Requiem for Draco's Dream

Requiem for Draco's Dream

Allow me to introduce myself, I'm a man of wealth of taste. Pleased to meet you... don't you know my name?

--Rolling Stones, Sympathy for the Devil.

I took my love, and I took it down.
I climbed a mountain and I turned around
And I saw my reflection in the snow-covered hills
Well the landslide brought me down.

--Stevie Nicks, Landslide

This is based on Irina's Halloween Challenge for the one year anniversary of her HP Pendragon Yahoo group, based on her wonderful Morrigan trilogy. I finally got around to uploading it to FA!! Personally, I think it stands alone, too. All you REALLY need to know is that Irina's Draco is evil, evil, evil. He lusts for Ginny;she's determined to stick to Harry. Oh, and she's also the Pendragon, so various gods, goddesses and immortal beings keep meddling in her life,including the Celtic triple goddess Morrigan/Macha/Badb. In Irina's fic, Draco and Ginny are probably never going to get together and I don't know if they SHOULD; he's just too evil to ever be completely redeemed. However, Draco is one of her mystical protectors (Harry's the other one,) so Morrigan wants 'em to (ahem) bond, if you know what I mean.

In Chapter 6 of Irina's fic, they spend a chaste night in a hotel on their way to Avalon to pick up Excalibur. In MY l'il world, I started wondering if anything happened that night.

That's what this story is about, as well as a little meddling by assorted Norse/Germanic gods(my idea) and Neil Gaiman's Lord Morpheus/Dream/Sandman from the Sandman series, not to mention a title paraphrased from the Aronofsky film. And if you've read Sandman, you'll get that much more out of it; if you haven't, it doesn't make any difference. Landslide is Stevie Nicks, but I was thinking of the Dixie Chicks' cover. Ready? Then hang on tight, it's going to be a bumpy ride...And yes, for me, the incurable epic writer, this IS a ficlet! ;)

All quotes in boldface are from:

Chapter 6

Irina's "Galatea"

He was just about to pull his hand back when she laced her fingers through his; he realized that she needed human contact, for all that she was asleep, and he didn't pull away. Although his skin was generally pale, his fingers seemed black against the silver light that poured from her hand. Draco couldn't help the feeling that by touching her he was somehow marring the purity of her power, and he wondered briefly whether Potter ever felt the same way. They stayed locked in that tableau through the night, Ginny curled into a fetal position with a death grip on his hand, and Draco sitting on the bed next to her, keeping the nightmares at bay.

Draco spent the hours deep in thought....

She tossed and turned restlessly sometimes, tendrils of her red-gold hair tangling against the pillow as fiercely as the snakes on Medusa's head. She murmured incoherent phrases, snatches of words, low moans. And she glowed. The bleached white linen of the hotel sheets looked dark against her shimmering skin. His own hand increasingly resembled a set of dark claws against her incandescent fingers. Over and over again in the hours stretching through the night, Draco found his eyes tracking the movements of her silver hand along his. He sighed, propped his chin on his other hand, and tried to think. But the moon kept spilling through the window onto the bed, surrounding Ginny with yet another nimbus of light, and the glowing girl on the bed, always in his frame of vision, seemed to be blocking some sort of circuitry in his brain.

Control. It was vital to regain control. He had felt it slipping away, bit by bit. How did one gain control? By gaining the upper hand in a situation.

--her hair, the coils and tendrils of her hair spilling over her silver shoulders--

Logic. He needed to think logically. Was it even possible to gain the upper hand here? How would one do so, against the Pendragon? What if it truly couldn't be done?

--the sweet curve of her cheekbone and jaw against the bedspread as she tossed her head from side to side--

A way. There was always a way. Sometimes you had to guide your opponent's strength towards her weakness, allowing her to do the heavy work towards her own defeat. Like ju-jitsu. Or sometimes one had to pretend to hold the cards one really did not have. Perhaps this was less a game of strategy than of bluff; poker, not chess.

--those sheets were in a terrible mess, twisted all the way round her and exposing the flawless sheen of her breasts; the shadow of the moon fell across her nipples but even they were glowing, glowing--

Draco swore softly and tried to jerk his hand away, but she clutched to it tightly and whimpered under her breath, her eyelashes fluttering. Resolutely, he turned his head towards the door to the hotel room. It had fallen slightly ajar; he likely hadn't closed it carefully enough earlier. There was a Muggle couple standing in the hall, dressed, with remarkable ineptness, as witch and wizard. The woman giggled and swayed on her black satin high heels, her pointed hat askew on her bleached blond head. Draco shuddered at the sight. Polyester robes; why didn't the gods just strike them down dead on the spot? The man pulled the sleazy imitation-witch close to him and kissed her, long and hard, his hands wrapped around her waist, and Draco could feel the waves of magic coming from them. The oldest magic there was, and one even Muggles knew without knowing it, tapped into without understanding it. The spells of Eros. The couple moved away. A few seconds later, the sound of a door being slammed resonated down the hall.

