Кассандра Клэр - Draco Veritas

"What are you complaining about, Malfoy? You've got your own room, don't you? You're a prefect."

"And spacious it is, too. I only call it a room because I'm too lazy to call it

'the broom closet with sconces.'"

"We could sell tickets to this place," said Harry, glancing around the nearly-empty chamber. He grinned. "Especially considering the soundproofed walls."

"Nice thinking, Potter. Glad to see Hermione hasn't got all the brains in that relationship." Draco cocked his head to the side. "On that note, you seem cheerier."

"Yeah." Harry lifted his sword, and made a half-salute towards Draco.

"Thanks for the workout. It helped."

"Good." Draco paused, and looked at Harry seriously. "Potter, I've never asked you this before, but…"

"But what?"

Draco hesitated, then asked his next question in the manner of one taking a step into the abyss: "Where are your parents buried?"

Harry stood for a moment, very still. There was a strange sort of painful buzzing behind his eyes. Finally he said, slowly, "I have no idea."

Draco blinked but otherwise showed no surprise. His voice was careful.

This was obviously something he'd thought about asking Harry before, but hadn't done it. "Well, someone must know."

Harry nodded, distantly. "Someone must…" Why has no one ever mentioned it to me, ever offered to take me there? Dumbledore, Sirius, Lupin, they've never — and I — why didn't I ask?

"Potter." Draco's voice was sharp. "Steady on. You all right?"

"Uh-huh." Harry's vision snapped back into focus; he saw Draco standing in front of him, looking worried. "Sirius would know."

"Or Lupin," said Draco.

"I'd rather ask Sirius. I was supposed to talk to him tonight anyway."

"Okay." Draco shrugged elegantly. "I just thought… it might help. You know. Closure. Maybe help you feel, uh, a little closer to them."

"Closer?"

"Sometimes you have to see things," Draco said quietly. "See them yourself — to know that they're real."

"I know they're dead," replied Harry flatly. "I've always known they're dead."

"I know," Draco said. "But lately sometimes I wonder if you know you're still alive."

Harry looked down. He felt disconnected, as he often did these days: disconnected from the room around him, disconnected from Draco, disconnected even from his own self, as if the body he looked down at, slender and clad in jeans and blue sweater, was somebody else's and not his own. One of the laces on his left shoe was broken; he had no memory of having retied it. "I used to be able to go to the Mirror of Erised and see my parents," he said. "I can't do that any more."

A slight line of confusion appeared between Draco's eyes. "Because you don't know where it is?"

"Because I don't want to look in it," said Harry. "I'm afraid of what I might see."

The fluttering pink numbers on the clock beside the bed told Ginny that it was two in the morning. She lay where she was, letting her eyes adjust to the half-lit darkness of the room. Her body ached all over, but her arm, which she had heard Madam Pomfrey describe as "snapped in half," seemed to be functioning again, and was not particularly painful.

There had been people in the room earlier, a lot of people. She remembered Madam Pomfrey shooing the Gryffindor team out the door, Harry putting his arm around Ron's shoulder as they went — Ron had looked quite shattered, Ginny would have been touched if she hadn't been so far gone on Anti-Pain Charms. She remembered Charlie coming in later, sitting by the bed and holding her hand, and bits of snow dropping off him and melting on her wrist. There had been other people in the room, but she remembered mainly Charlie. "What happened?" he had said. "What happened to her up there?"

And another voice had replied:

"We don't know. We're looking into it. No one has had a broom accident like that in years, not since Harry Potter fell off his broom his third year — "

"But that was Dementors. Ginny's a good flier, she always has been. She wouldn't just lose control of her broom like that."

"The broom is being checked for curses and hexes, Professor Weasley.

Please do not overexcite yourself."

"She's my sister," said Charlie tightly. Something in his voice had reminded Ginny of her very early childhood, when Charlie had been her absolute favorite brother. She remembered him coming home from Hogwarts at Christmas, picking her up as he ran in the door in his black school robes, lifting her into the air and dangling her upside down until she screamed with laughter. Charlie had been her favorite then, although more recently she had realized that her allegiances had switched a bit, and she was now much closer to Ron. She supposed it wasn't possible to go through what they had both been through together over the summer and not become closer. "My only sister," Charlie added, for emphasis.

"Yes, I know she is your sister. We're all very fond of her, Charlie. We'll find out what happened…and you, you should get some rest."

The dizziness of the pain relieving charms had taken over then, and Ginny had slipped into a dazed state where the room seemed full of shifting forms. She cast her mind back: she had thought she heard George and Fred talking above her, and then she thought she heard Ron, or it might have been Harry, and she even thought she heard Snape and Dumbledore, and she definitely heard Madam Pomfrey shouting at someone, but not before whoever it was bent over her and kissed her on the cheek.

She did hope it hadn't been Snape.

She rolled over now and looked at the clock again. The number marching across its face now said that it was half past two, and she didn't feel sleepy at all. There were a number of books stacked on the tabletop -

Hermione had undoubtedly left them so that she wouldn't miss out on her schoolwork. She wondered if there was anything in A Short History of Cursing (Harry had been very excited about that book second year, she recalled, until he had found out it contained nothing more than hexes and the like) that would explain why she had fallen off her broom. She reached out her uninjured arm and felt amongst the stacked books, then jumped in surprise as a lighter-weight paperback fell out and onto her lap. It was her copy of Passionate Trousers.

Hermione walked slowly down the corridor, wrapped in Harry's Invisibility Cloak, trying to muffle her footsteps by slowing her pace. She was well aware of the irony of the whole situation — herself, Head Girl, in charge of making sure other students didn't break rules, sneaking around the school long after curfew. She was aware of it, but she didn't care. She had gone beyond that.

She found the door in the wall where the floor plans had told her it would be. She put her hand to the door and pushed; it swung wide, and she walked inside.

The room was dark. There was one window set like a cold jewel in the north wall, looking out over the grounds. She could see the snowcapped ridge of the Forbidden Forest, and a diamond half-moon shedding its milky light over the ice-black world below.

On the wall facing her, across from the window, there was a visible shimmer, like sunlight on water. She turned and walked towards the shimmer, which coalesced as she approached into what she knew it really was: a gold-framed mirror.

I show you your heart's desire.

Your heart's desire.

I guess, Harry's voice said in the back of her mind, a person's heart's desire can change.

She recalled his voice when he had told her that, the look on his face -

hope and horror mixed.

No, she said back to him fiercely. I have never changed towards you. I have always been the same. I will always love you. I will always want you.

Whatever I have ever done, or said, it was always and will always be you.