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lomonaaerenThis is the second part of a two-part oneshot. Don't start reading here.
“No wounds have appeared in a little while.”
Ron blinked and woke up from the half-doze that he’d fallen into, standing against the wall and facing Harry’s bed. He wanted to leave the chair for Hermione, who needed the sleep more than he did. Ron had managed to sleep some of the time last night, while poor Hermione spent most of it awake and searching for a cure to Harry’s problems in the books of the Black library. Ron would have protested if he had thought it would do any good, but he knew Hermione’s greatest comfort at times like this was to be left alone so that she could get on with the research.
“What did you say?” he asked, through a yawn.
“I said,” and Hermione cast a look at him that told him he should have been more alive to the possibility that she would say something important and therefore more awake, “that he hasn’t had any new wounds in a while.” She turned and bent over Harry, her eyes so concerned that Ron would have been jealous if it was anyone other than Harry. There was only one other person in the world that mattered that much to both of them, he thought, only one person he would want his wife looking at like that. “I don’t know what that means,” she added lowly. “It could be a good sign, or it could be a sign that the magic its gathering its strength and something even worse is going to happen. Or happening inside him, somewhere we can’t see.”
“Milverwhite said that there’s no sign of internal bleeding or ruptures,” Ron said. He did remember that from yesterday, since it was one of the few pieces of hopeful news that Milverwhite had been able to bring them.
“What do Healers know?” Hermione made an agitated motion with one hand.
Ron raised an eyebrow and left it there. Hermione had the grace to look a bit ashamed, even flushing.
“Yes, all right,” she muttered. “But that doesn’t mean that they can’t be mistaken. I’ve read about a few cases like this now, where someone fell into a deep sleep plagued with dreams, or a coma, and couldn’t be awakened. It’s never good, Ron. It means that they could die slowly. Sometimes you wake up the next morning, and someone who seemed fine the night before is just—gone.”
Ron came up behind her and put his hands on her shoulders, leaning down to kiss her forehead. “We brought Harry to St. Mungo’s almost as soon as this happened,” he said softly. “And we’ve done all we could. And the Healers are working on him every moment of the day and night.” Ron knew that was true, even when few of them were in the room. And if they did more because of Harry’s name and fame than because they cared about him, still, Ron thought he could trust them to do as well as they could. No one in hospital wanted Harry Potter to die on their watch. “He’ll be all right.”
“It’s the almost that worries me,” Hermione said, and one of her hands crept up to take Ron’s while the other continued to stroke Harry’s forehead. “What if we hesitated too long? What if Harry would have been all right if we’d just moved a little faster and got him into hospital that much sooner?”
Ron kissed her forehead again. “And what if he had fallen over something, as we thought at first, or fainted from lack of food and sleep? A fine lot of fools we would have looked, taking Harry into hospital when there was no need for it.”
Hermione sniffled and then gave him a watery smile. “You really think it’ll be all right?”
“I do,” Ron said.
Hermione bowed her head. “You’ve said that I’m your intelligence, more than once,” she said, in the shy voice that she often used when she was saying something personal. Ron had never known anyone else who would rather discuss obscure magical facts than her own feelings, but that was Hermione, and she was special. His heart warmed as he listened. “Well, you’re my strength.”
Ron could think of no better answer to that than a kiss on the lips. Hermione put her arms around his neck and clung to him.
Ron could see Harry’s face, past her shoulder, and he exclaimed in surprise. Hermione turned around at once, flushing so hard that Ron thought she must have assumed a Healer had walked in. “What?” she asked, when she saw that the doorway was empty.
“Look,” Ron said, and pointed to Harry.
He didn’t need to say what the difference was. Hermione could see it for herself. They both examined the happy smile on Harry’s lips in silence, and hoped it meant better things to come.
*
—and they dropped into the middle of a starry void, with light and darkness opening up beneath them at depths that made Draco gasp.
He looked around automatically for Potter, fearing that it would be like the ocean, where he couldn’t see him at first. But Potter was right there, arms still clasped around Draco, and staring at the void with a worryingly Gryffindor expression. He seemed to think that he was duty-bound to find out what was at the bottom of the drop and report back on it.
“Where are we?” Draco shouted into his ear. “Why does this keep happening to us?”
Potter blinked and turned his head to look at him. “What?”
“Why do we keep bouncing from place to place, and why did you kiss me, and why don’t you seem more concerned?” Draco added as an afterthought. “I don’t know where we are, I can’t remember anything that’s close to this time, but you’re handling it like you expected it.”
Potter hesitated. Then he said, “I think we’re in a dream.”
“What,” Draco said. He didn’t make it a question, because it didn’t deserve to be.
Potter shook his head. “I know it sounds mental.” Draco opened his mouth to say that it sounded considerably worse than that, but Potter went on consideringly, and the chance to say something was lost, unless Draco wanted to interrupt. Come to think of it, why didn’t he do that? “But it’s the only thing that fits what’s happening here. I don’t remember anything recent, either. And I know that I’ve been bouncing from vision to vision for a long time.”
“I only remember four,” Draco said.
“Four?” Potter cocked his head at him and firmed his arms around Draco, as if he assumed that Draco was eager to get away from him and plunge into the void that had no firm footing for and no place for him.
“Yes,” Draco said. “The mountains, or that valley, if you prefer, when we were on your broom above the animals made of fire. The Forbidden Forest with the werewolves. The ocean, just now. And then this.” He looked around, struggling to find identifying features in the blackness, and continued to see nothing. “I don’t understand how we get from one place to another.”
Potter sucked his lips in, which was more distracting than Draco liked to admit. “There have been more than that,” he said. “I remember us in Hogwarts, dueling. And then running down a corridor away from Death Eaters. I think the corridor was in Malfoy Manor. And we nearly killed one another above a sea of blood.”
Draco would have doubted him, thinking he was lying, but Potter spoke with too much simple confidence. And what in the world would he have to lie about? Why would he want to confuse Draco? Their bouncing madly from place to place was doing a good job of that already. “Why don’t I remember those?” he whispered.
Potter peered at him, and Draco saw the shadow of a suspicion in his face. Potter had never been good at concealing his ideas (when he bothered to have them). But he said nothing, so Draco poked his face into Potter’s and demanded, “What is it?”
“It might have been a different version of you that experienced those with me,” Potter said. “You were a lot more—hostile.”
Draco leaned back, shaking his head. He didn’t know why, but panic had tightened his chest so that it felt as if someone was squeezing his lungs. “No,” he said reasonably. He intended Potter to know that he wasn’t about to give in and start believing something as ridiculous as that. “You can’t—that’s not right. You pulled me into your dream somehow, as I lay asleep, and the dream that you’ve had is the part you had before your mind touched mine. It’s not—it’s not that there was a different version of me here.”
“I don’t like thinking of it, either,” Potter said, his hands smoothing down Draco’s sides. “I like this version of you better. The other one probably would have punched me if I tried to kiss him.”
