Chapter 3
Draco paced around the creaking house, trying to get his temper under control.
He had bags under his bloodshot eyes from reading ancient runes until the early hours of the morning. Luna joked that he was becoming one of the creatures he banished. But he thought he looked stately, if rather dour. Black was always a color that had suited him, though he began to look a bit Addams Family the more he worked with ghosts and ghouls—it was the first observation Henry had made about him, after Draco spun in from the floo and the non-magical occupant of the household had coughed ash from his lungs. Henry being Pansy’s surprising muggle beau, and yes, Draco took quite a lot of satisfaction in flicking the ash his way after that untoward comment which he obviously wasn’t supposed to understand.
It must have been dreadfully disconcerting, to be thrown into a whole other culture right in one’s own soil. The thought made Draco grasp at the magic in his mind and hold it close: it was such an integral part of him, he couldn’t imagine a life without it.
Sighing, Draco lit the candles he’d placed around the floor of the living room on the third story, the very center of the house. He’d moved all the furniture to the side, and placed a crystal ball in the center. Future and past were connected by a thinner thread than many thought—sometimes it took Divination to figure out what the hell the spirits around them wanted.
Purplish smoke filled the room in wispy clouds and the air became heavy with heat. The ingredients he was burning weren’t exactly regulation, but then, there wasn’t much regulation in necromancy. The state he would need to put himself in to talk to these spooks and specters wouldn’t be the most stable for him, but then, it never was. He’d notified Luna of what he was going to do today, and she knew that if he wasn’t back for lunch, it was her job to search him out.
Knelt in the middle of the floor with the crystal ball beneath his fingertips, Draco began to chant. The smoke drifted before him, lazy and curling. The air became hot as a living being, too heavy for his lungs to push away, simply drifting in and out of his body as if of its own accord. He felt his heartbeat slow, and the room began to distort as his pupils slowly dilated. The noises of the dead became more pronounced, the soft whooshing movements just a bit more than a breeze, the low murmurs becoming more tangible than vaporous whispers. He felt himself move without moving, and knew the shift would happen soon.
Hands reached out through the smoke, intangible and with all the weight of downy feathers. They caressed his face and stroked his arms with barely-there touches, unable yet to grab him. Draco didn’t hold back the shudder the sensations prompted—it was hard to hold back anything, in the realm of the ghosts. He felt of himself and not, for as he stood and stretched he could see himself sitting before him, cross-legged and deathly still, chest hardly moving with each respiration, eyes closed and face calm as though he was merely sleeping.
Smoke, magic, and the dead floated through the air before him.
This part used to frighten him more than anything. Being vulnerable away from his body, suspended in two different places at once, tethered between worlds with the thinnest of threads. It still scared him, but after time and practice, he knew where he was going and what he was doing. He knew, now, that none of the spooks would attack him like people thought—these sorts just wanted to figure out how to home. If he was thoughtless enough to let himself get dragged away, it wasn’t out of maliciousness of the spirits themselves: they only clung to him the way drowning sailors clutched at a lifeboat until it sunk with the rest of them.
Which was why Draco needed to be absolutely sharp.
The air pooled thick with emotion around him, mingling with the heavy, cloying scent of the smoke. He heard the voices of the spectres, once murmurs and mumbles, now just barely louder, but enough to make out sounds that were almost words, that strange, elusive, unnerving language of the otherworld. Draco could make out some of the chatters and shivering whispers, could almost comprehend a bit of it, but he never dared stay long enough to truly learn it—to learn their language was, he felt, to understand them much more than any of the living should.
He didn’t usually talk much, to these creatures of profound magic and large sadness. He simply opened his mind to them, what little he could afford that wasn’t locked away by Occlumency. It was there that they truly communicated, when Draco was nearly on the same plane as them, almost there but not, as wretched and torn as they were.
Cold fingers trailed across his cheeks as he walked through the crowds. Rattling teeth clattered in his ears, echoing the shivers of those no longer alive. If it could have, the hair on the back of Draco’s neck would have stood on end. As it was, his essence walked on as his body remained unmoving.
What are you waiting for, he wondered. And then reached for them as they reached for him.
