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birdsofshoreTitle: Riches Ready to Drop Upon Me
Summary: During the nights that follow his trial, Draco dreams as never before.
Rating: PG-13
Word count: ~1400
Author's note: This is a little thank you for the lovely ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif){kind=small}
omi_ohmy, for her efforts with my Smoochfic. I've had a nagging desire to do something to sort out my feelings about this out-take of Draco throwing Harry his wand, ever since I saw it, and then thinking about some of my favourite parts of The Tempest this week made the rest of it fall into place. I hope you like it, Omi, despite the essential daftness of the premise. (Also, sorry I didn't let you beta it first, but I wanted it to be a surprise. I bet you are itching to put all the dodgy bits right :D)
“Be not afeard; the isle is full of noises,
Sounds, and sweet airs, that give delight and hurt not.
Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments
Will hum about mine ears; and sometime voices
That, if I then had waked after long sleep,
Will make me sleep again; and then in dreaming,
The clouds methought would open, and show riches
Ready to drop upon me, that when I waked
I cried to dream again.”
-The Tempest, Act III, Scene II
Riches Ready to Drop Upon Me
During the nights that follow his trial, Draco dreams as never before. His body lies blamelessly, resting exhausted between freshly-laundered cotton sheets, while his mind adventures to scenes so preposterous that, on waking, he can hardly believe his own nerve.
The first time it happens, he wakes up drenched in a clammy sweat. He dreamt he had walked into the middle of a pack of werewolves; on waking he can still smell them and hear their chilling howls. Potter had stood with him and kissed him; they had clung together, clasping one another as if they could hardly bear to be separate people. Now, his heart is thumping and he sits up wide-eyed, his fists crumpling the bedclothes.
It's hardly the first time he's dreamt of an inappropriate dalliance – isn't the first time he's ever dreamt of Potter that way, if truth be told. He doubts he's alone there; hundreds probably paw the Saviour nightly with their grubby thoughts, but this seems... different, somehow. It has the clarity and conviction of a past life remembered, or a Seer's vision of what will come to pass, rather than the muddled, unsatisfying tales his unconscious usually presents him with. It feels like he is simultaneously experiencing every second of it, and at the same time watching himself, with the sharp definition of a Pensieve memory.
The next night, when he drifts off, it's to find himself working as a Curse-Breaker in the attic of Potter's house. He and Potter are all smouldering glances and flirtatious, snarky banter. He shivers with pleasure to feel Potter's eyes resting hotly upon him. They don't go to bed, but he can tell that they will.
As two nights become three, then four, five, six, he isn't sure how he feels about the dreams. At first they seem like a gift – something to distract him from the grim truth of his post-war life. An alternate reality to escape into. But as they continue, he wonders if they aren't actually a ghastly form of punishment.
He sees himself as a Healer, an Auror, a Hogwarts professor, working in a Muggle coffee shop, the conductor of a choir - the conductor of the Knight Bus, for god's sake! He sees himself best friends with that crazy Lovegood girl. Living in America. Adopting a child. He sees himself... happy. Loved. In love. And always Potter, Potter, bloody, bloody, bloody, Potter.
Every detail is so lucid, so real. On one occasion he feels the mud beneath him, his knees grumbling slightly, as an older version of himself fucks Potter in a vegetable garden by the light of the moon. He remembers the mole on Potter's shoulder, and the silver streaking through his black hair, as clearly as if he had been right there in Draco's bed with him. Another night, he is trapped in a lift with Potter and he wakes with the claustrophobic sweat still on his brow, the taste of Potter still on his lips.
Some of these situations make him want to snort, and sometimes he does – Greg Goyle as a poet, for Merlin's sake? He has a good laugh over that one. After a different dream, he sits up with a horrified jolt at the very idea of himself pregnant with another man's child. But other times, the masquerades are so sublime, the endings so spell-bindingly perfect, that he buries his face in the pillow on waking, as if to search out the last crumbs of the dream which might be hidden there. Those days are the hardest. To come fresh from the warmth of his arms, to bask in the love-light shining in those startling green eyes, and then to awake to the drudging misery of another day as the disgraced Death Eater, that dreadful Malfoy boy, is a bitter draught indeed.