Draco felt a brief burn of wonder through him at the reminder that Potter had kissed him and he had survived. But he shook off the clutch of the past. He wasn’t going to let go of the main point, although he thought Potter probably would prefer it if he did. “I’m not—you can’t argue that I’m not real.”
Potter shook his head. “I don’t know what’s happening either, Draco.” Draco had to concentrate so that he wouldn’t get distracted by the sound of his first name on Potter’s tongue. “I do know that it’s something very strange, stranger than can be accounted for by the nature of dreams. I never used to dream about you in this intense way. It feels real. I can remember different parts of the dream, even if you can’t.” Draco pinched Potter on the shoulder, but said nothing. “So I don’t know what to tell you. You could easily be real, and asleep, and our minds touching, the way you said.”
He was silent, and Draco was silent while they fell some more, until Draco worked the courage and the spit into his mouth to speak. “But you don’t think that’s true.”
“No,” Potter said. His voice could be lovely when it was soft, Draco thought, which he could have gone the rest of his life without discovering. “I think that this is my dream, and I’m bringing you to life because this is the only way I can face the complex of my desires about you. To kill you, to rescue you, to be with you—I’ve wanted to do different things at different times, since the war. But I was too much of a coward. I was going to marry Ginny, and then I was going to live a normal life, and seeking you out again would have been too much like admitting to myself that the desires could come true.”
Draco tried again to remember what he could. His memories ran to the end of the war, and no further, he realized after a few moments. He had a hazy image of what the Great Hall at Hogwarts had looked like after the last battle, and he remembered Potter giving him a curt nod of acknowledgment as Draco leaned back in his mother’s embrace.
Then, nothing.
That was the moment when Potter and I parted ways, Draco thought. When he lost track of me, so he couldn’t give me any more new memories.
A surge of something passed through him. Fear? Despair? What was the appropriate name for the emotion you felt when you realized that you might not exist, that you might all be part of someone’s dream?
A hysterical laugh bubbled up from Draco’s throat. He shouldn’t fear death, he thought. Why? He wouldn’t remember anything or suffer any torment when Potter woke up. He would simply and easily cease to exist. There were a lot of people who would give much for deaths that painless.
A lot of people. Was he a person, if he had only come into being because Potter wanted to see and speak with someone who was like Draco without taking the risk of confronting the real thing?
And why couldn’t he remember the portions of the dream that Potter was talking about? Had he created a different Draco for those parts, a Draco who had vanished clean away when it turned out that he wasn’t needed any longer?
“I’m sorry,” Potter whispered, his arms clasping more firmly around Draco’s waist and shoulders. Draco wondered if it was his imagination that their fall was slowing. It had to be his imagination, he thought. Potter wouldn’t have a reason to change his stupid means of trying to cope with his stupid fantasies at this late date. “If I’d had the courage to do this myself instead of my magic having to force me…”
And then they were elsewhere, long before Draco could think of any answer that he could have made.
*
“What you’re saying,” Ron said, quietly, because he didn’t want to wake Hermione and he also didn’t want to get so angry that he would smash in Milverwhite’s face, “is that we can’t do anything to wake him up.”
“I have no doubt about my findings.” Milverwhite only gave Harry a brief glance before he turned back to the scroll of scribbled thoughts in front of him. Ron ground his teeth. Sometimes he wondered if he and Hermione were the only people who ever saw Harry as real. Did everyone else think he was only a hero or only a victim, someone to be admired from a distance or healed when he needed help?
Well, sometimes Ron had seen someone who had a look on their faces when Harry was near, as if they saw his loneliness and his needs and could fulfill them.
He didn’t like to remember that Malfoy had once been one of those people.
“I know what I found,” Milverwhite repeated, meaning that Ron had to pay attention to the git. “It is Mr. Potter’s own magic that keeps him under the control of this—coma. We will call it that because it has no better name,” he added, so condescending that Ron ground his teeth. “He will not wake until he breaks the spell himself, from the inside.”
“But that doesn’t make sense,” Ron said patiently. “How can he break the spell if he doesn’t remember there is a spell?”
Milverwhite shrugged and met Ron’s eyes, oddly defiant. “He has unusually strong and common dreams. I have timed them now, and his dream cycles last longer than they should, and resume sooner than they should, as well. I would submit that the answer will come in his dreams. He will remember that way, and choose to return to the real world. I do not think that you and Mrs. Granger-Weasley occur in his dreams. He will want to come back to a world that contains you, sooner or later.”
“Maybe,” Ron whispered. He could see the attractions of an endless youth, in the dreamworld, if he thought about it. He didn’t want to, but he could.
“Yes,” Milverwhite said. “Mr. Potter’s sudden collapse, and the unexpected thoroughness of the coma and the depths of the dreams, indicate that his magic has undertaken it to fulfill his desires. Why the dreams are necessary to his desires, I am not sure, not knowing what he wanted or what he was most interested in.” He paused and shot Ron an oblique look. “Did you look into his Pensieve diary as I suggested that you do?”
Ron flushed. He didn’t like to admit it, but both he and Hermione had entirely forgotten about those instructions, since they had wanted to be in hospital any moment they could with Harry. “No, we didn’t. We didn’t want to invade his privacy, and we know that he’ll wake up,” he added virtuously, wishing that Milverwhite’s skeptical look was more conducive to virtuous feelings.
“Those memories may contain information that would help me understand this case further,” Milverwhite said harshly. “Do so.” He stood up and stalked towards the front of the room.
“How can it, if what you’ve already said is true and Harry is the one who has to wake himself up?” Ron called after him.
“More understanding may help us with other matters than whether Mr. Potter would wake up,” Milverwhite said, and exited, leaving Ron to stare after him in frustration.
*
They lay in a comfortable place, Draco thought. It was the first place they had been that he would call by that name. He blinked and looked around, trying to understand the flickering shadows and light on the walls.
They were in a room with a fire. Draco stretched out one hand greedily to the warmth. He was shivering for some reason, although he thought there was something soft beneath him. A blanket? Then he should be in bed, and plenty warm enough. He didn’t have memories of the Manor, he had begun to realize, other than the hazy images that Potter had constructed for him, but he was sure he had a warm bed there.
Then he realized that he lay on an embroidered cloth of some sort, spread across the floor, and that he was naked.
No wonder he was cold.
“Draco.”
Draco turned his head sharply. Potter stood on the other side of the room, watching him with wide green eyes that absolutely shone with hunger. He was naked, too, and curving up towards his belly was an impressive erection, dark with blood, that made Draco’s mouth water before he thought about it.
Not that he was hungry for Potter. Not that he had ever thought about such a thing, for all that he had submitted to Potter’s kiss in the ocean.
