Challenge #46 (Nightmares)
Title: The Things That Draw Us
Rating/Warnings: Rated PG, I guess. Barely-mentioned secondary character death (not Ron or Hermione)
Characters/Pairing: Harry Potter/Draco Malfoy
Summary: In response to Challenge #46 (Nightmares).
Word Count: 1482
Author's Notes: NONE.
Registered purchases?: Both!
He could feel himself thrashing, feel the cool cotton of the bedsheets tangled around his legs as his body whipped itself around the soft mattress. He heard a whimper somewhere and was simultaneously unsure and certain that the noise had come from himself. In his dreams, there was darkness, and a skeletal hand reaching for him, always containing him within its grasping, and then there was the sensation that his soul was being pulled out of his body by the long, bony fingers.
It took him a second to realize that the fingers gripping his shoulder were warm flesh, soft but pointed, callused and worn, and his eyes snapped open as he attempted to still his racing heart, his panting breath.
There were green eyes gazing into his now, emerald eyes with dark black lashes and a set of furrowed brows that dipped in concern over him.
"Draco. You're alright. You're alright. I'm here."
Those words were murmured in a repeated chant, a series of short sentences that were imbued with calm, filled to the brim with something more than mere affection, and Harry's arms smoothed over his biceps in a repeated motion that was more soothing than unnerving.
Draco managed to calm himself enough to relax, and he willed all the muscles in his body to loosen, the act of it feeling like melting, and it was almost painful. He whimpered again, and as Harry's hands smoothed over his golden hair, the whimpers made way for soft sobs. He hated feeling like this.
Was it ironic that he spent so many nights being comforted by The Boy Who Lived? Surely Harry's title should be more descriptive than that, and Draco mentally corrected it to be The Boy Who Had Lived Through More Than Anyone Should And Still Found It In His Heart To Care More For Others. It was a mouthful, so it was back to just those four succint words.
He couldn't understand anything that Harry's mouth was breathing into his skin, knowing that they were both sleeping back into that hazy area before sleep claimed them, when Harry's tongue was loose and sure, and Draco's being was tense at the idea of the nightmares claiming him again.
How long could it go on? It had been months since the Final Battle had destroyed so many lives. Months had passed since Draco has seen his parents' empty gazes staring into the sky, their bodies left in a loose embrace on the ground where they had fallen, together. Even their deaths had been wrapped up in each other. Draco had spent the days following that moment -- well, he wasn't sure how he had spent them, wandering the grounds of Hogwarts in a pale daze as he struggled to adapt to this new world he'd been thrust into.
Harry had lost people, too, and it might've been the desperate mourning that brought them together. Somehow, they understood each other, and all the years of being enemies, of hating each other had melted away in the moment their eyes met and they knew. Both of them struggled with this darkness that pulled at their insides, both of them frantically clawing at the ground they were clinging to, the same ground that had disappeared from under their feet.
Hermione and Ron didn't understand, Harry had confessed. He didn't have the words to tell them, and he could see the worried glances they exchanged when they thought he was unaware. They treated him like he was more fragile now, like he would break, like he wasn't already shattered, like he hadn't been pieces of something other than himself since almost the moment he was born.
Draco understood that. Draco, who had been swallowed into a life in which purity bred ignorance and hatred, in which nobility and grace were things that had to run through your blood for it to count. Draco, who had been raised with a silver spoon in his mouth and silky voices pressed into his mind, who had been force-fed the finest food and the more ludicrous lies of people's breeding and his own superiority. Draco, whose entire life hadn't been turned upside-down in a single moment, but in a series of moments that had started when Harry Potter himself had rejected his friendship and chosen the blood-traitor Weasley over himself when they were just children. That moment had started a shift of thoughts in Draco's head, and the pieces didn't click into place until he'd seen his parents dead bodies, not even when a stupid Mudblood was smarter than him, not even when he found out his own Godfather chose the side his parents had not been on, when he knew that Severus Snape had been fighting against all the things he'd proclaimed to believe.
His parents' death had proven to him that blood standing did not keep you safe, it did not keep you whole, it did not keep out the darkness or the pain, and it certainly didn't protect the people you loved.
Harry knew that. Harry knew (and now Draco did, as well) that life wasn't something you could rank, it wasn't something you could choose or hide under a protective dome of glass, or within stone castle walls. Life wasn't something that you could guard, and you had to spend every moment preparing that someone might try to take it away from you, that someone would try to wrestle it from your grasp until your fingers were stiff and cold.
The idea that life could be so fragile was baffling, especially knowing that, after all he'd been through, there was still that life inside himself. He didn't feel worthy. He felt like it could've been better spent on someone else.
Harry understood.
