Special Author's Note: You will all undoubtedly notice that I have removed all of the review responses from Linked. This is because I have heard from more than one reliable reviewer that has begun to delete stories in which the author personally responds to the reviews. Though I think this rule is absolute CRAP (please see my profile to hear the extended version of this rant), I do not want my story deleted, so I am complying. I will be happy to respond to reviews through e-mail, so if you write a review and would like a response, give me your e-mail address and I'll write back to you. Yes, I'm bummed. Sorry I'm being whiny. You now have permission to continue on to the non-whiny actual chapter:)
A/N: YAY for 500 reviews! I really am speechless. Thank you all so much for your constant support and helpful comments. I don't know what I would do without you! Special thanks to saddlebum for being the 500th reviewer!
Thanks goes to Lorett for being the world's best beta and all-around sounding board!
As for the chapter, I really don't have much to say today. Just sit back and enjoy, especially the last scene, because I'm rather fond of it. On to the chapter!
Chapter 18: Late Nights and Nightmares
Draco sat on his bed and stared across the room at his desk, scowling ferociously at it. Well, not at it, per se, but at the journal that lay on top of it. He had managed to resist the urge to read it again all night, but now, with the next three weeks' homework lying completed on his trunk and all other avenues of distraction exhausted, it beckoned to him with all the pull of a siren's song (and Draco, having once born witness to such a song during a family holiday to the Aegean Sea, did not make such a comparison lightly.)
He knew it must be quite late; he hadn't left the library until well after curfew, which was the only rule he had so far discovered that Hermione Granger didn't hold in very high regard. After returning to his dormitory, he'd spent several hours doing everything in his power to avoid reading the journal, hoping that sleep would overtake him before he had given into his desire to do so. All that carefully orchestrated avoidance had led him to this moment, (one of the most pathetic of his life, he mused with detachment) in which he was sitting on a bed and sending death glares at an inanimate object that, unfortunately, could no more cower in fear before his gaze than get up and dance the foxtrot with his inkwell.
He did not want to read the journal, but he also didn't want to not want to. Why should he fear to read it if he really believed it had no bearing on his current situation? Currently, the portion of his brain that was devoted to the desperate rationalization that allowed him to lead the life he did without going stark raving mad was attempting to come up with a reasonable answer to that question, thus far without success. Draco scowled some more.
After a few minutes of this, he finally gave up, cursing colorfully about his lack of willpower, and crossed the room. Snatching the journal off the desk, he stalked back over to his bed and began to read.
It took him a few moments to find the correct passage again. Once he had, he began skimming the pages, telling himself that he was looking for mentions of the cure, and rolling his eyes at what a horrible liar his inner voice seemed to be. While he did run across more notes regarding the research, they proved as fruitless as every otherone they had happened upon thus far. Finally, he found what he had really been looking for; another passage written in that almost frantic, uncharacteristically-haphazard scrawl.
I begin to wonder if I'm as mad as Edward has always accused me of being. Today, while we worked in the lab, I looked up to find him staring at me, and I would swear on everything I have ever held dear that what he was feeling in that instant was quite the opposite of hatred. It was gone before I could blink, but it was real, I know it was. It is utterly ridiculous; I've never given him any reason to feel anything toward me but envy and hatred. It makes no sense, and what makes less sense is that I want him to feel that way. I know that soon I won't be able to hide it from him anymore, and then what will I do? Admit that I'm falling in love with a big-headed, holier-than-thou, absolutely insufferable git with the filthy blood of Muggles running in his veins? And what if he admits it back? What if I want him to? I certainly can't have that. No, I must find a cure, and it must be very, very soon . . .
Draco stared at the page with a heavy heart, his worst suspicions confirmed. Delilah James had hated Edward Flannigan; she'd said so herself a hundred times over. She had hated him for all the reasons that Draco himself would have hated him, and did hate Hermione and everyone like her. Was their link really enough to allow Delilah to overcome such long-held, and, to Draco, still-valid beliefs? Surely not. Surely she was merely confused by the rush of new emotions, allowing her romantic female mind to be swept up in the poetic sappiness of being linked so intimately with another. Surely he, as a jaded, practical sort, free of the encumbrance of feminine romanticism, was safe from such lunacy.
