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i’m haunted these nights
i’ve been to the afterlife
and still i don’t believe
in ghostly things
unless it’s you and me
dancing around these halls
like we never left
i’ll always be haunted by that
Draco woke all at once, his heart beating hard as though from a nightmare, though he could not remember any sort of dream. He knew without checking that it would be one, perhaps two in the morning. The night was perfectly dark and still, and he would not be able to fall asleep again.
With a sigh, he rolled out of bed and slipped into his robes and shoes. He tucked his wand up his sleeve and quietly made his way out of his bedroom, down the corridor and the stairs, and through the back door out onto the grounds.
It was a clear night; he had suspected it might be, after the day they’d had. Looking up at the stars had been a habit since his childhood: on nights when the skies were particularly clear, he would step out onto the balcony or even go out into the grounds and scan the darkness for familiar constellations. Back then, his mother had pointed them out to him; now he went alone, to count stars and sit with his thoughts. There was Draco, of course. Scorpius, the Pleiades, Orion. The sky was vast, endless, beautiful. Somewhere, maybe she was looking up, too, seeing the same stars. He wondered if she remembered laying here in the grass by his side, her gaze following the tip of his finger as he pointed out his namesake to her.
“I did attend Astronomy classes, you know,” she had said, but he had thought her tone more teasing than annoyed. He hadn’t even teased back, had only tried to distract her with the next star so she would forget the nightmare that had woken her up in his bed. She remembered her dreams, he knew, though she had never described them to him. He had wondered whether he ever featured in them, but somehow, he didn’t think he truly wanted to know.
Draco felt himself shiver, and cast a Warming Charm before laying down in the grass. The dampness worked its way through his robes and his rather weak charm, but the ground was soft, and he was used to it. He had laid down a cloak for her, and she had teased him about that, too. She had teased him a lot, he realised now. Had it all been a joke to her from the start?
He crossed his arms behind his head and lay there, gaze jumping from constellation to constellation, thoughts leaping from memory to memory.
He returned to his room as the sun began to rise, not wanting a house-elf or, worse, his mother to come across his empty bed and go looking for him. He washed up, changed, and waited until an acceptable hour to go down for breakfast. Narcissa was already sipping at a cup of tea; his father was nowhere to be seen.
“Good morning, Draco,” she said, her voice light as her eyes scanned his face. “Did you sleep well?”
“As always, mother,” he said, holding her gaze steadily.
She looked as though her night had been far more refreshing than his, though he suspected some concealing charms were to thank for that. She was always the first at breakfast, and he had more than once passed her in the corridors at ungodly hours of the night.
“You might want to look at the Prophet today.”
He grimaced. That rarely meant anything good. He settled down with a cup of tea and held his hand out for the paper, which his mother handed him already opened to the page he assumed she wanted him to see. He almost dropped it as Hermione Granger scowled up at him from where her photograph was plastered, accompanied by a few paragraphs about some initiative for werewolf rights.
“Her proposal has proven very unpopular,” Narcissa said.
Draco set the paper aside. “Of course it has. Even she doesn’t inspire that much goodwill.”
Narcissa raised her eyebrows at him, but he did not elaborate. He knew she suspected something, but how could she ever guess the entire truth of it? How could anyone? It hadn’t even been a great effort to keep the secret; no one would have believed it, anyway.
His gaze rested on the chair across from him, where someone else had once hesitantly sat down. He had brought her here. Had that been his fatal mistake? They had both avoided the subject, at first, for months on end. But in the end, he hadn’t been able to resist bringing her into his home, his life. He had wanted to see her in the halls he would raise his children in and grow old in. In the sitting room, in the ballroom, in the library. In his bedroom. He had hoped to make her see the beauty in the place, despite – well. Not for the first time, Draco had been a fool, and a cruel one at that. Whether seeing the Manor had been unbearable to her, or whether she had been about to end things anyway, he was now stuck with the painfully sweet memory of her, here.
Here, at breakfast, he would remember complaining about her to his father every summer. In the library, he saw her curled up in an armchair, that small, focused frown on her face, her expression entirely absorbed, her eyes lit up by the dancing flame of a candle. He remembered holding her by the hand as he guided her from room to room, sharing memories. He had pulled her into an improvised waltz down the corridor, so her eyes would not linger too long on the portraits that lined the walls. He had inspected the gardens for hours the day before he led her through them, critically assessing each flower, each bush, as though a rose and a peacock could banish the memories haunting the grounds, haunting her, haunting him. He had been pathetic, so desperate for her to like the place, or to at least understand what he loved about it.
