Chapter Text
Попробуем заснуть под пятницу,
Под пятницу, под пятницу,
Во сне вся жизнь на нас накатится
Салазками под Новый год
Юрий Визбор Сон под пятницу
Poprobuyem zasnutʹ pod pyatnitsu,
Pod pyatnitsu, pod pyatnitsu.
Vo sne vsya zhiznʹ na nas nakatit·sya
Salazkami pod Novyy god.
Yuri Vizbor Son pod pyatnitsu
Harry clearly remembered falling asleep in an empty Gryffindor dormitory, wrapped up in a blanket head to toe so as not to hear the dreary howls of wind outside a window. Yet, he woke up in an entirely different place - in a spacious room flooded with bright sunlight, lounging on fabulous sheets in a very comfortable bed. In addition, Harry realised with mortification that during his sleep, not only had he himself been relocated, but also his pyjamas had been transposed to a different place — he was lying completely naked under the covers.
"A sex dream!" thought the hero of all magical Britain, appalled, "I’d rather dream about Voldemort! How am I supposed to look Ron in the eyes now? Or even worse… How am I supposed to look Hermione in the eyes?"
It had never crossed Harry's mind that the night before Christmas could take an even more sinister turn — that he might have a sex dream not about Ginny or Hermione, but about Voldemort himself. He was, after all, a modest and well-mannered boy.
Harry shut his eyes, turned his head to the side, and snapped them open decisively, ready to brave any temptation.
There was no temptation at all — only Dobby standing by the bed, wearing a quite stylish brown cloak over a white cassock.
"Phew," Harry said, relieved, lost, however, in guesses whether he was asleep or awake. "Brilliant gear, Dobby. ‘Cause you’re always wearing only a sock on you-know-what, like Red Hot, God forgive me, Chilli Peppers."
Dobby only twitched his ears in response and squinted with a look of otherworldly wisdom on his face.
"Into the High Council, the Chosen One has just entered. Sleep, instead of meetings, he must not," solemnly spoke Dobby and, leaning on a walking stick, unhurriedly proceeded to the exit.
"Unbelievable," Harry thought. "All my life I’ve been the Chosen One — I go to bed, and even in a dream I’m still the Chosen One. Still it's a good dream — the room is beautiful and the bed is brilliant. Shame that in real life the Chosen Ones are not so appreciated…"
At that moment, the door behind which Dobby had just disappeared opened again, and a sturdy bearded brown-haired man, clad in the same style of cloak and cassock as Dobby’s, entered the room. "Master Kenobi," Harry's mind suddenly supplied. "Kind, reserved… like Lupin?" Harry almost breathed a relieved sigh, but looking at Master Kenobi with a fresh eye, Harry noticed that his disposition did not look like Lupin’s at all — his bearing and look betrayed him as a determined, harsh, and conceited man, although he hid the latter — not very successfully.
"Anakin," Kenobi said, attempting to sound as affectionate as possible, though it still carried the distinct undercurrent of "I’ll break your arms and legs!" Harry, who was naturally timid in daily life, almost dived under the blanket out of fear. "An appointment to the High Council for a Jedi of your age is a great honour. Not a single young man of twenty-three has been ranked among the twelve wisest Jedi before."
"Well, council-member Kenobi certainly won’t die of modesty," Harry thought quietly, instantly recalling not only the name of the man, but also parts of his biography.
"I understand, you are upset that you were not made Master," continued Kenobi, "But, at the end of the day, you are a General, a personal confidant of the Head of the Republic…"
"I understand, Master," Harry answered meekly, thinking that it would be wonderful not to wake up at all. Screw that Hogwarts and Voldemort along with it, when he already has a career here. "It would be out of place for me to demand more."
"I’m proud of you, Anakin," Kenobi said, surprised, though it sounded like "Are you out of your mind?" "You’ll become a truly powerful and wise Jedi."
"Thank you, Master," Harry answered abashedly, and Kenobi became even more surprised, because usually in response to such words, Anakin would either smile or say that he already is cooler than ice.
"Listen," Obi-Wan said, dropping back into his normal tone, realising that something was wrong with his student, and it had to be dealt with somehow. "Since you slept through the Council meeting anyway, shall we go to the sparring salle?"
