Кассандра Клэр - Draco Veritas

"What Harry thinks hasn't got anything to do with it," Hermione said. "I love Harry. But he's not infallible. And you shouldn't be living and dying by his opinion. I don't know why he wrote what he did. I have to believe he had a good reason. I also have to believe it doesn't matter. Because, in the end, he did leave, and we have to live with it. Only I'm terrified that you — you don't want to."

"It's not your job, Hermione," Draco said, "to keep me alive, you know. I wouldn't blame you if you gave up on me. Nobody would."

She shivered. He was aware suddenly of how small she was. At the best of times Hermione could only be generously thought of as slender — really, she was skinny, and more so now, as they had all lost weight in the past weeks. "You think I want to be responsible for you?" she whispered. "I'm so sick of being responsible. Of taking care of everyone. Only no one else will do it, will they? And first Ron left, and I lost him, and I thought, okay, I can get by still, I'll figure out a way to live without him until we get him back. And then Ginny, and I told myself I could get by without her, too.

And then Harry left, and I told myself that if I just focused on going after him and getting him back I could survive even that. But if anything happens to you — if you leave me — then I have nothing, I have no one, and I can't do this alone, I was never meant to be alone, I was only ever any good when I was with Ron and Harry — " She broke off on a ragged breath, and put her face into her hands. "I shouldn't tell you these things. It can't help."

Slowly, Draco levered himself up into a sitting position. His chest felt strangely tense, as if he couldn't quite breathe properly. He held out his arm, and Hermione looked at him wonderingly for a moment and then crawled across the floor to him and half-leaned, half-fell against his chest, hiding her face.

He closed his arm around her. The fact that he had withstood the impact of her embrace without keeling over backward seemed to him fairly impressive, given his current physical state. They were in a very awkward position now: Hermione, shy of sitting in his lap apparently had thrown her legs over his, and her knee bumped against his ribcage. "You're kicking me," he said.

She looked up. Her face was wet and there was a damp spot on the front of his shirt. She smiled. She was like Harry, he thought, in that she seemed to have a light behind her eyes that, when she smiled, broke across her face and lit it to a strange a sudden prettiness. "I didn't want to squash you," she said.

"You're not," he said.

She leaned her head against him again, and seemed to rest there for a moment, very still. Looking down, he could just see the nape of her neck, pale and vulnerable looking between the white collar of her pajamas and the strands of her dark hair. She was still shivering, but less violently now.

For the first time in days he found himself feeling someone else's pain besides his own, and it was strange and startling and he tightened his grip on her. She smelled faintly of antidote: belladonna, bitter aloe, a scent like blood oranges. He said her name without being aware that he was saying it, and this time, when she looked up, her dark-lashed dark eyes wide and curious, this time he kissed her.

She did not seem startled to be kissed. Her arms came up around him, thrown awkwardly over his shoulders, her hands cold against the back of his neck, and she did not try to pull away. He held her tightly on his lap, hands on her waist, and leaned into her mouth, and he could feel the outline of the blue glass ring Harry had given her, hard as a splinter of bone, trapped between their bodies as they leaned together.

His strength gave way then and he fell backward, holding her. They thumped to the floor, a tangle of arms and legs. He heard her cry out in surprise but when he reached for her she quieted him with her fingers against his mouth. "Stop," she said. She looked determined, very serious.

"Did I hurt you?" she asked.

"Yes," he said.

She put her face down by his, and her clouded dark hair fell over them both. "I'm sorry," she whispered, her cheek brushing his, and he tasted the salt of her tears and thought, it was the closest he had come to crying in ten years. He seemed to be able to see them both, as well, from a distance, as if some part of him were hovering over the proceedings and observing in a disinterested manner. The blond boy sprawled on the floor, the dark-haired girl lying beside him, and if he also imagined a third shadow flung over and between them, it only made him more conscious that there was no one there to cast it.

"I'm sorry," she said again. She kissed his face where the scar was, just under his eye, and then drew his hand towards her, kissing his palm lightly, her mouth moving over the angry scars there to his wrist. He could feel the beat of his own heart, painfully, as if his heart had cracked in half, spilling blood like a river down through his veins to the point where her mouth met the pulse of his wrist. It was a feeling like falling. He reached over to her and pulled her down to fall with him.

It would have been a lie to say he had not imagined this before. He was too much of a Slytherin to strictly discipline his own imagination; surely he could not be blamed for acts he had never committed. Still, against the grain of his nature, eventually the idea of betraying Harry had been too painful to contemplate even in the abstract and even now he felt that pain like the afterimage of sun against closed eyelids. It blended with the pain of the cold tiles digging into his skin and his bones bruising on the hard floor and the pain in his cut hand, trapped between their bodies as they clung together. It was pain like a winter chill, sweet and piercing.

Her hands on him were restless and a little uneasy. Her fingertips glided over his face, she stroked his hair as if he needed or wanted reassurance; she made a whispering sound when he kissed her that was like the soft sound of snow falling in layers on the ground. He kissed her throat, then, and the lids of her closed eyes, and she shivered and moved so that he could kiss her mouth. The lazy, sensual falling sensation was leaving him, sinking away like spilling sand, and he felt the new urgency in her as she moved against him. She locked her arm around the back of his neck and he rolled towards her, hooking his leg around the back of her knee, pulling her against him, her breasts against his chest. And he knew that he should stop what they were doing, stop it right now, and wondered if it was his illness and exhaustion that had killed all his willpower or if he really was the awful person that Harry apparently had always thought he was, and if Harry hated him anyway there was no point in stopping, in fact there was hardly any point in not doing anything he wanted to do.

His hand, no longer trapped between them, still throbbed with a dull painful ache as he traced the line of her collarbone down to the top buttons of her pajamas and began to undo them one by one. He thought at first that it was the pain in his hand that was making the operation so difficult and it was only after a few seconds of fumbling that he realized that there was something caught in the buttons. He tugged at it, impatiently, and it came away in his hand, startling him. He tried to close his hand around it, but it slid through his fingers and hit the tiles with the sound of splintering crystal and only then did he realize what it had been.

Hermione gave a little gasp and scrabbled for it with her hand. "My ring — "

She twisted around to pick it up and held it up between them. It was not shattered, but a thin and branching crack had spread through it, almost splitting it in thirds. "It's all right," she said. "It's all right, I can Reparo it."