Кассандра Клэр - Draco Veritas

"Thestrals don't like anyone."

"They like me," Draco said, and indeed, the thestral's desultory nuzzling of his hand was the closest thing to any kind of affectionate gesture Harry could imagine one of the deathly horses making. "At least, they always used to."

"I didn't know you could see thestrals before this, Malfoy," Harry said.

"Fifth year, you couldn't."

Draco shot him a sideways look. "Is that your tactless way of asking me whether I've seen someone shuffle off this mortal coil before today, Potter?"

Harry shrugged. "I didn't know you'd seen death, is all."

"I've done better," Draco said. "I've been dead — remember?" He dropped his hand, but the thestral continued to nuzzle his shoulder. "After that, I started seeing them. Around the Manor, on the school grounds. They tended to follow me. I think they just like anything related to death."

A shiver ran down Harry's bones. "I've ridden one before have you?"

To his surprise, Draco paled slightly. "No," he said, displaying a sudden and surprising hesitation. "I don't like — riding horses."

Harry blinked at him. "You don't?"

"No," Draco said sharply. "I don't."

"Why n-?"

"I just don't, that's all," Draco said, stepping back from the thestral and from Harry, his face shut like a locked box. 'I told you not to ask me questions."

"I didn't know you were banning all inquiries across the board," Harry snapped. "I thought it was just the important stuff you didn't want to talk about — "

"And I suppose I need you," Draco said, his tone glacial, "to tell me what is and isn't important?"

Bloody hell, Harry thought, right back where we were before, and impulsively, he reached out and caught the flaring edge of Draco's cloak, and held it tightly, preventing the other boy from walking away. "Never mind then," he said. "Forget I asked."

Draco, who had half turned away, looked back over his shoulder at Harry.

Harry could sense in him a coiling tension, and underneath the tension, he could feel the shape of Draco's thoughts brushing against his own. It was a strange blind sensation, as if he held his hand to the side of a jar and felt through the glass the beat of trapped wings inside. He wondered if Draco knew, or felt it too.

He didn't appear to have noticed. "Listen," he said, abruptly. "Potter " He paused a moment and then went on, dropping each word into the silence between them with a deliberate and passionless clarity, "I meant what I said before," he said. "That I'll go with you, that I won't leave you. And you know if I said it, I'll do it. You have that as an advantage over me, that I made that promise to you. And if you choose, you can press that advantage. You can ask me whatever you want, and I can't walk away. It's your choice then, if you want me here because I want to be with you, or if you want me here only because of a promise."

"I just don't understand why you won't talk to me," Harry said, despair in his tone.

"No," Draco said flatly, "you don't understand, and that's why I won't talk to you."

You talked to me in the kitchen, Harry thought, but he sensed without a doubt that saying it would only make Draco angry. There had always been vulnerabilities that the other boy was unwilling to discuss; all that had changed, Harry thought, was that now even the unwillingness itself was also apparently a forbidden topic. For someone he was so close to, Harry thought, he knew very little about how Draco felt about anything.

"If you don't like riding horses," Harry said, "how are we supposed to get off this roof?"

Draco gave him a poisonous look, but it didn't bother Harry; it was only one of Draco's garden-variety poisonous looks, and much less alarming than the clear, dead voice he had just been speaking in. "I said I didn't like it; I didn't say I wouldn't do it."

"Fine," Harry said, and reaching up, he fisted one hand in the thestral's tangled mane and pulled himself up onto its back. It danced forward a few steps, then relaxed. He looked down at Draco, who had taken several involuntary paces back and was now scowling up at him from a slight distance.

Harry held out a hand. "Come on," he said.

Draco's scowl deepened. "Who says you get to be in front?"

Harry leaned forward and theatrically banged his head against the ridged top of the horse's neck. "Just get on the fucking pony, Malfoy."

Ignoring the other boy's proffered hand, Draco swung himself up behind Harry, gripping the horse's back tightly with his legs to keep from sliding off. The thestral made a sound low in its throat; leathery wings rustled.

Draco swore rapidly under his breath. Without turning around, Harry could feel the tension in the other boy's body; he radiated a sharp and panicked electricity. "You'd better grab on to my shirt or something, Malfoy."

Draco stopped cursing just long enough to tell Harry what he could do with his shirt. It sounded like a complicated process involving knots.

Harry shrugged, and leaned forward to whisper into the thestral's ear.

"Take us," he began, "to the Dark Lord — "

The thestral's legs bunched beneath it, and it launched itself skyward before Harry had even finished speaking. Draco yelled out loud and grabbed onto Harry's belt; only Harry's grip on the thestral's mane prevented them both from sliding off. Together they sped up into the blood-red sunrise.

"'Lo, Sirius." Aidan fixed bleary eyes on Sirius. He waggled a manicured hand at him in greeting, then winced. "God, my head. Bloody magic, bloody wizards; we can turn a man inside out but we can't cure a bloody hangover. I tell you, I wish someone would turn me inside out—"

Sirius sighed inwardly. It was never easy getting information out of Aidan at the best of times. He'd worked with him briefly in the Resistance. Aidan had been the best-dressed bloke there, but his habit of rolling up every day at noon, incoherently hungover to the teeth, had not endeared him to his superiors, of which Sirius had been one.

"So listen, Aidan—"

"Right, right." Aidan tugged at the collar of his black velvet frock coat. "So enough about me, then," he said. "What's up with you, Sirius?"

Sirius sighed. "I don't know, Aidan," he said. "Charlie indicated that there was something you wanted to say to me. Have you any idea what that might have been?"

Aidan gazed blankly around the kitchen, then brightened. "Oh, right," he said. "About Harry."

Sirius tensed all over. "What about Harry?"

"Well, it's not about Harry specifically. It's really about Viktor, and sort of peripherally about Harry — " Aiden blinked again, then beamed. "Hey, that's a good word, peripherally. I didn't know I knew that word. I must not be as hung over as I thought."

"AIDAN." Sirius's voice was like thunder. "May I remind you that there is a fully grown adult werewolf in the other room who is entirely capable of eating your head if you don't tell me whatever it is you know about Harry?" (This, Sirius thought, was mostly true — Remus was indeed a fully grown adult werewolf who was entirely capable of eating Aidan's head although not, perhaps, in his present form.)

Aidan looked hurt. "All right, all right, there's no need to resort to threats." He flicked a speck of dust from his collar, and said, "So Viktor Krum, right, he's got this flat he lets me stay in sometimes, in Prague.

Lovely place, right in the center of town, all the modern conveniences — "

"AIDAN."

"Anyway," Aidan went on huffily, "yesterday, I got an owl from him demanding I leave the flat immediately because he needed to put up another friend there. Needless to say I was rather put out at being dismissed in such a manner — and besides, I had something of a hangover that day due to having been out at a party in Budapest the night before; anyway, the upshot is, I didn't actually get around to leaving the flat until well after Viktor had asked me to, and I was still in the bedroom when he arrived with his friend. Luckily I had the old Invisibility Cloak that I had borrowed from the Order — "