'Of using her to break him. Come on, Ginny. Everyone has one weakness.
He's protected elsewhere. Not where she's concerned.'
'Well, if letting yourself love someone is a weakness — ' she began sharply.
'Of course it is,' said Draco, as if she'd said something very stupid.
'I think you're talking like your father,' said Ginny softly.
'I think I'm talking too much,' Draco replied, and sat up straight. 'Never mind.'
'You're underestimating Harry,' Ginny said. 'He'd never let harm come to anyone he cared about. If that's a weakness, then he has a dozen. My brother. Sirius. Hagrid. You.' She reached out, and put her hand on his shoulder. The soft silvery-fair hair that fell past his ears just brushed the tops of her knuckles. 'He isn't protected where you're concerned, either.'
'Oh, no,' said Draco in a remote sort of voice, 'I think he'd sacrifice me along with all the rest.'
'Draco-'
'He's a hero, isn't he? That's what they do. Sacrifice for the greater good.'
'He needs you,' Ginny said.
Draco looked at her. His eyes were clear and silver, untouched by any shade of blue or green or gray. 'Harry doesn't need one single one of us an eighth as much as we all need him,' Draco said. 'It's what he is as much as who he is. He's the hero, we're his companions. We're satellites.
We revolve around what he does.'
'You don't think he needs us? You said he needs Hermione…didn't you?'
'He's in love with her,' said Draco. 'And more than that. You know he was almost sorted into Slytherin, don't you? That, and other things — he always feels like he's a fraud somehow. It's in the back of his mind, every day. It's why he wants to win, prove himself, all the time, why he never backs down, why he always has to be not just good enough but damn near perfect. He's afraid of what he might be capable of if he didn't hold himself back. But Hermione — he told me once that she sees him not as he is, but as he wishes he was. That she sees a better world than we live in, a better Harry than the Harry that really exists. I think he sees her as the custodian of his better self. She protects him not just from the world but from himself — am I making any sense?'
Ginny realized she was staring at him. 'Scarily,' she said, 'yes.'
'But that's a double-edged sword,' said Draco, his eyes on her face now, finding her own eyes, their gazes locking. 'Because the more he feels that perhaps he isn't the person she thinks he is, and the more afraid he is that he can never be that person, the more afraid he is that one day she'll realize what he really is, and leave him. And take with her not just herself, which would nearly kill him, but her vision of that better Harry that he has always wanted to be. And that's something that might do what even Voldemort couldn't.'
'Which is?'
'Destroy him.' He reached out and touched the curl of hair that had been falling in front of her eyes, tucking it back behind her ear in an absentminded manner. 'He thinks he has to be perfect, and that if he isn't perfect he's nothing. He doesn't understand that we all have to fight our worse impulses to be what we want, that we have to give things up, that we disappoint the people we love, that as much as you love someone sometimes it just isn't going to happen and you have to understand that you aren't nothing without them, and — '
'Are we still talking about Harry?' Ginny said, her voice very soft.
For a moment, Draco was very still, looking at her. The feel of his glance on her face was like a caress, if not a gentle one. Then his eyes went flat, as if shutters had been dropped down over them, and he sat back and away from her. 'I'm sorry,' he said. 'I've been rambling. I think it was the blood loss. Or something.'
'No,' she said, and reached for his hand, then thought better of it and let her own hand fall to her lap. 'You weren't rambling — you were making sense and I'm glad, because I've been so worried about Hermione and Harry and — '
'You shouldn't worry,' Draco replied, still distantly. 'It's your Yule Ball night. You should enjoy it.'
She wanted to tell him that she had been enjoying it, that these few moments with him out in the rose- scented, bitter cold night were the best moments she had had in months; that she loved the way he talked to her, as nobody else did, as if there was no question that she could be too fragile to handle the truth; the way he spoke his mind to her and didn't cajole or flatter or patronize. He never had, even when he was being nasty. 'Do you want me to go back?' she asked.
'No, but you should,' he said, without glancing away. 'Go back and be beautiful for Seamus. It's wasted on me.'
She hesitated, looking at him. The moment seemed poised on a crystalline point, sharp and diamond-like. 'You think I'm beautiful?' she asked.
He looked down at his hands, and then back up at her. When he spoke, it was in a toneless voice, made all the more sincere somehow by its lack of affect. 'You are so beautiful it is hard to look at you for very long,' he said.
There was a long silence. The moment stretched out between them, sharp and tense and elongated. He was looking at her, and in his eyes she could see the reflected moonlight, and she remembered the drowning pleasure of his mouth over hers, so she did something she had never done before, and kissed him.
He was sitting and not standing; they were at almost the same height. She did not have to stretch upward to kiss him. She had only to lean forward to cover his mouth with hers. She had never initiated a kiss. Others had always kissed her first. She could not believe she was doing this, and yet she was. The proof was there: his mouth against her own, tense and ungiving at first, then softening as he leaned into the kiss, reaching forward to pull her towards him. His arms went around her and pressed her tightly against him, so tightly that the clasp of his cloak dug sharply and almost painfully into the base of her throat. She could feel his hands on the velvet of her dress, sliding up to touch her bare skin. His fingers burned, ten slender wands of fire, and she felt her blood singing in her veins.
