The Intervals of Waking

Notes: A Sandman crossover, and sequel to Sleep Spent. Thanks to Rainpuddle for the beta and the encouragement!

***

Draco feels older now, as though a lifetime has slipped past him like an autumn breeze.

"How long?" He chokes on the words, because his throat is dry and unused to activity more strenuous than shallow breaths, and because he dreads the answer.

"Only a year," says his mother, smiling, though the lines on her face and the streak of grey in her hair hint at the changes that have happened while he was... sleeping, he supposes. Not quite the right term, but it almost feels as though he just woke from a long night's sleep, except for the tremors in his muscles and the unnamable feeling of having lost something precious that he hadn't realized he possessed.

"Just stay here, don't move," his mother says from the doorway. "I'll be back soon, and we'll get you out of here."

"Don't," he begins, but it's too late. She's gone.

The air feels heavy and stale. Even though he thinks he could never sleep again, his eyes close.

*

Draco sits up before his eyes are even fully open.

He is cold- freezing, in fact, shivering in his thick black robes. He hadn't noticed before, but he's dressed for a funeral, and now that he looks around he realizes that he is lying in a mausoleum.

Draught of Sleeping Death, he thinks, and wants to laugh and laugh. He wasn't sleeping, he was dead for a year, and now he's risen from the grave, just like the Inferi and the fleshy Muggle puppets that the Death Eaters play with.

Only-

Only he's not rotting, not yet. His body feels weak and his mind is still cloudy, but he's as much alive now, in this unknown future, as he was before.

The wind is howling through the stone walls, and Draco manages to push himself into standing position. He doesn't know how long his mother has been gone, or when she will return, but he knows for certain that he can't stay here any longer.

When he opens the door, snow swirls inside. He steps into the winds, and feels the flakes hit his face like tiny feathers, and does not think to be amazed that he is suddenly warm.

This is the way to go, he thinks, spying lights far in the distance, the only beacon of hope in a dark, strange world.

He stumbles, and he falls, but he climbs to his feet every time.

He arrives at Worlds' End feeling rejuvenated.

*

A pretty sailor smiles at him as he walks through the door, and asks him if he would like to have a some ale.

Draco shakes his head, and says, "I'm meeting someone." He doesn't realize he's telling the truth until the words are hanging in the air like a premonition.

"Shame," says the sailor in a light, musical voice.

Draco weaves through the cluttered dining room. A year - no, two years earlier, he would have laughed at the strangeness of it all. He would have mocked the strange clothes and the outdated faces, would have sneered at the monstrous and inhuman, but now he simply moves towards a small table that is drawing him like a beacon.

There is a girl there, and Draco doesn't hesitate before sitting across from her and smiling warmly at her, like she's a long lost love he's just discovered still sitting where he left her.

She gasps and throws her drink in his face and calls him a murderer.

Draco blinks. The butterbeer drips down his face, and he pulls out his wand (should he even have his wand? Had his mother left it with him? Or is this just a dream to be forgotten?) and cleans himself off with a whisper. He looks at the girl, whose expression is one of pure disgust, and realizes that she's Ginny Weasley.

"Why are you here?" he asks. His voice is stronger now, but he still doesn't speak much louder than a whisper.

"The storm," she says. "You disappeared. Have you been here the whole time?"

"No, I've just arrived," he answers. "I was... sleeping."

"For a year? Through the entire bloody war?"

Something in her tone explains why his mother looked so beaten. "So Potter did it, then."

"I'm not discussing that with you, you murderer."

"I didn't kill anyone," Draco says. "I tried, bloody hard, but I couldn't do it. I wanted my family to be safe more than anything, and I failed."

He wants to kick himself for bringing up his family. He doesn't want to hear about his father's death from the mouth of a Weasley. He doesn't think he'd mind hearing that Voldemort is dead and the Death Eaters are gone or imprisoned, because that feels cold and impersonal. Everything he believed as a child feels like an oddly vivid dream. The only things that feel real are this pub, the redhead across from him, and the memory of coldness and his mother's smile from the mausoleum.

Ginny is silent as well.

"Should I go?" he asks.

"No," she replies. "I don't know anyone else here."

Draco isn't sure why he's so pleased that she allows him to stay.

*

The silence becomes stiff after several minutes, but Draco doesn't speak. There's too much that he just doesn't want to know. As long as he stays ignorant, it's as though nothing has changed. He's still sixteen and terrified and willing to do anything to keep his family safe, except for the one thing that he's been commanded to do.

His wand is in his hand, and he can only remember the way he felt trying and failing to kill Albus Dumbledore, and how useless he felt once his failure became meaningless. When Dumbledore died anyway, and on the insides of his eyelids the green flash echoed across the faces of those he loved rather than an old man whose life had already lasted too long.

