The Dream Trilogy Book One: To Dwell On Dreams (A Harry Potter FanFiction)

Chapter Seven

Chapter Seven

It was a trick. It had to be, some sort of devious ploy dreamed up Voldemort. Harry scrambled backwards up the bed he'd woken up in, panic and horror surging through him. The woman who looked like his mother regarded him in shock. 

"Who the HELL are you!" he cried, eyes darting wildly to try and spy his wand, but it was nowhere to be seen in this foreign bedroom.  

"Harry," exclaimed the woman, reaching out to him. It was like they'd taken the images he knew so well from his photo album of Lily Potter in her teens and twenties, and added fifteen years. "Calm down, it's okay!" 

But Harry recoiled, tumbling out of the bed and darting up against the wall under the window. "Who are you?" Harry demanded again. "Where am I?" 

The woman, who he refused to think of as his mother, had jumped to her feet and looked stricken. She pulled out a wand, and conjured a patronus in the shape of a doe. "Get James," she told it, her voice breathy and tight. "I think something's really wrong with Harry, I think he may have been compromised." 

The doe nodded and spun on its heels, slipping through the solid wall like a ghost. 

Harry's eyes flicked between the woman and where the patronus had vanished. "J-James?" he repeated. "Get James?" He managed to fumble to his feet, his back to the wall, the coldness from the window pane hitting his clothes and skin. "Oh, that's, that's just sick!" He couldn't focus on anything, and his right hand kept flexing and twitching, reaching for the wand that wasn't there. Someone had put him in pyjamas, so there were no pockets to even search. 

Suddenly he stopped, his attention finally caught on something for more than a second. The pyjamas - they fitted. They had not belonged to Dudley, or anyone else as far as he could see. They really fitted him, and they had little golden snitches on. This detail was so bizarre he found it holding his gaze as the woman moved closer to him. 

"Harry," she said, holding up her hands. His attention refocused and he jerked his head back up to look at her, flinching away from her reach. "It's me, it's mum, you're home." 

"Get away from me!" warned Harry, and without his wand did the only thing he could think of, and raised his fists. She looked at him dubiously. 

"You're going to hit me?" she asked wryly.  

She looked like the woman Harry had always imagined his mother to be, and yet not. Her hair had a few streaks of grey, her face delicate crinkles around the eyes. Her frame was a little broader and she looked tired. Magical photos moved, so he felt he could say with some confidence that all these things were built upon something familiar. But her voice...the only time he'd heard her speak was in the echoes of her death, when the Dementors had got too near to him. Was this what Lily Potter sounded like? 

He shook himself, and looked at his fists. He wasn't sure he really wanted to hit her, but his brain was buzzing. What was this, what was he seeing? Could he trust his own eyes? 

"Where's my wand?" he shouted, trying to regain some control over the situation. "My clothes? Where am I?" 

The woman didn't budge, and they remained in their stand off for a moment as she bit her lip and frowned intensely at him. 

"Harry," she asked slowly. "What do you remember?" 

Harry could feel his heart thumping at a million miles an hour. "Uh," he said, blinking and trying to get a hold of his senses. What did he remember? "I was sleeping, someone was talking to me." Was that true though? He wasn't entirely sure. Before that, where had he been before? Why was it so hard to remember?