Harry felt himself yanked to a kneel as Voldemort tried to Legilimize him and failed. Firefirefirefire in Harry's mind and in his soul. Fire to protect his thoughts, to keep him safe even as the red eyes above him demanded knowledge, demanded everything he was...
Voldemort began to mock him then, cruel rasping words about how Harry had lost his magic, and someone in the circle of Death Eaters flinched wildly, a masked face thrown back in shock, shoulders tensing. It was the short one, the one by Lucius. The short one's robes fluttered in the breeze, then wrapped themselves around a slender, youthful form....
As Lucius motioned sharply, the younger Death Eater froze...
Harry knocked Voldemort's hands away from him and stood on his own two feet, swaying, breathing in the scent of pine needles trampled underfoot. His hands balled into fists as Voldemort ridiculed him anew, he focused on staying upright despite the thirst roiling through him.
A crunch of pine needles, the scent wafting stronger as Lucius fell to his knees beside him and spoke of torture. Moonlight glinted off Malfoy's white-gold hair as Voldemort pushed back his hood and toyed with the strands and bragged of how he took a sacrifice each Samhain.
"Each Samhain?" Harry mocked Voldemort's words, locking his knees to stay in place, determined not to kneel, not to cower... Every word seemed to shred his desiccated vocal cords, but that wasn't going to silence him. "Can't you bloody well count? There's only been one Samhain since you crawled your way out of the ooze and into a body, Tom."
A ripple of sound, of words almost unspoken, coursed around the circle of Death Eaters. Hushed noises blending with the breeze through the trees just beyond the clearing. Noises of disbelief that a boy could speak so to the Dark Lord. Nagini heard it too. She abruptly stopped her slithering and tilted her head to and fro, to and fro, tongue flickering out to taste the ground, and then the black boots of the short Death Eater Lucius had rebuked earlier...
The short, masked one lurched back from the circle, almost falling over backwards, the motion was so convulsive. Harry saw him shudder, a bone-deep trembling wracking him from head to toe. Then Lucius' silver eyes were glaring, promising dire retribution, and the short Death Eater steeled himself against the horrid gigantic snake so close, and stepped forward again, joining his fellow Death Eaters in the circle around Harry....
Voldemort's smile was feral, his red eyes vicious as he reached out toward Harry's scar and touched it, making fire blaze in Harry's forehead. Harry couldn't stop Voldemort, but when the evil wizard spoke of the scar as a badge of honor, proof that Harry had been touched by the Dark Lord himself, Harry knew no shame to tell the truth.
"It's hideous and disfiguring," he bluntly announced, the words tasting like metal on his tongue.
The short Death Eater made a sound low in his throat, as if he were being garroted by the air itself, his whole body clenching in a paroxysm of strong emotion.
On the forest floor nearby, where Lucius lay in the after throes of Cruciatus, a threaded hiss of noise brushed against the leaves scattered all around. The blond man barely spoke, his lips moving only in the pale remembrance of a word, the curse having rendered him limp and useless.
But speak, he did.
One word.
A word that ruptured Harry's dream and split his world apart.
A word rife with dismay, with worry, with fear for what would happen now...
"Dragon," Lucius barely breathed, the sound all but lost amidst the rush of the wind and the biting exchange of Harry and Voldemort's own conversation.
Dragon....
The dream world snapped in two, Harry's mind rejecting the Truthful Dreams Potion in order to ponder what it had seen. His body curling like a shrimp on the narrow bed Draco had transfigured, Harry drew his knees up to touch his chest. Arms came out to clutch his calves, his eyes clenching as the dream spun away from what had actually happened to what it must have meant.
He was standing in the clearing, Death Eaters all around, Lucius collapsed by his side, still pinioned by the aftermath of Voldemort's powerful Cruciatus curse. Yet nothing was moving. Nagini lay motionless in mid-slither; Voldemort himself stood with drool dripping down one thin lip, his open mouth caught upon a word.
The world was a frozen tableau. A painting, for Harry to explore.
Better yet, there was no more thirst to plague him, and no more pain. He was in the dream but not of the dream, an outsider this time, an observer, instinct telling him that he could do and say whatever he wished.
Truthful Dreams was but a memory.
Harry stretched out one arm in front of him and used the flat of his palm to push Voldemort. The dark wizard toppled backwards, falling stiffly over like a statue yanked to the ground. Too bad he didn't shatter, Harry thought, as he turned away in contempt.
His gaze lit on a hooded, masked Death Eater, the one he'd thought was Snape. Snape, giving the game away, flinching and stepping back from the circle when Nagini had licked his boots... but that was nonsense. Snape had been a spy for years and years; he knew how to mask reaction, mask emotion. Besides, Snape wasn't afraid of snakes. Not at all, he'd said.
It was Draco who hated snakes, Draco who couldn't stand one near him.
Draco, who had called Harry's scar hideous and disfiguring...
Dragon...
Without even pausing to draw a breath, Harry strode across the clearing to the Death Eater who had caught his eye. Even frozen solid by the force of Harry's dream, the man... no, boy... was wracked by a horrible convulsive shivering, his eyes through the mask portraits of distress.
Silver eyes, but not hateful like Lucius', not now.
Harry ripped the mask from the face and hurled it to the side, then stared into the face of Draco Malfoy.
Harry curled his body even more tightly into a ball, as two words came crashing through his dream-consciousness.
Paradigm shift.
The whole world changing around him, and changing him with it.
Deep inside his dream, Harry stood and stared into Draco Malfoy's glittering silver eyes.
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Coming Soon in A Year Like None Other:
Chapter Forty-Nine: Weakness and Strength
Comments very welcome,
Aspen in the Sunlight
Chapter 49: Weakness and Strength
http://archive.skyehawke.com/story.php?no=5036&chapter=49
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A Year Like None Other
by Aspen in the Sunlight
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Chapter Forty-Nine: Weakness and Strength
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When Harry woke up the next morning, he realized that he'd dreamed far more than just Samhain. Once his emotions had recovered from the shock of finding out that Draco had been there, the Truthful Dreams Potion had seemed to regain power over his mind. For the rest of the night, his sleeping thoughts had ranged far and wide, seeking out things Draco had said and done. Patterns... ones that Harry should have noticed sooner.