Union/5

A/N: Welcome back! Here's a little what to expect in this chapter: Harry's as well as Draco's friends begin to see the unnatural behavior between each individual. I know probably with a couple details.. like keeping her as his date.. and this chapter.. you may think this is a PP/DM thing but I hate that pairing more than life itself, so trust me, I'm only mentioning her affection for the story, ha. To the chapter!

Seeing Harry leave abruptly, Ron rose from his seat to follow but was stopped by Hermione gripping his sleeve's hem.

"Where do you think you're off to?" She asked him simply, without looking at him as she was still focused on the paper before her.

"What do you mean 'where'? He never just gets up and goes off like that alone, we need to check on him!"

Hermione looked from the paper to him finally with her eyebrows raised at him impatiently but softened when she saw his face was pinched in concern, and she felt a pang of guilt for keeping him from going after their friend.

"When have we ever known everything that is going on with him?" She watched his face fall. "It could be something secret between him and Dumbledore, or Snuffles even." She released his arm and patted the seat where he was before. "It's hard to get used to someone that may be forced to secrecy. However, we have to support him as his friends."

Ron plopped back down in his seat with his arms crossed. He knew she was right, as she always was, yet he couldn't nudge the feeling that something was just wrong here. He decided that, much like the bushy-haired girl next to him did in previous years, it was time to meddle.

Harry entered the corridor and casted his eyes warily from his right and left to not find a trace of Malfoy anywhere in sight. He sighed exasperatedly, running his fingers through his hair, and was about to turn right back into the great hall when a small ball of light, roughly the size of a golden snitch, darted in front of him and bobbed up and down in the air.

He watched as the light zipped away and ducked into the widemouthed hall that led to the entrance of the courtyard, leaving a faded twinkling trail behind it. Taking the hint, he followed suit, and as he turned the corner, he watched as the light receded into the tip of Malfoy's wand. Harry watched as his lips curled in amusement at the look of wonder on his face and recomposed.

"What was that?" he asked, trying to not sound too impressed.

"Child's play," the blond said passively as he tucked his wand back into his robes, "I'd use it to mess with the house elves when I was younger. Now let's make this quick, Potter." The blond peered around to make certain no one was eavesdropping on them.

Harry tilted his head at him. "Make what quick?" He watched as Draco parted his lips and wet them with his tongue before speaking again, and his heart skipped around in his chest in wonderment of what he may suggest next.

"I'm going to need you to not play dumb, as we only have moments left before lunch ends and we're swarmed by a crowd expecting a row." Harry felt the pressure of Malfoy's grey eyes weighing into his. "I need to know what you've done to me so I can fix it."

He squinted his eyes at him, still not understanding and the skipping of his heart flattening. "What do you mean?"

"What-" he annunciated each word slowly "-did -you -do -to -me?"

Irritation bubbled inside of Harry, not appreciating being made out to be an idiot.

"I haven't done anything to you, Malfoy," his voice came bitterly, "Unless you can elaborate a bit more, I still haven't eaten yet today." He made to leave yet was frozen in place when long fingers shot out and curled around his wrist. The contact soared through his body and the air began to hum around them, with the world suddenly feeling as if it were moving under his feet, and he stumbled to lean himself on the wall. Images had sprung across his vision, flickering by like a broken cinema player, and they were quickly taken away when the fingers that were on his wrist wrenched themselves away.

He whipped his head around and saw the Malfoy mirroring him, seeming to be similarly affected.

"That," Draco panted out, "Is what I am talking about."

Harry sputtered out his words, heat bursting to his cheeks at the thought that the boy before him had been seeing the same things he had been all along.

"You've been seeing things, too?"

Draco nodded and resituated himself to lean comfortably against the cold stone of the wall, taking a deep breath.

"Though I hate to admit it, yes." He eyed Harry's bewildered face and continued, "Judging by your look, you had no part of jinxing or hexing me, did you?"

Harry shook his head, although more interested in something else, "Tell me, what are you seeing? Can you remember anything?"

