Кассандра Клэр - Draco Veritas

She straightened up, eyes widening, hopeful — but it was not Hermione.

Ginny sank back against the couch, biting her lip. Of all the people she had not wanted to see right now…

"Seamus," she said. "I thought you were going to go home tonight…?"

He said nothing, just at the foot of the boys' dormitory stairs, looking at her. He had his hands in his pockets again. His navy coat was gone, though, and there was a rip in the shoulder of his shirt. She wondered if he'd had a punch-up with Draco.

"Did something happen with Draco? You're shirt's torn."

He did not reply. But now he smiled. She had never seen him smile like that. It was a sharp, bright smile like the edge of a knife. It went oddly with the fair hair, the angel face.

Unnerved without being able to explain why, she drew her robe closer about her shoulders, and shivered. "Seamus," she said. "You're scaring me. Is something wrong?"

He appeared not to hear her. He took the last step down from the stairs, still smiling. In the faint firelight his expression was hard to read; his eyes looked blue-black, the color of pansies, so dark the irises seemed to meld with the pupil, giving him a look of almost blindness.

"Ginny," he said at last, and she shivered again at the sound of his voice: so familiar, so caressing with its soft Irish lilt, and yet suddenly not familiar at all. "Ginny, it's good to see you again…"

Author notes:

The first time he had seen the room he had not noticed the beauty of it: The description of the room in which Ron and the Dark Lord play chess is taken from TS Eliot's poem A Game of Chess, part of The Waste Land.

Never again shall you return to tell this story: A passage from Dante Alighieri's Inferno (Canto 27, lines 61–66.)

"There are plenty of brands of decaffeinated coffee…" Real Genius.

"Department for putting things on top of other things" — Monty Python.

"We attack Voldemort with cheese" "callous and strange" "Sanity Fair" — Buffy.

— WH Auden.

Oh, it was strange to be alive again, and in possession of all those accoutrements of physical existence — eyes and mouth and limbs that moved, a heart that beat and veins that coursed with blood. When he first tried to stand up, amid the torn bits of paper, the smell of electrical energy as strong in the room as smoke after a fire, his legs buckled under him. The second time, however, they worked fine. He stood up, and went over to the mirror.

Tom saw himself, and was pleased. He had not expected the opportunity to take this body, but when it had presented itself his decision had been immediate. He did not regret it now. It was a fine body, in excellent shape, well-made and elegantly put together. It would do for as long as he needed it.

He glanced around the room curiously. The diary was ruined. This did not bother him. Having been released from it, he had no more use for it.

Blood and tears had brought him out of its ruined pages. Blood and tears and something else. He faintly remembered a voice, whispering to him, I hate you Tom, I hate you, I hate you.

Tom did not mind being hated. Hatred was a useful emotion, as strong as love in its way, and as powerful a force.

Tom looked more closely at himself in the mirror. A slender, strong body, not unlike the body he'd had himself at seventeen. Arms lightly downed with gold, wheat-flax hair, a choirboy face, blue eyes like bits torn out of a midsummer sky. Something glittered around his throat — Seamus' skin was pale from winter, but in the summer it would tan, a shade only slightly paler gold than his hair, although if he was not careful it would burn.

Tom knew this, and his mouth curled: he could not have said how he knew it, but he did. It was not his own memory, not organic to himself. It was Seamus'. He knew it the way he knew that Seamus Finnigan was seventeen years old, that he came from a small Irish town called Glyn Caryn, that he loved his parents, that he was a Gryffindor seventh year student with a sweet open nature and an uncomplicated mind. Tom loathed him immediately. Riffling through his thoughts was like wading through syrup. Boring syrup. Seamus liked Quidditch. He was fond of Herbology class. He kept a stack of comic books on the table next to his bed. He didn't like lending them out, unless it was to Harry, who always took good care of things…

Tom saw his own eyes flash in the mirror. Now this was interesting. He tapped harder at Seamus' memories, trying to pull up what he knew of Harry Potter. Tom's own memories were incomplete, confusing. He remembered a small boy with tangled black hair facing him over Ginny Weasley's crumpled body. He remembered his basilisk's hiss and the same boy covered in blood, crumpled and dying at the foot of the Chamber wall. And Tom knew that the boy had not died after all, and that he hated him, but not precisely why.

Tom turned away from the mirror, still concentrating. Seamus' thoughts were like a stack of randomly arranged photographs that fluttered by quickly — images would appear and disappear, with no apparent importance attached to their order or progress.

Tom left the room, and stood for a moment in the hallway outside, looking it up and down. It was not unfamiliar. He knew Gryffindor Tower well, it seemed. One of the paintings on the wall was chittering at him. He ignored it, following the curve of the hall around to the dormitories. Each had a brass number on the door, but even had they not been marked, he would have known which one was Seamus'. He pushed the door open and went in.

Everything inside was red.

He stood for a moment, blinking at the light that streamed in across the vermilion rugs thrown over the floor, and there were the four-poster beds with their scarlet hangings like bloated red flowers. Typical of Gryffindors to be so attached to their colors of blood and fire. How Tom loathed red.

Seamus' memories directed him to his bed, and the trunk at the foot of it.

Unsurprisingly, a swift search yielded nothing interesting, as Seamus owned nothing interesting. The trunk was packed, as if Seamus were preparing to leave. Tom dropped a folded jumper back on the bed and turned, and the glint of light reflecting off something gold caught his eye.

He paused and stared; the source of the flash of light was the bed opposite him. According to Seamus, it was Harry Potter's bed.

Tom went quickly across the room. His hands were shaking with some suppressed excitement: suppressed because he did not quite understand its source yet. He knew there was some strong emotion attached to the name Harry Potter. He knew he disliked this person intensely (although Seamus, apparently, was perfectly friendly with him). He was not, however, sure exactly why. His hands pushed the coverlet down, the pillows back, and there on the bed were two folded pieces of paper under what looked like a gold charm on a slender chain.

He looked briefly at the necklace and pushed it aside, uninterested in what looked like ordinary jewelry, and cheap-looking jewelry at that. His gaze went next to the letters. He picked them up, sharply curious — why was Harry Potter leaving letters addressed to friends on his own bed? He combed through Seamus' murky memories, but could find nothing that lent any comprehension to the situation.