A/N: chapter warnings for; explicit language, mentions of character death and torture.

*Next update on 11th December, Friday.

Chapter twenty one: Blanket of Normal

"Normal, in our house, is like a blanket too short for a bed-sometimes it covers you just fine, and other times it leaves you cold and shaking; and worst of all, you never know which of the two it's going to be."

― Jodi Picoult

...

Draco stirs his spoon in a bowl of what Harry had dared to call ice cream.

It doesn't look like ice cream to him at all, but rather a very generous amount of yogurt, mango and heavy cream with a dash of sugar that produced an almost sentient looking sludge. Draco would have said something, but who is he to judge?

Harry sits across from him with a bowl of his own, already three spoonfuls in, and in the process of shoveling in more. He seems to be enjoying it immensely. Slowly, with a slight sense of foreboding, Draco brings the yellow sludge up to his mouth, just a tiny spoonful.

He blinks once and clenches his teeth in order to stop himself from grimacing.

Harry is watching him avidly, "So? How is it? That's my first attempt at it alone," he shrugs, he sounds so insecure, "Usually Aunt Petunia makes it, I just help out in the small stuff."

"Sweet," Draco says after a moment's thought. It is sweet. Sweet enough that Draco's throat hates him for it. Sugar plus yogurt plus mangos does that, apparently. Getting up to get a glass of water so soon might hurt Harry's feelings.

Harry gives him a look, "Would you have preferred it salty?"

Draco opens his mouth for a retort, but then just closes it. "Right."

The second spoonful is an effort, and Harry looks ready to have a second serving. How is he eating it? Plugging his nose might have helped, but he doesn't really want Harry to see. He'd practically been bouncing when he'd told Draco about making ice cream. So as soon as Harry does get up for his second serving, Draco pinches his nose close and shovels three large spoonfuls in.

Harry returns when he has just taken in his fourth mouthful and he has to hastily bring down his hand. The urge to gag almost makes his eyes pop.

Harry is looking at him expectantly, but he seems satisfied at the amount of sludge gone from his bowl.

This feels uncomfortably like stuffing unwanted vegetables in his napkin, when he was six and his mother scolded him for it. He was supposed to eat all his veggies. Malfoys didn't dispose of food in napkins.

His parents wouldn't care about such things anymore. Dead people rarely did.

It makes him wonder, about his father and Harry and Severus, exchanging glances, talking in secret. It makes him think of conspiracy. In its purest form.

Draco licks his lips, starting to stir his spoon in the bowl again, then speaks, "You know, I've been thinking," he puts his spoon down, he might as well bring it up now, "You've been acting so odd since last night, well, in comparison to how you were acting before." There's no such thing as too odd when it comes to Harry. Even the mere thought sounds insulting to him, "I think you should tell me."

"Tell you?" Harry asks around the spoon in his mouth. He's caught off guard.

Draco nods. "Yes, whatever it is, seems to be concerning me. You and Severus even talked behind my back about it. You might as well tell me."

Harry just stares at him for a moment, not in shock as to how Draco knew the conversation was about him, but rather in a grim, blank silence. "I'm not sure you would like to know," he slowly says, lowering his spoon into his bowl.

"I'm sure it's better than my father suffering under hours of torture before finally giving in to death." He keeps his voice as flat and emotionless as possible, but with the way Harry's lips tighten, he's not sure if he succeeds that well.

Guilt-tripping usually always works.

Harry has stopped eating and is now staring at Draco. Draco shifts in his chair, highly uncomfortable with his idea of a grim joke, but Harry keeps on staring as if trying to figure out something. His gaze is piercing, but not uncomfortable. Just there.

"He didn't," he says.

Draco stills, "What-?"

"He didn't suffer. It was… quick," Harry winces, and for a second Draco wonders if he's lying, but then he continues, "Not clean," he fists his hand, "Just quick."

Father. Messy but quick. Those words make no sense to him.

A part of Draco wants to ask, but it is then driven out by a more important question, "Wait, how do you know that? Did Severus tell you?" He shakes his head at the idiotic assumption, "Why would he tell you and not me?"

Harry puts his spoon down too, pushing away the bowl a little, "I-" he shakes his head, and his hands disappear under the table, presumably to wring on his lap. "No, he didn't tell me." He sighs. And Draco is sitting on the edge of his seat.

Quick and messy.

Harry gulps, the motion is too prominent in his throat and suddenly it all feels far too intimate. "I- I saw. I saw it happen."

