A Saviour Uncaused (Harry Potter, Drarry)

Draco's Dilemma

Chapter 3

Draco's Dilemma

"Kill the spare!"

Harry jerked in his bed, sweat all over his skin, gleaming arms and legs trembling. He rolled around his bed, twisting his sheets all around him.

Pain beyond pain, all-consuming, writhing in his muscles, tearing apart his nerves...

"Let's just take it together."

"No!" Harry writhed on the bed, twisting his sweat-soaked sheets around him. His pulse was fast and fierce. "Cedric," he moaned in the night, unheard by his roommates as he had placed a Silencing Charm on this curtains. His legs kicked out and his head thrashed from side to side; his brow shone and was furrowed like ripples on troubled waters. He screamed into the night as he jerked wide awake, breathing hard through his lips, his chest heaving. His eyes landed on the next bed in which lay Ron.

He pressed the heels of his palms to his eyes and rubbed them. He had thought his nightmares would retreat with the profound comfort that his return to Hogwarts brought. He had thought once he escaped the oppressive grip of the Dursleys, the nightmares would somehow vanish. How wrong he had been. He was bound at the centre of a ghastly zoetrope spinning harrowing images in every direction.

It was the first weekend of term. Harry knew he would not be able to sleep for several hours to come, and he also knew where he would be in a few minutes. Groping around for his glasses, he pushed his bed curtains aside, spilling a square slab of moonlight from the window onto his bed, and swung his legs over the covers.

He grabbed his wand from his bedside drawer, padded over to his trunk, carefully lifted its lid and rifled blindly inside it. This had been a habit of his after waking up from his disturbing dreams. Without needing to light his wand, he found the familiar edges of two books and lifted the top one to slip out a folded piece of parchment between. He gently dropped the lid back onto the trunk and returned to his bed.

By wand light and fully awake with his legs folded and his back resting against the headboard, Harry ran his eyes idly across the yellow-brown surface of the Marauder's Map. Hundreds upon hundreds of names dotted the map in small and large clumps, with only a handful of them set apart from the rest which belonged to the professors who slept in their own quarters and the headmaster who was presumably snoozing in the higher levels of his office. Although these names stood out more easily than any other, Harry's attention was immediately stolen by something else: a most peculiar sight at—Harry found his watch atop his drawer and read the green figures—02:47 in the morning.

Harry's mind immediately roiled with a legion of suspicions he did not hesitate to justify to himself by simply supplying the name at which he was staring. As he continued to stare, his eyes burned and they glared as his loathing of the name swelled in his chest. The same name belonged to a man whom he had heard whisper his renewed allegiance to someone who has haunted his dreams ever since he discovered magic. The pool of wand light rippled and the map quivered under his hands as he all but burned a hole through the dot labelled Draco Malfoy. He wondered why the dot was in the corridor all on its own.

Harry had never seen Malfoy—whose dot zigzagged down the hallway strangely, sometimes pausing, sometimes retreating and then lurching forward once more as though it were dazed—walk about the castle under moonlight since he started studying the map alone at night. It was two weeks into the new academic year and he had not known anyone but him to listlessly prowl the corridors under a dark sky. What was Malfoy doing at three o'clock in the morning? And while seeming to behave so bizarrely? As far as Harry knew, Malfoy was not a prefect, and even if he were, Harry was quite confident patrol duty was not supposed to be performed this late.