"Do you know where this is?" Ginny asks.

"No," Draco replies. "Somewhere else, I think."

Ginny nods. "I'd heard of elsewhere, of course. What witch hasn't? But I never imagined I'd go there." She looks around, and the candlelight glints off her hair. "But I did imagine that it would be filled with faces I recognized, not strangers from even stranger places."

"Most of them aren't even proper people," Draco agrees. "A Muggle propositioned me when I walked in the door."

"Does blood even matter when we're somewhere this different?" Ginny probably believes her smile is gentle, but all Draco sees are bared teeth. Fenrir Greyback, he thinks, remembering seeing a similar grimace as a nail dragged down his cheek. Draco hadn't imagined that Ginny would be that fierce. He tries to not imagine what happened during that year to make her into a monster.

"Yes," says Draco, watching disdain overtake ferocity on Ginny's all too transparent features. "If you can't hold onto your beliefs, then what is real?"

He doesn't say that he didn't quite think any of this is real. At least, not real in the way his life before had been real.

"I should have known you wouldn't have changed, even after everything," Ginny says. Apparently she didn't believe he'd been sleeping for an entire year.

"You can go," he says. "There are other tables here."

"No, it feels like I ought to be at this table," she says, tracing a design on the scarred wood. "Besides, I was here first."

"I was drawn to this table too," Draco admits. "How did you come to be here, anyway?"

"It was after... everything," she says. "Everyone was... and Harry... I just couldn't..."

She doesn't seem to be able to finish a sentence, to describe in words what things were like in her world. It was his world, too, but it wasn't real, because it hadn't happened for him yet. But there was something about the way she'd said Potter's name, a choking that could be sorrow or hope or even grief, that made him wonder if things had really gone as well for them as he assumed. Had Potter actually died? For that matter, did Ginny even have a family left?

Draco thinks of Pansy and clumsy kisses, and Crabbe and Goyle's strong support, and Severus Snape saving his life, and prays that Ginny won't accidentally spill their fates to him. As long as he doesn't hear the words, they aren't actually dead or alive or broken. They're still the same as they were a year ago.

Draco thinks of his father, and wonders why he's so certain that he's dead, and why he would give anything for Ginny not to prove him right.

"Was there a snowstorm?" he asks, leading her away from the war and its aftermath.

"Yes," she says. "And even though I knew the area better than anyone, it seems like the land changed after only a minute's walk. Things were unfamiliar, and all I could see was snow, then lights up ahead. Then I got here," she motions around. "No one spoke to me, and no one tried to sit with me, until you arrived."

"How long had you been here?"

She looks confused, and picks nervously at a strand of her hair. "I don't know. It wasn't too long... just long enough, I'd say, that I would be willing to talk to someone like you, but not long enough that I wanted to scream because of the silence."

Draco remembered the mausoleum, and nods.

*

On the tabletop, initials are carved.

Draco traces them with a finger no more withered or weathered or worn than it was a year ago. There is a curling, twining S scratched deep into the surface of the table. It looks fresh, as though the table, too, has not aged for a very long time. He remembers the snaking letters that decorated every surface of his common room. He half-smiles before remembering another curving snake on seared flesh.

"Who do you think sat here before?" he asks Ginny before remembering that he isn't speaking to the bullheaded Gryffindor. No, Gryffindor is the wrong way to think of her. They aren't schoolchildren anymore, and the names of their houses define them no longer. Now, she is of the Order of the Phoenix (he supposes) and he is a Death Eater. (Was a Death Eater. Was used by Death Eaters. Is the son of a Death Eater. Any way he twists the words, he is still firmly aligned with only one group.)

Ginny seems lost in her own reverie, but after a few minutes looks up and says, "It doesn't matter who was here before, or who is here after." Her fingers trace a J, a T, and a jagged D sliced into the tabletop. " How long have you been here, do you reckon? I've lost track of the time."

Draco shrugs. "It seems odd, doesn't it?"

"That I've lost track of time?"

"No, that we'd meet here," Draco says. "Look around. There are people from everywhere and anywhere. It would have been just as likely for me to see Salazar Slytherin or Martin Miggs, the Mad Muggle, as Ginny Weasley, yet here you are."

Her brow crinkles as she ponders the situation. "It seemed to me like I was waiting on someone, and when you arrived I wasn't waiting anymore. Do you think we were intended to meet here? Because that's silly, we've known each other for years."

"I don't know you at all," Draco says. "I don't know anyone. I've been gone for a year, and everything moved while I was still, and now I don't know anything."

