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Sleepless	By : Lomonaaeren Category: Harry Potter > Slash - Male/Male > Harry/Draco Views: 16095 -:- Recommendations : 1 -:- Currently Reading : 1
Disclaimer: I do not own Harry Potter and I am not making any money from this story.

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Chapter Sixteen—Epiphany

            “Everything’s starting to work out, isn’t it?”

            Harry folded the Daily Prophet, which was carrying the second of the stories Rita Skeeter had written that asked questions about the Malfoy trial, and smiled at Draco. Draco was leaning forwards on the opposite side of the table, his eyes so bright that it made Harry want to shelter him, so he would never have cause to look sour or disappointed. “Yes,” Harry admitted. “I think Discipula has to at least be turning over strategies in her mind for fighting us now.”

            “She will find them.” That was Narcissa, speaking quietly across the remnants of a lunch of dry sandwiches. “She is canny, and has never had the instincts that make someone lash out in protection of power.”

            Harry kept his smile on his face as he turned to look at her, but it was with an effort. She could have said something about this before if she really understood Discipula, he thought. “Have you known her long, Mrs. Malfoy?”

            As she tended to do when faced with a direct question, Narcissa closed up, and a lovely statue might have been sitting there. “I have known of her for years,” she said. “She has been steadily gaining power in the Ministry, winning more of a foothold there.”

            Which is nothing more than what Draco told me already, Harry thought with a sigh. He was half-wishing now that he had had the chance to learn more about Discipula before he took the job defending the Malfoys. He had Hermione hunting, but she might change her mind about acting against her employer, or she might not get back to him soon.

            “Is there anyone who would know more?” he asked. “About details of her past, her weaknesses, the reasons for her grudge against you?”

            “She has survived by being transparent,” Lucius intruded smoothly. “Her past is a matter of public record. I hardly think you will discover a Death Eater’s robes in her closet.”

            “Then tell me more about her,” Harry snapped, turning to look at him. “It seems as though no one knows anything even though she hasn’t made an attempt to conceal it! Give me details. What does she like to do? Who are her allies? Does she have a reason that could be rooted in that past for hating you? That’s the kind of thing I need to know, and what no one can tell me!”

            Draco leaned in and put a tentative hand on his arm. “Harry,” he murmured. Harry liked the way he said the name, deliberately calm and soothing but also with a twist on the last syllable that Harry hadn’t ever heard before. “I’m sure my father doesn’t mean anything by it. We don’t know much because there’s not much to know. She’s made her career as an anonymous public servant. We all know whose daughter she is, but her parents are dead. She doesn’t have any siblings. She makes allies in the same way that any politician does, using certain people when she’s interested in certain causes and then breaking away when they turn on her or those causes are less important. I don’t know of any prominent ones that she has right now. Then again, she’s allied with the Boy-Who-Lived, so I don’t think that matters.” His voice turned wistful. “I wish the Boy-Who-Lived in this universe had been you.”

            Harry gave him a painful smile, and squeezed his hand. “I wouldn’t be sitting here if he was,” he answered. “I can’t imagine he would have let this happen.”

            Lucius’s voice struck out, bright with scorn. “You imagine that he would have concerned himself with the Malfoys? He would have been like you, a hero, and heroes traditionally have a very poor track record of associating with pure-blood families.”

            “He would have cared about justice,” Harry said. It was true that he didn’t know what his other-universe self would have been like, since he didn’t even know if his parents had been the same kind of people here, but it was just as likely he would have been good as evil. “He would have seen that it was done, and he would have been more independent than Longbottom is of Discipula.” He paused. “Do you think it’s worth approaching him? Longbottom?”

            Lucius snorted. “It is true that he has no pure-blood prejudice against us,” he said. “As he has no particular cause or concern that he is dedicated to, now that he has brought down the Dark Lord.” Harry gave him a particular glance, but if this Lucius mourned Voldemort’s fall, there was no sign of it in his face. “He is a man of many negative qualities. I cannot think of one positive virtue he contains for himself.”