He felt a deep emptiness, a hole, a vacuum. It pulled them in and pushed them away, as it pushed and pulled at him like ocean waves, carried away by the current. It was loss, and loneliness, and helplessness. It was the feeling of apprehension, of dark chills and bitten nails just before the dementors arrive.
They didn’t know why they were there.
He didn’t know why he was there.
The gentle caresses became rougher, fingers digging into ghostly flesh, nails dragging across translucent skin.
They were desperate, and Draco didn’t know what they were looking for.
Through the crowds, stronger and stronger the feeling became. They clung to him more and more, pulling him down. He wasn’t sure anymore of how much time had past.
He could feel their prying fingers in his mind, trying to force it open, trying to find that thing they were missing.
They just wanted to go where they belonged, so much it hurt. And it wasn’t here. And the pain was immense.
His memories began to spill away from him, laid bare as his walls slowly cracked and chipped, brick by brick, under a relentless assault of miserable souls.
He was young again, flying on his first broom, darting across the grass by the lake nest to the Manor. At the same time, he heard a rasping voice in his ear that made his spine straighten, spoken in a language he couldn’t understand.
He was in the dark dungeons of the Manor during Voldemort’s reign in his house, at the wrong end of Rodolphus Lestrange’s wand after getting caught giving apples to the prisoners. His high, undignified shrieks of agony echoed along the vaulted hallways of the grimy underground, mingling with Lestrange’s low laughter and the moans of the masses around them in Grimmauld Place, steadily growing louder, and louder, and louder.
He could not lose control.
The house creaked beneath them.
The world spun around him.
The faces of the dead became his mother’s, became his father’s, became Voldemort’s, became his.
His thoughts reeled. His memories were spinning out. The emptiness reached and netted him within it like a fish caught on a line, thrashing fruitlessly, trying to rip himself away.
But he was losing control.
If they couldn’t find what they needed alone, maybe, they thought, he could help them. And so they came to him. And kept coming.
There were too many of them. Draco had never done this with so many before. They were dragging him away, and his body—it was still there, waiting for him—just sitting there and he couldn’t get back—
Draco felt the atmosphere shift with a ripple. The blackened emptiness, this festering loss: something had changed about it.
Suddenly there was more, somehow, like a door that was opened just a crack, spilling light into a darkened room. But where the door was—where it was—they just couldn’t—quite—reach it. The crack wasn’t wide enough to squeeze through, and so they stayed, floating in limbo, neither here nor there.
“…raco?” he heard, as though underwater, the sound ringing through all the hazy whispers and barely-there murmurs. “Draco!”
Suddenly, the tearing fingers were gone. With a wrench in his navel like the spinning sensation of using a portkey, his eyes flew open and with a gasp his body pitched forward, nearly sprawling him onto the ground if not for the strong hands that caught him by the shoulders.
“Draco?” Concerned, cornflower-blue eyes peered worriedly into his own. Small fingers pressed into the pulse point at his wrist.
“What…?” he croaked, his voice sounding hoarse and grating on his throat like a rusty nail.
“You weren’t back when you said you’d be,” Luna said, running a few diagnostic spells that made him shiver and light up yellow. “We decided to check. Good thing I brought Harry with me,” she said, motioning to the very man who was now resting on his heels nearby, poised to catch Draco again if he lost his balance. “There was so much energy, you were so far gone—I tried a repurposed summoning spell, but it wasn’t strong enough. Harry had to cast a second spell to help.”
Draco looked at Harry in wonder, remembering the blackness and then the tiny sliver of light. He could feel it, still, ever so slightly. And he knew somehow that it wasn’t emanating from the house, nor from Luna.
But he didn’t say that. Instead he focused on that stupid hair and those perpetually smudged glasses and accused rather than asked, “Did you call me Draco?”
Harry’s face split in a lopsided grin. “Well, you’ve eaten my food, and I’ve slept overnight in your flat—I think we’ve reached that stage, don’t you?”
Draco was planning on replying. But, alas, his stomach lurched again as the magic cooled around him, and he instead expelled the steaming contents of his stomach onto the rug before him.
_*_
Communing with the dead always put Draco in an odd mood, but this one took the cake. It was like a comedown but without the fun night beforehand. And the night beforehand had not been fun at all—it had mostly involved avoiding Potter’s eye and cocooning himself in blankets in a darkened bedroom, because even if Potter was his guest, it was also wholly his own fault that he had to stay with a professional necromancer, and so propriety be damned if Draco was giving away his bed to the Chosen One so he wouldn’t have to sleep on the couch.
