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In hindsight, the plan had been a really crappy one. Regulus did realize that now. The problem was that “now” was a bit too late to go back and do anything differently. Now he was a body sinking into the depths of an underground lake and a disembodied spirit rising to the surface, tethered to the mortal world by the certainty that his death could not, would not, be in vain.
Unfinished business. That was what the books about ghosts called it, and he had more than his fair share. Nobody else knew about the Horcrux. He couldn’t be certain Kreacher would be able to destroy it. If he stayed here, in the world of the living, he wouldn’t be able to cast Fiendfyre or stab the thing with a basilisk fang, but he could try to make sure it was destroyed. He could make sure the Dark Lord was indeed made mortal once more.
Or, at least, that was the plan. It turned out, that was a pretty crappy one, too.
Ghosts couldn’t apparate.
Ghosts couldn’t summon house-elves.
Ghosts couldn’t even be seen by Muggles, or else maybe he could have gotten directions in one of the seaside towns he came upon. Never did Regulus expect to be so desperate and alone that even talking to a Muggle would be an improvement.
If he had any idea where the cave even was, maybe that would help. But he had apparated in with Kreacher’s help; it wasn’t as if he had ever attempted to find the place on a map. He could be anywhere, and it turned out, the world was a lot bigger without brooms, portkeys, and the like.
Years passed by, an eternity and the blink of an eye all at once. He wandered by the sea, lost and alone. He returned to the cave from time to time to watch over his fake locket, until one day, he returned to find it gone.
Well, he thought, that’s that, then. The Dark Lord must know now.
Some time later - maybe a month, maybe a decade, but he would eventually learn it was about two years - a young man came to the cave. He had James Potter’s hair and Lily Evans’ eyes. With one glance at Regulus, lurking by the shore of the lake, he smiled sadly.
“Oh,” he said. “I didn’t realize you were a ghost.”
“Do I know you?” asked Regulus.
It had been twenty years since he had met someone who could see him. The feeling of talking to another person was strange now.
“Er … no, I guess not,” said the young man. “But I think I know you. You’re R.A.B., right? You’re Regulus Black.”
“Yes. And you are …?”
“Harry Potter.”
“Tell me, Harry Potter,” said Regulus softly, “is the Dark Lord still alive?”
Harry shook his head.
“No. The war’s over. The horcruxes are all destroyed. He’s gone for good.”
Well, that was something, at least.
Harry, it turned out, had come to the cave for the Inferi. With the Dark Lord dead, the curse that kept them in their puppetlike state had been broken, and they were nothing but ordinary corpses now. He intended to ensure that the bodies were disposed of more respectfully this time.
“There are spells that can tell us who they were when they were alive,” he explained. “We’re going to contact their families if we can, and then the Ministry will take care of the rest.” He paused and looked at Regulus very hesitantly. “When we find your body, is there somewhere specific you’d like to be buried? Or would you rather be cremated?”
At one point, Regulus would probably have cared. After twenty years as a ghost, all he could do was shrug.
“Why are you still here, anyway?” Harry asked, apparently realizing there was no point in pursuing that line of questioning. “You weren’t here last time. I wouldn’t have thought you’d linger, even if you did come back as a ghost.”
If Regulus were still living, he would’ve blushed with embarrassment.
“I’ve tried to leave,” he admitted. “I couldn’t find my way to anyplace familiar.”
“I could help you with that,” Harry offered. “You don’t have to stay here unless you want to. You could go back to Grimmauld Place, or I’m sure you’d be welcome at Hogwarts.”
Hogwarts? Could he really return there, to the place that had been his home away from home for seven years?
“I’m not so sure they’d want the ghost of a Death Eater lurking around the castle,” said Regulus.
“The Bloody Baron was a murderer,” said Harry with a shrug. “Anyway, you didn’t die loyal to them. You tried to do the right thing in the end.”
Was that enough to earn a second chance, even now that he was dead? Hogwarts was a good place to be a ghost. A place where he would no longer have to be alone. He wasn’t sure if he deserved that, but the idea was certainly tempting.
“Alright,” he said. “I’d like to go there if I can.”
The new ghost was a strange one, Daphne thought. He wasn’t from the battle, she was sure of that, but he was younger than most of the castle’s ghosts.
No, younger wasn’t the right word. For all that he looked like he might have still been a student when he died, that wasn’t what she meant. She meant more recently dead. He moved and spoke and dressed like someone from the twentieth century, not the Middle Ages.
He was also, she was fairly certain, a Slytherin. He lurked in the dungeons as though he belonged there and made friendly conversation with the Bloody Baron as if, perhaps, he had known him while he was alive.
But the strangest thing about the new ghost was the water he seemed to drip wherever he went. Not real water, of course. Not wet, cool, drinkable water. He left no moisture behind, but his hair was slick and clung to his face, and the stuff dripping from his torn robes certainly looked like water until it vanished only moments later.
