The next chapter; it took me a while to get up, but here it is all the same. :)
I want to thank everybody who's taken the time to review and is still keeping up with this humble fic of mine. I appreciate each and every one of your comments, and hope that if you continue to enjoy (or, perhaps, not), you will drop me a line.
Selene
-----------------------
It was Hermione's hand on his arm that woke him up.
"Harry! Class is over." She seemed torn between looking disapproving and worried.
Harry sat up and blinked, brushing back his hair, making it impossibly messier. He looked at Hermione, got his bearings and suddenly sat up straight. "Oh! Er, I'm coming," he said, stuffing his book, quill en parchment back in his bag, wondering if he had creases on his face for sleeping on them, because Hermione sure seemed amused all of a sudden.
He pushed up from his desk and promptly had to grab it again to keep from falling over. For a moment stars shone before his eyes and he had to wait amoment for them to clear. He felt Hermione's hand back on his arm, and when he looked up at her she was frowning again.
"Stood up too quickly," he explained.
She only lifted an eyebrow at him.
"Let's go eat," said Harry hurriedly, trying to avoid more questions and worrying. Honestly, Hermione could be as bad as Madam Pomfrey if she wanted to. Soon she'd be feeling his forehead and tutting about his fragility. Well, Harry had never been fussed over at the Dursley's, and he sure didn't want people to start now. "Coming?"
"Fine," said Hermione, following him out the door. They joined Ron who'd been waiting in the corridor and joined the stream of students pouring into the Great Hall.
Luckily at the table Harry wasn't the only one who wasn't on the top of his game. His team mates looked about at pale and pasty as Harry must himself. Angelina kept hiding her face behind her arm to yawn widely, which Alicia then promptly copied. Katie was sneezing in a big handkerchief. At one point Fred's chair toppled over backward, and he didn't wake up until George and Lee had hefted him upright again and put some pudding before his face. The only one who looked awake was Oliver, who was gulping strong, black tea and scribbling madly in a notebook (planning more team practice, Harry thought sourly). Wood's eyes were wide and bloodshot, and he kept shooting paranoid glances over his shoulder, as if worried someone from the Slytherin team was reading over his shoulder.
When Katie fell asleep in her soup, Hermione huffed and turned to Wood. "Honestly, Oliver," she admonished. "Don't you think you're overdoing it a bit with those scheduled practices? You're hardly going to win if you're all asleep on your broomsticks, you know."
"Say what?" said Wood, straightening and shooting furtive glances behind him. "Slytherin is thinking about slipping us a Sleeping Potion?" He snapped his notebook shut and hugged it close to his chest while looking at the Slytherin table with narrowed eyes.
"Oliver!" snapped Hermione. "For heaven's sake, go get some sleep!"
"Oooh no," said Oliver, tossing spoonfuls of sugar in another tea and downing it. "They're not getting rid of me that easily! It's my last go for the Cup, you know. Can't leave anything to chance, can we? Gryffindor is due a win. Can't afford something as silly as a bit of sleep."
Harry dully watched as Hermione's eyes flared, recognising the start of an argument a mile away. As she started to lay into Wood – who looked rather taken-aback at the sudden barrage – Harry simply zoned out. Up until then he'd been playing with his food, not feeling very hungry at all despite having missed breakfast and lunch, but now he dropped his fork. He felt not exactly queasy, but certainly had no desire whatsoever to put any more food in his mouth. Instead, he sipped his pumpkin juice, while his head occasionally nodded to his chin and snapped back up as he kept dozing off. Those little catnaps he'd been taking hadn't helped at all.
Ron elbowed him. "Harry, look at Snape," he grinned, now that his attention had shifted from shovelling food down his throat to other matters going on in the Great Hall.
Harry lifted his heavy head to look at the teacher's table, but immediately noticed what Ron was pointing out. Snape's hair had never seemed shinier, sleekly and silkily framing his dour face .
Despite feeling miserable and dead tired, he dropped his head on his arms and started laughing unstoppably, muffling the sound in his sleeves. Ron was laughing soundlessly next to him, his shoulders shaking.
Hermione, after disgustedly realising there was no talking sense to a sleep-deprived and caffeine-high Oliver Wood, threw a confused look at the two of them. "What's up?" she asked.
Harry just pointed to Snape, while Ron managed to say: "Snape... The Hair-care Potion... "
Hermione followed their look, then quickly added her giggles to theirs. "You'd think he wouldn't look as grouchy now that his hair isn't so greasy," she offered. "He looks like he just swallowed a lemon."
"Anytime now," hiccoughed Harry, "they'll be asking him for a l'Oreal commercial..."
"Because he's worth it!" howled Hermione.
Ron was laughing madly with them, even though he mustn't have had a clue what they were talking about.
Across from them Katie woke with a snort. "Whassat?" she slurred, blinking. When she saw it was only Harry, Ron and Hermione huddling together and laughing, she dropped her head back in her soup and continued her nap.
