InsaneJournal

Tweak says, "DRAGON OF THE DARKNESS FLAME!"

Blaise Zabini (set_a_blaise) wrote in to_be_or_not,
@ 2010-11-18 02:37:00

Entry tags:

*complete, character: blaise zabini, character: draco malfoy, date: 1998 11 (nov), loc: braeburn

RP: Dreams
Date & Time: 18 November 1998 | Wee Small Hours
Post Type: RP
Open To: Private
Character(s): Blaise Zabini, Draco Malfoy
Location: Braeburn Slytherin Boys' Dorm
Summary: Not all dreams are pleasant ones.

He wondered if she even knew there were freckles on the side of her neck under her ear and running back into the nape of her neck in the shape of a constellation. If she did, Blaise was certain she'd interpreted it as a wide letter W and not Cassiopeia. She wasn't the type to think of herself as a queen. In his lucid moments, he wouldn't think of her that way either. It was only in dreams that the ragamuffin Ginny became the queen Ginevra. With her hair up in a twist held by exquisitely carved tortoise shell combs, just the right touch of cosmetics, and wearing a deep green, elegant gown which hugged her form, it was easy to see her potential. Queen Ginevra would never stomp around or dress like a boy. She didn't huff--

Blaise's dream shifted.

Ginny tilted her head back and looked at him upside down, huffing. It wasn't his fault the sun had slipped behind a cloud and spoiled her sunbathing. She turned over onto her freckled tummy and crooked a finger his way. She untied the string on her top, causing Blaise to hustle and drop anchor so he could join her. His lips met that constellation of freckles, drawing forth a moan.

Blaise frowned in his sleep.

The moan sounded like she was in pain. He reached out in his dream to turn her face to his when another noise intruded. Losing the trail of his dream, Blaise rolled on to his back. There it was again. Slowly coming awake, Blaise saw that he'd forgot to close his bed curtains all the way so his privacy charms weren't active. One of his roommates then. He would cheerfully hex whichever one of them had taken him from his sail with the Weaslette. Blaise sat up to grab the bed curtain. He was just about to close it when he realized that the noise was coming from Draco's direction and from the sound of it, it was a far from pleasant dream. Shaking himself awake, he picked up his wand. Blaise respected his own skin too much to wake a Dark wizard from a nightmare without something to defend himself should Draco try to hex first and ask questions later.

"Malfoy," he hissed. "Malfoy, wake up."

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purely_draco
2010-11-18 02:10 pm UTC (link)

It might be them. I don't know. I don't know.

Lucius whispering of rank and status and recovered glory. Bella laughing madly in the shadows, a silver knife. Screaming. Granger screaming and screaming. No, it's not her, don't look. You don't know it's her. Could be someone else, could be someone else, and--

The chandelier. Blood in your face, in your eyes, pouring off your skin, and they've escaped. They're gone.

Roaring in the ears, aching in the forearm. The Mark burns. The Dark Lord is coming.

They're gone. The Dark Lord is coming.

He's angry.

Draco curled in on himself, arm pressed to his gut in a vain, futile attempt to stop the inferno of pain that seared through it. Red eyes narrowed and a bone-white wand lifted. "Master, no," he muttered. "Please, no. We didn't-- I didn't-- Please. Please."

Master is angry, and will not forgive this time. Not for the Malfoys, failing him time and again. The recovery of the prophecy, the murder of Dumbledore, and now the capture of Harry Potter. They've failed too often.

Draco twisted in his bedsheets and screamed.

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set_a_blaise
2010-11-18 09:55 pm UTC (link)

Blaise barely had time to cast a Silencing Charm on Draco when he screamed. As it was, some of the noise escaped and now there was rustling from the other side of the room.

"Whadit?" came a sleepy question.

"Stubbed m' bloody toe," Blaise grumbled in a sleepy voice despite being wide awake now. It was no one's business that Draco was having a nightmare. Slytherins looked after their own even among themselves.

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purely_draco
2010-11-18 11:21 pm UTC (link)

Mum. Dad.

Mum. Not Mum, she's done nothing but support her family, her men, us. Master, no. Dad, he's ill, can't he see it, the ravages of prison, the howls of Dementors still in his eyes. They didn't deserve this. None of them deserved this. None of this was right.

The white wand lifts. Bella laughs and laughs, mad as lightning.

You step in front of your mother, your father, and you are stronger than them right now, but no one is strong enough to face those red eyes for long. Not when he takes such pleasure in the spell he casts, and then all you know in the universe is white.

Hot.

