Choices

Chapter Three: Black

As the walls are closing in

And the colours fade to black

And my eyes are falling fast and deep into me...

And I follow the tracks that lead me down

But I never follow what's right

And I wonder sometimes when I see all the sadness and pain

The truth brings to light...

~Sarah McLachlan, Black

***

Draco struggled into his pyjamas with a heavy heart. Even the light black silk felt heavy against his skin; it was as though the knowledge of fear that resided in his heart had tied weights to his limbs. He felt dulled, as if all light within him had been extinguished. He had been so used to shining, to standing out among the mass of the school and even among his fellow Slytherins, for his fair colouring, for his family and bloodline, for his patrimony. He was aware of what went on around him, aware of the concern of his housemates and teachers, aware of the whispered speculations from the rest of the students. He knew they were calling him a spy, a Death Eater, a traitor in their midst. He just couldn't work up the energy to care.

Shaking his head to try and clear the fog, Draco clambered into his bed, tucking the blankets tightly around his neck and pulling shut the velvet curtains as if they could shut out the darkness in his soul. He tucked his wand beneath the pillow (knowing that if he woke he would want light and plenty of it) and laid his head down to try and sleep.

After a while, he turned onto his side and opened his eyes, staring at the blank blackness. He couldn't stop thinking that this simply shouldn't be happening. Draco bit his lip. Malfoys were not supposed to be afraid. Malfoys were not supposed to suffer from nightmares. Malfoys were supposed to enjoy the Dark Arts, were supposed to strike fear into the hearts of the Mudblood filth that the rest of the wizarding world pandered to. Malfoys were not supposed to be terrified out of their wits by their first encounter with the Dark Lord. The shame was paralysing, exquisite, and Draco writhed with it.

I'm weak. I must be. This is all my fault, I'm unworthy of my name...Draco had never had nightmares before this, had never felt this kind of fear. He had been sheltered, he knew, raised to believe implicitly that he was the very centre of the universe, kept aside from the more dangerous aspects of his father's work. Until he was old enough, until he was 'ready.' And now he had failed at the first test, and he knew the truth: he would never be ready, never be worth the attention lavished on him by his pure-blooded family. Draco Malfoy was a failure, a coward, a canker on the family tree.

Draco squeezed his eyes shut in the darkness. It all came down to one thing; the shameful, terrible fear that he couldn't control and couldn't ignore. That was the crux of the matter; that was what kept him trapped in the dilemma within his own mind. There was no option that he could find that would allow honour to be preserved, and Draco was at his wits' end. He couldn't concentrate on his lessons, or even Quidditch practices. Half the time he was certain that Voldemort had seen his fear, that night in the dungeons, and told his father, who would shortly arrive to disinherit him and pack him off to St. Mungos with all the other psychiatric cases. Sometimes, as the evenings began to draw in, Draco would see Lord Voldemort's cowled form in a shifting patch of shadow, and stand paralysed with dread in the corridor until someone jostled him, breaking the spell. He very much feared that he really was going insane.

Draco clenched his hands around the sheets, feeling the stress in his fingers. The constant indecision he was living with made him want to hit something, to punch the wall until his knuckles split and bled. He didn't; it was bad enough that he had as little control as he did. If he was ever going to get out of this, self-control would be essential. Sometimes he thought he could almost manage it, could lock out all emotion and do his duty to his family. But then, he remembered the look on the Dark lord's face as he had stared at Draco. Voldemort knew, he knew that Draco was afraid, and he was amused by it...

It was all too awful to contemplate; too terrible to imagine himself facing that monstrous half-human creature again, too mind-numbing to think of attempting to defy his father. There was simply nothing he could do except endure this horror.

Suddenly, the darkness around him was stifling. Scrabbling at the blankets, Draco groped for his wand and muttered "Lumos" in a shaky voice. Wobbly greenish light filled the velvet cavern behind the curtains, sparked fitfully off the silver embroidery of his coverlet. Drawing his knees up to his chest, Draco wrapped his arms around them. It had been so long since he had had a full night's sleep; all too often the terror and indecision which plagued him was followed by dreams. Nightmares, mostly, of Voldemort moving towards him with wand extended and eyes glowing. Less often, he dreamt that he was standing before his father in disgrace as Lucius named him a coward and banished him from the Manor. Draco couldn't remember the last time he had slept more than two or three hours a night.