“Draco,” Potter said again, and began to walk forwards. His cock bobbed and swayed with the intensity of his pace. His eyes burned and devoured, and Draco found himself arching his belly towards that flame before he considered what he was about.
“I’ve wanted you so long,” Potter whispered. “That was why I couldn’t see you until I came here. My conscious mind wanted me to avoid acknowledging you. It tried to protect me from the strength of my own passion.”
Draco licked his lips. “Someone cast a spell on you so that you wouldn’t desire me?” he asked, wanting to be clear.
Potter shook his head. He was standing above the cloth now, staring down at Draco with an expression that was—Draco would call it flattering and say nothing else for now. “My own mind wanted to prevent me from seeing you. The way you really are. The way I wanted you to be.”
Draco took a deep breath. He was shaking with fear, but he had a source of power here, even if he could hardly bring himself to look straight at the light of it. “I’m only a creation of your mind, Potter. Of course you have me the way you want me. I don’t have any say in it. How could I? I’m just your creature, made to do what you wanted.”
Potter’s eyes widened, and a look of such perfect anguish came over his face that Draco couldn’t help looking twice; it satisfied some part of him that had lain dormant since his Hogwarts days. Or should he say some part of himself that had always been prominent, because he had only cause to think of those Hogwarts days? He hadn’t existed before he met Potter; he would not exist after Potter woke from the dream.
A choked whimper broke from him as he thought of that, no matter how hard he tried to keep himself from it. Potter knelt beside him at once and wrapped him in his arms. Draco closed his eyes and clung to him—his creator, his destroyer. His skin was so warm that it became obvious now why Draco had been imagined naked with only a fire for company. Potter had thought that he would be able to keep Draco warm.
“I’m so sorry,” Potter whispered. “I don’t—I don’t understand exactly what happened, but I’m sorry.”
Draco took a deep breath. His moment of weakness was past, and as fun as it was to remind Potter of whose fault this had been and that he wasn’t perfect after all, he couldn’t encourage this view of himself as broken. There was something else that he wanted to do instead, and he reached down and grabbed Potter’s cock.
“If this is all exactly as you desired,” he muttered into Potter’s mouth, “then make it something I can desire, too.”
Potter drew back at once, face flushed with passion, and kissed him. Draco gasped and opened his mouth, letting Potter’s tongue delve to the back corners. Wetness slid along his own tongue and his cheeks, and such a powerful bolt of weakness ran through him that he was glad he was already lying down.
Potter bit his collarbone, and licked his cheeks, and stroked his chest with hands that reverence made tremble. Draco found himself leaning back with a sigh and spreading his legs, inviting Potter between them. He wondered if that was his own idea, or an impulse picked up from Potter’s brain, reflecting his creator in the way that a good little creation should.
Then he decided that it hardly mattered, not when Potter’s mouth on his nipple felt like a revelation of paradise.
Potter prepared him with small squirms of his fingers, with lube that Draco hadn’t noticed being in the room when he first looked around, and with constant pauses for staring that would only last until Draco lifted his hips or gave an impatient cough. Then Potter had to sit back on his heels and stare at Draco’s hole. Draco lifted his head and pretended that he got someone staring at this part of his body every day of his life, fighting the flush that leaped through his cheeks like wildfire.
It’s a part of your body, he told himself. Another beautiful part of your body. Do you know what some people would give to see you like this? But Potter is the only one who gets to. And Draco entertained a mischievous vision of what would happen if someone else tried to look at him like this and Potter chased them off.
Not that anyone can. This is all happening inside Potter’s head.
Draco winced, but before he could sink into self-pity, Potter took himself in hand and lined himself up with Draco’s entrance. Draco gasped out loud and flung his legs around Potter’s waist in self-defense. Potter grunted and closed his eyes, face worked with desperation.
“God, you’re tight,” he said.
Draco knew no compliment had ever pleased him better, which was ridiculous, but there you are. He rocked back and forth in response, mouth working small grunts out into the atmosphere, gasping as strings of saliva slid down his face. Harry dipped his head and licked them up in a fervor. Draco wondered if he should have been able to be that flexible, and then reminded himself again that this was a dream.
“Draco,” Harry said.
When did I start thinking of him as Harry? But Draco had to admit that it was pretty hard to think of someone by their last name when they were buried in your arse, rocking back and forth in such a brilliant way. Small flashes of heat, more than enough to match the worry and shame he had felt earlier, surged through him and then built into big flashes. Harry began throwing his back into each thrust, and Draco cried out. Harry paused at once, staring at him, but Draco shook his head furiously and gestured for him to go on, and Harry did so, more than enthusiastically.
Draco could feel his own breath leaving him in gasping grunts, as if he was running a race, or as if he was detached from his body. And at the same time, he had never been more attached to his body, never more a part of it. His fingers tingled where they clutched at Harry’s arms, his shoulders, his flanks, any part of him that Draco could reach. His eyes were fastened on the small things, like the bead of sweat that slid from Harry’s fringe down his scar and then to his eyes, making him blink and turn his head irritably from side to side, or the flush that seemed to form and fade on his face as he rocked in and out of the firelight.
Pleasure began to build, low down in his belly. Draco whimpered. Harry smiled at him, but it wasn’t the smug, knowing, superior smile that Draco knew he would have been given when they were schoolboys in Hogwarts.
“Ready?” Harry whispered, and before Draco could ask him what he meant, he bent his body forwards and seemed to stab Draco’s arse with his cock.
He hit Draco’s prostate. Draco arched, froze, his body and his thoughts ringing, and then cried out aloud as his orgasm rushed through him and his spunk rushed over his belly.
Harry followed behind him, head hanging back, shoulder blades arched like wings, breath rasping out of his afflicted lungs, and then fell on Draco, half-crushing him before Draco could convince him to roll to the side. He had a look of such satisfaction on his face that Draco half-thought it might be worth it, to suffer through the changes of the dream with no certainty of the end, to have caused such pleasure.
*
“I—never knew.”
Ron shook his head silently. Hermione’s voice was stunned and shaken, and if Ron had wanted to speak, he knew he would have sounded the same way.
It was becoming obvious why Harry had kept a Pensieve diary instead of a written one (well, maybe there were lingering echoes of reluctance to keep a written diary because of You-Know-Who’s one that had almost killed Ginny, too, Ron thought). He wanted to store his fantasies somewhere far away from his head, where there was no chance of them breaking past his lips.
And they were detailed fantasies, though they leaped back and forth so much between memory and unreality that Ron didn’t know for certain which ones might have a basis in something that had really happened between Harry and Malfoy and which ones didn’t. There were memories of Harry fighting Malfoy that suddenly turned to snogging, and sometimes they taunted each other high above the ground at Quidditch games but then started flirting instead, and Harry had thoughts of, um…
Ron cleared his throat as he blushed. There was a reason he and Hermione hadn’t stayed in some of the memories very long.
