Evanescence

Fucking Hell, Harry Potter was really fucking stupid.

Harry pressed the heel of his palm to his forehead, eyes squeezed shut, as his body shuddered through the aftershocks of near-drowning. His throat burned, his chest ached, and the residual tremble in his fingers made his annoyance spike higher.

Of all the ways he could’ve gone - basilisk, dementor, Dark Lord, dragon - fucking sleeping in a bathtub had almost done him in. Brilliant.

He would definitely be mentioning that to Voldemort the next time he failed to kill him.

He let out another low, rasping laugh, though it was cut short when the raw scrape in his throat protested. He barely managed not to cough up another mouthful of regret. Instead, he let his head loll to the side, cheek resting against the cool, impossibly smooth floor the Room of Requirement had conjured for him.

His breath still rattled. His limbs felt like lead.

Harry let his gaze drift to the bath beside him: deep, dark, cut from heavy stone that shimmered with veins of something otherworldly. He had asked for quiet. Rest. A place away from everything. And the Room had given it to him.

Just a little too well.

His fingers curled against the floor. He should move. Should get up. Should leave, before he actually managed to do himself in; but the Room of Requirement was quiet.

The kind of quiet that sank into his bones, smoothed out the ragged edges of his thoughts, made it just a little too easy to stay.

He exhaled, slow.

Maybe just a minute longer.

Harry stepped through the Fat Lady’s portrait and into the emanating warmth of Gryffindor’s common room with a sort of detached awareness. And even as his cheeks flared pink from the roaring fireplace - where Ineua Stevenson guided flame-spirited drawings with the tip of her wand - his skin prickled with raised gooseflesh.

A chill liked at the base of his spine, like cooled silver imprinting his skeleton.

“ Where the shitting hell have you been ?”

A boy - no older than eighteen - lay splain on a rickety disused chair in the darkened corner of the common room; he was dressed in robes, a crumpled brown inlain with red and gold plaid and the Gryffindor lion was pressed as an emblem above his heart. His head was tilted at an angle just off from natural, dark eyes locked on Harry with something unreadable.

Harry’s jaw clenched. He squeezed his eyes shut, willed the image away, forced himself to shake his head and step forward. A hand landed on his shoulder and he flinched. Buried it under the habit of movement, under a sharp breath and a flicker of frustration at himself.

Hermione pulled back quickly, brow furrowed, concern flashing across her face like a spark off the firelight. “Harry?”

Harry wrinkled his face, fighting the discomfort winding through his ribs. His mind still clung to the shadows that hadn’t been there before - the flickering remnants, the ghosts-not-ghosts that had followed him since the Room.

Ron leaned forward from the couch, frowning. “You alright, mate?”

Harry exhaled sharply through his nose, raking a hand through his damp hair. He nodded, too quickly, as if that would be enough to settle them. Settle himself.

“Yeah,” he said. His voice was rough, scraped raw from his lungs still stinging with the ghosts of water. “Yeah, I’m fine.”

The boy in the chair smiled.

But, of course, no one else reacted; Harry’s skin crawled. He really was fucking mad as shit.

Harry let Hermione take his hand: carefully. Deliberately - and her fingers were warm, steady, but as they brushed across the raised, half-healed words carved into his skin, he stiffened. I must not tell lies burned phantom-hot under the stroke of her touch.

She didn’t say anything. Just curled her fingers around his and tugged him toward the sofa.

Harry let her; he let her guide him to Ron’s side, where the cushions dipped under his weight, where the warmth of his friends pressed into him from either side.

The fire cracked, throwing golden light across their faces, and Harry focused on it - on the flickering movement, on the way the heat stung at his cheeks. Good. Let it burn. Maybe it would chase away whatever hallucinations had latched onto his form like frostbite.

Hermione leaned forward, arms braced against his knee, voice low, urgent. “Where were you?”

Harry didn’t answer and she looked pointedly to Ron. A glance that said he’s not telling me, maybe he’ll tell you.

