All My Dreaming, It's Only Given a Name
Inspired by the Hozier song "To Someone in a Warmer Climate"... I'm fucking obsessed with it. I can't stop listening to it. If you haven't heard it, you simply MUST.
Harry woke up slowly, the room was still dark, his body warm and so content he couldn't be bothered by the ways his muscles twinged with the need to shift.
There was a comforting weight around his shoulders, a hand in his hair, anchoring him to the warm presence beneath him. A second hand had slipped under his shirt, hot palm cupping his side.
Godric, he never wanted to move again.
"Hi," murmured softly against his temple, lips brushing over his forehead in a lazy approximation of a kiss.
His heart swelled and burst, pressing against his ribs, pushing his lungs until he couldn't breathe with it; this easy, gentle affection. A love so full, so gentle that it felt like the tide washing over him and pulling him along. Words seemed to great a feat, so he just pressed his nose into Draco's collarbone, hoped it was enough.
"Hello, darling," whispered soft and sweet into Harry's hair as Draco's fingers carded through the curls there, his other hand drawing Harry even closer, lightly squeezing his side. "It's so early, love."
A low whine escaped Harry's throat, his body pressing closer, stretching out against Draco's until their bodies were aligned.
"That's it," he murmured encouragingly, holding Harry like he was something precious. "Come closer," he added, "close as you like."
"I'd like to crawl inside of your skin," Harry mumbled, then realized how odd that must sound.
Draco just chuckled softly, "I do understand that impulse," he said. "It doesn't ever feel like I can get close enough to you either."
He sighed, let the short-lived worry of being misunderstood fall away. "I used to dream about this, you know?"
"Did you?" he asked, voice warm like honey; indulgent, like he wanted to hear whatever Harry wanted to say no matter how ridiculous it might be.
He shook his head, "Not exactly," he said softly, turning to prop his chin on Draco's chest.
The other man shifted a bit so that he could look down at Harry, chin scrunching up in a way that should be unattractive but that Harry found impossibly endearing.
"My dreams are paltry in comparison to the reality of you," he murmured like a confession.
"Poetic," Draco replied, lips tilting up at the corners to soften his words, to tell Harry he was teasing, that he was feeling shy about being praised.
He hummed, "My whole life," he whispered, "There's this," he broke off, searching for the right word, "ache," he said, tapping his fingers against Draco's breastbone. He shook his head, "There's always been this yearning to be loved, to be held, to be cared for without the expectation of what I'll be able to give."
"Darling," Draco whispered, and Harry could hear the ache reflected in his voice. It was like this sometimes, like Draco took whatever was hurting Harry and held it in his own body, reflecting it back at him with an empathy and tenderness that left Harry elated and terrified all at once.
"But then there was you," he continued. "And all of my dreaming, it seems like a shadow compared to the reality of being loved by you. All of my longing, my yearning; the restless pursuit of something I never thought I could actually have-" he broke off, eyes stinging.
Draco's thumb brushed away a tear and lightly traced his cheekbone.
"I found all of the things I'd dreamt of in you," he managed. "And more," he added. "This is the fulfillment of everything I've ever wanted; a simple, cozy love. A shared bed, a shared home. Dinner together and evenings on the sofa, weekends attached at the hip. Someone to hold me gently, to kiss me tenderly. Someone who will let me hold them and love them with my love that's too big and never sufficient all at once."
"Darling," Draco murmured again. "You're not too much and you are enough," he assured. "I don't need anything more."
Harry nodded, snuggled back under Draco's arm, resting his head on his shoulder once more. "You make everything better."
"I love you," Draco breathed in that way of his, wondering and helpless, like the way he loved Harry was something that he found immense pleasure in. Godric, Harry loved it when he said it like that. "I love you so much," he repeated. "You make everything better too, darling."
"I love you too," Harry said softly, the simplest thing he knew. The truest thing he knew.
"Do you want to sleep a little more?" Draco asked through a yawn of his own.
He shrugged a shoulder, "Maybe," he said, "I do want to stay like this, even if I can't sleep any more."
"Alright," he agreed, dropping a kiss to the top of Harry's head. "Do you mind if I go back to sleep for a while?"
"Of course not," he said, squeezing Draco's ribs and kissing his collarbone.
Draco hummed, squeezed Harry a little tighter. "You're alright?"
Harry nodded, "Better than," he replied truthfully.
"Kay," Draco whispered, then as though sleeping was as easy for him as breathing, he dropped back off to sleep.
He lay there, listening to his beloved breathe, and couldn't fathom how his life had turned out sweeter than his very best dreams.
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(Read more of my fics, if you'd like)
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my locked tomb hot take of the day is that the way Harrow’s symptoms are presented in HtN line up much more closely with religious OCD with poor insight and psychotic features than schizophrenia. She shows almost no signs of paranoia or delusions (G1deon really was trying to kill her! It’s absolutely true that the other houses would swoop in like vultures if they knew her house’s true position! Her sword and psyche were both actually haunted, to the point that Alecto could hitch a ride in her body. She is never shown in the text to hold a belief that is inconsistent with reality, IMO) and her only true psychotic symptom that we see is hallucinations, and she seems to most of the time have some idea that they aren’t real, which indicates a level of self awareness incompatible with schizophrenia. She also doesn’t seem to display many cognitive symptoms like thought block or disorganized speech and thinking. The rest of her behavior is highly obsessive (compulsive praying, wearing face paint even when nobody is around, obsessive studying, needing her food to be arranged on her plate a certain way) and is very in line with someone suffering from religious scrupulosity. As someone who has experienced both OCD and psychosis, and knows how the symptoms can overlap, this is is the hill I will die on.
I don't feel like I can contribute in any meaningful way to your points, so I'll just put this out into the world and say that I appreciate your insights!
Speaking from a #meta perspective: I know that around the time HtN came out, Tamsyn gave interviews talking about her own experiences being hospitalised for mental health reasons and implied that was what she was partly drawing on when writing HtN. I can't remember if she called Harrow schizophrenic or stated that it was her intention to write her as such, and the author is dead anyway. Plus, obviously, the fact that someone's writing was informed by irl experiences doesn't have to mean that said writing is a 1:1 parallel for those experiences, expecially in a sff setting where ghosts exists and in fact there's something that Harrow can see and nobody else can.
TO ME, the fact that people who experience psychotic episodes can recognise themselves in Harrow's internal monologue and experiences is more meaningful than whether Harrow “really” has a given specific disorder or she's just seeing ghosts. The point is that SHE feels a disconnect from reality and that she's delusional and cannot trust anything she remembers or reads. Nobody in-universe is ever going to diagnose her, you know? The series itself doesn't claim to be straight-up representation for any specific named issues — things like Cytherea's cancer or Harrow's mental state are left ambiguous and partly influenced by magic. I think the fact that readers can relate to some symptoms some characters experience is more meaningful than whether these symptoms all point to something that can be diagnosed unambiguously.
Thanks for sharing your thoughts with me!
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