The light from his wand cast strange, shifting shadows across the bedclothes. If he stared into the corners long enough, Draco could imagine that the shadows hid creatures, nightmare creatures come to life and staring at him. Or perhaps he was simply trapped in yet another fearful dream. Perhaps this whole terrible situation was simply a fever in his brain from which he had yet to wake. Draco pinched himself, hard, on the arm. Pain. Well, it feels real enough. It always had, that was the true horror of it.

Abruptly the murmuring shadows became too much; gasping, Draco stumbled out of bed, fighting his way past the entangling curtains and to the door. He didn't care that it was the middle of the night or that he wasn't wearing anything more than his pyjamas; he had to get away, to find a place where the darkness wasn't so smothering. He padded down the corridor and up the stairs to the common room, his bare feet making little sound on the stone floors. Draco didn't notice the chill creeping into his flesh. Now that he was moving, he felt a little better, as if some of the pressure on him had eased a fraction. Even that small improvement was such a relief that he felt almost giddy for a moment.

The common room was empty, only a few trickling tongues of green flame dancing in the grate. Draco slipped out through the door and wandered off towards the main part of the castle. Outisde of the dungeons, the night was less pressing, less claustrophobic around him. It was lighter, too, thin streaks of pallid moonlight spilling through the narrow windows. They formed bright puddles on the floor, and Draco stepped around them carefully, almost regretfully. He belonged in the darkness now, he had been touched by it, and the shadows were where he belonged. Besides, his hair and skin would light up like a beacon in that pale radiance, betray him to Filch or who-knew-else who might be patrolling the corridors.

The moonbeams were wider and whiter now, and Draco realised that consciously or unconsciously, he had been taking the same route that he always took in hall-patrol duty. He paused in the deep shadow of a window embrasure, looking out across the grounds, watching the moonlight spill thick and silver across grass and trees and forest. It was so beautiful, so serene - and nowhere he belonged. Draco felt contaminated, besmirched by shame and fear and the lingering echoes of Voldemort's touch. He wondered if, now that the Dark wizard had touched him, he was bound into his service already despite his lack of the Dark Mark. It was as if he bore the mark already, branded onto his soul, by turns freezing and burning. Draco wondered if Voldemort could feel his terror and fear, his secret shame, through that invisible brand. Why can't I ever do what I'm supposed to?

It had been the same way for years - always, Draco had felt himself a disappointment to his father, too small, too thin, too weak. He had failed his family over and over, failed to win Harry Potter's trust that first day of school, failed to beat Potter's Mudblood minion in any academic examination, failed to beat Potter himself to the Snitch in Quidditch. And now, he had failed again, failed to uphold his family's traditions in service to the Dark Lord. Because Draco knew, he knew, that he couldn't. The fear was too strong, already it overwhelmed him. There was no way that he could suppress it enough to carry out his duty to his father. And yet there was nothing else he could do. It was awful; it gnawed at him, never permitting him a moment's peace.

Sighing, Draco paused on the threshold of an empty classroom. Light almost as bright as day lanced through the tall clerestory windows, filling the room and casting sharply defined shadows against the stone walls. He wondered whether he dared step into all that light, whether the moon would hide its face from him or the radiance consume him and burn him to ash. But he felt like defying the world right now, felt as if enough of a challenge could pull him back into his old self. He stepped across the dished stone lintel, directly into a patch of moonlight.

Despite the light, the floor was cold against the delicate sole of his foot. Abstractedly, Draco watched the dust motes he had disturbed dancing in the air, turning and glittering as they responded to invisible, intangible tides. The pallor of his skin contrasted with both the grey stone of the floor and the black silk of his pyjamas. He crossed the room slowly, his dragging feet stirring up more dust, and slid onto a window seat, leaning back against the wall and tucking his arms about his knees.