Pain.

Draco writhed, gasping, sweat between his shoulders and across his nape. He clawed at the sheets, at his clothes, at his arm, and he begged. He begged in whispers that had been screams only months before.

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set_a_blaise
2010-11-19 02:54 am UTC (link)

"Malfoy. Draco. Wake up. Come on, mate. It's just a dream. Wake up," Blaise urged from out of the line of fire should Draco wake up fighting. Just because he didn't see Draco's wand on the table beside his bed, he wasn't idiotic enough to assume it had fallen to the floor. Blaise hadn't slept in the dorm without his wand under his pillow since he was a second year. When Draco still didn't wake, Blaise took a deep breath. He'd have to risk getting close enough to shake him. He ducked low, assuming that if Draco shot off a hex he'd aim high. "Malfoy, wake up dammit," Blaise hissed louder as he reached out and shook Draco's arm.

Draco's left arm.

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purely_draco
2010-11-19 03:33 am UTC (link)

Not even Pansy had the freedom to touch him without his prior notice. Not there. Not that arm. The only person in the past two years who'd ever dared had been the madman who'd burned the Dark Mark into him, who'd branded it into his flesh. In his nightmare state, Draco's mind interpreted the touch as cold and bony fingers, interpreted the hissing voice as the hissing of Parseltongue. He'd done it that dawn a month after his sixteenth birthday, wild and frantic and mindless in pain, and he did it again. When fingers wrapped around his arm, setting off the memory of agonizing pain, he flailed. He twisted.

He struck.

He was light, he was thin, but most of all, he was fast. He bolted upright, he lashed out, and he wrenched his arm loose.

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set_a_blaise
2010-11-19 04:08 am UTC (link)

"Jy is 'n poes!" Blaise swore, dropping to the floor and scrambling until his back was against his own bed, which wasn't very far given how crowded their room was. He reached out with his foot to snag the wand he'd dropped when Malfoy lashed out at him and shot off a Stinging Hex to wake his roommate. "Wake up," Blaise snarled, clutching his eye. He was going to have a shiner, he was sure of it. The rat-faced idiot had got him full on.

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purely_draco
2010-11-19 04:29 am UTC (link)

The foreign swearing lanced through Draco's hazed mind, and the hex that followed finished the job. He sat up, gasping, clutching his arm to his chest, sweating and shaking, but awake. The little fairy light that Goyle insisted on using shone through his bed curtains, giving Draco enough light to see where he was and where he wasn't. He wasn't on the bloodstained drawing room floor in the Manor, taking the pain of his master's Cruciatus in punishment for letting Potter escape. He wasn't shivering and naked in wet grass, taking the pain of his master's Mark.

Braeburn. Hogwarts. "Blaise," he said, voice choked, as he realized who he'd hit. "Blaise, I--" His gut roiled, acidic bile coated his tongue, and he bolted from the bed, tripping over a shoe someone had left out. He landed hard, his thin pyjamas no cushion on his knees, and he scrabbled to make it into the bathroom. He skidded across the tiles and fetched up against a sink. He bent over it, clung to it, as he sicked up everything in his stomach. Whimpering, he sank to his knees and rested his forehead against the porcelain.

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set_a_blaise
2010-11-19 05:29 am UTC (link)

"Quiet down," someone mumbled when Draco fell.

Blaise considered re-casting the Silencing Charm but the way his head felt, he wasn't certain he'd succeed or that he could hold it if he did. Holding his hand to his eye, Blaise stood and made his way to the loo where Malfoy was on his knees. Blaise made a face and vanished the contents of the basin. The smell would only make him sick up himself. His head was bad enough without that. Wetting two flannels, he wrung one out and handed it to Malfoy without a word. The second, Blaise pressed gentle to his abused eye.

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purely_draco
2010-11-19 05:48 am UTC (link)

Draco slumped back onto his heels and took the flannel silently. He spat on the floor before wiping his mouth, refolded the flannel, and wiped his face and the back of his neck. "Thanks," he mumbled after a couple of minutes, waving the flannel absently before chucking it against the wall under the sinks.

He rolled back and leaned against the wall, his elbows on bent-up knees, both hands shoved into his fringe with the heels pressed to his temples. His voice was rough and raspy. "Anybody else wake up?"

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set_a_blaise
2010-11-19 06:04 am UTC (link)

"Mumbles. I had a Silencing Charm up. Not a good one mind you -- I was half-asleep -- but enough to get by." He could always take the offensive and mention the shoe in the middle of the floor if anyone said anything in the morning.