Ron exhaled sharply. “Mate, we thought Umbridge had-” He stopped himself, as if saying it aloud would make it real. His jaw tightened, his freckles standing out against his paling skin. “We thought she’d got you.”

Hermione turned away, her grip tightening just slightly on Harry’s knee.

Harry swallowed, his throat still raw from the bath, from the almost.

The truth balanced on his tongue, sharp-edged and fragile. I nearly drowned in the Room of Requirement because I wanted quiet, and now I’m seeing things that weren’t there before: imaginary people that shouldn’t exist.

But he couldn’t say it… couldn’t even begin to explain it. Couldn’t risk Ron and Hermione looking at him like everyone else had since Cedric died at the Graveyard earlier that year.

His jaw tightened painfully, lips suddenly dry despite brushing his tongue across them; so instead, he let out a breath, let the firelight lick at his skin, and muttered: “I just needed some air.”

Ron huffed with a single raised brow, unimpressed. “Right. So you disappeared for four hours ?”

“Lost track of time,” Harry said. It wasn’t a lie. Not really.

Hermione gave him a long, searching look, but whatever she saw in his face, she didn’t press. Not yet.

Instead, she let out a breath and squeezed his hand again. “Don’t do that again,” she murmured, soft but firm. “You scared us.”

Harry glanced down at their joined hands. At the way her fingers rested carefully against his knuckles, avoiding the scarred letters but still there.

He nodded.

It was the closest thing to a promise he could give.

The week passed in a haze of forced normalcy.

Harry ignored them.

Or at least, he tried to.

But his eyes had a mind of their own, tracking the figures that shouldn’t have been there, that no one else seemed to notice. They were everywhere. Everywhere. Bleeding into the edges of his vision, shifting at the corners of empty corridors, lingering in the periphery of common rooms and classrooms and hallways filled with people who walked through them as if they weren’t even there.

And yet, Harry saw.

Some of them were old ; not just in the way ghosts like Nearly Headless Nick or the Bloody Baron were old, but ancient . Their robes draped heavily around them, thick with the weight of another century, their faces lined with the passing of too much time . Their clothes didn’t quite match, their forms flickering between different states of decay - lace collars stiff with time, waistcoats embroidered with forgotten sigils, wands of yew and elm tucked into belts of silver and iron. Some of them carried objects: old pocket watches, quills long since dried, a girl in a dress from the 1800s who clutched a faded book of pressed flowers like it was all she had left of the world.

And then there were the young ones.

The ones who sat alone in forgotten corners, quiet, isolated, their eyes shadowed with something distant and unreachable. Some of them had the same raw, lonely silence Harry had once known himself - a childhood spent locked away, trapped in a space too small, too cold, too empty. A boy barely twelve with his arms wrapped around his knees, staring at the floor. A girl with her chin propped against a windowsill, watching the world outside but never moving to join it.

Not all of them had been students.

Some wore formal robes, their hems singed or muddied as if plucked from another life mid-step. One man stood near the Great Hall in what looked like the remnants of a Ministry uniform, his expression unreadable beneath the sharp glint of a monocle. His wand was still tucked into his belt, but it sat there, untouched, gathering dust in the space between existence and oblivion.

And then… then, there were the others.

They weren’t quite ghosts. Not quite people anymore, either.

Their edges were blurred, their forms wrong , their very existence twisted and half-there. They stood still , so still that Harry often mistook them for statues at first; hulking, grey, lifeless figures whose eyes never quite saw , their faces slack, their mouths unmoving. But they were there , lingering at the edges of rooms and corridors, never speaking, never shifting, never even blinking .

And Harry hated them.

He hated the way their unfocused eyes seemed to stare through the walls, through the world itself. Hated the way their presence felt : something thick, cloying, pressing at the back of his skull like a whispered warning just out of reach. When they drifted too close, the air seemed to thin, turning sharp, metallic. The hairs on his arms stood on end, his breath hitched in his throat, and for one terrible, irrational moment, he always feared they might reach out - and what then?

The others were bad, but these lifeless hulks? They were worse.

