Кассандра Клэр - Draco Veritas

The roll of parchment on Seamus' lap fluttered to the floor as he put his hands up to cover his face. He wanted her here; she would steady him, make him whole again the way he'd been before. Together, they would heal. Without her, he would always be broken. His fingers pressed painfully into his eyes, trying to erase the memory of the dead girl with Ginny's face, the sound of Tom's voice, reverent and desolate.

Ginny. Ginny. Ginny.

The sound of the door opening brought him out of his reverie. He looked up, half-guiltily, though he had done nothing wrong. It was only Ron, wearing a dark red cloak over his robes that clashed with his hair. "Oh, sorry," he said, seeing Seamus. "I didn't mean-"

"It's all right." Seamus hopped down off the windowsill. "It's your room, too."

"That's true." Ron didn't move, and for a long moment the boys just stared at each other, both equally uncomfortable though for different reasons. Seamus wondered drearily if anyone would ever treat him normally again.

"I was just going anyway," he said, finally. "I thought I'd see if I could find Ginny before dinner-"

"Actually," Ron said, stepping to block Seamus' path to the door, "if you wouldn't mind, there's something rather important that I needed to talk to you about…"

Sirius and Narcissa were standing together outside the infirmary doors.

Sirius, like the rest of them, looked hollow-eyed with tiredness, but he managed to smile at Hermione. Narcissa couldn't quite manage it — the strain of the past few weeks had left her looking terribly frail, her skin like parchment. Hermione could see the veins at her temples.

She thought how differently they all reacted to their grief: Sirius, short-tempered, strangely ineffective, Narcissa gone frail as a flower, Remus sharp, determined and distant, Ginny wound tight as a coiled spring, and Harry, vanished beyond recollecting.

Stifling a sigh, she greeted them with a wave and made to go around them, but Sirius stopped her. "Wait."

A sharp pang of fear assailed her. "Has something-?"

"Nothing has happened," Narcissa hastened to assure her. "We wanted to talk to you. Well — Sirius did. I…"

Her voice trailed off. Hermione wanted to say something to her, reassuring or kind, but she'd had a surfeit of grief already, her own and other people's. "What is it?"

"It's Harry," Sirius said. "If you could…"

"If I could what?"

"It's getting close to the time," Sirius said. "If you could get him out of the infirmary, persuade him there's something needs doing elsewhere, persuade him he needs a bath, anything — "

"He does need a bath," said Hermione, bleakly. "But he's needed one all week and that hasn't budged him. I don't know what you think I can do that you can't."

"He shouldn't be here when Draco dies," said Sirius flatly, and Narcissa looked away. "They're tied together and I'm afraid that when Draco fails at last, his death will pull Harry down after him."

Hermione stared for a moment. A clear picture rose up in her head: a huge ship going down in the limitless emptiness of the ocean and the splashing survivors, fallen from its rails, sucked under the surface in its wake, cold green seawater closing over their heads. She looked at Sirius with something like hate, and pushed past him through the doors of the infirmary.

Harry was where she had left him, in the chair by the bed. His head rested on one hand and he looked so tired, so tired and so young, that even as she approached him her impotent anger faded to sorrow and she longed to put her arms around him and comfort him. But he had shunned her touch since Romania — had shunned all human contact. He flinched away from Sirius's outstretched hands and even Ron's awkward shoulder pats, as if their touch burned him.

So she sat down in the chair next to his and only said quietly, "Harry?"

He turned his head. Black curls framed a face that was all angles and blue hollows, and the traced shadow of stubble along his chin and jaw which should have made him look older, but didn't. His lips were cracked; a thin line of blood ran along his lower lip where he had bitten it. "Yes?"

She lowered her half-raised hand. Something about him, the way he was now- not a new quality in him, but an old quality, lacking- held her back. "Sirius wanted me to see how you were," she said, hating the lie. "If you need anything — anything to eat, maybe? Or if you wanted to go and take — take a bath or something, I can sit with Draco."

"No." His voice was perfectly polite and perfectly dead. "No, thank you, Hermione."

It was, she thought, like trying to climb a glass wall in greased slippers.

There was nothing there, within those lightless, bottle-green eyes: no life, no Harry. She looked past him to Draco. The rosy afternoon light had moved away, and he lay white as a wax figure, hands crossed over his chest, the way he always slept. She remembered his hand slipping out of hers in the corridor, the limp curl of his fingers. Some people, Blaise had said, would fight till all hope was gone. And some would fight even past that.

"Have you tried, Harry?" she said, the words escaping before she could hold them back.

He only blinked. "Tried what?"

"Talking to him," she said, glancing from Harry to the boy on the bed.

"Talking to Draco."

"I believe you were there," Harry said, his voice as dry as winter air, "when Madam Pomfrey told me he was past hearing anything."

Hermione flinched. Harry had talked to Draco, of course. In that corridor in Romania he had said quite a lot of things, talking and talking, and sometimes hunching silently at Draco's side, until Sirius and Remus arrived and pulled him away. And she had watched, and Harry had watched, as Remus bent over Draco, then took hold of him and nearly threw him down on the corridor floor, Harry shouting out in anger and Hermione pulling him back, and the way Remus had pushed down on Draco's chest with a savage force, muttering spells under his breath, till Draco had coughed up silvery-black blood all over his robes and started breathing again.

But he hadn't opened his eyes again, then or since.

Madam Pomfrey's later comment that Draco was past hearing anything hadn't been directed at Harry, but Harry had reacted as if it had been, and clammed up almost entirely.

"I know what she said." Her tone was careful. "But she didn't mean you.

You can talk to Draco without him having to hear you, not properly. Mind to mind."

Harry said listlessly, "He's gone. There's nothing there for me to talk to. It would be like — talking to a wall."

"If you really think that," Hermione said, sharp as glass, "why are you here?"

The corner of Harry's eye twitched, but he said nothing. He was still looking down at his hands. The curl of the scar across his right palm was as darkly visible as if he had drawn it in ink.

"You could try," she said.

Harry said something so quietly that she had to lean close, and even then she wasn't sure she'd heard. Still, she knew what he had said. What if I try, and it doesn't work?

She looked at Draco, still as a knight carved on a tomb, those closed unsleeping eyes fringed with silver-wire lashes. She wondered if he dreamed, and if so, what he saw. Or was it only darkness? I can see you, in your white dress with snow in your hair.

"It will work," she said, putting all the confidence she didn't have into those three short words, bartering honesty for love. "I'm sure of it." What does it matter now? What's one more well-meant lie?

He raised his eyes to hers, and the trust she saw in them broke her heart.

"All right," he said, "I'll try."

Blaise looked up from the book, her nose wrinkled. "Well, I've checked in three places now. I think we have it right."