A Cupboard Under the Stairs
It's dark when Draco blinks open his eyes. Too dark. He's sitting on the floor and starts feeling around for his wand, but can't find it anywhere. Is this some weird kind of nightmare?
As soon as the thought strikes him, he realizes that he can hear someone else in the space with him. There are ragged, wet breaths, coming far too quickly for the person to be calm. He strains his eyes as he looks around, following his ears to the source of the sound until someone who looks an awful lot like Harry Potter is sitting, curled up in a ball, in front of him.
“Potter?” Draco asks, but there's no reaction from the boy. He shifts closer until he can place a hand on Potter's shoulder, but he flinches so hard that Draco pulls his hand away again.
“Potter,” Draco says as calmly as he can manage, “What's going on?”
“Can't-” Potter's gasps sound near painful as he cuts off his own attempts to speak. “Can't breathe-”
This is certainly the most unsettling dream Draco's had in a while. It hardly even feels like a dream. And Potter is still panicking in front of him.
“Is it the dark?” He tries asking. “Are you afraid of the dark?”
Potter shakes his head. Or at least Draco thinks he does, it's still kind of hard to see.
“What do you need?”
“The door-” Potter's knuckles are white where they grip his own hair. “Get out!”
Draco doesn't think that pointing out to Potter that there doesn't seem to be a door here would help matters, so he keeps the thought to himself as he looks around for something else that might help.
“Need out…” Potter's voice is small as he says it and something about the sound makes Draco's chest feel tight.
“Where the hell are we anyway?” Draco mutters, suddenly feeling the need to keep his voice quiet.
“Under the stairs.” Potter's grip on his own hair visibly tightens and Draco feels the insane urge to grab for them, get him to let go, but based on what happened the last time he tried to touch the other boy, he doesn't think a second attempt would go over well.
Draco starts looking around for a light source of some kind, at the very least if there was light it would make the rest of this a bit easier. He turns and something dangling from the ceiling lightly hits his face. A chord. Hopefully attaching to a lightbulb somewhere, though with how dark it is who knows. Draco tells himself again that it's just a dream, and then pulls the chord.
A lightbulb flicks on directly between him and Potter and Draco hisses slightly as he looks away and blinks the dark spots out of his vision. Then he takes in the space around them. It's so much smaller than he thought it was, than it logically should be, given how much he's been moving around. A dream, he reminds himself again. They seem to be in a cupboard of some kind and for a horrific moment Draco almost thinks that they're crammed into the Vanishing Cabinet somehow, but the shape of the space isn't right for that. He can feel a shelf digging into his back and his hair brushing the short ceiling and knows that he isn't that much taller than Potter, so the other boy must be struggling to fit as well.
Under the stairs, Potter had said. What the hell did that mean? As he takes in the space around them, Draco does at least find that there actually is a door, a fairly small one, but a door nonetheless. He reaches for the handle only for Potter to make some kind of distressed sound and shoot a hand out to grab Draco's arm. A jolt of panic runs through Draco at the suddenness of it. Can they not leave? Why did Potter stop him? Wasn't he just asking to leave? Draco turns to ask Potter what's going on, but freezes when he sees the other boy's face.
He looks wrecked. His eyes are red and puffy from crying, his breathing is still ragged and far too fast, his hand shakes where it clutches Draco's arm, nails digging in too sharply. Draco lets go of the door knob. “Okay,” He says, voice still quite, “What do you need?”
Potter shakes his head, closes his eyes, and tips his head back until he's leaning against the wall opposite the door, breaths still heaving. His hand never leaves Draco's arm. “I don't know.” He admits.
Draco shifts too, sitting far closer to Potter than he ever has before and leaning against the wall next to him. “I'm not a fan of small spaces either.” He says, though it feels rather silly given the state Potter is still in, so he quickly amends it. “Though I suppose that for me it's more… I don't like feeling confined. The size of the space I'm in doesn't matter so much as the knowledge that I can't leave.”
Potter's grip tightens slightly, before relaxing enough that at the very least his nails stop biting into Draco's arm. “Sorry.” Potter says, his voice still gasping slightly.
It's a slight effort to keep his voice calm, but Draco does, as he asks, “Why can't I open that door, Potter?”
“They can't know you're here.”
Draco's blood runs cold at the words. Who is out there that can't know? What kind of danger are they in? He squeezes his own eyes shut and forces himself to take a deep breath. It's just a dream. There's no danger on the other side of that door because this whole thing is nothing but a very strange, oddly real feeling dream.
“What's out there?” He finds himself asking.
“My aunt and uncle.” There's a pause, an audible swallow, “And my cousin Dudley.”
Draco blinks his eyes open again and looks at Potter, feeling confused. Those are the people who raised Potter, right? Aren't they muggles? Draco opens his mouth to respond, but before he can there's a sudden, loud banging from above them. Dust falls from the ceiling, the light between them flickers and goes out, and then he wakes up, gasping in bed.
“I had a strange dream last night.” Draco tells Blaise and Gregory the next morning.
“The fact that you're even mentioning anything means it must have been strange indeed.” Blaise says while Gregory gives him an odd look.
“What was it about?”
There's absolutely no way he's going to tell them anything about Harry Potter being in it, there's no way he would ever hear the end of it if they knew that. “I'm not really sure. I was crammed into some cupboard and I couldn't leave.”
“So it was a nightmare?” Gregory's voice is oddly soft as he asks. He's been doing that a lot lately, being oddly soft, since Vincent died.
Draco frowns. “I suppose, but it didn't… I'm not sure, it just didn't feel right.”
Blaise rolls his eyes. “I'm sure most people would say that being stuck in a cupboard wouldn't feel right.”
“No, I mean the dream. It didn't feel like a dream at all.”
Gregory cocks his head in confusion. “What else would it have been?”
“I don't know.”
“It was just a nightmare, Draco.” Blaise says, standing up to leave the dorm room. “A bad, realistic feeling nightmare. If you're that concerned about it, talk to Madame Pomfrey, I hear she has a good tonic for dreamless sleep.”