A/N: I lied. Slash next chapter, this is just vague build-up to slash...
Thanks for reading, everyone! You guys are stupendous :) Hey, to anyone who doesn't understand what's going on... all the stuff that's vague and weird, that's just my own craziness ranting. If you can guess from who's p.o.v. the rantings are supposed to be coming from, well *THUMBS UP*!
Ah yes. No Ron/Harry in this, uck uck. Just friendshipness. I... think that's all, onward, then...
[And...: I'm still not suuuuuuuuued... *flaunts blatant trademark violations* C'mon!]
Graffiti Writings from the walls of the Skull
Chapter Two
[i believe i can cure it all for you, dear]
+++
His messy black hair twisted slightly in the breeze that seemed to sweep just above his head, missing him by a hair's breadth. He turned around instinctually, but-
He hadn't been posessed of his usual calm reflexes as of late; he'd turned to find shadows, cats, strangers casting weird looks, friends with concern softening their patronizing stares, sometimes nothing at all. He wasn't paranoid, that much he knew. A paranoiac stays awake all night- [you stay awake all night]- but...
And they think people are watching them. Well, he *knew* someone was watching him. It was more than a feeling, it was the conspicuous absence of a pale face wherever he went, and the fact that now wherever his footsteps fell, the world was empty.
He knew the situation. The day he'd both discovered and rashly revealed that he was a Parselmouth, he'd had faced the same sudden stigma. The world had it's eyes suspiciously on him, but none of them *saw*, so it was okay...
Now someone had seen. What, he had no clue at all, for apparently, the seer refused to speak of it.
Dramatist.
And so he walked in the rose gardens out back along the outside stone corridors of the courtyards, eaten away by thorns and ivy and moss, made into a Muggle's mystical dream.
There was mist tangled in the leaves that dawn. As the airy morning light poured through, the clouds lit up with colorless light, descending on the places Harry dared to tread.
They knew, they knew, they knew.
[Yes, it *is* horrible, inside this mind of mine. Isn't it?]
With a shudder and a sickly smile, Harry stiffened back an irrational tear that weighed depressingly behind his eyes, sending the familiar silent pains through his cheekbones and the bridge of his nose, and the base of his skull as if hands were digging mercilessly into his mind.
+++
I could read this letter a thousand ways, but I will read it in one. I could write this letter in a thousand ways. I will write it in all of them. You won't read it the way I do. You won't read it at all. You'll only study the curves of my writing for mistrust and you'll see nothing at all.
"Dear Lucius."
Did you ever ask for me to speak? Did you ever beckon me towards you and beseech me my words? It was the same stark dissonance in your eyes every time I looked upon you, I know, I know, so don't bother reminding me.
"It's bliss, the stillness here. All the students are suspended in the inalterable motions of their fixed collective consciousness, and not one will ever dare to think beyond."
I'm lying, I know, and I note to myself the pure impersonal significance of the First Lie to Father. Unless, of course, concealment is a lie. And... and if you consider to be lies all the lies I would have told you had you asked, ever.
"Dumbledore is as unapproachable as always, and Potter has sunk into a mindless stupor of some sort and-"
A talent you infused me with was your miraculous disassociation.
"-h..." Don't let the pen tremble. Don't let the... the resolution waver.
"-he has failed to cause much disturbance of any kind, but instead tends to disappear more often and speak less to anyone."
I wonder if it's just that we have a bond between us that is above all other fathers and sons, severed so much by the age and neglect between all generations. Because it's something terribly unique for me to write so much, to divulge this trivialities of my life to you so you can pick out what facts your Lord may deem 'good to know'. He's been like an honorary Father to you, so if you find some yearning and small satisfaction in this mindless subservience to him, then maybe it's an example I should learn to follow. For you never ask for my letter, but I never fail to write them. And he never asks for your betrayals, but you cut through flesh and mind to lay them at his feet, again and again, without fail.
That's the key, I think, and twirl the quil amusedly at the tips of my pale fingers, never failing. For failure breaks the bond, and then I'm not your son anymore, and you are not my Father, not my Lord, but just...
Should I be afraid of you? Nevermind that you could have my life erased and have my physical self torn to pieces before you. Is it something to be afraid of?
In the end, I'll cease to be. And those who do not exist have no... painful memories, they... breathe not... and feel nothing.
So there's no way you can harm me in a way I care about, in a way I fear. Though...
"I am well,"
The way you shame me is something I irrationalize. And I'll never die at your hand, no. My own. I am the only one to command my life, it is my secret if you ever cared enough to try and pry it from me. And so, now, it's just another though unspoken.
I am well.
I... am always puzzled over how to sign it. I'm your son but I can't say it. I love you in a way, but not the way that comes out in the word 'love'. And really all I want to write to you is that I am your loyal son, but I cannot; you aren't trailed by loyalty, you aren't sided by a son.
I laugh in the shadows of my stoney room. Did they not think that five years sleeping in a box with four others would drive a boy insane? I can't stand their breathing, it's what destroys me. There's something broken about laughter in a cold empty room.
+++
Draco decides to go for a walk, and he slips from his dormitory with the kind of heedless invisibility that he would so often withdraw into while wandering by himself. He finds himself in a rose garden and sits quietly upon the white stone wall, crumbled down in places and overgrown by the brambles, and the ancient gardens gone wild.
"Hello," is the traditional response to his appearance, but he ignores it and stares with a secret smile into the grey of the sky.
