A/N: Oh lookie here - Beater 1 for the Ballycastle Bats with the prompts: (Object) Thistle, (word) visitor, and (word) bloodthirsty. I took a lot of inspiration from The Rocky Horror Picture Show's garish/dark/campy tone. There's a mix of the plot as well as its dialogue/timing).
Warnings: The Rocky Horror Picture Show touches on some iffy topics: dubious consent, language, and so forth. However, this fic is rated "T" so y'all should be fine.
Note: I know it's Graham Montague but after reading "The Mark of Montague" by Luckylily I can't turn back. In the books his first name is never specified so Alexander Montague it is!
Title : out of my head
Rarely does the rain stop in London. Alexander Montague loved that about the city. He liked the swish of his coat, the clip of his heels, the air in his face. Malfoy used to go on about the deplorable state of muggle London: foreign scents, muggy air, rude pedestrians.
Montague loved it all.
He liked walking around in custom dragonhide boots and knowing he was one dark figure in a sea of thousands. No one cared that he had a three-year-old scar that ached on his right bicep. No one in this miserable muggle city gave a damn about him or his questionable past.
Perhaps, considering the suffocating apathy that took up all the air in his ancestral house, muggle London reminded Montague of home.
He would take the anonymous streets of London over the battle scarred Diagon Alley. Every walk through the familiar wizarding shopping district was a terse affair. The wounds of the war were still too raw. Curses, fires, threats, and prejudices scabbed over a divided society. Blood spilt. Families torn asunder. Sons and daughters lost.
Magic is bloodthirsty. At their core - at the center of all wizard kind - lies a pit of darkness. The fundamental truth about magic is that appearances, countenances pleasing or vile, mean naught. Within each wizard and witch grows a thistle: small, harmless, and pretty in its own right. The small plant rooted in the subconscious is easily disregarded, easily forgotten. However the thistle, small and quaint, common and sharp, has its spines poked into the very essence of magic: hungry power and dependent on taking.
Hogwarts history books like to gloss over the goblin slave labor that built the foundation of the school much like the ministry annually fails to recognize the unique magical manifestations of the native aboriginal peoples as a legitimate magical sect.
Spells leave the caster weak. Magical plants soak up the nutrients in the ground, leaving coarse infertile land behind. Demiguise achieve their shimmery pelts by devouring their young.
Was Voldemort's rise really a surprise? More magic, more influence, more wealth, more blood.
The provisional government of 1997 bore the dark red stains of mudbloods past, leaving ugly marks - seen and unseen - upon all who walked the Ministries' onyx marble floor.
The Wizarding world held too much death, too much history, and housed far too many mudblood's with chips on their shoulders. For those simple reasons Montague closed off his floo and took to owling most of his needs straight to his windows.
Pansy called him a recluse but Montague liked to think of himself as self-sufficient.
And besides - if Montague were to truly be a recluse - he would need to rid himself of his annoying shadow first.
He knocked on her door. She answered. It was the dead of night. Broomstick in hand, he asked to use her fellyphone.
He had no one to call and no idea what he was asking for.
She let him in anyways.
Seated in a casual eatery, Alexander Montague chewed his fresh calamari resolutely, staring his companion dead straight in the eye. If only looks could kill.
Fred Weasley - the deceased bugger - paid his prickly friend no mind. Picking at non-existent grit between his ghostly fingernails, the eternal adolescent whistled jauntily. "Oye, Monty, want to know a factoid?"
Can the dead die?
Holding in a groan, Alexander Montague kept chewing.
Why couldn't the damn shade haunt his equally insufferable twin instead!
Fred rolled his shoulders back and propped his translucent legs atop the table. His left shoe was missing - probably blasted off when he died - so a stained socked foot stood offensively in the middle of Montague's food. Montague spiked his next bite through the foot with more viciousness than was required. The fork sailed cleanly through the air, arching down to spear the fried seafood. Fred was less than a ghost but more than a memory. Intangible but unavoidable.
"You know," Fred continued. "A place - forgot where - used to use the rectal sphincters of pigs in place of squid. Good business sense I say. Much cheaper. Gross, yes, but what customers don't know won't hurt 'em!"
Montague stopped mid-chew.
Fred cackled a high, echoing laugh. It grated upon no one's tortured ears but Montague's.
Montague threw some muggle money on the table and stood to leave. He bustled through the doorway and into the crowd like he might lose his shadow. Chewing on his thumb, Fred followed at an easy pace.
"Monty!" He exclaimed.
"Fred," Montague intoned.
"Monty!"
"Fred."
"Monty!"
Montague squeezed his eyes tight. He could feel stares. "Piss off!"
He stopped and looked around at the shameless people who surrounded them. He probably looked insane. The crowd eventually moved on but Fred stayed put. Montague couldn't put his finger on the expression on Fred's grey face: surprise, disgruntlement, rejection. The vibrant colors of life and the city surrounding Fred only served to wash the ghost out. The white of Fred's teeth and the red of Fred's lips seemed more pronounced - in fact, all of Fred's features looked exaggerated. Like a poor copy of humanity.