Weeks worth of sleep deprivation caught up with him rather suddenly, as they tended to do, and he put the journal aside with a sigh. He had barely enough time to pull his shirt off and slide beneath the sheets of his four-poster before the shadows of sleep were upon him.
To the outside observer, it would have appeared that Hermione was proof-reading her Arithmancy essay one last time before bed, but the outside observer would be gravely mistaken. Hermione was, in fact, trying very hard to proof-read said essay, but was instead dwelling endlessly on the last thing in the world that she wanted or would have ever expected herself to dwell upon: Draco Malfoy.
He had been hiding something, she was sure of it. It hadn't been anything horrible, but something had upset him, made him edgy and guarded, and it wasn't like him to be troubled by something and not whine on and on about it. She had noticed the change as soon as she had returned with dinner, and it hadn't abated in the next few hours they'd spent in each other's company.
She wondered what could have happened in the span of fifteen minutes that he would want to hide from her. She wondered why he had gone from being almost civil to her all day to being brusque and secretive all evening She wondered why it had bothered her so that he was lying to her. And, she thought, immensely irritated with herself, as long as she was wondering things, she wondered why the hell she was sitting here in the middle of the night wondering about Draco bloody Malfoy when there was homework to be done.
With a disgusted sound, Hermione pushed the parchment away from her, giving up all pretenses of being currently in possession of the mental faculties required for such difficult tasks as reading and holding a quill. She looked morosely around her empty dormitory, finding nothing in it that might distract her from her disturbing thoughts, and grumbled to herself as she slipped on a tattered pink robe and a pair of house slippers. She grabbed a book from her book shelf and headed out the door that led to the Gryffindor common room. Perhaps she could find a little peace there.
She halted in her steps upon entering the room. It was quite late, though she didn't know the exact hour, and she had been expecting to find the common room deserted. However, curled up in one of the large, squishy armchairs by the fire was the small, red-headed form of Ginny Weasley, who appeared to be writing a very long letter in the firelight. Though she had wanted to be alone, Hermione found herself intensely happy to see the youngest Weasley, who was also Hermione's only close female friend.
As Hermione approached the fireplace, Ginny looked up from her letter, happy surprise blossoming on her freckled, pretty face.
"What on earth are you doing up, Hermione?" she asked, putting her letter aside as she sat up more fully. "It's got to be close on 2:00 now."
"Can't sleep," Hermione responded as she dropped unceremoniously into the chair opposite her friend. Well, it wasn't a lie, she thought with dry amusement. She had just conveniently left out the reason she couldn't sleep. Ginny, however, was far more astute about things like this than her brother could ever hope to be. She gave Hermione a very shrewd and grown-up stare, and then one corner of her lips tipped up knowingly.
"Who is it, then?" she asked. Hermione blinked at her, honestly confused by the question.
"Who is who?"
"Who is the boy? The one who's keeping you up?" Ginny clarified. Hermione could feel the blush rise in her cheeks and could only hope that the darkness of the room and the warm glow of the firelight would cover it up.
"I have no idea what you're talking about," Hermione responded primly. Ginny giggled, the way only teenage girls who are gossiping about teenage boys can giggle.
"Come on, love, out with it, then. Who knows how long you've had it bottled up, with only Harry and my oaf of a brother to confide in. Tell me all about him." Ginny pulled her legs up underneath herself in the chair, so that she was sitting cross-legged, and leaned forward expectantly. Hermione blamed it on the very late hour, or on too many weeks of very late hours, but she sighed resignedly.
"It's really not what you're thinking," she said, by way of beginning. Ginny grinned wickedly.
"Of course it isn't, dear. You're far too innocent for it to be what I'm thinking."