And it had been that silent understanding that had drawn them to each other. There hadn't been words between them for the longest time. It was as if they both contained this piece of themselves that recognized itself in others, like drawn to like.
At first, it had been Harry to approach Draco as he sat at the edge of the lake, watching the dark shapes gliding just below the surface and wondering if that's what his soul looked like. Neither of them had spoken, and they probably would've gone on like that if Draco hadn't whispered, "I bet that's what we all look like inside."
Harry had startled at that, and neither knew if his reaction was from the words themselves or the scratchy quality of Draco's voice that had spoken them. Gone was the smooth confidence the youngest (and only, now) Malfoy had displayed to the world. This boy, this young man sitting next to him was irreperably fractured, lonely and scared, and uncertain how the rest of his life would go.
This was something they'd had in common, then.
Although Harry had never worried whether or not he'd be thrown into Azkaban, and Draco never had to worry about the false-friends he'd have to be on the lookout for now. They felt like opposite sides of the same coin, their values and fears and insecurities both the same and perfectly different. Even their looks had reflected this -- Harry with his dark messy hair and dark gemstone eyes, Draco with his white-blonde slick of gossamer threads and silvery orbs that made his face look like an angel or a ghost, depending on the time of day.
That moment had settled something for the both of them. It took a while for their conversations to extend to more than cryptic sentences about their general states of being (Hermione once joked that the two of them talking was like reading Fortune Cookies aloud, thought neither of them knew what that meant), but eventually they moved past the one-liners.
And once that happened, it was like they were suddenly filled with paragraphs of words that they only had for each other, stories with no morals or lessons, just things about their lives before they had become this ... this dual-entity.
And by the time they'd shared their words, it seemed only natural that they'd share their beds, tumbling into them with the same desperate lonliness and elemental understand that nobody else would know them, that there would be nobody else for the rest of their lives that could possibly understand all that they had gone through, separately until they were seventeen, and then together for all the time after that.
So it was that Draco spent most of his nights sweating and shivering into the circle of Harry bloody Potter's arms, both relieved and resentful that he was there. There were just as many moments in which Draco had to whisper reassurances into Harry's own small ears, the two of them clinging to each other in the hours when nobody else would ever be there, never again, using their soft voices and declarations of something-more-than-affection that they could not quite name to pull each other back from the darkness that tried to claim them as they slept.
1482/30=49.4 49
+ 10 for bonuses
59 points for Gryffindor!
Christa // Gryffindor
Rating/Warnings: Rated PG, I guess. Barely-mentioned secondary character death (not Ron or Hermione)
Characters/Pairing: Harry Potter/Draco Malfoy
Summary: In response to Challenge #46 (Nightmares).
Word Count: 1482
Author's Notes: NONE.
Registered purchases?: Both!
He could feel himself thrashing, feel the cool cotton of the bedsheets tangled around his legs as his body whipped itself around the soft mattress. He heard a whimper somewhere and was simultaneously unsure and certain that the noise had come from himself. In his dreams, there was darkness, and a skeletal hand reaching for him, always containing him within its grasping, and then there was the sensation that his soul was being pulled out of his body by the long, bony fingers.
It took him a second to realize that the fingers gripping his shoulder were warm flesh, soft but pointed, callused and worn, and his eyes snapped open as he attempted to still his racing heart, his panting breath.
There were green eyes gazing into his now, emerald eyes with dark black lashes and a set of furrowed brows that dipped in concern over him.
"Draco. You're alright. You're alright. I'm here."
Those words were murmured in a repeated chant, a series of short sentences that were imbued with calm, filled to the brim with something more than mere affection, and Harry's arms smoothed over his biceps in a repeated motion that was more soothing than unnerving.
Draco managed to calm himself enough to relax, and he willed all the muscles in his body to loosen, the act of it feeling like melting, and it was almost painful. He whimpered again, and as Harry's hands smoothed over his golden hair, the whimpers made way for soft sobs. He hated feeling like this.
Was it ironic that he spent so many nights being comforted by The Boy Who Lived? Surely Harry's title should be more descriptive than that, and Draco mentally corrected it to be The Boy Who Had Lived Through More Than Anyone Should And Still Found It In His Heart To Care More For Others. It was a mouthful, so it was back to just those four succint words.
He couldn't understand anything that Harry's mouth was breathing into his skin, knowing that they were both sleeping back into that hazy area before sleep claimed them, when Harry's tongue was loose and sure, and Draco's being was tense at the idea of the nightmares claiming him again.
How long could it go on? It had been months since the Final Battle had destroyed so many lives. Months had passed since Draco has seen his parents' empty gazes staring into the sky, their bodies left in a loose embrace on the ground where they had fallen, together. Even their deaths had been wrapped up in each other. Draco had spent the days following that moment -- well, he wasn't sure how he had spent them, wandering the grounds of Hogwarts in a pale daze as he struggled to adapt to this new world he'd been thrust into.
