Temptation on the Warfront

8

Draco turns in his sleep, his cheek damp against the pillow.

It's dark, too dark, but his legs keep moving, keep moving upwards, and eventually he can see light, and stars. There's hundreds of them, bright and sparkling, and Draco wishes could just stop and watch them, forget about what he has to do, and what will happen if he fails.

There's a hiss at his back, a deep voice, and then he is shoved forwards, ordered to keep moving. His aunt cackles beside him. Draco moves, and finally he reaches the last step, and the moment where his life will either end, or start anew.

Somehow, he doesn't know which he'd prefer.

Bent with frailty and pain, Dumbledore stands before him, and his face is too kind, too trusting, for somebody who is about to be murdered.

Draco tries to lift his wand, but his arm feels like lead, heavy and sluggish, moving as though in a dream.

There are voices, everyone is speaking in his ear, Death Eaters, his Headmaster, but all Draco can hear is Potter. And he swivels around, his legs numb, searching desperately for that voice, for Potter's voice. But Potter isn't there, Draco can't see him anywhere, can't find him in the small and circular space of the Astronomy Tower.

"You're not like them."

"I am! I'm exactly like them!" Draco tries to scream this, but his throat muscles won't work, and his lips are sealed over a sob.

"You're not like them," Potter says again. Draco turns, looking into every shadow, every crevice, but Potter is nowhere.

He can feel wands in his back, digging into his spine, Death Eaters telling him to do it now. But Draco can't. He needs to find Potter first.

"You're not like them!" Draco hears it in his own mind, and it's then when he realises that Potter is nowhere and everywhere all at once, and the shock of it knocks him onto his hands and knees with dizzying force.

Draco's palms never meet the hard surface of the floor, he just falls and falls and falls, and everything he tries to grab slips out of his grasp, everything except Potter's calm words, because Draco doesn't think he'll ever be able to let those go.

Draco jerks awake, his body aching from a fall that wasn't even real, and his hair is plastered to his forehead. He takes greedy gulps of air, sagging with relief when they reach his lungs, when his foggy brain makes the connection that this is real, and the place he just escaped from was nothing but a distorted figment of a memory, tainted with Potter's unwanted presence.

Draco fists the soft sheets, dragging his hands through them, before throwing them off, their weight claustrophobic and tight. Draco slides to the edge of the four poster bed, the one he knows Potter put there, the one he tries not to think about in it's pre-transfiguration state. Knowing Potter, it could have been a dirty old shoe or something.

Draco cards a slightly trembling hand through his sweat-soaked hair, and then gets to his feet, wishing he had some dreamless sleep potion. But he doesn't, so all he can do is take a walk through moonlit corridors, just like he'd do in the Manor before it'd been taken over, and hope that his dreams don't follow him.

The wooden floor is cool beneath his feet, and for something to do, Draco opens door after door. He doesn't worry about being quiet, because even if he cared about waking Granger and Weasley up, he knows they sleep two floors below, and Potter is probably just as sleepless as Draco is himself.

Draco steps into a high ceilinged room, the shape of a groaning chandelier hanging above him in the shadows. There's a sliver of light trickling in through a gap in the curtains, and without hesitating Draco walks over and throws them open.