Dream in Darkness
Title: Dream in Darkness
Author: jairissa or erisedreflect
Type: Fiction
Length: 1790
Main character or Pairing: Harry Potter, Draco Malfoy, Lord Voldemort
Card: Seven of Cups
Card Interpretation:
Interpretation One: Fairy favours, images of reflection, sentiment, things seen in the glass of contemplation.
Interpretation Two: The seven cups are filled with strange and wonderful gifts...but there is always danger hidden within one of two of them to sting anyone who ventures near. Lying amidst the gems and wreath of victory are a snake and a dragon.
Rating: PG-13
Disclaimer: Not mine, never will be.
Warnings: Slightly dark Harry, mild profanity.
Summary: When Harry dreams, he dreams of Voldemort.
Author Notes: The mammoth I originally planned for this failed somewhere along the lines, but this came from the ashes and hopefully works just as well. Beta-ed by the lovely hecticity
Opening his eyes, Harry gasped for breath, his lungs struggling for air. He couldn't even hear his breathing in the oppressive silence and darkness around him. It took a moment to realise that he was lying in a heap on the floor and he scrambled to get up. His limbs wouldn't cooperate, leaving him to lie where he was, feeling his lungs continue their deep breaths. Without warning his body stood, taking Harry unwillingly with it. Cold air brushed insistently past his skin as a cloak slithered off his body, and Harry would have checked whether he was naked if he could only make his eyes move.
Instead they focused on the floor below him, bare feet at the edge of his vision, cold wood covering the rest, deliberate patterns spreading in every direction from his sight. He could feel the freeze of the floor against his feet, but not anything more, anything inside. It was as though everything that made him Harry had evaporated, leaving an almost painful emptiness inside him.
Voldemort, then.
A vision or another piece of implanted information, Harry couldn't tell the difference. He suspected the latter only because he could think of no other reason Voldemort would discontinue the Occlumency he had been employing against Harry for over a year. But for what purpose? To show him a floor and a pair of bare (human?) feet? Even for Voldemort that didn't make sense, didn't have any purpose but to make Harry wonder whether Voldemort's insanity had finally consumed him entirely.
The eyes (his eyes?) raised themselves from the floor to the space in front of him, the visuals almost as oppressive as the heavy silence. There were pews out of line, pushed against walls and each other. A thud of happiness flows through him at the sight of a place he hated - it appeared to be a church - in disarray, though Harry had never had a problem with such places before. Maybe it was this church he (Voldemort?) had a problem with, in all it's smothering beauty. Would he ever know, when there was no reason for him to grasp and no Dumbledore to reason things out for him anymore.
A flickering light caught his (Voldemort's?) eye and the body he was attached to began to move without Harry's permission, ignoring his commands to stop. Couldn't Voldemort hear him, or was he just being ignored? There were candles, hundreds of them, burning everything away but the emptiness that filled him, the things these people had done to him, though Harry wasn't entirely sure what that was or even who they were.
It took a moment, blinded as he was by the brightness of the candles to realise that the candlelight was reflecting off the metal cup the priest would use. No, not one cup, seven. All identical in their gold shining in the light, their majestic emblems proudly proclaiming them as belonging to Helga Hufflepuff. Harry felt no sense of recognition even as his mind screamed at him to reach out and take his prize, as soon as he worked out which one of the seven was real. He should have felt nervous, felt a desperation to reach the thing that would make his quest so much easier. Instead there was a vague disinterest in the holder of his soul, tempered only by a mild familiarity and an almost invisible trace of pride. Strangely enough there seemed to be an even smaller thing, so close to non-existence that Harry would easily believe he was imagining it - revulsion. His own, perhaps, if he was allowed to feel anything in this body. Harry found himself unable to worry about it, unable to keep his mind on what his heart could not feel.
A softer glint now, subtler. Another flash of pride (revulsion?) at the sight on the floor near his slow moving feet. Nagini, another container to be destroyed, another evil (friend?) created by him. What had she been before she had become a part of him (Voldemort?).
He was at the alter now, the dreaminess not fading with the slow, shuffling steps. There was a mirror beside him, he knew this somehow, without having to (being able to?) look for it. He fought the impulse to look, searched for every scrap of willpower not to check, to continue the illusion that all was well, but he gave in, as he always did. The reflection too was the same. Not as tall as he would like, black hair reacting badly to the breeze. Green eyes. A scar that would almost be attractive if one was into the macabre. Harry Potter. How? Had he been possessed? How could he not know?
