But Only In Our Dreams (the sleepwalker remix)
Remix Author: Augustus
Original Story: But Only In Our Dreams by Kay Taylor
Summary: Madness is a quiet seductress.
Rating: NC-17
Fandom: Harry Potter
Warnings: Incest. Well duh.
i.
Draco often wonders whether insanity is contagious. He drums his fingertips on a tabletop, knuckles sharp and their movement fluid, and waits for the echo to still in the musty air. He has learnt to breathe dust and fog without choking, and now it is the air outside that tastes toxic when it glides across his tongue. Having grown accustomed to darkness, the summer sun stings his eyes.
He thinks that madness is probably a quiet seductress. If she takes him, it will be in a morning, draped in the shadows and wearing his aunt's dark eyes.
ii.
Draco dreams of long hallways. He walks endlessly, time-softened sandstone at either side. Sometimes, he thinks that there are faces at the cobwebbed windows, but he can't turn his head to catch their red-lipped smiles. It is bright. The floorboards beneath his feet are old and bleached and they smooth into a blur of beige, stretching into the light. The hallways never end. It is okay; Draco doesn't tire.
iii.
Draco's father is taken in the summer. Draco watches from a window as Lucius stands stiff and proud in the shadows cast by the setting sun. He is not worried. Draco learned years ago that the most important wars are won under the cover of failure. He thinks of Harry Potter then, as his father's hair glistens with lights of crimson and gold, and his fingernails press white curves of hatred into the palms of his hands. Vengeance is a solid word. Draco counts his enemies in sneers and scorn, forever his father's son--even now.
Draco has not cried since he was a child. His eyes have glistened with rage and glittered with frustration, but he can barely remember the salty taste of streaming tears. He is not ashamed of weakness; he merely doesn't feel as others might. Draco understands anger and jealousy, pride and hatred, but he is unaccustomed to sadness and the bitter embrace of loss. He does not weep for his father's capture and will not lie awake when nighttime comes. He will sleep soundly and, in the morning, he will eat breakfast in the usual manner, beckoning for seconds when the house-elf comes to claim his dish.
Draco loves his father; he is sure of that, just as he is sure of the sunrise and the blood that throbs (pure) within his veins. He admires the strong and even line of Lucius's shoulders and the haughty tilt to his raised chin. He watches every furious gesture and the curl of his father's lip and believes that he would do anything to inherit just a fraction of Lucius's soul.
Each of his shoulders held in the grasp of an accuser's hand, Lucius turns to face the manor for a moment, his eyes rising to the windows on the second floor. Draco raises a hand and smiles. His father nods quickly, tightly, a mere flicker of his head, and steps backwards as though there is nothing else to say. As it turns out, there isn't. A tempest of movement and magic takes Lucius into the dawning night and Draco watches the sun set over the stretch of the manor grounds as his mother wails in the entrance hall below.
iv.
Draco's first memory is of his aunt tossing him high into the air. She is all dark, glossy hair and shining white teeth. She catches him as he falls, her laughter rising, loud and pure, into the space where one he'd flown. She had been beautiful, then, but the bright shards of madness had always dwelt within her eyes. Draco soars, higher and higher, until the anxious tears of his mother seem like distant rain.
v.
Bellatrix lives in a house built from shadow. Draco arrives in the silent hours before dawn, with his mother clinging to one arm and a small case hanging from the other. The sisters circle like dogs, Narcissa pale and immaculate beside the black tangles of Bellatrix's hair. Draco kisses his mother's cheek before she leaves and tells her that he will be home before Autumn begins to colour the manor's grounds. He believes it then, perhaps even desires a swifter return, but the darkness of his aunt's parlour is already gathering at his feet. On the first night, Draco sleeps without dreams, watched by staring paintings on the bedroom walls.
Breakfast is in the dining hall. Draco and his aunt sit at opposite ends of a table that goes on for miles. The wood is dusty and knot-holed and Draco's toast is cold. He eats it anyway, marmalade sour upon his tongue, and Bellatrix drinks tea from a rose-print cup. She takes it black and far too sweet; later, Draco will learn the taste from her kisses, growing to love it as he would any vice. Now, however, he watches her across the length of the table, fascinated by the pallor of her skin against the deep greens of her dress. When she sees him watching, she laughs with a thousand teeth.
The grounds of the Lestrange home are overgrown. Draco follows twisting paths that allow glimpses of a far off village, ducking beneath wild roses that overhang the trail. Even at noon, the garden seems to be in the grasp of twilight, the sun stretching across the few splashes of grass as though it is forever setting. The shadows collect even in the brightest corners of Bellatrix's realm, clustering beneath hedges and perennials and unfurling towards an ever-nearing night.
Draco carves his name into the flesh of a rotting oak, taking care with his letters and underlining the 'o'. For when I am gone, he tells himself, brushing bark from the palm of his hand.
vi.
Draco sleeps with one hand curled beneath his pillow, knees bent and his ankles crossed. He puts on his left shoe first, but parts his hair on the right side of his head. He prefers classical music to its modern descendants and has an unspoken phobia of small creatures with too many legs. He appreciates routine and order. He loves his parents. The first time he brings himself to orgasm, he is staring at a photograph of his aunt.
vii.
Rodolphus appears twice during the summer. He is thinner even than his wife, moustached and bearded, his hair hanging in lank strands about his face. He speaks of storm clouds at the dinner table and weaves the Dark Lord into every sentence that passes his lips. Bellatrix paints her lips red when Rodolphus is home and twists her hair into piles of curls atop her head. They retire early, and Draco can hear them fucking from the far end of the hall. Rodolphus grunts like a fat man. Draco plugs his ears with tissues to drown out the worst of the noise.
