ivyblossom | Dream Eater

Title: Dream Eater
Rating: PG
Pairing: sort of H/D, but none really.
summary: Draco finds a potion that lets him do things he really shouldn't be doing.
A/N: thanks to

joyouschild for talking me through this. But no one can be blamed for the bad beta. I couldn't find anyone to go over it. Figures. Where are you,

bonibaru? Would you have let me get away with that ending?

Dream Eater

Draco Malfoy has found a most interesting potion. Moste Potente Potions lists only the legal ones, the ones everyone tries. The ones they end up learning about in class at one point or other. The one he found is listed in a book with the title page ripped off and stuffed into the back of his father's library, hidden behind a stack of books on necromancy. Half of it is written in a language Draco can't read, but the recipe for the potion is written in English.

It is very simple to make.

He takes the potion at night, when everyone else is sleeping. It makes him feel light, transparent; like a ghost. He leaves his body behind floats around the school. In this state all the walls are transparent, and no door or lock can keep him out. The portraits that guard the entrances to the dormitories don't see him pass by, because he's not really there; he's an astral projection, a wandering soul, his own imagination disentangled from his body and sniffing around. He feels a kind of strange clarity like this. He can focus on anything, anyone, and see them in such intimate detail. When he drinks the potion Draco can see other people's dreams.

At least, that's what the first variation does. After a week or so Draco gets accustomed to the strange landscape of other people's dreams; weird skies and heads with no faces, broken floors, cracks in the walls that opened up into rooms full of blood, underground chambers, or icy nights in the snow. Crabbe showing up late for Transfiguration, only to find that they have a test he didn't study for; Goyle running through long corridors from some invisible terror that is hiding in a potted plant; Pansy counting polished stones in a room filled with polished stones that fall from her mouth.

The second variation of the potion lets Draco participate.

"I didn't do it," Millicent says, staring at Draco. She's terrified, clutching at her sheets, drawing them around her naked body. "You're here to take me back to them, aren't you? I won't go."

Sometimes Draco plays along, calling forth demons of all description. "Yes," he said. "We know you did it. The blood is all over your hands." When Millicent looks down, the sheet she's wearing is covered with blood, it's dripping down her legs and into a puddle on the floor. But the more he plays along the more likely it is that they will wake up. Being in someone's interrupted dream is like falling from a great height; a strange, disconcerting event that leaves Draco's unleashed imagination in a vacuum. After a few days he realizes that he needs to let his hosts construct their own dreams. He can only act as a visitor, as a player.

The first time he wanders into Harry Potter's dreams, Harry is having a nightmare. He's tied to a tombstone and there is a fire in front of him, with Cedric Diggory's body spitted over top of it. There is a strange looking man standing next to it, turning the spit and basting the body with a brush. The eerie part comes when Draco realizes that Cedric is still alive.

"Don't eat him," Harry says, looking at Draco. "You can't be a Hufflepuff."

"You're right," Draco says. He's not sure what else to say.

During the day he says nothing about any of this. No one seems to know what he's doing, and he's not sure they even remember. So he makes it his rule; he won't ever talk about it, he won't ever admit to what he's seen. The dreams are part of his other life, his half-asleep, transparent ghost life. He comes to love their dreams, their dream selves. They are always on the offensive there, always waiting for the other shoe to drop. They construct realities for themselves, create a logic that makes no sense, they confuse themselves and cry. He likes them like this, even the Gyffindors, even the Hufflepuffs. He likes them vulnerable and hopeless.

After a couple of months there is almost nothing he hasn't seen. Cho Chang naked with her hand between her legs through her Defense Against the Dark Arts class; Luna Lovegood with snakes for arms; Hermione Granger eating pencils and spitting out the lead.

"They're good for my hair," she says to him. "Don't laugh at me."

