BlackRose's Page
We are now entering the part known as "main plot"... wheeee! ^_^ Comments, good bad or indifferent, are always welcome. I hope this is good.
Chapter 6 - The Waking Time
----- Ron -----
Late evening. The fire in the common room is burning down, the flames flickering in wild shadows and lights across the walls. Harry went up to bed earlier to try to get some sleep.
I wish I could join him but I can't. I just can't.
Hermione sits by the fire, her quill moving endlessly across pages of figures. The twins and Lee offered to help her earlier but she turned them down. Now, hours later when only the two of us are still up, she's sitting there with her free hand clenched in her hair, tugging at it as though she might pull it out by handfulls as she mutters to herself.
I haven't told her about Draco. I probably should, but she's so busy with her own work... I don't want to add to it.
She crumples up a sheet of parchment and tosses it into the fire, the flames flaring for a moment as they devour it. I don't know how she can sit there for hours on end doing that work. I tried to catch up on some reading earlier but I'm so tired the words blur and twist in front of my eyes.
The quiet scratch of Hermione's quill is a soothing sort of sound. I tilt my head back in my chair. Maybe I can just close my eyes... just for a minute...
I don't know how much later it is, it feels like only a second, when the sound of a book hitting the ground and the rustle of a flurry of papers jerks me up again. Hermione, her face screwed up as though she's about to cry, sweeps an arm across the small table beside her chair, sending books and inkwell crashing to the ground in a thunderous mess.
"Hermione?" I'm blinking, wondering if I'm dreaming or not.
"Bloody hell!" She has handfuls of her hair in both fists, pushing it back from her face, and now she *is* crying, the tears wet and shining on her cheeks in the light of the fire. Her breath stutters in her throat. "I can't do this, I just can't *do* it! Why won't it work?" She covers her face with her hands, her sobs exhausted and angry.
/Go talk to Granger./ His voice, haunting me. And maybe I've been too blind to see the answers.
/I'm trying to *help*... this is all of us.../
I take a breath and push myself up from the chair. Hermione, hiccuping miserably, doesn't look up until I sink down beside her and put a light hand on her knee. "'Mione?"
She wipes at her eyes, trying to get herself back under control. "I'm sorry. I'm sorry, Ron. I'm just so tired..."
I'm breathing but I can't seem to feel it. Everything feels leaden and I hear my own voice as though it's coming from someone else's throat. "Hermione... I think we need to talk."
----- Draco -----
/At the top of the stairs is a locked room, my secret chamber.../
It's a song, I think. Except that I can't recall what the tune was or where I heard it. Or if I heard it. It seems ironically appropriate, though, and I whisper the words to myself in the darkness, letting them hiss soft from my lips as they chase through the back corridors of my mind.
The moonlight streaming through the window is weak, pale and thready, barely a crescent in the sky. The classroom is silent, the shadowy shapes of the desks strange and different in the night.
I twist the cauldron before me, the dark water cupped in its silver depths rippling faintly in a series of circles that shiver out from the center. It's a trapping, really. All of it, just trappings, window dressings, nothing more.
But right now it makes it easier. It assures me of getting the results I want.
For a moment I can feel the shiver down my spine, the tiny tingle of something like fear. I exhale slowly, letting the sensation rush out with my breath.
/Behind this door is my other self.../
The first prick of the knife tip against my wrist gives me pause and I have to take another breath, steadying the hand that holds the blade. Now is not the time for weakness. Now is not the time for second thoughts.
I open my eyes to the shadows and press, feeling the sting as the metal parts skin and blood wells up in long shallow lines across my arm. I'm no artist but I know this pattern well, and line by curved line I trace it across my skin.
/Immobile, inert.../ the words breath across my mind.
"Not any more," I whisper back and the cool water engulfs my arm, dark and soothing as it washes the blood from my flesh. My eyes are open but the classroom around me has faded away into the night. There is a laugh, something giddy and ecstatic and just on the verge of hysteric, lodged deep in my chest. "Nothing is static. Everything... *everything* is falling apart."
----- Harry -----
He was dreaming again.
Lucid dreaming, where reality and nightmares mixed and he couldn't tell one from the other any more. The empty late night halls of Hogwarts stretched on endlessly before him, twisting and turning and looping back... he couldn't recall the way. Or where he was going. But he had to get there, he had to get there soon, before Filch or Mrs. Norris caught him.
The flagstones were cold beneath his bare feet and he couldn't remember where he had lost his slippers.
Shivering, he turned another corner to face another stretch of corridor. They all looked the same... how long had he been wandering? He started to turn back, wondering if he could retrace his steps.
"I wouldn't try to do that," a quiet voice said.
Startled, Harry whirled, his teeth gritted, but it wasn't the gleeful face of Filch that met his own. Torchlight glittered off of the lenses in wire rimmed glasses, bright in the dimmness and Harry gasped.
The smile was just like his own, a little lopsided. One hand brushed back a disarrayed tumble of black hair from the smooth forehead, leaving it just as rumpled looking as before. "That's the problem, you see," the man said softly. "We can't go back. Not any of us."
Harry couldn't breath, his lungs locked tight and hard in his chest. "Dad?" It was a thready whisper, thin and high as the voice of a small boy.
"James!" The hiss carried through the hall, hoarse and urgent. Harry looked, catching sight of a boy he didn't know, sandy hair and a thin boned, pale face. "James, would you hurry up?"
"Coming, Moony!" When he looked back it was into dark eyes, on a level with his own, in a face that could have been his twin. The boy grinned and for one moment perception twisted and Harry knew he was looking at himself from the younger James' eyes, the light falling on thicker glasses and the hint of a scar. "It'll be alright," he heard himself say. "Just... be yourself. Be who *you* think you should be."
"Dad!" But his cry was swallowed in the silence as the whole of it whirled away, washed in dark crashing waves that buffeted him, fierce and cold as they sucked him below the surface of the lake to sink, dropping, with the taunting laughter of the merfolk in his ears. Harry struggled, thrashing, his lungs burning.
A hand reached out and caught his own, the grip hard and tight. Harry glimpsed pale flesh, gleaming in the dark, before the darkness reared up and engulfed him utterly.
Quotes from last chapter:
Narrator: Can a person die from insomnia?
-- Fight Club