Waking Dreams

Chapter 4 - The Picture

"You're still here?" a familiar figure asked quietly, her eyes watching the corner where he stared at his hand, lying limply by his side.

He didn't answer.

The stupid girl sat down near him - not close enough to touch, but on the same wall. She looked away from him to stare at the opposite wall.

Apparently, she thought he needed company.

He was still a Deatheater. He was still sworn to kill her and all the dirty-blooded people like her. Just because he'd flinched at the torture of a real witch didn't mean he wasn't going to kill her with his own hands one day, certainly.

"Fuck you," he said, quite clearly, communicating as well as he could the thoughts going through his mind.

She didn't move from her place at the wall.

"I said get the fuck out of here," he told her in a quietly deadly voice.

At this, Hermione Granger turned to look at him, her brown eyes glimmering in the darkness. "No you didn't," she corrected him easily. "You just said 'fuck you'."

His fists clenched, and suddenly, he found his energy. "Then I'm saying it now!" he hissed, stumbling to his feet on legs that had lost their circulation. "Get out of here before I kill you, you disgusting little mudblood bitch! You think you can come in here and tell me you're so sorry or you'll be here for me or some kind of shit and I'll suddenly become one of your little groupies? You think you can make me so grateful to you I won't kill you the first chance I get?"

She didn't flinch, but she had to be frightened in some way. He moved toward her. "I'll make it painful," he said in a low voice, grinding it out with a vindictive, strangely cathartic pleasure. "We'll see how much I can make you bleed before you go-"

"Shut up about what you don't understand," she said suddenly, in a low, cold voice. "You don't understand anything, Malfoy. You never have. And you'd be so lucky to have Harry and Ron for friends - I just thought I'd give you what they gave me when I needed it."

Malfoy laughed, advancing on her and stopping to look down on her. "You think you're the prime candidate to offer a shoulder, then, do you? Go fuck yourself. No, better yet, go get one of your treasured friends to do it for you - I'm sure they'd jump at the opportunity-"

Hermione stood up - and at the same time, he felt something hard connect with his stomach, sending the air rushing from his lungs, stopping whatever else he might have said.

"I don't see anyone else in here offering," she said in a hiss, her eyes wet from some extreme emotion. "Let me tell you something, you pompous, spoiled, inbred, superior ass! Do you think you're the only one who's lost something?" Her fist hit his jaw, next, and he felt himself stumbling back in surprise and pain.

"At least you still have a mother!" she was crying now, pushing him back, her hands grabbing the collar of his robes. "You think you're alone in your little world? You think you're so underprivileged because you lost someone you cared about to a war you started?"

He stared at her enraged face, red, with salty tears dripping onto his skin.

"It's been less than two years since I lost everything," she told him in a quivering voice. "I came here because I thought you might need the same thing every other human being needs when someone they love dies, no matter how little I might have thought of you or anyone else in your family." She swallowed, and tried desperately to compose herself as Malfoy pulled himself free of her grasp to tumble to the ground a few feet away.

She looked away from him, toward the door.

"If you don't care, though, I can't make you," she whispered. "Stay here all alone in the dark, for all I care. No one else will."

Hermione Granger walked out the door and let it shut behind her with a very final crack.

And he did just as she'd suggested; he stayed in his corner, watching his hand, running his eyes over every single curve and vein and bone on it until Snape found him later and sent him out of the castle with a few galleons and the curt advice that the reporters would be there soon to ask how he 'felt' about all of this and he'd better be gone by then.

But Malfoy never once cried.

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Malfoy blinked, groaning as his headache kicked in full force.

"Oh - you're awake."

That was not the voice he wanted to hear.

"What the fuck are you doing here and why do I feel like shit?" he managed, realizing for the first time that he was in his own bed.

One hand reached for his forehead, then jerked back quickly.

"As for the first," Luna said, unfazed, "Lupin saw you weren't at dinner and sent me to check your room. I found you unconscious... evidently, you have a very high fever."

Malfoy groaned. He hadn't been sick since his last hangover - about two years ago.

He opened his mouth to tell her to get out (in a much more verbose way) when a cool, wet cloth draped itself over his vision.

"I'm making some tea," she said. "It's almost ready, if you want some."

Malfoy winced despite himself. "Where's Pomfrey?"

Luna shifted in her seat next to his bed to get something. "She's busy - but Ginny's already come and gone," she informed him. He heard her pour herself a cup of tea. "She said you must have been working yourself too hard. Have you been very stressed lately?"

The indignity of the situation just dawned upon him at the moment Luna took a sip of her tea. "You must have upset the nargles..." she murmured to herself.

"Fuck the nargles," he coughed. Usually, he kept such ideas to himself, but he wasn't feeling well enough to care at the moment. "Why did you call her?"

"My, you have an awful mouth on you when you're sick," Luna observed.

Malfoy thought about responding to that one, but the smell of her tea had wafted over to his nose and he felt a sudden, inexplicable, completely unrelated urge to be silent on the matter.

"Oh, here - I almost forgot," Luna said in her dreamy way.

A cup was pressed to his lips as one of her arms moved to support his back. He swallowed his pride and the tea both at once - and strangely, the mixture was the sweetest thing he'd ever tasted.

There was a small 'clink' as the cup was set down.

"I found my parents' wedding photo," Luna said thoughtfully. It sounded as though she were staring out his window.

His first instinct was to simply tell her he didn't care, but something - possibly the tea - held his tongue yet again.

"I don't care..."

Or perhaps it was something else.

"That's... good to hear," he managed with some amount of decency.

