A/N: Meh. There'll be slash next chapter, this is just me being vague.
Disclaimers: What's the chance that JK Rowling will ever read my crappy fanfic? Well sue me if you want, all I own are some socks and the cardboard box I sleep in.
Writings on the Walls of the Skull
Chapter One
[lay back and let me show you another way]
+++
Didn't they think of this!? In all their brilliance in constructing this little *haven*, didn't they think for once of...
God.
They didn't, they didn't... no one thought of how five years of sleeping in a room with four other people breathing, whispering, listening, watching, could drive a boy insane.
"Ron."
Harry's voice fell flat and he was suddenly intoxicated by the closeness of the bed's curtains around him, stifling and choking him- he couldn't get out, he couldn't go out, he couldn't...
He laid down on his back trembling, and the moment fused sickeningly with every other night past present and future that he'd found himself lying so still there, shaking, trying failingly to contain himself.
"Ron. Ron, Ron, Ron, Ron, Ron."
He realized that he was speaking so softly, his breathing so wracked, he couldn't himself discern
the words. He wouldn't hear. No one would come.
Here, he thought, it should end. In despair.
But it kept going.
Over and over.
Forever and ever unending...
+++
Ron ran his fingers through the tufts of his flaming hair, wondering hwo much of himself was really alive at any given time and then dismissing the thoughts as too Harryish. Concern swept him, and then he turned his attentions to a chess game he was playing out in his mind, which occupied him for the next little while.
He hadn't the longest attention span in the world, but it wasn't for lack of trying. His train of thoughts was not a train at all, nor anything that could occupy much rational physical space. No, his was a series of random explosions that only served to rattle the debris left behind from last night's fit of passive insomnia.
It was dawn. He always woke at dawn. Or, in winter, when he thought dawn should be. The swells of stormy grey that still quieted the world seemed demented and wrong, completely wrong. He thought to set the sky on fire, and it was a lingering abstraction on his mind.
Ron was a philosopher. Or, rather, he thought at the oddest times, when no one needed any thinking to be done.
He rose from his bed and paced the room, grabbed Harry's invisibility cloak from where it lay folded haphazardly in his open trunk and draped it with a hushed 'swish' around his shoulders. It had a nice weight on him.
Outside, it had begun to snow. He wondered if anyone had noticed.
Harry was awake in his bed. Ron turned; he hadn't seen, it was too dark. But he could hear Harry now rocking back and forth, as if he were sitting cross-legged and hunched over on his mattress.
The drapes concealed him completely. The mattress kept making the rocking noise, not a squeaking, but a crinkling of soft blankets and a weighted depression of the bed as he went forwards, backwards, forwards, backwards... forwards...
Ron blushed furiously and drew the cloak over his face. Then, on a whim, he walked hesitantly out of the room and followed the sound of his own footsteps down to the common room where he lit a fire and watched the sun come up from the window near the high ornate ceiling before wandering back to bed.
None of the others even knew he was gone.
+++
[I'm looking at you from behind myself, and I can see the outlined profile of my wax expression. I wish I could force the secret from parting in my marble lips, but my breath will not move and my head spins instead of forming words. So I'm trapped, the silent powerless puppeteer behind the face you see. The redness of your hair is such a comfort though, so I hope one day you'll know that.]
Somehow I made it to the Hall. Somehow I made it to the day. Somehow... I transcended the night...
"Hey Harry." I hear my own sigh of relief, and remember how anxious I was thinking you wouldn't notice me here.
"Hey Ron." Where were you last night when the words were bursting from me?
"How are you?" If you hadn't asked that way, maybe I could tell you.
"I don't know." If knowing means that I could put it into words...
"Are you alright?" Is it the sympathy you can't control or the sympathy you know that you should have that I hear in your voice that's so unnervingly level?
"No."
But I won't talk about it, not with you. You won't understand, but I'm still angry at you for sleeping last night while I was going insane.
"Do you-"
"No."
Don't think I'm mad at you. You don't think I'm mad at you.
"Okay."
So I know you understand, but you can't understand.
"Okay."
So maybe you're all the friend you can be, but just not the friend I need. Because you know a part of me that would just get in the way if I tried...
I guess I need a stranger, but I'll never find one. And that just leaves me all alone.
Beside you at the breakfast table unable to speak.
+++
Hello, my dearest one who understands.
Draco sat on the edge of his bed, swaddled in a crushed velveteen blanket of sorts, something shimmery and invariably valuable. It was dark, the room was... dark... he'd blown the candle out to see the smoke and tried to follow the wispy stream into the ceiling where it simply diffused... that wasted, he was sitting hidden by the night in a room that seemed equally hidden from him. Very mysterious, very a-la-Malfoy.
