Tuesday, November 6, 2001
Draco laid wide awake well into the early morning. The sun hadn't begun to rise yet but the star light was beginning to wane and Draco was at that point where he had long given up trying to sleep but had yet succumbed to the idea of getting up and starting his day.
He had fallen asleep hours ago, but by midnight had startled himself fully awake with an unbearably vivid nightmare of Azkaban. He could feel the burn of fresh welts across his back as if they were more than just lingering figments of nightmare, sweat drenching his face mingled with tears as pained screams tore out of his body, leaving his throat raw.
He tried to calm down, tried to remember where he was, but couldn't escape the mindset. He was back in the damp, cobblestone prison, his ears covers as he chanted to try and drown out the laughter of guards who'd told Draco that maybe his mother was alive, maybe she was dead – he would never know because he would die long before he would see her again.
The way they'd suggested though that she had been torn apart before her last breath made him certain she was already gone.
It took Draco hours to settle down and distract himself from his lingering fears. He focused instead on Hermione: her soft hair and the lingering smell of rosemary peppermint early in the morning; on the way she would keep eye contact with him always, no matter how uncomfortable it made him; on how she would nibble on the corner of her lip or the edge of her thumb when she was nervous; her gorgeous brown eyes.
Those brown eyes stayed on Draco's mind, kept there by sheer force of will, until suddenly Draco noticed they had melted and revealed the brightest green eyes.
Draco sat up, startled by where his mind had gone. Admitting to himself that he might find Hermione beautiful was one thing but to think of Harry that way—
Harry, who was standing at the bottom of Draco's bed.
"What the fuck Potter?" Draco asked in a gravely voice, accidentally slipping up and using Harry's surname in his groggy, startled state of mind. He rubbed at his eyes and scratched a sudden itch on the right side of his head but Harry just took a seat at the bottom of Draco's bed.
"I was checking up on Hermione when I thought I'd peek in on you. You were making some weird noises, I wanted to see you were okay."
Draco grunted at that, embarrassed that the noises Harry would have heard were either his earlier torment from thoughts of Azkaban or the traitorous thoughts Draco found himself returning to more and more often of his two roommates.
Thinking of Harry thusly should have made Draco self-conscious in his exposed state of being, mentally and physically as he often slept in shorts and nothing else, but he couldn't help but look at those brilliant green eyes shining with honest concern.
"Was it Azkaban?" Harry asked, settling in.
Draco nodded, not willing to share the other parts.
"It's not as bad as it was weeks ago but while it happens less now, they're much worse comparatively. Luna figures its progress," he explained, ending with a shrug as if he wasn't so sure he agreed.
Harry nodded, listening intently.
"Is it always the same?"
Draco thought about that and finally nodded. "In the way that there are some recurring moments and that the rest is just vague but vibrant memories of physical pain. I had no shortage of that but the guards weren't the most inventive of jailors so a lot of the beatings were to the same places."
Harry frowned at that, remembering the abused state Draco had been in when he and Hermione had first seen him in prison and how barely better he seemed when he moved in with them.
"You talk to Luna about the specifics of your dreams, right? When… when I was seeing a Mind Healer, I had to give a lot of horrible details. Was kind of like doing the thing twice," Harry admitted, not entirely sure why he was sharing that. It wasn't as though Draco didn't know Harry had seen someone professionally after the War but it wasn't exactly something they'd discussed.
"Sort of. She asks for a lot more than I give her."
Draco wouldn't always dream of Azkaban, although the wizarding prison always figured its way into his nightmares. Often he would dream of torturing others or being tortured, and sometimes it was Luna's eyes that would haunt him into the morning hours.
Harry, somehow, seemed to guess that.
"If talking about it is supposed to help but you can't talk to Luna about… certain parts… well, I'm here. I'm not much, but you can talk to me."
Draco dropped his head forward, the weight of its contents momentarily overwhelming him, before turning it up slightly to look at Harry curiously. The offer to reveal what had happened to him, to tell one person every horrible thing he had done, was painfully tempting but for it to be Harry Potter of all people – well, Draco hesitated.
"Consider it the least I can do after I nearly dissected you with Snape's sectumsempra." Harry whispered, his eyes tracing the scars across Draco's chest. Both men swallowed down lumps in their throat.
Perhaps it was the lack of sleep or the way the moonlight made Harry's eyes twice as bright or perhaps Draco was just so unused to having someone care about his personal well-being that he turned and shifted the pillows in such a way that there was room for the two of them to sit up against the headboard.
Harry accepted the wordless invitation and moved to the top of the bed.
