“It’s what I want,” said Draco, and went into the room, shutting the door behind him.
With the door closed, the room was enveloped in an intense quiet. The floor was layered with grey dust that showed no footprints. Draco wondered how long the Mirror had been here, though he suspected the manner of its conveyance from place to place was not the sort that left footprints behind.
It seemed to loom up in the center of the room, like an iceberg looming up out of frozen water. The windows shed light but not warmth; Draco shivered as he moved through a visible rain of dust motes towards the Mirror, kicking up grey puffs of more dust with every step. Dust to dust, he thought as he reached the Mirror. Its smooth reflective front was unsmirched by any grime. Standing at an angle from which the Mirror did not reflect himself, Draco saw that it gave back simply a reflection of the empty room, a clear and perfect likeness down to each crack in the floorboards.
He moved to strand in front of it and dropped his gaze immediately, his heart pounding. He wanted to look, and not to look; for it all to be over, and for him never to have had this thought, which had nagged at him subtly until he mentioned it to Dumbledore. Who am I? What am I, really?
Perhaps he had been wrong, perhaps desire was not the way to know himself as the Oracle instructed, perhaps it would only leave him chasing impossible dreams.
The Mirror is not a game, Harry had said, but then he had withstood looking it it, not once but several times. It was because of Harry that he knew that desire changed with the desirer, that one might outgrow one’s yearnings and put them away, as one put away childish things. For now we see as through a glass, darkly; then we will see face to face. There was nothing to be afraid of here, he told himself; after all, the truth about himself would still be the truth whether he acknowledged it or not. And surely it was better to know the truth than not know it? And lastly, he told himself sternly, he was a Malfoy, and Malfoys were not afraid.
He raised his head and looked into the Mirror, quickly, before he could stop himself. For a moment his vision blurred, then it resolved, and he saw what was reflected in the silvered surface of the Mirror: saw his own pale and startled face, oddly vulnerable, and the white line of the scar under his eye, bright as silver wire. He stared at the reflection for a long time, not moving, until he realized that his face felt weirdly, peculiarly cold; and when he raised his hand to touch the back of it to his cheek, it came away wet, and salt-tasting as the sea.
When he pulled the door of the room open he found Harry sitting on the floor in the corridor, idly playing with a feather that must have drifted down from the Owlery. Harry looked up in surprise when the door opened, and scrambled to his feet. “You’re all right?” he said breathlessly, making it more a question than a statement.
“O ye of little faith,” said Draco. “I’m fine, thank you.”
Harry looked at him hard. “Your face looks a bit strange —“
“Lots of dust,” said Draco. “Made my eyes water.”
Harry raised an eyebrow. “So?”
“So we should probably head out,” said Draco, squinting down the corridor, “We’re burning daylight here, Potter.”
“You’re not going to tell me what you saw?” Harry looked so dismayed that Draco nearly laughed.
“Oh, I saw myself,” he said casually. “Just as I am.”
“Bloody hell — you can’t be serious. Just as you are?”
“Maybe a few inches taller.”
Harry shook his head slowly. “Jammy bastard,” he said, and grinned. “I meant to ask you before, is that a girl’s barette you’ve got clipped onto your sleeve?”
Draco glanced down at the butterfly clip he’d found on his floor the day after Ginny had left. “What of it?”
“Bit peculiar, don’t you think?”
“Not really,” said Draco, with the air of one whose good humor could not be ruined.
“I suppose as long as you don’t take to wearing it in your hair,” Harry said with a shrug. “You know, maybe I should have a crack at that Mirror. I mean, if it worked out for you —“
“No,” said Draco firmly. “I don’t think Dumbledore’s lenience is going to extend quite that far.”
“All right, all right.” Harry looked at Draco with some amusement. “I guess what you told Snape was the truth.”
“What do you mean?”
“That you’re content. You must be.”
“I suppose I am,” said Draco, as if this were still something of a revelation.
Harry grinned. “You don’t even mind being my shadow?”
He said it as a joke, but to his surprise Draco looked at him long and steadily, without humor or annoyance or anger, only with a sort of level consideration. If I am your shadow, he said, silently and at last, it is only because you are my light. And the one cannot exist without the other.
He said it without affect, as if it were simply and obviously true, and Harry thought that after all, perhaps it was. “It’s a good thing we don’t have to, then, isn’t it?” he said. He glanced around, as if noticing the fading light for the first time. “If we don’t head out, we’ll miss the boat,” he observed, heading towards the stairs.
“I’m not the one who’s trying to get another crack at the Mirror,” Draco pointed out, falling into step beside Harry. “I said we should leave ten minutes ago.”
“It was not ten minutes. It was more like five. And how would you know?
You won’t even wear a watch.”
“I refuse to be constrained by someone else’s idea of what time it is,”
Draco said, but his mind was hardly on their good-natured arguing, which was, as usual, about nothing in particular. They had reached the ground floor now, and the sun was streaming in through the open double