“You died by drowning, didn’t you?” Daphne asked one day when they passed each other in a dark dungeon corridor.
He nodded silently.
“I thought so. I’m sorry if it’s rude to ask. I haven’t been a ghost for very long; I don’t really know the etiquette of it.”
Something like amusement took the place of his usual bleak and forlorn expression. He shrugged.
“I don’t know, either. I haven’t spent much time around other ghosts yet.”
Daphne looked at him more closely. His robes, though damp and torn, looked to be high quality, the sort a wealthy pure-blood might wear. She looked more closely at his face, wondering to herself what his surname might be.
He, on the other hand, clearly had other questions in mind.
“How did you die, then?” he asked. “If you’re going to ask me, I don’t suppose it’s rude of me to ask the same question in return.”
Daphne paused, floating in the shadows, and looked down at her school uniform, barely damaged except for a run in her tights. She touched her hair, pulled back into a messy ponytail forever.
“There was a battle,” she said, lifting her head to look him in the eye. “About a year ago. The castle was attacked by the Death Eaters, and the teachers sent all the younger kids to safety, but for the ones who were of age, they gave us a choice. Leave with the evacuation, or stay and fight.”
“You stayed?”
“No. I helped my little sister and the rest of the kids get out safely. But then I came back to fight for Hogwarts.”
Daphne held her chin up proudly and looked him in the eye, daring him to tell her she had done the wrong thing. Daring him to tell her Astoria shouldn’t have been her number one priority. He only smiled.
“It sounds like you were very brave,” he said. “I’m sorry it ended the way that it did.”
After that, Daphne and the ghost who drowned were friends. It was a strange sort of friendship. She didn’t know his name, and she was pretty sure she had never told him hers. But they greeted each other politely in the corridors and sat together sometimes near the underwater windows of the Slytherin common room.
“It’s still as beautiful down here as I remember,” he commented one day.
Beautiful? That wasn’t a word most people would use to describe the eerie, green-tinted world the Slytherins lived in. But looking out the window as a school of brightly-colored fish swam past, Daphne could understand the sentiment. There was a dark sort of beauty to it.
“You were in Slytherin, then?” she asked.
“No, I was in Gryffindor,” the other ghost said. “That’s why I spend all my time in their tower.”
Daphne rolled her eyes.
“I was in Slytherin,” he confirmed, as if there had been any confusion about that. “In the seventies. You?”
“The same,” she said, “not in the seventies, of course, but yes. And I know what you’re thinking, that it’s strange a pure-blood girl from Slytherin would’ve fought against the Death Eaters, but -”
“That’s not what I was going to say at all,” he told her. There was something very sad in his eyes now, that same bleak and forlorn look he had worn every time she saw him before they first spoke.
The ghost in the second floor girls’ bathroom went swimming in the lake all the time, but the idea frightened Regulus more than anything. He had died with water in his lungs. Why would he want to immerse himself in it again?
The ghost of the brave Slytherin schoolgirl looked out at the murky green waters with longing in her eyes, and he swallowed his fear.
“We can try it together, if you like,” he said. “It wouldn’t be dangerous, not for us.”
You couldn’t kill something that was already dead, after all.
They floated through the window together, side-by-side. He didn’t need to breathe. The water didn’t burn his lungs. There were no dead hands here to drag him to his doom, just fish swimming past and water rushing through his body as he floated along. The world around him was golden-green and as warm as anything could ever feel for a ghost, not dark and cold. Already dead, but not deadly.
The girl’s ghost floated past, looking like some kind of ethereal water spirit despite her messy ponytail and school uniform. Regulus smiled in spite of himself. He had never much liked the pure-blood girls his parents tried to set him up with, but if they had sat him down for one of their awkward chaperoned dates with her …
No, who was he kidding? If they had met that way, he would have felt nothing for her. She would have had perfect dress robes and perfect hair, perfect small talk about the weather and, if he was lucky, the Quidditch league or the latest Daily Prophet headlines. If it had happened like that, he would never have gotten to know her. Not really.
“Can ghosts fall in love?” Regulus asked the spirit of the medieval nobleman who rattled his ghostly chains in the castle’s dark underground corridors.
“I don’t know,” said the Baron. “Ghosts can be in love, certainly, but falling in love once you’re already dead is another matter entirely.”
“I cannot say,” said the pale woman who lurked in the towers high above. “I have existed for over a thousand years, and I have never been in love.”
“Why not?” asked the nearly-headless Gryffindor ghost. “Only it might not be easy, I’d imagine. You’d have to watch them grow old while you remain unchanged by time.”
Regulus smiled to himself. He didn’t think that was going to be a problem.
“Does it matter what the philosophers have to say?” asked the round man in a monk’s habit. “You’re the best judge of your own feelings.”
