Anchises

Chapter Two: The Dreams

Song: Pompeii, Bastille

The ground felt cold underneath him, dirt digging itself underneath his fingernails. The light of the moon was bright enough to cast shadows of the stones around him, each darker and more ominous than the last. Harry stood up in shaky legs, slowly moving towards the center, already knowing what he would find, but unable to stay still. It was as if some invisible force or string was pulling him forwards. He couldn’t even close his eyes or move his head away, no matter how much he wanted to. He was forced onwards until he was pushed into a kneeling position, right in front of Cedric’s corpse.

Dull, lifeless eyes stared at him, through him, and Harry could only stare back as the quiet of the graveyard was broken by Voldemort’s hissing laughter.

“Join me, Draco. Join me.”

Harry looked up. Not every nightmare was the same. Sometimes he watched Cedric die, others it would be Draco instead. There were the rare ones where it was Harry casting the killing curse. Each nightmare was equally as horrible as the last in its own way. But this was new, never had his dreams recreated the scene between Voldemort and Draco.

Suddenly, he was no longer kneeling down. He was trapped between the arms of the weeping angel, Cedric’s body laid in front of Draco, having jumped in the way of the curse at the last second. Draco was covered in mud, just as Harry remembered, and yet the other boy still looked beautiful to him.

“Join me, Draco. With me, you will have unimaginable power.”

Draco, say no!

Draco never glanced at him, his eyes remained on the skeletal hand stretched out towards him. Waiting for the other to make the deal with the devil. Harry struggled against the stone, feeling the cut and scraps in his neck and skin as he fought for freedom. He could not speak, his voice was not working, because something was off. Something felt wrong and it made his scar itch and burn.

Draco, say no!

Because Draco did not have the silver choker from the night at the graveyard. He had no dagger, just his wand. The change should not have mattered, Harry should not have paid that attention, not when Voldemort stepped closer to Draco. But, for some reason, something in Harry screamed at him that those changes mattered. That the missing choker and dagger changed everything.

Draco reached for the hand.

“NO!”

Harry sprang forward, hand reaching out to empty air, as if he could reach for Draco and take him away from Voldemort and the father who betrayed him.

“Harry?”

Right. He was not in the graveyard or at the Dursleys’ anymore. He was at Grimmauld Place, at Sirius’ ancestral home. He was back with people who understood the feeling of magic under the skin, and the need to use it. He was safe.

He was safe.

“Harry?”

“Sorry Ron. Nightmare.”

“Wanna talk about it?”

He stayed silent for a moment, mulling the nightmare over. Ron’s bed groaned and creaked as he sat upright, and Harry could see him rub the sleep from his eyes with the little light the moon gave. He looked over to his best friend, despite the betrayal Harry felt from Hermione and Ron ignoring him at Dumbledore’s orders, he also knew that they would always listen to his nightmares. It was one of the reasons he offered to let Ron sleep in the same room as him, while Ron’s room was being cleaned up after one of the Twin’s more destructive pranks.

“I was at the graveyard again, but… I don’t know. It was different this time. Draco seemed… different.. I don’t know how to explain it. It was. It was like he was another Draco, not the one we know.”

“Another Draco?”

Harry shrugged, hugging his knees closer. “Yeah. No necklace or weird dagger. Just a Draco who took Voldemort’s offer. It was… it’s as if I was seeing another possibility.” He laughed, it sounded hollow even to his own ears. “I sound crazy.”

“I don’t think so,” Run mumbled, and in the dark Harry heard him move around, opening a drawer and pulling something out of it. “Here, write it down before you forget it. But… I know from the stories that demigods can… dream events. Like, past, present and future you know? Maybe you can too?”

Harry took the journal. Already flipping it open to a new page, passing the others filled with his previous dreams. Without asking, Ron casted lumos . “But, I’m not a demigod.”

He could see Ron better now, even if his focus was on writing the nightmare that had begun to slip away from his mind. His friend shrugged, but a frown framed his features. He had an expression that Harry recognized as being deep in thought, particularly when he was trying to figure out something, but couldn’t because he had pieces of the puzzle missing.

It was a face Harry mainly saw when Ron was playing chess against Millicent.