            Harry glanced at Draco. Draco nodded—reluctantly, Harry thought, but more because he didn’t want to agree with his father than because he was going to defend this version of Neville.

            “I knew him in school,” Draco said. “That’s what he was like. Not evil, not cruel, not intelligent, not stupid, not good or bad at Quidditch, not especially heroic—except when he actually met the Dark Lord—or cowardly. Just in the middle. Average, all around.”

            Harry shifted in his seat. He couldn’t help wondering if this version of the Boy-Who-Lived was the one he should have aspired to be. He had said many times that he didn’t want to be special, that he wanted to be Just Harry, but he had gone out for a place on his House Quidditch team and leaped unhesitatingly to the rescue many times. That didn’t really make him average.

            You did it again, when you volunteered to defend the Malfoys, said a voice in his head that sounded like, well, Malfoy’s. You can deny that you want to be a hero, but your behavior doesn’t support that conclusion.

            Harry sighed in irritation. He would get nowhere by worrying about this. He had to deal with the realities of the dream world, not what lay inside his own head. “All right. Forget Longbottom. I want to wait and see how Discipula reacts to this article, but I am going to start calling in the witnesses.” Woburn had promised to be available when Harry needed him as a character witness, even giving him a Floo address that should work. Maybe, if he was in the mood. “Is that acceptable?”

            Narcissa and Lucius both sat like statues again. Draco shot them a timid glance, then realized that he would have to be the one making the decision and licked his lips. “Yeah,” he said a moment later, his voice wavering but strengthening as he looked into Harry’s eyes. “It is.”

            Harry smiled, overcome by the impulse to kiss Draco in front of everyone. Draco’s eyes widened in excitement, as if he had caught the idea. Then he flushed, apparently not knowing whether he wanted that to happen or not.

            Harry kept his fingers from curling into Draco’s robe and hauling him forwards by the slimmest of margins. He sat back and cleared his throat instead, glancing at the elder Malfoys just in case they had anything to add. But they remained there, and Harry turned around, reaching for the ink and parchment he always brought with him now. He had letters to write to McGonagall and Wellworth.

*

            “Harry Potter, wake up this instant.”

            Harry’s first instinct was to be alarmed that someone was calling him Potter rather than Evans, especially since the voice didn’t sound like any of the Malfoys’. But when he opened his eyes, light slammed into them, and then he understood where he was and winced. He sat up, turning his head on instinct so that he could avoid meeting Hermione’s gaze.

            “What’s got into you?” Hermione spoke quietly. That was the worst of it. When she was really angry, Harry thought in resignation, she never raised her voice. He thought she had read books that told her how to do that on purpose, so she would be more intimidating. “You send Malfoy off in a snit, you make Ron sound as if he’s going to splutter himself to death, and you’re asleep in the middle of the day. Why is this happening, Harry?”

            “I was tired,” Harry said, and sat up, rubbing his eyes and hoping that he could make a convincing story out of this. He suspected it would depend on what Ron had said earlier and whether he had been moaning anybody’s name. “I came home because there was nothing to do in the office and I had to get that book of Quidditch addresses for Malfoy, and—”

            “Bollocks!” Hermione flung the book she was holding to the floor, shutting Harry up in sheer surprise. He had never seen her treat books that way, even ones she disagreed with. “It’s more than that. It’s these dreams, isn’t it? Why are they so important? Why are you trying so hard to protect them?’

            Harry tensed in spite of himself, but shook his head. “I don’t know what you’re talking about, Hermione,” he said. “How can you protect a dream?”

            “You can try to prevent it from coming to the attention of someone who would do something about it,” Hermione said darkly, and drew her wand.

            Harry scrambled backwards across his bed so that he could reach his glasses and his own wand. Hermione paused, shaking her head mournfully at him. “See? You think I’m going to hurt you,” she muttered. “I know that you would never think that on your own. These dreams are having some sort of effect on your mind.”

