The sheer loathing in Draco's tone had astounded Harry. He'd realized then the essential inequality in their relationship — an inequality to which Draco seemed preternaturally sensitive. Harry didn't hate Draco as much as Draco hated him. He just didn't. The real depth and richness of Harry's hatred was reserved for Voldemort. All that was left for Draco was the rags and bones of what was really no more than an intense dislike. Harry couldn't imagine spending that kind of hatred on Malfoy. After all he'd never killed anyone Harry loved. It would be like hating a piece of grit in his shoe, a blister on his heel, an annoying snatch of song stuck in his head. And Malfoy knew it.
Hate you? I could never hate you, Draco had said, and he'd meant it. Oh, he'd meant it; he couldn't imagine hating Harry now any more than he'd once been able to imagine not hating him. Whatever he did — hating or loving — he did it with his whole soul, and Harry's inability to do the same had hurt him in ways Harry couldn't imagine or explain and was only just beginning to understand. He felt suddenly with a bursting feeling behind his ribcage how unfair it all was — he wanted to go find Draco and shake him and explain to him that just because they'd once been unequal in hatred didn't mean that they were doomed to be unequal in all their relations with each other, forever. Fate and history were what Malfoys believed in: destiny and the weight of thousands of years of nothing ever changing. Harry believed in none of that. He'd spat in the face of the expected order of things when he was barely a year old. He wanted to tell Draco that there was more than one way for things to be -
But he couldn't. Not after what he'd done; he'd lost that chance, cut himself off, walked away and started over. He'd left all that behind by choice, everything and everyone, and he done it by refusing to think about it. He'd told himself he wouldn't think about Draco or Hermione, Ron or Sirius, anyone he'd loved or been loved by and who he had left.
And he'd staggered around half-blind with guilt and despair because of it, he'd been ineffectual and stupid because of it, but he'd started on this path, and now there was no going back. Not even now, when things that had not made sense to him were finally beginning to make sense. He felt as if he had been sitting in a dark locked room, listening to incomprehensible noises filtering through a crack in the door, and now finally the door had been flung wide open and he could hear that the noises were music, and that he knew the melody — had always known it, but had not been able to hear it properly until now.
And yet there was nothing he could do about it. There are few feelings in the world worse than completely inopportune realization, and Harry felt it as a twisting knot in his guts as he leaned back against the wall next to the fireplace, and for just one moment abandoned himself to a scathing bitterness — What have I done? Oh, what have I done?
He couldn't stand it any longer. He got to his feet, went over to the desk, and fumbled for parchment and a quill.
'I think we need false names,' said Hermione, banging the edges of her small metal cauldron with the long- handled brass spoon she was using to stir the antidote as it settled. 'Or at least, you do.'
Draco glanced at her, looking faintly surprised. He sat on the counter next to the impromptu workstation she had set up in the kitchen of the hotel room. Hermione had insisted on having a kitchen so that she could mix the antidote properly; Draco had insisted on having the biggest and most expensive room in the hotel, so it had all worked out rather well, aside from the fact that Hermione, daughter of middle-class dentists, was, despite her knowledge that Draco could well afford the extravagance, secretly rather appalled at the gaudy splendor of their hotel suite.
A pair of gigantic fireplaces buttressed a vast marble-floored drawing room. Two bedrooms opened off it, one papered in all white and one in dark green and gold. Hermione had fled from the sight of the enormous bathtub with its silver mermaid spigots and floating, enchanted heart-shaped pillows. Curtains of white velvet draped the floor-to-ceiling windows: they had a thick, waxy feel to them when she touched them, like lily petals. There was a full kitchen with a selection of enchanted copper pots and self-washing plates.
'False names?' Draco said. 'Why?'
'You're too famous,' said Hermione. 'And your name is pretty unusual, you know. Anyone seeing me calling 'Draco' to a tall blond boy is going to turn around and wonder.'
Draco half-smiled. 'I'm not the famous one.'
When they had checked into the hotel, Hermione had worried that they would be recognized, that the desk clerks would want their names. Draco had lounged against the registration desk, one foot up on the brass railing bar, and like a Muggle street magician had trickled a seemingly unending stream of gold Galleons out of his sleeve and onto the blank registration forms that requested his name. Like magic, the forms had disappeared back into the desk clerk's drawers, unsigned and unmarked. 'Money buys silence,' Draco had said to Hermione as the levitating staircase bore them up to their room. 'He won't say anything.'
'It's not just Harry who's famous anymore,' Hermione said now.
Draco cut his eyes away from her. He always did that when she talked about Harry. Hermione said nothing; just stirred the antidote and looked at him. His black pullover jumper was slightly too big for him. He had dragged the sleeves down over his hands so only the tips of his fingers were visible. Wisps of curling white-blond hair poked out from beneath the drawn-up hood. He bit his lip.
'Fine,' he said. 'Pick a name for me.'
'Something that sounds like your name, so you'll respond to it,'
Hermione said thoughtfully. 'Drake?'
Draco's head came up and gray eyes flashed at her from beneath the hood. 'Call me that and I'll kill you,' he said.
Hermione grinned at him. 'No?'
'I don't like nicknames,' he said succinctly. 'You might as well go around calling me 'muffin' or 'boo- bear'.''
'Now there's an idea.'
'If rule 413 of the Malfoy Family Code of Conduct didn't proscribe me from violence against females, Granger, you'd be wearing that pot you're stirring on your head.'
'Hmph,' said Hermione. 'Hold my spoon while I drain.'
She handed him the long-handled spoon and he held it, looking mutinous, while she drained half the mixture she'd made into a smaller mixing bowl and emptied a small packet of vert powder into it. She grabbed the spoon back and began stirring furiously. This part of the procedure had to be done quickly or the antidote would be ruined.
'I think we should come up with a name for you,' said Draco, leaning back on his hands. 'Something classy. Trixie LaBouche? Boobs McChesty?'
'I'm not the one who needs a fake name and if I did, I wouldn't want to go around sounding like a porn star,' protested Hermione, half out of breath from stirring.
'I always rather fancied that if I grew up to be a porn star, I would rename myself Baron Hotcock von Hugenstein,' said Draco in a mock-wistful tone.
Hermione choked. 'You wanted to be a porn star?'
'Doesn't everyone?' said Draco.
Hermione tried to imagine Harry wanting to be a porn star, and failed utterly. She bit back a giggle as she put her spoon down — the antidote was done. 'Well, it's not very accurate,' she said, pouring some of the mixture into a glass.
Draco looked affronted. 'How would you know?'
'I just meant,' she said, putting the glass into his hand, 'that you're not a Baron.'
He looked at her suspiciously.
'Drink your antidote,' she said.
He half-closed his eyes and drank it. It took three swallows, and then he choked and dropped the glass and shut his eyes tightly, his hand pressed to his head. Shudders racked his body. Alarmed, Hermione grabbed at his hands, pulling them down — for a moment, his fingers wrapped her wrists and gripped them with bone-crushing force — then he released her and sat back, gasping and white-faced. Bright spots of dark red fever burned on his cheekbones.
'Are you all right?' Hermione asked.
'Oh, yes, terrific.' Draco's tone was acidic.