Hermione gazed at her with wide eyes and felt the blush return.
"Ginny!" she chided her friend. Then, for no reason that she herself could ascertain, Hermione began to talk. She started from the beginning, and, leaving out only the details of Draco's memories, told the entire story. As good as it had felt to confide in Harry and Ron several weeks earlier, she found a different sort of comfort in revealing the story to Ginny, whom she could trust to not jump to angry conclusions or quick, unfounded judgments.
The redhead's gossipy, teasing attitude had immediately dissipated when the details of Hermione's story began to be revealed, and when it was over, Ginny's eyes were serious and concerned.
"You said it felt like he was hiding something. Is it bad? Should you be worried?" Hermione frowned as she considered this.
"I don't think so. It can't be anything really dangerous, something to do with You-Know-Who or anything like that. He doesn't agree with his father, you know, about following He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named." She nodded, her voice growing more certain. "No, it must be something personal, something he was worried or insecure about. After all, whatever it was, it had to have happened in the ten or so minutes I was gone." She frowned. "I hope everything's okay."
When Ginny didn't answer, Hermione looked over at her. The other girl was studying her with a curious, appraising sort of stare.
"He's quite attractive, isn't he?" Ginny said suddenly. Hermione tried very hard not to let her expression change in the slightest at the rather random observation.
"Who? Draco?" She tried to keep her voice neutral, even flippant, and kept her gaze firmly on the fireplace instead of on her friend's shrewd eyes. "Yes, I suppose so. I hadn't really given it much thought. Why do you say that?" When Hermione looked back up at her, Ginny had a small, knowing smile on her face.
"No reason," she said easily. The strange, evaluating look disappeared from her eyes and she leaned forward, the gossipy enthusiasm returned. "So, what's he like?"
"What do you mean?"
"Well, you've spent so much time with him lately. Is he always a snarky prat?" Hermione smiled gently.
"Yes. But I rather like him anyway." Ginny grinned.
"And on that note, I really have to get to bed. Quidditch practice tomorrow morning, you know." She rose from her chair, yawning as she did so, and, picking up her unfinished letter, began to make her way toward the girls' dormitories. Hermione wished her goodnight but made no move to follow her, knowing that the thoughts that still ran rampant in her head were not going to allow for sleep any time soon.
Hermione wasn't sure how long she sat there, staring into the fire and allowing her mind to drift as it would. She hardly even noticed when the inky tendrils of sleep began to curl into the outer edges of her mind, and when her eyelids grew heavy, she was far too tired to resist the temptation to close them. Curled up in the armchair in the flickering light of the fire, she slept.
Draco did not dream in color. He did not know why.
He had never questioned this particular phenomenon until Hermione's dreams had begun to invade upon his sleeping mind. The faint memory of green grass and a sunny, cerulean sky had been the first indication he'd had that his dreams were now occasionally not his own. Though he secretly envied her the bright, vivid world in which her sleeping mind existed, he didn't find it terribly odd that his own was so radically different. He supposed that their dreams were like their lives; one was lived in color, the other in shadow, and that was simply the way things were.
Therefore, as he stood in one of Hogwarts' many corridors in the flickering, smoky light of ash-colored candles, looking at his own pale gray hands, it was not the monochromatic nature of the world around him that frightened him; it was the eerie sound of distant sobbing. The girl's sounds of -- pain? grief? terror? -- wrenched horribly at his heart, and with a heavy sense of foreboding, he began to walk toward them.
Though the girl's tormented wails echoed endlessly on the corridor's stone walls, his footsteps, curiously, did not. In fact, though he could feel his heels snapping smartly against the unyielding floor, he could barely hear any sound at all other than the distant, sobbing girl and the rapid beat of his heart. He didn't like it, didn't like the panicked feeling that accompanied the muffling of one of his senses, didn't like the surge of protectiveness that seemed to increase with every step he took closer to the weeping girl.
