Кассандра Клэр - Draco Veritas

Draco only looked at her as if he were waiting for her to say something worth replying to. She felt herself flush.

“And you weren’t inappropriate,” she said. “This is what’s inappropriate, this stupid pretense of yours that I don’t care about you and you don’t care about me.”

“I never said that.”

“You don’t have to. You know just how to behave to drive me away.

You’ve been doing it for a year, pushing me away but never quite far enough — it’s like you’ve sawed away at this tie between us until there’s only the thinnest thread left, but you can’t quite bring yourself to cut it entirely, can you?”

He looked up at her through heavy-lidded eyes. “Can’t I?” he said.

“I think if you could have,” Ginny said slowly, “you would have, already.

You can’t stand letting yourself love someone because you think it’ll destroy you both. That’s why loving Hermione was so perfect for you. You could never have her. And Blaise, you didn’t love her at all. Which was cruel, you know, but I suppose in your backwards way you thought you were being kind. And me—“

“And you?” Draco was standing up very straight now, looking at her, his affected disinterest having vanished. His face was shut, making her think of a locked box whose plain design left no clue as to what was contained within. Over the months she had dreamed all sorts of things into it, and perhaps opening it, she would find she had been entirely wrong about its contents. But at least she would know. “What is it you want to hear?” he asked, musingly, and very calm. “The ugly truth or the beautiful lie?”

“I want the truth. That’s all I ever wanted from you.”

A sharp laugh escaped him. “Oh, now, that isn’t true. There’s nothing pretty about the truth, Ginny, especially about me. It’s all prickly bits and sharp edges. Try to pull it out of me and you’ll only wind up with cut and bleeding hands.”

“Then I’ll make it simple for you,” she said. “Say you don’t love me.”

For the first time, he seemed caught off guard. “What?”

“Say you don’t love me,” she said. “If it’s true, say it. I know you wouldn’t lie.”

Draco looked as close to nonplussed as she’d ever seen him — as if she’d asked him suddenly the answer to a deviously difficult Arithmancy problem while he was in the middle of doing something else. “Ginny…”

“The truth won’t hurt me,” she said. “Really, it would be a mercy, either way.”

“Maybe I don’t have an answer,” he said.

Ginny’s hand went to the front of her dress. She drew from the bodice of it her wand, and pointed it at him. “Then I’ll Veritas you,” she said. “I’m taking this out of your hands, Draco. That should be a relief to you — shouldn’t it?”

He had taken his hands out of his pockets, reflexively, as if he meant to ward off her spell. He had his head down, looking at the wand, but when he raised it, she saw that he was starting to smile — a smile of wry relief, the same sort of look she’d seen on his face once after an especially hard Quidditch match, a look that said that the battle had been hard fought but there was some joy, perhaps, in at least knowing that it was over.

“I don’t want to love you,” he said.

The wand in Ginny’s hand trembled. She could feel herself breathing hard, too hard; she was getting lightheaded. “And?” she prompted.

“And I remember when I knew you were that girl, the one I remembered,” he said. His voice had a tone she’d never heard in it before: defeated but not unhappy. “We were in Slytherin’s castle, and you were shouting at me about something. I knew you then. Something about how you looked when you were angry did it, I think. Or it might just have been the fire — there was a fire in the library that day, when I was twelve.”

Because Lucius was burning the diary, Ginny thought, but she was remembering that room in the castle, the fire in the grate and Draco looking at her with sleepy, deadly eyes; their kiss had tasted like salt and brandy. “I remember,” she said.

“Perhaps that’s why I’ve always thought of fire, when I think of you,” he said. “Perhaps that’s why the red dress. Or perhaps it was because I knew there was something between us that, if we gave ourselves up to it, would burn us up and leave nothing behind.”

The wand wavered in Ginny’s hand. “I don’t know what you mean.”

He was looking at her thoughtfully now, the wry smile gone. “Perhaps you could survive it,” he said. “But that which is hollow burns easily. I couldn’t give you what you wanted — not without running the risk of being consumed myself. I had so little of me to go on…” He shook his head, as if snapping himself out of a daydream. “I put what roadblocks I could in our path — to keep me from disappointing you. And I knew I was disappointing you as I did it, but I imagined it was an easier disappointment than you would face if I let myself love you.”

“But you wouldn’t cut me off completely. You would push me away and then pull me back — why?” she cried, lowering the wand.

“Because I’m selfish,” he said. “Haven’t you been listening? And cowardly, too. And I made my actions seem mysterious, I suppose, so you wouldn’t know just how selfish and how cowardly —“

She shook her head so vehemently at that that he broke off with a choked laugh.

“You deserve better,” he told her, gravely.

“You told me love can’t grow in a dying heart,” she said, her mouth dry.

“You said you would love me if you could.”

“With all my rags of heart are capable of,” he said, “I remember, Ginny.

You don’t have to quote me to myself.”

“You aren’t dying any more,” she said.

“I know,” he said. “And I was so good at it, too. I’m not nearly as good at knowing how to live.” He searched her face for a moment with steady grey eyes. She could tell he was nerving himself up for something; he had that look about him, contained but kinetic. “Dying would have been the easy way never to have to answer your question,” he said, “or any questions, and if there is one thing that has always been true about you, it’s that you make me question myself — and questioning myself inevitably proves to me how little of myself exists to sustain that sort of interrogation. I know you, Ginny, better than I know myself. You are whole and entire — loyal and honest and stupidly, amazingly stubborn and beautiful as you are — and I’m shadows and the ghost of old lies held together by good intentions and hope.”

She dropped her wand. It landed with a click on the floor and rolled under a small night table. “Say you don’t love me,” she said.

He took a step towards her. “Ginny —“

“As a favor to me, please, just say it. I’m asking you —“

“Do you really want the answer?” He was standing in front of her suddenly, close enough to touch, and his face was very white but his grey eyes burned with a sharp clear light, like transparent crystals.

“Yes,” she whispered, “yes, I want it, yes.”

He caught her wrist, she knew it was with his left hand because she felt the light scrape of his scar against her skin. “I can’t say I don’t love you,” he said in measured tones, “because it would be a lie. I love you. I think I have for longer than I’ve known it. I tried not to love you. I didn’t want to love you. I did all I could to push you away, but in some way, somehow, I have found that you are — to me — essential.”

Her breath caught. It was suddenly very quiet in the room between them, Draco looking down at her, his mouth a flat hard line. She could hear the ticking of the clock on the bedside table, the rustle of branches hitting the window. The uneven sound of his breathing. He was looking down at their joined hands, where his fingers wrapped her wrist. As suddenly as he had taken hold of her, he let go.