Кассандра Клэр - Draco Veritas

Hermione blinked in surprise at his stern tone, then shrugged. "All right. I wanted to talk to you anyway."

"Did you?" His green eyes were serious. "All right, but let me talk first, will you?"

She nodded, a feeling of foreboding tightening her stomach. "All right, Harry." She sat down carefully at the base of the nearest oak tree, wrapping her cloak around her knees. "What is it?"

Harry hunched his shoulders inside his cloak, and was silent for a long time. Hermione sat where she was, letting him think. It always paid to be quiet and let Harry talk when he wanted to. "I've been thinking," he said finally, in a very quiet voice. "And wanting to talk to you, but I wasn't sure when would be a good time."

Hermione looked more closely at him, a bit startled. His face was set, unexpressive. She had seen that same look on his face before. She remembered Slytherin's castle, Harry chained to the wall, refusing to tell her what Draco had said to him that was terrible enough to shatter an adamantine door. I'll just tell you that it was something really, really terrible. Something I won't forget. Ever. Something… unforgivable.

"I know I've been…distant lately," he said finally, in a low voice, shoving his balled fists into his pockets. She wondered suddenly if he had brought her out there to break up with her, and the thought made her stomach lurch crazily in protest. I knew it, she thought, I knew it. "Harry…" she whispered.

He went on as if she hadn't spoken. "I wish I wasn't, but…I don't know how else to be right now. When I was…" He hesitated a moment, seeming to gather himself together, then went on with the air of someone falling into a bottomless black pit. "When I lived with the Dursleys, when I was a kid, I used to imagine what my parents might have been like, if they'd lived."

Hermione's lips parted in surprise. Harry never talked about his childhood before he had come to school. Never. "Well, of course, anyone would — "

"No," he said, cutting her off, although not unkindly. "I really imagined it.

I didn't know what my parents had looked like. The Dursleys told me they'd been ugly, low-class, but I never believed that. I assumed my mother had been beautiful, that my father had been handsome, and that, of course, they'd loved me more than anything in the world."

Hermione felt the back of her eyes sting. "I'm sure they did," she said softly.

"I didn't know what color hair my mother had. I thought maybe she'd had black hair, and I'd inherited it…I thought maybe my father was blond, I pictured him being tall and strong. I thought about that car accident they were supposed to have died in. I wondered where they'd been driving from, where they'd been going. I told myself that they'd been spies, working for the government, that they hadn't really died, they'd just been forced to go underground and leave me behind because the work they'd been doing was so dangerous. I told myself they'd be back to get me one day. I knew where we'd live together, what the house would look like -

blue, with every room painted a different color, because everything at the Dursleys was the same shade of gray…" His voice cracked a little, as it had when it had been changing. "I furnished every room inside my head. I knew where all my toys would be. The names of the pets I'd have. I wrote everything down so I wouldn't forget. I didn't live in that dark closet under the stairs. I lived in that house, with my parents."

Hermione realized she was crying. She ducked her head so Harry wouldn't see. She wanted him to go on.

"I used to write everything down in an old notebook of Dudley's," said Harry quietly, looking out over the lake. "And one day of course, I was careless, and my uncle found it and read it. He dragged me out of the broom closet and shoved me up against the wall and I still remember what he said to me. 'Your parents are dead, boy. They're not spies, they're not working for the government. They're dead. They'll never come to take you anywhere. They died stupid, pointless deaths, and they lived stupid, pointless lives, and I'd be glad they were dead if it hadn't landed us with you. And all your dreaming won't bring them back.' And that was that."

He paused. "That was when I was eight years old."

"Your notebook…" Hermione whispered.

"I burned it," said Harry flatly. "I knew my uncle was right. I couldn't bring them back."

"You believed him? That they were dead?"

"I knew it. I could see it in his eyes. He looked triumphant. He wouldn't have looked like that if he'd been lying." Harry's voice was thick with loathing. "He really was glad they were dead. I despised him. But I never thought about that house again. It was ruined. And it was hard. Like losing my parents again." His words came out clipped and staccato. "And then I came here, and I had another home — a real one. And I saw what my parents really looked like. And I knew that they had loved me. Would have been proud of me. Were proud of me. A world where ghosts walk and talk…I just assumed they were somewhere, watching me. That my father could see me fly. That my mother knew I'd faced a dragon. That they knew that everything I did, every day, was in some way an effort to redeem the sacrifice they'd made to keep me alive."

"Oh, Harry," Hermione whispered. "Oh, darling, I'm so sorry. I'm so sorry." The snow crackled under her feet as she stood, almost slipping in her haste to get near him. He stood and watched her, very alone somehow as if he had created a space around himself, specific and inviolable. She paused just outside it, hesitant to touch him, although another part of her ached to put her arms around him and hold him tightly. "You don't have to do this," she said. "I know you're trying to tell me why you've been distant lately — I know you've been thinking about your parents — and how could you not? I've been so selfish, thinking about graduation and moving on and how all that affected me, and I never even thought about what it must be like for you, knowing they won't see you graduate, get recruited for a team, go to Sirius' wedding…oh Harry, this is the most important part of your life in a way, and if you're missing them more now…" She let her voice trail off. "Is that what you were trying to say?"

He looked at her, his green eyes were haunted by a darkness she could not name. "Something like that," he said, and she had a feeling, from the tone of his voice, that she had gotten entirely the wrong end of the stick, and didn't understand what he was trying to say at all. She felt bitterly inadequate, incompetent even — and somewhere in the back of her mind a voice told her that she could not be expected to heal that darkness in him: she was too young, and the pull of the darkness too great. Surely if she loved him properly, loved him enough, she would be able to help and to understand, she told herself. But already she loved him more than she could imagine loving anything, and it was not enough.

"Hermione," he said, and his voice was oddly distant. "What are you thinking?"

She took a deep breath. "Just that…all those years with the Dursleys…it wouldn't be at all surprising if you'd turned out mean-spirited, or selfish, or self-centered. Or terribly angry, or vengeful — and you aren't. You have every right to be angry and you so rarely are; and every right to have self-pity, but you don't pity yourself. That childhood — it could have turned you into an awful person. Instead it turned you into the best person I've ever known. No — you turned yourself into that person. I meant what I said first year. You are a great wizard, and — and more important, you're a good human being as well. I admire you, Harry. I always have."

He ducked his head, and she did not see the expression that passed across his face. "No," he said, in a slightly husky voice. "I'm not as good as you."