Within a month Draco finds that he can't go more than a couple of days without taking the potion. He thinks there's something addictive in the ingredients, but he doesn't care. It's only an hour or two out of his nights, and he feels rejuvenated by the things he sees. When he takes the potion something inside him heaves a sigh of relief. The dreams feel like food, like water when he's dying of thirst.

Once in a while he tries to find his father's dreams, but he thinks that maybe they're not allowed to dream at Azkaban.

Harry Potter has a lot of nightmares, and Draco sits through most of them. Being chased, being caught, being killed. Once in a while he turns into his own killer, slaughtering himself slowly with a piece of bone, or a knife, or just by unstringing himself like a loose sweater. He pulls at a bit of his face and he comes undone.

"Here," he said once, holding out a bit of yarn-skin, "Pull. You want too. Pull." Draco takes the yarn and wraps it back around Harry's neck like a scarf.

"You'll get cold," Draco says.

He's never seen Harry have any good dreams, any normal dreams. His friend Ron dreams about winning the Quidditch cup in a million different ways, and Draco gets bored. His sister dreams about dark places, being invisible, having her head cut off, and turning into a portrait. Hermione's hair gets bigger and bigger as he approaches in her dreams, as if her hair will protect her from him.

"Don't call me that," she says, tears streaming down her face. "I hate it when you call me that."

"Call you what?" he asks.

"Stupid," she says, sobbing. "Don't call me stupid. I'm not stupid. Just because I'm Muggle-born doesn't make me stupid."

"I've never called you stupid," he says.

"But you're always about to."

Before long comes back to Harry, because Harry is always in the process of dying in some interesting way. This time he's standing among a room full of plaster busts, all serious-looking statues glaring at Harry and turning to glare at Draco too. Harry is standing still, dressed in plaster-white.

"Are you a killer or a victim today?" Draco asks.

"Both," he says.

"Who are you going to kill?"

"You." Harry blinks and looks down at his hands.

"Why?" Draco is standing right in front of Harry, so used to him he doesn't even feel any fear. He doesn't know what the penalty is for getting killed in someone else's dream; does he get thrown out, like when someone wake up? Or does he really die, still high on the potion and twitching in his bed? The calmness of his transparency overwhelms him. He puts his hand on Harry's plastery shoulder.

Harry leans forward and kisses him on the lips. "There. You're dead," he says.

Draco finds it odd that Harry's lips are still warm in the dream. He looks plastered over, like a statue of himself. It's creeping up from the floor, turning his legs into a pillar and his chest is edging outward like the sawed-off bottoms of the busts around them. His face is turning white, his fingers freezing into place, curled into each other in a nervous clench.

"No," Draco says.

He kisses Harry until his lips turn into plaster, until Harry another bust on a chipped pillar. "I killed you," Draco says. "I'm sorry." Harry's plaster eyes glaze over and go blank, and Draco is vaulted out of Harry's dream and into the void. Draco feels cold and alone outside the dreams.

The next night he finds Hermione sitting at a desk, her hair tied back but still growing in his presence.

"How do you get here?" she asks.

"I don't know," he lies.

"It's a potion, isn't it," She says. She opens up a book and flips to the middle. The pages are blank until she draws her finger across them. Words spill out and crawl across the page like ants. "You're spying on us."

"No," he says. "I love you."

She slams the book and her hair bursts out of its ribbon, growing so large and so fast that it pushes him out of her dream.

Draco decides not to drink the potion anymore. It's painful and his hands shake, but he's too afraid of getting caught. He sits in class with his hands balled into fists, looking straight ahead and not talking to anyone. Just before bed is the hardest time; he looks at his vial and his ingredients and licks his lips. He takes sedatives instead and tries to feed on his own dreams.

He wakes up hungry and with a parched throat.

Current Mood: anxious
Current Music: Choir of King's College: The Holly and the Ivy

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From:

tocomfortyou.livejournal.com

Good lord! Dream sequences are my least favorite plot contrivances, but you managed to construct an entire story of them and keep it interesting. This is haunting and almost mythological in feel, and not a little terrifying. Impressive!

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