While You Were Dead

There are people who might argue that Harry Potter has never done anything the way he should, Draco Malfoy reflects tiredly, and he himself is one of them.

Potter always got things too early; too fast. He always bit back too hard and took offence too easily. He approached things haphazardly, without plans or common sense. He was, in all ways, a Gryffindor.

But even Draco Malfoy thinks that lingering on after death is taking abnormality a little too far.

After all, he has only just gotten used to thinking of Potter in the past tense, a closed book, a final, tired goodbye; and now, from his vantage point at the high table, he can see Potter, milky and disheveled, staring mournfully at a piled platter of scrambled eggs. On either side of his insubstantial arms, students lean out and back and peer at him with wide, live eyes. But Harry Potter is very grey and very present and still very dead--and Draco Malfoy is sick and tired of having to expect the unexpected.

Something rises up in his chest and clutches at his throat with trembling hands. Disgust, he thinks automatically, but the need to retch is overwhelming. And when he has rushed from the room and vomited until he is on the brink of dizzy sleep in the boy's bathroom, he is terrified to admit that disgust might not factor into at all.

---

Draco Malfoy still thinks that Harry Potter is a colossal asshole. An idiot. A pea brained, Neanderthal, egotistical prat.

Even dead, Potter is annoying as hell--the first thing he says to Draco upon running through him (just as Draco, still unnerved, is doing his best to stride unconcernedly back to breakfast, hoping that the greenish tint of his face might be blamed on the morning light) is, "Oh God, is Ron dead?"

Draco scowls. "I know you like to think of yourself as a trendsetter, Potter," he snaps, "but this is taking it a little far."

Harry's eyes are wide, except they are not eyes at all, really, just insubstantial wisps of grayish smoke and Draco feels sick again. "No," he says tensely. "He's not. I have to go. I have to teach. I have--" to get away from you.

---

All the students love the ghost of Harry Potter, and why shouldn't they? he thinks bitterly, watching the way Harry cavorts in the corridors and mingles cheerfully among the rushing students, mischievous and curiously restrained by turns. Why shouldn't they?

He certainly did, he thinks, but that was a long time ago and it didn't really mean anything and Harry can never know and--and Potter is dead.

This is what he forces himself to remember everyday, and it hurts, not because of the actual death but because--wandering through the corridors daily--he is constantly in contact with the only remains of Potter's cremated corpse.

---

Draco thinks that Potter should be out talking to the tabloids or making his heartbroken friends cry, or doing anything but hover above his shoulder week after week after endless godamm week as Professor Malfoy--feeling old, now, at twenty-five and with responsibilities--grades papers.

"Harsh," Harry murmurs, grey eyes moving in amusement, but grey is not green and never will be.

"The kid's a sodding idiot," Draco snarls, slashing a circle around the deep red 'F' and flinging the paper across his desk.

"I used to write essays like that," Harry points out calmly. Death has settled Potter somewhat, Draco realizes, worn his edges down; with the uncertainty of life gone, Potter is impossible to bait, impossible to upset. It is as if, without skin, there is nothing for Draco to worm his way under.

"You were an idiot too," Draco says, and flips the pile of essays over angrily.

His hand is shaking. He is afraid to compose himself--he's not sure what he might find buried beneath the sudden swelling rage.

---

"Fine! I'll do it!" he finally yells, one day in late February, and smashes his inkwell onto the stone floor, barely watching as the blue-black liquid rolls out across the grey ground like an echo of February thunder.

"Do what?" Potter asks innocently from where he is floating above the fireplace.

"You arse," Draco shouts, "you bloody prick, you wanker," and stalks off to find a book on necromancy.

---

It is a complicated ritual, and every book he consults warns against it, and his soul is at stake, and he hates black magic and really always has, and once he has performed the spell he feels weak and half-empty and he hates Potter for being such a godamm sponger. But even so, in the moment before he sees Potter drop to the floor in a sudden rush of air (coloring gently, carefully, his hands stiffening, his limbs rounding into flesh) he is calmer than he has felt in months.

Hermione arrives to the scene minutes later, pelting in at a breakneck speed. "I got your letter," she gasps, "I got your letter and, god, what's happened, because I--" but she stops when she sees Harry. She stops dead. "You. Oh god, you..."

Harry, just barely awake, is hit mid-groan by Hermione's barely visible body, barreling into him with a sudden ragged moan. He holds her to him like a rag doll, close and heedless of strength, and doesn't try to comfort her so much as he listens to her sob hysterically and realizes that he can do that too, now, any time he likes.

Draco watches them wearily. Later, he will listen to Hermione's rebukes about the dangers of working such a spell on his own (and know that she doesn't mean a word she's saying) and he will accept the Weasel's mauling, distinctly unmanly hugs, and he will sit down at dinner only to watch everyone else stand up and being to clap, raucously, in a thundering avalanche of gratitude.

Now, however, he is only thinking about Harry, flesh and blood, alive, and how much nicer and nastier at once it is to no longer be in love with a ghost.

---

Later still, when Harry has learned how to move his limbs once more and no longer stumbles quite so obviously on his words as he moves his creaking jaw, he slips into Draco's room in the middle of the night and climbs into Draco's bed.

They kiss. They do not speak. Harry trembles and flutters and presses his lips against all of Draco's available skin, half-sitting in the mattress, until Draco growls deep inside his throat and grabs Harry by the wrists, pushing him back onto the soft surface.

"If I'd wanted to sleep with a ghost, Potter," he murmurs, "I would have fucked you while you were still dead."

---

Harry's flutters turn to touches and his touches turn to lingers and his lingers turn to bruising grips, and the night seems to stretch on and on into eternity, like a vast plain, like death, but they have stopped that and this night will never really end.

---

"Why did you do it?" Harry asks him as the morning air grows warmer and lighter (even in the dungeons the air warms in the morning and takes on a certain brilliant quality). One of his hands is buried beneath Draco's side, and the other is stroking his cheek.

Draco feels, in a moment, as if he has been broken and melted down and built anew. "Because," he says rawly, "I want you...and no one else will do. No one else will ever do."

Harry is quiet.

Finally, Draco snaps halfheartedly, "And I'm not going to do it again, you know."

"I know," Harry says appeasingly, stroking Draco's upper lip with his thumb.

"Not in a lifetime," he glowers, pushing himself up on one hand so he can glare at Harry from a better angle. "Not in a hundred lifetimes am I doing that again. So if you decide to die again you can just go and stuff yourself because not even your ghost could--"

"I love you," Harry growls, and in the ensuing silence drags Draco back down onto the bed to see if they can make the morning last as long as the night.