Draco gapes, because he'd thought he'd gotten used to the sort of strange things that Harry speaks of, his quirks and what not, that he had thought he would be ready for anything that's thrown his way. The sudden bursts of "oh grapes in heaven," and "Why do unicorns feed on nightshade?".

This is a whole other level of surreality.

Quite unlike himself, Draco forbids his mind from analysing those words to come up with a hypothesis. He doesn't need those. He needs straight answers.

"So you're telling me, you saw it happening," he says, and it feels like he's hearing his voice from far away; he forges on, "As in, you saw it happening in person. As in you were there?"

Harry averts his eyes, and for a split second Draco is sure he is gonna say yes, and that'd be it. But then he says, "No, not like that."

"Then like what?" Draco's tone is sharp, and he distinctly sees Harry swallow again. At the moment, he doesn't have it in him to feel guilty. He needs to know.

"I have been getting these… visions," he shrugs, not meeting Draco's eyes, "I guess."

"Visions," Draco deadpans. Well, it's a better answer than being there in person, at least. But not enough. There's a small voice in his head, in the corner of his mind, the same one that kept goading him into bullying Harry since the stinging rejection as an eleven-year-old boy. 'Scarhead's gone cuckoo in the head because of Auntie Bella,' it says.

Draco furiously tears the thought apart and stares into Harry's eyes, crossly waiting for him to elaborate.

"Yeah, in my dreams," Harry hunches down a little, "They started this summer." Then he pauses. "I saw your mum."

Draco stiffens.

"I saw it happen, all of it," Harry forges on, speaking quickly as if he wants to get it over with as soon as possible, stumbling over his words. "I saw Mrs. Malfoy and Bellatrix, and your father and… and you. And Snape."

Harry doesn't say anything about the Dark Lord.

Taking a deep breath, he says, "I think I was seeing it from Voldemort's eyes."

Draco hisses, for a moment not even registering what he'd just said, "Don't say his name, I've told you not to!"

Harry rears back slightly, eyes wide, "What?"

And then the words settle. Quick and messy, his father and his mother and him. Severus standing by the corner, his eyes stitched to Mother's body, stoic instead of maudlin. Instead of screaming and thrashing like Draco.

"You saw it from You-Know-Who's eyes," Draco repeats, slowly, deliberately.

The abrupt change seems to throw Harry off, but he answers after a beat, "Yes."

That is against every bit of logic in Draco's body. It's senseless, almost. It's not possible, he thinks, almost on the verge of hysteria. "How do you know that they're not just- just nightmares?" He hates the way his voice wavers. "Your… I don't know, your guilt manifesting in your dreams?" He regrets these words. Not a lot, but he does.

Especially when Harry flinches a little. But what Harry is saying is too much. He saw his mother being murdered. He saw his father dying.

He saw him.

"You-" Draco starts. His hands are clenched so tightly his palms have started stinging.

"Draco, I'm so sorry," Harry cuts in. That gleam in his eyes that Draco kind of liked is gone. "I wanted to tell you, tell someone, about this. It was horrible, what happened to you, I cannot imagine the same thing happening to me-"

"This cannot be true," Draco says firmly. He knows it isn't true. It can't be. There were only six of them. In the middle of the night. Potter wasn't there, and the dark lord wasn't Potter.

"It is," Harry says, shaking his head, "I told Snape, and he confirmed it, all the details match up."

So that was what they were talking about before. They were discussing Draco's father. His death. Without him there, with only Potter on the front row seat to the show. It couldn't be possible. "No, this is… no, you cannot have seen Mother or me," his breath is sharp, "You've gone crazy," he states.

Two days of constant torture. That must be it. Maybe Severus was messing with Potter, or maybe Potter was making this up. Something huge was missing here, a missing link that sent Draco's mind down in the panic well.

"No, I haven't!" Harry's nostrils flare, and voice rises.

Draco huffs in anger, scowling, "You cannot just joke about my mother-"

Harry's eyes widen, "I'm not! Draco," there's a clear glaze over his eyes. "I swear! I saw it, I was there. You were wearing a black-"

"Shut up!" Draco yells, standing up abruptly and breathing hard.

"I know you miss them, alright?" Harry is standing up too, now, but he isn't yelling. His voice actually seems to have gone down. "But don't take it out on me!"

Harry turns his head away, continuing, "That's what I'd thought for a long time. Mrs. Malfoy's death… it wasn't in the papers." This time, it's Draco who flinches, but Harry doesn't seem to notice, "So I was sure those were just nightmares. But then you… you told me that your mother was dead."

Draco remembers. Harry had said he was sorry, in the bathroom that day, said that it must be hard, watching it happen, when Draco had not said anything of the sort. But Harry's abrupt departure had left him reeling and unable to really think much on it.

