Кассандра Клэр - Draco Veritas

Malfoy? Harry sent out an experimental tendril of thought, and was none too surprised at not receiving an answer. He swung his legs over the edge of the bed, fumbled sleepily under the bed for his Invisibility Cloak, and threw it around his shoulders. He took care to walk quietly through the near-empty dormitory room so as not to wake Seamus, who was sleeping the sleep of the just, a pillow jammed under his cheek and a faint smile on his face. He looked unbelievably healthy — rosy-cheeked, bright-haired, faintly cherubic. A bitter flicker of resentment passed through Harry, leaving him feeling ashamed.

The night-time corridors were silent and deserted; the infirmary door was shut tight. Harry opened it with the care born of years of silent sneaking around the grounds. Stepping into the room, he blinked his eyes against the sudden light. The infirmary walls were lined with floor-to-ceiling windows and through them, the moonlight poured with a hurtful brilliance. It turned the curtains around Draco's bed to sheets of white fire.

Harry went forward, and pulled the curtains back. They rattled on their metal rings. Draco was lying face-up on the bed. His left arm was across his chest, the scarred hand curled in; his right arm was flung across his face. His pajama top had rucked up over his torso and the moonlight was more darkly pencilled in the spaces between his ribs than Harry would have liked.

"Hey," he said. "Malfoy."

The arm across the face was withdrawn, and Draco looked up at him.

Surprise flickered across his face, followed by amusement. "I woke you up," he said. "Didn't I?"

"Yes. Nightmare?"

"Yeah." Draco sat up, and propped his back against the wall behind the bed. He pulled his pajama top down, and shrugged. "I'm fine. Just lying here thinking," he said, matter-of-factly. The tone of his voice said, I don't want to talk about it.

"Thinking about what?"

"Oh, you know. The big questions of life. Like, if toast always lands butter-side down, and cats always land on their feet, what happens if you strap toast on the back of a cat and drop it?"

"I can't believe I woke up for this," said Harry.

Draco chuckled, very slightly. "You don't have to stay. I'm fine."

Harry looked at him. He wanted to say, "I'll stay if you need me." But Draco would never say that he needed him, even if he did. Draco, who never said he needed anything, who would have considered a verbal expression of his own wants to be declassè, an undignified fuss over nothing. Draco, who belonged to the class of people who, wounded and bleeding to death on the ground, might at the very end admit that perhaps there had been days when they felt better. Draco, who wouldn't even admit he needed an antidote for the poison that was slowly killing him. No, Draco wouldn't say anything.

Draco looked up at him with curious wide gray eyes. "Everything all right, Potter?'

Harry answered his question with a question. "Are you going back to sleep?"

Draco crossed his arms over his chest in his usual sleeping position and looked consideringly at the ceiling. "I don't think so," he opined finally.

"I'll stay then." Harry sat down in the chair by the bed, and leaned his elbow on the nightstand. He felt tired but quite alert. Outside he could hear the faint sound of wind as it struck against the windowpane. "Why do you sleep like that anyway, Malfoy?"

Draco cut his eyes sideways. "Like what?"

"Like this." Harry crossed his arms over his chest, fingertips touching his opposite collarbones.

"Oh, I don't know. My father used to have the house-elves take my covers away sometimes in winter. He thought it would be good for me. Make me stronger. Bloody freezing winter nights, too. I still get cold a lot, but I think it's mostly in my head."

Harry took a moment to ponder the myriad ways in which he hated Lucius Malfoy.

"Some things you never forget," he said finally.

Draco uncrossed his arms and put them behind his head. He stared up at the ceiling. "You slept in a cupboard," he said. "Didn't you."

Harry nodded, propping his chin on his knee. He liked the way Draco said it, without any pity or horror, just as matter-of-fact as if some people happened to grow up sleeping on four-posters while others chose cupboards as a matter of course.

"It must have been dark all the time," Draco said. "And the bed must have been small." He was still staring up at the ceiling. "Because you always keep everything you might need in the morning right by the side of the bed, and reach for it without looking, like you're used to waking up without light. And you don't ever move or turn over while you're sleeping. You must have rolled off the bed onto the floor a few too many times."

Harry laughed. "You do not know pain until you've landed on spiders in the middle of the night."

"Oh, I don't know about that, Potter. Remember, we had giant spiders."

"Mmm." A faint pang went through Harry at that, and he looked away from Draco. The curtains around the bed stirred in the faint breeze, making a soft sound, like wind in long grass. He thought of people whose missing limbs ached when cold weather came; Harry ached where he was missing people.

"Thinking about Weasley?" asked Draco. He rolled onto his side, head resting on his hand, and looked at Harry. The moonlight coming through the window turned his eyes into silver shields of elliptical light.

"How'd you guess?" Harry's voice caught on an indrawn breath. "Never mind. You probably think I'm being stupid, after what he did…"

Draco was silent for a moment. Harry let his eyes roam over the room. It recollected to him the look of an empty cathedral with its high and vaulted ceilings, the enormous windows through which were visible the distant trees of the Forest, and everywhere the softly blowing curtains like uneasy ghosts. Why, he wondered, did Draco prefer it here to his own bedroom in his own dormitory?

"I don't think you're stupid." Draco's smile was a ghost of its ordinary self; there seemed an odd wistfulness in his gaze, or perhaps it was just the lack of light. "Or, at least, no stupider than you usually are. We don't stop caring about people just because they do idiotic things. Friendship is not that fragile. Not real friendship, anyway."

"I really thought I hated him," Harry said, a little wonderingly.

"You haven't got it in you," Draco said remotely, and shrugged. "I'll say this for whoever orchestrated the whole situation: they certainly wanted you to hate him. Why, do you think?"

"So I wouldn't go after him when he disappeared," Harry said immediately, having thought about this already.

"But then why send you the broken chess piece? That was like a taunt, a

'catch me if you can'. They must know it's the sort of thing that would send you barreling after them. It doesn't make any sense." knowledgeable

"Because they know I won't leave now," Harry said.

The elliptical eyes widened. They seemed the only light things in the darkness. "Why not?"

"Because of you," Harry said. "I won't go without you."

Draco's hand tightened on his pillow. "And I can't go," he said, bitterly. "I mean, I could — I'm strong enough still — " He took a ragged breath. "But if you're going to be out there running away from the enemy — who am I kidding, I couldn't keep up the way I am now. The best I could manage would be strolling away from the enemy. Which isn't very impressive."

There was a live current of tension underneath the smoothly regulated voice. "If I came with you, I'd just slow you down."

"I would never let you anyway," said Harry. Weariness had pared away everything but the barest honesty from his voice and words. He heard himself speaking with no small surprise. "And I wouldn't go without you.

Not because I'm afraid to go alone, but because I wouldn't leave you while you were dying, and they know that."