"Draco?"
"I won't talk with you today, I believe... the silence contents me perfectly this afternoon."
"Why are you here then?" The voice becomes puzzled and Draco chuckles in the depths of his throat.
"Aren't you full of questions, then."
"I'll leave." Pansy rose and stared pointedly at the colorless sun suspended in the sky. "I wish you'd let me speak with you here more, like you used to. I think you haven't learned the sound of my voice as much as I'd like."
"I was selfish, you were selfish... but I just don't like having that much about myself known, Pansy."
"You can tell me and I... I won't listen, I'll only hear."
Draco is silent at this and Pansy realizes suddenly that she was both stunningly insightful and strikingly dumb at once. Not sure whether to be embarassed, she decides to side with mystery and step gracefully from the tangled brambles that cluster at the foot of the decaying wall, into the trees and out of sight.
The tresses of a weeping willow tree caress her hair. She has an inquisitive face that is both violent and maternal when silent and cast in the dullest light. Her eyes become quite livid at nothing.
Draco likes her as an object of beauty. Momentarily, he regrets ruining her with his few days of sudden surprising confidance.
"I am stupid."
Draco is talking to no one at all.
"I'm talking to no one. I'm talking to myself." The willows bend around him to listen. Turning flustered and red-cheeked, he turns to examine the trees in depths, as well as the dimensions beyond them, but at last he is satisfied that Pansy is gone.
His voice seems shocking and resonant, but he is only murmuring in a low vibrant key that he himself could probably only just decipher were he to listen with his ears instead of his mind.
"I have no one to talk to. But I made that mistake before, I could... I could share my secrets with the world and have them love me and pity me instead of hate me and pass me by. Like a pedastalled statue of marble legacy, I'm...'
'I need to be protected, God, how I need that veil of marble on me. Like I'm not safe without it's weight. So I carry and carry and carry it's weight."
Here he stops mid-monologue and breaks, his voice cracked uncontrollably. He thinks to himself. There is no one he is speaking to, no ears to listen, and he has only the miles of silence to fill.
"I hate myself."
The roses rustle and the trees stand stretching even more towards the raging sky, the churning grey beyond the scope of Draco's vision.
"I hate the sky. I hate the world. I hate that it will rain and stream and crash down on the world, soon, that the sky will *storm* and I can't, I can't, I can't, I can't!"
Fixated, he brushes his hair back and holds his head throbbing between his straining hands. He can feel the tendons defined beneath the surface of his pearly outside.
He can feel the heat of his tears bursting upwards like a fountain, or a spit of lava from the core of the earth, and breathes the chilled air deeply, more deeply than he needs, to ease them back and diffuse it all.
"I CAN'T!"
He wants it with every fibre and straining muscle in his being. His whole Self seems to transcend into desperate thirsting to shed his physical manifestation and cry, just cry without the burden of tears.
For he is only flesh.
He'd seen it, seen it, seen it... a beautiful nightmare and he ached with all his tortured body and pulsing ever-present mind to see it again.
"Harry," was all he could whisper in halting throbs of words, hunched over and collapsed, sitting on the stoney wall. Amid the ivy, amid the moss, amid the weeping willows.
He would head to Divining class soon. Guess, he thinks, what he will be foreseeing? Like a sudden lightness of his head, he thinks, I have found something Divine.
It was new and tangible to call his name like this.
+++
"Harry, are you alright?"
Pause for a moment. Be shocked. And annoyed.
"How many conversations have you started like that?"
I turn to you and you're staring with eyes softened and rippling with waves of empathy. The Great Hall for a second contains only you. I want to dive into those pools of your eyes that seem so fathomless and unreachable. But I'm being mean.
It feels good too. Because I want you to know I can be mean to you. I just don't want to drive you away.
"I'm sorry,"
You're not sorry, you're offended. And maybe a little hurt because you can't get through the way you'd like to.
"It's okay," I say so you won't leave. Because I like being subjected to this passive torture, it makes me feel just a little farther from the weakness you keep pushing on me.
"But-" and here you stop for a second and I can taste the indecision on your lips- "-do you, do you want to... talk about what's been going on?"
You took a risk there, you said that something was 'going on'. No one's said it to my face before, I don't know what to say. I could let you in and keep you near me, know you're here and close, and trust you, and risk everything. Or I could bury you.
"What do you mean?"
"You've been quiet. To yourself, you haven't talked to any of us- not even me, and you *always* talk to me. I know something happened to you, or something changed, and I want you to talk to me, Harry. We've never kept secrets, you haven't, I haven't, and... and I want to know. Because I care about you."
So where were you on all the sleepless nights?
"I care about you too, Ron." It's all I say.
I do. Care about you, I mean. It makes me smile how much of a friend you've been. But you're just... somewhere outside the world I'm in right now, maybe forever. But we'll be friends again someday. And until then, we'll pass each other in the halls and you'll occasionally ask me how I am. I'll tell you the truth. I don't know. I'll always tell you the truth, Ron.
"Okay," you say. It's your benediction and your frustration, it's you giving up, it's you not giving up... what do I say to a friend like you?
"Okay."
+++
"What are you doing?"
The words were spat out with the kind of vindiction reserved usually only for those who genuinely enjoyed reproach.
"Walking, sir," Potter answered, not really thinking. It was already prepared, he'd fixed for anything. As he walked he would construct to the clicking of his black shoe heels on the grey stones a thousand scenarios in which he'd be stopped.
