分卷阅读2（2 / 2）

“But—if it’s someone I know, maybe I can help. Bring them together, or something.” Harry cringes to hear himself. Is he offering to play matchmaker for Draco Malfoy? The thought sort of makes him want to throw up.

“No,” Pansy says.

“Why not?”

“Don’t you get it?” she shrills, whirling on him with her small, jeweled fists clenched. “You never speak the name of the victim’s beloved.”

“What? Why?” Harry stammers.

“It doesn’t do anyone any good,” she says, furiously. “You can’t make yourself love someone else, not even to save their life. Knowing would only make the beloved suffer. And if the victim finds out, having confirmation that their feelings aren’t returned makes their condition worse.”

“If he’s sick,” Harry argues, “then doesn’t he already know they’re not—”

“It’s the rejection, you dolt. Rejection makes death come faster.”

Harry’s hands ache to clench into fists, mimicking Pansy’s posture, but he shoves them into his pockets instead and affects a careless slouch.

“S’pose that makes sense,” he mumbles. “Sorry, okay? I’m not trying to make him sicker. I wouldn’t tell the person. I just—”

“For once, Potter,” Pansy says, “mind your own business.”

That weekend, Harry trudges into the library, expecting not to emerge for the next forty-eight hours. Though he’d never admit it to her face—that’s just asking for a lecture— Hermione wasn’t wrong about him falling behind on his studies. Now he’s got three separate papers due early next week, and between classes and his ongoing D.A. lessons, which are more popular than ever, his homework needs to get done now or not at all.

He rounds a bookshelf, finds the table he usually shares with Ron and Hermione, and stops dead in his tracks. Draco is leaning over the tabletop, scribbling something on a piece of parchment and nodding along while his companion rattles off what sounds like book titles. The companion in question is none other than Hermione.

She sees him before he can walk away. Draco follows the line of her sight to Harry, and grimaces. A flicker of his eyelashes and then his gaze drops as he shakes out his parchment to dry it. There are smudges of ink on his pale, spindly hands. Harry is close enough to make out the delicate ridges of his knuckles and the blue of the veins in his wrists.

He hasn’t been this close to Draco in weeks. Once it came out that Draco was dying, he’d stopped fighting with Harry. Stopped acknowledging him altogether. No more name- calling in the hallways; no more petty sabotage in potions class; no more sniping at one another when they crossed paths on their way to the Great Hall; and absolutely no more fistfights. This should have been a relief, but there is something alarming about this docile, faded version of Draco that leaves Harry feeling unbalanced, like he’d put his foot down expecting one more step on the staircase only to find he’d reached the top without noticing. Is this really how a seven-year rivalry ends? A fizzling out, and Draco nodding courteously and saying, “Potter,” with no inflection whatsoever as he sweeps past Harry on his way out of the library?

Draco is gone before Harry manages to get his jaw off the floor. He rounds on Hermione.

“When did you make friends with him?” he asks, trying and failing to sound offhand about it.

She rolls her eyes. “We’re hardly friends, Harry, but we’re civil. Our first week back at Hogwarts, he even apologized for calling me a Mudblood. Sometimes we trade Arithmancy notes.”

Harry slams his bag on the chair across from hers, but doesn’t sit. “What did he want?”