at him. To his relief, she was not naked, but was suddenly wearing a dark red dress with an elaborately laced bodice. High gold combs dressed her hair. Ron shook his head to clear it. 'I wouldn't exactly say Rhysenn was my girl,' he hedged, 'I mean, every once in a while she tries to seduce me, but I figured that was just professional courtesy, what with her being a sex demon and all. But no, I don't feel I have any claims on her. I guess what I'm trying to say here,' and he clapped Gabriel on the arm in a comradely manner, 'is, go right ahead. Although maybe you could drape something over the cage for privacy — '
'You,' said Gabriel, 'are a driveling idiot.'
Ron took his hand back. 'Well, I suppose I could just face the other way — '
'I did not mean Rhysenn,' Gabriel said. 'She is emphatically not your girl, or anyone's. I meant the little brown-haired witch. Your Hermione.'
Ron went cold all over, down to the pit of his stomach. His voice, when he spoke, also sounded frozen. 'She's not my girl either.'
'Be that as it may,' Gabriel said, his voice like raw silk, 'I have left her on the rooftop, without a cloak or a wand. If you do not go up to retrieve her, she may well freeze to death.'
Draco looked at Harry worriedly. He was covered in blood: it was all over his hands, in his hair, streaked down the front of his shirt like uneven swipes of red paint. The room even smelled like blood, a dark electric smell like the air before a storm. Draco kept his eyes on Harry, not wanting to look at the dead man on the floor, how small he looked in death, how waxy and vulnerable.
'What did I do?' Harry said, after a short, shocked pause. His voice was flat, dazed, affectless. The neck of his shirt was still gaping open, and where Draco touched his bare wrists he could feel how cold Harry was -
wasn't that a sign of shock, being cold?
Harry was covered in blood, too, as if he'd been dipped in it like a wick dipped in wax. It streaked his face and drenched his shirt and stiffened the dark curls of his hair. The blood didn't bother Draco, he only wondered if any of it was Harry's own, and if so, how much, and if he was all right.
The pulse that beat in the cold wrist he held was a steady one. Draco said, 'Can you stand up?'
'Yes,' Harry said. 'Yes, I'm all right.' He stood up, and Draco stood up with him. The bloody sword drooped from his half-open hand, and the cloth that had bound his eyes dangled, loose and bloodstained, around his throat. He stared down at the dead body at his feet without any expression at all. 'I thought,' he said, 'that there were two of them.'
'There were,' Draco said. 'Once the other one saw what you did to his friend here, he did a bunk. Ran right out the door.'
Harry's eyes flicked up; in his pale face, they were the transparent green of stained glass. 'I thought maybe you'd done something to him.'
'No,' Draco said, with bitter lightness, 'the way you were waving that sword about, I didn't much fancy wading in and getting my head cut off by mistake.'
'Ah,' Harry said, as if this made perfect sense, and Draco forbore to add that by the time he'd been able to stand up on legs that didn't want to hold him — he'd twice crumpled back to the ground — one of the men was gone, and the other dead. 'It doesn't matter anyway, I suppose. I wonder who sent them? Voldemort, probably. I mean, I'd assume so. Or your father. It's quite something having enough enemies that you can pick and choose among them, Malfoy. Although I imagine you already know that.'
Harry's speech had taken on a disquieting rapidity. 'I wonder how long it's going to take him to change back.'
Draco wasn't sure what he'd been expecting Harry to say, but this threw him. 'Change back into what?'
'Those shapeshifters we killed before,' Harry said, 'they changed back into whatever they were when they died. And vampires turn into dust. I don't know what these were, but — '
'They were just people, Harry,' Draco said, without thinking, 'he's not going to change into anything. He's just dead.'
'Oh,' Harry said, and his head went up and he looked at Draco. 'Are you -
do you know that, or are you just — '
His voice trailed off, but mentally Draco finished the sentence for him, Are you just saying that because you want to hurt me? — and he felt it, like a sharp and sudden pain, a pain he'd thought he was beyond. That Harry would think that of him, that he would mean it. That it might be true.
Only it wasn't.
'I'm not,' he said, 'trying to hurt you.'
Draco was someone who felt irony. He lived it and breathed it and his aesthetic soul, that saw the beauty in malice and admired the tightly controlled structure of tragedy even when it was his own, appreciated the irony here: he'd spent hours tonight trying to hurt Harry as much as he possibly could, and now fate had handed him the chance to watch Harry shatter into a thousand pieces, and he didn't want it any more.
'I'm sorry,' he said. 'But it doesn't matter — '
Harry didn't interrupt him, but instead turned around and walked out of the room. There was a precise, determined look on his face, as if he knew where he was going and what he meant to do when he got there.
After a moment of startled hesitation, Draco followed him.
He found Harry in the kitchen. He was standing in front of the sink, his slender shoulders hunched over, his bare, bloody hands plunged under a stream of water. Pinkish steam rose in a cloud and enveloped him, misting over his glasses, shrouding his face. It took a moment for Draco to realize how hot water would have to be to create that much steam in an already warm kitchen. He was across the room so fast he didn't remember later whether he'd walked or run. He pulled Harry back by his shoulders and spun him around and let him go.
Harry looked at him blankly. The steam had condensed into water droplets that clung to his hair and sheened the tops of his cheekbones and glittered on his lashes like tears. But he hadn't cried. Blood and water pasted his cotton shirt to his body. His hands were a bright and ugly red, already beginning to blister along the curve of his thumb and forefinger.
'What are you trying to do?' Draco said. He had to raise his voice to hear himself over the sound of running water. 'Ruin your hands?'
'Why not?' Harry said. 'You ruined yours.'
His voice didn't sound like his voice at all, and his green eyes were flat and vacant. Draco felt something inside his stomach lurch and tighten.
'You had to kill them,' he said. 'You didn't have a choice.'
'We always have choices,' Harry said. 'You said so yourself.'
'He would have killed you,' Draco said. Harry didn't seem to hear him.
'He would have killed me,' he added.
Harry looked up at that. He reached up and rubbed the clouded surface of his glasses. 'I know,' he said. 'I know that. It's the way I did it — I didn't think about it. I just did it.'
'It's what you had to do,' Draco said. 'You do what you have to do. You always have.'
Harry began to shiver. The color hadn't come back into his face yet, despite the heat in the kitchen. He was still papery white, a color like old eggshells. Against the whiteness of his skin, the blood stood out as glaringly as burning cinders. 'Hold me up,' he said.
Caught off guard, Draco blinked at him. 'What?'
'Malfoy,' Harry said, and the use of Draco's last name was oddly not so much distancing as merely pleading somehow, pleading and childish, as if Harry were eleven years old again and Malfoy was the only name he knew Draco by. 'Hold me up — I think I'm going to fall over.' He reached out with his hand, blindly, groping for the back of a nearby chair. Draco didn't move. 'I'm sorry,' Harry said, very softly, and Draco had no idea who he was apologizing to. It didn't matter. The scalding bitter rage that had been the constant companion of Draco's every waking moment since he had sat on Harry's bed and read the letter Harry had written receded with the soft sound of Harry's voice, and he took a step towards Harry and then reached out his hands and put his arms around Harry