***
Lately, Anakin has felt that his life is going somewhere wrong. To begin with, Padmé stopped appearing in his sex dreams and began to appear in dramatic dreams with a pretence of a deep, hidden meaning. Then Anakin began to dream of Kenobi, who he had enough of in real life. Anakin decided to act without waiting around until Kenobi started to appear in his actual sex dreams.
Anakin began by asking Yoda for advice. Yoda opened and closed his eyes like a big humanoid doll and, as always, gave Anakin the least suitable advice.
"If you love it, let it go," uttered Yoda and closed his eyes again.
Anakin, who had been raised among mechanics on Tatooine, almost answered him with "Would you like a handstand dance too?" but managed to restrain himself.
Next, Anakin visited Palpatine, who at the height of the war attended an opera and expressed disdain for the civic duty of the Chancellor with his whole appearance. Palpatine, being a politician hardened in parliamentary discussions and election campaigns, never answered Anakin’s question but instead gave a forty-minute-long speech about Darth Plagueis the Wise, the sides of the Force, power over death, deliberate life, and spaceships furrowing the grand theatres of cosmos. By the end of Palpatine’s speech, Anakin was deadly wanting to slosh him with something, possibly with his lightsabre, but he restrained himself again.
"Many thanks, Chancellor," said Anakin politely. "You’ve made a lot of very good points. I’ll be sure to pass it on to the Jedi Council, and I’m certain they will come very soon to thank you."
For some reason, Palpatine got very tense at those words.
There was the last remedy left that Master Obi-Wan resorted to when he didn't understand something in astronomy, that is, almost constantly. Anakin entered his Master’s favourite tavern, sat at the table, and waited for the pot-bellied owner, Obi-Wan’s go-to guy.
While the owner wasn’t coming, Anakin drank one after another and thought about what was going wrong in his life, except for the dreams, of course. As the bottle emptied, his conviction that too much was wrong grew. He almost reached the conclusion that the Jedi had ruined his young life and that burning their Temple to the Sith hells would be an excellent service to the galaxy. However, at that moment, the owner sat down at his table, subtly sensing the shift in the mood.
"Do you understand me?" Anakin asked drunkenly. He had been thinking out loud for the last few minutes before the proprietor’s arrival.
"Completely," the tavern owner, who hadn’t caught anything of his muttering, answered confidently, and put a new bottle on the table, worth five times as much as the previous one.
"I’m twenty-five and I still don’t know what I want," Anakin formulated after a moment. Under the influence of the spirits and the sympathetic eye of the proprietor, his soul started hearing the music of the spheres.
"But if you could choose yourself, would you become yourself again?" said the proprietor affirmatively, and he and Anakin shook hands.
Anakin remembered ensuing slices of time indistinctly and came to his senses only when the blender roared near his ear.
"Suppose that every Universe can be represented by a four-dimensional semi-Riemannian manifold," the tavern proprietor, who also drank, at Anakin’s expense, and remembered what he was taught during his physics studies, said impressively. "And let's consider the Chosen One as a fixed point. Do you follow the line of thought?"
"No," Anakin said honestly, and the landlord immediately sloshed another three fingers into his glass.
"Well, imagine two skew four-dimensional hyperplanes," the owner gave an easy example. "In a five-dimensional space, for example."
Anakin gulped down the poured drink and imagined the whole thing quite vividly.
"And imagine that they twist across one another," went on the owner while mixing a cocktail.
"In a six-dimensional space," clarified Anakin, who started feeling well again.
"You do get my drift!" the proprietor said respectfully and thumped ‘The Chopped Off Head’ cocktail before Anakin. "And now we kind of bend them, and let’s say they are continuous and even twice differentiable," he looked at Anakin as an illusionist at the audience and depicted a curved four-dimensional hyperplane with each hand, "gee! And they suddenly have a common point. Point of contact, you know?"
"And what?" Anakin answered and looked at the cocktail.
"I’m curious myself," the proprietor admitted. "If the osculation goes at the Chosen One, then you just drink — and boom!"
"You’re sure?" asked Anakin for form’s sake, raising the glass with a cocktail mixed for him by the proprietor.
And immediately drank it.