Blaise removed the flannel and looked in the mirror. There wasn't enough light to tell, but it certainly felt bruised. He re-wet it and pressed it back to his eye. Hopefully Madam Pomfrey could get him sorted in the morning, though how he was supposed to sleep with a raging headache, Blaise had no idea.

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	purely_draco 2010-11-19 06:09 am UTC (link)
	He grunted an acknowledgment and leaned his head against the wall, eyes closed. After a few minutes of waiting for his heart-rate to slow down and his arm to stop throbbing, neither of which seemed to be working, he exhaled slowly and looked up to Blaise. "Hit you?" (Reply to this) (Parent) (Thread)

set_a_blaise
2010-11-19 06:20 am UTC (link)

"Hard," Blaise nodded and winced. Moving his head made it throb. "I believe I have the start of a truly spectacular black eye. Next time I'm hexing you to start instead of trying to wake you gently," Blaise grumbled. Hopefully there wouldn't be a next time. It was a forlorn hope, he thought.

"Are they always that bad?" Blaise asked, still looking at his shadowy face in the mirror. His looks were his hallmark. He couldn't possibly run about looking as if he'd been in a Muggle pub brawl.

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purely_draco
2010-11-19 06:43 am UTC (link)

Blaise appeared to be quite focused on his face, and Draco figured he had several minutes before Blaise would look away from the mirror. He pushed his sleeve up and rubbed his arm, kneading deep into the muscles that had started to cramp from tension. He thought about shrugging off Blaise's question, but it seemed a bit idiotic to lie when there'd been a witness. Watching as his parents died were the bad ones. Being their executioner, those were really bad. Tonight's dream had been about normal. "Yeah," he said in a low voice, staring down at his arm. "Yeah, usually. Sometimes they're worse."

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set_a_blaise
2010-11-19 05:52 pm UTC (link)

"Worse?" Blaise's eyebrows shot up -- or rather the one that was capable of it did, the other one simply wiggled the puffy mess that existed where his left eye should be -- as he spun around. "You screamed." If it was bad enough to make him scream yet sometimes they were worse, no wonder Draco didn't like to sleep until he'd exhausted himself. Blaise wasn't dim; he didn't need to ask the reason for the nightmares. Nor did he want to know the content.

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purely_draco
2010-11-19 06:56 pm UTC (link)

Draco jerked his arm against his stomach, startled by how fast Blaise had turned around. If he hadn't been on the floor, he'd have jumped back, the sudden movement shrieking across his nerves. "Yes, Zabini," he snapped, "worse. Those are the ones where I can't scream. Tonight was normal. Welcome to the glamourous life of a Death Eater. Wine, women, and vomiting nightmares. Step right up and get your own brand, it's fucking glorious."

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set_a_blaise
2010-11-19 07:54 pm UTC (link)

"Forgive my concern," Blaise said coolly. He turned around smoothly and rinsed out the flannel before hanging it to dry. His head was throbbing in time with his heartbeat as the blood gushed into his eye and back out again. It was the middle of the night. It would be hours before he would be able to seek attention for his injury. The last thing he wished to deal with at the moment was a Malfoy tantrum.

"Do pick that up before you turn in," he waved his wand in the direction of the flannel Draco had sailed under the sink. "I'm not in the mood to play maid." Or nanny, he thought as he left the room to fetch his dressing gown and slippers. There were a few basic potions in a communal cupboard downstairs. Hopefully there was a headache draught among them.

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purely_draco
2010-11-19 09:15 pm UTC (link)

Draco, lifting his head to gather up his courage and give one of his rare, rare apologies, stopped with his mouth open as Blaise left. He snapped his jaw shut with a click and stared at the doorway for a minute, then glanced away. He was glad he was on the floor, out of view of the mirrors. He didn't want to see his expression right then. He could tell well enough from the ache in his chest and the shaking in his arms how he looked. Hurt, bewildered, angry. Lost. No one needed to see that. Not even himself.

Draco bowed his head to his knees and concentrated, Bella's lessons running through his mind. Wall it up, block it off. Separate what you know from what you're willing to let others see. Ball it up and shove it down. Lock all of it away.

He took a long, shuddering breath, pulled his sleeve down, and got to his feet. When he met his eyes in the mirror, they were blank and empty. He nodded once. He'd get dressed, go out for a smoke, and hit the kitchen for some coffee. This was how it was supposed to be. Nobody needed to see him like that, and he didn't need anybody. Didn't need to talk. Didn't want to talk. He could handle it alone.

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