But now other couples were appearing, all wearing orange pumpkin outfits, and a group of shrieking girls scurried past the door dressed as cats, with pointy black ears clamped onto their heads and black fabric tails waving from the bottoms of their bodysuits. What on earth was going on? Draco peered down the hall as far as he could without letting go Ginny's hand, and caught a glimpse of a banner over a large entryway.

Welcome to the Staffordshire 50th Annual Halloween Ball! Prizes and Fun For All! Eat, Drink, and Be Merry!

Of course. It was Halloween. Draco had utterly forgotten.

Images of all the other Halloweens he had ever known drifted through his head. The annual ball at Malfoy Manor. Getting thoroughly drunk on spiked punch, taking pride in its lack of effect on him, unless it were to make him more detached, more cut off from the crush of humanity about him. .Dancing, then strolling across the floor to the admiring eyes of Pansy Parkinson or Xanthia Morgan or Sadina von Tussel, catching his reflection out of the corner of his eye, approving of its glacial elegance. Yes... a perfect surface, a flawless surface, he had thought, more than once. But none of the memories seemed real, somehow, in the face of this moment. Holding Ginny Weasley's hand. Listening to the soft, incoherent sounds from her throat; the faint rustling of the sheets under her. Thinking of what she was now, of what she might be to him, of what he could be to her.

A strange thought struck him, gone nearly as quickly as it had come, but real for a fleeting instant nonetheless. All his life seemed insubstantial compared to this night. All the years that had come before were like a web of dark poison that might fall to nothing at the first touch of her hand. That hand that was even now intertwined with his.

He could hear the deep, low strokes of a clock tower's bell somewhere in the distance. One... two... three...four...

Draco stared down at Ginny's face, his mind curiously blank. That was anything but a normal state for him. However, there was something about this strange night, and the silver girl on the bed he was both obligated to touch and barred from touching...

Five...six...seven...eight...

Draco remembered one year when he had still been at Hogwarts, his sixth year, he thought, already damned, already fallen into darkness. The Halloween ball there. Little Ginny Weasley with her homemade flower costume and its patched green fabric; she so pretty and shabby, breathtakingly sweet and fiery sour. He had sneered at her for some reason or other that night; impossible to recall what it was, now. But he had watched her all night, the green and silver crocus, looking like a very breath of spring, and had deliberately turned away forever after that when he saw her coming towards him in the halls. The image of her red-gold head was threatening to blur into dream. But that mustn't happen. He rubbed his burning eyes. Gods, but he was tired; it had been a long time since he'd really slept well.

Nine... ten...

He mustn't sleep. He must stay awake, stay awake and plan his triumph, his domination over her, the crushing of the flower...

Eleven... twelve...

Draco's head drooped, and he fell into a sleep so profound that it was almost coma. His last waking sensation was of sliding into the bed, pressed closely against the soft, yielding body of Ginny Weasley, one of his hands still in hers, the other entwined around her waist.

On the night of All Hallows' Eve, the boundaries between the earthly plane and the Otherworld wear thin, like the nap of a fabric rubbed against rough stone. The two worlds touch, close as lovers, drifting against each other. This is true not only of the world of the Morrigan, of Macha, and of Badb, but of all the other aspects therein. For in the house of the Otherworld there are many mansions.

Aminaterasu clutches her heavenly mirror in the depths of her cave on the rocky island of Honshu, groaning with her regret that she ever let her brother Susano-o found the Imperial Royal House of Japan. And on Halloween night, the subways of the cybercity of Tokyo tremble, and salarymen taking the bullet train home wonder if another earthquake threatens the country built on a Pacific ring of fire. Shiva dances eternally through the skies above India, and Kali waves her necklace of dead men's heads, but it is only on Halloween that the beggars of Calcutta see them in their starving dreams. Hera still sports in the bed of Zeus, but only tourists climb Mount Olympus now, in search of a mythic experience they never find-- except, occasionally, at Halloween. The gaunt and somber face of Lord Morpheus haunts the nightmares of mortals after they have thrown off their costumes and masks, and lie sleeping through the witching hour. And Lady Death sometimes lets a hint of her smile slip through human dreams in her travels through this evening, too. Although it cannot be said if those who see her face before shuffling off this mortal coil are the lucky ones, since they spend the rest of their lives in a fruitless search to find such sweetness again. The exact day on which this feast falls varies, of course, from culture to culture and from time to time. But it exists in them all. For it represents the borderlands, the place where the nexus between gods and men is so briefly born