"You're awful hung up on this supposed lost year of yours," Ginny says doubtfully. "At their heart, people stay the same, no matter how much time has passed or what events have occurred around them."

"You really think that?" Draco is unsure why his voice sounds so fragile, like his heart is on the line.

"Maybe," Ginny says in a voice barely above a whisper. "Maybe I have to."

*

Two figures were making their way through the Worlds' End. Draco watched them weave through the room, seemingly attracting the attention of no one. He could barely draw his eyes away from the taller one. Draco couldn't tell if it was a man or a woman or something else, but it made him tingle like a Veela and he was almost certain it would taste like Honeydukes' richest chocolate.

"Them," says the beautiful one. Its voice is smoky and dark and reminds Draco of the first time Pansy didn't slap his hand away as he slid it up her skirt. "They're the ones."

The beauty was speaking to a girl who giggled and said something nonsensical about rabbits in hats. She looks dazed- Draco was reminded of an escaped Death Eaters who had spent too long in Azkaban, and who now saw reality in an entirely different and somehow wrong light. Her eyes were mismatched, but Draco still thought that there was something sharp about her, something that kept him wary. She was no less dangerous than the dark, beautiful figure who accompanied her, but she did not seem to register that she posed a danger. Not in the conscious way of her androgynous companion.

"Who are you?" demands Ginny. Draco hopes she won't empty her drink on these intruders, because he gets the impression of power and importance from them. Sort of like when he had seen Lord Voldemort for the first time, and his knees had gone weak and he'd fallen into submission even though his father would have stood tall and proud.

The beautiful one ignores Ginny's question, as though it were too crass to contemplate. "You both are familiar with our brother's realm."

"I don't think so," Ginny snaps.

The insane one laughs and makes her fingers spider-crawl up Ginny's arm. "I love the way they feel like fire wrapped in cotton candy," she says. "There should be more rabbit-fetchers. Where's your tophat?"

"Del, stop," says the beauty, annoyed. "I may have to keep an eye on you, but I'm here for a reason, remember?"

"I don't remember reason," Del answers. "Well, maybe, back when I was flowers and sunshine."

The beauty sighs and continues, clearly attempting to ignore its sister. "You both lived in the Dreaming for a time. What do you remember?"

"The ocean and white curtains and Ginny," Draco replies before he could think about the question and convince himself he remembered nothing.

"Tom Riddle and that cavern and the hissing of snakes," Ginny whispers.

"That's not what I want to hear," it says. "Your type remember the Dreaming better than anyone. I need to know what you saw there."

"I don't really remember," Draco lies.

"I don't want to remember," Ginny says at the same time.

The beautiful creature sighs, and Draco feels nothing but relief as it turned away, explaining to its mad sister that there were others who could share what they needed to know.

Del giggles and waves over her shoulder. "You shouldn't fear what you don't know," she said. "Especially when what you already know is so scary."

Draco isn't sure who she was talking to.

*

Silence settles over the table like a shroud after their departure.

Draco picks at his robes, wishing that he wasn't dressed for his own funeral, and wondering if the lingering image of light and love and happiness that he thought he remembered from his dream was true or just something that he'd been convinced had occurred. It didn't really matter, not in the way that the unspoken facts of the war he'd missed mattered, but he hoped that he had been happy outside of reality. He certainly had no prospects of happiness now that he was awake.

"Did you really dream of me?" Ginny's whisper startles him, and he accidently pulls a button off his sleeve.

"I think I might have," he says. "I don't really remember what I dreamed, or if I really dreamed, or if I just imagined that I did. But I think I would have liked to dream of you."

"Why?"

Because you're beautiful and bright and would stave off the darkness.

"I'm not sure," he says.

"You can't trust dreams," Ginny says. "I dreamed of a beautiful boy once, who seduced me before I knew what seduction was. But it was treacherous and false and made me weak."

He doesn't think Ginny could ever make him weak. He says, "I know."

"But sometimes," Ginny says, with a faraway look that meant she was thinking of something important that had happened to her that he was ignorant of. "Sometimes, it's better to be weak than to push away happiness. There's so little of it, as is."

Draco can't see how he could ever make Ginny happy. He was just now seeing that she could possibly make him happy. He says nothing.

"I think it's time to leave," Ginny says.

Draco stands.

*

"Are you sure this is the way?" Ginny asks. She shivers in her threadbare, homemade sweater.

Draco shrugs, and takes her hand so they wouldn't lose one another in the gale. Her fingers are cold, calloused, and feel like home.

"It has to be the way to somewhere," he says. Her fingers tighten around his, and she gives him a sweet half-smile that seemed like it was straight out of a dream he'd once had.

"Don't let go," she says.

"I never will," Draco promises.