He'd spent the week fleeing from spaces, seeking isolation, and he knew Hermione and Ron had started to notice… that even the other Gryffindors had noticed how his previously terse tension had spiked with even more volatility.

Because even as he tried to ignore them, all of the ghosts... they'd started to notice him. How his eyes lingered on their shifting figures, how he tensed when their voices rose, how he reacted when they came too close.

And the worst part? Some of them had begun to smile .

Harry sat stiff-backed at his usual workstation in the dim, dungeon-lit classroom, his fingers clenched around his quill as if holding onto something tangible might steady him. The low murmur of students working, the bubbling of cauldrons, the rasp of Snape’s sharp reprimands - these were things he knew , weirdly enough, things that grounded him.

Imagine that? Snape, of all people, offering harry some bizarre perverse comfort. That itself was enough to send a jolting nausea to the base of Harry’s stomach, settling like curdled oil against his stomach acid.

And yet, he still felt them: not just lingering at the edges anymore. Not just flickering in the periphery - they were closer now. Too close .

" You look like you’re going to be sick, ” a voice chirped near his ear.

Harry went rigid.

His hand nearly slipped, sending a blot of ink bleeding into the margin of his notes. The voice was light, young, the kind of bright, teasing tone he might have once heard among the Gryffindor first-years. But it was all wrong , because the breath that should have accompanied it - should have stirred the air - never came.

Slowly, as if he might trick himself into believing he was imagining things, Harry turned his head.

And there she was.

A girl, no older than twelve, was perched far too comfortably on the edge of his desk, her chin resting in her hands. Unlike the other ghosts, her clothes weren’t the faded, timeless remnants of some bygone era. No, she was wearing Muggle clothes; blue skinny jeans, a ruffled, colorful top, and a scrunchie pulling half her hair back into a messy tangle.

Bright. Vibrant. Alive… or at least, a mimicry of how she should have been.

She tilted her head, grinning. “You can hear me, can’t you?”

Harry swallowed, his pulse hammering in his ears. He kept his gaze forward, forcing his hand to move again, to copy the next set of instructions onto his parchment.

Ignore it. Ignore her.

But she didn’t want to be ignored. Her body flickered with movement, moving in frames at a rate slower than any of the concrete reality Harry kept trying to fall back to - and she was leaning in, impossibly close.

Harry could almost feel her, could almost swear he caught the ghost of warmth, a breath that didn’t exist.

"I know you can see me, ” she whispered, her voice lilting, knowing, almost sing-song as she shrugged, “ word gets around, you know? ”

His quill scratched harshly against the parchment. The air around him felt wrong, warped , as if reality was bending in ways it wasn’t supposed to.

The girl rocked back on her heels, watching him with sharp, gleaming eyes. “Why are you pretending? Nobody else bothers.”

Harry gritted his teeth.

“Not very nice, is it?” she continued, voice syrup-sweet. “Ignoring someone who’s right in front of you.”

His fingers curled, smudging ink; she leaned in again, her not-there breath almost tickling his ear.

“Don’t worry,” she cooed. “I’ll make you talk.”

Harry’s chair scraped back suddenly, the sound splitting through the quiet murmurs of the class and every head turned toward him.

Snape’s voice cut through the air, cold as ice. “Is there a problem , Potter?”

Harry’s breath came fast, shallow. His skin burned. His heart slammed against his ribs. He forced himself to look back and the girl was grinning mockingly, now, hand once more resting on her shin: fingers tapping noiselessly against her skin.

Harry’s jaw squared and he exhaled a short, audible huff of air, lips pursuing with a disgruntled frustration. 

“Potter!” Snape snarled, voice dripping acrid vitriol but with a curling satisfaction at the opportunity to punish Harry.

Harry forced himself to look away from the girl, his fingers tightening around the edge of the desk as he dragged his gaze up to meet Snape’s glare. His mind was still racing, lungs still tight with the remnants of a breath he hadn’t fully exhaled.

