Кассандра Клэр - Draco Sinister

Draco looked over at him. "Not really; why?"

"Because if my only other choice is to stand here and watch you two kissing, I think I´d like to go spend some quality time with him. You know, I kinda think he liked me."

'Don´t whine, Potter," said Draco dispiritedly. "What I was trying to do, didn´t work. We´ll have to try something else." He eyed Harry speculatively for a moment.

Harry raised an eyebrow. "You're not going to kiss me, are you?"

Draco grinned slowly. "I might."

"I really think you should," Fleur said. "He's a much more powerful Magid than I am."

"Desperate times," said Draco, and took a step towards Harry. "Shut your eyes, Potter, it'll all be over in a second."

"I am not going to shut my eyes," Harry began indignantly.

"So you like to kiss with your eyes open? Kinky, that," said Draco, cheerfully, and grabbed Harry by the front of the shirt.

Harry rolled his eyes. "Oh, all right then. Get it over with."

But Draco had frozen in place. A familiar tingling had begun to spread through his fingers where they touched Harry's shirt. A well-known familiar, dreaded feeling. He released Harry and stepped back abruptly. "We have to get back."

They both stared at him.

"We have to go back," he said again, more firmly this time.

"Back where?" said Harry. "You think thereś another way out?"

"Back where we started, where else?" Draco snapped.

"Draco, we can´t," said Fleur, looking desperate.

"What do you mean, we can´t? You got into the castle once through here. You can get back."

"No I can´t!" cried Fleur, visibly upset. "Before, I was following that -

" and she pointed at the emerald in his sword hilt. "I put a Tracking Charm on my broomstick and left it outside this door, as well, so I could find my way back to it — but Draco, this is a maze. If we 'ead back into it without knowing where we´re going, we could wander until we die. Did you not see all those skeletons in the corridors?

What did you think 'appened to them?"

"Well, have you got a better idea?" Draco demanded.

"I´ve got one," said Harry.

Draco raised an eyebrow. "You´ve got a plan? Forgive me if I don´t leap up and down with excitement, but your record in this department is not exactly gold standard. So what is it?"

"Letś try to break down the door together — you and me — you know our power is stronger when itś combined, and it doesn´t matter if we do magic now, we´re so close to getting out. Besides, what other choice do we have?"

Draco ruminated. The idea of holding hands with Harry did not exactly appeal to him at the moment, given the fact that he was increasingly positive that the Will-Strengthening Potion was wearing off. Once they got outside, Fleur could swiftly remove Harry from the vicinity via her broomstick, but at the moment, trapped together in a very small corridor with no appreciable way out — on the other hand, Harry was right, what other choice did they have?

Well. There was one other option. But he didn´t want to have to take it.

Draco stuck his hand out towards Harry. "Letś do it."

Fleur watched with raised eyebrows as they locked their hands together. Draco debated asking her to link hands with them as well but dismissed the idea, since they had never tried such an experiment and he was dubious about the side effects. He felt the familiar bolt of cold as Harryś scar touched his own; then they directed their linked hands towards the door and -

"Alohomora!" cried Harry.

A jet of whitish light shot from their hands, struck the door — and bounced off, shooting back towards them like a bullet. Draco threw himself flat as it whipped over his head, nearly singing his hair, and turned to watch in amazement as the bolt of light, making the whistling noise of a teakettle on the boil, erupted down the corridor, ricocheting off the walls as it went and in general making a thundering racket. He sat up slowly and looked at Harry, who was gazing off after the bolt of light, eyes wide and jaw hanging open.

"Great plan, Potter," he said. "Another world-beater. Congrats."

Harry looked at him, and, instead of telling to shut up, suddenly grinned instead. He was covered in dirt from the corridor floor, and his green eyes sparkled in his grime-streaked face. "Ha!" he said cheerfully. "You´re just hacked off that it messed up your hair."

Draco was about to respond when another half-painful jolt of feeling shot up his arm, and he suddenly realized that he was holding his sword again. He didn´t remember picking it up, either.

He dropped it quickly and stood up, ignoring Fleurś proffered hand. He glanced down one more time at Harry, who was trying to brush the dust off his shirt — a losing proposition. Then he glanced back at the sealed door, remembering the splintering of the adamantine box in Lupinś office, shattered by Harryś anger, and he wished that he could make himself feel that kind of rage, or pain, or grief, or anything that strong, but the emotional control drilled into him by a lifetime of his fatherś teachings just could not be dissipated so quickly, no matter how much he wished it could.

Do it, he said to himself. You have to. Thereś no choice.

"Harry," said Draco, and Harry looked up, his green eyes sparking with amusement, his mouth curving up into a smile.

"…Draco?" he replied, mimicking both Dracoś use of his first name and his anxious tone. "What?"

Draco could hear his own blood pounding in his ears. Why is this so hard? he thought to himself, furiously. If there was one thing he was good at, one thing he had been practicing unvaryingly and with great dedication since he was eleven years old, it was getting Harry Potter angry. Maybe he hadn´t gotten much practice at it in the past two months, but all those years of knowing exactly where to hit Harry to hurt him the most — that wasn´t something he could just forget how to do.

Was it?

"What?" said Harry again, still smiling, getting to his feet. "Are you going to tell me you slept with Hermione again, just to get me mad?

You said yourself that won´t work."

"No," said Draco. "I´m not going to tell you that."

Something in Dracoś tone made Harryś smile slip a notch. "What, then?"

"When I died," said Draco, "I saw the Founders."

Harry shrugged. "I know — Hermione told me."

"They weren´t the only ghosts in that place," said Draco, and waited. Surely Harry would know what he meant. He raised his eyes to Harry, saw his expression, that there was no smile on his face and his green eyes were blank; Draco couldn´t read them.

Harry shook away the dark hair that had fallen into his eyes.

"Malfoy? What do you mean?"

"I mean I saw your parents, Potter."

The color went from Harryś face as if it had been slapped away.

"What?"

"You heard me."

Very slowly, Harry took the Gryffindor sword and turned to lean it against the wall. Then he turned back to face Draco. His green eyes were dark with confusion and a dawning mistrust. "Thatś not funny."

"I´m not trying to be funny."

"You´re a liar," said Harry shortly, shaking his head. "You think I don´t know that about you?"

Draco straightened his shoulders. He was vaguely aware of Fleur, somewhere off to his left, staring at them both with wide eyes, but the world had narrowed down to just him and Harry — the way it had been for years; just him and Harry and what there was between them — call it opposition or hatred or whatever you like. The desire to hurt Harry as much as possible might have left him, but the ability to do it had not. Had, in fact, only grown stronger. How he would have killed, just last year, to know the things he knew about Harry now — how he felt, how he loved, what were the most important things in the world to him. Hurting Harry had always been hitting out in the dark, but now it could be as precise and explicit as surgery; and he didn´t want to do it, and yet he had to, because his father had always told him to consider every option and then pick the best one, and this might not be the best option, but as far as he could see, it was the only option.