He's reeling right now. But this time he can't not think about it.

Harry is still speaking, and Draco listens morbidly. He wants him to shut up, but he needs to know more, "And then… on the second night we spent here, I had another vision. I wasn't sure if it was a vision or a dream, but it felt like a vision. And then Snape, he confirmed it."

"What did you see?" Draco is leaning forward now, his hands on the table.

"Your-" Hary closes his eyes for a second, shaking his head as if trying to clear the image from his head. Draco remembers doing that a lot after his mother had died. "Your father dying, it was just… just one flick of m- of Volde-" Harry makes a frustrated noise, "Of Riddle's wand."

"Riddle?"

Harry frowns, "Tom Riddle? His real name?"

Suddenly, Draco has the hysterical urge to laugh. Of course Harry would call the Dark Lord by his actual name, of course he would refuse to call him anything else. Draco won't be surprised if he called him that to his face.

"Right," he murmurs, "Right."

Harry is silent for a moment, "I also saw him torturing Rosier." A shudder wracks his body, worse than any shakes Draco had seen. "Except that I didn't see it." Harry backs off a few steps, the chair clatters down behind him. "I did it. All those awful things."

"Harry-"

"I killed your father. I killed-" he starts backing out of the kitchen, "I... I'm sorry,"

Then he runs out.

Draco is left staring at the table, with two melting bowls of sludge. He thinks, a little hysterically, how at least now he doesn't have to finish the ice cream.

Harry doesn't actually leave the house. Rather he storms out the front door and sits down on the front steps of the porch, in spite of an upcoming storm, and the low rumbling of the sky.

Crazy. Now that's a word Harry has been hearing lately. All his life, if he's being quite honest with him in his head. Harry himself thought he was crazy when he started having the visions.

When one is being subjected to something long enough, they actually conform to fit their conditions. Harry is crazy. He doesn't like it. Doesn't love being different from others in ways that suggest something is wrong with him and not the entire world.

And in this onslaught of craziness, the visions might as well be the only things that are true.

He hadn't meant to hide this from Draco for so long, but in the rush of escaping certain death, and dealing with blood poisoning and a mirage of nightmares, stirring up another situation was the last thing on his mind.

Lucius Malfoy died in grace. His death was bloody, messy, all around, unlike the man who dripped arrogance and rich blue blood everywhere he went. But it was graceful. Fitting, in a way.

Snape had looked so startled when Harry had confessed, Draco looked outright enraged and it all made Harry's stomach clench as if trying to dispel the freak out of him.

Harry wants it out, at times like this. When he feels that others are wishing the same of him too. They wish Harry to be the normal, utterly ordinary, if not a bit of the heroic Gryffindor his parents were. The way his kindergarten teacher, Mrs. Prunell wanted him to be. Just a normal kid. The way the Dursleys tried so hard to make him.

He stays there as the storm starts, the salty wind whipping against his face with unrelenting force. He sees the waves raging against the shore, as if reaching out and planting themselves on the sand with every wave, unwilling to reel back to the ocean.

Harry is mesmerised by the repetitive moves. The desperate struggles of the tides, in their pursuit to get away from the storm.

The windchimes are going crazy behind him, and for what feels like hours, Harry cannot sense Draco in the vicinity at all. He should apologise. With something more than the usual 'I'm sorry'. What do people tell each other when they're the number one witness to their parent's deaths?

'It had to happen sometime,' Sirius says, he's on the porch next to him, beer bottle in hand. Harry wishes he had some alcohol on hand as well.

"What?" Harry mutters into the hand that's holding up his chin.

'Everyone finds out you're a loony at some point.' The man shrugs. 'Even the real me got a small glimpse, but what is that old bastard gonna do? He's been around dementors for the better part of your life.'

"I'm not loony," Harry says, his voice small. Even imaginary Sirius thinks he is.

'Don't argue with yourself," Sirius shakes his head, as if amused by his denial, 'Just pray that he sticks around. Ron and Hermione did.'

"Right."

Imaginary Sirius frowns, as if a thought just occurred to him. 'But you haven't flashed them with the crazy yet.'

"I'm not crazy," he grumbles and Sirius waves a hand.

'Everyone's a little crazy. You read that somewhere.'

"The visions were true," Harry says defensively, watching Sirius as he takes a swig of his drink.

'Do you know why you're telling this to yourself?' Setting down the bottle with a thump, Sirius turns to face him fully, 'Because you're scared to confront him. You're getting attached. You don't want him to go, but you keep forgetting that he's just a plebeian dot under the roof. They all come and go.'