Outside this window, Draco could see the moonlight sheeting across the surface of the lake, creating a glimmering path that seemed to lead into the distance, climb effortlessly into the star-dusted heavens. Pressing his face against the narrow panes of glass, Draco almost wished that he could follow it, leave his body behind along with all the fear and all the agonising, and ascend that path to... to where? Somewhere, he thought perhaps, where he might find peace. Actively wishing for peace was a strange sensation; before this summer he would never even have thought of it.

Draco sighed, blinking back the uncomfortable burning in his eyes. That, too was a strange sensation, something new. As far back as he could remember, he had never wanted to cry. He had never felt anything that seemed to require tears, not even when his father had expressed disappointment in him. It wasn't even sorrow now so much as tiredness that stung his eyes, dragged at the lids. Weeks of far too little sleep were catching up with him, and he scrubbed fiercely at his face, shoving his hair back behind his ears and willing himself sternly to stay awake. If he fell asleep here, Filch would catch him even if he didn't attract the man's attention by having yet another screaming nightmare.

Instead, he stared at the stones of the embrasure wall, slightly worn at the edges and patterned with a black-and-silver lozenge design from the moonlight pouring through the window. Draco could feel his eyelids drooping, but he fought against sleep, tried to distract himself by imagining feeding Weasley or the Mudblood to the giant squid while Potter watched, bound and impotent.... But it was no use. Sleep, too long denied, swooped down on Draco and claimed him.

***

He struggled, bound and terrified in utter darkness. He couldn't feel his fingers or toes any more, but the cords digging into his wrists and ankles were wire-sharp. The pain was exquisite. He could hear his own breathing, harsh and ragged and somehow desperate-sounding as he felt the approach of a new nightmare, a greater darkness within the embrace of the blinding night. He squirmed; writhed on the ground like a worm as he tried and failed to escape, and he heard his father's voice in his head: This is fitting, this is where you belong. He could feel the tears trickling across his face and into his hair, into his ear, as he sobbed in helpless terror and paralysing shame. Oh, god, it was coming, He was coming, and then there would be the pain, and the terror, and the torment, and it would never, never end, he would be trapped and helpless before Voldemort forever...

The ground was rough beneath him, and as the Dark Lord's footsteps moving toward him became audible, he felt it begin to move, undulating up and down, reaching up in slimy tendrils to bind about him. He moaned in terror, trying to raise his arms to ward them off, shaking his head back and forth as they clutched at him, and then he felt it again, felt that cold, clammy touch on his face that slipped into his mind and unearthed all his secrets, all his thoughts and desires and fears... He screamed as it burnt its way across his consciousness, a hoarse scream of horror and biting pain, and he would never be whole again, never be clean again, and now he felt the long, spatulated fingers pressing against his eyes, pushing into his skull to claw out his every thought along with his brain...

***

Draco's eyes snapped open as someone grabbed his shoulders and shook him roughly. Dazed and shivering, he tried to focus. "Wh-what?" The glint of moonlight on glass lenses caught at him, orienting his whirling thoughts, and the green eyes peering distrustfully at him from behind them were all too familiar. "Potter? What...?" The nightmare still lingered like a fever simmering in his mind, and for a moment he thought that Potter could see the truth of it clearly, naked in his eyes. Desperately, Draco tried to compose himself.

"Oh relax," the dark-haired boy sighed impatiently. "I saw you and woke you up is all. Get a grip on yourself, Malfoy." He paused, waiting for who knew what, but Draco was too busy trying to control the growing spasms of trembling that wracked him to take much notice. "Oh, bloody hell," he heard Potter groan in that familiarly insufferable manner. And then Draco froze, muscles locked in protest and still shaking like a leaf, because Potter, his enemy Potter, had actually, unbelievably, put his arms around Draco and was hugging him tightly.

"G-get off me, Potter, I d-don't need your help-" Draco protested immediately, then flushed with shame as he heard his voice shaking. He wanted to struggle but couldn't; the shivers were still too strong.