            “Malfoy already consulted dream experts because he was worried about that,” Harry said rashly, deciding that now was the time to plunge ahead, stun Hermione with lots of information, and hopefully escape the consequences for lying. “They all said that my dreams didn’t sound dangerous.”

            Hermione’s eyes narrowed. “You gave him a detailed description of the dreams? Why didn’t you do the same thing for me and Ron?’

            Harry opened his mouth, and then shut it. “Because I was afraid that you would be an interfering busybody and take the people in my head away from me” didn’t sound like a very rational explanation, when he thought about it, and certainly not one that Hermione would readily accept.

            “Harry?” Hermione sat down on the chair next to his bed and stared at him with what he could clearly see was worry in her eyes, now that he had his glasses on. “I’m waiting.”

            Harry winced and tugged his fingers through his hair. He reckoned he was fairly caught, and it would be best to be honest now, so that Hermione wouldn’t accuse him later of not having been that way. He didn’t want to damage his friendship with her and Ron, not really. And when he thought about it, he was even feeling a bit guilty for the way that he had stormed and shouted and ordered Malfoy out of the house earlier.

            “All right, fine,” he said softly. “I’ve been dreaming of a complete, coherent alternate universe, where I’m the barrister for the Malfoys. They’ve been accused of being Death Eaters, but no one else wants to defend them.” He gave her a quick glance; at least her eyes were wide with fascination, and she didn’t look as though she would interrupt him with scolding anytime soon. “I wasn’t born there. Neville is the Boy-Who-Lived instead, and there’s a woman named Discipula who’s taken Umbridge’s place and has it out for the Malfoys. You work for her,” he couldn’t help adding.

            “What?” Hermione spluttered. “That’s ridiculous! Why would I do that?”

            “Because that other you hates pure-bloods,” Harry said. “And because I didn’t exist to draw you and Ron together in Gryffindor, I reckon. We never got to fight a troll together.”

            “Even so,” Hermione said, her face pulled tight with disgust. Harry thought she was deeply bothered by her fictional self. She sat with her legs folded beneath her, pulling at her robes, and it was a long time before she shook her head and looked up at him again.

            “But why did you have to keep that from us?” she asked. “Recurring dreams aren’t unusual, and I would be surprised if you didn’t have something like them sometime in your life. Your nightmares from the war were so powerful.”

            Harry coughed. “Er—these aren’t recurring dreams, Hermione. They’re a story. They always stop when I wake up and then resume at the exact same time when I go back to sleep. I can talk to people, and influence them, and I keep meeting people who are changed from the ones I know, but in plausible ways. Ron is bored and doesn’t feel like a standout because of his brothers. The Malfoys are more bitter about pure-blood prejudice than they are here because worse things happened to them. Draco—”

            He stopped, too abruptly. Hermione leaned forwards. “What about Malfoy?”

            “Um.” Harry picked at his trousers again. “I like him. I’m helping to defend him,” he added. “You said that sometimes relationships like that could develop between barristers and clients.”

            Hermione leaned forwards more, until she seemed like she was in danger of falling off the chair. “Yes, Harry,” she said, too sweetly. Harry cringed. “And do you remember what I said was a good thing to do about relationships like those?”

            Harry winced. “Um. Not have them?”

            “Yes. Exactly.” Hermione’s nostrils flared, and Harry had the idea that she was holding back a long stream of curses that would have made him more defensive than she wanted to deal with. She finally shook her head and settled on, “This is dangerous, Harry. I agree, those don’t sound like normal dreams. Maybe Malfoy didn’t consult the right experts in dream magic.” Her eyes shone with a rapture that said she’d found her next research project. Harry relaxed. She liked research so much that some of the good feeling might spill over onto him, and he’d be forgiven for lying and hiding this.