“No, you are not and yet…”

And yet. Harry frowned, because despite not being a demigod, he was pretty sure that he was Dreaming, something that a mortal should not be able to do. At least, according to his godfather, and unless he could finally contact Draco, Sirius was the most knowledgeable person on the Greek pantheon Harry had at the moment.

And yet, Harry was mortal and he was Dreaming. He was a demigod and he was Dreaming.

He could never be normal, could he? Not even among the people who were not meant to be normal in the first place.

***

Harry stumbled out of bed, he had managed to sleep again… eventually. The room was empty, and Harry didn’t want to know the time, because if Ron was up and about it meant that it was probably past noon or close to it at least. Sirius and Remus had a habit of waking him up if he slept past both breakfast and lunch… unless Ron told them about his nightmare.

Which was a possibility.

He grabbed his wand, put on his glasses and moved towards the door. He hesitated, hand on the handle, and he looked over to his nightstand. His journal laid there, a simple object, leather bound and with pristine white pages except for the ones he already wrote on. Inside the back cover was an envelope, carefully glued there to keep the letter inside safe.

Harry remembered approaching Sirius and Remus with an idea a week ago. He could have asked Hermione, he knew she would have been able to figure it out, but it just didn’t feel right. So he went to his godfather and former professor.

The idea had been this: he wanted an envelope that could fit an infinite amount of letters that only he could access. He had been able to glue the envelope to the journal, but he was not sure how to approach everything else. And since the two of them were half of the people who created the Marauder’s Map, Harry could not think of better people (apart from Hermione) to help him solve the problem.

Sirius and Remus had been curious as to why, a curiosity that only grew when Harry only put one single letter into the envelope after they casted the necessary spells. But they did not ask. Harry had hesitated, but then he remembered Draco’s parting letter and suddenly, he told Sirius and Remus everything. From Draco’s apology to the unlikely friendship and growing feelings, and, finally, the true  version of what happened in the graveyard, not the edited one he told Dumbledore.

By the end of it, his godfather and former professor had sat down with unreadable expressions on their faces. Harry worried he made a mistake until Sirius barked out a crazed laugh.

“Of course, Cissy managed to seduce a goddess. She was always too good for the pretentious git!”

Safe to say, Harry learned he had nothing to worry about and suddenly was forced to sit down for the most interesting history lesson ever. He understood why Draco said to trust Sirius with everything. Despite how much his godfather hated his Black heritage, some aspects of it he was proud of and respected. The gods and the Black Family’s patron goddess were among them.

That new information explained a lot, but also created more questions that only Draco could answer. Answers that Harry may never get because the only letter he ever received from Draco was safely inside the enchanted envelope that only Sirius and Remus knew about. And while they didn’t know what the contents of the letter were or who it was from, Harry was certain that their suspicions were right on the money.

Quickly, he grabbed the journal and left his room.

When he got to the kitchen, there was a plate of food waiting for him. Sirius and Remus sat on the table, looking over some papers, and Harry could hear Mrs. Weasley working away in the kitchen. It was too early for her to be organising dinner, maybe she was going through what was left in the pantry. He knew that someone needed to go buy groceries soon, and Mrs. Weasley was always the one who made the shopping list when it came to ingredients.

“Good afternoon, Harry,” Remus smiled, looking up from the papers. “The food is still warm.”

“Thank you.”

Sirius reached over to ruffle his hair, a smile on his face despite the clear worry in his eyes. “Ron said you had another dream.”

“Yeah,” Harry sighed.

He didn’t want to talk about it so instead he pushed his journal towards them. It was an unspoken permission, enough that the magic imbued into the journal recognized it. When he had asked them to cast the spell on the envelope, Sirius had gone an extra mile and casted it on the journal itself. Harry couldn’t bring himself to be annoyed, it meant he didn’t need to worry about people seeing what he wrote and he didn’t need to worry about running out of paper.

He ate silently, while Sirius and Remus read over his latest nightmare.

“They are becoming more frequent right?” Remus asked when they finally finished reading it over, handing back the journal.

Harry shrugged, “Not really. They just became more… notable I guess.”

It all really began after his trial and Dumbledore saving him from being expelled. A month has passed since.

Sure, he had dreams before that, they mainly revolved between nightmares about the graveyard and a weird door at the end of a hallway. He had them during his stay with the Dursleys, so when Remus first gave him the journal, Harry hadn’t really used it. Just wrote down the next time he had the door dream and that was that.

