Кассандра Клэр - Draco Veritas

Draco looked at him blankly.

"What do you think is outside the Manor?" Harry asked, trying again.

"I don't know," Draco said, with an uncharacteristically artless sort of smile. "But I'm going-and I don't think I'll be coming back. That's why I'm glad you're here. I wanted to say goodbye."

He leaned back. Harry was struck by how healthy and ordinary he looked-there was color in his face and he was no longer thin. He supposed everyone was healthy inside their own mind. Perhaps this was the way Draco saw himself.

"Goodbye?" Harry echoed, and when Draco said nothing, he asked, "How did you know I was coming?"

"I could hear you. Talking to me. Like a ghost at the window." He glanced towards the window, seeming not to see the emptiness outside.

"There are so many ghosts in this Manor," said Harry, remembering, "but I never thought you would be one of them."

"I'm not," said Draco, a little too quickly. "I heard Hermione and Ginny too, and Sirius. But your voice was the strongest."

"They've been taking turns sitting with you," said Harry. "In the infirmary."

Draco's light eyebrows raised. Harry thought of talking to that false Draco in the rain-soaked alley outside the Midnight Club, thought about how he had known then that there was something peculiar, something wrong about his friend, but not what it was. It was like that now, though he had no doubt that this was Draco. A Draco altered, changed in some microscopic, particulate way, but still Draco. "And you haven't? Not up for taking it in turns, Potter?"

The slight sarcastic accent on his last name comforted Harry with its familiarity. "I haven't left you," he said. "And I won't, until…"

"Until what?"

Harry expelled a breath he hadn't realized he'd been holding. "Surely you must know," he said. "Where we are now, what's outside. There's death beyond that door, Malfoy. You'll die if you go outside."

Draco looked merely curious. "Will I?" he said, and, leaping from the desk, made his way towards the door with a determined stride.

The second journey, forward in time, seemed swifted than the first. She saw black clouds gather around her and heard a shrill, piercing sound, like the noise of nails on a chalkboard. Then the world came together again, and she was standing in the library, looking into Blaise's wide, frightened eyes.

"Crikey," said Blaise, recovering. "You just blipped right out and then back in again-you were only gone for a second! Does that mean you have to go back?"

Gasping a little, Ginny leaned on the table until her dizziness passed.

"Yes," she said. "But first I need-"

"What? Water? Do you need to sit down?"

Ginny shook her head. "No. Books."

Blaise's eyebrows drew together. "Books?"

Ginny nodded.

Blaise shook her head. "You're more like Granger than I thought."

Still, despite her sharp tone, once Ginny had made it clear what she needed, Blaise went to search the historical section for further books about the Founders. "Anything that contains an exact death date for Gareth Slytherin," said Ginny. "And I need to know if he had any children, and which of them became the next Heir of Slytherin."

Once Blaise had gone, Ginny sank down in a chair. She had forgotten how draining time travel could be. She lowered her head into her hands, letting her cold fingers cool her flushed face-then glanced up as the library door slammed.

It was Ron. He hurried over to her, blue eyes full of concern. "Are you all right?"

She nodded. "I'm fine. Ron, what are you doing here?"

"Seamus told me you were in danger."

"Seamus can be such a-"

Blaise reappeared from between the stacks with a book in her hands, chuckling. "I thought Gryffindors didn't know those kinds of words!"

"We're brave, not prudish," said Ron, shortly.

Blaise fluttered her eyelashes. "Whatever you say."

Ron narrowed his eyes at her. "Whatever's going on-did you put Ginny up to something?"

"I certainly did not," replied Blaise coldly.

"Oh, Ron," said Ginny wearily. "Stop being a tool, will you? This was my idea."

"What was your idea?" Ron demanded. He looked around, a muscle by his mouth twitching. "What are you doing in the library?"

The muscle by his mouth twitched more rapidly as Ginny explained.

When she was done, he exploded, "Ginny, that's the stupidest-"

"It is not stupid!" Ginny flared. "And Hermione said it was all right."

"That's because she's in love with him too," said Ron, even more angrily.

Blaise's eyes flew open. "With Draco?" he said.

Ron shot her a blistering look. "Shut up, Blaise."

She smiled at him-one of Draco's bland, withering smiles. "You seem different these days," she remarked. "More like your brother."

Ron seemed momentarily nonplussed. "Which brother?"

"Charlie," said Blaise, airily.

"Oh, for goodness sake," said Ginny in frustration. "Ron, this is something I have to do. It's Draco's only chance. I know you don't like him, but he's a human being, he's got as much right to a chance at life as anyone else does. And think of Harry."

"I do think of Harry," said Ron, gratingly. "I think of him all the time." He knelt down then, and looked up at her. "Ginny," he said. "I went back in time with you once before. Bring me with you again. That way I can be with you if there's any danger."

Touched, Ginny squeezed his shoulder. "All right. But let me do the talking, all right?"

He nodded. Blaise cleared her throat. "Gareth Malfoy," she said, reading aloud from the book she held open in her arms. "Dead of a fever caused by wounds sustained in battle." She added the date, and Ginny frowned.

"But that's only about five years after the last time I was there!" she exclaimed.

"He died young," said Blaise. "It was a long time ago."

"Not for Ben," said Ginny, and looped the chain of the Time-Turner over Ron's neck.

Harry moved quickly to block Draco's way. "Oh, no you don't," he said.

Draco looked at him coolly. There was only a little emotion on the finely honed face, a sort of distant curiosity. "I don't think you understand," he said. "This is something I have to do."

"No, it isn't."

"Death comes for us all, Harry." Not Potter, not this time. Harry. "You can't battle it like you battled Voldemort."

"I know that." Harry thought of Cedric, dead between one instant and the next, and set his jaw stubbornly. "But it's not your time."

Draco laughed shortly. "Who are you to say when my time is? Who am I to say it? We don't get to choose, any of us. And what do you know of death anyway, Boy Who Lived?"

Harry looked away, fighting a despair that threatened to rip him out of this dream, return him to the grim reality of the infirmary, the smell of death and sickness and medicine, the white of ice and snow and sickbed linens, and everywhere hopelessness and pain. "Why are you angry at me?" he ground at last, between his teeth.

There was a silence, and then he felt a touch on his shoulder-looking, he saw Draco's hand laid there, thin and brown, scarred white along the palm and the curve of the thumb. "Maybe because it is easier to leave you angry," Draco said. "But-"

"Then don't leave."

"I have no choice," Draco said, tightening his grip on Harry's shoulder.

"How do you think that is for me, to have no choice? I am a Malfoy-I cannot bear being forced. Even my father-"

"Took his own life out of guilt," said Harry harshly. "You don't bear that sort of guilt. Maybe once, but not now."

"I'm not killing myself, Harry. I am accepting the inevitable."

"Nothing is inevitable," Harry said.

"Not for you, perhaps." Draco sounded weary. Harry chanced a look at him. He could see the exhaustion in him, under the false glamor of wellness, the pallor that seemed to lurk under the brown skin, flushed with healthy blood along the cheekbones, the lips curved in a half-smile, no longer gray and bitten, the thin chest rising and falling rapidly with his breath… "I am not like you," Draco said. "And perhaps you think I am owed something for my redemption, but I never thought of it that way. I have always done just as I wanted. I wanted to fight with you and for you, and if I changed myself it was so I might have that-everything I have done has been for selfish reasons. Don't mourn me, Harry. I haven't changed as much as all that."