Кассандра Клэр - Draco Veritas

He raised his eyebrows. "Honesty," he said. "How diverting."

"Seamus wasn't well," she explained. "I had to see if he was all right."

Draco spread his long-fingered hands wide. She could see the thick double-cross shaped scar that disfigured his left palm. "You do realize," he said, "you've become on of those sorts of girls."

"What sorts of girls?"

"I've heard you talking in the halls," he said blithely, "not that you ever talk to me any more, of course, but you have a carrying voice. Every other word you say is either "Seamus" or sometimes, for variation, "Shay" which I take to be some sort of repellent nickname for our potato-like Finnegan."

Ginny leaned her cheek against the cool stone of the wall. "Jealous?" she said, and immediately regretted it. She didn't want to provoke Draco, she wanted him to leave her alone. Just being as close to him as she was right now made her feel as if she were being turned inside out.

"Yes," he said, "I was so hoping I'd get a chance to apply for the position of permanent nursemaid and caretaker to a possibly dangerous lunatic, but you beat me to it."

"Seamus isn't dangerous. Or a lunatic. He's — "

"Broken?" Draco suggested.

Ginny felt the ghost of a smile flit across her face. "I prefer to think of him as… sprained."

Draco didn't laugh. "You like fixings things that are broken," he said. "I ought to know. Interesting, isn't it, that you haven't spoken to me since I was cured?"

"That's not — "

"The only conclusion I can come to is that you liked me better dying," he said. "But now you have Finnigan to put back together, you don't need me any more."

Ginny drew herself upright. She could feel her tiredness in her bones, her wrists and back: they burned. "That's not fair."

"I'm not interested in whether it's fair," he said. "I'm interested in whether it's true." He took a step towards her; the torchlight flared up, and threw a shower of gold sparks across his pale face and silver hair. The curl at the corner of his lip was so familiar she could have traced it in her sleep…

"Is it that hard a question?"

"It's not really a question. More an observation. As to whether it's true…"

She looked up at him; she was close enough to see the little crescent scar under his eye, a shade lighter than the rest of his skin. "What do you care?"

"You're martyring yourself," he said. "Because you think what happened to him was your fault. You're developing a flatteringly saint like pallor, but that's hardly worth it. I liked you better freckled and flawed."

"I didn't think you liked anything flawed," she said with asperity, but she found herself leaning into him, like a vine twining a trellis.

"On the contrary, I'm a big fan of imperfection…Faultlessness is so dull."

His hand was under her chin now, lifting her face so that she was forced to meet his gaze squarely. "He's not the blood you have to wash off your hands, not a stake to burn yourself at — he's just a boy. How do you think he'd react if he knew he wasn't your love, but your penance?"

She jerked away from him. "Why? Are you planning on telling him?"

He laughed shortly. "Far be it from me to get between you and your martyrdom, Saint Virginia."

"You never let anyone get between you and yours," she snapped back.

"You come here acting all wounded that I don't seem to need you any more — what would you do if I said I did need you, if I told you I needed you, thought about you, loved you, all the time?"

Draco looked taken aback, and not pleasantly so. "I — "

"That's what I thought you'd say. You don't want anything you can have.

Just what you can't." She pulled away from him. "Well, you can't have me.

You had your chance, Draco Malfoy, and you lost it."

She'd thought it would hurt to say it, but it didn't; rather there was a sense of enormous satisfaction about it, the sort of satisfaction she'd felt when she was five years old and, having tired of Ron's teasing, had hit him over the head with a Widget's Cast-Iron Self-Cooking Fry Pan. Of course in this instance, there was slightly less blood.

Draco arched his eyebrows into decided peaks. "One of us has lost it," he murmured in a desultory fashion, "but I'm not sure it's me."

Ginny had expected any of several responses to her announcement, but for him to laugh at her was not one of them. Rage boiled up inside her.

She reached up, sliding her hand into the neck of her sweater, and found the thin gold chain that hung there. She pulled it up over and over her head and held it out to Draco.

Both Epicyclical Charms hung at the end of it, twisting and glinting in the torchlight. "Take it," she said.

He looked at her with unusually explicit surprise. "What?"

"I said take them," she replied icily. "You never asked me where they were

— you never asked any of us, did you? Who did you think was looking after them?"

He shook his head, very slightly. The surprise had faded from his face and she couldn't quite read his expression: Anger? Disgust? Bitterness?

Amusement? He reached a hand out and took the coil of gold chain and glass-and-gold-and-bone charms from her, closing his fingers around them.

"That's twice," he said.

She was angry enough that she could feel the tremble in her fingers.

"Twice what?"

"That you've given me back my life," he said. "Although only once that you've flung it in my face."

The backs of her eyes burned; she knew she was near to tears. Not wanting to cry in front of him, she spun and ran down the corridor as her eyes spilled over, turning the torches on the walls to shimmering circles of blurry golden light. Had she stopped at the turn in the corridor to look back, she would have seen Draco watching her, his hand still extended, a look of wry resignation on his face.

"No," Ginny said, again, now, "I don't remember that at all."

Blaise looked at Ginny curiously. "Are you all right?"

"I'm fine."

Blaise leaned forward and pushed a strand of scarlet hair out of Ginny's eyes. "Are you crying?"

Ginny hugged her arms around herself, shivering. "It's the wind. I told you, I'm fine."

Blaise dropped her hand and muttered something — Ginny caught the words "Gryffindor" and "stubborn" and "bint."

"I should get back to the tower," Ginny said. "Seamus is there and I don't like to leave him alone for too long."

"Sure," said Blaise. "God knows what would happen if he was alone. He might raise up another Dark Lord to scourge the countryside or something."

Ginny bit her lip. "That's not funny!"

"Draco would have thought it was funny," said Blaise. And a few months ago, her eyes added, so would you.

Miserable, Ginny curled on her bed in Gryffindor Tower, the velvet hangings pulled so that she lay inside a square of darkness. Now that she didn't even have the Trousers books to stave off the bleak thoughts, they flocked around her like black birds. The drumming of blood in her ears sounded like the incessant beating of their wings.

So Blaise and Draco were going to the wedding together, so what? It was hardly her place to complain; since that night in the corridor outside the Great Hall, Ginny had spoken to Draco only once, and that out of forced politeness. She had no stake in any part of his life, and that included his love life. Of course, knowing that didn't stop her from feeling as hollowed out as a scooped Halloween pumpkin.

Her hand snaked up and felt the locket she still wore around her throat, shoved down into the neck of her blouse where no one could see it. I love, and I hope. She thought of Draco, saying, I've only learned the difference between love and hate this past year… I'm a child and perhaps what you need is someone more grown-up. Finnegan, even.