He rarely was stopped, that was the thing. No one tended to notice the long raven-haired spectacled boy in his uniformed robes, who could pass off as anywhere from a fourth to a sixth year and bore no particular visual connection from afar to any house or recognizable social clump.
"Walking alone in the middle of the afternoon?"
"It's only eleven a.m., Professor," Harry said softly without much deliberate monotony to his voice. He'd turned around by now and found that it was Snape behind him, about fifteen feet trailing and almost lost in the distance of their conversation.
"Nevertheless, Potter, haven't you any classes, or... rubbish to occupy you? Hm?"
"No sir."
"So... what exactly is on your mind, that you should be wandering..."
A twisted smirk bewitched his face into the semblence of a sated gargoyle.
"...so aimlessly?"
Harry's eyebrow went up in silence, and there was an undetermined stiffness between them. The boy would have glared or else felt some sort of animosity for the menacing professor, but at the moment his confusion with what Snape meant exactly, mixed up with the general disassosciation he was wallowing in, left him in a bit of a stupor.
"I don't exactly understand you, sir," he stated, his apathy doubling as cool understanding control, which made him feel a little more grounded, but just a little.
"Well... you seemed to leave a rather violent impression on Mr Malfoy, Mr Potter. And I thought your animosities were reserved for me alone. I must say, after all these years of so happily absorbing your resentful little stares, I feel a bit... how shall I say it... sad? That you've found someone more deserving of your eyes..."
His tongue stayed poisonously between his teeth, hissing softly the last syllable, and Harry shuddered. So he thinks I'm after Malfoy then... the idiot...
Malfoy was... never meant to see what I think. It wasn't for him.
It wasn't for anyone.
And so he *was* thinking about Potions class, the vindictive serpent that he was... and he was standing there in all his ominous robes and aged pretenses of wisdom (how much is real?) trying to faze me into some sort of sudden letting down of my guard? A confidance? Or is he just trying to humiliate me in front of myself?
"I have no devices on anybody, Professor." Here he stopped, sucked suddenly into himself and overwhelmed by the beast he had unleashed. Want. Want. I don't want to hurt anyone. And the devices I have, my God, if you could know, if you could only know of them. A sudden pleading arose from the pit of his throat but seemed to scream at Harry alone- tell him, it whispered sharply, metallically, like razors grazing beautifully the scars of his burned and silenced throat. Tell him. Tell him. No. It's too-
Predictable.
...
Say 'Mr Potter, are you alright?' Say anything, anything for me to have an excuse to spill this cracking dam of nameless emotion and directionless rage on you. Give me a word, Professor, it's all I need... a word to break the wall. And I'll curse you.
Through foam-filled ears and veiled eyes, It never came. Harry's vision crumbled into tiny bits, the fragments falling away to leave blots of inky nothingness, black and swirling and cosmic.
He would only realize he'd passed out when he awoke, which was always the case. And he'd be humiliated and despairing for a moment, but now he was in a sick unavoidable moment that was mercifully being relieved right now by the breathy kiss of unconsciousness.
"Would you like for me to summon Mme Pomfrey, Mr Potter?"
He shook his head.
"Are you well?"
"No." God, I'm not well... cure me, cure me, but you can't.
"I'll get her immediately," Snape ended the tension and stepped away, a quiver on his last words as his guile washed away into submission. And he seemed to stumble off rather than sweep away; all his grace was gone in just an instant.
You can't know.
How strange that Harry's mind could not bend itself around those few minutes of strained pauses and silences, the slow reaction as he'd bent forward and swayed, eyes pressing shut as if against some terrible vision. It occured to him later the thing he'd been replaying without warning- being joined by what felt like a fatal, stupid mistake to a boy, a boy.
As he slipped to the floor, it was only sickness he could feel. And he repeated to himself the reassuring mantra of his own sanity, which did nothing at all.
Save me.
+++
Save you I will, Draco breathed suddenly, almost gasping on the rush of air. He dropped his cup of Divining Tea and the clear searing liuid flew across the floor, dashing the mess of black leaves over the rugs and the polished hardwood.
"Well," Professor Trelawny's voice came, lyrical and methodical, "Read them."
+++
He awoke in Mme Pomfrey's hospital wing in a bed of pure sterile white. He'd been thinking at the moment that he awoke that it must be difficult to enjoy such responsibilities as a Professor had; Snape hadn't made any report of the incident in Potions to Dumbledore, obviously, and no one had spoken of it.
Interesting, he mused, that it wasn't a strained avoidance, but a genuine forgetfulness; no one really remembered that anything had happened, it was simpler that way.
So many simple ways to get around things.
"Mr Potter!" came the flustered greeting, just as Harry's wandering thoughts were getting to the good part, the denouncement... he licked his lips as the nurse, wide-eyed and teary with relief, bustled in on him, throwing wide the curtains on his makeshift 'room' and wheeling in her tiny cart of jars and oddities.
He'd been savoring the prospect of mentally slandering Snape for a good few minutes with no one to offer reproach. Ah well, he thought, for he had all the time in the world. But he was heavily drugged, so coherence wasn't really a factor in his appeasement.
