That everything's my fault. How I left the Liber-Damnatis in the past, the way I brought Tom back — Seamus wouldn't have been possessed by Tom if it wasn't for me.'
'He wouldn't have been freed from Tom if it weren't for you, either,' said Hermione. 'You've done what you could to make it up to him. You saved him. You brought him back.'
'Back to what?' Ginny said bitterly. 'Nightmares, panic, torturing guilt — he didn't kill those people but he feels like he did. It was more my fault than it was his but I'm not the one who remembers them dying, bleeding their lives out — '
'They were evil people, Ginny.'
'That doesn't make it not murder,' said Ginny, and Hermione did not reply because she could think of nothing to say. Ginny leaned forward, and the sunset light from the window cast a rosy glow over her pale skin and picked out the strands of gold in her coppery hair. 'Only I know what Seamus has been through,' she said. 'Only I can help him, and I owe him that much. It's true that he wouldn't want me to martyr myself. But if I took a love potion, I wouldn't be. I'd be with him willingly, even happily.'
Hermione leaned her head against the window; the glass felt cool against her hot cheek. 'I have to ask you,' she said, 'Ginny, do you really want a potion to make you fall in love with Seamus, or just something to make you fall out of love with Draco Malfoy?'
Ginny looked for a moment as if Hermione had slapped her, but also as if she'd been expecting the slap. 'I thought about that,' she said finally. 'But as far as I know, for one thing, there's no magic to make you fall out of love with someone — '
'True,' Hermione said, thinking of her own experience, how the love potion had worked on her like a medieval torture instrument, pulling her in half. However much it had made her love Draco, it hadn't made her love Harry any less. 'It's like weight-loss or increased-intelligence spells.
No one's figured out how to make them work.'
'And even if they had, I wouldn't do it. Loving Draco, that's a part of me I wouldn't want to lose even if I could. I figure it'll fade over time, but at least I'll be able to remember it.'
Hermione opened her mouth, then closed it again. Ginny, she thought, lived in a world that was ruled by her own internal logic. It made it hard to argue with her.
'Never mind,' Ginny said abruptly. 'I can tell you're not going to help me.
I guess I didn't really think you would.'
'It's a ridiculous plan. Surely you must see that.'
'That's what you said at first about me going into the past to get the antidote for Draco — and that worked.'
Hermione was taken aback for a moment. That was a desperate situation, she wanted to say. But she could see that for Ginny, so was this. Draco would have died if Ginny hadn't gone back in time for him, but looking at Ginny's miserable face, at the violet shadows under her eyes, she couldn't bring herself to make light of her pain. 'I'll think about it,' she said.
'No you won't,' said Ginny, 'but I suppose it's nice of you to say so.' She paused. 'If I get the potion somewhere else, at least say you won't interfere.'
'Ginny-'
'Never mind!' Ginny hopped down off the window sill, her small hands clenched. 'Just forget I asked.'
Hermione passed a hand over her eyes. 'You do realize,' she said, 'if you succeeded in your crazy plan, it would be the end of you and Draco — forever.'
Ginny looked at her, eyes smoldering. 'You ought to know better than anyone, Hermione,' she said, 'you can't lose something you never had.'
And she ducked out through the curtain. Hermione heard her give a little gasp, as if she'd stubbed her toe on something, and then the pattering sound of her footsteps on the stairs overhead. Hermione covered her face with her hands, swimming in the cool darkness behind her closed eyelids.
I wasn't asking you for your sake, she thought, I was asking for Draco's.
Forever is a long time, even for a Malfoy.
When she emerged at last from behind the curtain, carrying her heavy book, she saw what had made Ginny gasp. Harry was standing in the middle of the common room, entirely silent and totally still, like a tree that had grown up suddenly out of the floor. Hermione bit back her own noise of surprise. 'Harry? I thought you were… '
Her voice trailed off as he turned to look at her. His face was blank, his eyes a much darker green than usual.
'Harry,' she said, again, this time with real concern, and moved towards him. 'Are you all right?'
He looked up. His eyes didn't seem to focus on her. 'I was just in Dumbledore's office. He…'
'Yes? What did he say? Is everything all right? Is Sirius?'
He laughed shortly. 'That was the first thing I asked him, too. But no, it's nothing like that. Everyone's fine.' He raked his hair back from his forehead. 'I shouldn't be making a big deal out of it. It's nothing.'
'What's nothing?'
'I'll tell you later. I have to send a message to Sirius. Confirm what time we're supposed to be picked up tomorrow morning. He's sending the carriages.' He reached out a hand, caressed her cheek briefly. 'I need some time to think, okay?'
'Okay.' Hermione didn't want to push. She watched him duck out through the portrait hole with a flutter of nervousness in her stomach.
Harry was much better about keeping things to himself than he had been once, but he still tended to disappear when he was unhappy, like an injured cat huddling under a porch.
It wouldn't hurt for me to do a bit of thinking myself, she realized. She'd been meaning to take a last walk down to the lake and it would probably be deserted now. She'd left the shawl Draco had given her for Christmas lying across the back of one of the armchairs. Setting down her book, she wrapped it around herself before following Harry out the portrait hole and down the tower stairs.
Sunset light turned the lake to a ruby mirror, streaking the sky with seashell pink and bloody scarlet. Grass whispered under Hermione's feet as she found the narrow path that wound around the lake. The air was chilly — as high up as Hogwarts was, spring came late and winter lingered, stretching its cold fingers into May and even the beginning of June.
Hermione remembered when the lake has been a frozen sheet of glass, the trees, stripped to bare branches, a skeleton orchard. She remembered standing on the front steps of the school, sugared with snow, waiting with Ginny for the boys to come back from Hogsmeade. And Draco walking up the hill, carrying Harry, who'd passed out from drinking too much, trying to forget how miserable he was. They'd all been miserable back then, for different reasons, everyone isolated in their little bubble of unhappiness.
But things were better now.
Weren't they?
She tried to duck under a low-hanging tree branch, but knocked it with her shoulder, sending a shower of pink, apple-smelling petals down on her head. She raked them out of her hair impatiently.
'You needn't do that,' said a slow voice from behind her. A voice that, if it hadn't been so cultivated and careful, she would have said sounded almost slurred. She whirled around. Draco was lying on the verge of grass just at the edge of the lake, his boots nearly in the water, his silvery head pillowed on his right arm, bent under him. He was looking up at the sky meditatively, eyes half-slitted against the fading light. With his left hand, he described a lazy circle in the air. 'It looks quite pretty, what with the petals being so pink and your hair being, all, you know…'
'Brown?' Hermione said with some asperity. 'Are you drunk, Draco?'
He rolled over onto his stomach. Leaves were caught in his fine light hair.
'Perhaps,' he said, with great dignity. 'Just a bit.'
'Did you get into the Archenland wine? That was supposed to be a present for Sirius!'
'I may have had a mouthful,' Draco admitted. 'But I'm sure my future stepfather wouldn't begrudge me a bit
