第6章 章節
his gaze away from Draco’s lips, which are dry and cracked, and looks at his eyes, which are worse, haunted and desperate, a total betrayal of his coolly patronizing tone.
“The only shocking thing about this is that you’re capable of loving anything other than yourself,” Harry says, more instinct than anger.
Draco flinches, but he recovers fast. He puffs up, ready with a retort Harry can almost predict word-for-word; they lock eyes, glaring, feeding on each other’s fury. It flows back and forth between them like a living thing. One of Harry’s hands clenches on his wand; Draco’s lip curls into a sneer that sends a riff of triumph through Harry. Draco will say something awful, and Harry will shout at him, and all will be right in the world.
Except. Except something stops Draco. He sags back against the wall before the tension can boil over, breaking eye contact. A helpless little cough escapes his lips, followed by a stream of them. Harry gets to see up close how Draco’s chest heaves, and how he struggles to draw breath as his lungs expel the lilies—sometimes only the petals, like shreds of white silk, and sometimes entire flower heads, the soft filaments in their centers fluttering.
Draco gags around them but he can’t stop coughing, either, and Harry sees his silver- grey eyes well up with pained tears before he shuts them and turns away. A flash of panic hits Harry, suddenly; for all he knows, Draco could drop dead any second. Harry grabs on to him, supporting him with a hand on his shoulder and another one firm on the nape of his neck, and Draco shudders and gasps. After far too long, the flowers stoping; he coughs a few more times, weakly, spraying drops of blood.
As soon as he’s able, he shakes Harry off, roughly.
“If you’ll excuse me,” he snaps, “I’d like to spend my final days doing something more pleasant than getting manhandled by a spy Gryffindor brute.”
“Prat,” Harry says, automatically, and then he finishes processing the words. “Days?”
“Maybe. I don’t know. But I haven’t got long,” Draco says. “What’s wrong, Potter? Not got sick of playing Savior? Straining that tiny brain of yours for a way to be the hero one more time?”
“Far from it. This is the best thing that’s happened at Hogwarts in years,” Harry says, which of course is absurd, he flew through Fiendfyre to save this boy, of course he doesn’t want him dead—and somehow he’s still going. “If I knew who it was, I’d shake their hand.”
Draco smiles, then, but it’s an awful smile; it looks like it hurts more than the coughing did. Harry opens his mouth to apologize, to take it back—he’s finally gone too far, hasn’t he —but Draco says, “Not even you can have everything you want,” and walks away without a backward glance.
Harry stares at his back as he disappears around a corner and wonders how, as always happens with Draco, everything went out of his control so fast.
Draco skips dinner that evening.
Harry’s eyes scan the Slytherin table over and over, searching for him, but half
