MINUO CAELITUS

DISCLAIMER: Harry Potter belongs to Ms. J.K. Rowling. I am only playing in her world. Please no legal action, this is not for profit only enjoyment.

RATING: M- for Mature: for violence, death, adult themes, occasional strong language, and slash.

Chapter Two: Dealing…

My breathing was too rapid; someone was making little sounds like a frightened animal. I held my breath, and the noises stopped. I closed my eyes and knocked the back of my head against the door. I gained nothing for my effort. I hadn't really thought that I could fix this problem so simply. I opened my eyes and looked at the ceiling. The dark blue color of the coffered walls was soothing like the ceiling of a cathedral. Here and there gold foil stars twinkled. My mind was anxious for any retreat from what it just saw. I stared at those stars, and remembered.

Once when I was very small, my father had taken me to Saint Chapelle in Paris. The French King, Louis X, had built the chapel to house what he believed to be the true crown of thorns and a fragment of the cross. My father took my mother and me to hear a concert there, maybe Vivaldi, maybe Brandenburg. I can't recall. My eyes were to busy to let my ears hear. Colors like I'd never imagined shone from the windows, pictures of such beauty and delicate transparency, even the marbled floors were a feast of color and design. However, as awed as I had been when I walked in, it was the ceiling, that magnificent ceiling of blue and gold stars that drew tears from my eyes. Father said that he would capture the stars for me, and as soon as we arrived back at the manor he'd magicked the ceiling into the heavens.

My eyes were staring at those beautiful, but silly stars, and I felt as if heaven was very far away. None of what happened made any sense. I shook my head. "Snap out of it." I muttered to myself. The talking helped. My legs felt weak as I stood up, but they held me. Pacing helped when I wanted to think, so I began walking from one side of the room to the other.

What to do? What to do? What to do? I thought over and over. It wasn't very helpful. I stopped, and looked down at the carpet, long worn from other sessions of pacing. Nothing was coming to me. Usually, if I walked long enough, some answer, some sort of inspiration would come to me. I looked at the clock on the wall. Three hours had passed since I had set down to dinner with my mother. How long had I been walking? How long was I seeing things?

It occurred to me then that I was having visions. Visions. I walked to my desk and sat down on the wooden chair so hard it groaned. Thank all the gods, I'm not crazy. I'm just seeing visions. I frowned and pulled myself up until I was sitting straight. The world could be falling down around my ears, but mother's insistence on proper posture would nevertheless bid me to sit up straight. Laughter bubbled obscenely in my throat, and I choked it back. Sometimes if you start screaming you cannot stop. With me laughter could be like that. Of course, sometimes I laughed to keep from screaming. Either way, best not to do it.

I sobered quickly, drawing in a few shaky breaths. I had established that I was seeing visions, but that didn't mean all that much. Many things caused visions, and visions could mean a great number of things. I stared at the top of my desk, trying to think of what to do next. I had several books about potions out, two well-chewed quills, scrolls of parchment, a bottle of green ink, and a recently completed essay arguing the merits and detriments of using pennyroyal as a potion ingredient. The parchment caught my eye, and I remembered back to my first year when I had taken Divination.

The professor had said to write down any dreams or visions that we had so that we wouldn't loose them and could analyze them for meaning. As I reached for a sheaf of parchment, I recoiled. Trelawney was an idiot, a charlatan. Why should I do what she instructed? I'd stayed in the class with her for a grand total of three weeks before I dropped her class. My annoyance with the professor's ineptitude warred with my indecision. I sighed and took up parchment and quill. She may be a dotty, useless, old coot, but Trelawney's class was all I had to go on for the moment.

My handwriting glided across the page as I wrote, the ink sliding out of the quill green emerald grass. When I set my quill down, I had a list that looked something like this:

Visions: June 5th 1995

First Vision: In a room, dark, with Potter. Talking about having met with someone. Scared of them. Who? Dark Lord? Don't know. Occlumency… Studying occlumency with Potter. He reassures me. Some kissing… gods- making out with fucking Potter?

Second Vision: With Dumbledore, looks like the Astronomy tower. I have to kill him? Why? He's telling me I won't do it, but I'm supposed to. I'm scared, overwhelmed. What happens?

Third Vision: I'm running in the corridors at Hogwarts. I'm afraid. Don't want to be caught. I'm holding something hard and metallic feeling. I'm running to someone up a tower I've never been in. There's a door, don't have time to see inside it.

Fourth Vision: I'm on the Hogwarts Express. Potter on the floor of an empty compartment. I stamp on his face. Blood pours from his broken nose.

Fifth Vision: Looks kind of like the Room of Requirement. Potter gives me a birthday present. Why would he do that? We argue. He knows I'm gay, and says that he likes that. At least we aren't kissing here! We are fiddling with a giant wardrobe. I've seen it somewhere. I don't know.

The list is short, sketchy, and incomplete. Every minute that goes by I seem to forget more of what I saw. There was more than this that happened, but I don't remember anymore. I'm glad that I wrote this down now. If I had waited until morning, then I probably wouldn't have remembered any of it. I sighed unsatisfied with what I did know.

There were several things that bound these visions. Hogwarts. In every vision Hogwarts played a role. Even in the first vision were the room had been dark, the stone walls screamed school to me. Another thing that bound most of the dreams was Harry Potter. I shuddered in distaste, and shook my head again, a nervous habit. I didn't want to think about him like that. If I thought about it I could feel his lips on mine- not something I wanted to dwell on. Of course one of the visions of him I didn't mind so much. It had felt so good to stomp on his ugly, hypocritical face. I shuddered again as I remembered the claret red of his blood spraying out of his shattered nose. How on earth did Harry Potter end up under my heels? He hadn't moved away from the blow or reacted to it. Had I managed to petrify him?

No, better to put aside my emotions. I couldn't sort these visions out if my emotions got in the way, and, for good or for bad, I could never think of Harry Potter without emotions. I sighed and mulled over the paper. I picked up my quill again and wrote:

Common Themes:

Hogwarts, Harry Potter, fear, violence, friendship…

The ink splattered on the page when I read the last word that I'd written. Friendship? Now that was an alien concept to my relationship with Potter. We'd never been anything but rivals, enemies. I struggled back a sound too close to a moan. I had once offered my hand in friendship to him, but he'd turned me down. I didn't like that memory with that annoying sycophant Weasel laughing at my rejection, and Potter looking at me as if he hated me. His eyes were bottle green when he was angry. Gods, I hated his eyes.

My ink is the same green as his eyes, I thought. Maybe it was the hurt of that day that made me hate him. Maybe I was embarrassed. Maybe I am jealous of him. I threw the quill away in a fit of pique. I hate self analyzing. I hate Harry Potter.

I looked up at the clock, and saw it had grown very late. I was tired and confused. Tomorrow I would figure this mess out, how it happened, why, what it meant. I pulled off my clothes and got into bed. I slid my hand under the pillow and winced. My hand hurt. Oh, well. I'll deal with that in the morning too.

To be continued…

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