Harry had lost people, too, and it might've been the desperate mourning that brought them together. Somehow, they understood each other, and all the years of being enemies, of hating each other had melted away in the moment their eyes met and they knew. Both of them struggled with this darkness that pulled at their insides, both of them frantically clawing at the ground they were clinging to, the same ground that had disappeared from under their feet.
Hermione and Ron didn't understand, Harry had confessed. He didn't have the words to tell them, and he could see the worried glances they exchanged when they thought he was unaware. They treated him like he was more fragile now, like he would break, like he wasn't already shattered, like he hadn't been pieces of something other than himself since almost the moment he was born.
Draco understood that. Draco, who had been swallowed into a life in which purity bred ignorance and hatred, in which nobility and grace were things that had to run through your blood for it to count. Draco, who had been raised with a silver spoon in his mouth and silky voices pressed into his mind, who had been force-fed the finest food and the more ludicrous lies of people's breeding and his own superiority. Draco, whose entire life hadn't been turned upside-down in a single moment, but in a series of moments that had started when Harry Potter himself had rejected his friendship and chosen the blood-traitor Weasley over himself when they were just children. That moment had started a shift of thoughts in Draco's head, and the pieces didn't click into place until he'd seen his parents dead bodies, not even when a stupid Mudblood was smarter than him, not even when he found out his own Godfather chose the side his parents had not been on, when he knew that Severus Snape had been fighting against all the things he'd proclaimed to believe.
His parents' death had proven to him that blood standing did not keep you safe, it did not keep you whole, it did not keep out the darkness or the pain, and it certainly didn't protect the people you loved.
Harry knew that. Harry knew (and now Draco did, as well) that life wasn't something you could rank, it wasn't something you could choose or hide under a protective dome of glass, or within stone castle walls. Life wasn't something that you could guard, and you had to spend every moment preparing that someone might try to take it away from you, that someone would try to wrestle it from your grasp until your fingers were stiff and cold.
The idea that life could be so fragile was baffling, especially knowing that, after all he'd been through, there was still that life inside himself. He didn't feel worthy. He felt like it could've been better spent on someone else.
Harry understood.
And it had been that silent understanding that had drawn them to each other. There hadn't been words between them for the longest time. It was as if they both contained this piece of themselves that recognized itself in others, like drawn to like.
At first, it had been Harry to approach Draco as he sat at the edge of the lake, watching the dark shapes gliding just below the surface and wondering if that's what his soul looked like. Neither of them had spoken, and they probably would've gone on like that if Draco hadn't whispered, "I bet that's what we all look like inside."
Harry had startled at that, and neither knew if his reaction was from the words themselves or the scratchy quality of Draco's voice that had spoken them. Gone was the smooth confidence the youngest (and only, now) Malfoy had displayed to the world. This boy, this young man sitting next to him was irreperably fractured, lonely and scared, and uncertain how the rest of his life would go.
This was something they'd had in common, then.
Although Harry had never worried whether or not he'd be thrown into Azkaban, and Draco never had to worry about the false-friends he'd have to be on the lookout for now. They felt like opposite sides of the same coin, their values and fears and insecurities both the same and perfectly different. Even their looks had reflected this -- Harry with his dark messy hair and dark gemstone eyes, Draco with his white-blonde slick of gossamer threads and silvery orbs that made his face look like an angel or a ghost, depending on the time of day.
That moment had settled something for the both of them. It took a while for their conversations to extend to more than cryptic sentences about their general states of being (Hermione once joked that the two of them talking was like reading Fortune Cookies aloud, thought neither of them knew what that meant), but eventually they moved past the one-liners.
And once that happened, it was like they were suddenly filled with paragraphs of words that they only had for each other, stories with no morals or lessons, just things about their lives before they had become this ... this dual-entity.
And by the time they'd shared their words, it seemed only natural that they'd share their beds, tumbling into them with the same desperate lonliness and elemental understand that nobody else would know them, that there would be nobody else for the rest of their lives that could possibly understand all that they had gone through, separately until they were seventeen, and then together for all the time after that.
So it was that Draco spent most of his nights sweating and shivering into the circle of Harry bloody Potter's arms, both relieved and resentful that he was there. There were just as many moments in which Draco had to whisper reassurances into Harry's own small ears, the two of them clinging to each other in the hours when nobody else would ever be there, never again, using their soft voices and declarations of something-more-than-affection that they could not quite name to pull each other back from the darkness that tried to claim them as they slept.
1482/30=49.4 49
+ 10 for bonuses
59 points for Gryffindor!
Christa // Gryffindor