"Up already... wonderful..." she stood up from where she had been bent over, searching out a bottle of something standard and horrid. "What *happened* to you, my dear boy? Merlin's Beard, if you're not here because a Bludger crippled you, or You-Know-Who, Merlin forbid it, attacked the school, or... or some idiot took the bones right out of your arm-" Harry smiled sickly, "- you're just collapsing on your own! My word... now let's give you a little more of THIS-"
The faithful nurse obviously was so troubled by whatever state things were in at the moment that she'd shut herself into a bustling world of her own frazzled commentary, and attacked Harry visciously with the medecine without a word of warning, still exclaiming under her breath. Harry yelped, then swallowed the, as normal, foul cup of, this time, deep plum colored liquid. He gagged.
"Alright there, deary," Mme Pomfrey upon reflex asked, but turned away before he could give an answer. He scowled.
"What *is* this stuff? It's disgusting, it's..." Crabbe in a glass, he thought, and almost chuckled.
"Hm? Oh yes, my poor boy... uh... Visciatus Potion, mild dose, meant to level you out, you know, should stop the fainting, or any bursts of energy that could..."
"It has chunks in it!"
"That'll be the, uh... the..." here she trailed off, got a puzzled look in her eyes, and then smiled and grabbed her tray and pushed off to another bed without a word. Harry groaned and sunk down into his cot.
He felt physically a bit better. Had anyone come to see him? As if on cue, the door to the hospital wing remained shut, and Harry's eyes fell back to his body, swaddled in the ivory bedsheets.
He'd slept a whole day? It felt like it... outside he could see the sun setting and his Gryffindor Quidditch team circling the pitch, warming up for practice.
He sighed. He *did* feel physically better. His body had taken on the warm motionless sensation of a weightless thing being caressed from all around by furs, or the pleasant pulsing aliveness of human arms. He hated being sick, he could have slept on his own. He loathed having collapsed before Snape. Snape. Who made him swallow a potion to surrender his own mind. Snape who'd... who'd thrust such betrayal...
Stupid words that go on and on, blah blah. So bloody sick of this rot, always thinking, thinking, thinking. Can't I bloody well stop, no! No. Bloody.
He wanted to get up.
And go to practice. To be normal; the desire clutched him suddenly by surprise and held him there, enraptured. He could be normal, he wanted to, had to be... normal. Go out and play Quidditch then, go on.
"Mme Pomfrey?"
"In a minute, dear..." came the distant voice.
"But... Mme... MME POMFREY!"
His maddened shriek deafened his ears and left a thudding in his head. His lungs were empty. He collapsed into himself upon the thin white mattress, smiled, laughed. The nurse ran in.
"Lord, what!?"
"I'm... I think I'm better."
She had a genuine look of terror on her face.
Sheepish, Potter.
+++
Lying on my back; it always seems like I'm lying on my back. Sent the letter to father, check. And I wonder if he'll reply. Of course not. I'm the voice with which he reassures himself, his deaf mute self.
To be deprived of all sense, like that... my.
I don't want to think about yesterday, is all I insist upon right now. So I'm lying on my back.
I could go out. Breathe the fresh air. Yes, I realize, I'm quite tired of this boxed in feeling...
And the sudden flashback sways me, and I'm there again. The potion that somehow brewed the maker into it... inside of him, and I was trapped, so trapped, as if I was bound in the heaviest of shackles and alone on a cold and desert plain...
Screaming.
There were demons in my head, clawing to get out, and I felt my skull give way and the fire burst from my eyes. Scream, scream-
Caught in my throat, no one could hear me. And then the fingers descended and I hollered out in real life and was so suddenly breathlessly SAFE-
Snape had saved *him*, of course. I was given a Chocolate Frog.
It was horrible. It was horrible... my head felt like it was going to split in two. For a second I felt sure I could trace a lightening bolt down the center of my face. And my finger went instinctively to the smooth pale skin, unscarred, of my forehead. Nothing. And everything. It wasn't upon me, it was within me.
Still, I can feel it throbbing. I lay, I lay, I can't get up... the flashback somehow fades away and I'm panting into my pillow clutched over my eyes, not crying but heaving. Something living surging through my body.
But *I* was within *him*.
What then could he have done to me? I pick up the parchment from my bedside, the owl is gone, but I'll write a letter anyway. And I grab the quill, and realize my hand is shaking beyond my own force to still it.
'Dear...'
But I have no one to write to. I cross it out. It disappears. The magic of the paper, or the magic of my will?
'Potter,
I don't know what you've done to me. But you've put something inside of me. Perhaps I cannot be contained by your mind. Perhaps I cannot accept the pulses that govern you. I have known... suffering. But you...
I don't know you.'
[And I want to.]
There's something delicious about your pain, Potter, I think as I fold the parchment in two and hold it between my palms, catching the warmth in the velvet paper. I wonder where you are.
In the walls, Potter? I wouldn't put it beyond you.
+++
Come into me, for you are my dream
And I'll inhale you.
Taken upon the crest of my evening breaths
I'll taste the air about you
And sense you from afar
And make you something of my own.
Driven from the abyss of what I've named my soul:
The mysterious sounds i barely hear
Over the scarcely ceasing screams i dare not yell,
The dark abstractions of what you've deemed my Self
Another entity.
So you believe you know me
Believing in the things you do...
Stellar that you can believe in anything.
+++
A/N: Longer and more fragmented, I know. If there comes another chapter, it'll be slashier and more... what's the opposite of fragmented? Clumpier?
