Кассандра Клэр - Draco Veritas

"Ginny, I have to talk to you."

She looked up from Passionate Trousers, and to her surprise saw Seamus, coming down the boys' staircase. He was wearing a dark cloak, thrown over a pair of red and white striped pajamas. His feet were bare.

She set her book down on the table beside her. "Seamus…what are you doing awake?"

"Hey." He sat down next to her, and in a very uncharacteristic gesture, put a hand on her wrist. She looked at him in surprise. His dark blue eyes held a troubled, anxious look. The firelight behind him turned the edges of his light hair to a fringe of pale gold: a faint halo. "I went to your room, you know…woke up Elizabeth and Ashley. They said you were here, reading."

"And here I am," she said. "What's going on, Seamus? You're scaring me."

He told her.

Somewhere in the middle of the explanation, Passionate Trousers fell off her lap and hit the floor with a bang. Ginny stayed where she was, rooted to the spot, staring at Seamus with awful amazement. "How…" she whispered finally. "How do you know?"

"I bumped into Hermione in the hallway when I left," he said. "She explained…she asked me to explain it to you." He bit his lip. "Ginny…."

She wrenched her wrist out of his grasp. "I can't believe this! I can't believe it! It's — it's — it's so unfair!"

Seamus looked at her in surprise. "Unfair?"

"Everyone falls in love with Hermione! Everyone!" Ginny leapt up out of her chair, picked up the poker she'd been using to stir the fire, and flung it at the grate. It hit the metal with a clang, and bounced off. Seamus winced. "First Harry, then Draco, now my own brother…." She whirled on Seamus, who was slumped down in the armchair, staring at her. "Who's next? You?"

Seamus looked justifiably startled. "I'm not in love with Hermione."

Ginny put her hands on her hips. She realized she was being ridiculous, but didn't seem able to stop. "Why not?"

"Why not?" Seamus looked even more startled. "Because I'm not!"

"That's not an answer!" she snapped, and crossed her arms over her chest.

Seamus looked exasperated. "I don't know, Ginny…she's Harry's girlfriend, isn't she?'

"Well, isn't she pretty?" Ginny demanded.

"Of course she's pretty."

"Isn't she nice?"

"She is, at that," Seamus replied, with a brief flash of a smile.

"And isn't she clever?"

"Of course she's clever…it's a bit intimidating, really."

"Oh, so is that why you like me? Because I'm not that clever?" Ginny raged. "Because I don't intimidate you?"

Seamus looked terrified. "No, not at all — "

"Well, then what? Is there something wrong with her?"

Seamus cast a hunted look towards the stairs. "I think I'll go back to the dorm," he said. "There may be glass flying around, but it's a bit more peaceful up there."

Ginny stamped her foot. "So what's the problem with her then? Not good enough for you?"

"What? Nothing's wrong with her, Ginny — "

"Why aren't you in love with her, then?"

Seamus, finally, lost his temper. "Because!" he shouted. "I'm in love with you!"

Ginny stared at him. He stared back, looking astonished, as if he couldn't believe what he'd just said. Neither could Ginny quite believe it. She'd dreamed of having a boy tell her that. What girl her age had not? But it had never been like this in her mind — the words had never been shouted -

— the eyes gazing into hers had never been blue. Blue was the color of her brothers' eyes: the color of steadiness and dependability and kindness, not of passion or romantic love. She thought suddenly and irrelevantly of Tom. She could no longer remember the color of his eyes, although she knew they had not been blue. They had been green…or was it that they had been gray, was that why she loved gray eyes, that bitter-cold color that said so little and hid so much?

"Oh," she said into the silence. "Seamus, I…."

Her voice trailed off. He was sitting, looking at her very steadily, his hands in his lap. The firelight played shadows over his just-mended, bruiseless pale skin, the strong straight nose, the lightly freckled arc of his cheekbones. He was handsome the way picture-book heroes were handsome — he looked like he ought to be slaying a dragon with one hand, and carting off a fainting maiden with the other. And yet his handsomeness didn't touch her — not the way Harry's melancholy-prince looks had touched her once, or Draco's fallen-angel beauty, or Tom's….

She shook off thoughts of Tom. "Oh," she said again, softly, and then, to her own great surprise, she added, "I have to go find him."

Seamus' eyes widened. "Find who? Harry?"

"No — my brother."

"Ginny — "

"I can't now, Seamus," she interrupted. "I need to find Ron."

Seamus nodded without looking at her. "I saw him come up the back stairs and go into his room."

"How did he seem? Was he all right?"

"All right? — no," he said, and then at her expression, amended himself.

"He looked pretty devastated. But physically, yes, he looked fine."

She sighed — in relief, in fear, in despair, she didn't know. She went to Seamus then, and kissed his cheek, and he let her. But he did not look at her. "Thank you," she said.

He didn't reply, and Ginny did not stay to ask him why. She made a beeline for the boys' staircase, all her thoughts now focused on her brother.

Draco ran down the front steps of the castle and out onto the snowy path without looking where he was going. He shivered, but did not stop walking — it was an icy night, and he had not brought his cloak. Throwing his head back, he stared up at the sky — it arced above in black and silver, the moonlight a steel-colored shriek raining shards of light down onto the snow. For the first time in days, there were clouds: heavy as blocks, they seemed about to collide with each other. He wondered if that meant it was going to snow again soon.

He had reached the bottom of the path, where the Quidditch pitch was, and veered off sharply towards the right, alongside the Forbidden Forest.

Some part of him knew he was following a route that Rhysenn had set for him, that he had often followed to meet her. He did not think about why he was going this way: he wanted to be alone, he wanted to be far from the castle, and he wanted…what did he want?

He was at the low wall now, that ran perpendicular to the forest's border.

He leaped over it and landed on the other side, silent as a cat in the deep snow. This was where he had met her all those weeks ago, that night he had bumped into Harry and they'd gone to get drunk in Hogsmeade. His boots sank up to the ankles in the snow as he took a few steps forward into the clearing, and paused. He stood there for a moment, gasping in lungfuls of icy air, trying to still the pounding of his heart. There was no way for him to know it, but the same thoughts that had run through Harry's mind earlier, in the dark, ran through Draco's now. Inside him, too, was the same lion on a chain, and its roaring was loud in his ears.

Iron control had been drilled into him since he was a child — hours spent locked in dark places, waiting for his father, hours spent in enforced silence without speaking. Over his emotions he had laid his own will, like heavy bars of steel, keeping everything contained. And yet….he visualized for a moment the steel bars snapping, the rage and grief inside him breaking free, how he could tear down the trees with the force of his anger, crack the world in half.

But of course he could do none of those things, not in reality. Instead, like a petulant child, he flung himself face-down in the snow, and buried his head in his arms.

The cold bit into him instantly; the snow freezing under his body, his bare hands. He ignored it, hearing his own voice in his ears. Stay here and rot, for all I care. Ruin everyone's life. Ruin your own!