As he moved with disconcertingly silent steps through the halls, he noticed that the paintings on the wall seemed distorted, dark, and nightmarish, inhabited by mutilated faces and shadowy figures that he could only see clearly in his peripheral vision. He suspected that the statues were moving menacingly toward him, though when he looked at them, they were completely stationary, if not leaning threateningly in his direction. His pace quickened slightly as he hastened to get away from the surreal horrors of the corridor, but slowed again when he began to fear whatever evil awaited him when he found the crying girl more than the ghastly painted faces of the hallway's inhabitants.
The sobbing seemed to grow louder and more heart-wrenching as he neared an open classroom door, and though both his feet and heart felt leaden and unwilling, he stepped into a pool of gray light that poured from the room and, with a deep breath that he could barely hear, he stepped inside.
He found himself in the Potions dungeon, which threw him off for a moment, considering that the hallway he had just left was several floors above the room he now inhabited. It took him a moment to find the source of the sobbing, which was now all he could hear. On the far side of the room, next to the table at which they had brewed the bloody potion that had turned his world upside down, sat the huddled, shaking figure of a girl.
He began to walk toward her, keeping an eye out for whatever monstrosity was responsible for her apparently bottomless despair. Suddenly he froze in his tracks. Her head was dropped down on her drawn-up knees, her arms hugging her legs against her, so her face was not visible, but there was no mistaking that bushy hair, even if it was a steely-gray color instead of its usual brown. Though he had no longer been able to hear it beating, he knew his heart stopped in his chest.
Rushing forward, a fear as great as any he had ever known slithering horribly in his stomach, he dropped to one knee beside her. Each sob that issued from her tremor-wracked body now seemed like a torture to rival his father's most powerful Cruciatus, and he was far too panicked to remember that he shouldn't care.
"Hermione, what's wrong?" he asked, knowing he sounded terrified, because, damn it all, he was, terrified down to the very marrow of his bones. He wanted to protect her, to ease her suffering; to grind into dust whatever or whomever it was that had caused her such pain. He was too desperately worried that he didn't even try to talk himself out of such traitorous notions.
"Hermione, please, tell me what's wrong," he repeated, knowing he sounded like he was pleading and not bloody well caring a single bit. When she still didn't answer him with anything other than continued sobs, he didn't hesitate to reach out and touch her shoulder. Finally, she looked up at him, her weeping finally quieting.
He fell away from her, a new kind of terror clenching at his heart. Though the ashen, tear-streaked face was certainly Hermione's, the eyes belonged to someone entirely different, someone dead for nearly seven years, whose eyes had haunted him as surely as any ghost ever could. Improbably, impossibly, they stared out of Hermione's grief-stricken, monochromatic face with all the vivid, brilliant color of the finest sapphires. In the gray twilight of his dream world, they frightened him more than all the smoke-colored demons that his subconscious had ever summoned to torment him combined.
He scrambled away from the gray Hermione with her unbearably blue eyes, unable to summon the strength to stand and run, but his movements made no sound. In fact, now that the crying had ceased, there was no sound at all. Hermione reached out a silent hand to him, the murdered Muggle witch's vivid eyes pleading from her face as they had done all those years ago.
"Draco," she whispered, though the words were intolerably loud in the utter silence. "Draco, please save me." The pitiful terror in her voice stirred something inside him, and he used every once of willpower he possessed to answer her.
"From what?" He felt his lips move, felt the vibrations of sound rumble in his throat, but he heard nothing at all. She seemed to understand though, for she shifted her trembling hand to point at something over Draco's shoulder.
Turning around, ready to tear limb from limb whoever had terrified her so, he felt the bottom drop out of his world as he came face to face with . . . himself.
With a shuddering gasp, Draco started awake.
High in Gryffindor tower, so did Hermione.
A/N: Ta-da! Is the dream cool or what? I thank Lorett for encouraging the idea, and my friends Tyler (who does not dream in color) and Kelly (whose dreams have no sound) for being inspirations.