Кассандра Клэр - Draco Veritas

Finnegan, even. She thought of Seamus, his honest face, his blue eyes, his gentleness, his concern. Draco had said she'd be better off with him, and for a time, she had agreed. She wasn't sure if maybe she didn't still agree.

What she really thought and what she wanted badly to think had become so tangled in her mind that she could no longer extricate herself from the knots.

Ginny did know, on some level, that she had, just as Draco had said, become one of those girls — the sort who talk about their boyfriends endlessly and without reprieve, boring their friends, annoying their acquaintances, and positively revolting their family members. She'd never had patience with those sorts of girls in the past; the kind who wouldn't shut up about how terrific their boyfriend was, the cute things he did, the funny thing he said just the other day; they were the same kinds of girls who flew into weepy fits if their boy so much as smiled at another girl, who demanded he rid himself of all his female friends — or all his friends entirely — and who hurled tantrums at you if you happened to mention that time the year before when their boyfriend had taken Orla Quirke to the Yule Ball, gotten pissed as a newt, and been sick all over her new silk robes — even if, at the time, said girl had been dating Ernie McMillan and had never given her current boyfriend the time of day. They demanded of their boyfriend that he be a blank slate, devoid of romantic history, devoted only to them. Ginny despised that sort of girl; why live in fantasyland when reality would only inevitably intrude and bring you crashing down to earth in a big ugly mess? Why found your relationship on lies?

Now she knew: sometimes the lies were all you could stand to believe. She saw Elizabeth's and Blaise's eyes glaze over when she talked about Seamus; saw Hermione's sideways looks of worry, and felt a new sympathy for those girls, who she now realized only talked about their relationships the way they did not because they thought they were perfect, but because they knew that they were anything but. Maybe love, she thought now, flat on her back staring up at the ceiling, is just a lie two people tell each other, and for it to work, they both have to believe it. And if she couldn't make herself believe it by sheer force of will, if guilt and desire were not enough, then maybe she would have to find another way.

Hermione sat in the window embrasure in the Gryffindor Tower common room and looked down the spring-green sweep of lawn, dotted with gray stones and trampled flat where students had trodden their own paths from castle to Quidditch pitch. She could see Harry and Draco — really just moving dots from here, but she recognized Draco's silver hair and Harry's red sweater — walking up one of the paths towards the castle, deep in conversation.

She linked her arms around her legs, drawing them up to her chest; her book Onieromancy and the Study of Protective Magic which had been perched precariously on her knees, slid down into her lap. It was getting darker outside, the sky streaked with the first markings of sunset. Soon Harry would come up the stairs and through the portrait hole, smelling of grass and boy and spring afternoon, and they would curl up together on the couch and read or talk until it was time for dinner.

The thought of Harry brought a helpless smile to her face. She wasn't sure when or how they had gotten back together; there hadn't been an event, just a sort of natural falling back into things: into walking to class holding hands, sitting folded together in the common room at night, the sort of near-telepathic interconnectedness she had missed so badly when they'd started having problems at the beginning of the school year. She was happier when Harry was around, and she knew from the way that he lit up when he saw her that he felt the same way. He was part of her and she of him: not in a possessive way, she thought, but in a way that brought to her mind those old words from the Song of Songs: I am my beloved's and my beloved is mine.

It made her nervous. Nothing could be this good, she thought, without it going terribly wrong. Sometimes she took her blue glass ring out of its box on her nightstand and looked at the crack that ran through it, straight down the middle, and then she would put it away and sit silently on her bed for a while, just thinking.

Out the window, she saw Harry stop walking and wave. Ron was coming down the front steps of the school red hair a bright dot at this distance, lanky frame instantly recognizable. He pointed behind himself, gesturing, Harry caught up to him, Draco just behind. An earnest conversation ensued.

Ron. Things were good with Ron, too, she thought. She'd been terribly worried that a great distance would have grown between herself, Ron and Harry after everything that had occurred, but that didn't happen. In some ways, the three of them were closer than ever — it was as if all the buried resentments and secret unhappiness that had plagued their relationship before had been burned away, and they'd been granted a chance to start over.

Of all of them, she thought, Ron had changed the most. Where once he'd been nearly as hotheaded and impetuous as his sister, he was more thoughtful now, slower to anger, often to be found lost in thought. When Hermione had questioned him about it once, he'd replied that in Romania, he'd learned that if he looked far enough into the future, he could see the end of the world. "Of everything," he said, chewing on the end of his quill, "stars, planets, galaxies — the end of magic. It gives you some perspective, knowing that."

Hermione supposed that it did. She didn't ask him if he'd looked that far ahead, either. She found she didn't want to know. Whatever Ron saw in the future, he kept it to himself, and for that, she was grateful.

Even if the urge to ask him did sometimes worry at her like a the pain of an old injury. One thing she had Harry had never discussed that did nag at her was what they planned to do when school ended. On their last day at Hogwarts, Malfoy carriages would arrive to take them to the Manor for the wedding; Hermione was riding with Harry and Ron, Draco with Blaise, and Ginny, of course, with Seamus. There would be a few days of festivities at the Manor, and after that — nothing. The future stretched ahead like a blank swath of unmapped terrain. Whatever Harry's plans were, she didn't know them, and didn't know how she'd feel about them.

And she didn't know how he'd feel about hers, either.

Down on the school's front steps, Harry and Draco parted from Ron, and then from each other, heading in opposite directions. Ron stood on the steps by himself — pensive? Lonely? She couldn't tell. A moment later, someone else joined him there. A girl, also with red hair. Ginny? Hermione thought, and was about to lean forward when and the curtain she'd drawn across the embrasure was pulled aside. Hermione looked up, blinking.

Ginny stood in front of her, holding the curtain out stiffly and glaring.

Hermione didn't take this personally — Ginny spent most of her time these days either glaring or looking as if she might cry — and she doubted it had anything much to do with her. "Hermione," Ginny said. "I need to talk to you."

So it hadn't been Ginny with Ron, Hermione thought, perplexed. She scooted back, making room for Ginny on the window seat. "What about?"

For a moment, Ginny hesitated. It was enough time for Hermione to notice that Ginny had buttoned her cardigan crookedly, that her normally neat and beautifully brushed hair was straggling out of its plaits, and that she had an odd, circular bruise on the back of her right hand. She felt a nearly painful wave of sympathy for her. She had been so brave back in January, so brave she'd nearly died, yet she seemed unable to find peace in the knowledge of her own courage. Instead, she seemed wrecked.