Draco started before Azkaban, to the day he returned home from school to find Voldemort in his bedroom. Draco was tortured in a lingering fit of resentment Voldemort had for his father's failures and drained of any and all information he had of Harry, Hermione, Ron, Dumbledore, the rest of the staff, and on and on.
He recounted the summer spent working with his Aunt to hone his Occulumency to hide his plans from Snape and Dumbledore and the research he undertook regarding the broken Vanishing Cabinet. How Voldemort knew so certainly it would be there meant nothing to Draco, just that if he didn't finish it by the end of the school year, he would quickly find himself an orphan.
Getting his Dark Mark had hurt so badly he had been knocked unconscious for days.
Harry admitted watching Draco relentlessly that year, watching as he decayed before his eyes, convinced that Draco was whole heartedly working away at something horrible. He apologized for never once considering what forces were driving Draco to madness. Draco nodded and accepted.
Draco didn't bother talking about the night he failed to kill Dumbledore. Harry had supposedly been there, which made sense because at the time Draco had been confused by the presence of the second broom stick but things had spiraled out of control so quickly that there was never any chance for him to figure that puzzle out.
The following year was agony. Tortured for failing to kill Dumbledore, forced to torture others to keep himself and his family in relative safety. His mother was largely kept as a noose around his and his fathers' neck, never properly respected for her power (something Draco was immensely grateful for).
"I'm sure if Voldemort had realized your mums power and won her over, the world would be a very different place right now," Harry murmured, earning a snort from Draco as he happened to think the very same thing.
Draco told stories of families he had destroyed, faceless muggles terrified of this magical man had come to destroy them. He confessed that he had been sick the first time he'd been told to kill and only escaped punishment because his Aunt pitied him. She had chosen this life for whatever reason but she knew Draco had not.
She made it her life mission after that to acclimatize him to the killing and the torture but accepted when he refused to partake in the rape their counterparts so reveled in. Thankfully his Aunt, while very much not a feminist, very much disagreed with Death Eaters sullying themselves with the spoils of war.
Another small blessing for Draco.
He confessed crying the first time he was told to torture Luna, the first person he had well and truly recognized. He admitted her screams and her eyes still haunted him. Harry, noticing that Draco's hands were balled into fists and shaking, immediately grabbed one and held tightly. He waited in silence as Draco struggled to regain his breath and finally unfurled his fist to clasp fingers with the man he never thought he would ever confide in.
He recounted the day he watched, powerless, as Hermione was tortured. Admitted in the tiniest of voices that he tried so hard to be invisible because not only could he not save her but he couldn't bear the thought of being the next one to torture her.
He had come to terms with the idea that muggle or not, no one deserved to be tortured. Discovering Hermione's blood was as red as his, something he was ashamed to admit he had honestly doubted growing up, had shifted everything into this blinding balance that undid everything he'd been raised to believe.
Explaining his prejudice and how it had died with Hermione Jen Granger was a liberating experience. He had touched on the topic somewhat with Luna but never really fully dived into it with someone who knew so little firsthand, but with Harry, he figured he had a chance to circle that square. He explained that purebloods are largely told that muggleborns are inferior creatures that aren't so much dangerous as they are defective.
You don't invite them over for tea.
"Hermione still gets a lot of that," Harry admitted with a lightly yawn, unwittingly lowering his head to Draco's shoulder. "Walking around the Ministry with her sometimes it's like society is shocked she can figure out how to button up her coat in the morning."
Draco nodded, not at all surprised, but surprisingly annoyed on her behalf.
"If I had been confronted by a witch half as competent as Hermione I would probably still be questioning everything I had been taught as a child but she took everything I had been raised to believe and burned it down. Her blood was just the last piece of that puzzle."
Harry nodded, his eyes closing.
Draco went on to describe his arrest and the humiliation he suffered at the trial, his misplaced anger with Harry for trying to save him when Draco refused to believe he deserved to stand trial at all. He kept that resentment and that rage throughout his years at Azkaban, which he figured largely helped him to keep his sanity. His single minded refusal to accept the beatings, the verbal abuse, any of it, somehow kept him outside the experience.
"I'm glad. You're not half bad how you are now," Harry whispered, awake but barely so.
Draco smiled softly, taking the compliment as it was, and discretely inhaled. He was comforted by the scent of freshly laundered clothing and something woodsy as he allowed himself to lean in to Harry and doze off as well.
A happy early birthday for ellsworth-longfellow, for whom I am posting this chapter early. I will hopefully be posting new chapters every second day, give or take, but who knows. My mother in law is staying us for the next week so we'll see what my writing schedule looks like.