Кассандра Клэр - Draco Veritas

Draco laughed, bringing silver-red bubbles to his lips. He wiped the blood away with the back of his hand. "My Hermione," he said, "not everything can be solved with an infusion of new information."

"Shush," she said, "You need to sleep — and when you wake up, we'll have a cure for you I could charm you — ."

"— And poppy or charms can make us sleep as well, and better than thy stroke," he said. "I'm quoting again — Ginny would be annoyed." He smiled faintly. "I kissed her earlier today, you know, because I thought I ought to kiss her before I died. Maybe that was thoughtless. Do you think she'll be angry?"

"No," Hermione said, "no, I don't think she will be." She wound a curl of his hair around her finger, soft as trammeled silk, fine as flax, and he moved restlessly under her caress. His skin burned almost too hot to touch. "Close your eyes," she said.

"If I do, I won't open them again," he said, "and I would like to wait for Harry, if I can." His tone was matter of fact. "You're a terrible liar, you know."

She stilled her caresses. "I am?"

"Yes," he said. "You just offered to charm me asleep with a broken wand."

She reached to cover her gasp, but was too late. "I had forgotten it was broken — "

"No, you hadn't." He closed his eyes, then opened them again. "I'm blind, aren't I? I ought to have known — even in the darkest night, you can see your own hand in front of your face."

"With the antidote, it could be reversed — possibly — " Hermione whispered.

"It doesn't matter," he said, and blind as he was, he caught her anxious, fluttering hand easily, and drew it towards him, and pressed a kiss to her palm. He folded her hand closed, trapping the kiss in the cage of her fingers. "I can see you anyway," he said, "in your white dress, standing on the steps, with your hair full of snow. I wonder if there are such beautiful things where I am going?"

Something hot splashed onto the hand he held; Hermione realized distantly that she was crying. "There should be only beautiful things," she said.

He laughed quietly. "I asked Harry once if he believed in Heaven," he said.

"I must have known, even then. I think I knew since the arrow went into me. I didn't want to believe it was true, and then it was easier to believe than not to believe, and then Harry left and I hoped it was true. And now I am only tired, so tired — it hasn't been a wasted life, this life of mine, has it, Hermione? I've been in love and had my heart broken and broken other hearts, and I've been found and lost, and saved the world — that's not nothing, is it?"

"You won some Quidditch games, too, if I recall," Hermione said, pressing the palm of her hand to her face, as if to transfer the kiss to her cheek.

"But never the Cup," Draco said.

"No," Hermione said gently. "Never the Cup."

"That belonged to Harry," Draco said. "Though I've forgiven him for it."

"And he you. I hope you believe that now."

"I believe it," Draco said. "But it doesn't make me less afraid."

"Of dying?"

"I always thought I would die before he did," Draco said. His tone was soft, reflective. "It was what I wanted, and I was glad for it. But I also thought I knew where I would be going when I died. To the place where the restless shades are, those who walk the riverbank wailing and crying out for justice. But I will have justice. Harry will have given me that. And I will have rest, because he will have given me that also. So where will I wait for him? What if there are no shores to stand on, where I am going now? I would wait for a hundred years, if that were what was required, but what if he cannot find me?"

"He can always find you," Hermione said. "You can always find each other."

"Now, yes, but then? Or are you positing telepathy in the afterlife?" Draco said, a shaky undercurrent to the lightness of his tone. "Forever is a very long time to be alone, Hermione."

Lightly, she touched his cheek with the tips of her fingers. The heat scorched her skin. "We're all alone," she said.

Magic, Ron thought as he watched Lucius stare at the door that had shut behind Harry, could do many things: it could transform a cat into a teapot, a blade of grass into a sword. But there were other forces at work in the world, stranger than magic and more powerful. The forces that held a family together, that broke and mended hearts, and that had transformed Lucius, in a matter of hours, into an old man. He looked stooped as he turned to Ron, the gray in his pale hair markedly apparent, lines grooved deep around his mouth and eyes. "And now they leave me with you," he said. "They might as well set a monkey to guard me." He squinted at Ron. "I have always wondered," he said, "if perhaps your ancestors intermarried with Muggles? There is something not quite right about the lot of you. Your muddy gazes and unfortunate hair — that whole business with your mother spawning two or three of you at a time — "

Ron looked placidly at the sword in his hand. The blade was clean, the ornate words carved into the side lovely to look at. "If you're trying to get me angry," he said, "it won't work."

Lucius didn't reply. He was staring at the blade and its design of roses.

"This is my son's sword?" he asked. "It is unfamiliar to me."

"Sirius gave it to him," Ron said.

"But it was I who taught him to use it," Lucius said. "Years of training, from the time he was a boy."

"And it shows," Ron said calmly. "He's very skilled with a blade."

Lucius bared his teeth. "Are you mocking me, Diviner?"

"Diviner." Ron slid a finger up the edge of the blade, felt his skin part against the sharpness, winced at the slight, satisfying pain. "Do you want me to tell you your future, Malfoy?"

Lucius laughed. "If you wish to predict my death — "

"Oh, no," Ron said. "Not your death. Not yours."

"Draco — " Lucius began.

"No," Ron said, "not his either, or at least, not his alone. He is not all that you care about, not all you lost when you allowed the Dark Lord to kill what made you human. There is your family. Your honor. The name of Malfoy. You cannot clear your conscience in a day, Lucius Malfoy, nor is there redemption to be found where there is no willingness to earn it.

What the Dark Lord took from you may have been returned to you, but it came at the end of a lifetime of evils for which there will be retribution.

Make no mistake; it will find you, Lucius. Black shadows are gathering around you. I can see them even now."

Lucius did not move, only his red-rimmed eyes flickered over Ron's face.

"That hardly sounds like a prophecy."

"I'm not done," Ron said. "Listen. I will tell you the rest of it."

He told him, and watched the changing colors in Lucius' face as he spoke.

With words, he painted a picture of the remainder of Lucius' life, and it was a long life and full of horrors, and they were not only horrors that were visited on Lucius and all that he loved, but the horrors Lucius would visit on others in his twisted desperation. He spoke of blood and death, and the Malfoy named blackened irreparably, and the Mansion brought to earth in a pile of rubble, and the treasures of a thousand years scattered and destroyed. He spoke of vengeance, and he spoke of humiliation and he spoke of shame. And as he spoke he saw that Lucius believed every word that he said, and Ron knew that the serpent in the tower had been right and that he possessed other powers than the power to see the future.

He stopped speaking only when he knew that he need speak no more, than he had done what he had set out to do. Lucius gazed at him like a man staring up out of a pit. He said, "Is there no escape from this?"

"There is one way out," Ron said. "But it is not for cowards."

"Anything," Lucius said.