The class was watching. Ron had half-risen from his stool, brow furrowed in concern, while Hermione's quill hovered over her parchment, ink pooling at the tip.

Harry schooled his expression into something blank, something unimpressed, something normal .

“No problem, sir ,” he said, voice carefully even.

Snape’s lips curled, as if he could taste the lie. “Then why, pray tell , are you disrupting my class?”

A soft, stifled laugh.

Harry didn’t dare glance at the girl, but he could feel her, see her from the corner of his vision, perched on his desk like some smug, unholy gargoyle. “Must’ve lost my train of thought, your lessons are just that interesting, Professor.” he said flatly.

Snape’s eyes flashed with dangerous irritation. He turned with a swirl of dark robes, stalking toward Harry’s cauldron, peering into it with the air of someone who already knew what he would find.

“This,” he said, voice thick with disdain, “is incorrect. Tell me, Potter - did you somehow lose the ability to read the instructions?”

Harry’s stomach clenched. He barely remembered adding ingredients at all. His thoughts had been tangled in the wrong things, twisted around the wrong presence.

“Well?” Snape prompted, mockingly patient.

Harry gritted his teeth.

“Must be a learning deficiency, ” the professor sneered, gaze flicking to the class as if waiting for them to laugh. “Or perhaps Potter simply believes himself above the need for proper technique.”

A scoff from behind him. A whisper, just for him. “ This guy’s a prick. ”

Harry clenched his fists: at the very least, the girl wasn’t a total arsehole.

“Ten points from Gryffindor,” Snape continued, tone smooth with satisfaction, “for your incompetence.”

His lip lifted into a sneer, but he kept his gaze pointedly on the yellowed parchment on the desk. 

The girl hummed thoughtfully. “I think he likes you.”

Harry shot her a glare before he could stop himself and her grin stretched wider.

Snape’s own smirk faltered, confusion flickering across his expression as he followed Harry’s gaze; towards what should have been empty air - the breath stalled in Harry’s throat. For a brief, terrible second, it almost looked like Snape saw something too. His eyes narrowed ever so slightly, his brows drawing together in something like suspicion.

Then, just as quickly, it was gone.

He turned back to the class with a sharp sniff, clearly deciding Harry was simply being insufferable . Harry swallowed hard, pulse drumming in his ears.

The girl leaned closer, her intangible presence pressing against the edge of his sanity.

“Don’t worry,” she murmured playfully. “I’ll keep you company.”

Oh, isn't that just fucking lovely.

Harry had skipped dinner again; but at the very least, the parasitic haunt - who had needlessly introduced herself as Laurie: the lingering remnants of a squib, killed in a cruel prank on her brother’s graduation day in the eighties - seemed to have some sense of disgust at the idea of seeing “teenage boys” anywhere close to naked. 

Which meant Harry would be hiding away in the Gryffindor Boys’ dormitory for the foreseeable future. 

And if he was anything close to lucky - which… let's be real, he wasn't - Harry would have at least twelve hours of isolation away from anything: from both the living, breathing suffocation of his housemates and the moribund shadows that seemed a separated by their own layer of perverse (un)mortality.

He’d spelled his bed-curtains shut and unaffected by the simmering light of dusk settling over the grounds, and so even with his tired eyes open and staring unblinkingly at the charmed ceiling of his bed-frame, darkness was still a comfort he could bask in.

He wouldn’t close his eyes until sleep swept him away with a forceful hand, and he wouldn’t leave his bedroom for as long as he could manage - because, why would he?

If not haunted by half-imagined wraiths through Hogwarts’ hallowed halls during the day… it was flashed of viridian veins and cold laughter and unending slithering along marble halls. 

The whispers of his roommates were the only marker of time’s slow, inevitable crawl.

“…been in there all day,” someone muttered - Seamus, voice edged with something that could have been guilt if it weren’t so bitter. “What’s he doing? Holed up in there, sulking? It’s probably-”

A sharp shush from Dean cut him off.