The clarity of the memories varied, from the misty forms of dreams to the bright and sharp images that Ron thought came from meetings with Malfoy since Hogwarts. The worst memory, for him, wasn’t one where Harry was fucking Malfoy or Malfoy was fucking him, though. The worst one was one he remembered.
Harry had opened the Daily Prophet and gone still, staring at the photograph on the second page. Ron, who had been sleeping over at Harry’s house after one of his fights for Hermione and hadn’t received his own copy of the paper, had to crane his neck past Harry’s shoulder to see what was going on.
Once he saw the picture, he was confused. It was just a picture of Malfoy at the opening of some fundraiser, his glass of champagne in the air as he proposed a toast. Ron shook his head. “What’s the matter, mate?” He hadn’t heard Harry talk about Malfoy a lot since school. Did he still hate him that much?
“Nothing,” Harry said in a low voice. But when he thought Ron wasn’t watching, he’d reached out and laid a finger along the pictured Malfoy’s cheek.
Ron had thought it was an odd way of punching someone across the distance between you. But, he had to admit now, not such an odd method of caressing someone.
Who could tell why Harry had got fascinated with Malfoy? The diary didn’t show them any beginning to it, only the memories, in a continuous stream, in the order Harry had deposited them in the Pensieve. And they never had a chance to see Harry’s reaction to things like waking up from dreams about Malfoy. It seemed that he had simply accepted the fantasies and gone on with his life.
But when Ron said that to Hermione after they had finished examining as many of the memories as they could bear, she stared at him in pity and shook his head.
“If he could accept his fascination,” she said, “he would have kept the memories in his head and integrated them with the rest. He would have made up his mind to do something. Instead, he hid from it, and didn’t want to think about what it meant. Maybe it even played a part in his marriage with Ginny ending,” she added softly. “But he wouldn’t face it. So his magic dropped him into a coma where he wouldn’t have any choice but to face it.”
Ron grimaced. He didn’t like to think about Harry hurting his sister for the sake of a fantasy. But perhaps she hadn’t known. And Harry had been punished by being put into dreams where, if Hermione was right, Malfoy was the only familiar figure Harry had to cling to. By the time he woke up, he would be ready to forget about Malfoy or confront him.
Then Ron realized that he was thinking as though Harry actually would wake up. If he couldn’t bring himself to think about what he felt for Malfoy—and the Pensieve diary was only more proof of how good at denial Harry was—there was a strong chance that he wouldn’t.
And there might be even more reasons for him to stay safely within the confines of the coma, as he would see it. What if he thought his friends disapproved of his choice of Malfoy? Would he want to come back if he thought it would mean facing their scorn, their pitying smiles, and their efforts to make him go back to Ginny?
That was how Ron ended up in hospital later that same day, bending down and whispering into Harry’s ear, “Mate, it doesn’t matter. You’re past her, over her. If Malfoy is your future—well, I’ll live with it somehow, and so will Hermione. Bill and the rest of the family might be a little harder to convince, but we want to see you back and awake most of all. So come back.”
*
Draco opened his eyes. He didn’t know what had awakened him at first, but then he saw that Harry’s head was turned, his breathing short. He had his eyes focused on one particular part of the ceiling. Draco looked with him, expecting to see a starry void or a whirlwind or something else that would signal the dream was changing, but there was nothing.
Nothing he could see, anyway.
“Do you hear that?” Harry whispered. “I think I hear Ron calling me. He wants me to come back.” A small, bitter smile touched his mouth. “To wake up, I suppose.” He turned over abruptly and flung an arm across Draco’s chest, staring into his eyes. “But how can I do that? It would mean killing you.”
“Can you kill someone or something that’s not even properly alive?” Draco tried to smile, but his face froze stiffly. “I don’t know if you can. You should go, Harry. You have a real world out there to live in, while I only have the world here inside your head.”
Harry pondered that for a moment, then brightened. “But if I stayed here, we could have all of eternity, or it would seem like it. We would only die when my body died. Don’t you want a longer life?”
Draco swallowed. He hadn’t thought that particular temptation would confront him. Of course he wanted to live and not die. Of course he was terrified at the thought of oblivion overcoming him after Potter opened his eyes. (He thought of the Potter with him as Harry and the one who lay asleep and whose mind had created him as Potter, he realized).
“In fact,” Harry went on, eyes so bright it was hard for Draco to look at him, “I’m only a figment of his imagination, too. I won’t exist in the same way when he wakes up. I want to live. I always have. Why shouldn’t we go on?”
It was the hardest thing Draco had ever done in his—life? existence?—but he shook his head. Harry, staring at him, let his mouth fall open slightly.
“Why not?” he whispered. “Don’t you love me?”
Draco looked away from him, letting his eyes unfocus as they stared at the wall. “I couldn’t forget what I am, now that I know,” he said, which was true. “I don’t—I want to be real, even more than I want to survive. But that’s denied to me. The best thing I can do, I think, is allow you, or your body, to wake up, so that my real counterpart might at least enjoy a real romance with him.”
Harry snorted and ran a possessive hand down Draco’s chest. “We know that he won’t. You only gave in to me in the first place because he made you so that you would.”
Draco squeezed his hand hard enough to hurt. “Then you’re denying me even the privilege to make my own choices,” he said fiercely, “and that’s more of a lack of reality than anything else. How can my decisions matter if they’re all foreordained? I want to make choices that matter. I say that we let him wake up. If he’s come to a point where he can go and ask my real self for a chance, then I’d say we’ve accomplished the purpose we were made for.”
Harry’s eyes were wide and dark. He stared at Draco and started to speak, then snapped his mouth shut again each time. He turned his head to the side and made a little whinnying, sighing sound, like a horse settling down to sleep.
“Will it hurt?” he whispered.
“I don’t know,” Draco said, kindly. At the moment, he was the one with the strength, something he relished. “Let’s try.”
Harry seemed to shimmer, and this time, even Draco heard the shout that came from somewhere beyond the room where they were sitting. “Hermione! I think he’s waking up! His eyes just half-opened!”
Draco turned his head to the side and buried his face in Harry’s shoulder. He didn’t want to change his mind now, but he thought he would give in to fear if he saw the room dissolving. Harry’s arm curved around his waist, still strong and firm.
“I hope we made the right choice,” Draco muttered.
“We did,” Harry said steadily. “I think we did. We—we can’t live in dreams, not really. We would just repeat ourselves over and over, especially if we don’t have the power to create new things and just get tossed from place to place by his mind.”
Draco nodded. He could smell sweat and skin and semen, and how could something false smell so real?
“Look at it this way,” Harry whispered. “Maybe we’ll go on living, in memory or somewhere else, after he wakes.”
Draco nodded again. Harry’s skin was soft and yielding against his forehead.
“I love you,” Harry said.
Draco whispered it back and closed his eyes.
The End.
“No wounds have appeared in a little while.”