"I guess they are," says a third voice that startles Harry out of his brooding. He drops his arm and straightens his back as the blonde settles next to him with two bowls in his hands. Harry absently rubs at his cramping hands, trying to ease the sharp pain.

"You've been here for over three hours," Draco says, his eyes flicking over to Harry's hands, making him abruptly stop the motion. He's right. The sky looks murkier already and Harry bites his lip. A slow drizzle has started, and lightning flashes.

Harry frowns. "I'm sorry you missed lunch," he starts to get up but Draco's hand darts to his thigh, pushing him down.

"I don't want lunch," he says. And pushes Harry's bowl in his hands. Draco's lips quirk, "This ice cream will hold us for a few days at least." The shift in Draco's behavior is jarring. But it has been three hours, just because Harry had been arguing with himself over whether or not he is crazy didn't mean that Draco spent his time doing the same.

Harry mulls over the words and nods when the heavy mango cream slides over his tongue. It definitely is rich enough to immediately grip him by the shoulders.

Their spoons clank in silence as soundless lightnings light up the sky, and the wind settles down to a mild cold breeze.

"I'm sorry," Harry says and Draco winces into his ice cream, his face weirdly contorting for a moment before smoothing out to a perfectly bland expression.

Harry's eyes roll to a sniggering Sirius, standing a few feet away from them.

'He hates it, ' Sirius snorts and Harry turns to Draco.

"You didn't err… you don't have to eat it if you don't like it," Harry says, although he cannot see how anyone could hate ice cream.

Draco quickly stuffs another spoonful in his mouth. "It's good," he says and Harry hums.

"I'm sorry," Harry says again and this time Draco doesn't turn away.

"I know, but it's not your fault." It seems as if it's taking a lot of Draco to admit that. "I could do the easy thing and blame you," Harry's heart clenches. But Draco gives him a very dim smile.

"But I don't want to do the easy thing anymore." Another lightning flash plummets them into a white glow for a split second. "Doing the easy thing got my parents killed. You had nothing to do with their deaths. You couldn't help seeing it," there's a booming thunder, so loud that it startles Draco into dropping his bowl.

It drops on the steps and then tumbles into the sand, the yellow sludge mingling with the sand. Draco doesn't look too torn up for the loss. He's looking at Harry again, and Harry is captivated by his gaze. Grey and conflicting and at the same time, the most calming thing Harry had ever seen.

"You're not crazy," he says. "I… I shouldn't have said that."

'He's not doing his lines right,' Sirius cuts in, looking at Draco as if he's spouted two heads.

Harry pointedly ignores the sarcastic voice. "It's okay," he says to Draco.

"Still.," Draco looks troubled. Harry is sure it isn't because of the ice cream. "Did Severus know why it was happening?"

"No," he suddenly feels cold inside. Just because the visions were true doesn't mean he's not crazy. They still don't know why he's having them. "He had no idea. But he said Dumbledore would know. He's coming back this Saturday," with that Harry shovels the last spoonful of ice cream into his mouth, trying to replace the chill of unease with mango, and places the bowl on the ground, too lazy to go back in.

They are quiet for a while, and the pattering of rain almost lulls him to sleep. Sirius too, is silent. The sharp electric smell mixing with the salty ocean breeze. It's almost more comfortable than the bed they shared in the cottage.

He startles away when Draco speaks up suddenly, "Oh."

"What?"

"You said… three days ago, didn't you?" Draco asks, voice hesitant as he stares at Harry intently.

Harry frowns, "Yeah."

"Is that why you came to my room that night?"

Harry's cheeks colour, he hadn't thought Draco would bring it up, not if he didn't on the first morning. He had been hoping to avoid it. He had always been alone after waking up from nightmares, either at the Dursleys or at Hogwarts. But the fact that it hadn't been a nightmare, that he'd just seen someone die and someone get so horrendously tortured… he couldn't have beared being alone.

Clearing his throat nervously, he says, "Yeah." The sky is clear now, and he can make out the small, nearly invisible scatter of stars.

"Oh," Draco repeats, "I'm glad."

Harry blinks. Draco is… glad? Apparently his confusion is clear on his face, because Draco looks slightly flushed too.

"Yeah, I didn't want to be alone either," he says, before hastily adding, "I mean, I know you had that- that vision, so you obviously needed, uh, company, but I didn't want to be alone either." He looks away.

This time, it's Harry who says, "Oh." Draco's cheeks darken, his blush probably rivaling Harry's own.

The storm has long since moved on when they make their way inside the cottage, the ice cream bowls forgotten.