            No such luck. Hermione turned around in the next moment and pinned him with a disconcertingly direct gaze. “So. Exactly why did you think that you had to keep this from us? And why tell Malfoy first?”

            “He sort of forced it out of me,” Harry mumbled. “And it was obvious that he thought the dreams should stop. He even threatened to tell you. I thought you would agree with him and make me stop dreaming.”

            “Have you fallen asleep in the middle of the day before?” Hermione asked, voice full of promises of death and destruction if he lied.

            “Yes,” Harry admitted.

            Hermione stared at him, then burst out, “Harry! How could you keep something from us that was so dangerous?”

            “Because it was dangerous!” Harry yelled back, quite suddenly pressed against the limits of his temper. “And because I think I’m falling in love with Draco, and I knew that you would say I couldn’t be in love with someone who only exists in my head!”

            There was some more staring on Hermione’s part, and some inner reeling on Harry’s, although he tried to look calm and strong and stoic for Hermione. Then she turned her head away and lifted her hand, beating the heel of her palm gently against her forehead.

            “I’m going to pretend that you didn’t say something that idiotic,” she said. “I’m going to pretend that you just feel for him what you would feel for anyone you could help. And why did Malfoy get involved?”

            “He said something about wanting my attention, and doing something stupid to get it,” Harry said weakly. He had a little breathing space, but he knew Hermione would return to the subject of Draco, and he felt irrationally compelled to defend the mere idea of him not existing. “I don’t know what it was, but he’s been involved from the first day. He should stop now,” he added. “He wants a place on another Quidditch team, and I gave him the Floo addresses of people he could contact. So he shouldn’t have to deal with me again.”

            Hermione looked at him, and blinked. “You sound unhappy about that.”

            “I’m not unhappy about it,” Harry said, aghast. “I just—feel guilty.” Hermione rolled her eyes, and he knew she would have said that was nothing new, but he went on before she could, trying to work out his own feelings. It really didn’t make sense for him to be upset about this, when he’d been working to get rid of Malfoy in the first place. “I wish that I could have sent him away in some other way. And I wish I could have known what the stupid thing he said he did to get my attention is.”

            “You’ve cut the ties with him,” Hermione said flatly. “A pity, since I think he might have been able to help us.” She stared into his face, and Harry winced. He couldn’t help thinking that Hermione would have made a great interrogator if she hadn’t chosen to become a barrister. “But you are going to tell me everything about these dreams, including everything that you told Malfoy, aren’t you, Harry?”

            Harry sighed and bowed his head. “Yes, Hermione.”

            Hermione patted him on the shoulder, and then began her gentle, merciless questioning as to the finer points of all the dreams.

*

            Harry leaned against his pillow and closed his eyes. He hadn’t dreamed last night, at Hermione’s insistence; she had given him a potion that wasn’t Dreamless Sleep, but similar to it, which simply edited out his need to dream for a night. He felt groggier than if he’d spent the entire time in Draco’s world.

            He wondered how much of that was due to not having any dreams—he had sometimes felt like this when he woke up after taking Dreamless Sleep, too—and how much came from his anxiety over not seeing Draco. What happened to the dreams on the nights that he was prevented from going there? Did they advance without him? Would he melt away in front of Draco’s eyes? Would the trial begin, without him there to help it along and make sure that things went well for the Malfoys?

            It’s all very well for Hermione to think that it’s not real and so it doesn’t matter what happens, Harry thought, opening his eyes and glaring at the book in his hands. She’s not the one who’s become close to them and helped them through all of this so far.

            The book was the one on dream magic that Malfoy had bought for him at that bookshop the other day. Hermione had insisted that Harry read it and start learning the basic tenets of dream magic. If none of the dream magic experts Malfoy had consulted saw anything wrong with the dreams, she had said inexorably, then Harry would just have to become his own expert.

            Harry had tried to argue that that must mean nothing was wrong with the dreams after all, but Hermione had only stared at him until he had to look away.

