Кассандра Клэр - Draco Veritas

They were farther south than Hogwarts, and here it had snowed much less. It dusted the tops of the headstones with a layer of fine powder, and sugared the bare black paths between the graves. Draco had not been in a graveyard before; the Malfoys were all buried on the grounds of the Manor, with cenotaphs erected over their bones. Something in the back of his mind, his old self, revolted at the thought of being buried like this, among strangers not of your own blood.

He glanced sideways at Harry. "You know where you're going?"

Harry nodded. It was still too dark for Draco to see his face properly, although the eastern sky was beginning to brighten with a few gray streaks of light. Dawn was coming. Harry raised a jacketed arm and pointed: "Over there."

They went, their boots crunching on frozen dirt, and then, as Harry left the path and cut across towards the cemetery's far side, on frozen blades of grass. The only sign that this was a wizarding cemetery was the flowers that bloomed, unfaded and unfrozen, on each of the graves as they passed. Draco barely registered the names on the headstones as they walked by; he was looking at Harry, who seemed stretched taut with a sort of nervous anticipation. His gloved hands were balled into fists in the pockets of his jacket, his shoulders tense and set.

He stopped walking. "All right," he said, in a quiet voice. "We're here."

And Draco, his heart jumping with adrenaline for some reason he couldn't define, stopped with him, and looked.

There were tall mausoleums in the graveyard, carved all over with angels; there were cenotaphs covered in Latin writing and crowned with statues of Merlin and other famous wizards: But they stood in front of a plain gray doubled headstone adorned only with names. Lily Potter, said the name on the right; the one on the left: James Potter. Under the names was a carved a Latin motto, Amor Vincit Omnia, and under that the date of death. October 30, 1981.

He chanced a look at Harry, who had gone very quiet. In the blue-white dawn light, his face was finely etched with shadows, his mouth an uncompromising straight line. He was very pale, as if a light shone somewhere in him, beneath the skin. His eyes had changed again. There was a far-off look in them, as if he gazed into some other landscape, another world dimly seen beyond this one, a look like blindness.

"Harry," Draco said slowly. He wanted to say something profound and interesting, something comforting, something about the nature of life and death and the importance of closure. However, no words came to his mind. He hesitantly took his hands out of his pockets, vaguely thinking that he should touch Harry on the shoulder, make sure he was all right.

"Malfoy?" Harry said into the silence. His voice was very quiet, his eyes now fixed on the headstones.

Draco stood up a little straighter. "Yeah?"

"If you don't mind," Harry said, his face still averted, "I'd like it if you left me alone here for a little bit."

"Oh," Draco said. "Oh. Right." He put his hands back in his pockets, feeling suddenly very awkward. "Sure. I'll just…come back later."

The other boy didn't reply. Draco turned then, and left Harry standing there by his parents' graves, in the pale light of the chilly dawn.

Harry waited until the sound of Draco's footsteps crunching ice had faded into silence before he got down on his knees by the side of the grave. He looked at the headstones for a moment from his position there on the ground. His father's name and his mother's beside it looked as if they had been scarred into the stone. He read the Latin words under their names.

Love conquers all. He wondered who had picked it out. Someone who must have thought it was true, which, of course, it wasn't.

He could feel his own heart beating, hard, against his ribs, and a dryness in his mouth. But other than that he felt nothing. Nothing at all. He had wondered if he might cry, but he did not feel like crying. All his thoughts were focused on the task at hand. He suspected that he had not that much time before Draco came back. He pulled his gloves off, laid them carefully on the ground, and began to scrape away the layer of snow that covered the graves.

He had not realized that the ground beneath the snow would be frozen so hard. But it was. He scrabbled at it with his fingers, but was like trying to dig into iron. He wished he had brought something with him he could scrape at the earth with, or knew a spell that might work, but then again he suspected that it would not be wise to use magic here. Eventually he unfastened the belt from about his waist, removed the scarlet charm that hung there, and used the diamond-hard edge to scrape at the grave soil.

When he had enough dirt to fill his cupped palm, he dropped the runic band, took a small vial out of the inner pocket of his jacket, and filled it with the half-frozen soil. Then he capped it tightly, and put it back in his pocket.

He stood up, suddenly dizzy. He wasn't sure if it was because he'd been holding his breath, or just a reaction to where he was. The carved names on the gravestones seemed to be leaping out at him, printed blackly against his inner eye. He heard Draco's voice in his head, speaking to him in the corridors under Slytherin's castle. There's nothing you can do and there's no way to avenge them and they'll be there forever and you'll never see them again, not even if you die.

He realized he didn't want to be looking at the graves, didn't even want to be near them, and he began to back away, moving quickly, until he rounded the corner of another mausoleum and was out of sight of them.

He found that he was standing in a grassy square between four towering stone cenotaphs. He leaned against the side of one, letting his heartbeat slow. The sun had continued its swift and steady eastward rise and the snowy grass all around, the pale stone of the mausoleums, were tinged with a deceptively beautiful rosy light. Headstones stretched away in the distance, an unmoving and unbroken line, until he realized that in fact there was movement there — someone was coming towards him along the path between the graves. Someone not Draco. A girl.

Rhysenn.

Harry straightened up and stared. He remembered having seen Rhysenn descending the stairs at the Manor with Charlie on her arm, and thinking at the time that she was very beautiful, if much older, one of those women so elegantly dressed that she seemed more like a doll than a person. Now, however, she looked…very different. She wore a short, pleated gray skirt and knee socks, black patent leather sandals, and a soft blue sweater set.

She must, he thought, be freezing cold, although she gave no sign of it.

Her glossy black hair was wound into long plaits that fell nearly to her narrow waist, tied at the ends with incongruous bright blue bows. Her face was scrubbed clean of makeup, her eyes very bright. She looked fifteen -

at least, her face looked like a fifteen-year-old girl's even if it did seem to be attached to the body of a twenty-five year old woman. "I suppose you wouldn't believe me if I said I was just in the neighborhood?" she said, still walking towards him. "Would you?"

"No," he said, and took another step back. This brought him up against the side of the mausoleum, and he was forced to stop retreating. "If you want Draco, he isn't here. He took a walk."

"How fortunate that I wasn't looking for him, then," she said. "How fortunate that I was looking for you."

"Me?" said Harry. She was very close to him now, and was coming still closer. "Why me?"

She was only about a foot away from him now, so close that her face seemed to fill the field of his vision: her bright red lips and depthless tunnel-like gray eyes drew his gaze. He wanted to look away, and didn't want to look away. "I just wanted to talk to you," she said, her scarlet mouth curving up. "That's all."