The night after the trial was when the shift first started. When he dreamed of The Door or The Graveyard, Harry knew it was a dream or nightmare (it all depended on which one it was). But that night it didn’t feel like that. It felt real, but also as if he was just observing. Somehow he knew what he was seeing (dreaming?) was true, but he could not move, just observe.

It was a forest. That was the first thing he noticed, and then felt, and then smelled. There was a girl, spiky black hair and a black leather jacket. There was a silver circlet on her head, not something that should have matched her aesthetic, but it seemed right at home despite that. She had a bow, and an arrow ready to fire. Despite being the only one Harry could see, somehow he knew she was not alone. That there were others nearby, hidden away in the foliage around them.

The dream only lasted seconds, but Harry remembered feeling like it lasted longer, but as quickly as the dream happened, the girl had tensed, as if aware that someone -- him -- was watching. In the same second Harry realized that her head had turned towards him, the dream vanished.

He woke up instantly. It was morning, and unlike the other dreams that would have awakened him in the middle of the night, sweating, that one had not. He wrote it down instantly.

After that, other dreams (events?) became part of the rotation. He still had The Door and The Graveyard, but he began seeing the girl in the forest. Sometimes, he could see the others he knew were always there, they were girls as well, sometimes there would be wolves. They were too big to be normal, but they didn’t look like werewolves either. The mysterious group of hunters, he concluded they had to be hunters, with the arrows and tents, and occasional snippets of conversation he could sometimes hear.

Every time they appeared, he wrote it down with as much detail as he could. Every similarity and every difference. He never caught the name of the girl, the one he always saw, but he never caught the name of any of them really. Harry had not been sure what to think about these weird dreams.

And then new ones joined the rotation. It was these dreams that made him suspect that the hunter group weren’t normal. Harry had never once thought they were muggle, but with the new dreams he began to suspect that they weren’t even wizards or magical in any sense. At least the magic he knew.

He began to suspect that, somehow, they were connected to Draco’s world.

Because he began dreaming of Draco. It had begun just like The Hunter dreams, which was why Harry had been prepared to be in a forest again or some other place, hunting something down, a monster with a name he could never pronounce in a language he had never heard of before. Instead he was atop a hill next to a pine tree. Harry had been confused and became even more so when he noticed he could move.

He didn’t even hesitate and maybe he should have, but Harry was happy he hadn’t because when he moved, it was as if a fog had cleared and he could finally see .

The hill looked down to a massive camp. The size of it could rival Hogwarts and its grounds, the Forbidden Forest included. And it was beautiful.

There was a Colosseum and he could, if he squinted, barely make out the specks of what he assumed were more people walking below him, all in bright orange -- maybe one or two in another color. Cabins were at the center of it all but he was too far and there were too many for him to count, but there had to be more than twelve. Surrounding the entire area was a massive forest, there was a large lake with various rivers branching out into the ocean.

“Race you!”

Harry startled, the yell caused him to jump and look away from the unbelievable sight and towards a girl. She was pale and with unnatural black hair, but what striked out were her eyes. They were a bright green that almost seemed to be glowing. She wore a bright orange shirt with lettering that Harry could not understand, and an Abraxan printed on it, or at least something similar to it.

She was laughing, waving at someone that Harry could not see, and began to run, going straight past him without a glance, unlike the hunter girl from his other dreams.

“You are not winning!”

That voice. Harry would never forget that voice nor get it confused. He watched, wide-eyed and fascinated as Draco ran after the girl. And it had to be him. Same pale skin, hair so blond it looked silver under the sun. Except, this Draco wore jeans, sneakers and a bright orange shirt, the same as the girl. Gone was the boy that Harry knew from school who would not be caught dead with even a wrinkle on his robes.

And yet, Harry could see the dirt on the shoes, the crease of well used jeans, and wrinkles on a shirt from constant movement.

But he knew it was Draco.

When Harry woke up, he wrote everything down, from the beautiful camp to the wrinkled orange shirt. He could not even bring himself to feel embarrassed for writing down Draco’s smile. Of how happy and safe and good he looked atop that hill, running after what Harry could assume was a friend from his laughter.