"Okay, that's it!" shouted Wood. He jumped off his chair, tripped over his own feet, toppled backwards to the floor, and immediately leapt back upright, looking around suspiciously as if someone had booby-trapped his legs. Shrugging, he pointed at his team. "We are going upstairs and to bed, right now!"
"Oh, hallelujah," said Angelina gratefully, pushing to her feet.
"After going over this game strategy I just invented, of course," added Wood shiftily, ushering his groaning team members from their chairs (he shook Katie once, then twice, then, with a confused frown, a few more times until she finally parted with her soup).
The rest of Gryffindor tower seemed to take it as their cue that dinner was over and a loud chatter and scraping of chairs filled the Great Hall as students stood and left for their common rooms. Harry, after getting his hoarse chuckles under control when Snape was sending them furious glances – he was sure to have found out what was amusing them to such an extent – stood slowly and followed Ron and Hermione, still grinning, out of the Hall.
It was strange how a day that had been so awful so far still had its silver lining – and Harry felt slightly better for knowing that it had been an awful day for Malfoy and Snape too, especially since it had been so because of him. That exploding potion had at least been good for that.
Now that he was once again up on his feet and slowly making his way to the DADA classroom, however, his head was back to throbbing uncomfortably. It seemed to come and go. He wished the damn headache would finally decide to take a hike and set up house in a different continent. He considered asking Professor Lupin if they could postpone the lesson just this one time and he might get an hour sleep in before heading down to Snape's detention, but decided against it as he envisioned walking into the Gryffindor common room, where Wood would be drilling the team on game plans. Wood would blow a gasket if he saw that Harry wasn't doing his Dementor repelling training. He'd start lecturing him on making sacrifices for the well-being of the team, about taking all variables of failure out of the equation; of their (no, his) final shot at the cup; start frothing at the mouth... Over all, Harry didn't think it would lead him to either sleep or well-being.
So with a sigh, and a straightening of his back in the name of team-spirit, he pushed open the door to the classroom.
Lupin was just levitating the trunk with the Boggart to the middle of the room, his back to Harry as he entered. "Hello, professor," said Harry softly, so he wouldn't startle the man with his presence.
"Ah, Harry, good evening," said Lupin good-naturedly, parking the trunk and turning to smile at him. He at least seemed to be completely over the illness that had prevented him from teaching two weeks ago. "You're just in time. The boggart is at the ready, and I've got a new batch of chocolate, so we can begin right away. Your attempts at a Patronus have been getting better all the time. I'm sure it won't be long until it is completely visualised."
Harry muttered an incoherent reply, not so confident in his abilities as his teacher seemed to be.
Though Harry had successfully conjured a Patronus at the Ravenclaw match, Lupin had afterwards explained to him that it was quite a lot easier conjuring one when no Dementors were actually near. To Harry's frustration, this had proven to be quite clear during his next Dementor class, when, confronted with the chilling effect of the Boggart-Dementor and the screaming in his head, he one again managed nothing more than a silvery fog (which admittedly was clearer and better at warding the Boggart than before, but still not, according to Lupin, a true Patronus). Though terrifying Malfoy and his cronies had been rewarding, Harry was adamant that the true purpose of the lessons had been to learn to repel Dementors, not dressed up Slytherins. So, his classes had continued.
"Do you want to start right away?" asked Lupin, stepping away from the trunk to the side of the room.
"Yeah, okay" agreed Harry, pulling his wand from his pocket and holding it ready.
"Here goes, then, think hard of your happy memory." Lupin waved his wand and the trunk opened.
Harry cast around for a happy memory, but his mind was drawing a blank. Instead, it was aching distractedly, and he was acutely aware of how hot and uncomfortable he was, and how much energy it would cost to launch the spell with any sort of success. He was very, very tired.
From the trunk, the black, billowing form of a Dementor was starting to take shape. It pushed out, looming over Harry, sucking a rattling breath.
As the cold of the Dementor seeped in his already shivering frame, Harry hardly managed to bring up his wand, his hand was shaking so hard.
"Expecto Patronum," he said, his voice hoarse. "Expecto..."
But still no happy thoughts entered his muddled brain, and for the first time since his first classes he didn't even manage to shoot at least some white mist from his wand to keep the Dementor away and prevent himself passing out.
As the Dementor drew closer, its cold crept up Harry's arms and legs and seemed to chill the breath inside his chest. The familiar screaming grew louder, his father shouting at his mother to run, and his mother begging for her son's life. He welcomed them, willing away the cold and concentrating on their voices despite the terror that laced them. His vision wavered, and instead of the Dementor coming ever steadily closer he saw a flashing green light. And then it started over again.
"Lily, It's him! Take Harry and run!"
"Not Harry, please not Harry!"
"Stand aside, you silly girl. Stand aside now."
Hands shook him, making him lose the voices and their desperate cries.
"Nooo," he moaned, his hands weakly pushing against those which were interfering with this connection.
"Ridikullus," he heard a floating voice say from far away.
Then the voices were gone, and he blacked out completely.
-------
TBC
