Author's Note: We've all, at one point or another; have tried to imagine ourselves living in another world, or in someone else's shoes. Deep down, we all know that that's just a fantasy. What would happen if you dismissed the real world and gave everything you had to dwell in that fantasy forever? Would it become reality and swallow you up inside it; or would you just go insane?

Summary: AU, magical. Drarry. After the war, Harry goes into a coma and when he wakes up, he has no memories of his past life. As chapters pass, pieces of his past life are triggered back into his conscious memory. It's going to be a slow story and mostly spent in people's thoughts and not on their actions.

Disclaimer: The plot is mine, dreamt up in the darkest hours of the night. I wish I could say the same for the characters; but sadly, Harry and Draco do not belong to me; and neither do the basics of the story. They belong to the gorgeous J.K. Rowling.

Warnings: This is a slash fic. There's going to be HarryXDraco in it. Read at your own risk.

Chapter One

The Psyche Ward

Life wasn't so bad here.

He wasn't sure how long he'd been here; he wasn't even sure where herewas. Sometimes, he could hear wings beating gently as birds flew close to and then further away from him. Sometimes, he could just barely hold on to the sound of waves rolling softly against the sand; the ghostly picture of a beach almost forming in his head. He felt peaceful then. With no sense of a physical body or his real surroundings, he felt free. Because that's all that this was: an illusion, some fantasy world that allowed him to escape reality. Deep down, he knew it. But why acknowledge that when pretending to be lost was so much easier?

When he was honest with himself, when he truly couldn't shut off all the more disturbing thoughts, then he could admit that maybe pretending wasn't always the easier option. It was especially hard to hold onto the illusions when the pain came. He would feel hands on his body and voices that called to him over and over again. Each touch burned a hole in his skin and each word pierced his head; ringing hollowly many times over, getting louder each time, until it shook him to his core. The illusion would completely dissipate then. He would be left in complete darkness, darkness so consuming and absolute that it almost terrified him enough to make him want to wake up from the fantasy. But he wasn't one to give up so easily. He would try to go deeper in his mind still, hide under the darkness, and lose the consciousness that was creeping up on him. Under a well of murky waters in his head, he would hide from the voices and recall the illusions back to him. It worked.

It usually worked.

If it didn't, if the voices were too deafening to ignore, or if the vigorous shaking made his teeth rattle, he would be dragged back into his body. Was it hisbody? It didn't feel as if it belonged to him. It didn't feel as if it belonged to anyone. It felt uninhabited. No, it was more than that. It felt completely deserted, unused. It felt weak, numb. But how could it still hurt so much if it was numb? Maybe it was all just a nightmare that would end any minute now. Or maybe he lived in two worlds, one filled with nightmares and one filled with dreams. He just wanted to hear the fluttering of the wings, the whoosh of the waves. Why were the nightmares getting longer and the dreams shorter? He would try to concentrate on the dreams, to make them more solid, to lose himself even more.

In those moments of honesty, the moments of total clarity, he knew that the nightmare wasn't actually a nightmare. He knew that it was the real world that he was hiding from. What did they want from him? Why couldn't they leave him be? Why were they getting more persistent in their efforts to wake him up? This was the important part. He had to wait for the wings. If he heard the birds, then it would all be okay. How could he hear it though, when they kept shaking him, kept calling to him? They had to stop. He had to hear the wings, followed by the waves. Couldn't they see that this was the important part?

He would wait them out. After all, they had lives, places to be, things to do. He didn't. His life now consisted of cloaking himself in the colourful shadows of the illusion, running away from the darkness and the voices of the nightmares. He didn't know how long it would take; he had no sense of time. He would wait for days, months, decades, and centuries still. He would feel hands holding his face; the touch burning right through his skin. If he had been able to figure out how to use his hands, he would have struck at the intruder, tore its hands away from him. The problem was that he wasn't even sure if he had hands. How did hands feel? How did they connect? How did you move them? It was all too exhausting. Thinking was exhausting. It was easier to simply wait for the hands on his face to coax his mouth open, pour in the cold liquid, and then leave him be. For a few moments, he would know that he had a mouth. And he'd notice the liquid going down his throat. For a few moments, he'd remember what swallowing a potion felt like. And then he'd feel smug, because he'd once more waited out the pain and could go back to his illusions undisturbed.

