A/n: Thank you all for the patience (and reviews of course)! I hope it's worth it with this brand new chapter :)
Chapter 23
A Snowy Mountain
A mountain. There was a mountain. It was covered in snow.
From behind the mountain, over the peak, came someone. It was a human, it was a person, it was a woman. She had hair like…her hair was…it looked…unreal. For some reason, it moved in an unnatural way.
The raven squinted. The snow was so white and so bright, it was hard to see, hard to see what was wrong with her hair. Why was it unnatural? What made it strange? It looked normal; there was nothing wrong with it. And still…there was something wrong with it.
The raven trudged up the mountain to meet the lady with the strange hair. He wanted to get to her quickly. He wanted to touch her as soon as possible. He had to be with her now!
Why? He thought, and he didn't know. But still he had to get to her. It was the single most important thing, and Harry could think of nothing else.
He fought against the snow like a crazed tiger, but his legs would always sink deep under the icy fluff, and it was hard to get them out, to make another step forward. But there was nothing else he cared about, and he kept moving his short legs towards the woman, who was descending the slope of the mountain to meet him.
All that time, Harry kept his eyes fixed on her, nothing else. And all the time he thought about her hair. There was something about her hair.
"No!" Harry yelled suddenly. He hadn't wanted to. He just did. Just like that. No, he'd said. Just came out like that.
The woman had fallen in the snow. It looked like she had tripped or something, she'd fallen forward. She looked up at Harry from the ground. Harry was close enough to discern her eyes now. They looked at him in a hopeful and desperate kind of way. Hopeful and desperate.
And all Harry kept thinking was no. As if he were objecting to something. As if it mattered if he objected. As if he could will something to happen, or not to happen. No! He'd forgotten all about the hair. Just no, he thought.
Finally, he reached the woman. He came to her. But just when he reached out to touch, to help her get up, a voice said "Your mom isn't a very good cook, but don't tell her that, okay?" It had come from nowhere, and it went nowhere. Just a voice, echoing off the slopes of the mountains.
Harry tried to touch the woman again, but the voice stopped him, again "I won't let him come anywhere near Harry…" And as an echo does, it repeated itself over and over, coming from everywhere and nowhere. Each time it grew fainter. "I won't let him come anywhere near Harry…" Again…again…and again…and slowly…nothing.
Harry was confused. He felt as if his toes were wet and sticky. It felt like they'd been glued together. He looked down at his feet, expecting to see them buried in the snow. And the snow didn't blind him.
No, the snow did not blind him. The snow was red. It was really red. It was the reddest red you'd ever seen. It was deep. It cut through you, that red. And it cut off Harry's oxygen. He couldn't breathe, so red it was.
He looked at the woman. The woman was struggling against the snow, and she was crying. But not aloud. Just tears. Her eyes, they were green, and filled with tears. But they too became red. And her mouth became red, her hands and fingers… It came from her stomach.
Her stomach…
The raven screamed. It was louder than the disembodied voice had been. He screamed so loud it felt like he was tearing his body apart.
But then he couldn't breathe! He couldn't breathe! And his scream was cut off.
Harry woke up with a cushion pressing over his face. He struggled away from it and gasped. Two hands immediately gripped his shoulders and turned him. The boy opened his eyes. And he saw nothing. It was too dark, and without his glasses it was all too blurry. But he remembered now. He knew where he was. And he knew whose hands were on his shoulders.
"Harry!" Draco's voice hissed in the dark guest room at the Malfoy house. "What is the matter with you?" He demanded. He sounded panicked. His fingers were digging into Harry's skin.
The dark-haired one wriggled himself loose from the painful grip, then felt on the nightstand for his glasses. Once he had those on he could finally see a little more around him. It reassured him. There was no mountain, no snow, no blood.
Still, his breathing was very quick. It was loud in the quite large guest room. It resonated.
"Harry?" Draco insisted. He didn't sound reassured at all.
The raven could only nod. His chest was rising and falling at an alarming speed. He was aware of it. And at that point, he knew. And he knew that he'd always known. This dream wasn't a new one. He remembered it now. He'd had it before. Many times before.
But this time, the boy had screamed out loud, not just in his dreams. It had woken his friend sleeping next to him the in the large double bed in the guest room.
"What's the matter?" Draco asked. He sounded just a little bit calmer, now that he'd gotten a lucid response from Harry.
But Harry was confused. The dream was confusing. The voice, and the woman…he knew they were his parents, but they had been different in the dream than his conscious memory of them. And the woman, his mother…he'd seen her stomach...or rather, he'd seen where her stomach should have been. That was the point at which he'd started screaming. He'd been terrified. And that raw fear was what still scared him in his waking state.
Harry couldn't make sense of all of it. Not yet. He only knew he was afraid. He was more afraid than he'd ever felt before. He clutched at his chest. It was still rising and falling too rapidly. He couldn't control it.
Draco was at a loss. He was scared too. He'd never seen anyone in hysterics. He'd never seen anyone have nightmares. He'd never heard anyone cry out in fear, and certainly not in the middle of the night, when he was asleep.
When he'd been woken, the first thing he'd thought of was to muffle the screams, so he'd pressed his pillow against Harry's face. He didn't really know why this had been his first reaction the second he woke up, he had just done it by instinct. But now there was no instinct to guide him. He clearly saw that there was something wrong with Harry. His breathing was much too quick and much too loud, and his eyes were frantically looking around, as if expecting something to jump out of a dark corner. It made Draco expect monsters too.
Finally, he grabbed his friend's shoulders again. He couldn't think of anything else. He tried looking Harry in the eyes, tried to make him calm down this way, but Harry wouldn't focus. His green orbs kept wandering around, looking for something.
