Heart Of Glass
On Draco's right, there's a heart floating in a yellow jar with Snape's name on it.
Clearly Draco is dreaming, because there is no room in the manor as white and bright as this one, and he knows for a fact that Snape is alive and downstairs talking with his father. If Snape is alive, then it's impossible for his heart to be in a container on this small shelving unit, and yet, there it is.
The jar rests next to several other jars with hearts and names that Draco doesn't recognize. It's only when Draco picks up the jar and the contents slosh around that he realises it's not the jar that's yellow, but the heart itself and the liquid.
It could be formaldehyde. It could be piss.
Furthermore, a heart is dense; it shouldn't float. It should sink to the bottom of its crystal prison, but this is a dream and Draco knows it's not supposed to make sense.
He's not particularly certain about what's going on, but that's been a recurring theme in his life recently, and he's learned to accept that he will never know everything as long as he goes unmarked.
One day he will belong.
Draco's never been to the Ministry of Magic.
His father refused to take him on his errands there lest Draco become 'contaminated' by the backwards ideology and rampant spinelessness. His father said the Ministry was nothing more than a storage facility for weak-minded individuals just waiting for the sweet bliss of Imperio.
Draco knows none of the details of the prophecy of Harry Potter or the death of Sirius Black.
He has extremely vague and formless ideas based on hushed words and battered house elves that breathe at the wrong time. Draco's father has never been one to suffer fools lightly, but since his return from Azkaban, his tolerance is extraordinarily low. Even for a Malfoy.
Draco has already felt his wrath on more than one occasion, and yet, he still marvels at his father's ability to rail and cause massive destruction all around him without disrupting a single hair on his head.
There's a certain smooth elegance to his father's insanity that Draco can't help but admire, even when he's nursing a blackened eye or licking the salt away from a split lip.
Normalcy comes in all different flavors for Draco.
Draco swirls Snape's heart in its jar a few times, amused by how the heart seems somewhat larger than he imagined. Not that he's ever imagined what Snape's heart looks like, but if he had, he knows he would've expected it to be smaller and slightly more wrinkled, like a sultana or Professor Flitwick's visage.
The jar makes a loud clunking sound when Draco sets it back down on the middle shelf, and he steps back to get a better look at what's before him. It's a small bookcase with only three shelves, and apart from the wooden unit there's nothing else in the room.
If it is indeed a room -- it appears to just be a vast wasteland of whiteness and this one bookcase.
Draco's world is indeed this small.
The bottom shelf is loaded with similar jars, and when Draco crouches down he sees all sorts of names that he recognizes. Lestrange. Parkinson. Riddle. Fudge. Malfoy.
Instinctively Draco picks up the jar with his surname on it. The contents are obscured by an inky liquid, like the squid ink he uses in potions, and Draco has no idea what could possibly be inside. His heart is still beating in his chest, and when he shakes the jar nothing happens.
The liquid swirls, Draco's chest tightens, but even when he turns it upside down there's no clue as to what's inside. When he tries to pry the lid off, there's no give, and his wand isn't up his sleeve or in the folds of his robes.
Draco's not even wearing his robes.
He doesn't even have his wand.
He's wearing the Muggle clothing he keeps in the false bottom of his trunk, but he's missing his shoes, and in frustration he throws the jar into the white void that surrounds him.
There's no sound of the jar breaking, and when Draco bends back down to further study the bottom shelf the jar with Malfoy scrawled on it is back where he found it.
Draco knows dark magic when he sees it, and instead of making a second attempt to get rid of the jar, he grabs the blood red one marked Riddle instead.
The jar is ice cold, and the obviousness doesn't escape Draco, but when he drops to his knees to get a better look at the heart of the Dark Lord, Draco finds the container empty of anything besides red liquid and little black bits.
Carefully placing the container back on the bottom shelf, Draco straightens up, and rising on his toes, his eyes make another pass of the bookcase, finally coming to rest on the top shelf and what he knows has always been there.
The jar with Potter's name on it is sealed in gold, except that Draco can't see the heart from his vantage point. And strangely enough, when Draco does finally grasp hold of the jar, he finds it empty. He can feel the heart beating inside though, and he doesn't expect the glass to shatter when he drops it.
But it does.
A thousand shards fly in a thousand directions, and it's only natural that at least a few penetrate Draco's skin. Draco can feel glass slivers like needles in his feet and his hands. They gouge his eyes and seep into his brain forcing him to admit the ugliest truth of them all.
Harry Potter is everywhere. Even in Draco's dreams.
When Draco wakes up, his heart is racing and he can taste the bitterness in his mouth from where he's bitten his tongue in denial. The sound of his bedroom door snicking shut makes his blood run cold, and on his nightstand there's a glass of water with odd red pieces floating in it.
His mother said that small bits of dragon heart were supposed to cure anxiety, not create it.