第18章 章節
ybe they love you back, or maybe they’re at least willing to try,” Harry says, desperately. “If not—I know the rejection will make you sicker, but then you can go ahead with the operation like you planned. You’d be no worse off than before.”
“Oh, it’s that easy, is it?” Draco snaps, face reddening dramatically. “I’m already in pain, so what’s a little more?”
“That’s not what I—”
Draco cuts him off. His expression has transformed into wide-eyed horror; something new and awful has evidently urred to him.
“Did someone say something to you?” Draco demands.
“What?” Harry asks, bewildered.
“Is that why you’re telling me to—?” Draco cuts himself off. “Because you know who it is and you get some sort of sick pleasure out of watching me embarrass myself—”
“How can you think that?” Harry asks, trying to sound righteously angry but knowing he just sounds wounded. Because that’s how he feels. “I’ve been trying to help you. I’ve spent all this time—”
“Oh, yes, heavens forbid we waste Potter’s precious time,” Draco sneers. “I didn’t ask you to do this. I didn’t ask for your help. You’re the last person I ever would have gone to.”
Harry grabs blindly at the strap of his bag and shoots to his feet.
“You’re right. I don’t know why I thought I could help you,” he says, voice shaking. He is blazingly mad, and there is a dangerous lump in his throat, and he does not want to look directly at Draco for fear of what he’ll see on his face. His eyes land instead on Draco’s sagging collar, where he can just see the thready silver-white end of the sectumsempra scar, almost the same color as Draco’s hair. “But it’s ridiculous you’d think I’d go out of my way to make you sicker,” Harry continues, “when the truth is I don’t care whether you live or die. You don’t matter to me. At all.”
Harry spins around and gets about three paces away before he hears Draco choking behind him. He wavers, waiting one, two, three seconds to see if Draco will stop. But this is a bad one. He keeps coughing, harshly and with his whole body by the sound of it, and Harry can’t leave him like that.
He drops his bag and turns, but the sight of Draco makes him freeze where he stands. Draco is not just coughing. He is vomiting a steady stream of flowers, swallowing hard and gasping for breath every time he has a chance, only to sputter and cough out another wave of lilies as the disease fights him. Most of what he expels are whole flower heads, the rims of their petals and the tips of their inner filaments streaked with bright red blood. Draco is hunched almost in half, one hand flat on his chest where the scar Harry made is hidden under his robes and the other hand clutching his throat, and he is still not stopping, he’s not breathing, and Harry falls at last to his knees and latches on to Draco as if he could somehow hold him together.
His eyes fall from Draco’s open mouth and closed eyes—as though he were screaming— to the carpet of lilies forming around their knees. Somehow that’s what does it, t