Those dreams, he kept close to his heart. The Camp and Draco most of all. It didn’t seem right to share them, not with Sirius or Remus or even his best friends Ron and Hermione.

(He only mentioned them to Sirius and Remus once, out of curiosity.

He never even thought of mentioning them to Dumbledore, Draco’s warning clear in his mind. He still remembered Sirius' blank look when Harry asked if The Camp dreams were somehow Draco contacting him, and if so how Draco could have possibly contacted him through the Fidelius Charm. He remembered how Remus grasped Sirius’ hand before answering.

Harry remembered the words clearly.

“I don’t think it is him, Harry. But…he is half-god, and our magic is mortal no matter how powerful. There is very little he cannot do… should he put his mind and powers into it.”)

When Harry had The Camp dream again, somehow, he knew that it was not Draco’s doing. It was something else.

And he knew he should be worried about it, but it gave him an opportunity to see Draco. To see how happy and safe he was inside the odd camp. Because of that, even with The Door and The Graveyard dreams, Harry was always excited to sleep.

Because among the horrors and the confusion, there was the chance of seeing Draco smile and laugh.

***

Harry's day repeated like that. Sleep. Dream. A flip of a coin if it was a good or not. Wake up. Write it down, and either spent the day learning history from Sirius and Remus or spending it with his friends. Even when Ron was finally able to move back to his own room, Harry's routine didn't change.

But there was one thing he always looked forward to. One thing that change the repetition.

The Order meetings that he and the others were banned from attending, but would try to listen in to anyway.

It happened to be one of those days.

Mrs. Weasley had yet to find a spell that would stop the extendable ears. The younger Weasleys, Hermione, and Harry were gathered in Harry’s room, prepared to move to the edge of the stairs to try and eavesdrop on the meeting again. Ginny was pressed against the door, while everyone else was doing their own thing. Hermione was reading, pointedly ignoring Fred and George, who were discussing some new invention of theirs in hushed voices. Ron was hunched over Harry’s desk, writing furiously on a piece of parchment that nobody else was allowed to read.

Harry had a feeling that it was a letter for one of the Slytherins. Sure, he and Hermione had become some level of friends with them, but Ron was the only one of them who was truly part of the Slytherin group. Harry trusted Ron to tell him if it was related to Draco.

Draco…

Harry forced the thought away. He could not afford to be distracted at that moment, else he would want to read over The Camp dreams again, and he would rather not do that with everyone around. Sure, the journal was enchanted so only he can the people he gave permission in the moment could see the contents, but it was the principle of it that stopped him.

“The meeting has started!” Ginny whispered yell and they all scrambled to the stairs, one end of the extendable ear already being lowered down.

SLAM!

For a second everything was still. And then, it wasn’t. Harry wasn’t sure what the others did, but he remembered scrambling up from the floor, tripping over himself or air or someone and taking out his wand. By the time he was at the bottom of the staircase, everyone who had been at the meeting had created a human wall between the intruder and the rest of the house.

“You really don’t wanna do that.”

The air became electrified and the feeling that something was wrong increased tenfold. Something in Harry was screaming “danger, run, hide,” and Harry’s breath hitched. The feeling he had come to know as his magic twisted and turned, and in front of him, he saw Mad-Eye Moody stumble back, eyes wide. Harry moved, ignoring Mrs. Weasley tightening grasp. That feeling… it was the same one from last year… when Draco had—

A girl with spiky black hair stood in front of the closed door. The house itself seemed to try and make space for her, shaking off jackets from the jacket rack and changing the colour of the carpet to a rich purple, fit for royalty. She raised her hand, and everything became still. Harry was sure he had stopped breathing, too afraid to move. The bow and arrow-filled quiver on her back gleamed. They seemed like they were made of silver, and Remus must have noticed too, because he was eyeing it warily. The circlet on her head glowed, and everyone began to lower their wands.

Harry knew who she was. His dreams had told him—warned him?—about her.

“You… are a demigod,” Sirius breathed, awed, and Harry was certain that the only reason his godfather didn’t kneel was because of Remus’ tight grip on his arm.

Her smile was sharp and deadly, and her eyes sparkled with electricity. “Thalia, daughter of Zeus, and Lieutenant of Artemis’ Hunters. Let's have a chat.” The house came back to life at her words.