"You're late," a voice exploded in the silence around him, familiar to both boy and madman. "I've been waiting here, among all these pretty treasures forever." Dragon. Flies beautifully against the sky, even though he had never seen it for himself, the other part of him remembering clearly the hundreds of times he had seen Malfoy fly. Almost a snake but not close enough to be able to communicate. Parseltongue would be useless here. He turned to brush the flesh and darkness on the Dragon's arm.
"I didn't know you were waiting," his voice said, both harsh and tender, as though its owner didn't have a frame of reference for warmth. "Are you going to fight me?"
"Yes," the Dragon replied instantly, the matter of fact tone tinted slightly with sarcasm and surprise. "I always fight you, Potter. That's what we are."
His face twisted into a smile, a feeling so unfamiliar to his usual that he almost wondered whether his face was broken entirely. He reached a hand out to the Dragon's almost impossibly soft hair, earning himself a grin and glare, a twist of lips and narrowing of eyes. When he made to undo the ties of the Dragon's robes the serpent slid away, narrowly avoiding stepping on his sister-snake as Nagini winding her way around their feet as though her participation made everything less surreal rather than more.
Instead he moved his hands to where the ties on his robe would be, images of black and a lion's read and gold flashing through his mind before seeming to remember that he wore nothing. The Dragon was neither surprised nor amused by this fact, making Harry ask himself whether this Malfoy was real at all.
Untying his robes slowly, the Dragon (Malfoy, damnit!) left them hanging off his shoulders, hiding nothing but his arms and legs, the important (disgusting!) parts still on display. The skin where he reached out to touch it was softer than Harry expected, considering the roughness of the personality behind it. The Dragon tensed but despite his earlier warnings did not fight. A whimper was the only reaction given.
"Ssh," he soothed in a deceptively soft voice, sounding more disturbing than it did kind, but the Dragon (Malfoy, Malfoy, Malfoy!) didn't seem to notice at all. If anything the whimper became more of a moan. Harry's body, something Harry refused to believe belonged to him anymore, trailed it's fingers down Malfoy's torso, reaching his abdomen before Malfoy pulled away and fixed him with that smile-glare again.
"Don't shh me, Potter," Malfoy said, although there was no fight in his words. It was almost as bizarre as the rest of this - Voldemort couldn't possibly expect him to believe that he would seduce Malfoy, or that Malfoy would accept it if he did.
"I'll shh anyone I chose," Harry's voice replied. If Malfoy noticed the hint of thread behind it he didn't say, smiling seductively as his robe slipped further off his shoulder. Harry's eyes watched entranced as Malfoy lay on the only untouched pew, a small piece of order among the chaos of its companions. Harry's body walked slowly towards the thick wooden bench Malfoy had perched himself on. "You know you want this."
"I do," Malfoy replied in a voice as soft as Harry's had been. "Do you?" The question seemed to give Harry's body (Voldemort, it had to be Voldemort) a pause as it stopped for a moment, its head tilting and face contorting into confusion.
"Of course." Harry's voice replied calmly. "Why else would I be here?"
"You'd be here for anyone, Potter. That's what you do, you save people from people like the snake and her owner without another thought. But this is more than saving, isn't it, Potter? It's taking and it's me."
"Of course it would be you," Harry's voice crooned. "You and I...we fight because we hate, and what is love but that same intensity made obsession?"
Harry didn't know which part he was more disturbed by, that anyone could turn his hatred of Malfoy into love, or that anyone could have twisted a view of love in the first place. God, everything about this twisted situation disturbed him and if he didn't get some form of answer to the fucking riddle RIGHT NOW he was going to start screaming loud enough that even Voldemort's hold over him would not be enough to drown it out. He wanted OUT of this place, he wanted his hands to STOP crawling towards a smiling Malfoy and he wanted the insane old man in his head to LEAVE HIM THE FUCK AL-
The image in front of him shifted and refocused, answering the question of who had been in who's head. It had been glass he was watching, not a church, glass with a familiar inscription above it.
Erised.
The recognition came with a flood of rage as the owner of the eyes he was seeing through realised he had not been alone in his contemplation of the image. Harry felt the battering of Occlumency shields forcing himself out of his host, and into wakefulness, the darkness of his bedroom stifling in it's familiarity. He took a breath, then another, trying to remove the rotten stench of Voldemort's mind from his soul.
He shook his head, letting it fall against the hard wood of the bed's head board. Morning. In the morning he would tell Hermione to get them a list of churches that Voldemort may have visited as a child. Then he would forget that Tom Riddle's greatest wish was not to win, but to be Harry, loved and safe, innocent and apart from the evil he had poisoned his own soul with on his first murder. He would forget so he was able to kill. To acknowledge the man's humanity would render Harry's own greatest dream impossible, something Harry would not allow after all this time.
He could quell the part of him that remembered the dreams of innocence. His conscience would forgive him eventually.