Oh, and don't you start getting the notion that I've got self-esteem or any sort of applicable work ethic, I still need to be told! Meaning R&R, cause it's nice to do :)
Thanks for reading, everyone! You guys are stupendous :) Hey, to anyone who doesn't understand what's going on... all the stuff that's vague and weird, that's just my own craziness ranting. If you can guess from who's p.o.v. the rantings are supposed to be coming from, well *THUMBS UP*!
Ah yes. No Ron/Harry in this, uck uck. Just friendshipness. I... think that's all, onward, then...
[And...: I'm still not suuuuuuuuued... *flaunts blatant trademark violations* C'mon!]
Graffiti Writings from the walls of the Skull
Chapter Two
[i believe i can cure it all for you, dear]
+++
His messy black hair twisted slightly in the breeze that seemed to sweep just above his head, missing him by a hair's breadth. He turned around instinctually, but-
He hadn't been posessed of his usual calm reflexes as of late; he'd turned to find shadows, cats, strangers casting weird looks, friends with concern softening their patronizing stares, sometimes nothing at all. He wasn't paranoid, that much he knew. A paranoiac stays awake all night- [you stay awake all night]- but...
And they think people are watching them. Well, he *knew* someone was watching him. It was more than a feeling, it was the conspicuous absence of a pale face wherever he went, and the fact that now wherever his footsteps fell, the world was empty.
He knew the situation. The day he'd both discovered and rashly revealed that he was a Parselmouth, he'd had faced the same sudden stigma. The world had it's eyes suspiciously on him, but none of them *saw*, so it was okay...
Now someone had seen. What, he had no clue at all, for apparently, the seer refused to speak of it.
Dramatist.
And so he walked in the rose gardens out back along the outside stone corridors of the courtyards, eaten away by thorns and ivy and moss, made into a Muggle's mystical dream.
There was mist tangled in the leaves that dawn. As the airy morning light poured through, the clouds lit up with colorless light, descending on the places Harry dared to tread.
They knew, they knew, they knew.
[Yes, it *is* horrible, inside this mind of mine. Isn't it?]
With a shudder and a sickly smile, Harry stiffened back an irrational tear that weighed depressingly behind his eyes, sending the familiar silent pains through his cheekbones and the bridge of his nose, and the base of his skull as if hands were digging mercilessly into his mind.
+++
I could read this letter a thousand ways, but I will read it in one. I could write this letter in a thousand ways. I will write it in all of them. You won't read it the way I do. You won't read it at all. You'll only study the curves of my writing for mistrust and you'll see nothing at all.
"Dear Lucius."
Did you ever ask for me to speak? Did you ever beckon me towards you and beseech me my words? It was the same stark dissonance in your eyes every time I looked upon you, I know, I know, so don't bother reminding me.
"It's bliss, the stillness here. All the students are suspended in the inalterable motions of their fixed collective consciousness, and not one will ever dare to think beyond."
I'm lying, I know, and I note to myself the pure impersonal significance of the First Lie to Father. Unless, of course, concealment is a lie. And... and if you consider to be lies all the lies I would have told you had you asked, ever.
"Dumbledore is as unapproachable as always, and Potter has sunk into a mindless stupor of some sort and-"
A talent you infused me with was your miraculous disassociation.
"-h..." Don't let the pen tremble. Don't let the... the resolution waver.
"-he has failed to cause much disturbance of any kind, but instead tends to disappear more often and speak less to anyone."
I wonder if it's just that we have a bond between us that is above all other fathers and sons, severed so much by the age and neglect between all generations. Because it's something terribly unique for me to write so much, to divulge this trivialities of my life to you so you can pick out what facts your Lord may deem 'good to know'. He's been like an honorary Father to you, so if you find some yearning and small satisfaction in this mindless subservience to him, then maybe it's an example I should learn to follow. For you never ask for my letter, but I never fail to write them. And he never asks for your betrayals, but you cut through flesh and mind to lay them at his feet, again and again, without fail.
That's the key, I think, and twirl the quil amusedly at the tips of my pale fingers, never failing. For failure breaks the bond, and then I'm not your son anymore, and you are not my Father, not my Lord, but just...
Should I be afraid of you? Nevermind that you could have my life erased and have my physical self torn to pieces before you. Is it something to be afraid of?
In the end, I'll cease to be. And those who do not exist have no... painful memories, they... breathe not... and feel nothing.
So there's no way you can harm me in a way I care about, in a way I fear. Though...
"I am well,"
The way you shame me is something I irrationalize. And I'll never die at your hand, no. My own. I am the only one to command my life, it is my secret if you ever cared enough to try and pry it from me. And so, now, it's just another though unspoken.
I am well.
I... am always puzzled over how to sign it. I'm your son but I can't say it. I love you in a way, but not the way that comes out in the word 'love'. And really all I want to write to you is that I am your loyal son, but I cannot; you aren't trailed by loyalty, you aren't sided by a son.
I laugh in the shadows of my stoney room. Did they not think that five years sleeping in a box with four others would drive a boy insane? I can't stand their breathing, it's what destroys me. There's something broken about laughter in a cold empty room.
+++
Draco decides to go for a walk, and he slips from his dormitory with the kind of heedless invisibility that he would so often withdraw into while wandering by himself. He finds himself in a rose garden and sits quietly upon the white stone wall, crumbled down in places and overgrown by the brambles, and the ancient gardens gone wild.
"Hello," is the traditional response to his appearance, but he ignores it and stares with a secret smile into the grey of the sky.
"Draco?"
