Guiding Light || OC x Draco Malfoy

Chapter 14:

The few hours of sleep that I got overnight were luckily dreamless, but certainly not empty. The same 'visions' from earlier were much more pacifistic than before. My mind was replaying a scene that I had seen many times before. The stars of the night sky were painted on the inside of my eyelids, revolving around in my head. If I isolated individual constellations, they began to warp around, forming vaguely humanoid faces.

At first they were unfamiliar to me; just random cookie-cutter faces that you could find anywhere. What really started to upset me was when the faces began to morph into those that bore a haunting resemblance to the ones from my past. Eyes that had previously belonged to my sister, or dark hair that lay messily on heads that housed scars and green eyes. The ghosts of my past, I guess.

I shot up in my bed, no longer impeded by restraints, and tore the covers off of me to try and remedy the cold sweat that was seeping out of me. My body was shaking, and only partially because of the chills on my spine. My breathing was becoming rapid and it took all the power within me not to go full-on panic mode. I had no Draco here to help calm me, so I needed to fill that roll on my own for now. I screwed my eyes tight and tried to conjure up any memory of him.

I subconsciously began to rock back and forth on the top of my bed, my eyes still glued shut in focus. Snippets of our previous conversations were able to be dragged up from my memory, and even though none of the words coming from him would have been much help in any other situation like this, his nonsensical phrases did just the trick for my temporarily fractured thought process. Even just being able to see him right now was enough to settle my breathing to a tolerable level. Seeing his smile and the glint in his eyes disarmed me and I fell back limp on my pillows. His almost-spectral form followed my actions, laying in front of me and turning so that we were facing the same way.

When he raised a hand to brush my hair away, it dawned on me again that he wasn't really there. He was just a form of my imagination that was controlled by my mind, but everything he did felt so real to me. His movements were never things that he had done with me before, but it never felt like I was controlling him. He looked like the real deal, if not a little more pale, and the only real difference I could find was the fact that he couldn't touch me.

He was curled up to fit like a puzzle piece with my tensed and quaking body, and the genuine emotion I saw in him soothed my body into stillness, but also made me quiver in a brand new way. His gaze was strong as it ensnared my eyes, and it managed to maintain that level of dare-I-say intimacy as he leaned in to me. My breath hitched with expectation, but I was, unsurprisingly, let down.

His forehand pressed against mine as he enveloped me in his arms. Rather, he would have done those things, permitting he were actually here with me. That aside, the emotional weight of everything he was doing was enough to compensate for the lack of actual weight on his part. His arms stayed around me, helping to provide me with ghostly warmth in the absence of my blankets. My breathing had slowed to a normal pace, if not slow for that, even.

My heart, however, seemed to have no intention in slowing down. It was pounding against my ribcage, the actions being mimicked by my brain and skull. I had opened my eyes, but he was still fuzzy at best. His features that were engraved in my memory were washing away into nothing on the face of the form in front of me. The arms around my hips were fading to black and disappearing into the crushing darkness of my room.

As all of his body dissipated, the calming aura he was washing me with never ceased. It was only now that I realized how crushingly dark it was in my tiny little room. There were no windows here, and the air-tight seal on the door panel made it nearly impossible to get light in from the hallway outside. Holding my hand not 5 inches away from my face, it was impossible to see, not even the outline. I took deep, rattling breaths as I settled the last of my nerves. I put my hands over my chest to feel the pulsations of my heart beneath my chest. I let the steady rhythm alost consume me and it filled my ears. I focused all of my energy onto filling the room with light, as the darkness felt like it was driving me mad.