Two Sides of the Same Coin(DRARRY)

Chapter Four

"Here's much to do with hate, but more with love. / Why then, O brawling love, O loving hate, / O anything of nothing first create, / O heavy lightness, serious vanity, / Misshapen chaos of well-seeming forms." - Shakespeare

When Draco entered the Potions classroom a few minutes early, Potter was already there, sitting idly at their shared desk. He was clearly trying to avoid Slughorn's further wrath by overcompensating for his tardiness the previous lesson.

"Good morning," said Draco, as he slid into his seat.

Potter nodded affably, if a little clumsily since his chin was nestled in the palm of his hand, and mumbled, "Morning."

Draco suppressed a sudden smile that welled up from an unfamiliar corner of his chest. So, apparently, Potter wasn't a morning person; he appeared to be still more asleep than awake. His lips sagged in a soporific pout and his eyes were unfocused, like two dark green smudges of oil pastel on a clear ivory canvas, outlined in the thick ink of his eyelashes. Draco realized, feeling indistinctly queer about it, that he was staring at them, so he spoke again to distract himself.

"Did you sleep better last night?" he asked Potter.

"Wha—hmm?"

"You said you overslept last lesson. I thought you must have slept badly."

Potter blinked forcefully several times as if by doing so he could force the conversation to make more sense. "Yeah, nightmares." He yawed. "Happens a lot." Potter's speech was clunky and disconnected and made Draco think his head hadn't quite caught up with his mouth yet.

So, Potter suffered from nightmares, too, Draco thought, reflecting on his own nightmares. The ones that plagued his sleep at night and lurked in the back of his thoughts during the day, not always on his mind but dancing around the edges of his consciousness. Nightmares of cold eyes and colder voices, of burdens far too heavy to carry and dark figures demanding he do so anyway, of being chased by a hot red sea, and of death – always death, hovering everywhere as if it composed the very particles of the air. Nightmares that reminded him of his flaws and his failures and, even worse, the things he hadn't failed at. Nightmares that made him want to tear himself apart, peel off his skin layer by layer, do anything to quell their shrill disquiet and release himself into the nothing-land of pure, undiluted darkness.

It wasn't so surprising that Potter should have nightmares too; he'd seen at least as much as Draco had during the war, and that was enough to scar a mind.

"But you're early today, so I figured you must have slept better last night," Draco continued, as if his thoughts hadn't just been swallowed by a black hole.

"Mm ... yeah. No nightmares." The softly smudged quality of Potter's sleepy features was beginning to sharpen as Potter became more alert.

"Is it the war?" Draco asked softly, his sympathy – or was it empathy? – getting the best of him. A dry laugh sounded in his mind as the thought struck him that Potter probably didn't even believe Draco to have an ounce of empathy or sympathy in him, much less enough to get the best of him. But there you go. Potter didn't know everything about him. Not by a long shot. "I relive it all the time, too ... every night."

Suddenly, Potter's newly clear eyes narrowed suspiciously and instead of answering Draco's question he spat, "What are you playing at, Malfoy?"

"Playing at?" The question surprised Draco. He'd been getting so comfortable in his and Potter's casual, albeit short, exchange that the sudden switch to antagonism felt like whiplash. How could that have happened so fast? That he'd already forgotten the patterns of their arguments?