Author: jairissa or erisedreflect
Type: Fiction
Length: 1790
Main character or Pairing: Harry Potter, Draco Malfoy, Lord Voldemort
Card: Seven of Cups
Card Interpretation:
Interpretation One: Fairy favours, images of reflection, sentiment, things seen in the glass of contemplation.
Interpretation Two: The seven cups are filled with strange and wonderful gifts...but there is always danger hidden within one of two of them to sting anyone who ventures near. Lying amidst the gems and wreath of victory are a snake and a dragon.
Rating: PG-13
Disclaimer: Not mine, never will be.
Warnings: Slightly dark Harry, mild profanity.
Summary: When Harry dreams, he dreams of Voldemort.
Author Notes: The mammoth I originally planned for this failed somewhere along the lines, but this came from the ashes and hopefully works just as well. Beta-ed by the lovely hecticity
Opening his eyes, Harry gasped for breath, his lungs struggling for air. He couldn't even hear his breathing in the oppressive silence and darkness around him. It took a moment to realise that he was lying in a heap on the floor and he scrambled to get up. His limbs wouldn't cooperate, leaving him to lie where he was, feeling his lungs continue their deep breaths. Without warning his body stood, taking Harry unwillingly with it. Cold air brushed insistently past his skin as a cloak slithered off his body, and Harry would have checked whether he was naked if he could only make his eyes move.
Instead they focused on the floor below him, bare feet at the edge of his vision, cold wood covering the rest, deliberate patterns spreading in every direction from his sight. He could feel the freeze of the floor against his feet, but not anything more, anything inside. It was as though everything that made him Harry had evaporated, leaving an almost painful emptiness inside him.
Voldemort, then.
A vision or another piece of implanted information, Harry couldn't tell the difference. He suspected the latter only because he could think of no other reason Voldemort would discontinue the Occlumency he had been employing against Harry for over a year. But for what purpose? To show him a floor and a pair of bare (human?) feet? Even for Voldemort that didn't make sense, didn't have any purpose but to make Harry wonder whether Voldemort's insanity had finally consumed him entirely.
The eyes (his eyes?) raised themselves from the floor to the space in front of him, the visuals almost as oppressive as the heavy silence. There were pews out of line, pushed against walls and each other. A thud of happiness flows through him at the sight of a place he hated - it appeared to be a church - in disarray, though Harry had never had a problem with such places before. Maybe it was this church he (Voldemort?) had a problem with, in all it's smothering beauty. Would he ever know, when there was no reason for him to grasp and no Dumbledore to reason things out for him anymore.
A flickering light caught his (Voldemort's?) eye and the body he was attached to began to move without Harry's permission, ignoring his commands to stop. Couldn't Voldemort hear him, or was he just being ignored? There were candles, hundreds of them, burning everything away but the emptiness that filled him, the things these people had done to him, though Harry wasn't entirely sure what that was or even who they were.
It took a moment, blinded as he was by the brightness of the candles to realise that the candlelight was reflecting off the metal cup the priest would use. No, not one cup, seven. All identical in their gold shining in the light, their majestic emblems proudly proclaiming them as belonging to Helga Hufflepuff. Harry felt no sense of recognition even as his mind screamed at him to reach out and take his prize, as soon as he worked out which one of the seven was real. He should have felt nervous, felt a desperation to reach the thing that would make his quest so much easier. Instead there was a vague disinterest in the holder of his soul, tempered only by a mild familiarity and an almost invisible trace of pride. Strangely enough there seemed to be an even smaller thing, so close to non-existence that Harry would easily believe he was imagining it - revulsion. His own, perhaps, if he was allowed to feel anything in this body. Harry found himself unable to worry about it, unable to keep his mind on what his heart could not feel.
A softer glint now, subtler. Another flash of pride (revulsion?) at the sight on the floor near his slow moving feet. Nagini, another container to be destroyed, another evil (friend?) created by him. What had she been before she had become a part of him (Voldemort?).
He was at the alter now, the dreaminess not fading with the slow, shuffling steps. There was a mirror beside him, he knew this somehow, without having to (being able to?) look for it. He fought the impulse to look, searched for every scrap of willpower not to check, to continue the illusion that all was well, but he gave in, as he always did. The reflection too was the same. Not as tall as he would like, black hair reacting badly to the breeze. Green eyes. A scar that would almost be attractive if one was into the macabre. Harry Potter. How? Had he been possessed? How could he not know?
"You're late," a voice exploded in the silence around him, familiar to both boy and madman. "I've been waiting here, among all these pretty treasures forever." Dragon. Flies beautifully against the sky, even though he had never seen it for himself, the other part of him remembering clearly the hundreds of times he had seen Malfoy fly. Almost a snake but not close enough to be able to communicate. Parseltongue would be useless here. He turned to brush the flesh and darkness on the Dragon's arm.
