Кассандра Клэр - Draco Veritas

Carefully, the goblin reached out and took the fragile hair from between his fingers. "Pretty red hair… is she an equally pretty girl?"

"Quite," said Tom, dispassionately. "I have a few other requirements, as well."

As he detailed them, the goblin's greenish-yellow eyes widened and he paused, arrested in the middle of retrieving a room key labeled Twenty-Eight from beneath the desk. "That may take some time, sir. A few hours at least."

"I don't mind waiting," said Tom, and held out his hand for the key, lips curling up into a smile. "I plan to catch up on my reading."

As Tom Riddle used an enchanted key to let himself into Room Twenty-Eight, Harry lay in his own room farther down the hall, face-down in front of the fireplace, trying to get warm. The heat seemed to come and go, leaving him sweating and shivering at regular and monotonous intervals.

If he had not already been so ill, he might have recognized at this point that he had a fever. Very few people can spend a significant amount of time in freezing rain after several nights of little rest and an exhausting journey and not catch a fever, and Harry was no exception.

He was, however, not aware of this. He was only aware of the fact that he could not seem to get warm enough, despite lying as close as he could to the fire, and that sleep had turned into a distant possibility. He also seemed to be both having trouble organizing his thoughts and to be aware of things with a sudden piercing clarity that was both a relief and a disturbance.

He kept seeing the boy who he had thought was Draco, standing opposite him in the rain-soaked alley. It had been rather surprising to be kissed, that was true, and he wondered if it should have bothered him. It hadn't bothered him. But what had bothered him, and what had stayed with him, was the look on the boy's face as he'd spoken — the look on Draco's face -

the way he'd looked at Harry as if Harry didn't matter.

Harry wasn't used to Draco looking at him like that. He was used to Draco looking at him as if he were all that mattered in the world.

He rolled onto his back, stared up at the ceiling. The fire threw a dancing pattern of shadows across the smooth surface. He could hear Draco's voice in his head, blurred with sleep, almost a whisper: Are you going to stay?

Yes. I'm going to stay.

But he hadn't stayed, of course, and so the last thing he'd said to Draco, the last thing he might ever say to him, had been a lie.

He shivered. His clothes were still damp, the fire had only partially dried them. There was a knot in his stomach. He wished he could still the voices in his head.

Is that what you want, Harry?

It's what I want.

Then I'll do it.

He rolled onto his side and looked at the fire. The heat stung his skin, this close up, but he didn't mind it. He felt cold down to his bones, as if he'd never be warm again — and in his mind, he was back on that tower, kneeling opposite Draco, cold moonlight spilling down on both of them, bright and stinging and clear as pure alcohol. Maybe you just hate me, Harry had said, shivering in the freezing night.

Hate you? Draco had said. I could never hate you.

At least Harry thought that was what he had said. Perhaps it had not been worded quite like that. His tired mind struggled after the memory -

kneeling on that tower, his hands full of glass and blood. He had picked up the glass carelessly on purpose, wanting the pain and the injury. You hate me, he'd said to the boy kneeling opposite him in the moonlight, I always thought you hated yourself, but maybe you just hate me.

He couldn't remember exactly what Draco had said back: some kind of denial, a sputtered half-sentence before interruption. Harry felt sick, thinking about it now; how could he have said something so stupid? He remembered Draco kicking the antidote bottle, breaking it beyond repair, and Harry had felt a terrible rage against him in that instant, a blindly narrow despair: how could he do that to me, how could he? When of course it hadn't had that much to do with Harry at all, or at least Harry couldn't believe that it did, because if it had then it was a gesture of such an ultimate sort of devotion that the thought of it filled Harry with a hollow and profound sense of unworthiness.

No, it hadn't been about him at all, but that was no reason for him to accuse Draco of hating him when he knew perfectly well that he didn't.

You could tell when Draco hated you. For a moment there, in the alley that night, he'd thought he was talking to a Draco who hated him and it had unsettled him in a way he hadn't expected. He remembered what it had been like when Draco really had hated him, when they'd hated each other. There had never been any doubt in his mind back then that if Draco ever got the chance to, he'd cut Harry's throat and walk away smiling. Harry hadn't minded being hated — well, he'd minded it, nobody liked being hated, but in an odd way he'd taken an obscure pride in the fact that he seemed the one person in the world able to make Malfoy lose all his self-control. On rare occasions he had to admit he'd taken pleasure in goading Draco into rages; it had amused him the way that Draco's mouth twitched and his knuckles went white, the tendons in his hands knotting and unknotting as he tried to hold himself back from leaping at Harry and strangling him.

Sometimes, of course, he couldn't hold himself back. Fifth year, when Gryffindor had won the Quidditch cup yet again, Harry'd had Dobby deliver a blue velvet cushion to Draco in the middle of breakfast, on top of which rested a small plastic drinking glass and a note reading 'Perhaps this cup might be a bit more your size, Malfoy — H. Potter.'

Draco had done nothing at the time, but later Harry had been behind schedule, running alone to Potions class, when he'd felt a hand tug on his sleeve. Turning, he'd found his arm seized and without warning he was dragged under the nearest stairwell, his legs kicked out from under him, and Draco was on top of him, hands fisted in Harry's robes, doing his level best to render Harry unconscious by knocking his head repeatedly against the stone floor.

Draco had surprise on his side, and a near-blinding rage, but he wasn't a particularly skilled fist-fighter — he'd been taught fencing and dancing and the like, but Harry'd honed his brawling skills on the wrong side of Dudley's bad moods and knew exactly how to squirm away to evade wildly placed blows. He squirmed now, kicking upward with his legs, and they rolled sideways, a writhing, punching mass of flailing fists and kicking feet. They fetched up against the far wall, Draco's knees pinning Harry to the ground. Harry ducked, trying to slide out from under Draco and avoid the blows aimed at his head, when he realized suddenly that he didn't want to squirm away from Draco — he wanted to hit him back.

He stopped squirming and jerked his body upward, startling Draco so that the other boy lost his choke-hold on Harry and slid sideways. Harry flung himself up and over and now he was the one on top, the one with the advantage, and he bashed Draco across the face one, twice, hard with the side of his fist and the third time he hit him his hand came away bloody and then Draco jammed his forearm into Harry's throat, choking him, and shoved his hand down between them and Harry realized Draco was going for his wand and so he jerked his knee up, brutally hard — a dirty-fighting move, something Dudley might have done. It was enough to make Draco gag and double up, and Harry shoved him away and staggered to his feet, and only realized when he was standing up that he had grabbed Draco's wand himself and was holding it in his bloodied fist.

Draco was choking and gasping on the floor. Very slowly, he raised his head and looked up at Harry. His eyes widened, registering the wand gripped in Harry's hand. It was an expensive wand — Harry knew as much from Draco's bragging, it had been in Draco's family for generations, had in fact been carved out of rosewood for an ancestor of his during the Tudor dynasty. It felt smooth and cool in his own hand and surprisingly light.