He stilled the waters in his goblet with a silvery stare, light gleaming off the muted grey and the swirling depths that was only a goblet of water. He took a sip, and it tasted metallic. He spit it out.
Where were the house-elves at this hour? And extension of this thought could have led to a complaint to drive somehow the train of thought in his head, but it just hovered there. Where are the house-elves?
They must be *somewhere*, after all. He jumped and the shadows altered suddenly around him, becoming startlingly brighter and more defined.
Were they in the walls?
+++
Harry wiped the sweat from his forehead and then realized that he wasn't sweating at all. Good, he supposed. He felt unnaturally cold, though. And he reached for his father's cloak which he'd packed for some reason in his back pack that day. He was carrying a back pack. For some reason, lately, he'd needed something solid slung over his shoulder and pressing heavily into his spine.
He enjoyed sitting in the back of Potions class. He was stand-offish with the teacher and the dull repetition of stirring a churning cauldron for two long silent periods, ignored by the Slytherins and left to quietude by the Gryffindors, left him warm and still inside.
And it was in Potions, strangely enough, that he felt most within the braces of Magic, the Magic that had captivated him when he'd been taken from the windswept cabin with the Dursleys so many years ago. Five years, he thought, not that many... but it was a lifetime.
/... and even put a stopper in Death.../
Had those been the exact words?
Harry bent his emerald eyes, darkened but glittering, into the opening of his cauldron. They were brewing the Obsesciatus Potion; a draught that would watch the drinker from within. The spying potion. The insanity potion, really, for it was the victim's ultimate end...
Betrayal, exposure, humiliation, and insanity. Four fates as sure and concrete as fact, swirling in his iron pot- created like lines traced by his fingertips was nothing more than reality transcended into possibility. His potion was the same green as his eyes and his thoughts wandered. What, then, could he see?
"Mr. Malfoy, would you like to be the first to test your potion?"
Could he pierce the image of those he looked upon?
"How, sir? Isn't the potion..."
"Extremely dangerous, yes. But there's a counterpotion I have ready, so... if you would choose a victim..."
Or was it that he was meant more to see within himself, he mused, a sleepy smile crossing his blank face.
"Or perhaps we should ease everyone's curiosities and find out exactly what Mr. Potter has been
daydreaming about all class!"
Silence.
"Wh... what?"
Professor Snape grinned, and Malfoy turned with a vial-full of his potion, which strangely was a glistening silver, towards the back of the classroom where Harry was shaking himself very violently from his thoughts.
"Well, Mr. Potter? In the name of... what do your guardians call it, Science?"
Harry swallowed, realizing what he had been sentenced to, and he stepped amid the snickers of the Slytherins towards Malfoy's cauldron. Scowls befouling both faces, he locked eyes with the pale boy and took the vial with grim determination.
For really, he had nothing to hide, and Malfoy couldn't read specifics from the rudimentary mess they'd brewed...
"Bottoms up, Potter!" Snape uttered with a disturbing grin on his face. He tipped the contents down his throat and felt the imidiate invasion.
He's inside me.
Convulsing, Harry threw himself forward onto the table and two Slytherin cauldrons went flying- Pansy Parkinson screamed somewhere from the right of the class and gasps were coming from all around him- he could see nothing, his were screwed shut, he lay and curled himself tighter and tighter...
[Get out of me.]
Distantly, he heard Snape shout a halting command over the muted delerium of the class's panicked babble, and there was silence as two iron hands grasped his arms and flipped him onto his back. At the sudden release of his clenched muscles a pain broke out over every edge of his body- his eyes became pits of fire, his throat closed suddenly, hysterically, and he began to kick furiously-
[-GET OUT OF ME-]
He was inside him, he was inside him, he was inside him...
A vile sickness was penetrating every inch of his form, his organs, he squirmed, but now the hands were holding him down firmly. He heard the shout, now painfully void of control, afraid-
"SWALLOW POTTER!"
And he did. And it went black.
There was a dull nausea washing over him but he breathed... it was black, the world was black, and he was beautifully emptied and numb.
As if he were under water, the sounds were fading from his ears and he could hear the pressure of the air, the swells of the wind and everything all around him...
Gone, all gone.
"What did you see, Malfoy?"
He heard the distant interrogation of his Potions Master, and he heard the shuddering reply in a low trembling voice, through the absence of tears and a body broken by sobs.
"It was horrible... it was horrible..."
+++
Stillness.
Stillness in your eyes.
You're watching me like you know something. Like you're afraid to watch me.
Why are you fixated, why, why...
Because. Ha ha...
I can hear you.
"I know..."
But you're afraid as you say it.
I think we are both out way beyond our depths.