In some unplottable place of the hinterlands in the Otherworld, then, was a twelve-faced ruby jewel of infinite size. Within this jewel lay a great promontory of rock beneath the roof of a cave. Chained to this rock was the Teutonic trickster god, Loki. Coiled above him among the roots of Yggdrasil, the world-tree that reaches through all time and space, was Nidhogg, a great serpent that dripped venom from its fangs. As it fell, the corrosive poison sizzled through Loki's body, dissolving flesh and bone. Day after day, the god suffered through the greatest torment imaginable. Night after night, his healing powers renewed what had been destroyed. All in all, reflected Loki, he'd rather be in the French Riviera.

His sister, the goddess Hel, ruler of the frozen underworld, strode across the rock floor of the cave. "Suffer, victim," she said by way of greeting.

"Can't you ever just say hello?" Loki grimaced. It was a particularly agonizing point in the regrowth of his backbone, which was grating against the rough stone beneath him.

She looked at him with eyes like water at the bottom of wells abandoned before man first learned speech. "The time of All Hallows' Eve is nigh, my brother."

"Don't I just know it."

Even as they spoke, the clock tolled twelve. Not that there were actual clocks in the Otherworld, mind you, but the marking of time on this evening was felt in the very flesh of the Immortals. Loki sat up, his spell-chains falling away for this one night only, as was the rule of the gods. The red walls of the jewel that imprisoned him shimmered into insubstantial air. Behind them were the jagged snow-covered hills of pain.

"What wilt thou do with thy short time of freedom, my brother?" Freya, another of his sisters, had come up to stand beside the gaunt dark form of Hel, Loki saw. The draperies of flowers the goddess of love and beauty wore gave off a scent such as mortals dream of all their lives, inextricably mixed with the smiles of Lady Death.

"I will go to and fro in the earth, and walk up and down in it." Loki swung his legs off the stone platform and onto the floor. "Seriously, I'm going to blow this popsicle stand."

He sighed at the blank looks his sisters gave him. "Yes, I know, I've been picking up American television signals again. It's something to do. You try lying on a rock in a jewel tied down with spells and doomed to have a snake dripping venom on your body until Ragnarok, the fall of gods and men."

"Why must you continue to meddle in the affairs of mortals, Loki?" asked Hel.

"They interest me." He looked at his sisters with what might properly be termed devilish glee. "Look."

An image of Draco and Ginny intertwined in sleep hovered in the air before the three gods.

"He is one of mine, this Draco Malfoy," said Hel, with something like satisfaction in her grating voice. "His feet are set on the path to Nilfheim. I can feel it in him. He has fallen too far."

Freya shook her head, her golden hair flying. "The girl has something of us in her, that I can see. How this is I do not know. And he loves her, although he knows it not. He may yet come to Valhalla."

Hel turned aside with something that sounded suspiciously like a sniff. "I wager not," she said.

"A wager?" Freya's ice-blue eyes sparkled. "This I accept."

Hel looked at her brother and sister with bottomless eyes, and then disappeared, leaving no trace to mark her passing.

"She always does that when she can't think of anything to say." Loki swung up to the roots of Yggdrasil, preparing to pass through the veil that separated the worlds. The serpent slithered aside with an ungracious hiss.

"Wait," said Freya. She handed him a curiously marked golden cup, engraved with runes and symbols. "Let them both drink from this, the mortal man and woman. Then..." An unearthly smile played about her lips. "We shall see who will win this wager."

"Oh, my sister, my sister!" laughed Loki. "No wonder Mom always loved you best." He kissed her once on the forehead, and was gone. The music of the faceted sphere died away. But ahead of him, the god heard a soft silvery sound. The girl he sought was singing.

It was the deepest, most satisfying sleep he had ever known. He was slipping further and further into its comforting darkness, cradled like a child in its mother's arms, except that he could never remember his mother holding him this way. He heard singing, very sweet and low. Yet even as this thought entered Draco's head, he realized that he couldn't still be truly asleep. Something had awakened him. He blinked at the bedside table. A gleam of gold met his eyes. It had not been there before.

The shock awakened him fully, and he sat up abruptly, rubbing his face. Ginny made a soft mewing noise next to him, breaking off the song she had been crooning in her sleep. He almost jumped in amazement at the feel of her naked body along his. Surely they hadn't... but no, he was still fully clothed. Taking care to keep her hand firmly in his, he turned towards the golden thing.

