Кассандра Клэр - Draco Veritas

"It just seemed like a good place to hide out."

"I wouldn't call it a good place. Weren't you worried someone would recognize you?"

"I think I blended in pretty well with the three dozen other people who all looked like Harry Potter."

"Did you try to chat with yourself?"

"No. That would have been creepy."

"I don't know. Given the opportunity, I'd probably chat myself up a bit.

Wouldn't want myself to feel overlooked."

"Well, there were certainly plenty of you to chat up, if one was so inclined."

"Of course there were. I'm sure I'm a very popular choice."

"Sometimes your arrogance astounds even me. Aren't you even a little disgusted?"

"Like it would help if I was. So did you try to chat with me?"

"…."

"Oh, come on. You can tell me."

"I refuse to talk about this anymore, Malfoy."

"Well, did you — "

"No."

"Spoilsport."

The rose garden was empty and lovely under the stars, the ground dusted with a light sugar coating of snow, though the air was not cold. High stone walls blocked Ginny's view of the rest of the castle and the flowered springtime meadows that fell away from the castle and down the endless, rolling hills that surrounded it.

Seasons contradicted each other here, or seemed to, but it hardly mattered. They did what she wanted them to do. She was inside her own dreams, after all.

She smoothed down the material of the shimmering green dress she wore and glanced around the garden for the third time in as many minutes.

The air here smelled of roses and woodsmoke, the sky was dusted with glassy shards of stars, and she could hear faint music coming from very far away, as she had that night so many weeks ago, sitting alone on that bench in the rose garden, listening to the music that filtered down through the windows of the Great Hall. They always played Greensleeves at midnight. As if on cue, it began playing now, somewhere out in the invisible night. Alas my love, you do me wrong.

"But I never would," he said, a soft voice in her ear.

He had come towards her along the path of crushed shells and stones so quietly that she had not heard him approach. He stood there in front of her now, the bright moonlight clustering his pale hair with icicles, his eyes like chips of glass. He wore black, as Draco would have, the only color about him the green ring burning on his pale left hand.

She felt her hand clench tightly in her lap. "You never would what?" she asked him.

"Do you wrong," he said, and sat down on the bench beside her. Even the smell of him was the same — citrus and spices and boy-soap.

"You shaved," she said.

"Well," he said. "You asked me to."

She turned to him, hands in her lap still. In the moonlight, his pale face was a mask. Her heart flew up into her throat, for the first time since this strange dream-hallucination had begun, because suddenly he was Draco, in a way he had not been before. Draco, with his closed-off eyes and unreadable expression. Draco, who she loved but could never know — or perhaps, whispered a small voice in the back of her mind, you love him precisely because you cannot know him.

She pushed the voice back. "You look different," she said.

He only nodded. His hand came up and cupped her chin lightly. Her pulse quickened — this was happening too fast. She pulled away, trying to remember what they had talked about that night — they had talked about Harry, she remembered, and then she had kissed him and he had drawn back from her and she had accused him of being in love with someone else.

He sat looking at her now, blank-faced. She remembered something she had thought once about Draco: like a beautiful, empty house…you could dream anything into him. "I brought you a gift," he said.

She smiled, tucking a lock of hair behind her ear. "Nice of you to think of me."

He didn't reply, merely reached out and dropped a small wooden box, wrapped with black ribbon, into her hand. Something about the carelessness of the gesture recalled Draco to her again, and she reached to untie the ribbon with an anticipation that nearly matched the tremulous anticipation she would have felt had this been how that night in the rose garden had truly played out…didn't it?

The box fell open. Inside was a thin chain, glittering silver. A pendant hung from it. The pendant was also silver, but a darker shade, showing its age. Words were inscribed on the back: J'aime et j'espere.

"I don't know what that means," Ginny said.

"It means, 'I love and I hope,'" he replied, turning to face her at last. "Can I…will you let me fasten it on you?"

She nodded, and turned, lifting up her hair, feeling his fingers light against the back of her neck as he closed the clasp. He spoke softly, into her hair, his voice nearly a whisper. "The pendant…it's been in my family for years. I wanted you to have it because — because I do love you — I think I loved you before I ever knew it. I struggled so hard to tell myself that what I felt for you wasn't love. That it was only friendship, or loneliness.

But your image — that image of you I carry with me always, in the back of my mind, in my heart — it's never left me. Not for — "

She whirled on him, letting her hair fall, the pendant bouncing against her throat. "Who are you?"

He sat still, looking at her, a beautiful statue with blank white eyes. "Who do you want me to be?"

"Yourself," she said, her voice harsh.

He raised his face, and the bright cold air caught his hair. There were glints of icy green and frost-blue deep in his empty gray eyes, just like there were in Draco's, but she wondered, with a catch at her heart, how she could have mistaken his blankness for Draco's tightly bound restraint.

So many times in her dreams she had gone over that night in the rose garden, willing it to end differently. And perhaps it was true that this had been what she wanted — tasteful gifts and halting words of love, sincerity evident in each stumbling syllable — but those were her dreams alone, they had nothing to do with Draco, the reality of him, or what he might want.

It was real love she wanted, not the trappings that made up its form. And it was Draco she wanted, his own real self, not the colors and shapes that made up his image. If she could not have that, then she did not want imitations. She wanted only herself; that would be enough.

She leaned forward and kissed him — Tristan, Draco, whoever he was-lightly on the mouth. His lips were cool and soft; it was like kissing air.

When she drew back, she looked at him with pity. He was only a blank wall against which she could cast whatever shadows she might choose, after all — only a dream she had abandoned. "I'm sorry," she said.

"But you could have anything you want here," he said. His voice held the plaintive quality of the last of the childish yearnings still inside her.

"Anything you desire or imagine."

"All I want," she said, getting to her feet, "is to wake up."

She did not stay to see if he reacted; she had forgotten him already. She was already running up the path, then through the rose bushes, heedless of the thorns that tore at her legs and arms, scoring long and bleeding lines against her skin. She felt the pain but it didn't matter — her heart was pounding out the words wake up, wake up, wake up, wake up. Blackness fell around her; there was no more rose garden, no castle, only darkness and her own laboring breath. Wake up. I want to wake up.

Wake me up, Tom.

Wake me up.

There was something down in the tunnels with them. Harry had known it for some time now, though he'd tried to keep up his chatter with Draco regardless. He wondered if Draco knew, and if he didn't know, if Harry should tell him.