Color budded across his pale cheeks but he held the pleading green stare, determined to not let himself waiver. "Things that are not there. Asleep, and now-" he motioned his hand to gesture what had just occurred "-awake."

Harry pressed on. "But what have you-" "That's not the point!" Draco interrupted fiercely. "The point is," he willed his voice to be calmer, "that it needs to be taken care of. I can't go around having these… illusions. I have a reputation to maintain. So, what do you plan to do?" He felt the residual bite in his tone simmer then, feeling the calming effect from the emerald of Harry's eyes seep into him even a few feet away.

Harry's stomach, however, dropped, and he wasn't sure why the thought of losing the visions left him with an empty feeling. He reached back to rub at the base of his neck and cast his eyes to the floor.

"I haven't even begun to think about 'fixing' them, I don't even know how or why it started."

Draco exhaled through his nose and fixed his lips into a line. "Well, you best go figure it out. There's bound to be something in the library." He shoved his hands into his pockets and walked past Harry in the direction back to the hall.

"Malfoy, wait!" The Slytherin turned halfway to give him his attention again, his eyebrows lifted curiously. "Don't you want to join me? We'd cover more ground with both of us looking."

Unsurprisingly, the Malfoy heir made a pained face at Harry and scoffed at him. "As lovely as being graced by the Boy-Who-Lived for an afternoon reading sounds, I think I'll pass." With that, the left.

Harry's face relaxed and the furrow between his eyes finally faded, and he murmured to himself, "Okay, well that could have gone worse." He stepped around the corner and watched for a moment as the slender form of Malfoy moved away. He shook the blooming thoughts from his mind and decided that if he were going to look for a solution, he had better start now, and made his way to the library.

To be entirely fair, Harry was not at all certain of what he was looking for. All he really had to go off of right now was he had been seeing things that weren't there, illusions as Malfoy had put it. In the library, it would be an effortless task to find at least one book that hit the pin on what you were searching for, yet here Harry sat, guarded behind a leaning tower of scrolls and texts that held nothing of exactly what he was experiencing. He found one or two books, both of which contained explanations of sleep deprivation and the side effects, then another where an old wizard went mad after the loss of his wife. A thick, leathery book with pages worn, and faded with a liquid he hoped was water, held two more unfavorable options. One, put very simply, was a false memory charm, however this didn't explain the constant changes at different times, he felt. Someone would need to be near them, monitoring them. The other had Harry wishing he didn't even come into the library, mostly because he didn't understand what some of it meant without Hermione around to explain which made him need to pluck another few books to look up the details, and the other was because it would take an incredibly talented Legilimens to induce these visions at, once again, a continuous and ever-changing rate.

Harry pressed the heels of his hands into his eyes after pushing the books away from him, trying to seal everything he had read in his memory. This had to have been more reading than he had done thus far in the school year put together. Falsifying his satisfaction, he waved his wand to sort the texts back into their proper places and headed on back to the common room to actually make an effort to work on his professor-given studies.

While Harry was off doing what he was more or less tasked to do, Draco had caught back up with his group of friends and they all decided it'd be nice to go out to the Black Lake to skid rocks along the hardened surface by the shore. Blaise was trying to demonstrate to Goyle that he wasn't supposed to blatantly toss the fattest rock at the ice, to no avail as the hefty Slytherin heaved another stone a ways out where the ice sheet was still forming, effectively creating a large crater. Crabbe, on the other hand, seemed to have a knack at it and he and Blaise had a friendly competition on who could knock out each other's tosses into the crater Goyle had created prior.

Draco himself was sitting cross-legged in a wide circle of grass he had used a hot-air charm on to quickly melt the snow and dry the damp ground, watching the lighthearted scene before him with one arm propped up behind him and the other with Pansy tucked under it as she tried to keep warm, so she had said. Snowflakes still littered loosely from the sky, but the clouds had parted enough for streaks of the sun to cast down and offer a sheet of warmth over the students. The ground glittered around them almost blindingly with the sunlight against the stark white that had fallen, and he noticed how serene this landscape should make him feel, however it little did so as he couldn't help his mind straying every now and again to his rival, wondering if he may have found something on the matter at hand.

