Кассандра Клэр - Draco Veritas

Harry felt his lips curve into a shaky smile. "You sound like a detective."

"Read a lot of Auror comics as a kid," Draco said. "Always wanted a trenchcoat."

"Do you need my help?" Harry asked. "What should I do?"

Draco shook his head. "I don't need your help, not right now. If I do, I'll tell you. And if you want to know, I'll tell you. But maybe right now you don't need any more on your mind." He got to his feet, a swift graceful gesture. Harry looked at him hard, remembering Draco's weakness in the Quidditch game and while they were fencing. However, he did look much better. There was high color in his face, and his eyes sparkled. Hopefully he was over it. "Go to sleep," Draco said, and headed towards the door.

"I'll see you — "

"Will you make them sorry?" Harry said. He had gotten to his feet without realizing it, and he put his hand out to steady himself on the sofa arm. His legs prickled with waking-up pains.

Draco turned, one hand on the portrait door, and looked at him curiously. Even disheveled and tired he had an elegant remoteness that Harry vaguely envied. He knew he wore his own heart on his sleeve, not as a badge of honor but because he knew no other way to be. Whereas nothing ever seemed to touch Draco so much, or so deeply, that he could not control his expressions. Nothing ever put a slump in those straight shoulders. "Will I what?"

"Make them sorry," Harry said. His voice rasped slightly. "I know…that you can do things I couldn't do. You're ruthless in ways I could never be.

And you know about revenge."

"I do?" Draco's expression was unreadable.

"I know you do," Harry said.

"Don't you?" Draco said. "That's what you told me…"

"Oh, I know about hating," Harry said, his voice flat and empty. "But I'm not clever about it, like you are. I couldn't think of a really imaginative way to make anyone suffer. Not like you could."

"Is that what you want?" Draco asked. His eyes were flat, metallic gray.

Nothing came off him: no emotion, no fear or worry or regret. He stood where he was, illegible as a parchment written in Gobbeldygook.

"Yes," Harry said. "It's what I want."

"Then I'll do it," Draco said, and he smiled, and for a moment a faintly wicked inner brilliance illuminated his expression. If there was any bitterness or sorrow underneath it, Harry didn't see it. He was too busy fighting his own relief. "I'll make them sorry."

He went out, and shut the portrait door behind him.

Ginny had once read somewhere that the difference between memory and recall was that with memory, you knew empirically that you had been in a certain place in a certain time, while with recall you once again felt that you were there.

When she looked back on those last few days before the end of winter term her sixth year at Hogwarts, it was always with a sense of recollection.

She could not have said exactly how the days proceeded, but various images and moments were burned into her brain — she remembered the cold that descended on the castle, both literal and figurative, after Ron and Hermione had gone home. The flowerlike slivers of ice that formed on the windowpanes overnight, the water freezing in the mug beside her bed.

Sitting at the Gryffindor table with Seamus, waiting for Harry to come downstairs. Watching him sit alone, not saying anything. And Draco.

Always with Harry, or watching him from across the room if he was not beside him. He seemed to have taken the words Dumbledore had spoken to him weeks before — "Harry is strong and can endure much, and for what he cannot endure he has you" — as if they were some sort of sacred trust.

She wondered if he was trying to expiate some sin he thought he had committed; she could imagine such devotion came only from guilt. Of course, she did not know until later that Hermione had made him promise to stay with Harry always — and he tried to, as best he could given the obvious restrictions. The professors, in those final days, turned a blind eye to the fact that Draco was sometimes in the Gryffindor common room.

He never tried to go further than the common room, however, sensing probably that he was not welcome.

Harry seemed to notice all this only barely. He went through everything in a dazed sort of sleepwalking manner, probably because during the night he did not sleep — Seamus had told her as much. Apparently he spent the night sitting in the widow embrasure, looking out over the snowy grounds. He was starting to look translucent, as if he had been very ill, the bones showing sharply under his skin. Ginny had seen him walk accidentally into Draco several times, as if he'd forgotten Draco was there at all.

One afternoon she came into the common room and found that Harry was there, lying on the couch, a blanket over his legs, apparently asleep. She walked towards him, and reached to pull the blanket up over his shoulders, when a hand darted out of nowhere and seized her wrist.

"Shhh." It was Draco's voice. She turned her eyes towards him. He had been sitting sunk into the shadows of an overstuffed armchair next to the sofa, and had blended so completely with the darkness that she had not seen him. "Do not wake him up."

"I wasn't going to," she whispered back, annoyed. "I was just going to pull up his blankets."

Draco, looking weary, released her wrist. "Just…let him be," he said. "He hasn't slept in three days."

"I know," said Ginny. She looked down at Harry and her feeling of annoyance vanished, buried under a flood of sympathy. He looked like a little boy, curled sideways on the couch, his head pillowed on his arm, his pale cheeks flushed with feverish sleep. His dark hair curled all around his head in tangles like licks of dark flame. "How is he?" she asked, sitting down in the chair next to Draco. "How is he really?"

Draco looked considering. "Rotten," he said finally, and his voice was flat.

"Pretty much like you'd expect."

She bit her lip. "I wish there was something I could do," she said. "he's had so much suffering in his life — I wish I could take it for him, you know?"

He looked at her, his gray eyes dark, slightly unfocused with tiredness.

"You still love him," he said.

"I always will love him," said Ginny, "if not that way. We all do. He's like that."

"Not your brother," said Draco, and his tone was bitter.

Ginny sighed. "Especially my brother," she said. "I wouldn't expect you to understand."

"I don't want to understand," Draco said. "And I can't be bothered — I've got enough to be bothered with without pondering your brother's motivations for creating this fucking mess."

"He didn't create it," Ginny said sharply. "It was already there — "

"Shhhhh," Draco said. "Keep your voice down."

She looked more closely at him. "How long has it been since you slept?"

"Hey." Draco cocked a finger at her. "I slept a whole hour on Tuesday."

"You should sleep," she said firmly. "You'll crack otherwise."

He shrugged. "It's not so bad. I hallucinate occasionally and I think that takes care of the problem. Yesterday I thought I was a teapot. Which wouldn't have been so bad if I hadn't also thought that Malcolm Baddock was a teacup…"

Ginny smiled at him. The warmth of the fire was making her sleepy, and she was conscious of the slumbering form of Harry on the sofa. She wanted very much to hug him, and some part of her almost wanted to hug Draco as well, despite him being a prickly non-hugging sort of person. She recognized it was simply stress that was making her feel close to both boys when really, it was Hermione who loved and mothered them, and was loved in return. But Hermione wasn't here…she shoved that thought down. "Draco…"

"Maybe I will take a walk," he said, his eyes going past her to the window.