Draco went a step further and threw all his weight against the smaller shape in front of him. He fell flat on top of the younger boy and held him tight. He didn't say a word, just held him tightly, and pressed himself against Harry's frail chest to try and stop the frantic breathing.
For a long time, the two boys, one a little younger, one a little older, stayed this way. And gradually, Harry's breathing slowed down. It slowed, more and more, as the minutes passed by; until he'd gone back to the normal rhythm.
Draco had not only felt the lungs inflating beneath him, he'd also felt Harry's heart beat all over the place. But it had been too fast, even for a panicked heart. There were too many beats. It was only when Harry had calmed down that Draco understood he'd felt his own heartbeats too. Both hearts had raced a hundred miles an hour, trying to keep up with the other, or maybe trying to slow down the other. Who knew why hearts did what they did?
After what seemed like ages, Draco asked again "Harry?" in a slow whisper.
He heard Harry swallow very loudly from where he was, pinned against green-eyes' chest, his ear close to his throat.
"Yes." Harry whispered back.
That was when Draco knew it was over. He sighed in relief and pushed himself off Harry to lie on his own side of the bed. He felt exhausted. Fear was really exhausting.
"What was that?" He kept wondering. "A nightmare?"
Harry nodded. Then attempted to speak with a hoarse voice. "I think I've had it before."
"Do you scream like that at home?"
"No. That never happened." He had not even been able to remember a single thing before. Now he knew where that unsettling feeling had come from, the feeling with which he sometimes woke up.
Green-eyes had calmed down, and he could finally start to think about what he'd seen. Draco asked him questions, and he answered truthfully. He told him of the woman and the voice. Of course, Draco couldn't' make sense of what the voice had said, only Harry could understand because he had context, but grey-eyes was horrified all the same.
Normally, Draco wouldn't be so upset at hearing a nightmare. Nightmares were like horror stories. They were dreadful, but they weren't true, and that made them entertaining. But having seen his friend's reaction, that blood-curdling scream right next to him, he felt that there was more truth to this dream than any other dream he'd had.
Besides, he knew about Harry's parents. Harry had never actually said they had been murdered, but Harry's aunt had said it, and the rumours said it. Draco decided to ask.
The question forced Harry to link the dream to his parents' murder. He still didn't remember what had happened that day. He didn't remember going to Mrs. Figg, or seeing Rebecca. Did the nightmare show how his mother had died? What had been wrong with her stomach? What had happened? Had there been so much blood? So much blood that it had drenched his shoes and even seeped through to his toes?
A strange kind of half-sob escaped Harry's throat. He felt his chest rising quicker again.
"Hey!" Draco hissed. "Not again!"
An order was no use of course. Harry wanted it to stop, but he couldn't' control it. He watched helplessly, as if it were someone else's body. It distressed him even more.
"It's okay! It's fine!" Draco whispered hastily. "You don't have to tell me." He sounded worried, but also a little disgruntled that he had to concede.
Harry turned his head sideways to look at his friend lying next to him. And Draco recognized the same expression he'd seen when Harry had hidden his face in his sleeves and rocked back and forth on his bedroom floor, the day he'd asked about his parents. Suddenly, his green eyes turned clearer, more piercing, as if he was simultaneously begging for something and screaming something at him. It was the second time Draco saw it, and it rendered him as speechless as the first.
Each time this happened, the blond understood more of how Harry must feel, and it gave him that weird emotion again, that desire to make Harry feel better in any way he could. It was such a new experience for him, it made him doubt whether he was physically sick.
This time, he had no book to give. He had no other idea than to shuffle closer and sling an arm over Harry's chest. "Come here." He said in what he hoped was a soothing kind of tone. "My mum always takes me in her arms when I have nightmares. It helps me a lot."
"My mum did it too." Harry said, and it hurt to do so. "But I was never this scared."
"Are you that scared?" Draco wondered, remembering the scream and suppressing a shudder.
Harry nodded, and turned on his side so he could face Draco. It was more comfortable for both this way. It was the first time they were so close. He couldn't' remember Malfoy ever having his arm around him. Not so softly. It felt weird, because he expected this softness from Mrs. Malfoy, but not from her son.
"It's okay, Harry, it's…" Draco stopped mid-sentence. He'd wanted to say it was just a bad dream, the way his mother told him, but he suspected it wasn't true, and he knew Harry knew too. So instead he said: "It's over." The two words sounded with such finality that it depressed Draco. 'It's over' meant Harry's mother and father were dead, and would never come back.
Green-eyes didn't seem to take it that way though. He breathed loudly, but at a more normal pace, and crept a little closer to grey-eyes, fitting himself between his arms. It accentuated their difference in size. There was more of a difference than he'd thought.
For a while, both were content just staying this way. But Draco wasn't used to not having his questions answered. He wasn't used to unsatisfied curiosity. And there was this nagging feeling in his stomach. It felt a little like fear, but different. It went deeper than just fear of a big dog.
He found that the only way to relieve the feeling of nagging a little bit was to hold the small form in his arms closer. The less distance between them, the more the feeling dissipated. But never completely. He wasn't sure what that was all about.
What he knew was that he wanted to know more. He wanted to know what was wrong with his dark-haired schoolmate.
"Harry?" He whispered again.
"Hmmmpfff."
Then nothing. He tried again. "Harry?" But this time there wasn't even a mumble. He peeked down to look at Harry's face. It looked different. He assumed it was his sleeping face. People had sleeping faces, and they were different from their day faces.
The blond-head took off the boy's glasses. The metal frame was digging uncomfortably into his collar bone. He reached over Harry to put it back on the nightstand, and then he curled himself around him as if he were a stuffed animal, and went to sleep.
And we're back on track! I'll try and keep it up like before, about once a week. Hope you keep reading :)
much love from Aoiika
