Nightmares

Nightmares by Verity

one: staring out the entrance to eternal life

Once, she had a dream.

She dreams that she stands on a wide open field in a dress of soft cream; a gentle breeze blows. There are flowers tangled in her hair. Her bare feet are buried amongst dandelions.

A man comes up behind her, and ties a blindfold on her; she laughs, a lovely laugh of happy days and lovers; and chases him, blind; finally she catches up with him. She tumbles him into the grass, wrapping her arms around him.

And someone unties the blindfold, and he is Snape, looking tired and weary. Beaten.

"No," she says, "It wasn't supposed to happen like this."

"Nothing ever does," he answers her.

"I fuck up everything."

"No." And in this dream he leans forward, as he never had, and holds her. The breeze whispers around her face as he plucks the tangled and wilting flowers from her hair, sedulously, meticulously compassionate.

"You're only a dream," she whispers. "He hates me."

"Do you really think that, Hermione?"

She woke up screaming, and after that invested in sleeping pills. But always as she swallowed them, she remembered the bitter taste of asphodel and wormwood, and a fairytale life once-upon-a-time.

two: whip cracks on a shadow

Ginny Weasley loved her nightmares. Treasured them, even.

In the most frequently reoccuring one, she is still a child, a skinny wisp of flesh with no breasts or hips to speak of. Her innocence is the pure white of the winter sky.

Tom comes to her in her dorm room, kisses her on the forehead, so gentle and careful. His dark jewels of eyes are kind and clever. How she loves him. He is the only one who has ever needed her; she thinks of worship and how its bondage is no different from this.

And suddenly she is facing Voldemort in the Malfoy's tower, with Hermione-the-bitch-and-hero gone from the scene. It seems so easy to whisper the curse, a life for a life, little Ginny Weasley such a regular Gryffindor; the Avada Kedavra takes him down painlessly. And Tom is there and he takes her hand in his. The light seems to dim a little. She's frightened.

"Tom?" she whispers, though her lips are still.

"My little Isaac," he replies, putting a ghostly finger over her lips. "My sacrificial lamb."

She's older now, wiser, but betrayal is behind them now. "I killed him. He wasn't you anymore."

"You've always been such a good girl, Ginny." He kisses her, her lips this time, and the light flows out of her body as he touches her.

She slept beneath cool sheets in her bedroom at the Burrow, a smile on her lips. And her back arced up to meet the touch of her dream lover.

three: what you're doing to be reasonable

He couldn't sleep. Snape was long gone, it was the wee hours of the morning, he was half-drunk; Harry ached less from the act than from the game of poker-face they always held during it.

"You're so fucking cold," he'd said afterward to the man who had once been his teacher.

"Yes," Snape agreed, "I've had practice."

And there was nothing he could say to that.

At last Morpheus surprised him as he sat curled up in the wing chair in front of the fire. And thus he dreamed.

"You betrayed me!" Ginny, dead, the sword in her chest, her corpse screaming at him. "Didn't you know what he was? He was a part of me."

"I never meant to hurt you!" he pleads, trying to pull the sword from her chest, the blood is running down its blade and over his hands...

"You never meant to hurt your mother!" she says, mockingly. "And who died because her baby was too precious to shut up when it was told? And who told Diggory to take the Cup with him? And who tried to stop Hermione from killing Voldemort?"

"I killed Tom! It was the same thing!"

"Tom would never have become Lord Voldemort. Not with me to guide him." Her bluing lips twist into a grotesque smile. "He needed me... and he loved me..."

"I loved you! Not - he killed Myrtle! He stunned all those students in your first year!"

"No," she laughs, "I did that for him... and only you killed me..."

Her dead fingers dig into the soft white skin of his hand (still wrapped about the sword's jeweled handle) and she shuts her eyes suddenly.

"GINNY!" he cries.

Nothing. Nothing but the tap of saddle shoes on the stone floor of the Chamber of Secrets and the sensation of someone's breath on the back of his neck. "Never forget, Harry," Tom whispers into his ear, "that she died for me..."

He woke up the next morning with a hangover and a nasty taste in his mouth, and silently resolved never to let this happen again.

Though, of course, it was a resolution he could never quite make himself keep.

four: completely, utterly eradicated by memory

He still taught Potions.

The students were afraid of him. Something had changed that he couldn't define or understand. Hatred was easier to deal with. Now they shivered as he passed by their desks, though their hands were steady as they placed the Potions ingredients into their cauldrons.

And, to compensate for their irrational terror, he was less cruel. Not kind, though - kindness was an entirely different thing alltogether.

He mused on these things as he lay in bed, waiting for the Lord Dream's cold kiss...

She sits next to him, her knees tucked up to her chest, perched on the edge of the Astronomy Tower observation balcony. Her brown hair waves around her face, unbound, and she looks terribly beautiful, unbroken.

"Miss Granger," he says, look up to her.

She smiles at him. Her front teeth are perfect and even. "Dance."

And from somewhere, music comes: a song that he does not recognise, though she seems familiar enough with it.

She'll come back as fire, to burn all the liars, and leave a blanket of ash on the ground...

It's not an easy song to dance to, but they do, with grace, and suddenly it is as he has stepped out from himself: watching student and teacher dance in perfect harmony.

I miss the comfort in being sad...

"And you will never get it back," she whispers.

He awoke in the dark, his heart thudding and knew: it had to come to an end.

- end -