"Shh," said Loki, seated in the chair next to the bed.

"What in the bloody hell--" Draco began furiously.

But Loki only laid a finger across his lips. At the touch of the god's flesh, Draco fell silent. He looked at the being in the chair with terrified eyes. He had known power, dark magic, ritual, sacrifice; Death Eaters, Voldemort, even Grindelwald. But not this, never this. What he now saw was something entirely outside of his experience. "Who are you?" Draco's voice was only a thread of a whisper.

"Depends on who you ask." The god idly examined his fingernails. "It's good to sit up straight for once... to the Zoroastrians, I was Ahura Mazda; to the Egyptians, I was Set; to the angels, I was Lucifer; to the Israelites, I was Satan. Mortals don't give me much respect anymore, whatever name they use. Humanity makes its own devils now. I was already obsolete at Flanders field, or once the crematoria burned at Auschwitz--" He broke off at the blank look on Draco's face. "I forgot how dreadfully badly educated you pureblood wizards are. Well, anyway, my personal favorite avatar has always been Loki, don't ask me why. Might as well call me that."

"What are you doing in my room?" Draco continued carefully. It was always unwise to anger immortal beings. He seemed to dimly recall that bit of wisdom from a book in the Hogwarts library called Unworshipped Gods-- Where Are They Now? "Uh, sir-- Lord Loki?"

"It is the night mortals call All Hallows' Eve," replied Loki, his face expressionless, divided down its middle by the moonlight into substance and shadow. "It is one of a few, a very few nights in the year when I may appear to men. But I have not cared to do so in a very long time."

"So why now?" ventured Draco, careful to keep his voice noncommittal.

"I have a gift for you," said the god, reaching for the golden chalice on the bedside table. Draco could see that it was nearly brimming with a crystal clear liquid. "Do you know what it is you see?"

He swallowed hard. "Freya's cup of joy. Isn't it?"

Loki nodded approvingly. "Well spoken, mortal. You've learned something in that school of yours." He tipped the cup to Draco's mouth.

He felt the lip of the golden grail against his own lips; the incorruptible touching the corrupted. There didn't seem to be anything to do but swallow. So he did.

The liquid was both strong and sweet, like the finest vintage wine, but it also carried the scent of all the flowers the world had ever bloomed. It spread through Draco's veins with the suddenness of poison, and for a panicked moment he wondered if that was what it had been. But then he steadied, and the pulse in his veins throbbed with whatever he had drunk. Not an unpleasant sensation. Not at all. But... different, very different.

Without knowing why, he took the cup from Loki's hands and held it to Ginny's lips. She turned and sat up slightly at the feel of it against her mouth; her eyes opened wide but still unseeing. She drank thirstily.

The immortal looked at both of them, smiling for a very long moment. There were flames licking at his long silvery hair, Draco saw now, and it was impossible to get a fix on his face, or body, or even his exact location. He seemed to be eternally falling, falling through fire as John Milton's Lucifer fell through Paradise Lost. Loki reached out a hand to touch the side of Ginny's face.

"How I envy you this night, Draco Lukas Malfoy," he said. Then the god laughed softly, and was gone.

They were alone. Even the noise in the rest of the hotel had at last died down. It was the very deepest part of the night, and there was only a vast, waiting silence. Draco turned towards Ginny and ran a hand along the side of her cheek, where Loki had touched her. His fingertips were glowing, now, where they had brushed her glowing skin. She looked at him. Her citrine eyes focussed, and she really seemed to be seeing him.

"Draco? What are you doing?" she asked, but there was no anger in her voice.

"Touching you," he replied simply. "Do you want me to stop?"

"No," she said.

He ran one hand down her neck, trailed it along her shoulder. He no longer felt that he was marring her purity, but that she was, in some mysterious way, seeping past all the impurities in him. Draco moved the first hand down further, and still further, and then, warm and firm and very sure, up again. His other hand was still entwined with hers, and when he glanced down at them, he saw with a thrilll that they were both suffused by a white light.

"I don't understand," she said in a soft, low voice. "What's happening?"

"I don't know," he replied.

"We've suffered a sea change, haven't we?"

"Into something rich and strange," he agreed.

Ginny shifted next to him, turning to face him. Her face was grave and very beautiful. "Draco," she said.

"Mmm?" He was afraid that she was going to ask him to stop what he was doing. It was suddenly of surpassing importance that she not ask him to stop. But if she did, he must, or die trying.

"Do you remember a few days ago at the manor, when you wanted me to ask you to stay the night, and I wouldn't? Couldn't?"

How could I forget in this lifetime, he thought, but Draco only said, "Yes."