"I won't talk with you today, I believe... the silence contents me perfectly this afternoon."
"Why are you here then?" The voice becomes puzzled and Draco chuckles in the depths of his throat.
"Aren't you full of questions, then."
"I'll leave." Pansy rose and stared pointedly at the colorless sun suspended in the sky. "I wish you'd let me speak with you here more, like you used to. I think you haven't learned the sound of my voice as much as I'd like."
"I was selfish, you were selfish... but I just don't like having that much about myself known, Pansy."
"You can tell me and I... I won't listen, I'll only hear."
Draco is silent at this and Pansy realizes suddenly that she was both stunningly insightful and strikingly dumb at once. Not sure whether to be embarassed, she decides to side with mystery and step gracefully from the tangled brambles that cluster at the foot of the decaying wall, into the trees and out of sight.
The tresses of a weeping willow tree caress her hair. She has an inquisitive face that is both violent and maternal when silent and cast in the dullest light. Her eyes become quite livid at nothing.
Draco likes her as an object of beauty. Momentarily, he regrets ruining her with his few days of sudden surprising confidance.
"I am stupid."
Draco is talking to no one at all.
"I'm talking to no one. I'm talking to myself." The willows bend around him to listen. Turning flustered and red-cheeked, he turns to examine the trees in depths, as well as the dimensions beyond them, but at last he is satisfied that Pansy is gone.
His voice seems shocking and resonant, but he is only murmuring in a low vibrant key that he himself could probably only just decipher were he to listen with his ears instead of his mind.
"I have no one to talk to. But I made that mistake before, I could... I could share my secrets with the world and have them love me and pity me instead of hate me and pass me by. Like a pedastalled statue of marble legacy, I'm...'
'I need to be protected, God, how I need that veil of marble on me. Like I'm not safe without it's weight. So I carry and carry and carry it's weight."
Here he stops mid-monologue and breaks, his voice cracked uncontrollably. He thinks to himself. There is no one he is speaking to, no ears to listen, and he has only the miles of silence to fill.
"I hate myself."
The roses rustle and the trees stand stretching even more towards the raging sky, the churning grey beyond the scope of Draco's vision.
"I hate the sky. I hate the world. I hate that it will rain and stream and crash down on the world, soon, that the sky will *storm* and I can't, I can't, I can't, I can't!"
Fixated, he brushes his hair back and holds his head throbbing between his straining hands. He can feel the tendons defined beneath the surface of his pearly outside.
He can feel the heat of his tears bursting upwards like a fountain, or a spit of lava from the core of the earth, and breathes the chilled air deeply, more deeply than he needs, to ease them back and diffuse it all.
"I CAN'T!"
He wants it with every fibre and straining muscle in his being. His whole Self seems to transcend into desperate thirsting to shed his physical manifestation and cry, just cry without the burden of tears.
For he is only flesh.
He'd seen it, seen it, seen it... a beautiful nightmare and he ached with all his tortured body and pulsing ever-present mind to see it again.
"Harry," was all he could whisper in halting throbs of words, hunched over and collapsed, sitting on the stoney wall. Amid the ivy, amid the moss, amid the weeping willows.
He would head to Divining class soon. Guess, he thinks, what he will be foreseeing? Like a sudden lightness of his head, he thinks, I have found something Divine.
It was new and tangible to call his name like this.
+++
"Harry, are you alright?"
Pause for a moment. Be shocked. And annoyed.
"How many conversations have you started like that?"
I turn to you and you're staring with eyes softened and rippling with waves of empathy. The Great Hall for a second contains only you. I want to dive into those pools of your eyes that seem so fathomless and unreachable. But I'm being mean.
It feels good too. Because I want you to know I can be mean to you. I just don't want to drive you away.
"I'm sorry,"
You're not sorry, you're offended. And maybe a little hurt because you can't get through the way you'd like to.
"It's okay," I say so you won't leave. Because I like being subjected to this passive torture, it makes me feel just a little farther from the weakness you keep pushing on me.
"But-" and here you stop for a second and I can taste the indecision on your lips- "-do you, do you want to... talk about what's been going on?"
You took a risk there, you said that something was 'going on'. No one's said it to my face before, I don't know what to say. I could let you in and keep you near me, know you're here and close, and trust you, and risk everything. Or I could bury you.
"What do you mean?"
"You've been quiet. To yourself, you haven't talked to any of us- not even me, and you *always* talk to me. I know something happened to you, or something changed, and I want you to talk to me, Harry. We've never kept secrets, you haven't, I haven't, and... and I want to know. Because I care about you."
So where were you on all the sleepless nights?
"I care about you too, Ron." It's all I say.
I do. Care about you, I mean. It makes me smile how much of a friend you've been. But you're just... somewhere outside the world I'm in right now, maybe forever. But we'll be friends again someday. And until then, we'll pass each other in the halls and you'll occasionally ask me how I am. I'll tell you the truth. I don't know. I'll always tell you the truth, Ron.
"Okay," you say. It's your benediction and your frustration, it's you giving up, it's you not giving up... what do I say to a friend like you?
"Okay."
+++
"What are you doing?"
The words were spat out with the kind of vindiction reserved usually only for those who genuinely enjoyed reproach.
"Walking, sir," Potter answered, not really thinking. It was already prepared, he'd fixed for anything. As he walked he would construct to the clicking of his black shoe heels on the grey stones a thousand scenarios in which he'd be stopped.
