Chapter Text
There was a lavatory on the second floor where nobody went, and Draco Malfoy had been crying in it since February.
It was a miserable, damp, cracked room at the end of a long cold corridor, with half its sinks broken and a smell of old pipes, and a ghost in the cistern who sobbed all day with a kind of luxurious despair. Nobody came. Nobody wanted to. It was the single place in the whole castle where a person could stand in front of a mirror and be seen by no one living, and she had stood in front of this one, with her hands gripping the rim of the basin, on a hundred evenings, until the cold came up through her palms and the tears stopped.
She was sixteen. It was May. She weighed seven pounds less than she had at Christmas, and she had not slept properly in four months.
There was a letter in her pocket.
It had come that morning by the family's grey owl, and she had read it four times in the corridor with her back against the wall, and she was not going to be able to answer it.
Darling, it said, in the upright hand. Are you eating? I do not ask what you are doing. I ask only whether you are eating, and whether you are warm, and whether you have a friend who sits with you. Your father is well. The house is quiet. Write to me, if you can, and tell me anything at all. Even the weather. N.
She had read even the weather and had had to go and be sick in this same lavatory.
She could not tell her mother the weather. Every letter that went out of the Manor was read before it left, and every letter that came in; she wrote I am well, the exams are going on, it has been raining, and every word was a lie, and her mother would know, and neither of them could ever say. That was what the letters were now. Two people holding up a wall from either side, in the dark, and not able to see whether the other one was still there.
"Not you again," said Moaning Myrtle, from the cubicle, with a sort of sullen relish.
"Be quiet."
"I was here first. I'm only saying. You come in here with your sniffling and your face, and I've got feelings, you know, I've got a great deal more feelings than most people—"
"Myrtle," said Draco, "I will give you a hundred Galleons to go away."
The ghost gave a long, delighted, offended wail and went down the pipe. It was, Draco thought, with a kind of hollow amusement, the nicest conversation she had had all week.
She looked at herself in the mirror.
The glass was cracked from corner to corner in a long silver fault, and in it a girl looked back. She was very white. She had shadows under her eyes like bruises, and her hair was lank, and there were hollows under her cheekbones that had not been there at Christmas. Her wrists, where they came out of her sleeves, looked like a child's. She looked like what she was: somebody who was being asked, quite politely, by the most terrible man in the world, to do something that she could not do.
It was the Cabinet. It was always the Cabinet.
It stood in a room on the seventh floor, in the dust and the dark, black and polished and patient, and she went up there every night and tried to mend it, and every night it failed. She had failed at it for six months. She had been given until the end of the year. If she did not do it, if she did not do the other thing, the thing at the end of it, in a tall tower, with an old man looking at her, they would kill her mother. They would kill her father. They would kill her.
She had stopped being able to think about that. It sat in her chest like a stone, too large to look at. When she tried, there was only a white roar, like being very high up, and a long way down.
And there was the other thing. She could still hear Katie Bell scream.
She had heard it from three floors away, in October, and had known at once what it was. She had put a necklace in a bag and told herself, in a small, hopeless, childish voice, that perhaps it would not work. Perhaps the old man would just refuse it. And a girl who had never done her any harm had picked it up off a Hogsmeade road, and Draco had stood in this room afterwards and washed her hands for an hour. She had put poison in a bottle, too. A boy with red hair had drunk it, and lain in the Hospital Wing for three days, and she had gone to look at him in the dark, once, and stood at the end of the bed and not been able to say anything at all.
She had meant to say sorry. It had not been a word that she knew how to say.
Under the long sleeve of her left arm, the Mark burned. It did that when he thought of her. It had burned twice this week. She had learned to bite her tongue until it bled, so as not to make a sound.
"I had plans," said Draco.
She said it to the mirror. It was a stupid thing to say, and she did not know why it had come. But it was the thing that she could not get past, in the long nights; it lay at the bottom of everything like a coin at the bottom of a well.
She had had plans. She was going to be a Potions Master. She was going to be the youngest in a century. When she was twelve she had drawn a shop-front on a sheet of parchment, with a bow window and a brass bell and a painted sign over the door, MALFOY & CO., and her mother had pinned it up in the drawing room, between two portraits of men with very long noses. And Co.? her mother had said, laughing, with her cool hand in Draco's hair. And who is Co.? And Draco had said, quite seriously, I haven't decided. Somebody nice.
She had thought that there would be somebody.
She was sixteen years old, and she did not have a friend who sat with her. She had Pansy, who was good and loyal and frightened, and who had said, in the dormitory, in the dark, what's wrong? and had squeezed her hand when Draco said I'm tired, and had not asked again, because Pansy was not brave, and nor was she. She had a house with a man at the dinner-table that she was afraid to go home to. She had a mother who was going to be killed. She had a drawing on a piece of parchment of a shop that she would never open.
"I can't," said Draco.
She said it to the mirror, in a whisper. It was the first time that she had said it aloud.
"I can't. I can't. I can't do it. I can't, I can't, I can't— Mum. Mum, I can't. I want to go home."
Her breath hitched. It turned into something else. She put her forehead down on the cold rim of the basin with her hair falling forward, and her whole body began to shake in long wrenching dry sobs, the kind that hurt, the kind that come up from the stomach; and she stood there gripping the porcelain, with her mouth open and no sound coming out of it, and cried as she had not let herself cry in front of anybody since she was seven years old.
Home. That was the joke. That was the thing that she could not bear. She wanted to go home so badly that it was a physical ache, a hole in her under the ribs; and home was a great cold house in the dark, with a snake on the floor of the drawing room and a thing in the chair that had once been a man. She could not go home. There was no home to go to. There was a place with her mother in it, and the one person in the world who had ever said darling to her was locked up in it, waiting.
"Please," said Draco, to the cracked glass. She did not know to whom. "Please. I don't want to. I don't want to. Please."
There was a movement behind her in the mirror.
It was a very small one. It was the faintest flicker at the edge of the glass, as of a curtain stirring; and she saw it through her blur of tears, and her heart gave a great sick leap and stopped.
He was standing in the doorway.
He had come out of nowhere. He stood there in the grey light, quite still, with his wand in his hand and his glasses crooked and his face white and very set, looking at her in the mirror; and it was the face that she had dreaded, and it was worse. There was no gentleness in it. There was a flat hard certainty, like a door closed.
Somewhere in the pipes, Myrtle gave a faint, startled, delighted squeak.
"Malfoy," said Harry Potter.
She had imagined this moment a hundred times, in the dark, and in none of them had she been ready.
She turned round. She did not draw her wand. It lay in the pocket of her robe, beside her mother's letter, and her hand stayed at her side, open, and all that she could think, with a long slow dizzy ache like falling, was: of everyone. It had to be him.