"Yes you do." Potter sounded firm and altogether too Gryffindor, as though he just couldn't restrain himself from playing hero to everyone he met. "Come on, I don't like this any more than you do! Just - get a hold of yourself so we can forget this ever happened, all right?"

Draco groaned inwardly. The shame he had felt before was quadrupled, multiplied to infinity by the fact that he had allowed the hated Harry Potter to witness this breakdown. Maybe the stupid Gryffindor could forget about this, but Draco knew he never would. But, finally, he relaxed, stopped fighting the spasms, and just let Harry hold him. At least this wasn't in public; he wasn't sure he could have survived any more humiliation. To his surprise, the shaking eased almost at once, leaving him relaxed within the encircling arms. "You're the one who's got hold of me," he pointed out, pleased to find that his voice was almost normal again. Draco pulled away sharply, sitting up and running a hand through his hair. Potter let him go, but was looking at him strangely.

"And I have every intention of pretending I never saw you tonight, all right?"

Draco sniffed. I wish you never had. "Fine with me." The moon had been eclipsed by clouds, he noticed, squinting a little to make out Potter's shadowy form.

Harry started to get up, and Draco was conscious of a wash of relief that the insufferable git was finally leaving, but then he frowned, looking down at Draco. "What were you dreaming?"

Draco looked away, pretending to be absorbed in the shades of darkness he could see through the window. He was more than a little afraid that if he looked at Potter, the secret of his fear and shame and nightmares would somehow leak out through his eyes, communicate itself to his nemesis. And Draco didn't think he could stand that, not if Potter knew, didn't think he would ever be able to show his face in public again with that hanging over him. But all his dissembling was for naught, because Harry spoke again.

"You don't have to tell me. But - it was Voldemort, wasn't it?"

Draco couldn't hold back his gasp of horror, and as he turned to look at Potter, he could see the knowledge explicit in those green eyes, along with something other, something indefinable. Pity? Draco wondered. "No!" he protested anyway, but it was futile and he knew it. Potter simply raised his eyebrows in that knowing way he had, the way he had always looked at Draco. Draco crossed his arms over his chest, trying not to hug himself too obviously; the chill of the ancient stones was starting to impinge on his awareness. "Maybe," he muttered when at last the silence became too pressing, telling himself that it wasn't an admission if Potter already knew.

Those gull-winged black brows drew down in confusion; Draco was familiar with this expression too, and privately thought that it indicated a certain slowness of wit. "But why are you..." Potter began slowly, as if he was thinking his way through something. He was interrupted by a growly sort of purr from behind him.

Draco groaned, turning his head to see Filch's rough-coated cat sitting with demure calm in the middle of the classroom floor. And where Mrs. Norris was, her master would not be far behind. "Shit," he muttered, shocked beyond belief to find himself echoed with even greater vehemence by Potter. A second later he was more startled still as his arch-enemy dragged him to his feet and flung a fold of some kind of dull-silver material over the both of them.

"What the hell are you doing, Potter?" Draco hissed, trying to move backwards. Glancing aside, he was arrested by the sight of the thrice-damned cat peering into the corners of the room. He could see through the material of the cloak. "Is this an Invisibility Cloak, Potter?"

"Full marks for stating the obvious, Malfoy," Potter muttered into his ear, and Draco narrowly refrained from clocking him one.

"More to the point, why in hell are you protecting me?" Draco demanded, letting the other boy drag him across the room and out of the door. There was no sign of Filch, but the cat had started mewling loudly; no doubt the squib would be along momentarily. "If it was me, I'd let you rot."

"Of course you would, Malfoy," Potter hissed in exasperation. "I'd expect nothing less from you. I would also fully expect you to sell me out to Filch if I let you get caught."

"Well, of course I would," Draco muttered. "Out after hours, Invisibility Cloaks..." His eyes narrowed as he remembered a certain incident in third year. "This is how you managed to fling mud at me that time at the Shrieking Shack," he accused.

Potter didn't deny it. "I'm not the only one who's out after hours."

"Yes, why are you out wandering the school at one in the morning, Scarface?"

"I could ask you the same."

"You saw why. And where are we going?" Draco added as they crossed the entrance foyer, although he thought he knew.

