分卷阅读3（1 / 2）

“He’s researching Hanahaki Disease. He’s done the basic reading but now he’s expanding his search, looking into other cases of physical deterioration linked to a wizard’s own magic turning on him, and he wanted to know if I’d read anything worth his time. I suggested a few titles.”

Hermione’s tone is light but her eyes watch Harry shrewdly.

“Is he looking for a cure?” he asks. He takes his time rummaging through his bag, pulling out some parchment and a quill and his books and then just standing there fiddling with the straps like a twit.

“He didn’t say so, but I think he must be,” she says. Well, that’s something; at least the git’s not just going to roll over and die.

“Right. Anyway,” Harry says, “I forgot something. Watch my things, will you?”

He doesn’t entirely know what he’s doing as he leaves Hermione sitting there. He clears the library’s doors and finds himself breaking into a run as soon as he’s out in the halls, racing down the route to the dungeons, skidding around a corner—

He almost collides with Draco, who leans against the wall with his back to Harry, a spray of lily petals at his feet and his hand squeezing his throat as he raggedly pants for breath.

“Er,” Harry says. “Alright there, Malfoy?”

“Fine, Potter,” Draco says tonelessly, wiping pink-tinged spittle off his lips with that pretentious monogrammed handkerchief and trying to keep his face turned away from Harry’s.

“Why, er, why are you bleeding, aren’t they just flowers—” Harry starts. Draco snorts and shoots him that disdainful look Harry knows all too well, and he feels the familiar hatred rearing up in his chest.

“Potter,” he says, somehow turning Harry’s own name into a weapon without even having to straighten up. “There are lilies blooming inside my lungs. There are roots wrapped around my heart and leaves rattling inside my ribcage and broken stems lining my throat and seeds in my bloodstream. I can taste the petals every time I swallow. The scent follows me into my dreams. Compared to that, is a little bit of internal bleeding really so shocking?”

Harry tears 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 stop coming; 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 speccy 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?”