Кассандра Клэр - Draco Veritas

Ginny glared at him.

"I'm not minimizing anything he's done," said Draco, his voice slightly distant. "There isn't anyone braver, or more determined — in a reckless sort of Gryffindor way. But that doesn't necessarily translate to the kind of self-control I'm talking about. He doesn't hide what he feels. He never has been able to. You wouldn't know — you've never tried to manipulate that easy emotional access. I have. I've spent years trying to hurt him. Let me tell you, with Harry you always know when you've scored a hit and really injured him. His whole face breaks apart. Everything about him crumples up like he's been kicked everywhere at once. It's — "

"Heartbreaking," Ginny interrupted.

Draco looked at her with narrow eyes.

"No, I'm not still in love with Harry," she said, answering the unasked question. "And I'm not sure I ever really was — but I used to spend a lot of time watching him. I know exactly what you mean."

Draco kicked at a piece of gravel with the toe of his boot. "Maybe you do," he said. "Anyway, that's what I meant. Harry can't hide things like that.

He's as transparent as glass. Come on, when did you figure out he was in love with Hermione?"

Ginny felt herself flush. "My fourth year," she said quietly. "Maybe my fifth — I wasn't here that year, but I saw them all over Christmas at the Burrow. I remember Hermione was teaching Harry how to put together a wizarding Christmas tree, and I saw him watching her while she was spinning a web of lights over the branches. I saw the expression on his face and I just — knew." Her throat closed up with the remembered pain of it. Not just her pain — she had also felt for her brother. Later they had talked about it, and he had said he had always known, but she often wondered if that was true. He had shocked her with how well he had taken it, when it happened. Maybe a little too well. "What about — what about you?"

"Oh, last year," said Draco, with an offhanded shrug. "It would have been earlier, but I was a bit blindsided by that whole her-dating-Weasley thing -

oh, sorry. Your brother." He grinned, a white flash in the darkness. "Harry was looking at her in Potions class when he thought she wouldn't notice.

Staring at her as if she was water in the desert. So obvious, really. I recall catching the look and thinking, "Aha. He's besotted with her and he's too stupid to know it. Wonder how I can use that?"

Ginny shook her head. "That's really grotesque, you know. And how did you?"

"How did I what?"

"Use that."

"I didn't. The Polyjuice thing happened before I got a chance."

"Poetic justice," said Ginny, firmly.

"What?"

"You heard me. You were going to use the fact that Harry loved Hermione against him. And then…" Her voice trailed off before she wandered into the dangerous territory they had agreed not to discuss. "What an awful thing to do that would have been."

"I agree," said Draco, his voice clear and hard as glass. "And there's something else bothersome about it."

"What?"

"Well, I can't have been the only person who's had that idea."

"That idea?"

"Of using her to break him. Come on, Ginny. Everyone has one weakness.

He's protected elsewhere. Not where she's concerned."

"Well, if letting yourself love someone is a weakness — " she began sharply.

"Of course it is," said Draco, as if she'd said something very stupid.

"I think you're talking like your father," said Ginny softly.

"I think I'm talking too much," Draco replied, and sat up straight. "Never mind."

"You're underestimating Harry," Ginny said. "He'd never let harm come to anyone he cared about. If that's a weakness, then he has a dozen. My brother. Sirius. Hagrid. You." She reached out, and put her hand on his shoulder. The soft silvery-fair hair that fell past his ears just brushed the tops of her knuckles. "He isn't protected where you're concerned, either."

"Oh, no," said Draco in a remote sort of voice, "I think he'd sacrifice me along with all the rest."

"Draco-"

"He's a hero, isn't he? That's what they do. Sacrifice for the greater good."

"He needs you," Ginny said.

Draco looked at her. His eyes were clear and silver, untouched by any shade of blue or green or gray. "Harry doesn't need one single one of us an eighth as much as we all need him," Draco said. "It's what he is as much as who he is. He's the hero, we're his companions. We're satellites.

We revolve around what he does."

"You don't think he needs us? You said he needs Hermione…didn't you?"

"He's in love with her," said Draco. "And more than that. You know he was almost sorted into Slytherin, don't you? That, and other things — he always feels like he's a fraud somehow. It's in the back of his mind, every day. It's why he wants to win, prove himself, all the time, why he never backs down, why he always has to be not just good enough but damn near perfect. He's afraid of what he might be capable of if he didn't hold himself back. But Hermione — he told me once that she sees him not as he is, but as he wishes he was. That she sees a better world than we live in, a better Harry than the Harry that really exists. I think he sees her as the custodian of his better self. She protects him not just from the world but from himself — am I making any sense?"

Ginny realized she was staring at him. "Scarily," she said, "yes."

"But that's a double-edged sword," said Draco, his eyes on her face now, finding her own eyes, their gazes locking. "Because the more he feels that perhaps he isn't the person she thinks he is, and the more afraid he is that he can never be that person, the more afraid he is that one day she'll realize what he really is, and leave him. And take with her not just herself, which would nearly kill him, but her vision of that better Harry that he has always wanted to be. And that's something that might do what even Voldemort couldn't."

"Which is?"

"Destroy him." He reached out and touched the curl of hair that had been falling in front of her eyes, tucking it back behind her ear in an absentminded manner. "He thinks he has to be perfect, and that if he isn't perfect he's nothing. He doesn't understand that we all have to fight our worse impulses to be what we want, that we have to give things up, that we disappoint the people we love, that as much as you love someone sometimes it just isn't going to happen and you have to understand that you aren't nothing without them, and — "

"Are we still talking about Harry?" Ginny said, her voice very soft.

For a moment, Draco was very still, looking at her. The feel of his glance on her face was like a caress, if not a gentle one. Then his eyes went flat, as if shutters had been dropped down over them, and he sat back and away from her. "I'm sorry," he said. "I've been rambling. I think it was the blood loss. Or something."

"No," she said, and reached for his hand, then thought better of it and let her own hand fall to her lap. "You weren't rambling — you were making sense and I'm glad, because I've been so worried about Hermione and Harry and — "

"You shouldn't worry," Draco replied, still distantly. "It's your Yule Ball night. You should enjoy it."

She wanted to tell him that she had been enjoying it, that these few moments with him out in the rose-scented, bitter cold night were the best moments she had had in months; that she loved the way he talked to her, as nobody else did, as if there was no question that she could be too fragile to handle the truth; the way he spoke his mind to her and didn't cajole or flatter or patronize. He never had, even when he was being nasty. "Do you want me to go back?" she asked.

"No, but you should," he said, without glancing away. "Go back and be beautiful for Seamus. It's wasted on me."