He had the distinct impression next that she had turned to beam at him. "Yes, it is. I spent a long time looking for it."

Malfoy felt something distinctly uneasy twist his stomach. "Why?" he asked, despite himself, pulling the cloth from his eyes to regard her.

There was a short silence, then; the kind that comes directly after an unexpected question.

Luna looked at him, her face slightly paler than usual, and opened her mouth tremulously-

And the door opened.

"Damn willow-root, we would have to have only one willow on the grounds... I don't imagine Snape will enjoy getting more after this..."

A shock of red hair bumped through the doorway, blue robes swishing - Ginny was carrying a steaming cup and saucer in one hand while her other pushed open the door to the room. She turned about again then stopped cold, her green eyes trained on the upright figure drinking tea, and turned a livid, pasty color before clamming her mouth shut. Her hair framed her face, let loose like a wild thing, tangled curls bouncing up and down like ringlets of bright ginger. She stared, blinking at Malfoy in a sort of euphony of surprise that tinted her face a color similar to her hair.

"Well," she said, after a minute. "You're awake."

Malfoy gritted his teeth at the interruption she represented and the red hair that sent him into memories...

"Who the fuck sent you an invitation?" he snarled, attempting to sit up on his own now and not seem quite so dependent on Luna's hand behind his back.

Ginny's eyes narrowed somewhat, but she quickly controlled herself and set the cup and saucer down, wiping her hot fingers gingerly on her robes before walking stoically to his bedside. "I invited myself," she said, the red of her cheeks slowly fading. "Luna was looking for Pomfrey and I was the next best thing." She looked utterly professional, the exact opposite of the ragged woman she had been the night before. Soon, Ginny had set about fluffing his pillows gingerly while flashing a quick smile at Luna. "That's better. You can... put him down now, Lu-"

"Perhaps you should let me put my tea down first," Malfoy advised curtly, setting the cup Luna had given him down on the cabinet next to him. The second-to-last thing he needed at the moment was Ginny Weasley making a muck out of his sudden onset of sickness. The last thing he needed was sitting next to him and holding him up with one hand.

He was definitely going to have words with Pomfrey about this.

"Perhaps," Ginny said, digging in a nearby cabinet. "Perhaps not. You're not going to get better from complaining." Emerging from the cabinet, she handed Luna a small vial of purplelish liquid and sent Malfoy a narrowed look. "Dreamless sleep," she said, pausing. "Take it with your tea."

Malfoy snapped his eyes up to hers. "And what," he said in a very low voice, "gave you the idea that I needed a potion of Dreamless sleep?"

Ginny hesitated a moment. He saw her eyes flick toward Luna - almost too quickly to catch - and he knew immediately that she wasn't going to give him a straight answer. Not with her dotty old school chum in the room.

"I don't know," she said finally, brushing her hands on her hips, heading toward the door. "I thought you might like to... sleep more deeply. That's all."

The wooden door shut with a sharp 'thud' that echoed just a little in the too-quiet room. Luna, who was still holding him up with one hand, stared after her friend with her normal, dreamy, thrice-damned oblivious expression.

"I wonder," she said in amusement. And that was all.

"Give me that," Malfoy snapped, snatching the vial from her hand with a frown. Luna turned to look at him strangely as he tried to pull the cork with shaky fingers.

Goddamn the Weasleys. Every single one of them. Even the dead ones.

As he struggled with the vial, a certain green-tinged face, perfectly dead and twisted, came to mind.

Especially the dead ones. Sometimes...

A cool hand gently pulled the glass from his fingers.

"I can do that for you," Luna offered quietly - he knew without looking that she was staring at him with that horrible, sickening sympathy on her face. The kind that said he was cracked up, but she'd put up with it, and she'd feel sorry for it. He knew because it was what he saw in every face, on every acquaintance, now.

A soft hiss told him she had pried off the top.

"Would you like me to add some sugar?" she asked.

He didn't look at her. "That would make it useless," he muttered. "That's true of most potions - didn't you pay attention at all in school?"

"Not really," she admitted. "Only when something interested me, really. And I thought it more useful to learn to make something that tasted good."

It was perhaps the most coherent thing he had ever heard her utter.

Malfoy took the vial from her and threw it back. It burned as it went down, and left an acrid taste in his mouth. Luna tapped the edge of his teacup, and it transformed into a glass of water, complete with ice cubes. He drank it without a word and settled back into the pillow to let the potion take effect.

His eyes closed, and he thought of all the things he wished to forget.

Luna's hand brushed his hair from his eyes, and strangely, he didn't mind.

"It's strange, isn't it?" she murmured. "At eighteen years, it's still affecting us all. Even though it's just a memory..." Her hand moved back to stroke his hair. "In a way, we're all orphans from the war."

He felt his consciousness starting to fade pleasantly. "Some of us more literally than others," he told her quietly.

Luna's hand stopped, and he had the idea that she was smiling faintly. "Yes. I suppose we both went through that, didn't we?"

Both?

"Do you... do you have a picture of your father?" she asked suddenly, sounding slightly shaky.

"No," he answered tiredly. "I burned them all, once."

He felt something wet on his face, and felt her hand trembling in his hair. "I almost did that," she whispered. "Almost... but then, I thought what if I forget their faces..."

Something tugged at his understanding, then. A realization, on the edge of his mind.

"But really," she murmured. "I think..."

The picture... the one she couldn't find...

"...I think it's possible to go past it, eventually. Without forgetting."

The near-epiphany disappeared as he felt himself stop thinking altogether - the last thing he remembered was hearing a door close gently on his empty room.

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