Ginny bent her head so that he could not see her face. And then he felt her lips against his neck. "Stay with me," she said against his skin. "Stay with me now."

"You're asking me to-- do you understand what that will mean?" he murmurmed.

"Yes."

"Do you understand what I am? What I have been? What I have chosen to be?"

"Yes, yes, and again yes." She disengaged her hand from his, and he felt a shock of loss, but only for an instant. Both of her hands slipped around his waist to pull him close to her, and the barrier of cloth between them was enough to drive him to madness at that moment.

"What do you want from me?" he whispered, feeling strangely awkward, teetering on the edge of a precipice, longing to jump. Terrified to fall.

She put her hands inside his shirt, and he nearly swooned from the sensation of the preternaturally glowing fingers on his bare skin. "I want you to make love to me," she said. And he could do nothing but comply.

When he touched her as he desired for the first time, he felt a wanting unlike any other emotion he had ever known. It was a slow terrifying gentleness such as he had never held for any living being on this earth. Draco was not himself, running his hands along Ginny Weasley's body, touching and taking her; or if he was, it was some part of himself so deeply buried that he had never even known of its existence. This stranger within his flesh had been set aflame indeed. And it was a burning that would consume some part of him from this day onward. He already knew that always, always, forever after, would he long to burn to dust and ashes on her shuddering skin, in her golden eyes, in her mysterious silver soul.

This, only this, was what Draco had dreamed of, in his buried dreams of perfect purity within the monstrous nightmare that had been his life. This bed, this night, these secret hours, suspended in time like a flower frozen in amber. Her hands on him. Reconsecrating him. Her smooth white body under his, over his, moving with him, clenching in delirious pleasure with him at its heart. Like an erotic saint, the healing power of Ginny Weasley returned him to the human race, and Draco knew that it was infinitely more than he had ever deserved. He wept at the unearned, unlooked-for grace. And she kissed his tears away, and he tried once more to sink himself to the bottom of her, to become suffused with her, sated with her, to incalculate her into his very bones. Already knowing that he never could.

So were the Pendragon and her second protector joined, and so were they doomed. Neither fate was for the first time.

In a grove of oaks that were ancient when Zeus last trod the earth, seducing goddesses, mortals, and random carbon-based forms of life, Morrigan sat by the edge of a clear pool, trailing her fingers in the water. She looked long and long into the Mirror of Llyn Dinas, a smile curving her unearthly lips. Draco and Ginny were striving towards a common goal on the hotel bed before her, the moonlight dappling their naked bodies. The goddess was well pleased. For that mirror always shows truth.

"This was your plan all along," said Macha, the crown of moonflowers moving on her rippling hair as she stood behind her sister. "Wasn't it?"

Morrigan nodded.

"You knew how stubborn the girl is. You knew that if she even suspected that she wanted that boy because she was under your influence, she'd fight it with all the strength in her."

"But she would want him nonetheless, and the battle between desire and loathing would only sharpen the power of their coming together," said Morrigan in agreement.

Macha sniffed indignantly. "I was used. You knew I'd tell her what you were trying to do."

"It had to be done," shrugged Morrigan. "And at this moment the hope of all our worlds is more important than your feelings, or hers. There is no joining to compare with the power of the flesh. Now she is joined to her second protector, life to life and beyond."

"But of her own free will she never would have--"

"Can you be so sure? They have lived before this, and they have been lovers before this.Those mortals house two very old souls."

"There's more," Macha said suddenly. "Isn't there? Is that damn Loki involved? You had better tell me, Morrigan!"

But Morrigan only laughed, and looked up to salute Freya passing through the grove on her way to Folkvang, her palace in the vast hall of Sessrumnir. The two goddesses exchanged a look of perfect understanding.

"Thou art devious indeed, my sister, my other self!" called Freya. And her silvery laughter trailed through the sky of the Otherworld.

Once, and only once, did the outside world intrude. They lay next to each other, intertwined in a brief lull, his hand caressing the perfect curve of one hip under the spill of moonlight from the window. Ginny was singing softly under her breath, and the beautiful sound seemed to interweave itself with the rays of the white orb in the sky.

"What is it that you're singing?" asked Draco.

"You wouldn't know it. A Muggle song. I was thinking of it... I'm not sure why..." Ginny's voice raised slightly, until he could distinguish the words. "Oh mirror in the sky, what is love. Can the child within my heart rise above. Can I sail through the changing ocean tides, can I handle the seasons of my life..."

Her voice spilled over him like honey; he half expected to see it flowing onto his silver hand and across her silver thigh. A hand and a thigh, curiously detached, set apart from everything they had been to one another before this night. He closed his eyes and the image was imprinted on the inside of his eyelids. Yet it was fleeting, already disappearing, and what might take its place?

