'Don't tell me you've read Hogwarts: A History.'
'Of course,' Blaise said mildly. 'Who hasn't?'
It had begun to snow outside the castle, a thick blanket of white settling like a sinking curtain over the fields. Seamus, sitting in the window embrasure of the Gryffindor boys' dormitory, pressed the back of his hand to the cold glass. He liked the touch of cold things now; they soothed him, quieted the burning in his blood.
His parents had wanted him to come home, but he'd insisted that he was fine, and wasn't dating Dean Thomas either. (He wondered vaguely where they'd come up with that one.) It wasn't that he didn't want to see them, though he had found it hard at first to conjure up an exact memory of their faces and in the end had had to refer to a book of photographsHe wanted to be around Ginny.
In a world of flickering haze and unexpected, sudden mists, where familiar faces seemed strange and ordinary English phrases dropped suddenly into gibberish, Ginny was the only constant, the only element that remained unchanged from his life before. She did not flinch from the sometimes bleak expression in his eyes, which he could not yet hide; she did not turn away in disgust when he told her his dreams of washing and washing his hands, unable to remove the sticky film of blood. She understood. Tom had been inside her, too, had made her a part of him; she knew what it was like. What it was like to be forced to commit unspeakable acts you could never have imagined, much less imagined yourself performing. What it was like to feel that hate always inside you, hate for the world, burning away at your heart like an acid. What it was like to feel that pride, that unstinting arrogance. The lightness that came with loss of conscience.
That clean sense of superiority.
He remembered the prostitute who had looked like Ginny, with her long red hair in braids, the short mock- schoolgirl outfit, the same brown eyes.
When he had kissed her, at first she had kissed him back, more expertly than Ginny and with a simulated passion that-no, he thought, she hadn't kissed him, she had kissed Tom, and she'd been paid to do it, or thought she would be paid before Tom broke her neck the way a small child might snap a stick of rock candy in half. He remembered how Tom had stroked his fingers through the long red hair as she died. Ginny, he'd said. Ginny.
The roll of parchment on Seamus' lap fluttered to the floor as he put his hands up to cover his face. He wanted her here; she would steady him, make him whole again the way he'd been before. Together, they would heal. Without her, he would always be broken. His fingers pressed painfully into his eyes, trying to erase the memory of the dead girl with Ginny's face, the sound of Tom's voice, reverent and desolate.
Ginny. Ginny. Ginny.
The sound of the door opening brought him out of his reverie. He looked up, half-guiltily, though he had done nothing wrong. It was only Ron, wearing a dark red cloak over his robes that clashed with his hair. 'Oh, sorry,' he said, seeing Seamus. 'I didn't mean-'
'It's all right.' Seamus hopped down off the windowsill. 'It's your room, too.'
'That's true.' Ron didn't move, and for a long moment the boys just stared at each other, both equally uncomfortable though for different reasons. Seamus wondered drearily if anyone would ever treat him normally again.
'I was just going anyway,' he said, finally. 'I thought I'd see if I could find Ginny before dinner-'
'Actually,' Ron said, stepping to block Seamus' path to the door, 'if you wouldn't mind, there's something rather important that I needed to talk to you about…'
Sirius and Narcissa were standing together outside the infirmary doors.
Sirius, like the rest of them, looked hollow-eyed with tiredness, but he managed to smile at Hermione. Narcissa couldn't quite manage it — the strain of the past few weeks had left her looking terribly frail, her skin like parchment. Hermione could see the veins at her temples.
She thought how differently they all reacted to their grief: Sirius, short-tempered, strangely ineffective, Narcissa gone frail as a flower, Remus sharp, determined and distant, Ginny wound tight as a coiled spring, and Harry, vanished beyond recollecting.
Stifling a sigh, she greeted them with a wave and made to go around them, but Sirius stopped her. 'Wait.'
A sharp pang of fear assailed her. 'Has something-?'
'Nothing has happened,' Narcissa hastened to assure her. 'We wanted to talk to you. Well — Sirius did. I…'
Her voice trailed off. Hermione wanted to say something to her, reassuring or kind, but she'd had a surfeit of grief already, her own and other people's. 'What is it?'
'It's Harry,' Sirius said. 'If you could…'
'If I could what?'
'It's getting close to the time,' Sirius said. 'If you could get him out of the infirmary, persuade him there's something needs doing elsewhere, persuade him he needs a bath, anything — '
'He does need a bath,' said Hermione, bleakly. 'But he's needed one all week and that hasn't budged him. I don't know what you think I can do that you can't.'
'He shouldn't be here when Draco dies,' said Sirius flatly, and Narcissa looked away. 'They're tied together and I'm afraid that when Draco fails at last, his death will pull Harry down after him.'
Hermione stared for a moment. A clear picture rose up in her head: a huge ship going down in the limitless emptiness of the ocean and the splashing survivors, fallen from its rails, sucked under the surface in its wake, cold green seawater closing over their heads. She looked at Sirius with something like hate, and pushed past him through the doors of the infirmary.
Harry was where she had left him, in the chair by the bed. His head rested on one hand and he looked so tired, so tired and so young, that even as she approached him her impotent anger faded to sorrow and she longed to put her arms around him and comfort him. But he had shunned her touch since Romania — had shunned all human contact. He flinched away from Sirius's outstretched hands and even Ron's awkward shoulder pats, as if their touch burned him.
So she sat down in the chair next to his and only said quietly, 'Harry?'
He turned his head. Black curls framed a face that was all angles and blue hollows, and the traced shadow of stubble along his chin and jaw which should have made him look older, but didn't. His lips were cracked; a thin line of blood ran along his lower lip where he had bitten it. 'Yes?'
She lowered her half-raised hand. Something about him, the way he was now- not a new quality in him, but an old quality, lacking- held her back. 'Sirius wanted me to see how you were,' she said, hating the lie. 'If you need anything — anything to eat, maybe? Or if you wanted to go and take — take a bath or something, I can sit with Draco.'
'No.' His voice was perfectly polite and perfectly dead. 'No, thank you, Hermione.'
It was, she thought, like trying to climb a glass wall in greased slippers.
There was nothing there, within those lightless, bottle-green eyes: no life, no Harry. She looked past him to Draco. The rosy afternoon light had moved away, and he lay white as a wax figure, hands crossed over his chest, the way he always slept. She remembered his hand slipping out of hers in the corridor, the limp curl of his fingers. Some people, Blaise had said, would fight till all hope was gone. And some would fight even past that.
'Have you tried, Harry?' she said, the words escaping before she could hold them back.
He only blinked. 'Tried what?'
'Talking to him,' she said, glancing from Harry to the boy on the bed.
'Talking to Draco.'
'I believe you were there,' Harry said, his voice as dry as winter air, 'when Madam Pomfrey told me he was past hearing anything.'
Hermione flinched. Harry had talked to Draco, of course. In that corridor in Romania he had said quite a lot of things, talking and talking, and sometimes hunching silently at Draco's side, until Sirius and Remus arrived and pulled him away. And she had watched, and Harry had watched, as Remus bent over Draco, then took hold of him and nearly threw him down on the corridor floor, Harry shouting out in anger and Hermione pulling him back, and
