Work Text:
After the Battle of Hogwarts, the castle never really heals. The cracks remain, filled with dust and memory. Every hallway hums with echoes, laughter turned to ghosts, names carved into stone because no one can bear to forget them.
Harry wanders through it all like a shadow that forgot how to fade.
Draco finds him the first night, barefoot and silent, trailing his fingers over bloodstained walls. He’s speaking to someone, murmuring words that make no sense. Sometimes it’s a name, sometimes an apology. Sometimes it’s just the word please.
“Potter,” Draco says, because it’s all he knows how to say.
Harry doesn’t look up. “They’re still here,” he whispers. “I can hear them.”
And Draco, who doesn’t believe in ghosts, doesn’t argue.
He starts finding him there every night after that, always in a different place. The courtyard where Fred fell. The shattered classroom where Lupin last smiled. The Astronomy Tower, still smelling faintly of blood and lightning. Harry sits in the rubble and talks to the air, voice hoarse, eyes glassy, asking for forgiveness from people who can no longer give it.
Draco doesn’t know why he keeps following. Maybe it’s penance. Maybe it's pity. Maybe it’s because he doesn’t know how to stop looking for someone else’s ghosts when his own won’t leave him alone.
He starts bringing things, blankets, tea that goes cold before it’s touched, candles that burn down to stubs. Sometimes Harry thanks him. Sometimes he doesn’t speak at all.
Once, when Draco finds him trembling near the Great Hall steps, Harry says, “You were lucky, you know. You didn’t have to choose.”
Draco wants to tell him he did choose, he chose wrong, over and over again. But the words stick, like ash in his throat.
Weeks blur together. The nights are longer now. Harry grows thinner, quieter. There’s a distant look in his eyes, like he’s already halfway gone, waiting for the rest of him to follow.
Then one night, Draco waits in the ruins until dawn. Harry doesn’t come.
He waits again the next night. Then the next. The silence grows teeth.
He searches the castle, every broken hallway and scorched stairwell. Finds nothing but echoes and the faint smell of smoke.
It isn’t until morning that he finds Harry’s cloak, folded neatly on the stone near the Black Lake, the same lake that used to shimmer with sunlight and laughter, now dark and still as glass.
No footprints. No note. Just absence, heavy and suffocating.
Draco stands there until the sun rises high enough to burn his eyes, until the frost melts at his feet. He whispers Harry’s name once, like a prayer. It catches in his throat and shatters.
Days pass. No one speaks of it. They all lost someone; they can’t bear to lose him too.
Draco keeps coming back to the ruins. He sits in the same spots Harry did, stares into the same emptiness. Sometimes, in the silence, he swears he can hear him, that soft, broken whisper, asking forgiveness from ghosts.
Draco whispers back.
Because someone has to.
And because this time, he’s the one who can’t let go…