“I just wish you looked a bit more all right,” said Draco as they set off down the corridor to the ballroom. “You’re still sort of a pinkish-green color. It does complement your eyes, the green, but it also makes you look like a mollusc.”
“I can’t help it.” They had reached the double doors to the ballroom; Harry turned around and gazed mournfully at Draco “Don’t you ever get that feeling,” he said, “like there’s a huge scary monster inside your chest trying to burst free? Do you think that’s what being in love always feels like?”
“No,” Draco said, pushing the door open with his elegantly shod foot and gesturing for Harry to go in ahead of him. “I think you have indigestion.
I’d see a mediwizard if I were you.”
Ginny, Draco had thought, ought to be easy to spot with her fire-engine red dress and equally bright hair, but search the ballroom as he might, she seemed to have vanished. He caught a flash of red as he made his way towards the silver punch bowl, but it turned out to be Charlie Weasley, steering Blaise Zabini across the dance floor. Blaise was looking pleased with herself. Draco wondered idly if she intended on dropping Ron for another one of the Weasleys — Charlie certainly seemed a better bet, looks and intelligence-wise — but Blaise was surprisingly loyal in her way.
She’d certainly been loyal to him when he’d done little to deserve it.
He was about to head to the French doors to see if Ginny had decided to step out onto one of the balconies, when he felt a hand touch his shoulder. He turned and saw Dumbledore standing just behind him, holding a silver tankard in one hand and beaming inquisitively down at him. “I thought I’d see how the birthday boy was doing,” he said.
Draco blinked. “It’s not my birthday, sir,” he said. “That was the last party we were at here. This time it’s my mother’s wedding.”
“How silly of me,” said Dumbledore breezily, but Draco caught the glint of amusement in the headmaster’s blue eyes and wondered, not for the first time, what he might be up to. “And are you enjoying yourself?”
“I suppose so.”
“Not dreading tomorrow too much?” the Headmaster said. His tone was light, but his blue eyes were keen and penetrating.
“Tomorrow?” Draco said slowly. “You mean the — the spell reversal we discussed before. That will be tomorrow?”
“I expect to see you both in the study at noon, yes.”
Draco said nothing to that.
“Do not think I delight in being cruel to you,” said Dumbledore, more gently. “I would not do this if I didn’t think it was for your own good.”
“My own good,” Draco echoed, flatly.
“You don’t agree, Mr. Malfoy?”
Draco looked down at his left hand. The scar there, thick and double-cross-shaped, had its own whitish gleam under the flickering lights. He said, “Part of me wonders who will walk out of that room tomorrow, after you’re done with us. Harry will be the same. I didn’t change him like he changed me. But I wonder if I’ll even know myself — and if that means the self I’ll be tomorrow is a lie, or perhaps the lie is what I’m living right now. And have been for a year.”
“I am not sure you are correct about Harry and whether you have changed him, but we will leave that aside for the moment,” said Dumbledore with a certain dry concern. “If you don’t mind my bringing it up, it is true, is it not, that in the last moments of your father’s life, the curse Voldemort had laid on him was lifted?”
As always happened when he talked about his father, Draco felt as if the air was being suctioned from his lungs, leaving him gasping. He said tightly, “It wasn’t a curse that was lifted. It was something Voldemort had taken from him that was given back.”
“His paternal affection for you.”
Draco nodded. Air, he thought. He wished he could go out onto one of the balconies and catch his breath.
“That must have been difficult for you,” said Dumbledore.
“I didn’t feel anything about it at the time,” Draco said. “He looked at me and he said all these things, things he’d never said — never would have said — and I just thought: more lies.”
“But that was actually when he spoke the truth to you,” said Dumbledore.
“It was the past seventeen years that had been the lie.”
Draco looked away, no longer able to bear the headmaster’s steady gaze.
“It doesn’t matter,” he said. “It was too little, too late.”
“I agree,” Dumbledore said, surprisingly. “And that is what I don’t want for you. To find your true self too late. To live a lie.”
“But what if I hate my true self? What if he’s just the same unpleasant bastard I remember him as? What then?”
“That is always the choice,” said Dumbledore. “The ugly truth or the beautiful lie.”
“I thought truth was beauty,” said Draco with a short, unmirthful laugh.
“In poetry, perhaps. But not in life.”
“That must be why I prefer poetry,” said Draco. He looked up at the Headmaster. “There is something,” he said, an idea, which had nagged at him before but never been fully realized, blooming suddenly to life in his head. “A favor I wanted to ask you. If it were at all possible…”
“There’s something you want from me?” said Dumbledore, eyes glinting behind his spectacles. “If this is about the Quidditch Cup —“
