Кассандра Клэр - Draco Veritas

Short of handcuffing myself to your leg, I see no other way to assure myself that you stay put until Hermione gets back and we decide what to do with you."

"Hermione won't be happy that you tied me up," Harry said grumpily.

"Nonsense. It was her idea."

Harry's right wrist jerked in the loop of rope that held it. "Where is she?"

Draco shrugged, elegantly. He looked as if he had splashed water over his face, although his clothes were stained with mud and blood. Harry realized he was staring a little. He hadn't really looked at Draco properly in the street outside, and he found himself experiencing an odd pang of recognition: so that was what Draco looked like, all shapes and angles and that soft disorderly hair contrasting with the pointed chin and sharp features. "You're the one tied up," Draco said. "Shouldn't I be asking you questions?"

Harry gave up the idea of struggling and lay back on the bed. "Look," he said. "I know you're upset with me. I know what I did was — "

"Shut up," Draco said. His expression hadn't changed and neither had his inflection, but there was something in his voice that made Harry flinch and stare. Draco continued to regard Harry with the same look of faint, bland amusement.

"Well, if you have something to ask me, ask me," Harry said. "Incidentally, I can't believe you hit me over the head with a rock."

"I didn't hit you over the head with a rock. I hit you across the side of the head with my sword hilt."

"Details," Harry said. "And it was my sword."

"Which you luckily happened to bring with you. I won't say it was the one intelligent thing you did today, although we might perhaps agree it was the one not-completely-stupid thing you did."

'Call me stupid if you like," Harry said ruefully. "Everyone else has already today."

Draco raised an eyebrow. "Everyone?"

"Well — Fleur. Of course she also told me I was a great warrior."

"Don't get too excited. She uses that line on every guy."

"The warrior line or the stupid one?"

Draco ignored this. "Your eye is blacking up beautifully, by the way," he noted. "It's kind of red and yellow and maroon around the edges. Looks like you even bruise in Gryffindor colors."

Harry squinted at him. "Did you get a haircut?"

"No," Draco said.

"Yes, you did," Harry said. "It was getting so long you could practically have stuck bows in it. Now it's barely over your ears."

"Technically, I did not get a haircut," Draco said. "I cut it myself. Anyway, I don't want to talk about my hair."

More than slightly taken aback by Draco's cold tone, Harry plowed ahead gamely anyway. He'd certainly had experience with Draco's bad moods before. Usually it was all right if you could just get him to laugh, lower his guard briefly, let you in just a little bit — "You don't want to talk about your hair?" he said lightly. "Who are you, and what have you done with Draco Malfoy?"

Draco gave him a look. It was an indescribable sort of look. "You know who I am."

Harry felt a shiver of tension run along his spine and realized all his muscles had tightened up — it was as if he expected Draco to hit him again.

And yet a voice in his head said, Draco would never hit me, and he knew that in a way it was true, that Draco had only hit him to stop him running away, and he would have done the same thing himself — he remembered flinging Draco down that snowy incline near the Manor, out of the path of the hellhounds, and Draco climbing back up to him through the snow with blood soaking through the bandages on his arm. The things we do to each other. "Malfoy…" He bit his lower lip, casting about for something to say. "I didn't know you spoke Romanian."

"We have relatives in Romania. My uncle lived there for years. I've told you that."

"What did he say to you? The vampire?"

" Sângele apã nu se face," Draco said. "Blood is not water — it's a saying. I assume he was referring to my father, or my family in general."

"He knows your father?" Harry asked.

"I'd rather not talk about my father."

"You don't want to talk about your father, you don't want to talk about your hair. What do you want to talk about?"

"I'd rather not talk to you at all," Draco said, "but since we're stuck here until Hermione gets back from the kitchen, I suggest we choose some topic unrelated to either of us, our family members, or how much we dislike each other."

Harry blinked; Draco's words made no sense, and all that came to his lips was a startled denial. "I don't — "

"For INSTANCE," Draco interrupted loudly, "If there's a petrificus totalus, then is there a petrificus partialus? And if so, do people use it for kinky sexual purposes? Because I can't see what else it would be good for."

"Dislike you? I don't — "

Draco looked so angry that Harry wondered briefly if he was going to hit him again. Fortunately, the door opened at that moment and Hermione came in to the room, carrying a silver flask.

Harry stared. She looked the same, and yet somehow different — he leaned forward, although the ropes bit into his wrists. His heart jumped up — she was wearing his old Puddlemere United shirt, surely that was a good sign?

It was slightly too big on her, and the sleeves gapped around her slender arms: her face looked thinner, her skin translucently pale. Her soft mouth tensed uncertainly as she looked at him and her dark eyes went very wide and very soft. "Harry," she said, her voice barely a whisper.

Draco looked from one of them to the other as they stared at each other, and his mouth set in a bitter line. "Plus ca change, plus c'est la meme chose," he said. "I'll be going. There's a bottle of sixty-proof Bulgarian cough syrup in the kitchen with my name on it. If anyone here needs me, well, they can fuck right off."

That snapped Hermione out of her daze. "Draco," she said. "Wait — " and she held out her hand to him, with the silver flask in it. "Take this, please," she said.

Draco got up from the bed without looking at Harry, and went over to Hermione. She pressed the flask into his hand and said something very quietly to him that could have been Don't be angry, although Harry couldn't hear her and couldn't tell anything from Draco's response. He was shaking his head and had half-turned away when Hermione caught at his arm and pulled him back.

And there was something about the way she did it — the familiarity of the gesture, or her need to keep him there, or the way that Draco let her do it when Harry knew perfectly well how careful he was about being touched, how alert to the meaning of every casual gesture — Harry wasn't sure what exactly, but the feeling of jealousy he had experienced so powerfully in his dream surged up and over him again, a nausea so bad it was like pain.

He bit down on it, clenching his fists. I deserve this, he thought, I have no right at all -

Hermione dropped her hand from Draco's arm. He looked at her — he wasn't smiling, certainly, but neither was it that look of absolute hatred he'd bent on Harry, it was rather a curiously vulnerable sort of blankness

— and then he went out the door and shut it behind him. Hermione turned and looked at Harry and took a deep breath and Harry realized something: he had absolutely no idea what to say to her.

"Those illusions don't sound so bad now after all, do they?" Rhysenn murmured, her forefinger tickling the back of Ron's neck. "How many games of chess are you at now? Six? Ten?"

Ron twitched away. "Stop it. What's the point of that cage if you can just stick your arm out like that? If you ask me, Voldemort should have made the bars closer together."

"You're holding back," she whispered, letting her black hair veil her face like a curtain. He could see her grinning behind it. "The Dark Lord won't like that. Are you afraid of the future?"