Ron blinked and woke up from the half-doze that he’d fallen into, standing against the wall and facing Harry’s bed. He wanted to leave the chair for Hermione, who needed the sleep more than he did. Ron had managed to sleep some of the time last night, while poor Hermione spent most of it awake and searching for a cure to Harry’s problems in the books of the Black library. Ron would have protested if he had thought it would do any good, but he knew Hermione’s greatest comfort at times like this was to be left alone so that she could get on with the research.
“What did you say?” he asked, through a yawn.
“I said,” and Hermione cast a look at him that told him he should have been more alive to the possibility that she would say something important and therefore more awake, “that he hasn’t had any new wounds in a while.” She turned and bent over Harry, her eyes so concerned that Ron would have been jealous if it was anyone other than Harry. There was only one other person in the world that mattered that much to both of them, he thought, only one person he would want his wife looking at like that. “I don’t know what that means,” she added lowly. “It could be a good sign, or it could be a sign that the magic its gathering its strength and something even worse is going to happen. Or happening inside him, somewhere we can’t see.”
“Milverwhite said that there’s no sign of internal bleeding or ruptures,” Ron said. He did remember that from yesterday, since it was one of the few pieces of hopeful news that Milverwhite had been able to bring them.
“What do Healers know?” Hermione made an agitated motion with one hand.
Ron raised an eyebrow and left it there. Hermione had the grace to look a bit ashamed, even flushing.
“Yes, all right,” she muttered. “But that doesn’t mean that they can’t be mistaken. I’ve read about a few cases like this now, where someone fell into a deep sleep plagued with dreams, or a coma, and couldn’t be awakened. It’s never good, Ron. It means that they could die slowly. Sometimes you wake up the next morning, and someone who seemed fine the night before is just—gone.”
Ron came up behind her and put his hands on her shoulders, leaning down to kiss her forehead. “We brought Harry to St. Mungo’s almost as soon as this happened,” he said softly. “And we’ve done all we could. And the Healers are working on him every moment of the day and night.” Ron knew that was true, even when few of them were in the room. And if they did more because of Harry’s name and fame than because they cared about him, still, Ron thought he could trust them to do as well as they could. No one in hospital wanted Harry Potter to die on their watch. “He’ll be all right.”
“It’s the almost that worries me,” Hermione said, and one of her hands crept up to take Ron’s while the other continued to stroke Harry’s forehead. “What if we hesitated too long? What if Harry would have been all right if we’d just moved a little faster and got him into hospital that much sooner?”
Ron kissed her forehead again. “And what if he had fallen over something, as we thought at first, or fainted from lack of food and sleep? A fine lot of fools we would have looked, taking Harry into hospital when there was no need for it.”
Hermione sniffled and then gave him a watery smile. “You really think it’ll be all right?”
“I do,” Ron said.
Hermione bowed her head. “You’ve said that I’m your intelligence, more than once,” she said, in the shy voice that she often used when she was saying something personal. Ron had never known anyone else who would rather discuss obscure magical facts than her own feelings, but that was Hermione, and she was special. His heart warmed as he listened. “Well, you’re my strength.”
Ron could think of no better answer to that than a kiss on the lips. Hermione put her arms around his neck and clung to him.
Ron could see Harry’s face, past her shoulder, and he exclaimed in surprise. Hermione turned around at once, flushing so hard that Ron thought she must have assumed a Healer had walked in. “What?” she asked, when she saw that the doorway was empty.
“Look,” Ron said, and pointed to Harry.
He didn’t need to say what the difference was. Hermione could see it for herself. They both examined the happy smile on Harry’s lips in silence, and hoped it meant better things to come.
*
—and they dropped into the middle of a starry void, with light and darkness opening up beneath them at depths that made Draco gasp.
He looked around automatically for Potter, fearing that it would be like the ocean, where he couldn’t see him at first. But Potter was right there, arms still clasped around Draco, and staring at the void with a worryingly Gryffindor expression. He seemed to think that he was duty-bound to find out what was at the bottom of the drop and report back on it.
“Where are we?” Draco shouted into his ear. “Why does this keep happening to us?”
Potter blinked and turned his head to look at him. “What?”
“Why do we keep bouncing from place to place, and why did you kiss me, and why don’t you seem more concerned?” Draco added as an afterthought. “I don’t know where we are, I can’t remember anything that’s close to this time, but you’re handling it like you expected it.”
Potter hesitated. Then he said, “I think we’re in a dream.”
“What,” Draco said. He didn’t make it a question, because it didn’t deserve to be.
Potter shook his head. “I know it sounds mental.” Draco opened his mouth to say that it sounded considerably worse than that, but Potter went on consideringly, and the chance to say something was lost, unless Draco wanted to interrupt. Come to think of it, why didn’t he do that? “But it’s the only thing that fits what’s happening here. I don’t remember anything recent, either. And I know that I’ve been bouncing from vision to vision for a long time.”
“I only remember four,” Draco said.
“Four?” Potter cocked his head at him and firmed his arms around Draco, as if he assumed that Draco was eager to get away from him and plunge into the void that had no firm footing for and no place for him.
“Yes,” Draco said. “The mountains, or that valley, if you prefer, when we were on your broom above the animals made of fire. The Forbidden Forest with the werewolves. The ocean, just now. And then this.” He looked around, struggling to find identifying features in the blackness, and continued to see nothing. “I don’t understand how we get from one place to another.”
Potter sucked his lips in, which was more distracting than Draco liked to admit. “There have been more than that,” he said. “I remember us in Hogwarts, dueling. And then running down a corridor away from Death Eaters. I think the corridor was in Malfoy Manor. And we nearly killed one another above a sea of blood.”
Draco would have doubted him, thinking he was lying, but Potter spoke with too much simple confidence. And what in the world would he have to lie about? Why would he want to confuse Draco? Their bouncing madly from place to place was doing a good job of that already. “Why don’t I remember those?” he whispered.
Potter peered at him, and Draco saw the shadow of a suspicion in his face. Potter had never been good at concealing his ideas (when he bothered to have them). But he said nothing, so Draco poked his face into Potter’s and demanded, “What is it?”
“It might have been a different version of you that experienced those with me,” Potter said. “You were a lot more—hostile.”
Draco leaned back, shaking his head. He didn’t know why, but panic had tightened his chest so that it felt as if someone was squeezing his lungs. “No,” he said reasonably. He intended Potter to know that he wasn’t about to give in and start believing something as ridiculous as that. “You can’t—that’s not right. You pulled me into your dream somehow, as I lay asleep, and the dream that you’ve had is the part you had before your mind touched mine. It’s not—it’s not that there was a different version of me here.”
“I don’t like thinking of it, either,” Potter said, his hands smoothing down Draco’s sides. “I like this version of you better. The other one probably would have punched me if I tried to kiss him.”