He rarely was stopped, that was the thing. No one tended to notice the long raven-haired spectacled boy in his uniformed robes, who could pass off as anywhere from a fourth to a sixth year and bore no particular visual connection from afar to any house or recognizable social clump.
"Walking alone in the middle of the afternoon?"
"It's only eleven a.m., Professor," Harry said softly without much deliberate monotony to his voice. He'd turned around by now and found that it was Snape behind him, about fifteen feet trailing and almost lost in the distance of their conversation.
"Nevertheless, Potter, haven't you any classes, or... rubbish to occupy you? Hm?"
"No sir."
"So... what exactly is on your mind, that you should be wandering..."
A twisted smirk bewitched his face into the semblence of a sated gargoyle.
"...so aimlessly?"
Harry's eyebrow went up in silence, and there was an undetermined stiffness between them. The boy would have glared or else felt some sort of animosity for the menacing professor, but at the moment his confusion with what Snape meant exactly, mixed up with the general disassosciation he was wallowing in, left him in a bit of a stupor.
"I don't exactly understand you, sir," he stated, his apathy doubling as cool understanding control, which made him feel a little more grounded, but just a little.
"Well... you seemed to leave a rather violent impression on Mr Malfoy, Mr Potter. And I thought your animosities were reserved for me alone. I must say, after all these years of so happily absorbing your resentful little stares, I feel a bit... how shall I say it... sad? That you've found someone more deserving of your eyes..."
His tongue stayed poisonously between his teeth, hissing softly the last syllable, and Harry shuddered. So he thinks I'm after Malfoy then... the idiot...
Malfoy was... never meant to see what I think. It wasn't for him.
It wasn't for anyone.
And so he *was* thinking about Potions class, the vindictive serpent that he was... and he was standing there in all his ominous robes and aged pretenses of wisdom (how much is real?) trying to faze me into some sort of sudden letting down of my guard? A confidance? Or is he just trying to humiliate me in front of myself?
"I have no devices on anybody, Professor." Here he stopped, sucked suddenly into himself and overwhelmed by the beast he had unleashed. Want. Want. I don't want to hurt anyone. And the devices I have, my God, if you could know, if you could only know of them. A sudden pleading arose from the pit of his throat but seemed to scream at Harry alone- tell him, it whispered sharply, metallically, like razors grazing beautifully the scars of his burned and silenced throat. Tell him. Tell him. No. It's too-
Predictable.
...
Say 'Mr Potter, are you alright?' Say anything, anything for me to have an excuse to spill this cracking dam of nameless emotion and directionless rage on you. Give me a word, Professor, it's all I need... a word to break the wall. And I'll curse you.
Through foam-filled ears and veiled eyes, It never came. Harry's vision crumbled into tiny bits, the fragments falling away to leave blots of inky nothingness, black and swirling and cosmic.
He would only realize he'd passed out when he awoke, which was always the case. And he'd be humiliated and despairing for a moment, but now he was in a sick unavoidable moment that was mercifully being relieved right now by the breathy kiss of unconsciousness.
"Would you like for me to summon Mme Pomfrey, Mr Potter?"
He shook his head.
"Are you well?"
"No." God, I'm not well... cure me, cure me, but you can't.
"I'll get her immediately," Snape ended the tension and stepped away, a quiver on his last words as his guile washed away into submission. And he seemed to stumble off rather than sweep away; all his grace was gone in just an instant.
You can't know.
How strange that Harry's mind could not bend itself around those few minutes of strained pauses and silences, the slow reaction as he'd bent forward and swayed, eyes pressing shut as if against some terrible vision. It occured to him later the thing he'd been replaying without warning- being joined by what felt like a fatal, stupid mistake to a boy, a boy.
As he slipped to the floor, it was only sickness he could feel. And he repeated to himself the reassuring mantra of his own sanity, which did nothing at all.
Save me.
+++
Save you I will, Draco breathed suddenly, almost gasping on the rush of air. He dropped his cup of Divining Tea and the clear searing liuid flew across the floor, dashing the mess of black leaves over the rugs and the polished hardwood.
"Well," Professor Trelawny's voice came, lyrical and methodical, "Read them."
+++
He awoke in Mme Pomfrey's hospital wing in a bed of pure sterile white. He'd been thinking at the moment that he awoke that it must be difficult to enjoy such responsibilities as a Professor had; Snape hadn't made any report of the incident in Potions to Dumbledore, obviously, and no one had spoken of it.
Interesting, he mused, that it wasn't a strained avoidance, but a genuine forgetfulness; no one really remembered that anything had happened, it was simpler that way.
So many simple ways to get around things.
"Mr Potter!" came the flustered greeting, just as Harry's wandering thoughts were getting to the good part, the denouncement... he licked his lips as the nurse, wide-eyed and teary with relief, bustled in on him, throwing wide the curtains on his makeshift 'room' and wheeling in her tiny cart of jars and oddities.
He'd been savoring the prospect of mentally slandering Snape for a good few minutes with no one to offer reproach. Ah well, he thought, for he had all the time in the world. But he was heavily drugged, so coherence wasn't really a factor in his appeasement.