In the first few years after the battle, the living had no doubt as to who Daphne was, but as the years passed by, they began to forget. They began to whisper other names that weren't hers. The Slain Schoolgirl. The Spirit of the Battle. She, who had grown up calling the ghosts around her names like “the Bloody Baron” and “the Fat Friar” without thinking to ask what they wanted to be called, found that she didn't like it so much when it happened to her.
“It’s a beautiful name,” said the ghost of the drowned wizard when she told him. “You should make sure people remember it.”
“What’s yours?” she asked.
He didn’t reply.
Daphne’s name was beautiful, but Regulus wasn’t sure his own was something to be proud of. He kept it to himself the way the Bloody Baron and the Grey Lady did. Until, one day, he heard a whisper that would have chilled him to the bone if he still had bones at all.
“The drowned Death Eater,” one student whispered to another. “You know the one. The Slytherin ghost who looks like he’s just crawled out of the lake.”
Regulus wasn’t so sure he wanted to be called Regulus Black anymore, but he definitely had no desire to be known as “the Drowned Death Eater.”
“Are you, though?” Daphne asked when he confided in her, floating in the shadows of an empty dungeon corridor.
“Drowned? Yes.”
“Obviously,” she said. “That’s not what I meant.”
He had a feeling his answer mattered to her more than she was letting on. With a sigh, he nodded.
“I was. I was trying to leave when I drowned. So … the name is not inaccurate, but it’s not how I’d prefer to be remembered.”
She smiled at him, a soft, understanding sort of smile.
“You’re like my sister’s fiancé, then,” she said. “He regretted joining, too, in the end.”
She didn’t say how she felt about that, but she stayed by his side. That said a lot on its own.
“Can ghosts fall in love?” Daphne asked the living woman who still came to visit her a few times a year.
“I don’t know,” said Astoria with a smile. “Why don’t you tell me when you figure it out?”
None of the other ghosts at Hogwarts seemed to have the capacity for such emotions, except perhaps for the Bloody Baron, who was still stuck pining after the same woman he had loved when he was alive. But perhaps they simply hadn’t met the right person. Or perhaps they had, long ago, when they were still alive, and nothing they felt as ghosts could compare.
Daphne couldn’t even be sure if what she felt for the ghost of the drowned man was love at all. She had never been in love while she was alive. There had been kisses and hook-ups, but never the deep affection she felt when she was near Regulus. It was unlike anything she had felt, for friends or family or the passionate-but-shallow relationships she had during her lifetime. She didn’t know if it was what the living would call love, but she definitely felt something for him, and it was something unique and special.
She could never hold his hand or kiss his lips or any of the other things living couples did together. But she could float beside him in the shadows of the Hogwarts dungeons. She could listen when he spoke, knowing that he would do the same in return. She could cling to him metaphorically if not physically, and - unlike her sister and her friends - he would never grow old, never die.
Well, of course not. They were both dead already. But maybe staying frozen forever at eighteen wouldn’t be so bad, if she didn’t have to do it alone.
“Why did you come back as a ghost?” Regulus asked Daphne one day. “From what I can tell, nobody else who died in the battle did.”
Daphne gave an elegant shrug and floated along the dungeon corridor.
“I can’t tell you what was in the others’ minds when they chose to move on,” she said. “But I’ve got a little sister who’s … fragile. Very frail and ill, and very emotionally vulnerable. I couldn’t leave her. She’s okay now - well, as okay as she can be with an incurable blood curse - but it’s not the sort of choice you get to change your mind about, is it?”
“I think there are ways of moving on, even for a ghost,” said Regulus. “If you really wanted to.”
It hurt him to say it. He wanted her to stay. But he had learned a lot about souls and spirits during his Horcrux research, and he couldn’t withhold such information from her if moving on was what would really make her happy.
“No,” she said, shaking her head. “Not yet. I’m rather enjoying being a ghost, at least for now.”
Tilting her head and looking at him, she asked, “What about you, then? Why didn’t you move on to whatever comes next?”
“Unfinished business,” said Regulus with a grimace. “What I was trying to do when I died, I failed at. I suppose I couldn’t move on without knowing if someone else would succeed.”
“And did anyone?”
“Harry Potter.”
She made a face, and he laughed.
“He’s really not so bad, for a half-blood from Gryffindor. I thought you died fighting for him.”
“For Hogwarts,” said Daphne. “Not for Potter.”
“Well, he killed the Dark Lord,” said Regulus, “and he helped me find my way here from the place where I drowned. So I suppose I’ve got to think well of him.”
He watched as Daphne’s face morphed from a haughty expression of disdain to a sly, almost playful smile.
“If he brought you to Hogwarts, then I suppose I do as well,” she said. “The afterlife is a much more interesting place with you in it.”
She smiled and reached out to take his hand. Her insubstantial and translucent fingers slipped right through his as though neither of them was really there. Still, her smile remained, and he returned it. He could not feel the soft warmth of her skin against his the way that he longed to, but something in his soul rejoiced as he realized he was no longer alone.