I do not own any of the characters that appear in this story. I'm just playing with other people's property.

1. Pain and Paternity

It did not come as a surprise that it was possible to inflict pain on a ghost.
Not exactly.

Of course it was a shock, even a quite atrocious one, when you felt the pain for the first time, no doubt about that.
But back when you had been a man, you yourself would not have thought it impossible. No, you would have been very confident, that you would find a way. It did not seem so unimaginable a task.

It wasn't the question of feasibility that had made you feel save from pain before, more a question of human scruples.
If you had had time to get to know Justin before, well, you might even had expected it, braced yourself for it.

As it was, you were quite certain after the first time, that it would happen again.
That it would be a constant in this relationship and that you had to brace yourself for the next time. That you had to choose a course of reaction.

Of course one could decide to not feel pain, but that also meant that there were a lot of other things you could not experience any more. Should you manage to block out the rough, harsh feeling of pain, what chance did the flutter of a tender emotion stand? And you could not bear the thought of losing those. Not after what price you had paid to acquire them.

So what one did, if one could not escape pain, one endured.
You avoided pain of course, because everyone who could experience pain, in the important sense of the word, as something that brings anything but pleasure, would avoid pain. But when it couldn't be avoided, you endured.

You did not cower, you did not beg, you did not give any other satisfaction than that of having caused pain.
You wondered shortly if you could fake not feeling it, but that was indeed impossible.

You did not give the satisfaction that something more than your superficial well-being had been affected, even if it had.

But sometimes when you were alone and the fire seemed to run through every fiber of your being, even if you did not actually have any fibers, your aching mind wondered. Asked the question that your tattered pride would not want to be asked, but you couldn't suppress it then:
Could you really? If he seriously tried to break you, do you think you'd stand a chance? And you shuddered to know the answer.

There were things that could be done to a spirit. Things that would break everyone in the long run. Much darker things. Things that would never be part of a Council sentence.

The Council had sentenced you to an existence that might not be pleasant, but it was easily bearable. It was a punishment. Not torture.

But torture was possible – easily possible for someone with the right personality and abilities.

And you knew that you just hadn't given your master reason to try it. This – this careless, effortless, thoughtless inflicting of pain was just in his general way of dealing with another being. But the idea that he might ever get interested in trying to- ... That was deeply unsettling.

As long as their current arrangement was advantageous to Justin he would probably not be very inclined to, but if that should ever change …

But that was up to you, right? So you had to prevent him from ever entertaining the idea that he might just not get the long end of the deal.

So Harry.

Curse the boy. Bless the boy. He had upset the carefully observed balance. Had made you upset it.

Had made you risk everything.

Harry was more than just your master, someone to whose commands you were bound through your curse.

Long before he had come into this inheritance, he had been your pupil.
And more than that.
Maybe – to use an old-fashioned word from the past that now seemed like an unreachable far-away foreign country – your ward.

Yes, Harry was the closest thing to a child you had ever had.

Not that it had come to that by your own decision.
You hadn't had any children in life and that had never seemed like a huge regret to you.

You had never had a special connection with kids and you did not share this deep felt need of some of your contemporaries – that one had to have an heir, to carry on the name, to be a legacy.
It just never did seem very important to you. You had banked more on your deeds than your seed. If they were memorable enough your legacy would be your legacy and if that was great enough – well the name would be remembered.

Hell, in a way you had succeeded, given your current state you were in a way your own line of succession, all rolled into one ethereal being, just going on and on.

You and Winnifred would probably have had children, but it wasn't something you had been especially excited about and then it never came to that …

So you had not been particularly interested in becoming Harry's attachment figure.
Admittedly teaching the boy seemed interesting, something new for a change. No one had ever before asked you to tutor a child.
But that was that, even when you found yourself to your own surprise to delight in your new charge, to draw enjoyment from teaching and Harry's progress, even then you never on your own accord would have enlarged your relationship beyond that.
You weren't interested in getting too close to someone who was to be groomed to Justin's ideals, were not keen at all to get caught in an emotional attachment.
But Harry came to you and you did not find it in your heart to refuse the boy.

It just goes to show what kind of dreary place the mansion was for a child - that he chose a grumbly ghost as the most accessible person, a spectre as the one thing to cling to.

But then there really was no one else.
Justin never wanted to spend time with the boy, he only wanted to use him.
He certainly had no interest in teaching him about warmth and love and being allowed to be weak sometimes and all the things the soap operas suggest a family is supposed to teach a kid.
And Harry clearly sensed the harshness in this man with the cold hard eyes that only ever asked after his progress and never gave him any appreciation for it, just kept pushing, never enough.

Anyway he was out most of the time, always something more important to tend to.

Apparently he did want an heir, someone to carry on his legacy, someone to step out of the shadows only after he had passed away, reluctantly no doubt.

Or maybe just a lackey. Someone who was under his influence. Enough so to do his bidding.
He had a lot of those kind of people already of course, but he also wanted someone who had the ability to do what he wanted him to do too, and those were rare. The combination probably non-existent.
Something valuable.
But not really the kind of asset you poured any emotional efforts into.

And so it had happened that you had practically raised the boy.
And thus you could not help but care for him deeply.

And that meant you were ready to do anything in your admittedly rather limited power to make sure Justin did not succeed. Even though that meant you upset the balance.

True, back in the real life you yourself had been the kind of sorcerer just after Justin's fancy.
Practicing black magic and ambitious to have the world bow to you.
The black was highly addictive and you had been knee-deep in it for years.
Still spending a century inside your own skull made for a quite efficient withdrawal treatment, even in the case of such an advanced state as yours.
Of course you had not been allowed out of the skull back then. Only for rare questionings by the Council of that time. The Council would never had the spirit of a black mage roam the living world to give his counsel.

But what they hadn't told you and what you had not seen coming at all was, that once your soul had been cleansed of the black you could get in and out of the skull on your own accord. Not too far away from it and only as long as the one owning you didn't order you otherwise, but still. It was a big improvement.

Spending more time out of the skull also meant that you got to spend more time taking the form of your former body and that was actually the only thing that kept you going on. One could not create a ghost without tricking some unconscious but essential part of the mind into thinking it still had a body. If that did not happen, there was nothing that could keep it in place. It started drifting and if it was denied to cross over to next world, or even tied to a special place, by a punishing curse for example, it would just start to dissolve and after a certain period of time would be gone altogether.

The part of the curse that stopped you from dying had not really been the worst part. It had been a chance. If you managed to reject the black you would not dissolve into nothingness but get the chance to exist again in a way. And maybe even to try and pay off a portion of your considerable debt. Who knew maybe one day, many centuries from now, you could have cleaned your slate and be able pass on to the other side.

Of course, serving as Justin's subservient spirit, one did not get many opportunities to gain karma points.

TBC