Set Fire to Rain

It turned out that divination was a completely lunatic and pointless class. The fact that I spent the whole class looking expectantly into Draco’s tealeaves just went to show how pointless it was. He had a giant blob of wet tealeaves, not exactly showing any particular shape. I frowned at it and showed him the cup, willing him to help me. He shrugged his shoulders and laughed. This was completely ridiculous.

“What do you see?” A loony voice suddenly said next to me. I flinched and looked with an amused expression at the crazy professor in front of me. Professor Trelawny was a very strange woman with grey, very curly and outlandish hair, covered in crazy, colorful robes and dangling jewelry. Not to mention her glasses made her eyes look ten times larger, and extremely bug-eyed.

I glanced at the tea cup and tried to examine what the figure was in front of me. It looked like a green, bubbled mess. I could see some sort of blob and wholes but the whole thing had me completely stumped. I was definitely not going to be good at this subject, not that it particularly mattered.
“Um, that looks like the sun? So I guess that means happiness… so you’re going to be happy?” I rambled, looking at it with my head turned to the side, as if that would give me a better angle. Professor Trelawny held out her hand and I gave her the cup. She looked into it a frowned, before looking at Draco with pity and shook her head, handing him the cup.
“Well aren’t you going to tell us what it is?” he demanded, the angry Draco coming out in him. His blue eyes were like daggers. Pansy jumped up from her seat and came over uninvited and smirked at me, picking up the cup before frowning and then looking sad.
“It’s a skull.” She threw me a ‘ha’ glance at that. “Unlike a few others I understand the art of divination.”
“Good, you’re probably not good at anything else,” I quipped. She sneered at me before turning back to Draco, who seemed completely uninterested.
“It means you have a dangerous path.”
“As if I didn’t know that,” he muttered, turning his back to Pansy who fumed before turning away and practically stomping back.

I gave Draco a serious look, knowing that the tealeaves were more than just a sign. The task we were given would start tonight, and the fact that we knew now it wasn’t going to be easy made it somewhat worse.

Draco looked away from me, pretending I wasn’t glaring at him. He knew very well that I was worried about his safety, and that I wanted to lecture him. He tried to prove he wasn’t scared- but I wasn’t stupid. Behind the cold demeanor and the steely-blue eyes, there was a teaspoon of fear, and for the first time I realized it was in me too.

I felt a pair of eyes on me and flickered to the other end of class, where I knew Harry was watching. His eyes had a knowing stare to them, as if he knew it wasn’t just Draco with a dangerous path. I held his gaze for a moment, challenging him to step forward and say something. He didn’t say anything- he didn’t have to. His eyes said everything. His eyes had a warning, and before turning away my lip curled in a smirk.

*
It didn’t matter how much I knew this was a dream. I knew I was asleep, but I couldn’t escape how real this felt, how physically felt the pain, the terror and the exhaustion.

The sky above me was black, no moon in the sky and the stairs veiled by storm clouds. I was in front of Hogwarts, if it could even be called that. The school was in ruins, blasted apart into debris and dirt. The smell of death and decay was heavy in the air, making my stomach roil. On the ground, blood ran thick and dark in the night, trickling over the broken stones. I felt stings all over my body, and I saw that I had been scrapped and cut.

Wizards stood all around me, dueling and there was yelling, blast and cracking. Death eaters swarmed the grounds, casting curses and laughing maniacally as they ran along, blood lust evident. I turned to see a young boy, attempting to fight off a grown death eater. He could be no more than a third year. Something inside me burned in a rage and I felt myself run to him, raising my wand at the death eater and shouting, “Confringo!”

The man yelled and burst into flames. And the boy ran, thanking me with his eyes.
Before me was the breach of Hogwarts, part of the Dark Lords plans. I knew in my head that these images shouldn’t bother me. They never had before, but in my dream they made me want to cry, and they made something in me alive and fiery.

I woke up in a sweat, panting quietly in my bed. I shook my head, knowing the dream was stupid and nothing to worry about. I had nightmares before, much worse than that. But I subconsciously knew I had never felt that way in a dream before. I had not felt hate for my own people, and I had never felt so helpless in my life.

I got up quickly and walked to the bathroom, needing to take a cold shower. I needed to wash of this sweat before I left to meet Draco in the common room. I also wanted to wash the dream away as if it were dirt on my skin.

Once showered and dressed, I told myself that I felt a lot better. That the shower in fact had washed the dream off as if it were grim on my skin, something the water had carried away down the drain. And I smiled, knowing I would never think of the drain again. But there was that small tiny ounce of doubt that I didn’t acknowledge, the small seed of doubt that I had no idea, would prosper and grow to something completely different.

*
“You don’t look happy,” Draco said quietly the moment I walked into the common room. I flinched and watched as the blonde boy materialized out of the darkness near the window that glow a dark green at night. He was dressed in a black t-shirt and jeans, which is the same thing I was wearing. At night and alone together, we didn’t care about showing the mark we both carried.
“Didn’t sleep well,” I said smoothly, walking past him and out of the common room.
“Fine,” he muttered, fallowing me. “I won’t ask questions anymore.”
I sighed and turned around, looking at him in the dim light. He had dark circles under his pale eyes and he looked at me as if my words had given him a paper cut. The care in his eyes were evident and for a moment I felt something strange in my chest, like a hiccup of some sort. I moved forward and opened my arms, wrapping my arms around him and hugging him tightly. I noted lightly that he smelled of some kind of aftershave and peppermint.
“Sorry,” I mumbled into his chest. “I know you just care.”
“I more than care, Ree. It’s our job to watch over one another. We have to take care of each other.”

I stepped away and nodding, fallowing Draco down the halls with lit wands. Draco had to take care of me, and I him. It was a requirement if we were going to live. But I couldn’t help but think for a brief moment, that us taking care of a each other, is something that a brother and sister should do.