Ron’s response was less forgiving. “Oh, fuck off , Seamus.” His voice was low, tense - tired in a way that meant he’d been biting back words for longer than he should have. “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

The dormitory filled with the rustling of clothes, the creak of beds settling under shifting weight, and Harry kept staring into the blank ceiling of his four-poster, the wood grain lines twisting into shapes his mind wasn’t tired enough to stop deciphering.

Footsteps neared his bedpost.

He didn’t move.

Didn’t even breathe .

“…Harry?”

Ron’s voice was quiet now, a frown hidden in the syllables of his name.

Harry didn’t answer.

A pause.

The weight of expectation settled between them, thin but pressing. He could feel Ron waiting, feel the consideration of whether or not to push, but after a moment, the tension loosened with a sigh.

Something heavy was placed on his bedside table with a soft clink of ceramic.

Quiet. Urging. But not pressing.

“Hermione charmed a plate of food for you,” Ron murmured. “It’ll keep warm for a few hours, mate.”

Another beat of silence. Then the steps receded.

Harry stared at the darkness behind his closed curtains. His throat felt thick, and something wrenched painfully in his chest, but he only exhaled slowly, forcing himself to unfurl the tightness in his fingers where they had curled into the sheets.

He lifted his hand to his mouth, picking at the edges of his nail until the skin gave, a small sting, then the faint warmth of blood. He pressed against it absently, grounding himself with the bite of pain.

Outside, the dormitory settled into the small sounds of sleep. The slow, steady breaths of his roommates. The occasional creak of wood shifting with movement.

And inside, within the thick, protective cocoon of his bed, Harry remained awake.

Waiting.

Unmoving.

Until exhaustion finally pulled him under - into something restless, something cold. Something filled with viridian veins and slitted pupils, and the phantom feeling of a whispering breath just behind his ear.

Harry woke with a jolt, heart hammering against his ribs, his throat raw and aching. His breath came in sharp, uneven gasps, and for a long, disoriented moment, he simply sat , his body drenched in cold sweat, his limbs trembling as the last remnants of sleep clung to him like cobwebs.

He swallowed against the dryness in his throat and forced his aching muscles to move. With a silent flick of his wand, he cast a Tempus.

02:45 AM.

It was too late to sleep. Too early to be awake. But Harry knew , deep in his bones, that he wouldn’t find rest at all tonight.

With a quiet sigh, he swung his legs over the side of the bed, rubbing at his eyes before glancing across the darkened dormitory. Ron was sprawled out on his bed, snoring softly, his blankets half-kicked to the floor: the plate he’d left for Harry - half a sandwich and a few roast potatoes - still sat untouched on his bedside table. 

Guilt twisted in Harry’s stomach; he could be suck a cockhead, sometimes, and neither Ron nor Hermione deserved it.

He grabbed the sandwich, stuffing half of it into his mouth as he reached for his Invisibility Cloak and the Marauder’s Map.

He didn’t know what he was looking for.

Only that, for the past week, he had been hunted .

The ghosts - if that was what they were and, in fact, not proof that Harry had actually gone insane like the prophet and Saemus were proclaiming - hadn’t left him alone. They trailed him through corridors, flickered at the edges of classrooms, lingered at the periphery of every waking moment. 

And Harry couldn’t tell if he was just being self-centred, but they seemed drawn to him; he didn’t know, but it was just on his particular brand of luck that he’d find yet another way to stand out like a freak.

No one else saw them. Not Nearly Headless Nick. Not Peeves. Not even Luna, who always seemed to notice the things that didn’t want to be noticed: it was just him.

He had tried ignoring them. He had tried pretending they weren’t there. But it didn’t matter - and Laurie’s bolstered haunt had proven it. They knew .

Tonight, though, he had had enough; Harry was a Gryffindor, he was a Potter, he was Sirius Black’s Godson… and even if the thought of suspected insanity terrified him; the thought of anyone knowing he had another impossible thing to isolate him from a world built on impossibilities; he refused to sit and hide like a coward.