“You should eat something.” His mother’s voice broke through his reverie.
“So should you.”
“Draco,” she said, gently, too gently. “If something is troubling you…”
“Thank you, mother,” he said reflexively, “but I’m fine.”
He ran his thumb over the cold gold of the signet ring heavy on his finger. His father had once told a very young Draco, “It is pointless to regret that which cannot be changed. Do not doubt a decision once made. Take pride in our forebears, and likewise strive to make our descendants proud, and I promise you, son, you shall lead a fulfilling life.”
The advice had settled Draco’s nerves and gifted him a sort of inner peace: the knowledge that even when he disappointed his father, displeasure could never long linger. Even if he made the wrong decision, time would keep moving forward, and in time Draco had learned to keep his thoughts moving with it.
He wondered if she, too, had been raised to live life with no regrets.
“I’ll be away this afternoon,” Narcissa said.
He hummed in acknowledgement. It was polite of her to let him know, but he might not have even noticed otherwise; the Manor was large enough that its inhabitants could choose to spend entire afternoons without seeing each other. He knew better than to ask what she was working on, where she was going. Most of his mother’s old friendships had not survived the war. For the first few months after the final battle, the family had barely left the house.
“Perhaps you could invite someone over,” his mother suggested.
“One of my many friends,” Draco drawled. “I’ll consider it.”
His mother pursed her lips, but did not call him out on his rudeness. It wasn’t as though there were no one he could choose to invite. Once more, Draco had found his father to be correct: their family had emerged from the war, if not unscathed, then at the very least in a decidedly better position than some of their decisions might have left a less resilient family in.
Time had briefly stopped for them in May 1998, for two weeks in Azkaban Draco would never forget. He had thought he would die – and then time had started right back up, and while some things were different, not everything was.
There were those who resented them for it, but Draco knew his history. The Malfoys always came out ahead, in the end.
“Or perhaps you need a change of air,” Narcissa said. “Some time in France might do you some good. A different environment, new faces –”
He smiled, knowing where she was going with this. “Eligible French witches?”
“You’re twenty years old,” his mother said. “It’s a good time to be meeting women.”
“I know, mother.”
It wasn’t like he had gone this long without ever considering choosing a life partner. He had, fool that he was, once allowed himself to fancy that generations down the line, his union with a high-profile Muggleborn whose role in the Dark Lord’s downfall was celebrated would be seen as the move that saved the family’s wealth and reputation. His mother would certainly have seen it that way; his father would have come around with a few well-chosen arguments.
Draco’s thoughts had been racing so far ahead, he had been taken aback when she brought him back to the present, and then stopped time altogether with three sentences.
“Let’s not fool ourselves. This was never going to work out. We both knew that.”
Had they both known that? Had he been lying to himself this whole time? The words were endlessly on repeat in his mind, over and over, a haunting echo. For Draco, time had stopped in 1999. When he closed his eyes, it was her face he saw, unchanged – not the one in the papers, but the one that had said her goodbyes to him without a tear in sight. If he were to return to Azkaban, there was no doubt in his mind as to what the most painful memory the Dementors would pull to the surface was.
There had been a before Azkaban and an after Azkaban. Now there was life before her, and life after.
“You should consider it,” his mother said as she rose from the table. “I would want to see you happy, Draco.”
“And I you,” he replied as she left the room.
It was late in the afternoon when the gates announced a visitor. Draco had been lounging in the sitting room, trying not to remember the way her hair had shined when the sunlight came in at just the right angle through the windows. There had been no ripple in the wards, nothing to warn of potential danger, so Draco rose to his feet, checked his attire, and allowed the gates to swing open as he made his way to the entrance, ordering a house-elf to the sitting room.
Social calls at the manor were rare these days. Pansy had stopped by, briefly, six weeks ago on his birthday, and had given every impression that she would much rather be anywhere else, was in no way eager to repeat the experience, and ardently wished for Draco’s next birthday to take considerably longer than a year to come around.
Unsurprisingly, the guest was not Pansy.
When the doors front swung open in utter silence, there at the top of the steps to the manor stood a ghost.
i’ve been to the afterlife
and now i do believe
in ghostly things
like you and me