Nothing is mine.

A chapter in which Dudley gets upset about his adult magazine collection and Harry has another happy dream!

I Know Not Her Name

Dudley's footsteps pounded up and down the creaking stairs, thundering back and forth along the landing like a tarmac compactor out on the road, ringing in Harry's ears as he scrubbed at a stubborn spot of limescale with not the slightest success. The lemon-sharpened scent of bleach spun his head in a little swirl with each breath, tugging the edges of his mind into light whirls, snatching his thoughts away like leaves on the breeze.

'Oi!' Dudley barged into the bathroom, banging the door against the wall. 'Did you nick my stuff?'

Harry dropped the cloth into the sink. 'No. Your mum made me dust some of your stuff. Unless you're counting the dust as yours, it's all still where you left it; on the floor.'

Dudley squinted at him. 'My lighter's gone. And some of my… magazines.'

A flash of humour swept through Harry. 'Did the top one of those magazines have a girl with red toenails on it?'

An ugly red flush crept up Dudley's neck. 'You did nick them. Give them back. Now.'

'I didn't take your magazines—' Harry let the word linger just long enough for that flush to rise a little further '—but you left them sticking out from under your bed, Diddiekins, so your mum probably saw them…'

'Wanker,' Dudley growled. 'Why couldn't you just push them back under it?!'

Harry snorted. 'Because I care about your health and want to see you back on your grapefruit diet of course.'

Dudley's jaw twitched and the flush climbed up to the tips of his ears. 'At least I don't wake up screaming like a fucking psycho every night. Oh, Cedric! Do you scream like that when he shags you? Or are you just heartbroken he dumped you?'

Fierce anger seared all the laughter from Harry in a rush of blistering heat. 'He's dead you prick. He was a friend and the man that killed him, if you can even call him a man anymore, tore the life from him before he could blink when I was standing right fucking next to him. Imagine if you were walking to Tesco car park to mess with trolleys and someone just stepped out and shot Piers in the head, you wouldn't be happy about it either.'

Dudley balled his fists, but that ugly flush crept back down a couple of inches. 'Dad always said your kind are too dangerous to be around good, normal people,' he muttered. 'If he comes near me, I'll break his jaw and lay him right out on the concrete.'

'You go right ahead Big D.' Harry picked his rag back up and gave the spot of limescale one last tired scrub. 'Pretty sure he'd rip all your limbs off while you were still alive if you tried it. I've seen him do it, like pulling the wings off a fly or the legs off a spider, just, you know, with a lot more screaming involved.'

Dudley stared at him; all the flush had faded now and some of the colour drained out of his face after it. 'That shit's messed up.'

'Go tell him that.' Harry stuffed the bleach bottle back under the sink as his scar began to throb, biting deep into the front of his skull. 'Or go tell literally anyone else that, as long as you're not in here annoying me because your mum took your porn mags and your lighter.'

'They're not porn mags.' Dudley stomped back out and into his room, slamming the door shut.

The bang sent a lance of pain tearing through Harry's head and the fierce tang of bleach stung his nose; the smell clung to his hands as he scrubbed at them with soap, resisting even the scrape of his fingernails until he gave up and trudged back to his room, dragging off his clothes and collapsing into his small bed. There, curled into a ball beneath the thin, worn polyester, he shoved his face into the old, soft pillow and squeezed his eyes tight shut against the stabbing pain ripping through his forehead.

'Go away. Go away. Go away,' Harry muttered, pinching the bridge of his nose and groaning into the pillow. 'Just go away!'

A flash of fire sliced through his skull and he hammered the heel of his hand on the mattress until it passed.

Just let me sleep. Harry clenched his fists and tried to breathe through his mouth to avoid the faint burn of the bleach in his nostrils. Or die. Death wouldn't be so bad. At least I wouldn't have this bloody headache.

The throbbing eased, fading like the pounding of the distant train tracks, but he held his breath, closing his eyes and waiting for the sharp stab of its return.

Sleep settled upon him instead, tugging him down through a tired tangle of familiar nightmares, and there, beyond the swirl of ragged dementors capes, rattling wheezing breath, and rotten scabbed skin, stretched a silent plain of snow and a starless sky.

I'm dreaming. I must be.

Harry bent and pressed one hand to the ground, brushing the thick cool white away.

Dark ice lay beneath his fingers.

Am I Voldemort again?

But his fingers were his own, pink and normal, scraped and scratched and dotted with little white scars upon the knuckles, and bearing the little dent upon the scuffed nail of his thumb from when Dudley had shut the cupboard door on it over a week ago.

No. No, I'm me. This is another nightmare. Only… I feel awake.

Cold pale light rose over the horizon; the face of the moon crept into the sky, huge and wide, filling all the heavens with shining silver. It called to him, a silent whisper, soft as the grey shades that had spilled from Voldemort's wand in the graveyard's fog, drawing his feet toward it step by stumbling step across the snow.

A shadow stood across from him before the vast, bright white moon, still and chill as the fringes of that starless black, a shapeless thing, formless and faceless, less than the flash of dark in the corner of his eye, but deep and dark enough to swallow him and every glimmer of light his imagination could cling to.

Waiting. It's waiting for me.

Harry knew it with ironclad certainty, felt its endless patience looming ahead like the vast shade of some towering mountain. Each slow, dragging step he took tumbled away behind him like grains of sand through an hourglass, spilling into nothingness, yet it stood, undiminished and undwindling ahead of him, and, somehow, he knew it was smiling, smiling wider with every passing second and every passing step, smiling so impossibly wide that all its sharp teeth ought to be gleaming from ear to ear.

Dread clamped cold fingers about Harry's spine, but his feet staggered on through the snow, dragging him on in an inexorable shuffle.