The Marauder’s Map was a familiar tool, now, a way to connect him to his father and aid his and Hermione and Ron’s late night escapades: and it was a tool he would once again be utilising.

At first, he had taken comfort in the fact that none of the ghosts appeared on it. Even the actual ghosts of Hogwarts had tiny ink-blots to show their presence. But these? Nothing.

For one desperate, fleeting moment, he had let himself believe he was imagining all of it. That he truly was losing it - it would be easier, after all, would get him away from Voldemort and Dumbledore and Umbridge.

But as he wondered Hogwarts shadowed halls under the star-sheened silk of his invisibility cloak - watching and listening and trying to understand - they started moving .

From different floors. Different corridors. Different parts of the castle.

All walking in the same direction.

The seventh floor.

Harry’s stomach clenched. He adjusted his grip on his wand, pulled the Cloak tighter around his shoulders, and followed.

The castle was too quiet at this time of night. The usual shifting groans of ancient stone felt dampened, the flickering torchlight barely enough to cut through the gloom. Every footstep, every breath, felt too loud .

When he reached the corridor, they were already there.

More than before. More than he’d ever seen at once.

Some he recognised - the old professor with ink-stained fingers, the Auror with the monocle, the girl no older than fifteen. But there were others , too, filling the corridor in a loose, shifting cluster: some stood alone, glancing at the wall where the door would appear. Others exchanged murmured words. A few simply stood in silence, heads bowed, waiting for something unseen.

Then, without a sound, the door appeared .

It didn’t open by hand. It knew . It welcomed them . It was the first tangible hint that Harry wasn’t totally fucking losing it.

One by one, they stepped inside, disappearing into the space beyond.

Harry’s breath came sharp and shallow. His grip on his wand tightened and he pushed himself forwards: speeding up with an awkward haste to slip inside the room without notice and hunker down in the corner closest to the door.

How had they not noticed? In the months of using this room, that it appeared at will in the middle of the night for no apparent reason…

“ Oh, don’t sound so miserable, you old codger. ” 

Harry shook his head - thinking could come later, when he was… alone? 

A gruff-looking man - his mustache dramatically unfurled in a way Harry would expect to see in a Daily Prophet from the 1920s or deep within the bowels of old Wizarding London - hunkered in one of the many conjured chairs around a large, star-stained oak table.

His muttered complaints were incomprehensible and full of gravel, vibrating through his chest more than his mouth: and the boy beside him with a perfectly manicured quiff and a grin made of trouble, rolled his eyes before flopping into the seat.

“Honestly, Stanley,” the boy said breezily. “You’re long passed. One would think change might become you.”

“Bah!” Stanley barked, and Harry flinched as the man slammed a thick, calloused fist onto the table with imperial finality. “You think your positivity and optimism have any use to me now? Has death addled that young mind of yours so completely, Techan?”

His heavy-lidded eyes narrowed under a brow like iron, and Harry’s breath stuttered in his throat. There was something in the weight of Stanley’s stare - unmoving and charged - that reminded him of Uncle Vernon, and not in any pleasant way.

“Truly,” Stanley continued, voice curling with disdain, “if I find myself concerned over this boy –”

Harry tensed, jaw locking around the no-doubt audible swallow clawing up his throat. He didn’t move.

Another groan broke the moment. “Harry’s actually quite cool, for your information,” Laurie drawled.

She was leaned back, boots kicked up on the table, inspecting her nails with bored interest. Harry didn’t know whether to be grateful or mortified.

The older ghost, Stanley, sat straighter, jabbing a thick finger across the table. “You approached him? I thought we were all in agreement,” he said darkly, turning a look onto the rest of the table.

There were more of them now; a woman swept in wearing a dramatic Victorian skirt, a haughty twist to her mouth, one hand resting with theatrical care on the shoulder of a sullen boy whose fists were buried deep in his pockets.

“Stop bickering, the lot of you!” the woman snapped, tone sharp and clipped as a wand’s crack.

The room hushed instantly. Even Stanley grumbled into silence, inclining his head in a kind of stiff respect; Laurie, however, wore defiance in her smile, and Harry got the distinct impression that argument was something of a hobby for her.

