How Did This Happen?!

Death Eater?

He tried to get up the stairs to the girls' dormitories but even though Hogwarts was a partially-demolished wreck, some of the magic was still there and still functioned; the stairs vanished from beneath his feet and making him fall flat on his face to slide back to the common room. After feeling the small carpet burns on his nose, chin and palms he decided that there was no way that he was going to get up the stairs-cum-slide; he wasn't going to attempt again once the slide metamorphosized into innocent-looking stairs.

Defeated by the architecture, he walked over to the bed that he had slept on and realized that Hermione must have come back to sleep after he dozed off. He didn't realize earlier, too much had occurred as he wore for him to pay attention to anything but his own agony and confusion. He lay back on the bed, his hands behind his head as he thought; he liked the thought of her sleeping next to him – odd, he'd never shared a bed with anyone before, he'd never shared much, to be honest. Though, he'd happily shared a bed with Hermione Granger, Mudblood, know-it-all, pain-in-his-arse...

...A vixen who wasn't the innocent princess she was painted to be; a passionate witch who'd walked away naked to prove a point.

He turned his head into the pillow, breathed in her scent, and sighed in misery. He could smell the sweetness of her body on the linens, he had the visions in his mind of their explorations. He longed for her to come back and forgive him for the things he said; and preferably for her to let him prove his forgiveness with a nice bout of make-up sex.

'Why am I so mad about her?' he thought, barely vocalizing the words in his mind before something else shot through his head; the pleasant and erotic images were violently torn from his imagination and replaced with more pain-wrenching visions.

They didn't cease, they continued on and on, running into each other with no break or pause. He screamed in pain, his throat raw with the agony of being trapped within his own psyche; but at the same as trying to escape a living nightmare, he was vainly trying to focus on what he was seeing.

It was as if he was flying on a broom but faster than he could possibly ever achieve; there were blurring lands and lands of different places, deserts and oceans, mountains and meadows, cities and forests; then finally there was darkness.

Everything was dark and the pain surprisingly became even worse; Draco hadn't thought there was anything more excruciating than what had already been before – he hated that he'd been proved wrong on that front. There was a small dark building and he got closer and closer, the speed of motion slowing down to a halt. He heard laughing; the same laughing that was in his last vision, the door opened and the dark figure flew at him, Draco blinked, trying to focus on the shape; fighting the agony, he opened his eyes to get one good look at the form...

... The form had peachy skin, bronze eyes spilling with tears, framed by a riot of birds'-nest curls. In a panic he looked about the tattered Gryffindor common room, there was no darkness, no figure, no laughing. A wave of nausea overcame him in his confusion, and Hermione barely managed to hand him the empty log bucket from next to the fire before he wretched. Her presence left him for a moment, and he instantly slipped into a deeper panic, gasping for breath and shaking.

She returned, laying him into the recovery position on the bed, she pressed a cold cloth to his forehead and simultaneously wiped his face with a warm, sandalwood-scented flannel. She held his hand tightly, making little cooing noises that would only make sense to an infant. He continued to shake, suddenly as cold as if he'd stepped into the center of a glacier. Hermione climbed in behind him, spooning against his back to offer comfort and warmth.

"Oh Draco, I'm sorry about earlier, you just made me so angry! But I should have been here for you, not sulking! What happened? What's wrong? I know something is going on! Tell me and I can help you. Please tell me. Please?"