+++
TBC, I guess, if you like this enough for me to keep going.
Disclaimers: What's the chance that JK Rowling will ever read my crappy fanfic? Well sue me if you want, all I own are some socks and the cardboard box I sleep in.
Writings on the Walls of the Skull
Chapter One
[lay back and let me show you another way]
+++
Didn't they think of this!? In all their brilliance in constructing this little *haven*, didn't they think for once of...
God.
They didn't, they didn't... no one thought of how five years of sleeping in a room with four other people breathing, whispering, listening, watching, could drive a boy insane.
"Ron."
Harry's voice fell flat and he was suddenly intoxicated by the closeness of the bed's curtains around him, stifling and choking him- he couldn't get out, he couldn't go out, he couldn't...
He laid down on his back trembling, and the moment fused sickeningly with every other night past present and future that he'd found himself lying so still there, shaking, trying failingly to contain himself.
"Ron. Ron, Ron, Ron, Ron, Ron."
He realized that he was speaking so softly, his breathing so wracked, he couldn't himself discern
the words. He wouldn't hear. No one would come.
Here, he thought, it should end. In despair.
But it kept going.
Over and over.
Forever and ever unending...
+++
Ron ran his fingers through the tufts of his flaming hair, wondering hwo much of himself was really alive at any given time and then dismissing the thoughts as too Harryish. Concern swept him, and then he turned his attentions to a chess game he was playing out in his mind, which occupied him for the next little while.
He hadn't the longest attention span in the world, but it wasn't for lack of trying. His train of thoughts was not a train at all, nor anything that could occupy much rational physical space. No, his was a series of random explosions that only served to rattle the debris left behind from last night's fit of passive insomnia.
It was dawn. He always woke at dawn. Or, in winter, when he thought dawn should be. The swells of stormy grey that still quieted the world seemed demented and wrong, completely wrong. He thought to set the sky on fire, and it was a lingering abstraction on his mind.
Ron was a philosopher. Or, rather, he thought at the oddest times, when no one needed any thinking to be done.
He rose from his bed and paced the room, grabbed Harry's invisibility cloak from where it lay folded haphazardly in his open trunk and draped it with a hushed 'swish' around his shoulders. It had a nice weight on him.
Outside, it had begun to snow. He wondered if anyone had noticed.
Harry was awake in his bed. Ron turned; he hadn't seen, it was too dark. But he could hear Harry now rocking back and forth, as if he were sitting cross-legged and hunched over on his mattress.
The drapes concealed him completely. The mattress kept making the rocking noise, not a squeaking, but a crinkling of soft blankets and a weighted depression of the bed as he went forwards, backwards, forwards, backwards... forwards...
Ron blushed furiously and drew the cloak over his face. Then, on a whim, he walked hesitantly out of the room and followed the sound of his own footsteps down to the common room where he lit a fire and watched the sun come up from the window near the high ornate ceiling before wandering back to bed.
None of the others even knew he was gone.
+++
[I'm looking at you from behind myself, and I can see the outlined profile of my wax expression. I wish I could force the secret from parting in my marble lips, but my breath will not move and my head spins instead of forming words. So I'm trapped, the silent powerless puppeteer behind the face you see. The redness of your hair is such a comfort though, so I hope one day you'll know that.]
Somehow I made it to the Hall. Somehow I made it to the day. Somehow... I transcended the night...
"Hey Harry." I hear my own sigh of relief, and remember how anxious I was thinking you wouldn't notice me here.
"Hey Ron." Where were you last night when the words were bursting from me?
"How are you?" If you hadn't asked that way, maybe I could tell you.
"I don't know." If knowing means that I could put it into words...
"Are you alright?" Is it the sympathy you can't control or the sympathy you know that you should have that I hear in your voice that's so unnervingly level?
"No."
But I won't talk about it, not with you. You won't understand, but I'm still angry at you for sleeping last night while I was going insane.
"Do you-"
"No."
Don't think I'm mad at you. You don't think I'm mad at you.
"Okay."
So I know you understand, but you can't understand.
"Okay."
So maybe you're all the friend you can be, but just not the friend I need. Because you know a part of me that would just get in the way if I tried...
I guess I need a stranger, but I'll never find one. And that just leaves me all alone.
Beside you at the breakfast table unable to speak.
+++
Hello, my dearest one who understands.
Draco sat on the edge of his bed, swaddled in a crushed velveteen blanket of sorts, something shimmery and invariably valuable. It was dark, the room was... dark... he'd blown the candle out to see the smoke and tried to follow the wispy stream into the ceiling where it simply diffused... that wasted, he was sitting hidden by the night in a room that seemed equally hidden from him. Very mysterious, very a-la-Malfoy.