Then the moment would pass. He would no longer remember anything but the wings beating overhead. He would no longer hear anything but the repetitive sound of the waves. He wouldn't remember that he had a body or a face or a mouth, or what feelings felt like, or that he was lying somewhere with strangers feeding him unknown potions. He would only know the dream world, the world that mattered, real or not.

Sometimes, little things came and went. Little things that he knew mattered; but couldn't put his finger on exactly why they mattered. He'd see a flash of green light, associated with a foreign, heavy feeling. He couldn't name the feeling. He couldn't properly grasp it long enough to be able to search his foggy memories for a name. Why did it matter anyway? It was only a name. What was a name? He didn't remember. What didn't he remember? He didn't know. What didn't he know? He didn't know anything. It was a string of words that left him as soon as they came. After all, this was a world of pictures and sounds, not a world of words. It was a world that would be foreign and confusing to anyone else, but it was one that was comforting and familiar to him.

Occasionally, he'd see an image of someone smiling at him in his mind. It filled him with another sort of feeling altogether, a vast contrast from the heavy feeling before. He knew every crease of the face, the laugh lines, and the bright eyes. He knew every detail of the face; he just didn't know who it belonged to. He knew it was someone that mattered; but in this place, nothing mattered for very long.

Remembering things was painful. Not remembering them was easier; although it wasn't always his choice not to remember. Every now and then, he'd want to hold on to an image, or recall a memory. It was an impossible task. No matter how hard he tried, no matter how long he waited, they wouldn't come to him. This was something that his hard lessons of never-ending patience didn't help him with. So he wouldn't ask his foggy mind to recall. It was a simple solution to his problems after all. When he was on the edge of sleep but the voices of his nightmares pulled him towards consciousness; caught between heaven and hell; they'd prompt him to remember his name, hold on to his story. They wouldn't let him simply float in the illusions. That was when his simple solutions would become too simple for a more complicated problem.

For a while, he would push it all away. They were not real. This place was not real. He was not real. Then, he would see the image of the smiling face in his head, and another face looking at him expectantly next to it; and he'd want them to be real. He wanted to go search for these people, ask them for the meaning of the smile, the reason behind the expectation. Ask them what the feeling that filled him was; what it meant. Ask them to help him sort out this confusion. And if the smile and the expectation were going to be real, then he had to be real too. And if he was real, then he must have a name.

Shouldn't he have a name?

He couldn't remember. Not remembering would make him want to scream. For that to happen however, he would have to figure out how to use his vocal chords. He would have to remember where they were, how they connected, how they worked.

How what worked? He was so tired. He was always tired. It was wrong; it was all wrong, he knew that. He just didn't know what 'right' was supposed to be like anymore. If his options were the two worlds of dreams and nightmares, then of course he would choose the dream world. As long as he was here, he was safe. As long as he was away from there, he would be alright. He wasn't sure how he'd ended up here, or why he'd run away in the first place. This was now his home. This was all he knew. Deep down he knew he was only fooling himself. But it was easier, and he was too tired to take the harder option right now.

So he'd let the voices screech all they wanted; he'd let the hands throw him around. He'd submerge in the colourful shadows and listen to the familiar wings and waves that soothed his soul.

xXx

He wasn't sure if he was awake or still dreaming; the images had never been this vivid before. They played in front of him consequently; demanding his attention. At first, he'd payed it no mind. He'd believed that it would go away; like every other image. As if it had a mind of its own, after it had replayed itself for a while and was faced with no interest from him, it had decided to add more colour, more sound, more sensations. Now, he could do nothing but watch.

He was familiar with the first picture: it was that of the smiling person. He knew he'd seen it many times before, although he never could recall it after it had come and gone. Now, he was sure that it had ingrained itself in his mind forever. That was only the first picture though.

The smile would come and go in a flash, followed by the green light, followed by the foreign, heavy feeling.

He didn't know what it meant. He couldn't remember if it had been a part of his past, present, or even future. It might have been a nightmare. After all, half the time he was living a nightmare.

