Chapter Nineteen

A/N: Thank you to Bookwormkat1 for reviewing the last chapter.

For the fifth night since Merida had been taken away, Draco dreamed the same dream.

He dreamt that he was sitting in a puddle of blood with Merida in his arms, just as he had been on that awful day. But slowly and steadily, the puddle spread, until it was a river, a lake, a sea of scarlet, with waves that washed over him, drenching him with that familiar iron that made him want to gag. Every night the dream ended the same way, with Draco, blinded by the blood seeping into his eyes, letting go of Merida and watching her begin to sink. He dived beneath the surface of the crimson lake, feeling around for her hand, but she was nowhere to be found. Unwilling to be the cause of her death, Draco kept searching until his lungs burned and he went to take a breath and felt his chest filling up with the hot red liquid, until he was drowning, drowning in the blood of the woman he loved.

Draco bolted upright in his bed, sweating and panting. He glanced around wildly for a girl, a wave, the tell-tale stain of scarlet, but all of it was gone. Merida was gone.

With a sigh, the boy leant back against his pillows, the tide of confusion ebbing away until only a searing guilt remained. While that may have been a dream, he still felt as though he was drowning, lost without the one person who could always pull him back to the surface to breathe again. The worst part of all hit him like a curse; she was dying, maybe even dead, and despite the fact that another had wielded the blade, it was all his doing.

'She's safe.' he told himself, trying to calm his rapid breathing. 'She's with her mother, in St. Mungo's. She's safe.'

But even as he thought the reassurances, he found himself shooting his ideas down in flames. This was war; no one was safe. Not anymore.

Trying to force the awful thoughts from his mind, Draco lay down once again, clenching his eyes tight shut as if that would keep the nightmares at bay. He had no hope of returning to sleep, not now the blood was pumping so furiously through his veins, but at least in the darkness he could not see the familiarity of his dormitory, which seemed to remind him all the more of the familiarity of his lost friend, Meri. 'More than a friend, truly.' he thought, then tried to clear his mind. It would do nothing to help if he remembered the true nature of the relationship they had shared.

Sleep did not come for the boy- he had not expected it to- and it was after only half an hour of lying in wait that he decided to find something else to do. He could not lie awake in his bed, doing nothing until the sun came up, with only his thoughts to keep him from going mad. Or to make him.

So, throwing on some discarded clothes from a few nights ago, Draco decided to make his way down to Merida's room, to find something to give to her when he went to visit St. Mungo's on the weekend. True, he was not allowed into the Professor's private quarters, where the room was situated, but then again, neither was he permitted to walk the corridors in the early hours of the morning. After all he had done, he no longer cared if he got into trouble, for he could not feel any worse than he already did.

It was a long walk from the Dungeons to the Transfiguration classroom, one that Draco usually took as a leisurely stroll with his gang of followers, if only to see the look on McGonagall's face when he arrived halfway through her lessons. But now, the portraits on the walls were blurring into one, as Draco all but ran towards the room. He listened intently to their muffled complaints as he passed each one, though he did not stop to do so, as they gave him a rest from his own thoughts.

Around twenty minutes had passed before the boy prised open the lock to his friend's bedroom. He had expected that it would be closed, to protect the possessions inside it, the very possessions Draco was about to plunder to find something to cheer the girl lying in the hospital bed- or perhaps it was locked simply because McGonagall could not bear to look inside. Your fault, a voice inside him sang, and the Malfoy heir could not help but feel it was.

The room was remarkably tidy for that of a teenager, which was surprising, given that Merida was one of the most remarkably disorganised people Draco had ever met. 'It's probably her mother's doing, or the house elves.' he thought, beginning to look through the shelving unit in the corner of the room. It was littered with books and Quidditch memorabilia, scrolls of parchment... and a photo album, bound in red leather.

He knew it was wrong, he knew that he should take the album and give it straight to Meri, but he could not resist looking inside. As he had expected, it was filled with photographs of his friend when she had been younger, a few containing the image of a man Draco could just about place as having the distinctive small ears of an Urquhart. 'They look far better on Meri than they do on him.' he could not resist thinking.

But suddenly, a sound brought him from his thoughts, back into the darkness of Merida's bedroom. He closed the book, placing it down on the bed, and retrieved his wand from his belt, managing to hold it steadily towards the door, despite his heart beating a furious rhythm against his chest.

He needn't have worried about the footsteps until he saw the face of the woman who had made them. Her eyes were filmed with tears and her cheeks had white lines dug into them where the last tears had fallen. Her limbs were sagging with exhaustion and there was something about her that suggested she had suffered a great loss.

Draco felt his own heart break in two. Professor McGonagall had only one person who could have made her feel in that way, the same that had crushed his heart between her cold limp fingers. Meri.

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