Title: dare to dream
Fandom: Harry Potter
Rating: General Audiences
Length: 182
Author notes: Nothing better than dropping the exestential terror of non-existence on a toddler.
Summary: It can hardly be called a mental link if one half of the soul-bridge has no body to speak of. Or is it?

On a cold doorstep in Surrey, a toddler's swaddled body lies still with the limp plasticity of heavy sleep. Potion or spell, Harry knows and cares not. All he knows is that the world has dissolved into the warm technocolour nothingness of sleep, and when he wakes his parents will have returned and his empty stomach will be soothed.

The world turns towards morning. An unmoored wraith scrabbles at the dubious shelter of a fleeing rat. The first round of celebrations begins to peter out, and another begins, toasting the Boy-Who-Lived.

Harry's dreamworld dissolves from around him like unwanted vegetables until it is formless, touchless, without any hint of colour or sound or shadow to give him baring. He exists in grey nowhere. In Surrey, warmth is slowly leached away from the blanket's flickering heating charm, slow as tendrils of ice creeping across the surface of a pond.

He is alone, drifting, helpless as a balloon dragged behind his toy broom. He wakes, screaming, to a grey, smoky dawn, and the stuttering chug of the postal van's engine coming around the bend.