title: foresight reawakened
author: newtypeshadow
rating: PG-13
warnings: slash, het, some language
notes: Dedicated to Brenna8, for starting me off; Mintapotter, ashlyn, and weez, for faithfulness; and raineycreek, for inspiring me to write again. It's been fun. this is my first completed (albeit really, really short) chapterfic! I haven't read the books since last year, so I've no memory of how anyone sounds. Concrit is very welcome.
Draco's mother did not want him to join the Death Eaters. She would not tell him why, and his father agreed with her. Conversations throughout the summer were shot down immediately with "perhaps when you're older" or "the war will be over by then, darling."
He found out the real reason after a fight with Potter. It took place in the hallway on the way from Potions to Care of Magical Creatures, and in the end both used Crucio. Only Potter's hit. It lost him fifty house points and gained him the eternal respect of everyone who'd ever crossed Draco Malfoy, and more besides.
Draco, meanwhile, had never felt such pain. As his vision went dark, he saw his own face bending over his body. I'm dying, he thought, and passed out.
He woke in the hospital wing. Madam Pomfrey was fussing with the person in the bed next to his. "I'm not giving you anything for those, young man," she was saying. "You got into that fight yourself. And poor Draco! Mr Potter, you've certainly done it now."
So it was Potter then, the smarmy bastard. Draco sat up, limbs aching, and turned to swing his legs off the side of the bed. He was leaving. He was leaving and writing his mother, who would use her considerable influence to get Potter kicked out of Hogwarts and onto the witness stand at his own bloody trial. The git should have his wand broken, that's what. Draco was humiliated. More than anything, he hated Harry Potter.
"Oh, you're awake." Madam Pomfrey scurried over and, not bothering to close the curtain so Potter's nosy face couldn't peer right in, bustled Draco back into bed and under the thin sheet. "I'll need you to take these for me—" she motioned to a handful of vials on the table, "and tell me how you're feeling now. Do your legs hurt?"
"My entire body hurts, no thanks to Potter," Draco spat, glaring at the cause of his misery. Potter was now standing across the room at hospital bed. Its occupant was obscured by the sheet, but he or she looked to be just waking up. Fucking Potter, wasn't even paying attention to Draco. Then Potter leaned down and kissed the person in the bed. Draco almost felt impressed—who knew he could do that? The patient lifted a bit, and Draco saw—himself?
"Sweet Merlin's balls—" he swore, covering his mouth and feeling decidedly ill. "What the bloody—"
Pomfrey was whining at him but Draco paid her no attention. He instead slipped off the other side of the bed and hobbled over to Potter, who, come to think of it, looked strangely harder, and the crazy vision of himself with the lowborn taste in mudblood-descended wizards. "What the hell are you doing?" He near shouted. "Stop, for the love of Macha!"
Thankfully, they did. And Draco found himself staring at…himself. Older, eyes a bit warmer, hair certainly longer, face pale as a ghost. "Hullo," the other Draco said. "I must say I didn't expect to be able to see you, much less speak to you."
"Draco?" asked the older Potter.
"Do you remember the incident in the sick ward after you—I'll explain later." He turned to Draco. "Draco, I know this looks…odd…but write mother about it and she'll explain everything. And look up curses and spells that Crucio counteracts. Also, remember: no one can see us but you."
"What?"
"So it would be wise to turn around and pretend you were hallucinating. At least until you've written mother."
"Wait—what do I tell her?"
But the other Draco wasn't paying him any mind. He pulled not-Potter's head down for another kiss, and Draco turned from them, disgusted.
Only to find the real Potter, Pomfrey, Professor Snape, and Headmaster Dumbledore staring at him like he'd grown another head which, in hindsight, Draco supposed he had. It just came with a very different body. "I…feel sick," Draco said truthfully. "I think I'll go lie down."
He wrote his mother. He said he'd seen himself, but older, kissing Harry Potter. Narcissa Malfoy arrived at Hogwarts that very night. She spent a long time in Dumbledore's office. Snape and Pomfrey were present, but Draco was told he needed to go to class the next day, and so should wait until morning to speak with her. He was drugged in the hospital wing, so he didn't put up much resistance, but all in all he felt let down. She had come to see him, hadn't she?