He stilled the waters in his goblet with a silvery stare, light gleaming off the muted grey and the swirling depths that was only a goblet of water. He took a sip, and it tasted metallic. He spit it out.
Where were the house-elves at this hour? And extension of this thought could have led to a complaint to drive somehow the train of thought in his head, but it just hovered there. Where are the house-elves?
They must be *somewhere*, after all. He jumped and the shadows altered suddenly around him, becoming startlingly brighter and more defined.
Were they in the walls?
+++
Harry wiped the sweat from his forehead and then realized that he wasn't sweating at all. Good, he supposed. He felt unnaturally cold, though. And he reached for his father's cloak which he'd packed for some reason in his back pack that day. He was carrying a back pack. For some reason, lately, he'd needed something solid slung over his shoulder and pressing heavily into his spine.
He enjoyed sitting in the back of Potions class. He was stand-offish with the teacher and the dull repetition of stirring a churning cauldron for two long silent periods, ignored by the Slytherins and left to quietude by the Gryffindors, left him warm and still inside.
And it was in Potions, strangely enough, that he felt most within the braces of Magic, the Magic that had captivated him when he'd been taken from the windswept cabin with the Dursleys so many years ago. Five years, he thought, not that many... but it was a lifetime.
/... and even put a stopper in Death.../
Had those been the exact words?
Harry bent his emerald eyes, darkened but glittering, into the opening of his cauldron. They were brewing the Obsesciatus Potion; a draught that would watch the drinker from within. The spying potion. The insanity potion, really, for it was the victim's ultimate end...
Betrayal, exposure, humiliation, and insanity. Four fates as sure and concrete as fact, swirling in his iron pot- created like lines traced by his fingertips was nothing more than reality transcended into possibility. His potion was the same green as his eyes and his thoughts wandered. What, then, could he see?
"Mr. Malfoy, would you like to be the first to test your potion?"
Could he pierce the image of those he looked upon?
"How, sir? Isn't the potion..."
"Extremely dangerous, yes. But there's a counterpotion I have ready, so... if you would choose a victim..."
Or was it that he was meant more to see within himself, he mused, a sleepy smile crossing his blank face.
"Or perhaps we should ease everyone's curiosities and find out exactly what Mr. Potter has been
daydreaming about all class!"
Silence.
"Wh... what?"
Professor Snape grinned, and Malfoy turned with a vial-full of his potion, which strangely was a glistening silver, towards the back of the classroom where Harry was shaking himself very violently from his thoughts.
"Well, Mr. Potter? In the name of... what do your guardians call it, Science?"
Harry swallowed, realizing what he had been sentenced to, and he stepped amid the snickers of the Slytherins towards Malfoy's cauldron. Scowls befouling both faces, he locked eyes with the pale boy and took the vial with grim determination.
For really, he had nothing to hide, and Malfoy couldn't read specifics from the rudimentary mess they'd brewed...
"Bottoms up, Potter!" Snape uttered with a disturbing grin on his face. He tipped the contents down his throat and felt the imidiate invasion.
He's inside me.
Convulsing, Harry threw himself forward onto the table and two Slytherin cauldrons went flying- Pansy Parkinson screamed somewhere from the right of the class and gasps were coming from all around him- he could see nothing, his were screwed shut, he lay and curled himself tighter and tighter...
[Get out of me.]
Distantly, he heard Snape shout a halting command over the muted delerium of the class's panicked babble, and there was silence as two iron hands grasped his arms and flipped him onto his back. At the sudden release of his clenched muscles a pain broke out over every edge of his body- his eyes became pits of fire, his throat closed suddenly, hysterically, and he began to kick furiously-
[-GET OUT OF ME-]
He was inside him, he was inside him, he was inside him...
A vile sickness was penetrating every inch of his form, his organs, he squirmed, but now the hands were holding him down firmly. He heard the shout, now painfully void of control, afraid-
"SWALLOW POTTER!"
And he did. And it went black.
There was a dull nausea washing over him but he breathed... it was black, the world was black, and he was beautifully emptied and numb.
As if he were under water, the sounds were fading from his ears and he could hear the pressure of the air, the swells of the wind and everything all around him...
Gone, all gone.
"What did you see, Malfoy?"
He heard the distant interrogation of his Potions Master, and he heard the shuddering reply in a low trembling voice, through the absence of tears and a body broken by sobs.
"It was horrible... it was horrible..."
+++
Stillness.
Stillness in your eyes.
You're watching me like you know something. Like you're afraid to watch me.
Why are you fixated, why, why...
Because. Ha ha...
I can hear you.
"I know..."
But you're afraid as you say it.
I think we are both out way beyond our depths.
+++
TBC, I guess, if you like this enough for me to keep going.