The woman - tall, striking, her hair slicked back and coiled low down her spine - swept her gaze across the gathered shades: “Tonight, we welcome a new member. Let us leave talk of the boy for another time.”

She gave a decisive nod and gestured lightly toward the young man standing by her side. But before she could speak his name, Laurie tilted her head and cut in, her voice mischievous.

“Shouldn’t we wait for Tom ?”

The question seemed to pull tension into the room like a drawn curtain.

“Please,” Techan snorted, throwing an arm lazily across the back of the empty chair beside him. “That man works on his own time . I wouldn’t be surprised if he’s off lamenting his death again.”

Stanley let out a wheezing sort of chuckle, the sound rustling through his dark red robes like brittle paper, but quickly cleared his throat after a hard look from the woman. He pinched his lips “ Victoria ?”

“ As I was saying ,” Victoria sighed, seemingly tired already, “This is Conrad. He has woken from his wander and has decided to make an effort to avoid fading once more.”

Laurie leaned forward, waving her fingers in lieu of hello; Stanley nodded shortly; the unnamed girl with hair shimmering faintly blue tilted her head, almost owl-like; and Techan was the only of the conglomerate to speak, voicing his hello with a wide grin and easy tone.

“Now, child,” Victoria sniffed, turning her attention mostly to Conrad, and she almost sounded kind when she spoke; “We understand better than any, how difficult the shift from wandering to wakefulness can be,”

Conrad didn’t reply. His lips pressed into a tight line, his gaze falling from hers to his twitching fingertips on the table.

“Stanley was adrift for fifty-two years before joining us,” Victoria said, her voice carrying the story like a memory often told. “I myself was alone for a decade: awake and untouched, the only one left of my own group. When Techan woke not long after, we began what you see now.”

Her hand swept across the table, the mismatched chairs, the eclectic congregation.

“We meet each night. We speak, we gossip, we remember. During the days, we walk among the shades - those who remain, even those who do not see us. We speak with professors, students, even if they cannot hear. It grounds us. It keeps us tethered to the world.”

Victoria’s voice dropped, almost reverent. “It keeps us from fading.”

“Yeah?” Conrad scoffed, and Harry could see how his shoulders shook his whole body. His fingers tapped once, the noise reverberating an echo of its own. “Seems real invigorating , this life of yours.” His lips were twisted wryly, eyes wide with honest mocking.

Victoria’s expression didn’t falter, though something behind her eyes cooled. Not anger: Harry didn’t think she was easily riled... but a deep, weary patience. The sort of look McGonagall gave when someone asked a stupid question she still had to answer.

“We are not alive , Conrad,” she said, voice as level as still water. “But we are here. And if you are here, you are choosing something over nothing.”

“Maybe I didn’t choose ,” he bit back, the sharpness in his voice cracking at the edges. “Maybe I just didn’t want to disappear like the rest of them. Doesn’t mean I want to… sit around playing bloody bridge and talking about the good old days.”

Laurie made a noise like a bark of laughter, and even Techan smirked, elbows on the table. Stanley just grunted.

“You’ll come around,” Laurie said, eyes dancing. “They all do.”

“I won’t,” Conrad snapped, but his voice lacked weight now, sagging under the weight of something else, something tired and bitter. “I’m not like you lot. I’m not used to being dead .”

“None of us are,” Victoria replied quietly. “We just stopped pretending not to be.”

That shut him up.

A stillness fell over the group, heavy but not uncomfortable. Harry felt like he was holding his breath again, though he hadn’t realised he'd stopped breathing in the first place. His legs had gone pins-and-needles cold, but he didn’t dare shift. He didn’t know what would happen if they saw him here, listening .

“And Tom?” Conrad asked then, something hollow in his voice. “Why does he get to swan about and do what he wants? Why isn’t he as concerned about… fading as you are?”

