A Lover's Paradise

Chapter One: Harry Potter

When Harry Potter woke up, he was on the ground. It was a great, white expanse, the floor covered with waking people.

Some he knew, some he might have known, and some he had never seen before.

Harry wondered why he had woken up when the silence in his ears suddenly registered as noise. He crawled closer to the other side of the endless room, chairs lined up long until he couldn't see.

"Wake up. Find a chair. Find a partner. Wait."

Harry crawled closer, pushing himself up until he was stumbling forward. After a few minutes, more people started to wake up.

He started to panic when people started to scream, and shake, and push. Harry started to push back, urging his legs to move faster. When he got to the chairs, the bellowing voice started to countdown.

"Wake up. Find a chair. Find a partner. One hundred."

It was giving him a splitting headache, everything was pulsing and he started to tremble.

Harry found a lot of chairs, but people were already fighting over them, or they were broken beyond repair.

His stomach turned, and he fell into a person in front of him, when he looked around blood was pooling everywhere, and he was sure at least one person was dead.

"Wake up. Find a chair. Find a partner. Sixty-two."

It was when someone pushed him, that he found a chair. A tall, brooding woman sneered at him, pushing him as hard as she dared. When he looked up, he was sitting in a chair.

Though perhaps it's not sitting if it's done face down. He fixed himself upright, the chair glowing white while most around him glowed black. One a few feet away faded into a dull grey, just having it's back legs snapped in half.

"Wake up. Find a chair. Find a partner. Forty-seven."

He looked around at all the faces, thinking hard on the words that floated around him. A partner? A partner, how?

He tried to look around a find a person to grab, tried to build up the courage to ask a running and screaming chick if perhaps she wanted to be his partner.

Harry didn't know what was happening, but it felt like mass hysteria.

"Wake up. Find a chair. Find a partner. Seventeen."

Harry still was yet to find a partner, and vomit was coming up his throat. What if he failed, would he be fine? They wouldn't hurt him, would they?

Harry looked around, looking down at himself only when he realised he wasn't wearing what he usually would. A black shirt, and black trousers were all he could see, feet bare and covered with cuts.

Everyone was wearing the same, but most were stained darker with other things.

"Wake up. Find a chair. Find a partner. Six."

Harry was looking around when he saw her, the shadow from history rooms, from classes so quiet you breath only silently.

"Five."

A sudden urgency washed over him, and he stared at her as she looked over at him, eyes glassy and hair everywhere. Like he had always remembered her to be.

"Four."

He tried to yell over the noise, waving his hands at her to come over. Even if he saw people he thought were familiar, he knew her. Or, at least he used to.

"Three."

Her eyes widened, and she took a step forward, so far away he couldn't remember if her hair was black or dark brown. He was screaming at her, now.

"Two."

She was running, but he felt it was too late. He reached out, though, as she got closer. She was five meters away, then she was one meter away. People pushed, and pulled, and she slipped so many times. She was so close now, their fingers brushed.

"One."

She landed in his lap, and their clothes glowed white, he gasped and shook and buried his face in her hair, relief stealing both their breath.

Everyone around them dropped, and only the people in chairs were left. Though most people were wearing white clothing now, there was also black in the mix.

He looked around at all the faces, people holding hands or in laps.

"Congratulations, the ones in white will proceed."

People wearing black shouted and tried to stand dropped to the ground, or slumped in their chairs. Only, from what he could tell, a few hundred were left. He wrapped his arms around her, she cried into his neck.

"Go to sleep."

She slumped in his arms, and darkness welcomed him as the words echoed in his mind.

It was silent.

Waking up was more disorienting.

Harry was laying in a bed; white, on white, on white. He couldn't move for the first few minutes, but when he could, he moved to stare at the body beside him.

Pansy Parkinson had moved to his town when he was nine. He remembered her only from then because of her strange clothes, and the way she had hated PDHPE.

They hadn't been friends, enemies if anything, until he was fifteen. But even then, they were mere classmates. Pansy had disappeared one day, Lavender Brown had told him she had been placed in a different home. Six years later, and he hadn't thought of her since.

"Where are we?" Harry looked over at her, thinking on her question while watching the way her face went red, and the way she stared at his ear.

She always had liked him, hadn't she?

"I don't know, but the voice makes me think this is serious." She stretched out, her fingers brushing his arm.

"Voice? All I heard was mind-numbing screeching. I couldn't even think until I saw you." He sat up, bones aching and eyes burning. He feels as if he'd been dunked in a pool of bleach, skin squeaky clean of all his impurities.

"Really? I heard a voice, telling us to move to a chair and find a partner." Pansy looked over at him, unmoving still.

She was about to speak when a single beep echoed throughout the room, Pansy shivering as she moved closer to the wall they were pushed up against.

"Welcome, candidates. We have brought you here for the repopulation program. For the next year, we expect you to grow close, close enough to have a child." Harry choked on his spit, lurching forward as Pansy turned to look at him.

He couldn't.

"We will give you rewards with every milestone you reach. Breakfast, lunch, and dinner will be held in the Great Hall. Keep hold of your partner at all times." He fell back, dizzy and sick and everything going in and out of focus.

"Enjoy your stay at Hogwarts Containment Facility."

When Harry, arm shielding eyes slightly from the blinding white, looked over at Pansy, he felt sick.

She sat there trembling, rubbing her eyes and twitching.

"I had never wanted kids, never." He avoided touching Pansy as he turned to face her on his side, breathing with shaking lips, hands gripping at his elbows.

He smile at her, watching as her face went a darker shade of red. Her eyes were green in the light.

"I had, just never with you."