He was feeling mutinous and sulky, and the cloudy sky over the park he cut through with its light drizzle was not helping. He was supposed to be the best in the business, and here was Potter, fucking things up for him again. So what if Potter had probably saved his life once more. That just added insult to injury—not enough that he had to put him through hell, but he had to be alive for it too. Couldn’t Potter have just let him die when he slashed his chest open those years ago in Myrtle’s bathroom so he could haunt him forevermore in peace?
Draco sighed. The cigarette he’d taken hadn’t helped soothe him: all he wanted to do was curl up again and never leave the darkened sanctuary of his bedroom.
It really had been a while since he’d thought of Myrtle. Their strange friendship had become brittle and awkward after the accident. She quite obviously had a bone to pick with Voldy, his Basilisk being the cause of her death, but she’d taken a shine to him because he was the only person in roughly a decade who’d actually sat in her bathroom and listened to what she had to say. Granted, he’d been doing so as a means to escape his own troubles—but she didn’t seem to care, really. The other ghosts were all so much older than her, and she was only a teenager, after all. She’d never gotten the chance to mature out of her limited perspective, and though her problems seemed silly to many, they were still problems, no matter how small. Sure, she could be annoying—but annoying wasn’t deadly. Annoying wouldn’t kill him. The most it got was a few irritated toilets bursting in his face, and that was more disgusting than anything.
Perhaps now that he was better at necromancy he should return to Hogwarts and see if anything could be done to help her. It was she, after all, that had begun teaching him ghost language—he’d needed so badly to talk to someone about his own problems. After an eternity of numbness acting as the empty vessel into which Myrtle had poured her many emotions when everything had become too much for him and he’d simply ceased to feel, she’d begun teaching him it as an afterthought: for her, it was more natural than her mother tongue. But once he realized he had enough skill to express himself, albeit in a blinkered, constricting way, the floodgates had opened. He’d finally talked about all the problems which had plagued him for the year, all the impossible tasks that had become his yoke to bear.
And then Harry had interrupted him, and they’d both reacted while Myrtle watched from the pipes below, her otherworldliness never as clear as when his opaque blood stained the misty floors and thinned in the swirling water.
But then Draco went home, and he realized that maybe he was not the only one affected.
He was reaching for the door to the landing when he heard it.
The cacophony was emanating from the bathroom, the place where all meaningful emotional outbursts naturally occurred. Draco made a mental note to Banish every bathroom he ever spent a significant amount of time in after this, because whatever energy was in them was obviously never positive.
“Why are you here?!” A voice roared, loud even through two sets of walls. As it continued, the questions lost their marks, and instead revealed their desperation. “Why not the others! Where are the others!”
It was Harry’s voice, but not as he had heard it in years. It was an angry voice, a resentful voice. The bitter and broken voice of a scared boy who was treated with the sacralty of a martyr and had never really known what boyhood should have been.
A hard thump and a profoundly felt swear fell in the silence. A “fuck you, Dennis,” floated through the walls, softly but with venom.
Draco fingered the pack in his cloak pocket and came to the realization that yes, he would indeed like another cigarette—perhaps that was just what he needed to feel right again. Perhaps even two. He shouldn’t nap in the middle of the day anyway. It really wasn’t healthy for the body and destroyed all hopes of establishing an efficient sleep pattern during the night.
Perhaps, if he made himself scarce and ignored the problem, it would go away as easily as he told himself it would. Potter was compensating him well for his time and service, but emotional support necromancer was not in his job contract, nor in his certifications.
When he returned, a half hour later, the Golden Boy was gone.
Unfortunately, however, evidence of his outburst was not. The toilet was flooding over despite the fact that there was nothing clogging it. Even an everlasting Banishing charm on the water didn’t stop the ominous creaks and groans that it doggedly continued making, and black sludge kept sliding down the white sides of the tank where it overflowed from the tank. A rank and foul odor of decay clung to it, and the toilet seat rattled where it stuck.
Draco was older and wiser than he had been at seventeen, and his decisions reflected this.
“Not my monkey, not my circus,” he muttered with finality, closing the door firmly and shutting it tight.