The next morning she was by his bed, and he was excused from class. She told him everything she knew. It wasn't much, but by late afternoon, Draco was so enraged he wanted to kill someone—he just couldn't decide who.
Who do you blame for a future you don't want?
Draco was getting used to seeing people that weren't there yet walking down the corridors and sleeping in the wrong beds. He was excused in Snape's class from staring into space sometimes, and the first week out of the hospital ward Snape wore a different color pin in his lapel each day so Draco would know which Snape was real, and which is not-yet. He was learning that the not-yets—what his mother called them—had a shimmery quality that others didn't. The watery translucence was hard to see in black clothing, which swallowed the colors behind it. Draco came to hate the Hogwarts black robes. He was glad of the casual weekends when students wore what they wanted. They were much easier to tell apart that way.
They were in Potions class when Draco lost points for the first time. On the way in, he saw himself and the delinquent trio standing in the hallway. Ron was crying. The other Draco said something into his ear, and Ron did nothing. Not-yet-Hermione's hand gripped not- Ron's arm tighter, but she didn't let go or lash out at the other Draco like she seemed to want to.
Draco watched this and felt his stomach sink. The feeling was unexpected and unwelcome. Anger enveloped the unaccountable sorrow. Draco felt better this way.
In the classroom, the students sat bantering in a subdued manner—it is Snape's class, after all. He had not arrived yet, but the students were still careful of their words. When Snape came in, he was no longer wearing a color on his black robes. Draco's grace period was over, it seemed.
"Turn to page three-hundred and ninety-one," he said, and Draco forgot for half a lesson that anything was wrong with him at all.
Fifteen minutes before the end of class, Malfoy raised his hand. "Three sliced beetles," he smirked. At the front of the classroom, Snape raised his eyes from the papers he was grading with an angry hand and stared hard at Malfoy. The class was tittering. Draco realized he had spoken to a not-yet. His face reddened. "Sorry, sir," he said, but the damage was done.
"Talking to your ghosts again?" Ron whispered from the next desk over. Of course Potty would tell him about the incident in the hospital wing. The prat had no discretion whatsoever. "What are they saying now?" Ron asked when Snape was glaring at papers again. Snape slashed a big, thick line in red ink over what looked to be a paragraph, and something inside of Draco followed the annoyed movement with its own cruel shade of red.
"What do you think of that Head Boy brother of yours, Ron? The stuck up one—Pasley? Peasley? Percy? Yes, Percy…He's a ponce, don't you agree? You've called him names now and again."
Ron glared at Draco, but Draco wasn't finished. Of course not. This was too good not to tell. "You know something, Weasel? Next year your brother Percy is going to give his life to save you from something typically reckless. And I'm going to walk right up to you—just outside this classroom, in fact—and whisper 'I told you so.' And you—" Draco's voice fell to a whisper, "—are going to stand there and know it's true, and you. Still. Did it."
Very suddenly, someone wrenched Malfoy down the aisle of desks. It was Snape, Draco realized just in time not to lash out. He was practically thrown into Snape's office. The professor thundered in right behind him and slammed the door.
The sallow man was so angry he couldn't speak for several moments. Finally, he calmed and, hands clenched into fists at his side, said, "Is. That. True."
For the first time in his life, Draco Malfoy was terrified of his Head of House. "Yes," he whispered.
Measured silence. Professor Snape crossed his arms slowly across his chest. In a deceptively soft voice, he said, "I don't need to tell you, of course, that you mustn't speak of these visions to anyone except the Headmaster, myself, and your mother. I also don't need to tell you never to use your gift to harm students at this school." His mouth turned down a bit. "And of course, you knew before you opened your mouth that house points would be taken for your horrendously juvenile behavior."
"Points?" Draco sputtered. "But Prof—"
"I must say I'm disappointed in you, Mr Malfoy," Snape continued over Malfoy's objection. "I thought you would handle yourself better. I see I was mistaken. Twenty points from Slytherin." Snape swept out of the room. He left the door open. Draco saw the classroom was empty, but for Snape gathering the papers on his desk and putting them away.
Draco, for himself, could not remember a time when he had felt so hollow.