Draco had a sudden, jagged vision of his rival's hand in place of his. That Potter had been where he was, he knew. Doing everything that Draco had done to Ginny, taking everything he had taken, accepting everything he had been given. And the thought struck him that this night could not last forever, and that morning would come.

"Ginny."

She turned her face towards his, a smile on her lips. "Yes?"

"We-- this changes everything. It has to change everything. So-- what about Potter? He's waiting for you once we get the sword, once I bring you back."

She turned her head restlessly to one side, and for a moment only the silver web connecting them trembled, and grew thin.

"No," Draco said hoarsely. "I won't let him have you, I won't, I won't. He had his chance and he didn't protect you and--"

"No," Ginny agreed.

He moved his lips on the skin of her neck, glowing like swanfeathers with the moon behind them. "Ginny, Ginny. Little Gwenhyfar."

She sat up, looking at him with curious intensity. "Why did you call me that?"

"It's your name, isn't it?"

"Yes, but-- nobody knows that. Everyone thinks it's Virginia and I let them but-- it really is Gwenhyfar.I wonder if my own mother even remembers anymore."

Draco moved his shoulders in a shrug. "I don't know how I know. I just do."

Ginny traced a pattern on his bare smooth chest with the tip of her forefinger, and was silent for a long time. When at last she spoke, the subject seemed utterly changed, and yet Draco thought that perhaps it really was not.

"I never thought this would happen. I never thought that this night would come. Never. Never."

"Nor did I. Not like this."

"But it has," she whispered, lifting her face to him. She was unbearably beautiful in the moonlight, or perhaps the lift of her chin and the curve of her brow contained something that could not be described by that word. "You know that I'm in love with you," she said. "Don't you?"

"Yes," he replied. "I have loved you, Gwenhyfar, for thousands of--" Draco stopped himself briefly, astounded at the words that were coming out of his mouth. But they felt inexplicably right, so he continued. "--years."

She jerked away from him, looked up at him. As they stared at each other, something whispered into the room and rushed through them like a wave. For a moment only, the disguises of a lifetime washed away.

"I know you," Ginny said. "We've loved before. You were my protector before. You swore an oath to me,and I to you, in a time and place that are now legend and the shadow of legend..." Her voice trailed off.

"But it's more than that," Draco said. He had ceased to wonder where all his strange words were coming from. He might have struggled against them, if they had felt as if they sprang from some source outside himself. But it was more as if they had been locked within him for a thousand thousand years, and the floodgates holding them in check had at last been opened. "I think I understand,"he added.

"Understand what?"

"Why we are your protectors, why we are the ones who have to be. Potter is bonded to you by love. I am bonded to you by betrayal. And betrayal ties lovers with the power of both love and hate, life after life after life."

Ginny sat up, the sheets moving around her. She turned away from him slightly, her chin resting on one of her hands. "I think... I'm not sure why, but I think that this is the first time we've been lovers again. We have been locked in enmity, Draco, for a very long time."

"But now that's over, we've found each other again. Haven't we?" Draco added an little uneasily, when she did not respond.

"Yes," she finally said, clenching her hands into fists. "Forget the past. Destroy it!"

Gently, Draco loosened her fingers. They were already leaving fiery half-moons in the skin of her palms. "Whatever has come before this moment in time is swept away," he said."And only we two exist."

With an almost savage cry, she arched her body against his, and, Freya's elixir of joy thrumming through their veins, the lovers seized one another yet again.

But even as Ginny and Draco pressed their bodies together once more, both radiating with the same unearthly silver light, the goddess Hel was creeping up to the throne of the Sandman, the King of the Dreaming, one of the seven Immortals with authority over gods and men.

"I greet you, Lord Morpheus," she said to him.

"I greet you, Lady of the Underworld," he said to her.

They stood in silence for a long moment, he seated on a throne of obsidian, curiously carved. It was perched at the top of a slippery slope of glass, and every sound and movement was magnified by the cavernous hall of reflecting mirrors.

"I have come, my Lord, to--" Hel began.

"I knew that you would come to me," Dream interrupted. For to the gods and their like, all that has been or will ever come to pass is an open book, a tale twice-told. Most of them make it a point of pride to at least act surprised. But not Lord Morpheus, most pretentious of the Immortals. He, like all of them, is continually taken aback by the power of human choice, even as he knows its outcome. But that is a mystery of which it is forbidden to speak.

"Then you know what has happened," said Hel in her whining voice. "Ginny Weasley is the Pendragon, and it is not given to mortals, such as this Draco Malfoy is, to love the Endless."