Thick deep shadow blossomed from the formless thing, blooming out of it like a flower through the chinks in concrete, pouring forth before into his dream like ink spilling from the pages of Voldemort's diary.

'At last,' it whispered in a voice as soft and cold as heavy snow — years and years of it, piling up above the mountains and into the sky until even the sun's warmth was spent somewhere beneath the endless chill. 'Thou comest to me.'

Terror pinned Harry to the spot, froze him stiff as a mouse beneath the sharp gaze of a cat.

A slim hand stretched from the shadow, little wisps of dark curling together like thick fog stirring upon the breeze and settling into silk-smooth, snow-white skin and pitch-black nails, but only a stub sat where the forefinger ought to be. 'Dost thou recall mine touch?' The pale tip of its middle finger hovered just before his heart. 'I held thee once as a babe. For just an instant, thou saw me and felt mine embrace.'

He shook his head. 'Who are you? Are you…?'

Voldemort?

From the great flowering darkness above it, a petal of shadow tumbled, melting like snow in Harry's hand, and pouring over that slim arm and its bone-white skin; the blossom of swirling blackness fell over it, settling into a loose veil of inky silk that whispered upon its pale skin like the hushed tones echoing through Hogwarts' Great Hall after his name had been read out of the goblet.

A ring of burning gold stared at him from beneath its hood, bright as the setting sun, and somehow sinking in just the same way, fading, streaked with orange and yellow and red as if the sun bled its last light out into the night, dying on the cusp of dusk.

'You're not Voldemort,' Harry said.

His eyes are red. And slitted like a snake's. His heart hammered against his ribs. It's something else.

The hood dissipated like morning mist.

Within that ring of golden flame, the pupil was dark as the starless chill looming beyond the moon, a bottomless black that bored into Harry, piercing right through to some hidden point deep within his heart, but her left eye was white, white as bone and snow and ice, and blind. A crown of braids sat atop her head, woven from ice-blue hair as fine as frost, glowing with the same cold pale light as the vast full moon filling the sky behind her; yet, at her left temple, the shorn stub of one braid stood out like a missing tooth.

'Dost thou know me now, wychling?'

Harry shook his head.

She smiled, the corner of her pale blue lips crooking up in a sharp curve, creeping back further and further and further — too wide for the slim, elegant beauty of her high cheekbones, much, much too wide — and icy terror trickled down his spine. 'Thou willst come to.'

This is just a dream. She can't hurt me. She's not even real.

She extended her right arm from beneath her gossamer-thin shroud of shadow; white sand poured through her fingers and faded to nothing. 'Wychling, I shalt have thee, dream or no.'

Harry's blood froze.

Her smile curved a little broader and that burning ring of gold seared through to his soul like a brand of searing flame pressed right through him to the bare bone. 'But I come not for thee; I come to reclaim what is mine. Wouldst thou strike a bargain with me?'

He mustered his courage and forced his head to move, shaking it.

'No?' Something shifted in the burning gold of her eye, a little shiver of molten flame, as if that dying setting sun split open and spilt out the last gasp of its light. 'Thy kin hath bargained with me many a time. The accord I struck with those that begot thee still marks thee; it is by mine power alone that thou livest.' She swept the snow from beneath his feet with a crook of her finger. 'I know thy pain, little wychling. Thy sorrows. Thy fears. What thou dreadst when thou comest to dream.'

Harry stared down into the dark ice.

Cedric's pale face stared back from beneath it, his wide dead eyes still alight with that flash of eerie green, and beneath him swirled dozens of shadows more, drifting through the ragged snatches of his nightmares like dementors through the dark pines of the Forbidden Forest.

'I can take it all from thee if thou wisheth.' Her smile was sharp, razor-sharp, and bright as stainless steel, all her neat white little teeth glinting like knives in the dark. 'Dost thou not desire it? To shed thy dread. Thy misery. Thou wilst not feel them again after our accord is struck, I vow to thee.'

Cedric's skin withered and rotted below the ice, the flesh of his cheeks bloating, blistering, almost bubbling, and peeling back from the bone; his eyes melted like wax into the deep dark hollows of his eye sockets and his hair wilted from his scalp.

Harry dragged his eyes from the crumbling skull. 'It's just a dream. What's the point agreeing? You're not really real; this is just a weird nightmare. When I wake up, everything will be the same.'

'Thou waketh screaming from dreams each night, little wychling. And in thy waking world, thy fears do not abate but further feast upon thee, like carrion flocking to gorge upon thy rotting guts. Yet, all the fear thou art tormented by, I can set thee free from. Thou hast but to grant me one thing from thy possession in return.'

'What?' Harry asked. 'I barely own anything.'

'Thou wilt know it when I take it from thee.'

His stomach twisted itself up into a tight little knot. 'But what if it's something important to me?'

She reached out her left hand with its stub of a forefinger. 'Take mine hand. Take thy bargain. Thou art chosen.'

Harry swallowed. 'Will this dream end so I can sleep if I do? You know what, yes; deal; done; enough of this; just let me sleep.'

She opened her palm, her three remaining fingers uncurling like the claws of a crow's foot, and all the gold of her lone eye burnt bright and fierce as the fading flames of the setting sun, but sinking, a last brilliant gasp of dwindling, dying light.

'Okay. Fine.' Harry reached out and took her hand, shaking it like Uncle Vernon would the plumber or window-cleaner's. 'Deal.'

'As I hath sworn to thee—' her black nails bit into his palm, cold as ice, but she faded, bleeding back into the still, dark silent chill beyond the moon with a whisper as soft as settling snow '—so shalt thou be.'

AN:Follow the linktree to Discord to find all of my other works and read a few more chapters of this story, or, if you like my works, come support me to read all my original stuff and get access to the early release of first drafts!

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