He is not fond of his uncle. Each time, Draco smiles as Rodolphus leaves. There is no room for three within the ivy-covered walls of his new home. He waits to hear news of his uncle's death in battle and is disappointed when it fails to come.
During the day, Draco reads family histories handed to him by his aunt, fat tomes full of names and dates. The pages are yellowed and the people in the photographs nod to him while wearing long-ago clothes, but Draco's gaze dashes across the print as his hands clench and unclench upon his lap. A month, and the human heads on the library walls don't distract him with their screaming any more. Sometimes, Draco runs a finger over a cheek or a forehead when he leaves, his nostrils filling with the scent of ancient skin. Time moves slowly in rooms that are darkened by hovering dust.
Draco's mother writes often, long letters filled with anxiety and pleas for Draco to remain strong. Bellatrix reads them after he does, the corners of her lips twitching with unshed mirth. Narcissa is already fading in Draco's mind. She is weak—Bellatrix says it is so—and Draco has little time for her fears. He thinks of his father often, but he doesn't worry. Lucius has many enemies, but he is by far the greater man.
viii.
His dreams are of forests, trees towering high above his head as he moves, barefoot, though a floor of rotting leaves. The sun forms starpricks in the foliage, bright eyes peering from the circling shadows that ooze beneath the trees. Draco walks in an ever-dwindling spiral. The air is dank and musty against his cheeks.
ix.
The first time, Draco is summoned to Bellatrix's room. She asks him about his studies, a teacup full and steaming on the nightstand and the bedclothes puddled about her in snaking, swelling folds. Her nightdress is thin and dark and Draco watches the movement of her breasts as she speaks. He tells her of a great uncle who wore the skins of Muggles to a Ministry affair and she laughs and claps her hands, like a toddler with a new toy. He waits as she sips tea from morning-pale lips, shifting his weight from foot to foot. When she has drained the cup, it clatters, empty, in its saucer, and she pats the mattress beside her thigh.
She tastes of tea and sugar and her lips move over Draco's as though she has kissed him before. Taking his hand, she presses it to her breast, and he shudders with the intensity of a moment that has coloured his dreams. Beneath the thin fabric of her nightdress, Bellatrix is strangely cool, heavy and full within the curve of Draco's hand. He kisses her again as she unbuttons his shirt, his right hand rising to echo his left hand's movements, thumbs brushing against nipples that rise to meet his touch.
"You kiss like your father," she says as her lips draw patterns on Draco's chest. He arches his back, unsurprised, and clutches at the angles of Bellatrix's back.
Her nightdress tears when Draco tugs at its straps, and she laughs again, delighted by the game. He flushes beneath the bright madness of his aunt's stare, scrabbling at the remains of the fabric until she is naked to the waist, her breasts starkly white in the lamp-lit room. Her hair forming dark waves upon the pillows, she watches silently as he flutters inexperienced fingertips over the pink of her nipples, hissing with pleasure as his touches grow more desperate.
He hates her, then. He understands that he is a reflection, a creation of her will. He squeezes one nipple too harshly and she gasps, delighted, at the pain. Draco's nails are short, but the skin of his aunt's breasts is fragile and relatively easy to mark. She smiles and smiles and pushes away the bedclothes, thrusting his head between her thighs. Bellatrix's breasts may be cool, but here she is fever-hot, and Draco presses tomorrow's bruises into the flesh of her thighs as she guides his mouth to places that make her shiver and her breath puff harshly from between parted lips.
He hates Bellatrix as he slides inside her. Draco bites at his own lips until he can taste nothing but blood and the faintest hint of tea. She wraps winter-white legs around his waist, pulling him closer, deeper, into the dusty swirls of her hair and the scrape of her nails over his back. He wants to hurt her as much as he loves her, but she sighs happily at his harshest touch. Bellatrix laughs when she comes and Draco laughs with her, the sound rising and mingling with the dust and the heat-shimmer of burning oil.
It is the first time. It will not be the last.
x.
Draco prefers winter to summer, the white of snow and ice caught in the bark of naked grey trees. He burns in the summer, but winter is painted in Malfoy hues. Summer is to be endured, spent within curtained rooms that seem to reek of sunlight and too-long days. It is always summer in Draco's dreams.
xi.
Narcissa's letters change as the summer fades. She pleads for his return, for him to come away, come away, come away while you still can. But Draco is still his father's son, more so now than ever, and he has grown darker in his aunt's house of blindfolded windows and dusty air. He discards the pages with an uncaring eye; his mother cannot possibly understand the things of which she speaks. Bellatrix tears the final letter into thin strips of parchment, destroying the remains in a flash of blinding red. It is an ending that stretches into a whirlpool. Draco closes his eyes and feels his world spin.
They arrive at Azkaban beneath the first gold of twilight. Draco kneels before the Dark Lord as his father and Bellatrix watch him, side by side. Voldemort's hands are fiery hot as they draw Draco to his feet and his tongue is forked as it demands allegiance, pushing between Draco's lips. "I am yours," Draco whispers, and in his master's eyes he can see the dark reflection of his aunt.
He stands within a circle of Death Eaters, Dementors floating like spectres above his head. Lucius is proud and hooded; his sister-in-law is a collection of shadows, draped in shapeless robes. The Dark Lord's eyes shine red within a sunken face and when he takes Draco's wrist, it is with fingers that move like naked bones. The sky glows, coppery-pink. Draco cannot be sure whether the laugh that splits the silence is Bellatrix's or his own.
xii.
Madness is a shadowed mistress. Draco taps out rhythms on a dusty tabletop, the sound rising thickly to blend with the echo of his aunt's laughter in the stagnant air.
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But Only In Our Dreams (the sleepwalker remix)
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