            Now Harry flipped through the book and stared at the words with what he knew was a pout on his face. Hermione had forbidden him from going to the office, sleeping without taking the potion, or taking a nap until he’d read the book. And Harry knew he could have disobeyed her, knew it was his choice, which only made him feel worse.

            It felt as though he was betraying Draco to satisfy his friend.

            Yet he couldn’t betray Hermione either—or Ron, who was starting to come around to Hermione’s side of the question on whether Harry was safe from the dreams or not, even though Harry hadn’t described them directly to him. Harry sighed and turned to the table of contents. Months of reading through tomes on wizarding law had taught him that that was the place to start.

            The Origin of Magical Dreams…Dreams of Conscience…Nightmares Sent By Enemies…The Foretelling of Omens…

            Harry made an impatient noise in the back of his throat. None of that looked like it would help him. He wished it was as simple as that to prove to Hermione that that meant the dreams were real, a glimpse into another universe, not—dreams.

            But Harry did have to admit that it was strange that they had started so suddenly, and that they felt real in a way that not even the visions from Voldemort had. Or in a different way than the visions from Voldemort, perhaps. There, Harry had never had a doubt that he was watching something that took place somewhere in his own reality. The feel, the atmosphere, of them was the same.

            When he dreamed of Draco and his world, it was as if Harry was far from his body, acting in that world like a spirit other people could see and hear and touch. It would explain why he never seemed to get hungry or tired there, although he could eat the food.

            A little more interested now in what the dreams might mean, since that was a difference he hadn’t noticed before, Harry turned back to the book and decided that he might as well start with the chapter on nightmares. He flipped to it.

            The pages turned unnaturally, and then the book flopped open in the middle of the nightmares chapter. Harry blinked. Had someone picked it up from the shelves already and spent enough time reading it to crack the binding in that particular spot? He felt obscurely outraged, as though Malfoy had spent his Galleons on something worthless.

            Not that he deserves that outrage, when he was probably the one who stole my Galleons so that I wouldn’t have the money to pay Nibbs in the first place, Harry told himself.

            He looked more fully at the place of the cracked binding, and then discovered that it wasn’t a crack at all. Instead, a slender card lay there, made of what looked like some stiff parchment. Frowning, Harry took it out.

            The card was completely white, a blank and dead-looking white, except for the silver handwriting that curved elegantly over it. Harry knew he had seen that handwriting before, and placed it after a moment. It was Malfoy’s.

            I need you to know what I did. I never meant to cause this. I’m sorry. I cast the incantation Coacto Curationem on you. Ask Granger; she should know what it means. But I never thought it would have an effect like this, which is listed nowhere in the literature. I’m sorry.

            Not sorry enough, Harry noted, his heart beating slowly, to tell him what the bloody spell actually meant.

            But he didn’t need to wait for Hermione, who had gone out to meet with a potential client. He had a Latin dictionary on his shelf, bought with the ridiculously ambitious idea of teaching himself the language and becoming more of a spell expert than he was right now, especially with some of the obscure legal incantations. He seized it and began to turn through it, a lot more urgently than he had with the book on dream magic.

            Not that he got much further, much faster. His hands were shaking.

            Coacto—yes, fine, there it was. It meant to compel, to force, something like that. And Harry suspected that he already knew what Curationem meant, but he still looked it up.

            I compel your attention. That has to be it.

            Nothing in that incantation to explain the dreams, but Malfoy’s card sure as fuck implied there was a connection, and it would fit very well with the stupid thing he had claimed to have done so that Harry would pay more attention to him.

            Nothing to explain the dreams—unless that’s the reason I’m falling in love with Draco.

            Harry was on his feet in the next moment, Latin dictionary and dream magic book tossed on the bed, wand in his hand, hair almost bristling off his head with the wild magic as he stalked towards the door.

            Sorry, Hermione. But I think having a little talk with Malfoy is more important than finishing that book right now.

*

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Sleepless