Кассандра Клэр - Draco Veritas

Draco paused and the dazzling smile faded slightly. "Oh."

Harry looked stricken. "You don't like peanut butter?"

"I like it fine," Draco said. "It's just, well, it's a bit…"

"Plebeian?" asked Ginny, from behind her book, a sharp edge to her tone.

"Sticky," said Draco woefully. "It sticks to my teeth."

"Oh, for goodness sake," said Hermione.

"It's all right," Harry said, and reached to take the plate back. "I'll get you something else."

"No, don't bother. I'll eat it."

"No, you won't. There's no reason for you to eat something you don't like.

Give me the plate."

"No, it's all right, really. Perhaps the peanut butter will give me strength."

"Hand me the plate, Malfoy."

A sudden obstinacy seemed to strike Draco. He clung to the plate as if it were a departing loved one. "No," he said.

Harry hissed an exasperated breath through his teeth. "I don't mind," he said.

Draco allowed his eyes to grow huge and woeful. "Well, I mind. It's not your fault I don't like peanut butter. Anyway, I said I'd eat it."

"I don't want you to eat it because you feel like you have to."

"Maybe I want to."

"But you don't want to."

"I might have changed my mind."

"You haven't, you're just being ridiculous." Harry's eyes flashed. "Give me the plate, Malfoy."

"No," Draco said.

"AAARGH," said Ginny, stood up (dropping Trousers Revisited as she did so), reached forward, grabbed the plate out of Draco's hand, yanked open the nearest window, and flung out the plate. There was a moment of silence as all three of them stared at her, frozen with astonishment — then the loud sound of shattering china interrupted the silence as the plate struck the stone courtyard below the window.

Hermione, unable to help herself, winced. "Oh, the poor house-elves," she said. "They do hate broken crockery."

Harry raised both eyebrows, but remained silent.

Draco slowly lowered his hands to the coverlet, wide-eyed. "I would have eaten it," he said.

Ginny, her cheeks flushing suddenly scarlet, looked at him furiously.

"You're so selfish," she said, her eyes sliding from him, to Harry, to Hermione. Hermione winced again, under Ginny's gaze, feeling suddenly and inexplicably guilty — but what for? "You're all so selfish," Ginny said again, her voice fierce. She scrabbled blindly for her book, seized it, and ran past Harry and out of the room before any of them had a chance to move or react.

Harry was the first to speak. "What was that about?"

Down the hall, a door banged shut as Ginny slammed her way out of the infirmary.

"Maybe she doesn't like peanut butter either," Draco suggested helpfully.

"Seems a bit of a violent reaction," Harry observed.

"So it does." Draco didn't seem very exercised about this; in fact, laughter was dancing behind his gray eyes. Harry seemed to notice this, and looked pleased.

"You look better," he said. "Do you feel better?"

Draco looked slightly sheepish. "I do, a bit."

"Having plates thrown out the window makes you feel better?" Hermione asked, hiding a smile.

"I can't help it," said Draco. "I may be ill, but I'm still callous and strange."

"I'd throw plates out the window all day if it would get you better," said Harry absently, as if his mind were on something else.

Draco looked surprised; his eyes widened and his lips parted as if he were about to say something. Hermione interrupted him.

"Harry, could you go see if Ginny's all right?"

Harry, snapping back to the present, agreed with a slightly mournful air: Hermione had a feeling that if he didn't find Ginny, he'd be back in the kitchens shortly. He left, taking his abstracted mood with him.

"Don't say it," Draco said, as soon as the infirmary door had closed behind Harry.

"Say what?" Hermione's voice was severe. "That Harry might not show you how upset he is, but that doesn't mean he isn't? He's only making you sandwiches because he doesn't know what else to do."

"I know that," Draco said quietly. The affected air of haughty weariness had left him, replaced by a grave seriousness Hermione found infinitely more sympathetic. "And I'd rather he had something to do, honestly.

Otherwise he just feels like he ought to be doing something else, something bigger. And there's nothing to do. This isn't the kind of enemy he can fight. He can't crawl inside my veins and kill the poison before it kills me."

"You're not going to die," Hermione corrected him sharply.

"I am," he said. "You know I am — "

Thwack! Draco broke off as the Liber-Damnatis hit him square in the chest.

"Don't you ever," Hermione said, her voice trembling, "ever, ever, say that in front of Harry. Don't you ever."

He stared at her. In his white face, his eyes were the color of rain: luminous but leaden. All his previous playacting had hardly moved Hermione's heart, but this Draco, eyes dark with haunted apprehension, made her ache inside. She hated the poison that, as it killed him, seemed to burn away all impurities from skin and hair and eyes, turning his eyes to flaring crystal, lighting the roses of fever in his pale cheeks, paring away all excess flesh from the lovely arcing bones of cheek and chin and jaw. He had never been as eerily beautiful before and it bothered and upset her.

"I wouldn't," he said. "Of course I wouldn't."

"Oh, Draco," she said. A sudden weariness came over her, and she hugged her arms about herself, feeling chilled. "What am I going to do with you?

You make everyone you meet either love you or hate you and sometimes I wonder which is worse."

A faint smile touched the edge of Draco's mouth. "A keenly felt observation," he said. "Thank you."

"And you treat people appallingly." Hermione's tone was glum. "Blaise, for instance. Paying her to date you. That's just eewy."

"Please clarify for me the exact dictionary definition of 'eewy,'" said Draco, sounding unforgivably amused.

"Unethical," Hermione said darkly.

Draco cocked his silvery head to one side. "Nope, I don't think I know that one either," he observed. "Is that like having three equal sides?"

"That's equilateral," Hermione snapped. "And you're really despicable sometimes, you know that?"

"Now there's a word I know," Draco said with a beatific smile.

"I mean, how do you justify an arrangement like that? It would be one thing if it was just for show entirely, but you actually did things with her.

Didn't you?"

"Define 'things'," said Draco. "You mean like did we spend time together knitting booties for underprivileged infants? Because if so, no. If you mean did we occasionally take off our clothes and — "

"That's what I meant," Hermione interrupted hastily. "And please, spare me the details."

Draco crossed his arms behind his head and arched his back like a cat in the sunshine. "Well, what did you expect me to do, anyway? Realistically speaking. I'm seventeen years old, you know. I ought to be having sex with everything that has legs and isn't a table. So I messed about with Blaise a bit. I didn't sleep with her."

Hermione felt relieved despite herself. "You didn't?"

"Not that it's any of your business, but no. I could have. On occasion, I wanted to…"

Hermione chuckled to herself. "So using sex to get what you want didn't work out, then?"

Draco shrugged and pushed his fair hair out of his eyes. "I'm a boy. I can't use sex to get what I want. Sex is what I want."

"Just not with Blaise."

"No," he said, a little more quietly. "Not with Blaise."

"It wouldn't have been fair to her," Hermione said. "So I'm glad that you didn't, for what it's worth."

Draco looked merely confused. Hermione knew he didn't understand, and probably never would understand, that what he had done to Blaise was wrong. With an inward sense of here goes nothing, she reached into the pocket of her robes and drew out the small box she'd been carrying for the past three days, opened it, and took out Blaise's three barrettes. She handed Draco one.