Кассандра Клэр - Draco Veritas

Ginny looked even more miserable. "Ron…"

But Ron was looking past his sister. "Fine," he said. "Fine. I'll talk to you."

Ginny's face fell, and she glanced at her brother, but his mouth was set in a stubborn line. With a resigned shrug, she went to the door. "I'll meet you on the steps," she said to Ron, and went out.

The door shut behind her, and Ron and Hermione were alone together in the empty, silent room. Ron crossed his arms over his chest, hugging his elbows as if he were cold. He was staring at a point just past Hermione's left ear, as if he couldn't quite bring himself to look directly at her.

"You can't leave," she said to him. It wasn't what she'd meant to say at all, but there it was. "You can't."

He still wouldn't look at her. "I'm leaving," he said. "It's done. And don't tell me I didn't have to resign — "

"I'm glad you resigned," she interrupted coldly. "That's not what I mean.

You can't leave without talking to Harry."

Now he looked at her, his blue eyes gone wide with amazement. "Talk to Harry?"

"You owe him an apology at least — "

"An apology?" Ron's voice was a slap. "You think this is like that little disagreement we had back in fourth year; you think this is something that can be solved with an apology? Hermione, he hates me now, after what I did."

"But you didn't really do it — "

"Yes, I did." He was hugging himself again, his knuckles white. "In every way that matters, I did."

"Why?" The question she had promised herself she would not ask, burst out of her. "Why did you do it?"

He was silent. After a minutes had gone by, he dropped his hands from his elbows, and straightened up. And his eyes met hers. "I thought you loved me," he said. "I thought…"

His voice trailed off into silence. She looked at him, seeing as if for the first time how white and drawn he was. His red hair fell in dank tangles over his forehead, his eyes were shadowed with a violet as dark as any of Pansy's horrible eyeshadows. His clothes were crumpled, as if he had slept in them. He looked like someone who had been ill for days. She wanted to hate him and reached for the anger she knew was there, the rage that ticked away just below the numbness that had claimed her thoughts.

Instead, she saw a series of images cast like shadows against the walls of her mind.

Ron, on the train to school, eleven years old in threadbare robes. Sitting in class, chewing a quill, a look of intense concentration on his face. De-gnoming the Burrow garden with determined glee. Facing down Snape, facing down Sirius Black, teetering on his broken leg, wincing in pain.

Soaking wet when Harry dragged him out of the lake. The first time he had kissed her. The way he had looked when he had brought Harry up out of the Bottomless Pit, and Ron had pushed Harry towards her, and then turned away while they embraced. His face in that prison cell under Slytherin's castle, and she wondered again what he had been about to tell her. Her eyes went to his left hand where the hilt of the sword had burned its cross-shaped mark. I want to hate him, she thought, but I can't, any more than Ginny can. He's part of me, my own blood and bone. My childhood.

"Of course I love you," she said. "And you love me. And you love Harry, and he…he loves you."

Ron winced. "Don't," he said.

Hermione ignored him. "And you threw all that away. And for what?"

"I don't know." His voice was fierce. "I told you I don't know. I can't explain it. It's like I went mad for a while. It's like I was looking down from some high place, seeing myself do these things, and it seemed right and justified. And I loved you…" He looked away again. "I never have loved anyone else."

"You didn't love me. Whoever she was…that's who you loved."

"She never existed," Ron said. His voice was bitter. "That's what I think.

There never was a girl I loved…just something evil that took the shape of what I wanted."

"Like a demon?" Hermione asked, her mind suddenly flipping the pages of her DADA textbook. "Like a succubus?"

Ron looked faintly exasperated. "I told you I have no idea."

"You spent all that time with her and you never — "

"I thought she was you!" he burst out. "Maybe I'm a fool, and I just saw what I wanted to see, but she did a damn good impression of you, Hermione. She had your mannerisms down — the way you curl your hair around your finger when you're thinking. The way you bite your nails.

She had your clothes — "

"I know. I saw. My pajamas." Hermione shook her head. "Six years of friendship," she said in an icy voice, "and all it took to convince you was a little bit of nail-biting and a pair of stolen pajamas."

Ron made a little gasping sound, as if she'd walloped him in the chest.

"Maybe I believed it because I wanted to believe it."

"You wanted to believe I'd do that to Harry?"

"Not everything," he said in a deadly cold voice, "is about Harry."

"Bollocks," she shot back. "This is all about Harry."

Ron put a hand up, as if to ward off her rage. "This — this is why I have to leave."

"Why? Because I want you to face what you did? Because I want to know why?"

"Yes, because you want to know why. And there is no why." His voice was flat with exhaustion. "I don't have any answers."

"You must know why you did it…"

"I don't. It seems like a fever dream." His shoulders hunched, and he shoved his hands in his pockets, shivering. "I close my eyes, I see her face.

Your face. I was sick all night, thinking about what I did. I've been sick all morning. I've been throwing up till there's nothing left to throw up, and then I throw up again." His eyes were bleak. "I touched her, I spent nights with her, hours and hours talking. It wasn't just sex, you know. We talked, we ate together, we did our Potions homework. And I don't even know who she was. She could have been anyone — anything." He shook his head, and leaned back against the wall. "So don't ask me why I did it — because it's what I've been asking myself, and I still don't know."

"Don't try to tell me how much you're suffering." She heard her own voice in her ears, and was shocked at its cruel tone. "I doubt it could be enough."

His mouth hardened. "Let me ask you something, Hermione. If I'm so horrible, if I'm so awful… then why do you want me to stay?"

"Because — because I can't do this alone." There, she had said it. "I can't."

"You can't do what alone?"

"Put Harry back together. I…" Ron looked at her blankly, and she bit her lip. "I saw him tonight…just now, and he…"

A muscle spasmed next to Ron's mouth. "How did… how did he seem?"

Hermione looked away. "Broken," she said.

Ron's blue eyes darkened, but when he spoke his voice was steady. "He's been broken for a while now, Hermione," he said. "You never saw it because you didn't want to. That other Hermione…whoever was pretending to be you…she saw it." He looked, then, at the photograph in his hand. Abruptly, he shoved it into his breast pocket. "She saw it better than we did."

She looked at him, then turned away quickly and went to the window. She put the palm of her hand against the cold glass, and looked out. The sky was heavy, leadenly gray, the clouds weighted with their freight of incipient snow. The only color in the white expanse of ground before the Forest was a cluster of moving black dots where some students were having a snowball fight. Hermione closed her eyes, remembering Ron's cold hand in hers, her other hand gripping Harry's. Promise me…that we'll always be friends.

"He can't be broken," she said, not opening her eyes. "I won't let him be."

"And what'll you do if he won't let you fix him?"

"That doesn't matter," she said, in the same remote voice. "I'd do anything for Harry. Anything. Even if it made him hate me."