Nightmares and Nocturnes

The Night Girl

Nightmares and Nocturnes

Summary: A story per night to save her life. Dramione, dystopian post-war AU.

Disclaimer: I do not own these characters and claim no profit from this work. Credit to Joanne Rowling.

A/N: This is my second Dramione AU (after my This World or Any Other series) and takes place in a separate storyverse. It stands alone from my other work.

The premise is based on the legendary Scheherazade from One Thousand and One Nights and will have numerous other fairytales woven throughout. The story begins seven years after the Battle of Hogwarts, and as will become clear over time, Voldemort has won. The first chapter is by far the darkest, and as a warning, it contains references to psychological torture. However, it will get better from here.

As always, I hope you find the story interesting, and look forward to starting a new journey with you.

Post-submission edit, December 2020: While this fic was originally written July 2016-August 2017, the volume of my fics recently reposted to Wattpad without my permission has led me to believe it would be easiest to just make my stories available here. I am not making any changes, and I'm leaving in all my original author's notes. They are probably embarrassing... ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ it is what it is. Enjoy!

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PART I: NIGHTMARES

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Chapter 1: The Night Girl

She tried to lift her head from the ground but couldn't; her mind had long since lost command over her movements, and it seemed that even muscle memory could sometimes fail. She let her eyes open and close slowly, feeling her chest creak as it expanded and contracted, wondering why it still did.

At one point, she had been keeping track of the days. At one point she had been convinced that her current state of being was only temporary, that surely no twisted fate could have seen fit to punish her with this.

And this, whatever it was, had to amount to madness, really. She could identify that, somehow, mustering only the clarity necessary to diagnose herself as though the tiny, nearly inconsequential sliver that remained of her sanity, the piece of her that had managed to evade the slow destruction of her captivity, were taunting her from within; it whispered to her about how far she'd gone, how monumentally distanced she'd become from what she once was. It reminded her of her catastrophic failures and her imagined terrors, every single one of them amounting to both wretchedly true and spectacularly false, trapping her in a state of paralyzing stupefaction for her harrowing lack of proof. She had been heralded for her mind only to have it turn on her, to find herself engulfed by its desolation.

She had once been keeping track of her own capture, letting her nails grow savagely unkempt so as to carve a shallow line for each day that passed into the rotting wood of the floor beneath her, only to realize with the last of her lucidity that her captors were taunting her, changing their patterns and shifting her meals so as to take ownership over even her concept of time.

It was to be her last possession.

Then she became disjointed and unsettled, biting her nails until her cuticles bled, and the tiny lines that railed against the grain of the wood began to change shape and mock her, taking the form of her fears; she steadily unclenched her grip on reality, losing herself with every passing moment that the diminutive, linear army battled relentlessly against her soul.