling over parchement as she holds her toast with the other hand. Hermione, up all night doing homework. Imagine that.
Someone ruffles my hair in passing and I glance up at Fred's smiling face. Or maybe it's George. Hell. It's too early to deal with my brothers, but I summon a wry smile.
"You look like hell," one of the twins state bluntly as they descend on the table across from us. "Didn't you sleep?"
"Not very well," I lie. Or not at all.
Harry's been staring at a bite of sausage on his fork for the last several minutes in a bleary eyed daze. "Me neither," he mutters, setting the bite aside.
"What's sleep?" Hermione asks distractedly. She reaches for the jam without looking and her hand would have ended up in the biscuit gravy if one of the twins - George? - hadn't moved it out of the way.
The other twin - Fred? They've got different freckle patterns, I should know this but I'm too tired to focus - reaches across the table to flip up the cover of her textbook, ignoring Hermione's squawk of protest. "Arithmancy? Ugh. You should have asked us..."
"...we would have told you not to take it," George finishes. "Beastly subject. All those forumlas..."
"...lines and lines of them..."
"...checking and rechecking just because you transposed one number somewhere, but it's two feet of scroll back up the problem..."
"...and why does anyone need it, anyways?"
Hermione humphes, pushing a tangle of hair out of her eyes. "It's a very fascinating subject. I like it."
Fred catches my eye and grimaces. "Percy liked it," he said, as though that summed up all that needed saying right there.
I shake my head. "you won't catch me taking it, that's for sure. Divinations is bad enough."
Harry groans softly. "Are those predictions due today?"
I wave a hand. "Just make something up." Hermione turns to glare at me.
"Ron!"
"What?" I demand. "Everybody does. That's all the class is good for!"
"At least we don't have anything with Slytherin today," Harry mutters darkly as he pushed eggs around on his plate. I can only agree with him.
----- Draco -----
I eat mechanically, not really tasting any of it. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust, and it might as well be for all that I'm tasting it. There's no point to it, not really, no more so than to anything else. My eyes aren't on my plate. They're on a shock of rumpled black hair across the dining hall, one that's been nodding time and again throughout the meal.
That old saying about how you always hurt the one you love. Well, it works both ways, doesn't it? And sometimes I can feel it, like a sore beneath my ribs, a spot of wasting cancer eating into my organs.
An emptiness, and there's only one way to fill it.
I'm so intent on watching as I eat that I don't notice I'm being careless until the knife in my hand slips. I wince, dropping it with a clatter, blood welling up wetly from the shallow cut along my fingertip. Automatic instinct puts the abused digit in my mouth, the taste of it salty and metallic and familiar. I swallow and drop my hand to examine the cut.
Blood and saliva on skin, mixed in thin tendrils of curling red and for one instant I glimpse a question within the shapes of it, playing in flickers along my mind's eye.
*Why?*
It startles a sound from me, half laugh. Why? Because.
Because I want to destroy something beautiful.
Something innocent.
I want to stop feeling empty.
----- Harry -----
He was more asleep then awake, the heavy fumes of incense in the warm air of the classroom making him drowse. Dimly, in snatches, he could hear the voices around him; dull droning sounds, like a distant bee hive, lost in the curling whisps of smoke.
Ron's elbow found his ribs, jerking Harry awake again. Blinking, he straightened up, rubbing at aching eyes. "Ball gazing time," Ron muttered out of the corner of his mouth. Harry groaned.
"Oh god... I'm not awake enough to invent something," he whispered back, trying to bring his scattered mind back together.
Ron snorted quietly. "Then don't. Tell her the ball is broken or something. Tell her you've got a headache. Tell her you're seeing your bed... maybe she'll send you off to get some sleep."
"I wish," Harry growled and then Trelany was calling his name and he stifled another groan, struggling to his feet.
The crystal ball hadn't changed. Didn't change. Big and clear and brightly polished, it sat on the table and gleamed at him as he glared at it. But Trelany was waiting, eyes bright as she watched, so he obediently bent over the ball and looked into it.
"That's it, Harry," Trelany was saying, "just relax..." and in an odd way her voice was relaxing, languid and slow, reminding him of the distant drone as he'd been dozing and his eyes were so heavy, tired and strained...
One of the reflected shadows in the ball moved, shifting, twisting up like the curls of smoke rising from the incense brazier. And as he watched for one moment the shadow raised a spade shaped head, looking at him with chips of crystal eyes in a bright, unblinking gaze.
"Sssslide," it hissed softly.
"Harry?" Trelany's voice brought him back to himself. Dozing. He'd been dozing while he was standing there, his eyes open and his mind fast asleep. Trelany was beaming. "There you go, Harry, very good, come back to us. Just tell us what you saw."
Harry shook his head. He hadn't seen anything not inspired by too little sleep and whatever incense Trelany was burning. He opened his mouth to reply that he hadn't seen anything, too tired to make up something fantastical to suit her. To his surprise he heard his own voice, with the odd dream snake's word on his lips. "Slide?"
Silence for a moment, the class startled and Trelany just staring at him, the color slowly bleaching from her face. "Professor?" he asked. "Ah... I mean... I'm sorry..."
"Thank you, Harry," Trelany interrupted abruptly, her voice distant and strained. "Ah... yes, thank you. You can go back to your seat, now." She cleared her throat, the bangles at her wrists chiming as she clasped her hands sharply in front of her, her knuckles stark and white. "Yes, well... I think that's enough crystal ball today. If you'll all take out your astrology texts..."
Quotes from last chapter
Narrator: You're insane.
Tyler: No, I think you'll find that you're insane.
Tyler: Stop trying to control your life and just let go.
Penguin totem animal: Slide!
-- Fight Club