Draco felt a brief burn of wonder through him at the reminder that Potter had kissed him and he had survived. But he shook off the clutch of the past. He wasn’t going to let go of the main point, although he thought Potter probably would prefer it if he did. “I’m not—you can’t argue that I’m not real.”
Potter shook his head. “I don’t know what’s happening either, Draco.” Draco had to concentrate so that he wouldn’t get distracted by the sound of his first name on Potter’s tongue. “I do know that it’s something very strange, stranger than can be accounted for by the nature of dreams. I never used to dream about you in this intense way. It feels real. I can remember different parts of the dream, even if you can’t.” Draco pinched Potter on the shoulder, but said nothing. “So I don’t know what to tell you. You could easily be real, and asleep, and our minds touching, the way you said.”
He was silent, and Draco was silent while they fell some more, until Draco worked the courage and the spit into his mouth to speak. “But you don’t think that’s true.”
“No,” Potter said. His voice could be lovely when it was soft, Draco thought, which he could have gone the rest of his life without discovering. “I think that this is my dream, and I’m bringing you to life because this is the only way I can face the complex of my desires about you. To kill you, to rescue you, to be with you—I’ve wanted to do different things at different times, since the war. But I was too much of a coward. I was going to marry Ginny, and then I was going to live a normal life, and seeking you out again would have been too much like admitting to myself that the desires could come true.”
Draco tried again to remember what he could. His memories ran to the end of the war, and no further, he realized after a few moments. He had a hazy image of what the Great Hall at Hogwarts had looked like after the last battle, and he remembered Potter giving him a curt nod of acknowledgment as Draco leaned back in his mother’s embrace.
Then, nothing.
That was the moment when Potter and I parted ways, Draco thought. When he lost track of me, so he couldn’t give me any more new memories.
A surge of something passed through him. Fear? Despair? What was the appropriate name for the emotion you felt when you realized that you might not exist, that you might all be part of someone’s dream?
A hysterical laugh bubbled up from Draco’s throat. He shouldn’t fear death, he thought. Why? He wouldn’t remember anything or suffer any torment when Potter woke up. He would simply and easily cease to exist. There were a lot of people who would give much for deaths that painless.
A lot of people. Was he a person, if he had only come into being because Potter wanted to see and speak with someone who was like Draco without taking the risk of confronting the real thing?
And why couldn’t he remember the portions of the dream that Potter was talking about? Had he created a different Draco for those parts, a Draco who had vanished clean away when it turned out that he wasn’t needed any longer?
“I’m sorry,” Potter whispered, his arms clasping more firmly around Draco’s waist and shoulders. Draco wondered if it was his imagination that their fall was slowing. It had to be his imagination, he thought. Potter wouldn’t have a reason to change his stupid means of trying to cope with his stupid fantasies at this late date. “If I’d had the courage to do this myself instead of my magic having to force me…”
And then they were elsewhere, long before Draco could think of any answer that he could have made.
*
“What you’re saying,” Ron said, quietly, because he didn’t want to wake Hermione and he also didn’t want to get so angry that he would smash in Milverwhite’s face, “is that we can’t do anything to wake him up.”
“I have no doubt about my findings.” Milverwhite only gave Harry a brief glance before he turned back to the scroll of scribbled thoughts in front of him. Ron ground his teeth. Sometimes he wondered if he and Hermione were the only people who ever saw Harry as real. Did everyone else think he was only a hero or only a victim, someone to be admired from a distance or healed when he needed help?
Well, sometimes Ron had seen someone who had a look on their faces when Harry was near, as if they saw his loneliness and his needs and could fulfill them.
He didn’t like to remember that Malfoy had once been one of those people.
“I know what I found,” Milverwhite repeated, meaning that Ron had to pay attention to the git. “It is Mr. Potter’s own magic that keeps him under the control of this—coma. We will call it that because it has no better name,” he added, so condescending that Ron ground his teeth. “He will not wake until he breaks the spell himself, from the inside.”
“But that doesn’t make sense,” Ron said patiently. “How can he break the spell if he doesn’t remember there is a spell?”
Milverwhite shrugged and met Ron’s eyes, oddly defiant. “He has unusually strong and common dreams. I have timed them now, and his dream cycles last longer than they should, and resume sooner than they should, as well. I would submit that the answer will come in his dreams. He will remember that way, and choose to return to the real world. I do not think that you and Mrs. Granger-Weasley occur in his dreams. He will want to come back to a world that contains you, sooner or later.”
“Maybe,” Ron whispered. He could see the attractions of an endless youth, in the dreamworld, if he thought about it. He didn’t want to, but he could.
“Yes,” Milverwhite said. “Mr. Potter’s sudden collapse, and the unexpected thoroughness of the coma and the depths of the dreams, indicate that his magic has undertaken it to fulfill his desires. Why the dreams are necessary to his desires, I am not sure, not knowing what he wanted or what he was most interested in.” He paused and shot Ron an oblique look. “Did you look into his Pensieve diary as I suggested that you do?”
Ron flushed. He didn’t like to admit it, but both he and Hermione had entirely forgotten about those instructions, since they had wanted to be in hospital any moment they could with Harry. “No, we didn’t. We didn’t want to invade his privacy, and we know that he’ll wake up,” he added virtuously, wishing that Milverwhite’s skeptical look was more conducive to virtuous feelings.
“Those memories may contain information that would help me understand this case further,” Milverwhite said harshly. “Do so.” He stood up and stalked towards the front of the room.
“How can it, if what you’ve already said is true and Harry is the one who has to wake himself up?” Ron called after him.
“More understanding may help us with other matters than whether Mr. Potter would wake up,” Milverwhite said, and exited, leaving Ron to stare after him in frustration.
*
They lay in a comfortable place, Draco thought. It was the first place they had been that he would call by that name. He blinked and looked around, trying to understand the flickering shadows and light on the walls.
They were in a room with a fire. Draco stretched out one hand greedily to the warmth. He was shivering for some reason, although he thought there was something soft beneath him. A blanket? Then he should be in bed, and plenty warm enough. He didn’t have memories of the Manor, he had begun to realize, other than the hazy images that Potter had constructed for him, but he was sure he had a warm bed there.
Then he realized that he lay on an embroidered cloth of some sort, spread across the floor, and that he was naked.
No wonder he was cold.
“Draco.”
Draco turned his head sharply. Potter stood on the other side of the room, watching him with wide green eyes that absolutely shone with hunger. He was naked, too, and curving up towards his belly was an impressive erection, dark with blood, that made Draco’s mouth water before he thought about it.
Not that he was hungry for Potter. Not that he had ever thought about such a thing, for all that he had submitted to Potter’s kiss in the ocean.
“Draco,” Potter said again, and began to walk forwards. His cock bobbed and swayed with the intensity of his pace. His eyes burned and devoured, and Draco found himself arching his belly towards that flame before he considered what he was about.