"Slytherin dungeons, of course. You have Voldemort nightmares often?" Potter actually sounded... concerned? This was shaping up to be the strangest night of Draco's life. Quite apart from the rest of it, he had been less than a foot away from Harry Potter for the last ten minutes without either of them erupting into violence. It had to be a first. Or maybe it was just the lingering after-effects of the dream-terror.

"Why? You worried about me, Potty?" Draco sneered, smirking to himself. God, the git couldn't be more of a pansy Gryffindor if he tried, all caring-and-sharing.

"No... well, it's just... I thought I was the only one..." Now Harry sounded confused. Nothing new there, really. He has nightmares too...? Well, of course he must, he's met the Dark Lord more than once... Coward. But the thought had no heat, and Draco was surprised to feel a strange sort of sensation settling in his chest. Was he... was he actually feeling sympathy for Potter? Surely not. He tried to force himself to remember the pity that had been in Harry's eyes when the Gryffindor had first woken him.

They were almost to the common room door. Potter was walking carefully in the darkened dungeon corridors. "How do you know the way to Slytherin anyway, Potter?" Draco demanded suspiciously.

"Never you mind," Potter informed him sanctimoniously, and Draco ground his teeth. Then he froze. Standing in the corridor outside the section of wall that served as a door was Professor Snape himself. Draco felt Potter come to a standstill beside him, swearing softly under his breath, and tuck his Cloak more tightly about them.

"Dragon's Blood," Snape intoned portentously, and Draco groaned as the wall swung open - now Potter had heard the Slytherin password.

"Come on," he hissed, staring forward through the arch behind Snape. Potter balked a little but Draco dragged him on, into the common room and quickly down the steps to his own room.

When he had closed the door behind them with a sigh of relief, Potter whirled on him, yanking off the cloak. "What the hell did you bring me down here for, Malfoy?" he hissed.

"So Snape wouldn't see us, of course, you idiot Potter," Draco explained with great forbearance.

"I'm not your friend, Malfoy," Potter said hotly, pushing those ridiculous glasses up his nose and glaring at Draco. Draco sneered back, wondering if the gangly fool could be any more naïve.

"I don't have friends. I'm a Slytherin."

Potter frowned as if unable to comprehend this. Knowing him, Draco realised, he probably couldn't. He and the Weasel seemed to have been joined at the hip for the last six years, and that was a mental image Draco really didn't need... "But what about Crabbe and Goyle?"

Draco sneered openly this time. "They're not friends, Potter. They're minions. Anyway, I brought you down here to make a deal with you, not indulge your ridiculous penchant for pointless chit-chat."

"A deal? Is that where I sell you my soul or something?"

Remarkable. Perhaps the Gryffindor idiot was less of an idiot that Draco had thought. Slightly less, anyway. "You really need to work on your insults, Potter. What I mean is, you tell anyone about my nightmares and I tell everyone about your Invisibility Cloak. In fact, I think I'd like a pledge never to speak of this night again, really."

"Fine," Potter said curtly. "I have every intention of forgetting any of this ever happened at all."

"Right. Me too." Draco stuck his hand out; Potter took it with visible distaste and they shook very briefly, dropping each other's hands as soon as possible. Draco nodded once, slightly, towards the door. "Snape will be back in his office by now. Sod off, Potter."

"With pleasure." Those green eyes seemed to drive jade spikes into his brain, and then the silvery cloak swirled and shimmered, and the door opened and closed with a tiny click, cutting off the slight burr of Potter's footsteps.

Draco sank down onto his bed and picked up his still-glowing wand thoughtfully from the bedclothes. Tonight was definitely a candidate for Things I Never Thought Would Happen, Ever.

***

Draco wasn't used to feeling fear. His father had taught him that to fear was to be weak, and that to be weak was to be destroyed. He had always thought that now that he was almost grown, he would put fear behind him with the other relics of his childhood, left to moulder in some dusty corner of his memory. He had never expected to feel this kind of panic, but now that he did, it grew on him, around him, twined its slippery tendrils through his mind until waking or sleeping he was never free of it.