“Harry,” he whispers into the pillow like a mantra, his lips dry and breath shaky. “Oh, Harry.” He knows he is a fool, a child, to cry for impossible things, but it is hard not to, when his days are so barren and his nights are full of such riches. On days like these he will lose the thread of conversations around him, letting his mind wander to recall the feeling of being held, cherished, understood, of knowing passion and desire, of many things he had never dared to dream of while awake. He surfaces, as if from underwater, to find his mother stroking his hair, her forehead creased with concern. It is hard to dredge up a smile for her when his body is aching with loss and longing, but he does it.
The dreams go on and on, every one different, every one making him feel things. One night he will wake still burning with a biting hunger for Potter, achingly hard and desperate to plunder his body in every way possible, while the next might bring an even more painful and ardent yearning of a purely romantic nature. He expects there to be some order to them, some progression, but no. He goes from being in his forties, to back at Hogwarts, barely more than a boy. Once he dreams that there are letters under his Dark Mark, the meaning of which he can only guess at; once he dreams he and Potter are magically bonded by a mysterious invisible force; once he dreams he can hear Potter's every thought inside his head and Potter can hear his. Potter is there, by his side, under his skin, seemingly inside his soul. Several times he dreams he is married to a woman and has a child, a son, with her. Potter is still there, with his bloody irritating hair and his idiot's clothes and his addictive smile, making Draco's heart leap, making him want so badly. Making him want too much.
The most terrible ones of all, the ones that make his eyes screw up and his body cramp with shame the next day, are the ones where he himself becomes the hero. Where instead of trying to kill Dumbledore, he carries out a daring rescue to save him. Or, he carries the Dark Lord's secrets to Potter, and gives him the crucial knowledge he needs to gain victory. The most vivid and shivery-strange of these is the one where, instead of Potter going to duel Voldemort prepared with Draco's seized wand, Potter ends up facing Voldemort wandless and unprotected. Draco sees himself breaking ranks with the massed Death Eaters, hears the shocked gasps around him, his feet ringing out on the cobblestones, his desperate shout of “Potter!” as he flings the hawthorn wand wildly to their Saviour.
Why he dreams of this happening out of doors, rather than in the Great Hall, he has no clue. All he knows is that after Voldemort's dream-defeat, he is lauded, toasted; a little of Harry's glory shines on him, and it is like turning to feel the sun on his face, after being locked in a windowless room for years. On waking from this particular scene, he sheds stinging tears, self-loathing and regret churning within him. The worst of it is the realisation that even more than Potter's love, he craves Potter's respect, and that part of him possibly always has done.
Real life starts to recede a little; ordinary events seem flat and grey compared to the fantastical scenarios of the night. At breakfast one morning he stares blankly into his tea cup, more than half of his mind still romping with Potter in the Room of Requirement, dressed in something it makes him blush to remember. He hardly acknowledges the unfamilar owl tapping at the window and leaves it to his mother to rise and let the bird in.
“Draco! What's wrong? You're so pale again this morning. Aren't you going to read your post?”
Draco fumbles with the parchment, thinking that it is the exact shade of the delicate skin of Potter's throat which he mouthed so tenderly last night. It occurs to him that perhaps he has been Cursed. Perhaps someone has sent these dreams to drive him mad, some kind of vigilante, who thinks he and his mother got off lightly...
“Draco? Draco, darling, what on earth is it?”
His hands tremble as he rereads the words, which seem, at first, to still be part of his dream.
“Dear Malfoy,
I wonder whether we could meet up some time. I don't really know how to say this, so I'll just come right out with it: I've been having the strangest dreams recently....”
no subject
Date: 2013-05-06 10:04 am (UTC)