He felt the girl beside him shuffle closer as they saw their friends returning to them at a hurried pace, and he noticed that one of them, namely Goyle, was soaked through, and had a thin sheath of ice forming on his robes. The warmth at Pansy's side left her as Draco leapt to his feet and speedily swept a hot-air charm across their friend whose trembling subsided and lips went from pale blue to their normal pink. She looked on and admired the rare sight of Draco caring for their friends. She had watched him grow increasingly attached to their group over the years, and even with his cool, bored nature, he showed he cared when it counted most.

With Crabbe and Blaise going back and forth at what had caused Goyle to somehow to try fetch a rock he threw on the ice, they all agreed that had been enough excitement for the afternoon and retreated into the castle. As the blond lead the way, Pansy and Blaise exchanged a look to remind themselves of the silent pact between them.

Earlier that day they had stayed near their friend in the common room while he slept, as suggested by Blaise to show Pansy what he had been noticing at night in the dorms.

They watched him a few strides away, when he rested back peacefully by the crackling fire for about twenty minutes. They were in the middle of conversation when out of the corner of their eyes they saw his body seem to seize up. Pansy had stood to wake him up, yet Blaise put a hand on her shoulder to keep her back for her to see what had been happening. The tone of their friend's skin dipped in color and his fingers dug into the plush arms of the chair as his face twisted in frustration and jaw went tight. This went on for another few minutes before Pansy's bottom lip trembled as her eyes followed the newly forming beads of sweat rolling down his paled face, and she couldn't watch him suffer anymore, even if it wasn't physical pain. Her friend caught the desperation in her eyes and whispered to her to go wait by the portrait and try to straighten herself up. She covered her mouth and watched with worried brows while Blaise muttered something under his breath with his wand barely poking out of his sleeve to not draw attention from the other students in the room, and saw Draco's face gradually soften, however still with his fingers clutching desperately at the chair's fabric.

Blaise strode over to her and she turned on him instantly. "He's been having nightmares?" Her voice trembled at first before fury whipped up inside her. "How long has this been going on," she snapped, "No wonder he's been so worn out!"

"He isn't in any danger, Pans," he said gently under his breath, "just comes and goes. I will check on him later to see if anything's going on and fill you in." He glanced back at a soft shuddering breath that came from the chair to see Draco had roused, and quickly turned to the girl again with a finger pressed to his lips before going to greet the freshly woken blond.

Lunch seemed to go normally from their perspective, sans for the normally chattering boy only offering a few words for conversation, and then abruptly getting up from the table without a word to any of them, leaving the hall.

"Is something wrong with Draco?"

Blaise and Pansy snapped their heads around and saw Crabbe and Goyle staring after their friend as he left, and both silently decided to not tell them about what they knew from the look of concern that had befallen them from only him leaving so suddenly.

"He's alright, sorry Crabbe," Blaise offered his usual charming smile, "He probably forgot to mention to you two that he wanted to go fact check Snape on the controversial use of a potion ingredient and knew that the Professor's pride wouldn't allow that with an audience."

Pansy's eyes bulged at him, impressed at the quickness and genuine sounding lie the boy produced. She reached out and took a sip of tea she had poured earlier, quickly reminding herself to never cross him. This seemed to satisfy the two beefy Slytherins next to them as they both turned back to their now dwindling plates of lunch, looking disappointed at the meager amounts of crisps left.

Pansy let out a quiet sigh of relief and locked her eyes on Blaise's intently. Getting the message, he nodded in acknowledgement to let her know he remembered what he had promised earlier.

Then here they were, all trailing to the common room once again. Goyle suggested a game of gobstones but that idea was quickly stricken down by Pansy due to the stink the stones made when you lost. A wicked smile rose to her face then, and she suggested they still play, but over by the Gryffindor tower entrance as an ode to their Potter Stinks! badges. Everyone hooted in laughter except for Draco, who chuckled under his breath although agreed, nonetheless.

A/N: This may have been a bit boring to some, sans for the interaction between our two boys, but the fill-ins are necessary to give perspective on the oncoming events. Stay tuned! -Yenne