Draco Veritas

Chapter Eleven: The Hostility of Dreams

Young men late in the night

Toss on their beds,
Their pillows do not comfort

Their uneasy heads,

The lot that decides their fate

Is cast to-morrow,
One must depart and face

Danger and sorrow.

Clouds and lions stand

Before him dangerous,
And the hostility of dreams.

Then let him honor us,
Lets he should be ashamed

In the hour of crisis:
In the valley of corrosion

Tarnish his brightness.

–WH Auden.

***

Oh, it was strange to be alive again, and in possession of all those accoutrements of physical existence: eyes and mouth and limbs that moved, a heart that beat and veins that coursed with blood. When he first tried to stand up, amid the torn bits of paper, the smell of electrical energy as strong in the room as smoke after a fire, his legs buckled under him. The second time, however, they worked fine. He stood up, and went over to the mirror.

Tom saw himself, and was pleased. He had not expected the opportunity to take this body, but when it had presented itself his decision had been immediate. He did not regret it now. It was a fine body, in excellent shape, well-made and elegantly put together. It would do for as long as he needed it.

He glanced around the room curiously. The diary was ruined. This did not bother him. Having been released from it, he had no more use for it. Blood and tears had brought him out of its ruined pages. Blood and tears and something else. He faintly remembered a voice, whispering to him, I hate you Tom, I hate you, I hate you.

Tom did not mind being hated. Hatred was a useful emotion, as strong as love in its way, and as powerful a force.

Tom looked more closely at himself in the mirror. A slender, strong body, not unlike the body he'd had himself at seventeen. Arms lightly downed with gold, wheat-flax hair, a choirboy face, blue eyes like bits torn out of a midsummer sky. Something glittered around his throat—Seamus' skin was pale from winter, but in the summer it would tan, a shade only slightly paler gold than his hair, although if he was not careful it would burn.

Tom knew this, and his mouth curled: he could not have said how he knew it, but he did. It was not his own memory, not organic to himself. It was Seamus'. He knew it the way he knew that Seamus Finnigan was seventeen years old, that he came from a small Irish town called Glyn Caryn, that he loved his parents, that he was a Gryffindor seventh year student with a sweet open nature and an uncomplicated mind. Tom loathed him immediately. Riffling through his thoughts was like wading through syrup. Boring syrup. Seamus liked Quidditch. He was fond of Herbology class. He kept a stack of comic books on the table next to his bed. He didn't like lending them out, unless it was to Harry, who always took good care of things...

Tom saw his own eyes flash in the mirror. Now this was interesting. He tapped harder at Seamus' memories, trying to pull up what he knew of Harry Potter. Tom's own memories were incomplete, confusing. He remembered a small boy with tangled black hair facing him over Ginny Weasley's crumpled body. He remembered his basilisk's hiss and the same boy covered in blood, crumpled and dying at the foot of the Chamber wall. And Tom knew that the boy had not died after all, and that he hated him, but not precisely why.

Tom turned away from the mirror, still concentrating. Seamus' thoughts were like a stack of randomly arranged photographs that fluttered by quickly—images would appear and disappear, with no apparent importance attached to their order or progress.