Which was why the sheer restfulness of his sleep that night shocked him more than anything Potter had done or said. If Draco dreamed, he did not remember it; he laid his head on the velvet pillow, closed his eyes, and woke some hours later to the sound of his alarm clock chirruping at him, feeling more refreshed than he had in weeks. When he pulled the bed-curtains aside, weak sunshine was streaming into the underground room from the light well in the ceiling, marking out a glowing square on the stones of the floor. He dressed in its light, shocked by the pallor it cast on his skin. Maybe he needed to get out more. He felt by no means healthy and glowing, but better than he had been.

The feeling persisted until he got to the breakfast table. Draco noticed that as soon as he entered the Hall, Potter's eyes swept across him, and paused for a moment. He could feel it without needing to look up, feel that green gaze weighing and measuring him, and he felt a pang in his chest, half annoyance and half sheer gnawing panic. God damn it, Potter, you swore to pretend it never happened! When he had taken his seat at the Slytherin table, Draco deliberately looked up, sneering impartially around the Hall. At the Ravenclaws, their table packed with books and bent heads, at the Hufflepuffs, because, well, they were the Hufflepuffs, at the glorious, gallant Gryffindors. At Potter and his cronies. Weasley and the Mudblood seemed to be having some sort of sickening snuggle-fest over there, just short of outright groping. Disgusting, but no more than could be expected from a Weasley. Draco vaguely remembered having seen them together more than usual this term, but he'd been... distracted.

His eyes flew to Potter again; the Muggle-loving fool was an island of silence in the midst of his overly-exuberant housemates. Before Draco could look away, Harry raised his head and locked gazes with him. Cursing inwardly, Draco smirked across the Hall at him and pointedly turned his attention to his coffee cup.

At least it didn't seem like Potter had told anyone about last night, or about his nightmares. Draco was mortally certain that if Weasley got hold of that juicy titbit of gossip, he would be forced to commit suicide out of pure shame. Not that he hadn't been considering that anyway, of course...

"Draco?" Goyle cut into his private musings. Draco spared him an indifferent glance, remembering just why he had been so distracted this term. The fear returned, like an unwelcome guest, settling somewhere around his liver and proceeding to roil his insides.

"Yes?"

"Are you ill?" Goyle, and Crabbe too, Draco noticed with concern, were looking at him like mother hens. He noticed not a few ears subtly pricking up among the rest of the Sixth Form Slytherins, and vowed to flay the first person who started trying to undermine him to shreds.

"Of course not." He deliberately made his voice icy and indifferent. "Why on earth would you think that?"

"Well, Draco dear," Pansy chipped in, sipping tea from an elegant china cup for all the world as though she was taking tea in society instead of breakfasting amongst a crowd of schoolchildren, "you have been a little, shall we say, withdrawn recently. You can hardly blame us for worrying about you, you poor thing."

Draco narrowed his eyes at her honeyed tone. She was playing to an audience, and he wondered if she'd set this up purposefully. No matter; he could act too. He made himself lean casually back in his seat and smile at her. "Your concern does you so much credit, Parkinson. I may have been a little... hmm, distracted lately, but then who wouldn't be, stuck in this pit of a school? Of course, I admit I have been concentrating on more important matters recently." The veil covering that insult was extremely thin; even Crabbe beetled his brows over it. Pansy practically hissed at him, and Draco smirked at her. That would teach the little bitch to go around thinking she could take bites out of him.

***

That night, Draco prepared for bed with a heavy kind of foreboding dragging at him. On the one hand he hoped desperately that his previous night of relatively uninterrupted sleep would by some miracle be repeated. On the other hand, he had actually had a nightmare last night, if only for a brief time before Potter had awoken him. He liked the hope - perhaps, finally the nightmares had run their course. It's been months since I actually saw Voldemort, after all. But the twisting terror that gripped him when he thought that unspeakable name was enough to take the shine off his hoping.

