Кассандра Клэр - Draco Sinister

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When consciousness returned, Draco found that he was lying on his back with his head pillowed on someoneś lap. Slowly, he opened his eyes and looked up. Backlit by the moon, a figure was bending over him. He saw long waving hair and a pale oval face, dark eyes and a worried mouth. Hermione. She smiled when she saw he was awake.

"Welcome back," she said.

He started to struggle into a sitting position. "Harry — Ginny — "

"Shh. Everyoneś all right." She touched his face lightly, and then turned her head. "Harry!" she shouted. "Ginny!"

"Don´t yell," said Draco firmly. "My head is splitting."

She grinned at him. "Poor baby. Here." She scooted back, and helped him into a sitting position. It was true that his head was pounding, but it didn´t matter. He felt light, as if a huge weight had been lifted off him, as if he´d spent weeks in a dark shuttered box, and now the lid had been pulled off and at last he could look up and see the stars. For the first time in many days, he was no longer cold.

He propped himself on his hands and glanced around. He was sitting on grass, and grass stretched all around him, a wide green untenanted meadow in between a circle of trees. Of the castle which had stood there, with its walls and battlements and towers, there was no longer any sign. The sky overhead was streaked with explosive color: blue, green, scarlet and gold, bright as the Aurora Borealis, and through the washes of brilliant color the stars glittered like towering crystal cities Far off to the right he could see a glimmer of bright scales, a towering form: Feroluce the dragon, and just below Feroluce, two small figures: one in dark red robes, the other with dark red hair. Ben and Ginny.

"Hey! Malfoy!" There was a thud as Harry dropped to his knees next to Draco. He was, if possible, even filthier, covered in soot and bloodstains, but he was grinning all over his face. He gripped Dracoś shoulder hard for a second, and Draco looked back and gave him a half-surprised smile. "You missed the coolest part,"

Harry announced.

"Damn," said Draco mildly. "Because I was so enjoying the fun we were having right up until I passed out."

"It was not cool," said Hermione, looking slightly ill. "Slytherin caught on fire, and he…sort of burned without actually burning up.

And the demons dragged him into the pentagram while he was screaming and then they all just vanished into the floor with this huge sucking sound, and everything in the room started sliding down into the hole, and you fainted and nearly fell into the hole too, but Harry caught you. And Sirius and Ben came charging in because the doors broke apart. Sirius carried you out. The whole castle came apart, piece by piece and all the Dark creatures fled into the woods, the dementors too. I´ve never seen anything like it.

Lupin said it was a retrodimensional timeshift collapse — heś over there with Fleur. Sheś fine, by the way."

"Sounds like I missed some good times," said Draco.

"Then I´m telling it wrong," said Hermione positively. "It was quite horrible. And Harry thought you were dead and made a spectacle of himself."

"I did not," protested Harry, but he didn´t look particularly bothered. He craned his neck around. "Whereś Sirius?"

Hermione got to her feet. "I´ll get him. He was talking to Ben about what to do about the army." She smiled down at Draco. "Ron told him you killed a Dementor, so he wants to hear all about it."

Draco nodded, just about too exhausted to speak. It wasn´t a bad exhaustion, however. Even though it was a cool night, and he was sitting on wet grass, and his body felt like a giant bruise, he nevertheless felt his eyelids drooping, as if he were sinking back into the blissful comfort of the first real sleep he could remember having had in weeks.

Malfoy. Harryś voice spoke in Dracoś head. Draco was grateful that he didn´t have to open his eyes or move to respond. I thought it was time to give you this back.

Now Draco did open his eyes, and saw Harry holding something out to him that glittered bright as sunlight in his hand. The Epicyclical Charm.

He shook his head faintly. I don´t want it.

Harry looked surprised. But itś your life.

I know. Draco leaned his head back against the tree trunk. I don´t want the responsibility for my life. Not right now. Hold onto it for a little while.

All right. Harry looped it back around his throat, looking somber.

Not unhappy, though. Thanks, then.

Draco shut his eyes again. The exhaustion was folding in around him like a blanket. He vaguely heard other people arriving, sitting down around him in a circle in the grass — heard Sirius´ voice, heard Harry greet Ron (awake again) happily, heard Lupin speak to Fleur in French, heard Hermioneś laugh, and then Ginnyś soft voice in response. There was a soft touch on his arm; he heard Lupin ask how he was doing, and Harry said that he was fine, just tired, and they should let him sleep; he heard Sirius say that the Ministry was on their way; he heard Ginny announce, some sadness in her voice, that Ben had gone, and his army had gone back with him. The voices became fainter and fainter, like music heard from another room, and then one last voice bent close and whispered in his ear.

"Draco." It was Ginny. Her voice was barely a murmur. "Thereś one thing you should see before you fall asleep." She leaned over, and he felt her hand on his left arm, pulling up his sleeve with great gentleness. He half-opened his eyes and looked down, and it was a moment before he realized that what he was looking at was not an object she wanted him to see so much as the lack of an object — on the fair inner skin of his forearm, which had born the skull-and-serpent sign of the Snake Lord, there was no longer any mark.

References: The Pattern that gives Daco flashes of memory and represents his life is inspired by the Pattern in the Chronicles of Amber series by Roger Zelazny. Oggrings and skolks are from Tanith Lee's White Horse, Black Castle.

Aztec Camera, "Mattress of Wire"

On the evening before Harry Potterś seventeenth birthday, not two weeks after his last glimpse of Salazar Slytherin, Draco left the Manor, where Harry, Hermione, Sirius and Narcissa were playing Exploding Snap by the fireplace, and went and sat on the hill overlooking the house where they had buried what remained of his father. The night was beyond clear, as if someone has stretched a sheet of glass across the sky, through which the starlight shimmered with a diamond brilliance. It had rained that day and all around him the grass was wet, each blade glittering like a nail driven into the ground. Above him rose the mausoleum erected to the memory of his father. It was hewn black onyx and its unreflective surface seemed to draw in the darkness of the night.

He wasn´t sure what he had hoped to accomplish by sitting here all night; whether he was saying goodbye, or had hoped to have some communication with his fatherś ghost, and what he would say to that ghost if it appeared. Nobody had tried to stop him from going; they were all being so careful around him these days, as if he were something terribly fragile that might break. Not that all of them who were at the Manor now — himself and Harry, Hermione and Ginny and Ron, Sirius and Lupin and his own mother — hadn´t been through the same nightmare, but he had been its focal point. The darkness had touched them all, but only Draco had nearly been swallowed up by it, had been inside it, had been the darkness. The Dark Mark was gone from his arm, but the memory of everything that had happened still burned against the back of his eyes. There was still so much to be sorted through, to be understood, to be forgiven and to try to forget. He found himself restless, wandering the dark halls of the Manor at night, startling his own reflection in mirrors, looking for answers and finding none.