Кассандра Клэр - Draco Veritas

“Hermione,” Harry said, his tone exasperated. “I’ve been trying to say something to you for the past five minutes and you keep interrupting me.

Will you just listen for a second?”

“Oh!” Hermione said, suddenly contrite. “Sorry, I was babbling. What is it?”

“It’s…” Harry began, and hesitated. Hermione looked up at him as if for the first time that evening and saw the hectic color in his cheeks, the sharp brightness of his eyes, the rapid pulse beating in his throat, and became truly alarmed.

“Harry! Is something wrong?”

“No,” he muttered. “Nothing’s wrong,” and with that, he took a firm hold of her wrists and steered her across the dance floor to a shadowy alcove, some distance from the other dancers. “It’s just private.”

“But you’re all right?” she said, scanning his face for clues. “Nothing’s happened?”

He let go of her wrists then and took her face in his hands, his fingertips on her cheeks as light as kisses. The feel of them was so familiar, as everything about Harry was familiar, and beloved as everything about him was beloved, as she might love the best and brightest part of her own self. His eyes were wide, looking down at hers, his breath coming rapidly, and her instinct told her to put her arms around him and hold him and comfort him, for surely only a terrible sort of pain could make him look at her with such an intensity as this.

“Hermione,” he said, before she could move. “Hermione, I’ve got something to ask you…”

“So ask me, Harry,” she said, bewildered. “Whatever it is, you know you can ask me. You can ask me anything.”

He slid his hands down to her shoulders and gripped them tightly, so tightly it hurt. “Hermione,” he said, levelly. “Hermione, will you marry me?”

She felt her eyes fly open, her heart stop, and she wondered if all of her might suddenly stop as she fainted dead away like Sleeping Beauty wounded by the needle. But no, she was just Hermione Granger, not a fairytale princess, and she couldn’t faint dead away on command — no matter how much she wished she could when she looked up at Harry’s face, Harry’s beautiful, beloved, so-familiar face, his green eyes so wide and hopeful, and said:

“No, Harry. No. I couldn’t possibly. I’m sorry, but no.”

“Don’t you think it’s time you introduced me to your parents?” Blaise inquired as they moved — fairly gracefully, Ron felt, considering his lack of serious dancing experience — across the polished marble floor of the Manor ballroom. “I mean now that we’re officially out, so to speak, to your friends.”

“I suppose,” said Ron reluctantly. He couldn’t help wondering how Blaise, beautiful and sophisticated as she was, would react to his down-to-earth, slightly shabby family situation. He tried to picture her casually pitching in to help his Mum with the washing up, and failed utterly.

“Ashamed of me, are you?” Blaise demanded, fixing him with a piercing green stare. “I’m all right for a bit on the side, but when it comes to introducing me to your parents —“

“I never thought of you as a bit on the side!” Ron protested, though he sensed that this, like most arguments with Blaise, was a battle he was going to lose. Mostly because she didn’t play fair. It was like dating Malfoy — if, he reminded himself quickly, Malfoy were a girl. A hot girl. Malfoy was neither of those things. In fact, it wasn’t like dating Malfoy at all. He wished that thought had never occurred to him.

“What on earth is wrong with you, Ron?” Blaise demanded, executing a complex turn and steering him along like a small barge as she did so.

“You’ve turned a horrible green color. Surely the idea of introducing me to your family isn’t that nightmarish.”

“No,” said Ron, weakly. “It’s not that.”

Blaise smiled that smile that always made his knees go wobbly. “Well, you’re a Diviner. Surely you can look into the future and see how your parents take the news.”

“What if I told you that telling them would set off a chain reaction of apocolyptic events, covering all the world with a second darkness and flooding the Earth’s continents with boiling, red-hot magma?”

“I’d say you were shirking.”

“As I thought.” Ron sighed. “I suppose I was rather hoping Ginny would do it for me.”

Blaise chuckled. “She looks as if her mind is on other things at the moment.”

Ron followed the line of her gaze and saw his sister, in that terrifying red dress of hers, her arms wrapped around Draco Malfoy. They weren’t so much dancing as clinging to each other. “Why now?” Ron said plaintively.

“I thought she was over her whole Malfoy fixation —“

He broke off and stared. Just beyond Draco and Ginny, moving among the dancers like a flickering shadow, was a familiar, dark-haired figure. He would have recognized her anywhere, as much from the way she moved as from the black hair that wrapped her like a shawl, or the slim pale face, like a thumbprint in white paint against the shadowy background of the suddenly darkened room…

Rhysenn.

She knew that he saw her — she raised a hand, slim and white-fingered, and beckoned him towards her. She was smiling as she turned and slipped away through the dancers, headed for a low door at the east side of the ballroom.

“What is it, Ron?” Blaise sounded actually alarmed now. “Are you —“

“I’ll be right back.” Ron drew away from his dancing partner and hurried after Rhysenn, leaving Blaise, perplexed, staring after him.

They were in a room full of people, and they were dancing. Distantly Ginny knew that the room was the ballroom at Malfoy Manor, and that it had been beautifully decorated in clean shades of white and black: white and black silk draperies drifted in the air like restless ghosts, and rose petals spilled from the sky at intervals. There was even a glittering ice sculpture that changed shapes as it melted: now a flower, now a swan with outspread wings. She saw all this, and didn’t see it; she was focused entirely on Draco.

They had been laughing together as they came down the stairs into the ballroom, but that had changed once they started dancing. Conversation had fallen away, swallowed up or vanished in the intensity of feeling that touching each other had brought with it — Ginny knew she wasn’t alone in feeling it, either; she’d seen the pulse jump in Draco’s throat when he took hold of her to pull her into the dance, and he’d had that look on his face too, that funny, half-taken aback and half-wry look that meant that his own emotional response had surprised him.

She could feel the roughness of his scarred hand against the bare skin of her back, the feather-light brush of his fingertips against her wrist. Her mouth was dry and her heart felt both impossibly light and impossibly saturated with feeling — and all these things she had never felt with Seamus, not even when he was kissing her, she felt from the light touch of Draco’s hands.

She felt like a raw wound, cut open and terribly vulnerable to injury, and yet at the same time she felt more alive than she ever had. There was a word for this feeling, a word she had almost forgotten how to apply to her own life.

Hope.

I love and I hope. They were passing the long table where the ice sculpture sat; as they moved past it it morphed from the shape of a heart to the shape of a glittering star. “What did you say?” Draco asked, leaning in to hear her, his hair brushing her cheek.

Ginny hadn’t realized she had spoken out loud. Flustered, she said, “I was just noticing the ice sculpture. It’s awfully pretty.”

“Yes. Mother does seem to have gone all out with the décor,” said Draco, as if the topic interested him only mildly. “I suppose that’s because Father never really let her have any say in it before.”