“I’ve wanted you so long,” Potter whispered. “That was why I couldn’t see you until I came here. My conscious mind wanted me to avoid acknowledging you. It tried to protect me from the strength of my own passion.”
Draco licked his lips. “Someone cast a spell on you so that you wouldn’t desire me?” he asked, wanting to be clear.
Potter shook his head. He was standing above the cloth now, staring down at Draco with an expression that was—Draco would call it flattering and say nothing else for now. “My own mind wanted to prevent me from seeing you. The way you really are. The way I wanted you to be.”
Draco took a deep breath. He was shaking with fear, but he had a source of power here, even if he could hardly bring himself to look straight at the light of it. “I’m only a creation of your mind, Potter. Of course you have me the way you want me. I don’t have any say in it. How could I? I’m just your creature, made to do what you wanted.”
Potter’s eyes widened, and a look of such perfect anguish came over his face that Draco couldn’t help looking twice; it satisfied some part of him that had lain dormant since his Hogwarts days. Or should he say some part of himself that had always been prominent, because he had only cause to think of those Hogwarts days? He hadn’t existed before he met Potter; he would not exist after Potter woke from the dream.
A choked whimper broke from him as he thought of that, no matter how hard he tried to keep himself from it. Potter knelt beside him at once and wrapped him in his arms. Draco closed his eyes and clung to him—his creator, his destroyer. His skin was so warm that it became obvious now why Draco had been imagined naked with only a fire for company. Potter had thought that he would be able to keep Draco warm.
“I’m so sorry,” Potter whispered. “I don’t—I don’t understand exactly what happened, but I’m sorry.”
Draco took a deep breath. His moment of weakness was past, and as fun as it was to remind Potter of whose fault this had been and that he wasn’t perfect after all, he couldn’t encourage this view of himself as broken. There was something else that he wanted to do instead, and he reached down and grabbed Potter’s cock.
“If this is all exactly as you desired,” he muttered into Potter’s mouth, “then make it something I can desire, too.”
Potter drew back at once, face flushed with passion, and kissed him. Draco gasped and opened his mouth, letting Potter’s tongue delve to the back corners. Wetness slid along his own tongue and his cheeks, and such a powerful bolt of weakness ran through him that he was glad he was already lying down.
Potter bit his collarbone, and licked his cheeks, and stroked his chest with hands that reverence made tremble. Draco found himself leaning back with a sigh and spreading his legs, inviting Potter between them. He wondered if that was his own idea, or an impulse picked up from Potter’s brain, reflecting his creator in the way that a good little creation should.
Then he decided that it hardly mattered, not when Potter’s mouth on his nipple felt like a revelation of paradise.
Potter prepared him with small squirms of his fingers, with lube that Draco hadn’t noticed being in the room when he first looked around, and with constant pauses for staring that would only last until Draco lifted his hips or gave an impatient cough. Then Potter had to sit back on his heels and stare at Draco’s hole. Draco lifted his head and pretended that he got someone staring at this part of his body every day of his life, fighting the flush that leaped through his cheeks like wildfire.
It’s a part of your body, he told himself. Another beautiful part of your body. Do you know what some people would give to see you like this? But Potter is the only one who gets to. And Draco entertained a mischievous vision of what would happen if someone else tried to look at him like this and Potter chased them off.
Not that anyone can. This is all happening inside Potter’s head.
Draco winced, but before he could sink into self-pity, Potter took himself in hand and lined himself up with Draco’s entrance. Draco gasped out loud and flung his legs around Potter’s waist in self-defense. Potter grunted and closed his eyes, face worked with desperation.
“God, you’re tight,” he said.
Draco knew no compliment had ever pleased him better, which was ridiculous, but there you are. He rocked back and forth in response, mouth working small grunts out into the atmosphere, gasping as strings of saliva slid down his face. Harry dipped his head and licked them up in a fervor. Draco wondered if he should have been able to be that flexible, and then reminded himself again that this was a dream.
“Draco,” Harry said.
When did I start thinking of him as Harry? But Draco had to admit that it was pretty hard to think of someone by their last name when they were buried in your arse, rocking back and forth in such a brilliant way. Small flashes of heat, more than enough to match the worry and shame he had felt earlier, surged through him and then built into big flashes. Harry began throwing his back into each thrust, and Draco cried out. Harry paused at once, staring at him, but Draco shook his head furiously and gestured for him to go on, and Harry did so, more than enthusiastically.
Draco could feel his own breath leaving him in gasping grunts, as if he was running a race, or as if he was detached from his body. And at the same time, he had never been more attached to his body, never more a part of it. His fingers tingled where they clutched at Harry’s arms, his shoulders, his flanks, any part of him that Draco could reach. His eyes were fastened on the small things, like the bead of sweat that slid from Harry’s fringe down his scar and then to his eyes, making him blink and turn his head irritably from side to side, or the flush that seemed to form and fade on his face as he rocked in and out of the firelight.
Pleasure began to build, low down in his belly. Draco whimpered. Harry smiled at him, but it wasn’t the smug, knowing, superior smile that Draco knew he would have been given when they were schoolboys in Hogwarts.
“Ready?” Harry whispered, and before Draco could ask him what he meant, he bent his body forwards and seemed to stab Draco’s arse with his cock.
He hit Draco’s prostate. Draco arched, froze, his body and his thoughts ringing, and then cried out aloud as his orgasm rushed through him and his spunk rushed over his belly.
Harry followed behind him, head hanging back, shoulder blades arched like wings, breath rasping out of his afflicted lungs, and then fell on Draco, half-crushing him before Draco could convince him to roll to the side. He had a look of such satisfaction on his face that Draco half-thought it might be worth it, to suffer through the changes of the dream with no certainty of the end, to have caused such pleasure.
*
“I—never knew.”
Ron shook his head silently. Hermione’s voice was stunned and shaken, and if Ron had wanted to speak, he knew he would have sounded the same way.
It was becoming obvious why Harry had kept a Pensieve diary instead of a written one (well, maybe there were lingering echoes of reluctance to keep a written diary because of You-Know-Who’s one that had almost killed Ginny, too, Ron thought). He wanted to store his fantasies somewhere far away from his head, where there was no chance of them breaking past his lips.
And they were detailed fantasies, though they leaped back and forth so much between memory and unreality that Ron didn’t know for certain which ones might have a basis in something that had really happened between Harry and Malfoy and which ones didn’t. There were memories of Harry fighting Malfoy that suddenly turned to snogging, and sometimes they taunted each other high above the ground at Quidditch games but then started flirting instead, and Harry had thoughts of, um…
Ron cleared his throat as he blushed. There was a reason he and Hermione hadn’t stayed in some of the memories very long.
The clarity of the memories varied, from the misty forms of dreams to the bright and sharp images that Ron thought came from meetings with Malfoy since Hogwarts. The worst memory, for him, wasn’t one where Harry was fucking Malfoy or Malfoy was fucking him, though. The worst one was one he remembered.