Sighing, Draco blew out the lamp and got into bed by the glow of the banked embers on the hearth. Always before, he had liked the darkness. He was a Malfoy and a Slytherin, and he had considered night his natural habitat. His nocturnal wanderings about the castle (although not at the Manor - his father had made his disapproval of such jaunts clear) had been undertaken for fun and not in a desperate need to walk, to move. Once, he had been unafraid to lay his head on the pillow; nightmares and visions had been the plagues of others, of weaklings like Potter. He had embraced the darkness, wrapped it about him, made it his home. His wardrobe consisted almost entirely of Malfoy black and silver, offset with Slytherin greens. He had revelled in his family's reputation for darkness. Once. A time so near, and yet so far away.

Draco stared at the darkness before his eyes, a darkness that had once been warm and secure, but which was now shredded into a cold web of terror and whispers. He wondered, not for the first time, what had happened to his life? Nothing is the way it should be any more, and it's all my fault... He could feel sleep dragging at the corners of his eyelids, no matter how much he tried to resist it. He couldn't stay awake forever no matter how much he wanted to try...

***

This dream was something new. Draco was sitting at his desk in the Potions laboratory, writing furiously on a piece of parchment as Snape talked on and on and scribbled on the blackboard with a piece of green chalk. He didn't know what Snape was talking about, but he knew it was important. The words just flowed through his ears and down his arm and out onto the parchment without making any connection with his mind. Now and then he thought he almost caught a sentence, or a phrase, or the name of an ingredient, but they vanished like wisps in the wind before he could grasp them. He wrote, and he wrote and he wrote, but there was no pain, no cramping in his left hand as it flowed across the paper. He noticed that his handwriting was becoming spikier and scratchier, and that his breath was misting into little clouds of bluish vapour in the cold air.

When he looked around the classroom, he saw other heads like his own, bent over parchments and furiously scratching quills. Everyone seemed so small, he was sure he remembered being taller than this... Millicent and Crabbe were snogging in the corner, and Draco blushed in embarrassment, suddenly feeling himself turn that unbecoming shade of pink that he had always hated. Snape talked on; Draco picked out 'extract of wormwood' from the flood and wondered whether Snape drank absinthe.

Potter was looking at him. Draco knew this, just as he knew that this was a regular occurrence. But he could feel the sharp green spikes of Potter's gaze digging into his skin, and he didn't like it. He had just turned around to glare at the other boy when he realised that Potter was smirking at him. Dimly he was conscious of a how-dare-he sort of feeling bubbling up in his chest. Draco was the one who smirked, not Potter. It was all wrong. He opened his mouth to snarl at the hated enemy when he realised that Potter's gaze was travelling over him in a decidedly uncomfortable way, and he was smirking even more broadly. "Nice view, Malfoy."

Draco looked down at himself automatically, and gaped. Then blushed furiously - he was stark naked. He watched the flush spread across the pale skin of his chest, and wanted to die. Potter was still grinning at him like a maniac.

The dream changed. The Potions dungeon melted away into a meadow filled with patches of sunshine and little white flowers. It was warm, in a distant sort of way. Draco recognised it as a place to which his nurse had taken him once as a child; he had chased butterflies and trapped grasshoppers and crickets, and got grass stains on his knees that his father had taken the woman to task over later. He realised in a vague manner that he was still unclothed, but it didn't seem to matter any more.

"I like it here." The voice was Potter's, and Draco turned. The other boy was lying back on the grass behind him, staring at the sky. Draco followed his gaze, seeing clouds like smudgy fingerprints of white paint dotting the dizzying expanse of blue. The fact that Harry too was naked seemed curiously irrelevant. Draco sat down beside Potter.

"I like it here too. It's better than those other dreams." Draco didn't know why he shivered at those particular words, or even what they meant, although he had said them. Everything seemed very calm and peaceful and quiet here; he thought that he would like to stay.

But already the green of the meadow was smudging into formless brown, and the sky was whirling overhead, and he was being sucked back into the whirling vortex of sleep. The last thing he heard, and which stayed with him even on waking, although the rest of the dream faded back into his subconscious like smoke, was Potter's quiet voice speaking words that had no discernible meaning.

"I'll be waiting, Draco."