"I didn't know you were waiting," his voice said, both harsh and tender, as though its owner didn't have a frame of reference for warmth. "Are you going to fight me?"
"Yes," the Dragon replied instantly, the matter of fact tone tinted slightly with sarcasm and surprise. "I always fight you, Potter. That's what we are."
His face twisted into a smile, a feeling so unfamiliar to his usual that he almost wondered whether his face was broken entirely. He reached a hand out to the Dragon's almost impossibly soft hair, earning himself a grin and glare, a twist of lips and narrowing of eyes. When he made to undo the ties of the Dragon's robes the serpent slid away, narrowly avoiding stepping on his sister-snake as Nagini winding her way around their feet as though her participation made everything less surreal rather than more.
Instead he moved his hands to where the ties on his robe would be, images of black and a lion's read and gold flashing through his mind before seeming to remember that he wore nothing. The Dragon was neither surprised nor amused by this fact, making Harry ask himself whether this Malfoy was real at all.
Untying his robes slowly, the Dragon (Malfoy, damnit!) left them hanging off his shoulders, hiding nothing but his arms and legs, the important (disgusting!) parts still on display. The skin where he reached out to touch it was softer than Harry expected, considering the roughness of the personality behind it. The Dragon tensed but despite his earlier warnings did not fight. A whimper was the only reaction given.
"Ssh," he soothed in a deceptively soft voice, sounding more disturbing than it did kind, but the Dragon (Malfoy, Malfoy, Malfoy!) didn't seem to notice at all. If anything the whimper became more of a moan. Harry's body, something Harry refused to believe belonged to him anymore, trailed it's fingers down Malfoy's torso, reaching his abdomen before Malfoy pulled away and fixed him with that smile-glare again.
"Don't shh me, Potter," Malfoy said, although there was no fight in his words. It was almost as bizarre as the rest of this - Voldemort couldn't possibly expect him to believe that he would seduce Malfoy, or that Malfoy would accept it if he did.
"I'll shh anyone I chose," Harry's voice replied. If Malfoy noticed the hint of thread behind it he didn't say, smiling seductively as his robe slipped further off his shoulder. Harry's eyes watched entranced as Malfoy lay on the only untouched pew, a small piece of order among the chaos of its companions. Harry's body walked slowly towards the thick wooden bench Malfoy had perched himself on. "You know you want this."
"I do," Malfoy replied in a voice as soft as Harry's had been. "Do you?" The question seemed to give Harry's body (Voldemort, it had to be Voldemort) a pause as it stopped for a moment, its head tilting and face contorting into confusion.
"Of course." Harry's voice replied calmly. "Why else would I be here?"
"You'd be here for anyone, Potter. That's what you do, you save people from people like the snake and her owner without another thought. But this is more than saving, isn't it, Potter? It's taking and it's me."
"Of course it would be you," Harry's voice crooned. "You and I...we fight because we hate, and what is love but that same intensity made obsession?"
Harry didn't know which part he was more disturbed by, that anyone could turn his hatred of Malfoy into love, or that anyone could have twisted a view of love in the first place. God, everything about this twisted situation disturbed him and if he didn't get some form of answer to the fucking riddle RIGHT NOW he was going to start screaming loud enough that even Voldemort's hold over him would not be enough to drown it out. He wanted OUT of this place, he wanted his hands to STOP crawling towards a smiling Malfoy and he wanted the insane old man in his head to LEAVE HIM THE FUCK AL-
The image in front of him shifted and refocused, answering the question of who had been in who's head. It had been glass he was watching, not a church, glass with a familiar inscription above it.
Erised.
The recognition came with a flood of rage as the owner of the eyes he was seeing through realised he had not been alone in his contemplation of the image. Harry felt the battering of Occlumency shields forcing himself out of his host, and into wakefulness, the darkness of his bedroom stifling in it's familiarity. He took a breath, then another, trying to remove the rotten stench of Voldemort's mind from his soul.
He shook his head, letting it fall against the hard wood of the bed's head board. Morning. In the morning he would tell Hermione to get them a list of churches that Voldemort may have visited as a child. Then he would forget that Tom Riddle's greatest wish was not to win, but to be Harry, loved and safe, innocent and apart from the evil he had poisoned his own soul with on his first murder. He would forget so he was able to kill. To acknowledge the man's humanity would render Harry's own greatest dream impossible, something Harry would not allow after all this time.
He could quell the part of him that remembered the dreams of innocence. His conscience would forgive him eventually.