he said finally.
'You tired, Malfoy?'
Draco turned his gray gaze back to Harry. 'Always,' he said. 'Aren't you?'
Harry shrugged. 'I don't think I get to be tired.'
'Yeah,' said Draco, looking back out the window. 'Maybe you don't.'
The bedroom was full of pale dawn light. Ron sat in the window seat, and looked out. Just above the eastern line of trees sunrise was unraveling like a red seam along a pale gray cloth. It touched the Forbidden Forest with its light and the trees seemed to burn as if they had caught fire. The unmarked snow beneath the Quidditch pitch shone like a crystal dipped in scarlet ink. It was a beautiful new day, and Ron regarded it with almost no interest whatsoever. The deepening sky above the treetops made him think of a slit throat gushing blood, and his head ached and pounded as if it had been trapped in a vise.
He was tired, physically exhausted from lack of sleep compounded with stress and tension. But he had gotten used to that. What gnawed at him was the anxiety. When he was with her, he was happy; when he was not with her, he wondered if he would see her again and that made him miserable. She had been the one who had come to him first, but somewhere along the way, the balance of power had shifted, and what had seemed like a game had become something else instead. Initially, it had seemed like a convoluted way of getting his own back — a revenge for slights real or perceived, it hardly mattered. But it was not that now — not for him, anyway. For her, he could hardly guess. She was risking a great deal, he knew. Maybe more than he imagined. He had thought that made him safe. But she had come to him knowing the answer to the question in his eyes and willing to give it, and in taking from her he somehow found he had given her everything. The keys to his locked-away secrets, the hopes buried at the back of his mind. The deepest and most desperate desires of his heart. She knew them all now. He could not have answered honestly that he knew the same about her. Sometimes she seemed to be hiding purposely, keeping him at a distance, and in public, when she looked at him, her eyes said nothing at all; this other life of theirs might as well not exist. It made him want to yell and throw things; to hit her, just to get a reaction. Assuming even that would get one.
Harry had once told him that the worst feeling imaginable was to find yourself hating the person you loved best in the world; he wondered now if this was only because Harry had never known what it was like to love someone and realize you could not trust them. Surely that was worse.
It had to be.
When the Knight Bus finally came to a careening stop, it was nearly dawn.
The sky had lightened enough to reveal heavy clouds, and the air tasted of impending snow. Draco was only too happy to disembark from the bus, and stood next to Harry, who was putting on his gloves and scarf, as the Knight Bus roared away into the distance.
They were on a country road, a slender lane of ice-dusted paving stretching away between black lines of bare trees. Along the left side of the road ran a high stone wall topped with spikes. The graveyard, Draco assumed.
Harry finished pulling on his gloves, and started off down the road. Draco followed, enjoying the cold air. He had always liked low temperatures. The wall soon ended in a metal gate, chained and padlocked shut.
Draco watched Harry as he thoughtfully took his right glove off, and touched his hand to the lock. 'Alohomora,' he whispered, and the padlock sprung eagerly apart under his hand. The two boys stepped back as the gate swung open, with a faint creaking sound. When they were through, Harry chained the gate behind them.
They were farther south than Hogwarts, and here it had snowed much less. It dusted the tops of the headstones with a layer of fine powder, and sugared the bare black paths between the graves. Draco had not been in a graveyard before; the Malfoys were all buried on the grounds of the Manor, with cenotaphs erected over their bones. Something in the back of his mind, his old self, revolted at the thought of being buried like this, among strangers not of your own blood.
He glanced sideways at Harry. 'You know where you're going?'
Harry nodded. It was still too dark for Draco to see his face properly, although the eastern sky was beginning to brighten with a few gray streaks of light. Dawn was coming. Harry raised a jacketed arm and pointed: 'Over there.'
They went, their boots crunching on frozen dirt, and then, as Harry left the path and cut across towards the cemetery's far side, on frozen blades of grass. The only sign that this was a wizarding cemetery was the flowers that bloomed, unfaded and unfrozen, on each of the graves as they passed. Draco barely registered the names on the headstones as they walked by; he was looking at Harry, who seemed stretched taut with a sort of nervous anticipation. His gloved hands were balled into fists in the pockets of his jacket, his shoulders tense and set.
He stopped walking. 'All right,' he said, in a quiet voice. 'We're here.'
And Draco, his heart jumping with adrenaline for some reason he couldn't define, stopped with him, and looked.
There were tall mausoleums in the graveyard, carved all over with angels; there were cenotaphs covered in Latin writing and crowned with statues of Merlin and other famous wizards: But they stood in front of a plain gray doubled headstone adorned only with names. Lily Potter, said the name on the right; the one on the left: James Potter. Under the names was a carved a Latin motto, Amor Vincit Omnia, and under that the date of death. October 30, 1981.
He chanced a look at Harry, who had gone very quiet. In the blue-white dawn light, his face was finely etched with shadows, his mouth an uncompromising straight line. He was very pale, as if a light shone somewhere in him, beneath the skin. His eyes had changed again. There was a far-off look in them, as if he gazed into some other landscape, another world dimly seen beyond this one, a look like blindness.
'Harry,' Draco said slowly. He wanted to say something profound and interesting, something comforting, something about the nature of life and death and the importance of closure. However, no words came to his mind. He hesitantly took his hands out of his pockets, vaguely thinking that he should touch Harry on the shoulder, make sure he was all right.
'Malfoy?' Harry said into the silence. His voice was very quiet, his eyes now fixed on the headstones.
Draco stood up a little straighter. 'Yeah?'
'If you don't mind,' Harry said, his face still averted, 'I'd like it if you left me alone here for a little bit.'
'Oh,' Draco said. 'Oh. Right.' He put his hands back in his pockets, feeling suddenly very awkward. 'Sure. I'll just…come back later.'
The other boy didn't reply. Draco turned then, and left Harry standing there by his parents' graves, in the pale light of the chilly dawn.
Harry waited until the sound of Draco's footsteps crunching ice had faded into silence before he got down on his knees by the side of the grave. He looked at the headstones for a moment from his position there on the ground. His father's name and his mother's beside it looked as if they had been scarred into the stone. He read the Latin words under their names.
Love conquers all. He wondered who had picked it out. Someone who must have thought it was true, which, of course, it wasn't.
He could feel his own heart beating, hard, against his ribs, and a dryness in his mouth. But other than that he felt nothing. Nothing at all. He had wondered if he might cry, but he did not feel like crying. All his thoughts were focused on the task at hand. He suspected that he had not that much time before Draco came back. He pulled his gloves off, laid them carefully on the ground, and began to scrape away the layer of snow that covered the graves.
He had not realized that the ground beneath the snow would be frozen so hard. But it was. He scrabbled at it with his fingers, but was like trying to dig into iron. He wished he had brought something with him he could