Had Fred always looked like that? Maybe all Montague's exorcisms were finally getting somewhere.
She let him fall into bed. She let him pull down her clothes. She let him - glassy-eyed and too familiar, dark hair, blue-eyed - open her mouth with his own.
"Night visitors," her mom used to say. "Are trouble."
A month earlier…
Montague didn't really know why he chose to enter the WWW flagship store. Perhaps it was the congestion of the street that drove him to find shelter. Perhaps the shapely backside of Angelina Johnson lured him in.
Montague had no shame in privately admitting that it was the latter that brought him indoors. The inside of the shop was just as crowded - if not more - than the streets outside.
He made his way, weaving through crowds, watching her face all the while. His eyes never left her face just as her's never left her husband's.
They were arguing, that much was clear.
He was three meters away, about to jump in, to interject, before George spat something with a vicious twist of his mouth and Angelina turned tail and ran. She bumped into Montague but before he could grab her she was gone.
When Montague looked back up to seek out the stupid Weasley, his eyes landed on a freckled face he never thought he'd see again.
It couldn't be possible but it had to be.
Those unmistakable blue eyes were caught in the perfect picture of surprise when they saw that Montague could truly see and was not just seeing through him.
Fred almost cried. He hadn't cried since he bothered to watch his brother first bed his girlfriend.
It only makes sense that once you have one dead hooligan following you that more are sure to follow.
Colin Creevey showed up on a bright Sunday. He looked like a sixth year. It appeared that a ill-placed Bombardia had taken out some of Colin's physical functionality. The eternal sixteen-year-old slumped into an unfortunate hunch, his hair matted and falling into his eyes. Montague took one look at the blonde's shuffling gait and couldn't be bothered to suppress the rising well of pity that clawed out of his gut.
"Can I sit?" Colin pointed pathetically at an empty chair by Montague.
Fred made a noise of discomfort - seemingly looking down upon Colin from his lower vantage point.
Colin looked to Montague and Montague looked to Fred and Fred looked to Colin. Eventually, Fred's eyes drifted back to Montague and shrugged. "I dunno mate, he's kind of a perv. I don't know if you want him hanging about you.
Colin sat.
She was too familiar with the routine. Open door, open bedroom door, open legs. But something felt off. She was too hot, too cold. His movements felt like someone else. Someone agonizingly familiar.
Montague read his mother's letter for the third time before he tossed it into the fire. He was too sober to deal with her.
Fred sat to his left, the fireplace at their feet. "Do you know what I am, Alex?"
Startled by the use of his name, Montague sat up a little straighter, eyes still keeping a vigil on the yellow flames. "Haven't the foggiest."
"I'm," Fred paused.
A shade, an illusion, a curse, a masquerading hippogriff, an alien. Fred could have said anything and Montague was sure he would have believed it.
"Waiting."
Dark blue eyes met the almost translucent blue of Fred. Everything - his arms, his mind, his lips - felt overused and sluggish. The fireplace was getting low like the liquor in Montague's grip.
Fred's face held an indescribable sorrow. A sadness that couldn't be erased or undone. Montague found them familiar. So familiar like maybe he had been looking at them all his life through a reflection.
The dark room built up in a suffocating crescendo. Montague was standing (when had he stood up?). Fred was standing, only slightly off the ground. He drifted closer, his entire being cold yet unimaginably hot. Montague watched Fred's lips move. They might have been whispering the secrets to the universe. Maybe he was telling a dirty joke.
However, as Fred's spectral figure slid closer to Montague, all of Montague's senses shut off, overwhelmed by the warring sensations of burning and freezing.
The greatest point of conflict was right in front of Montague's eyes. Noses so close they were a hair away from touching - if Montague stuck his tongue out he would undoubtedly be tasting the contradictory ridges and lines of Fred's thin mouth.
Fred was breathing hard. It was a weird sensation to say the least. Montague could see his rising and falling stomach, the open and close of his mouth, but no air ghosted his cheeks, painted the inside of his mouth.
As the last embers of the fire gave their last sputter, Montague found himself moving forward into ice and fire, into death and regret.
When he should have felt sweetness and soft lips, all Alexander Montague felt was indescribable agony.
Montague woke up in bed. Strange.
Even stranger, he woke up with the immediate knowledge that Fred was gone. He could tell by the temperate air, by the way his shoulders were relaxed.
A small snore alerted Montague that he wasn't alone. Not yet.
Still keeping his eyes closed, afraid of what he might find - better not be damn Creevy - Montague reached out. His callused hand came into contact with warm skin and Montague automatically relaxed. He slid his hand up and down as far as he could reach, feeling nothing but silky, alive skin.
But whose?
A light appeared in the darkening sky.
Creevey's grip on Fred was tight and unforgiving. "Let's go, mate. We have a train to catch."
A/N: that's the end folks. Don't die of anticipation! -R