Drarry One Shots

A Lament for Lost Souls

A/N A short one (for me).

All Draco wanted in life was to sleep. To sleep fitfully and deeply and without dreams or nightmares. He wanted to sink into his familiar bed at Hogwarts and disappear into oblivion. Instead, he faced the unaccustomed, neutrally-cream curtains and canopies around his new bed and listened to unfamiliar rustles and breaths in his shared year-eight boys' dormitory room. And he was aware of the familiar, soundless stasis from the bed opposite his.

Draco dreaded the nights because he knew what came next...

All he wanted in life was to sleep. No overwhelming insomnious thoughts of guilt or bullies or mad aunts. No nightmares about snakes or werewolves or pale, creeping men with deathly wands. No dreams about Harry Potter.

The dreams were as bad as the nightmares. Dreams that started normally enough but slowly merged into one omnific landscape dominated by rich greens—so stable, and safe, and filled with hope—so dark, and ambitious, and unknown... And slowly the greens would change like a kaleidoscope. He came to expect it, almost anticipate it. Hope for it. The greens would darken and become flecked with amber, like the dance of sunlight on late-summer leaves. And out of the viridian sea would emerge a familiar pair of eyes. Dangerous forest-green eyes that watched him knowingly and understood him; piercing emerald eyes that penetrated his mind and saved him from his thoughts; enticing moss green eyes that he wanted to drown in. He felt like he could never escape. He felt like he never wanted to escape. Sometimes he didn't want to wake from those dreams. He just wanted to comprehend their meaning. There was something there that left him puzzling, left him wanting to grasp their meaning, to know more, fall deeper. And when he awoke, he always felt like he'd left a part of himself behind.

And in the morning... every morning... he'd have to face the glances from the green-eyed boy who saw too much but never said a word about what troubled his mind behind the furrowed brow that carried a lightning-bolt shaped scar.

If his nights were filled with the colour green, his days were filled with words. Not Harry Potter's words – he remained mute on that front. And never his own, his words were silenced and lost in the wilderness of harsh gritstone corridors and lofty imposing towers. Instead, his days were overfilled with the words of others. The hollow words of teachers telling him useless information. The superficial words in the white pages of books forever tainted by bruising ink. The empty words of his parents, pleading their regret in their worthless letters. The brash words of students swirling around him in a wall of merging, senseless sound. Amongst it all he could hear the taunts and name-calling. Those who wanted to preach to him about the purposelessness of the tainting Dark Mark, the cruelty of Voldemort's murderous campaign, the meaninglessness of his father's views on blood supremacy, the inadequacy of inbred beliefs he'd long since discarded. As if he didn't know those things! There was no point in telling them that though. And honestly, who, apart from his father, gave a fuck about such things? Really? Who gave an actual fuck? It was meaningless, cruel, purposeless, and inadequate. It was many more things too. All of it. That was blindingly obvious now. How he hated those associations that would forever be tied to his name. How he hated to be reminded of the spiteful words he used to spout and parrot and not truly understand. Yes, he'd submitted to the fact that the words 'Mudblood', 'Half-Blood', and 'Blood-traitor' held more currency than his so-called precious Pureblood heritage that stretched back for a millennium. And hadn't that been proven by the Golden Trio, the heroes, the saviours. But those people who scorned him would never believe him if he told them that... so he kept quiet, his guilt enclosing him like a cage.

If he longed for sleep during the night, then he longed for silence during the day.

He found a table in the library, hidden in its depths, a new alcove by a small window, tucked away in the labyrinth of shelves, behind towers of books, and smothered in darkness. There, everything was stifled by the muffling vanilla smell of old heavy books and layer upon layer of ancient ink laid down in previous centuries. The window caught the evening sun and slices of colour were cast across the table by a stained-glass image of an ancient House-Elf holding a lily and a book. Draco thought he looked remarkably like Dobby and that gave him comfort. He liked his table, he liked to think it was there just for him with his old Dobby looking after him in the muted darkness. It was as if the library had created a sanctuary for him away from the joyous laughter of children that haunted the oppressive grey corridors of the school. He wanted some of that laughter too but how was he to find it? It seemed beyond his grasp, a distant ephemeral ghost of a memory as if his body could remember but couldn't find the tangible link to make it happen again.