"The Pendragon is not an Immortal," Dream said in his perfectly measured voice.

"But they have shared knowledge not given to man," Hel argued. "They know, now, that they have lived before. And they know that they were joined before. This is not permitted."

"I still see no reason why you should disturb me in my realm." Dream stared out over the goddess's head, his face perfectly immobile.

Hel paused, seemingly to collect her thoughts. Her voice was sly and wheedling when she spoke again. "It is a small matter, the least of matters, indeed, to lay before you, highest of the Immortals. But I would protect my brother Loki from the consequences of his own foolishness, in sharing with mortals a draught from the Cup of Freya."

Lord Morpheus rose so suddenly that all the dreamers in the world shifted uneasily in their sleep, and gave a collective gasp. "Loki's tricks lie at the bottom of this?" he asked, his voice rising for the first time.

"My brother can be such a fool," shrugged Hel. "And it is, after all, the night men call Halloween. When the borders between the worlds grow thin."

With a muttered oath, Lord Morpheus vanished, his black cloak swirling about him. Hel smiled. And, as she sat in the very Heart of the Dreaming, the center of the realm of the Sandman, many mortals woke screaming from nightmares of her teeth.

The Lord of Dreams found Loki in Asgard, staring into Mimir's Well and chuckling softly.

"You've come to spoil my fun, haven't you?" the god asked without looking up.

Morpheus moved to stand beside him. The bottomless eyes of the Immortal reflected the waters of the well. Draco and Ginny were locked so tightly in each other's arms now that only the faintest of dark lines separated their silver bodies. "They are beautiful, these mortal children," the Lord of Dreams said softly.

"Aren't they, though." Loki looked at Morpheus appraisingly, his unearthly eyes going from the spiky black hair to the gaunt, white face to the shifting black cloak that always seemed to be blowing in an invisible wind. "So are you, in that moody, broody, Goth-y way of yours."

"The Father of Lies is too kind." The Immortal smiled suddenly. Few except his sister, the Lady Death, had ever seen his smiles, and, in their own way, his were as unforgettable as hers. "But the only things that are truly beautiful are those can decay and die."

"Ain't that the truth," agreed Loki. They stood for another few moments. Then the trickster god stretched and yawned. "Well," he said, "it's about that time."

"It is." Lord Morpheus offered his hand to Loki. The two of them walked through the limitless tree trunk of Yggdrasil and down into the twelve-faced jewel, where Loki was once again chained to the rock in the web of spells woven by men from civilizations whose names are only myth and the shadow of myth.

"We have to stop meeting this way," called Loki after the retreating Immortal. "Ahhh!" he grimaced as the first drops of venom sizzled on his immortal skin. "After ten thousand years, you'd think I'd be used to this."

Lord Morpheus lingered at Yggdrasil, the world-tree, to watch the suffering of the god. He absently petted the smooth, slithering head of the snake. Nidhogg smiled up at him. There were no fangs along its smooth mouth. As the Lord of the Dreaming saw the endless misery of Loki, his tears dripped onto the body of the god and caused him to writhe in pain unappeasable. And with the immortals, whether gods or the Endless, what is, what was, and what ever shall be are all one.

Draco woke with a start. He turned to glance out the window. Dawn was coming; it was the first rays of the sun over the horizon that had awakened him. He looked down at Ginny Weasley, fast asleep next to him, her hand entwined with his as it had been. He knew that he would never be able to get enough of looking at her, of touching her. A crazed impulse swept over him.

He could awaken her, get her dressed, hurry his own clothes on, and get the bloody hell out of here. Never have anything to do with magic again, or fates again, or Machiavellian struggles for power again. They could both lay down the burdens that had twisted and tortured them, that had driven them both beyond humanity, each in their own separate ways. But they need never be separate again. There would be only he and she, forever and ever and ever. Draco watched Ginny sleep in the hotel bed in the hour before morning and knew that he never wished to be apart from her again.

She began singing, very quietly. Only a smooth silver thread of song. She was still asleep. It was the same song she had sung before, and for all she had said it was written by a Muggle, its haunting, wistful melody seemed to weave magic about them both.

"And if you see my reflection in the snow-covered hills, well maybe... well, maybe... well, maybe... the landslide will bring you down..."

Caught in the spell that was Ginny, Draco never felt the landslide hit him.

Lord Morpheus looked sadly down at the two mortals on the bed, but then his face was nearly always sad. He reached into the little leather pouch at the side of his belt, drawing out a handful of sparkling stuff. He laid it in the palm of his hand and blew gently towards Draco's face, and Ginny's. They were surrounded by a numbus of silver sand.

