Next chapter right here. Has been done for a while, forgot I hadn't posted it yet. Sorry.

Yelling, insults, cries of pain, a bloody steak knife lying on the floor. A three-year-old boy yelling obscenities at a woman while sitting at his father's side. A woman with lank black hair and eyes shaped like a snake's but colored the brightest turquoise anyone would ever care to see Disapparating from the scene. I was standing by, watching it all, watching as the child yelled after the woman to come back, though she didn't hear. She was gone already.

I awoke from the dream and looked down at myself, instinctively, as though to make sure I was still completely alive. I was laying in my bed in the sixth year dormitories, unharmed and with no bloody steak knives in sight, no screaming or yelling or any noise but that of a few snores here and there. I looked around, verified my surroundings – but as in the Hospital Wing, lying on the bed to my right, I saw Algie Longbottom in his statuesque state, but I wasn't in Hogwarts at all, I was in my own home, in the backroom where I slept in the bed at the back left corner. He was lying on his side, pointing at me, his eyes glazed over like those of the dead. I tried to stand, to run, but I found myself glued to my bed. I groaned – I was in another dream. There was no bed to the right of mine in my room at home, there never had been one! I knew, I knew I would wake up if I closed my eyes, for maybe five seconds.

I attempted that experiment and opened my eyes after five long seconds, looked down at myself, a three-year-old child afraid to look around, a child afraid of the monster lying in wait next to him – but I found my head turning to the right automatically to check to see if it was gone anyway. It never was, not ever. She was still standing there with lank black hair and those serpentine eyes, not turquoise but the yellow color of a Basilisk's – and no, not hair, but snakes, thousands of tiny black snakes as thin as locks of hair, all ready to strike at the moment I moved a muscle. Always, she was holding in one hand that bloody steak knife with a ring hanging off of the very tip of the blade, a gold ring with a black stone, and a scythe in the other hand. The hand closed around the scythe was nothing more than a skeletal web of a hand. I closed my eyes, knowing what was to come, knowing in my little three-year-old mind that this woman had come to drag me to the land of the dead regardless of how hard I fought it. I closed them as tightly as I could, yes, withdrew into myself, and fell a thousand feet into the eternal darkness that lay behind my closed eyelids –

And landed finally on my bed in the Slytherin sixth year dorms with a fearful start, thirteen years older than I was sure I had been no more than a moment ago, and I drew the covers over my head like the three-year-old in my dream, afraid she would be waiting for me at my bedside if I looked to my right.

Then, with an inward sigh, I chalked another one up.

The dreams had started and continued every night since Tom and I had fought a month ago. Twenty-five nights so far. I was keeping count. What better was there to do when I woke up in the middle of the night, every night, and found myself unable to sleep again? Just chalk another one up. It had started as a sort of All right, that's the fourth bloody time, this NEEDS to stop, but it had more lately become more of an Oh, nineteen, wonder if I'll make it to thirty. They were really starting to get to me.

It was twenty-five tonight. Twenty-five times. The woman, I could barely remember what she looked like. One dream, a kind (though somewhat snakelike, yes) face and turquoise eyes, lank black hair, a woman with no intention of violence unless it was to protect another. The next dream, the very object of fear. Those same eyes, a murky yellow where they should have been white with black, vertical slits for pupils. No irises, no turquoise, just the horrible eyes of a snake, of the king of all serpents.

They were two different people, no matter how similar they looked – no, not two different people. One wasn't a person. One was Death, a form come to lure me back to the land of the dead, drag me back if she had to. She was there, always. She was standing at my bedside even as I hid beneath my covers, and I knew she was hovering over me with the Basilisk's eyes and Medusa's hair, taunting me with my father's ring – but why? I never did understand his ring. With her scythe and her skeleton hand, she could have been no entity other than Death, haunting my dreams in a form that would scare me beyond any other. The bloody steak knife, I knew why that was there. Come with me – that was what she was saying as I stared into her yellow eyes, a scared little child with no one to help him – come with me, and I'll take you to the one who did this, you know her even if you don't think you do.

That steak knife was the same in the first dream, the one full of yelling and screaming and negativity, the one I could do no more than stand by helplessly and watch as a family tore itself appart, and as my father tore that steak knife out of his leg to stand up and indignantly call her a blood traitor, one last time.

Well, that's a first… I thought to myself, putting my forehead in my hands. I never remembered enough of that first dream to know what was going on, not until tonight. The steak knife, I understood finally after night after night of wondering.

But why the ring?

I lowered my left hand, where the ring constantly rest around my ring finger, the gold scratched around the heavy black stone itself. I could barely see it with the covers drawn over my head, but just enough with the little light from the dim fire of the few lanterns still lit on the walls shining through the sheets to continue to wonder…. Why would Death need a ring? That made nearly as much sense as the garbled death-cry of a Jobberknoll. To me it did, at the least.