Harry rolled his eyes, his fingers twitching: he appreciated these ghosts, shades - whatever - likely had little going on with them, but he really could not be bothered to listen to supplicatory ghosts lament and whinged. God, why couldn’t they get back to him!

And, look, Harry know he sounds every bit as self-centred and pertinent as Snape and Draco and Petunia believed… and something acrid struck prongs against his stomach at the admission, but he just needed to know what was happening to him; he just needed to know if they could help him at all.

Victoria hummed, leaning back with a heady contemplation that stayed her lips; Techan and Stanley shared a lingering look. 

“Tom is…” Techan started, shifting his head in thought.

Stanley made a grumbling noise, “Tom is not like us,” he decided, meeting Conrad’s curious gaze head on. “We may all one day fade regardless of all this,” his lips twitched, and his meaty hand gestured about the space. “But he, I don’t think, will ever be allowed to fade.”

As if summoned by his own name, the torches around the room flickered - just once - and the door eased open on a groaning hinge.

Harry’s stomach dropped, his breath stilled and a wave of unfurling chill licked hotly at his skin.

Tom Riddle stepped inside.

He didn’t so much walk as glide, footsteps deliberate but silent, his presence folding into the room like a knife sliding into its sheath. He wore his robes like they were armor, high-collared and close-cut, and his expression was the same unsettling calm Harry remembered from the diary all those years ago; cool, composed, and utterly unreadable.

Did Harry do this, all those years ago? Did he trap the memory of a psychotic killer in a quasi in-between limbo? 

Even though Harry knew: knew that Tom Riddle was Voldemort, knew that he’d effectively killed the memory of a child with a personality disorder because he’d tried to kill Ginny and Hermione and close the only home Harry had ever had. 

Even though, he knew all of this, the words of the ghosts circled his mind with tempering reverberance. They were all trapped here. All of them. And the suggestion that Harry could have condemned anyone to this, curled a blooming thorn around his chest.

And then Harry scowled, watching Tom Riddle - Voldemort - because that was ridiculous and suddenly the fervence of hatred that welled up inside him had his wand slipping into his hand and teeth gritting painfully.

Talk about fucking mood-swings.

He didn’t look at anyone as he entered, yet somehow, everyone shifted in response.

Victoria’s spine straightened subtly, Laurie’s jaw tightened in something half like a grin, and even Stanley adjusted his weight as if to make room for the space Tom naturally occupied. Techan only smirked and leaned back in his seat, arms crossed in amused anticipation.

“Fashionably late, as ever,” Techan drawled.

Riddle ignored him. He walked forward with quiet purpose, hands tucked behind his back, and took his seat without a word.

He didn’t have to.

Harry, still invisible, pressed further into the shadows. Something in him coiled - an instinct, maybe. A memory. A warning. Even now, even here , Tom Riddle radiated danger.

Conrad blinked at him, quiet now.

Victoria turned to address the group again, but her eyes briefly, just briefly, lingered on Riddle. “Now that we are all here,” she said softly, “we may begin.”

Tom didn’t look up. Didn’t offer a greeting. But Harry could feel his awareness - sharp and unnerving - skimming the edges of the room like the brush of cold silk.

Tom Riddle wasn’t in charge here, but he held gravity like a planet. The others orbited without realising.

Harry’s bare feet scuffed the floor, shifting backwards until the wall could kep him up, and he’d thought for just a second: that nobody had heard; that they’d been too concerned with the new ghost and their talks. But then Riddle - and Harry knew the exact moment, because he could not tear his eyes away from the man - lifted his head.

Hair shining with the shift, a single piece curling at his scarred brow, shoulders tensing with the slightest of shifts. 

Tom Riddle looked up; red met green.

His eyes… there was the softest flicker of red but no serpent’s slitted pupils. No inhuman malice.

Just something quiet. Calculating. Aware.

He sees me.

The thought struck like ice in his veins. Harry hadn’t lifted the Cloak. He hadn’t moved. But Tom Riddle’s gaze landed on him with quiet precision, as if he had known Harry was there the whole time.

And like his breath: Harry’s heart stopped.