The hands on the clock hanging over the bed were doing something strange. Quite unmistakably, they moved backwards. The sheets smoothed themselves into flat, freshly ironed linens. The faint bruises on Draco's pale skin where Ginny had gripped him faded, and the marks of his kisses disappeared from her body. The very air in the room cleared, the sweet scents of desire and sex thinning, vanishing into the anonymous fake-lemon smell of an upscale hotel room.

And when Draco lifted his head again, his grey eyes had hardened.

Something had happened here. Ah yes, something most definitely had. He smirked as he looked at Ginny's naked body, letting his eyes feast on her slender curves. And he was naked too; oh, here was a situation to conjure with!

Damn. If only he could remember.

But his hand kept holding hers, as if desperately trying to anchor him to some lost and forgotten world of sweetness such as he had never known.

When the tower clock outside the room struck seven, Draco gently disengaged his hand from hers and eased off the bed, heading for the shower. It would be a game of wills from now on, and he was certainly familiar with that. These odd, disconnected images floating through his mind meant nothing. He was Draco Malfoy, and he was in control.

She threw the black shirt across the room, but he snatched it out of the air before it could hit him. "Fuck you, Malfoy," she hissed through clenched teeth.

Draco's expression was predatory. "Already been done."

"You're a liar." Desperation and fury clouded her eyes.

He let the shirt slip through his fingers to the floor and slowly stalked across the room to her. When he spoke again, his tone was carefully measured, intense, and every word drove into her brain with the force of a hammer. "What if I told you that I spent the entire night on that bed with you, touching you, my body entwined with yours?"

Ginny's mouth opened as she drew in a shaky breath, but to her credit, she didn't back away from him. His eyes met hers, and the corner of Draco's mouth turned up in a satisfied half smile. The shock and confusion that filled her gaze was exactly what he had hoped she would feel. "You can see with your eyes that I'm telling the truth, can't you?" he drawled.

For one terrible moment, Ginny's mind frayed in panic, and her knees almost gave out from under her. It just couldn't be. He had to be lying. But he wasn't. She could see his truthfulness with her own eyes.

Draco could see her hesitating. She had half convinced herself already; she really was doing all the work towards her own defeat. All he had to do now was push a little further, just a little, and Ginny would fall into his hand like a ripe plum. Of course, what he'd said wasn't true; he'd surely remember if it was, his words must be lies, but...

They could not be. Or she'd know. He felt his own mouth drop open slightly.

His eyes met hers for an appalled moment. For that single fleeting instant, he knew. For that space of a heartbeat, she remembered. Wordlessly, they cried out to each other. Draco took a single step towards her.

Then forgetfulness clamped down upon both of them once again, and the moment was over.

"I was asleep, not dead," she said coldly. "If we had done anything interesting last night I'd have noticed, unless you're the lousiest shag in the world." She pushed his hand away from her chin, elbowed past him, and slammed the door behind her as she stepped into the hall.

Draco seemed to hear the last haunting strains of some faint, faraway music mingled with the echo of the door closing. Maybe. Maybe. If you see my reflection in the snow-covered hills... Where that had come from, he didn't know. But the song was inexpressibly sad, an elegy. A requiem for the ghost of a dream within a dream, something he had already long forgotten. No time for it now. No time at all.

And so it was that Draco Malfoy and Ginny Weasley were joined, and then forgot the truth of their joining. But their bodies remembered. And the body never forgets.

Loki meddled in the affairs of mortals, and then returned to his eternal torment, his flesh eaten away without end by the venom of the serpent Nidhogg. His ultimate purpose remains a mystery-- for now. But he may be heard to chuckle from time to time in the ebb moments of his torture. One may be fairly sure that he has a plan. There is a mystery here, too, in that this venom was, is, and always shall be the tears that fall from the eyes of Lord Morpheus, Dream of the Immortals. But that is another tale for another time-- as is the strange link between the Lord of Dreams and a mortal named Harry Potter.

Meanwhile, the wager still stands. Loki's sisters have taken an interest in this mortal man, this Draco Lukas Malfoy, even as the Morrigan has done with Ginny Weasley. Hel believes that his feet are set inexorably on the path to her frozen lands, but her sister trusts that she will see his face in Valhalla at the end of all things. And whether Hel or Freya has the right of it, no man yet knows. But when Hel walks through her cold underworld kingdom of Nilfheim, even she is sometimes entranced by the reflection of the face of the Pendragon in the snow-covered hills.

And in the deepest part of his dreaming, Draco, too, sees the shimmering face of Ginny Weasley, eternally just out of his reach.

--end--