I gave a groan under my breath – Divination class tomorrow, and we were supposed to be keeping track of our dreams so we could interpret them. Tom had been right to get out of that bloody course while he still had the chance. I had done well enough in it to take the NEWT level classes, and Annabelle had talked me out of dropping it so we could have "more classes together."

The problem with being in that class with Annabelle was that she had a certain gift for the course. The "Seer" garbage the teacher was always spouting didn't convince me of anything, no, but Annabelle had mentioned to me last year that the women on her mother's side of the family did generally do well in anything pertaining to Divination. I didn't doubt it. She had been making O's on everything in the class since her third year, which I found maddeningly annoying.

Of course, it was always rather fun to perplex Professor Sable employing Legilimency on her and agreeing with any random thoughts I happened to catch when she walked past my table, then pretending I thought she had said them out loud. I halfway suspected that was why I had passed my OWLs for that class with an Exceeds Exceptions, considering I completely flubbed both the crystal ball and the reading tea leaves portions. After the end of the exam, when she was appearing particularly disappointed with the results of my examination, I told her I would tell her everything she was thinking if she would give me a passing grade.

Yes, Legilimency did come in handy for many things, even cheap tricks on unsuspecting teachers.

And in getting grades I didn't actually deserve.

For now, I would have to come up with some sort of fake dream to interpret tomorrow in that class that I really couldn't help but despise with every fabric of my dream and hope that Annabelle wouldn't manage to – to put it in terms of Divination – See past the fake dream.

I do wonder how much more time is left in class…

"Fifteen minutes."

I held back a laugh as Professor Sable gave me a somewhat questioning look. "Excuse me?" I looked over my shoulder where she had stopped.

"Didn't you just ask how much longer until this class is over?"

"No." She said this quite firmly and walked away. I laughed under my breath and dodged the crumbled piece of parchment Annabelle had just thrown at me.

"You need to stop doing that!" she said.

"Why?" I asked, grinning as Professor Sable gave me a somewhat reproachful look from the other side of the classroom. "It's the only form of entertainment I have in this class, and Merlin knows I'm not going to pass it any other way. Not that I need it, but it still wouldn't look good if I failed any class, would it?"

"Then try passing it honestly," she said, though she sounded amused when she glanced over at Professor Sable. "It is rather entertaining," she added thoughtfully, and I could tell easily enough that she was holding back a laugh, "but it's still not a very nice thing to do."

"But it's funny," I pointed out.

"Lots of things are funny," said Annabelle. "Take for instance last year. Remember the last Hogsmeade trip of the year? The one when Riddle and Malfoy had to drag you back from Hogsmeade because you were too sloshed to even stand up, I don't think anyone's ever going to forget that. But no one's Imperiusing you into drinking gallons of Firewhiskey just for a good laugh."

I blinked a few times. "Why would anyone have to Imperiuse me?"

"Because the barkeeps at all the pubs now know your age and you'd have to take anything stronger than butterbeer by force if you wanted to have it."

I blinked a few more times. "That still doesn't answer the question of why anyone would have to Imperiuse me to do it." I dodged another spare bit of parchment.

"Well I'd hope you wouldn't attempt doing that without anyone controlling you, but I can't say I really believe it," said Annabelle. She shook her head. "You got me off topic again, we're supposed to be interpreting dreams," she said, looking at a roll of parchment in front of her on the table. "And I somehow doubt that you actually had a dream about evil pink bunnies invading the North Pole to steal all of Santa's presents."

"With machine guns and armored tanks."

Annabelle sighed. "Maybe I shouldn't have talked you into taking Muggle Studies, your fascination with their weapons is getting a bit disturbing. But again," she said, sighing impatiently as she opened her course book on top of the parchment to the pages on dream interpreting, "I highly doubt this was your dream last night."

"Why?"

"Because you were up at five in the morning in the common room, and you yelped like a hurt dog and fell off the couch when I said hello. Dreams about rabbits don't do that to people."

"Even rabbits with ma–?"

"Even ones with machine guns," she said with a laugh. "Trust me. Now. Either you're going to tell me your dream or I'm going to use deductive reasoning to figure out what it was."

"I doubt you'd be able to," I said, hiding slight nervousness that she indeed would be able to with a laugh. It was a rather poor mask, but she apparently didn't see through it. She just crossed her arms stubbornly, eyebrows raised.

"I've done it before."

"That wasn't deductive reasoning, that was insanely keen Legilimentic superpowers," I said, waving my hand dismissively. I leaned my chair onto its two back legs and looked around the classroom. If I had to dodge the subject for the last ten minutes of class, I would. I wasn't going to repeat a word of what was in that dream. Or in the dream within that dream.

