'How dare you,' she hissed. 'How dare you sit there and act as if this is all about laundry?'
'I didn't say it was about laundry — ' Draco began in what he thought was a reasonable tone, but barely had he gotten the words out of his mouth when Hermione seized a crystal candlestick off the coffee table and slung it at his head. He ducked, again, and it shattered against the floor.
'Hey!' Draco protested. 'You could have hit me!'
'Good!' Hermione shrieked. She was on her knees now, cheeks scarlet with rage and suddenly, with an almost painful clarity, Draco remembered the skinny, wild-haired girl who had slapped him full across the face when he was thirteen years old. It had been the first really stunning thing that had ever happened to him. 'I wish I had hit you! Do you even have any idea what you did, you stupid, stupid bastard? You're not supposed to use your magic! I told you that! Snape told you that!
Don't you listen to anyone? Did you think he was telling you that because he was trying to be funny? You're not supposed to use your magic because you're dying, and it takes every bit of your own strength and every bit of the strength in that antidote just to keep you alive! And then you go and have a stupid temper tantrum like this one, and I can't even imagine what it's cost you — a week off your life? Two weeks? And for what? For nothing.
It's not like you got what you wanted. They couldn't have helped you if you'd burned the whole place down.'
'I was angry,' Draco said. 'I'm tired of living every second like I'm under a death sentence — '
'You are under a death sentence,' Hermione said savagely. Casting about for something else to throw, she seized a heavy ceramic mug and hurled it at the far wall. It hit with a crash. Draco winced, but Hermione seemed to feel better. 'You're not tired of living like you're under a death sentence, you're just bloody tired of living. I have to make you take your antidote.
You go walking into a place like that brothel without even bringing a Portkey to get you back out. And then that little display of suicidal temper. If it wasn't for me you'd be dead three times over today and you act like you don't even care. You don't care about anything now, and it isn't fair. He left me too, you know.'
She broke off, but Draco remained silent. He lay where he was and looked at her, as the angry color slowly faded out of her face. She bit her lip.
'Say something,' she whispered.
'Every time I say anything, you throw something at me,' Draco pointed out.
'I won't this time. Just say something.'
Draco sighed. He felt very tired. 'This isn't about Harry,' he said. 'But if you want to make it about Harry, then fine. He left you, too. But he didn't write you a letter and tell you how worthless you were and how it made him sick to look at you, did he?'
'He didn't say that to you, either,' Hermione said.
'Not literally, perhaps, but that was the general gist. Harry's too kind a soul to say anything like that outright. Apparently he couldn't stand living in my head anymore because it's such a revolting place. I can't blame him. I don't like it there myself.'
'What Harry thinks hasn't got anything to do with it,' Hermione said. 'I love Harry. But he's not infallible. And you shouldn't be living and dying by his opinion. I don't know why he wrote what he did. I have to believe he had a good reason. I also have to believe it doesn't matter. Because, in the end, he did leave, and we have to live with it. Only I'm terrified that you — you don't want to.'
'It's not your job, Hermione,' Draco said, 'to keep me alive, you know. I wouldn't blame you if you gave up on me. Nobody would.'
She shivered. He was aware suddenly of how small she was. At the best of times Hermione could only be generously thought of as slender — really, she was skinny, and more so now, as they had all lost weight in the past weeks. 'You think I want to be responsible for you?' she whispered. 'I'm so sick of being responsible. Of taking care of everyone. Only no one else will do it, will they? And first Ron left, and I lost him, and I thought, okay, I can get by still, I'll figure out a way to live without him until we get him back. And then Ginny, and I told myself I could get by without her, too.
And then Harry left, and I told myself that if I just focused on going after him and getting him back I could survive even that. But if anything happens to you — if you leave me — then I have nothing, I have no one, and I can't do this alone, I was never meant to be alone, I was only ever any good when I was with Ron and Harry — ' She broke off on a ragged breath, and put her face into her hands. 'I shouldn't tell you these things. It can't help.'
Slowly, Draco levered himself up into a sitting position. His chest felt strangely tense, as if he couldn't quite breathe properly. He held out his arm, and Hermione looked at him wonderingly for a moment and then crawled across the floor to him and half-leaned, half-fell against his chest, hiding her face.
He closed his arm around her. The fact that he had withstood the impact of her embrace without keeling over backward seemed to him fairly impressive, given his current physical state. They were in a very awkward position now: Hermione, shy of sitting in his lap apparently had thrown her legs over his, and her knee bumped against his ribcage. 'You're kicking me,' he said.
She looked up. Her face was wet and there was a damp spot on the front of his shirt. She smiled. She was like Harry, he thought, in that she seemed to have a light behind her eyes that, when she smiled, broke across her face and lit it to a strange a sudden prettiness. 'I didn't want to squash you,' she said.
'You're not,' he said.
She leaned her head against him again, and seemed to rest there for a moment, very still. Looking down, he could just see the nape of her neck, pale and vulnerable looking between the white collar of her pajamas and the strands of her dark hair. She was still shivering, but less violently now.
For the first time in days he found himself feeling someone else's pain besides his own, and it was strange and startling and he tightened his grip on her. She smelled faintly of antidote: belladonna, bitter aloe, a scent like blood oranges. He said her name without being aware that he was saying it, and this time, when she looked up, her dark-lashed dark eyes wide and curious, this time he kissed her.
She did not seem startled to be kissed. Her arms came up around him, thrown awkwardly over his shoulders, her hands cold against the back of his neck, and she did not try to pull away. He held her tightly on his lap, hands on her waist, and leaned into her mouth, and he could feel the outline of the blue glass ring Harry had given her, hard as a splinter of bone, trapped between their bodies as they leaned together.
His strength gave way then and he fell backward, holding her. They thumped to the floor, a tangle of arms and legs. He heard her cry out in surprise but when he reached for her she quieted him with her fingers against his mouth. 'Stop,' she said. She looked determined, very serious.
'Did I hurt you?' she asked.
'Yes,' he said.
She put her face down by his, and her clouded dark hair fell over them both. 'I'm sorry,' she whispered, her cheek brushing his, and he tasted the salt of her tears and thought, it was the closest he had come to crying in ten years. He seemed to be able to see them both, as well, from a distance, as if some part of him were hovering over the proceedings and observing in a disinterested manner. The blond boy sprawled on the floor, the dark- haired girl lying beside him, and if he also imagined a third shadow flung over and between them, it only made him more conscious that there was no one there to cast it.
'I'm sorry,' she said again. She kissed his face where the scar was, just under his eye, and then drew his hand towards her, kissing his palm lightly, her mouth moving over the angry scars there to his wrist. He could feel the beat of his own heart, painfully, as if his heart had cracked in half, spilling blood like a river down through his veins to the point where her mouth met the pulse of his wrist. It was a feeling like falling. He reached over to her and pulled her down to fall with him.
It would have been a lie to say he had not imagined this before. He was too much of a Slytherin to strictly discipline his own imagination; surely he could not be blamed for acts he had never committed. Still, against the grain of his nature, eventually the idea of betraying Harry had been too painful to contemplate even in the abstract and even now he felt that pain like the afterimage of sun against closed eyelids. It blended with the pain of the cold tiles digging into his skin and his bones bruising on the hard floor and the pain in his cut hand, trapped