Harry had opened the Daily Prophet and gone still, staring at the photograph on the second page. Ron, who had been sleeping over at Harry’s house after one of his fights for Hermione and hadn’t received his own copy of the paper, had to crane his neck past Harry’s shoulder to see what was going on.
Once he saw the picture, he was confused. It was just a picture of Malfoy at the opening of some fundraiser, his glass of champagne in the air as he proposed a toast. Ron shook his head. “What’s the matter, mate?” He hadn’t heard Harry talk about Malfoy a lot since school. Did he still hate him that much?
“Nothing,” Harry said in a low voice. But when he thought Ron wasn’t watching, he’d reached out and laid a finger along the pictured Malfoy’s cheek.
Ron had thought it was an odd way of punching someone across the distance between you. But, he had to admit now, not such an odd method of caressing someone.
Who could tell why Harry had got fascinated with Malfoy? The diary didn’t show them any beginning to it, only the memories, in a continuous stream, in the order Harry had deposited them in the Pensieve. And they never had a chance to see Harry’s reaction to things like waking up from dreams about Malfoy. It seemed that he had simply accepted the fantasies and gone on with his life.
But when Ron said that to Hermione after they had finished examining as many of the memories as they could bear, she stared at him in pity and shook his head.
“If he could accept his fascination,” she said, “he would have kept the memories in his head and integrated them with the rest. He would have made up his mind to do something. Instead, he hid from it, and didn’t want to think about what it meant. Maybe it even played a part in his marriage with Ginny ending,” she added softly. “But he wouldn’t face it. So his magic dropped him into a coma where he wouldn’t have any choice but to face it.”
Ron grimaced. He didn’t like to think about Harry hurting his sister for the sake of a fantasy. But perhaps she hadn’t known. And Harry had been punished by being put into dreams where, if Hermione was right, Malfoy was the only familiar figure Harry had to cling to. By the time he woke up, he would be ready to forget about Malfoy or confront him.
Then Ron realized that he was thinking as though Harry actually would wake up. If he couldn’t bring himself to think about what he felt for Malfoy—and the Pensieve diary was only more proof of how good at denial Harry was—there was a strong chance that he wouldn’t.
And there might be even more reasons for him to stay safely within the confines of the coma, as he would see it. What if he thought his friends disapproved of his choice of Malfoy? Would he want to come back if he thought it would mean facing their scorn, their pitying smiles, and their efforts to make him go back to Ginny?
That was how Ron ended up in hospital later that same day, bending down and whispering into Harry’s ear, “Mate, it doesn’t matter. You’re past her, over her. If Malfoy is your future—well, I’ll live with it somehow, and so will Hermione. Bill and the rest of the family might be a little harder to convince, but we want to see you back and awake most of all. So come back.”
*
Draco opened his eyes. He didn’t know what had awakened him at first, but then he saw that Harry’s head was turned, his breathing short. He had his eyes focused on one particular part of the ceiling. Draco looked with him, expecting to see a starry void or a whirlwind or something else that would signal the dream was changing, but there was nothing.
Nothing he could see, anyway.
“Do you hear that?” Harry whispered. “I think I hear Ron calling me. He wants me to come back.” A small, bitter smile touched his mouth. “To wake up, I suppose.” He turned over abruptly and flung an arm across Draco’s chest, staring into his eyes. “But how can I do that? It would mean killing you.”
“Can you kill someone or something that’s not even properly alive?” Draco tried to smile, but his face froze stiffly. “I don’t know if you can. You should go, Harry. You have a real world out there to live in, while I only have the world here inside your head.”
Harry pondered that for a moment, then brightened. “But if I stayed here, we could have all of eternity, or it would seem like it. We would only die when my body died. Don’t you want a longer life?”
Draco swallowed. He hadn’t thought that particular temptation would confront him. Of course he wanted to live and not die. Of course he was terrified at the thought of oblivion overcoming him after Potter opened his eyes. (He thought of the Potter with him as Harry and the one who lay asleep and whose mind had created him as Potter, he realized).
“In fact,” Harry went on, eyes so bright it was hard for Draco to look at him, “I’m only a figment of his imagination, too. I won’t exist in the same way when he wakes up. I want to live. I always have. Why shouldn’t we go on?”
It was the hardest thing Draco had ever done in his—life? existence?—but he shook his head. Harry, staring at him, let his mouth fall open slightly.
“Why not?” he whispered. “Don’t you love me?”
Draco looked away from him, letting his eyes unfocus as they stared at the wall. “I couldn’t forget what I am, now that I know,” he said, which was true. “I don’t—I want to be real, even more than I want to survive. But that’s denied to me. The best thing I can do, I think, is allow you, or your body, to wake up, so that my real counterpart might at least enjoy a real romance with him.”
Harry snorted and ran a possessive hand down Draco’s chest. “We know that he won’t. You only gave in to me in the first place because he made you so that you would.”
Draco squeezed his hand hard enough to hurt. “Then you’re denying me even the privilege to make my own choices,” he said fiercely, “and that’s more of a lack of reality than anything else. How can my decisions matter if they’re all foreordained? I want to make choices that matter. I say that we let him wake up. If he’s come to a point where he can go and ask my real self for a chance, then I’d say we’ve accomplished the purpose we were made for.”
Harry’s eyes were wide and dark. He stared at Draco and started to speak, then snapped his mouth shut again each time. He turned his head to the side and made a little whinnying, sighing sound, like a horse settling down to sleep.
“Will it hurt?” he whispered.
“I don’t know,” Draco said, kindly. At the moment, he was the one with the strength, something he relished. “Let’s try.”
Harry seemed to shimmer, and this time, even Draco heard the shout that came from somewhere beyond the room where they were sitting. “Hermione! I think he’s waking up! His eyes just half-opened!”
Draco turned his head to the side and buried his face in Harry’s shoulder. He didn’t want to change his mind now, but he thought he would give in to fear if he saw the room dissolving. Harry’s arm curved around his waist, still strong and firm.
“I hope we made the right choice,” Draco muttered.
“We did,” Harry said steadily. “I think we did. We—we can’t live in dreams, not really. We would just repeat ourselves over and over, especially if we don’t have the power to create new things and just get tossed from place to place by his mind.”
Draco nodded. He could smell sweat and skin and semen, and how could something false smell so real?
“Look at it this way,” Harry whispered. “Maybe we’ll go on living, in memory or somewhere else, after he wakes.”
Draco nodded again. Harry’s skin was soft and yielding against his forehead.
“I love you,” Harry said.
Draco whispered it back and closed his eyes.
The End.
If I should die before you wake
Date: 2010-11-20 03:55 pm (UTC)That was certainly on the angst side of things. Powerful imagery and you could taste the pain the dream Harry and Draco felt.
Fantastic one shot, even if it was on the dark side.