"What in the name of Merlin have you been smoking this morning?" she asked incredulously. Rhetorical question, obviously, but I resolved to answer her anyway.

"Floo powder." I looked back in time to see her forehead get a rather informal introduction to her left palm, and the table to her elbow.

"You know, for as many times as you've said that I'm beginning to wonder whether or not that's true," she said, shaking her head.

"You wouldn't love me if I wasn't so ridiculous."

She smiled sourly. "Maybe not, but I'd love you more if you'd tell me what your bloody dream was," she said in a sardonically sweet voice.

"Add a keg of butterbeer in with that and we shall have an accord," I said. I held out my hand. "Shake on it?"

She looked down at my hand, and then gave me a piercing stare that almost made me flinch. I managed not to, as I knew that would have made her think she was winning. That couldn't happen. "I'm going to bite your fingers off if you don't tell me your dream," she said finally in a toneless voice, her stare unwavering.

I sighed and looked around the class, withdrawing my hand. "You take this class really seriously, don't you?" She nodded rapidly. I looked around the class. There were too many people sitting close by, and who knew when Sable would wander past again? I couldn't say anything, not here at least. I could tell Annabelle. If no one else, I knew I could tell her. I looked back at her seriously.

"All right," I said, careful to keep my voice quiet. "But not until later. Just interpret the fake dream and we'll be done with it for now, all right?"

Her expression changed in an instant, as it was so good at doing, from determined and somewhat angered to concerned and confused. "Was it that bad?" I nodded grimly. "O-oh, I didn't know, I'm –"

"Don't apologize," I interrupted her. "I could've said that much myself, I just didn't want to think about it again." I laughed. "Once I got my mind back in order after waking up from it last night, the first thing that popped into my head was 'Merlin's beard, I'm going to need to make up a fake dream for Divination today.'"

"Your mind just wasn't in order enough to make a very believable one, then," she said, tracing a finger down the pages of her book. "Let's see, we'll say this means that you've predicted World War II – I know you know what the war is as you've apparently been paying attention in Muggle Studies to anything dealing with weapons and cars – will end within the next year or two. The rabbits represent the Axis powers – stop laughing at me, you're the one who wrote this! – and 'Santa's elves' represent the Allied powers. The fact that they're represented by such childish things just shows your subconscious views of Muggle warfare – you believe it to be inferior to any methods wizards use." Annabelle looked up at me. "Now if the war does end, you'll probably pass this class with flying colors."

"And if it doesn't?" I asked, amused.

"Then just invade her mind and scare her into passing you again. It's not like I'm going to be able to stop you."

I shrugged in a semi-apologetic manner. "I can't help it. You know I lack the self control most normal humans possess. And considering you and Tom are refusing to loan me any of yours, I'm sor' of stuck, aren't I?"

"I'm not loaning you any of mine because I know you'd just leave it sitting around somewhere and go about your life the same way you always have."

"Besides the fact that it's physically impossible to distribute your self control as you see necessary," I said.

"That as well, but mostly because you wouldn't bother with self control if you had any."

I sighed and leaned forward to pick up the description of the dream I was supposed to be interpreting. "I hope you know that your complete lack of faith in me is a bit depressing." I skimmed quickly through the page. "Ah, another patricidal one. I'd reckon it means your father's going to be dead inside of a week of you getting home this summer, and it won't be accidental. Of course, maybe not. There's the whole self control idea to take into consideration again. You probably won't kill him. Maybe this means he will have an accidental death."

"Or just that I wish he would have an accidental death."

"Right." I put down the paper. "Can't really say there's anything prophetic in that. It's just a semi-conscious psychiatric mumbo-jumbo type thing of you despising him. Mind getting her over here?" I added, nodding sideways at the professor. "I highly doubt she'll listen to me now."

"And whose fault is that?"

"Hers," I said defensively. "She's under this weird impression I can read her mind. Bonkers, isn't she?"

Annabelle shook her head. "I'm starting to worry about your sanity."

You're not the only one, I thought to myself with a somewhat grim smile. Oh, I most certainly was not looking forward to recounting the dream that had been driving the remaining sanity out of my mind for the past twenty-five nights. With my luck, it would mean that I was going to die before the end of the year. That's what it fealt like it meant to me, anyway, but who really knew? No doubt Annabelle would. She did have an uncanny gift for Divination that even I, who often stomped on beliefs of true "Seers", couldn't deny. I wasn't sure if telling anyone else would help or just drive me further down the path to the Janus Thickey Ward in St. Mungo's.

But, as I told Annabelle that I would educate her on the dream, I supposed I would soon find out just what the result would be.

I honestly do wonder what would happen if someone decided to smoke Floo Powder. Hmm. *Adds to list of questions I'll ask if I ever meet JKR.*