"Up already... wonderful..." she stood up from where she had been bent over, searching out a bottle of something standard and horrid. "What *happened* to you, my dear boy? Merlin's Beard, if you're not here because a Bludger crippled you, or You-Know-Who, Merlin forbid it, attacked the school, or... or some idiot took the bones right out of your arm-" Harry smiled sickly, "- you're just collapsing on your own! My word... now let's give you a little more of THIS-"
The faithful nurse obviously was so troubled by whatever state things were in at the moment that she'd shut herself into a bustling world of her own frazzled commentary, and attacked Harry visciously with the medecine without a word of warning, still exclaiming under her breath. Harry yelped, then swallowed the, as normal, foul cup of, this time, deep plum colored liquid. He gagged.
"Alright there, deary," Mme Pomfrey upon reflex asked, but turned away before he could give an answer. He scowled.
"What *is* this stuff? It's disgusting, it's..." Crabbe in a glass, he thought, and almost chuckled.
"Hm? Oh yes, my poor boy... uh... Visciatus Potion, mild dose, meant to level you out, you know, should stop the fainting, or any bursts of energy that could..."
"It has chunks in it!"
"That'll be the, uh... the..." here she trailed off, got a puzzled look in her eyes, and then smiled and grabbed her tray and pushed off to another bed without a word. Harry groaned and sunk down into his cot.
He felt physically a bit better. Had anyone come to see him? As if on cue, the door to the hospital wing remained shut, and Harry's eyes fell back to his body, swaddled in the ivory bedsheets.
He'd slept a whole day? It felt like it... outside he could see the sun setting and his Gryffindor Quidditch team circling the pitch, warming up for practice.
He sighed. He *did* feel physically better. His body had taken on the warm motionless sensation of a weightless thing being caressed from all around by furs, or the pleasant pulsing aliveness of human arms. He hated being sick, he could have slept on his own. He loathed having collapsed before Snape. Snape. Who made him swallow a potion to surrender his own mind. Snape who'd... who'd thrust such betrayal...
Stupid words that go on and on, blah blah. So bloody sick of this rot, always thinking, thinking, thinking. Can't I bloody well stop, no! No. Bloody.
He wanted to get up.
And go to practice. To be normal; the desire clutched him suddenly by surprise and held him there, enraptured. He could be normal, he wanted to, had to be... normal. Go out and play Quidditch then, go on.
"Mme Pomfrey?"
"In a minute, dear..." came the distant voice.
"But... Mme... MME POMFREY!"
His maddened shriek deafened his ears and left a thudding in his head. His lungs were empty. He collapsed into himself upon the thin white mattress, smiled, laughed. The nurse ran in.
"Lord, what!?"
"I'm... I think I'm better."
She had a genuine look of terror on her face.
Sheepish, Potter.
+++
Lying on my back; it always seems like I'm lying on my back. Sent the letter to father, check. And I wonder if he'll reply. Of course not. I'm the voice with which he reassures himself, his deaf mute self.
To be deprived of all sense, like that... my.
I don't want to think about yesterday, is all I insist upon right now. So I'm lying on my back.
I could go out. Breathe the fresh air. Yes, I realize, I'm quite tired of this boxed in feeling...
And the sudden flashback sways me, and I'm there again. The potion that somehow brewed the maker into it... inside of him, and I was trapped, so trapped, as if I was bound in the heaviest of shackles and alone on a cold and desert plain...
Screaming.
There were demons in my head, clawing to get out, and I felt my skull give way and the fire burst from my eyes. Scream, scream-
Caught in my throat, no one could hear me. And then the fingers descended and I hollered out in real life and was so suddenly breathlessly SAFE-
Snape had saved *him*, of course. I was given a Chocolate Frog.
It was horrible. It was horrible... my head felt like it was going to split in two. For a second I felt sure I could trace a lightening bolt down the center of my face. And my finger went instinctively to the smooth pale skin, unscarred, of my forehead. Nothing. And everything. It wasn't upon me, it was within me.
Still, I can feel it throbbing. I lay, I lay, I can't get up... the flashback somehow fades away and I'm panting into my pillow clutched over my eyes, not crying but heaving. Something living surging through my body.
But *I* was within *him*.
What then could he have done to me? I pick up the parchment from my bedside, the owl is gone, but I'll write a letter anyway. And I grab the quill, and realize my hand is shaking beyond my own force to still it.
'Dear...'
But I have no one to write to. I cross it out. It disappears. The magic of the paper, or the magic of my will?
'Potter,
I don't know what you've done to me. But you've put something inside of me. Perhaps I cannot be contained by your mind. Perhaps I cannot accept the pulses that govern you. I have known... suffering. But you...
I don't know you.'
[And I want to.]
There's something delicious about your pain, Potter, I think as I fold the parchment in two and hold it between my palms, catching the warmth in the velvet paper. I wonder where you are.
In the walls, Potter? I wouldn't put it beyond you.
+++
Come into me, for you are my dream
And I'll inhale you.
Taken upon the crest of my evening breaths
I'll taste the air about you
And sense you from afar
And make you something of my own.
Driven from the abyss of what I've named my soul:
The mysterious sounds i barely hear
Over the scarcely ceasing screams i dare not yell,
The dark abstractions of what you've deemed my Self
Another entity.
So you believe you know me
Believing in the things you do...
Stellar that you can believe in anything.
+++
A/N: Longer and more fragmented, I know. If there comes another chapter, it'll be slashier and more... what's the opposite of fragmented? Clumpier?
Oh, and don't you start getting the notion that I've got self-esteem or any sort of applicable work ethic, I still need to be told! Meaning R&R, cause it's nice to do :)