The images kept playing over and over in his head, like a broken record stuck on replay. A spark of light blinded him with its intensity in the darkness he'd wrapped around himself. Had he just thought of a broken record? What was that? A shock went through him. Shock. That was a feeling, wasn't it? Yes, he had felt the shock. He felt shocked, and excited, and scared.

He was feeling.

NO! He wanted to scream until his lungs tore out of his chest. He wasn't supposed to feel. He wasn't supposed to remember. He was supposed to hide. Hide from the pain; hide in the darkness. He tried to put out the light, tried to stop remembering. However, it proved to be impossible to stop the wheels of the train once they started to roll. The images kept playing in front of his eyes –he had eyes! The same illustration was pushing him yet again. It was pushing him to remember, to get out of this void, to feel again.

He wasn't sure what happened next. One moment, he was fighting it, trying to diminish the light; and then he saw the image of the other face giving him the expectant look, and in the next moment, he was fighting alongside the forces in his mind to get rid of the illusions and the absolute darkness that covered it all. Maybe it had been the smile –a woman, it had been a woman smiling– vanishing after the green light had shone that started it all, but it was the man's expectation of him to stop this nonsense and face his problems instead of living in denial that ended the lies. He was left full of despair and a prompting to go after the woman –Lily?– and make sure that she was okay, make sure that the man –James?– wasn't disappointed in him.

He knew that a green light couldn't hurt anyone; of course he knew that. Lily –Mum! She was his Mother. It had been the images of his Mother's smile that had prompted a pull out of the darkness and it had been his Father's stern expectation that had ended his last holds on the illusions. But why had she stopped smiling? He had to go find her. He had to make sure that she was fine. He couldn't stay here any longer.

He tried to find his way back into his body. He tried to swim against the current that was pushing him under the absolute darkness; the current that was trying to take his limited memories away once more. But now he had a purpose, a reason. He couldn't stay oblivious to it all, couldn't stay in the safe cocoon. Besides, now that he knew the illusions were hidden inside the darkness, essentially a part of it, instead of having fought off the terrifying darkness the way that he had thought was their purpose, he was distrustful of their reasoning for keeping him distracted from the real world. Had he really called the real world a nightmare and dismissed it so easily? He couldn't live in fear, in shadows. It still scared him to face it, for whatever reason, but it was better than that ruthless darkness that had existed in his mind and engulfed his memories and personality so completely. He could now see that the sacrifice of living in oblivion was too great. He didn't know how much longer he could have lived in dreams and inside the darkness before he would have lost himself completely. That was more terrifying of anything he could think of that had driven him from living in the real world and pushed him into trapping himself inside illusions.

He found his way back into his body piece by piece. Of course he found his body. How could he have ever forgotten that it was his? It wasn't uninhabited, or deserted, or unused. It was his. He tried to open his eyes, but even behind the protection of his closed eyelids, the soft light protruded quite painfully. He shut his eyes even tighter, even though the pull on his facial muscles was a foreign feeling, and tried to move his hand instead. Although his body didn't feel deserted anymore, it was still weak and shaky. He couldn't even muster enough energy to move a finger, let alone raise his hand or even arm.

His breathing quickened. Realizing that he was panicking, another feeling that he'd forgotten about, he smiled slowly. Although everything hurt horribly as though an electric shock was constantly travelling up and down his whole body, the sensation of feelingagain was amazing, and it at least let him knew that he wasn't paralysed, just weak from not moving for however long he'd been living inside that foul darkness. Yes, every feeling was foreign, but it was so in a delicious way. And now that he was out of the darkness, he could admit that that had been no dream but a nightmare. He wanted to explore everything anew, find himself afresh. His brain, rusty from not having to solve even the simplest problems for as long as he could remember, was eager to start racing with thoughts, but at the same time the flood was giving him a headache. Still irrationally unsure about not being paralysed from the neck down, he put all of his focus and concentration first and foremost on getting his fingers and toes to move.

Without his permission, his mind kept on racing, content to let a part of his mind deal with that task while the rest flowed and rushed to every corner of his mind, re-familiarizing him with every corner. All thoughts come to a sudden halt and for a moment he didn't care if he was after all paralysed. He remembered.

He remembered that his name was Harry Potter.

And that he was in the Psyche Ward.