So, this is completely AU. Ages have been screwed with, places changed, powers taken, powers added, blah blah. Really...I just needed something to write and this idea seemed good ha.
Oh, and if you don't like Drarry, I suggest you turn back now.
(Obviously I don't own anything in this story [characters, blah] that come from the Harry Potter series. They all belong to JK Rowling.)
Draco Malfoy did not believe in ghosts.
The young aristocrat had learned at a tender age that ghosts were make believe entities created by parents to control their wild children, much like werewolves, vampires and the boogie man. How else could the notion of someone dying and coming back to life just to punish someone's child for not brushing their teeth be logical? The idea was simply ridiculous.
Frankly, Draco was pleased that his parents had never lowered themselves to such crude standards of discipline when he had rebelled as a child. They took his possessions, spanked him and made him do the servants work to punish him, but they had never threatened him with make believe 'ghosts.' This, Draco believed, was what made him so above the bumbling idiots he called his peers at his newest school, Hogwarts.
Draco's father, Lucius Malfoy, was a business man who often moved his family from place to place as he worked on expanding his empire and his fortune. Until a week ago, the Malfoy's had been living in America for a little under two years. Draco had been ecstatic when he had heard they would be returning to England, having grown tired of the American way of life and the people who inhabited the large country. The young Malfoy had left behind no friends and no acquaintances – he may have spent two years there, but Draco had known that eventually he would move once more, and so what was the point of attempting to make friends anyway? No one there had been at his level, but try as he might, Draco hadn't been able to stop himself from wishing maybe being back in his home country would allow him to find someone, anyone who he might consider being friendly with. So far, he had found no one.
Hogwarts was a school steeped in tradition, having been around for what the headmaster claimed to be hundreds, if not thousands of years. Every student, from those who had just entered the school to those who were about to leave it, were placed into one of the four houses on the moment of their arrival and were expected to stay true to that house for the remainder of their time at the school. There were house common rooms for free periods, equip with dormitories for those students who boarded there during the school year, and a huge dining hall and library for all to use. Despite what Draco liked to call the 'rich and educated' atmosphere the school held, everyone he had met on his first day seemed to be functioning on brain levels below what humans needed to survive. His prime examples of this (that he had used to explain to his mother that night how dreadful the school was) were two boys in his year and house, Crabbe and Goyle.
Vincent Crabbe and Gregory Goyle had come across to Draco as not humans, but gorillas in human suits. They had attached themselves to his hips as soon as the Headmaster, Professor Dumbledore, had placed Draco in Slytherin house. For the first half of the morning, when Draco had attended his first classes and was irritated to find that Crabbe and Goyle shared them with him, he had believed they could not talk but only grunt. For a brief moment he had felt hopeful that this speech impediment was what made them so dumb, but was only let down when he had realized they were actually speaking English in grunting tones. By lunch, which Draco thankfully did not share with the two gorillas, the newest Slytherin thought he was going insane. However, it wasn't until the next period did he truly feel the urge to snap.
His class after lunch was Math, something Draco thought might relax him after the stressful first half of his first day. He was after all an excellent mathematician, something every math teacher he'd had from London to Sydney praise him for, and found the combination of equations and complicated formulas as good as a bit of meditation. He had stepped into the class and instantly felt some hope for sanity…until Crabbe and Goyle had bounded in behind him, grunting at him with stupid smiles on their faces. Apparently their math teacher (who taught a much lower grade of math that just happened to be on at the same time as Draco's advanced class) was away sick, and so Professor Granger who taught Draco's class had agreed to merge the two maths together for one day. Feel queasy, Draco had taken a seat at the back with Crabbe and Goyle, who instantly returned to the meaningless drabble they'd been talking about early in the day.
It was then Draco heard them talking to him, and found himself unwilling being pulled into the conversation.
"So where do you live?" Crabbe had asked, and Draco had told them about the small but wealthy village his parents had moved the Malfoy's to not far from Hogwarts called Godric's Hollow. Goyle had instantly begun grunting excitedly at the name and waving frantically at Crabbe, who had smiled.
"You didn't move into…the Potter's old house, did you?" He whispered dramatically, leaning so close to Draco he had been able to smell something like rotted fruit on the boy's breath. That had been one question Draco hadn't been able to answer. He didn't know if he'd moved into the Potter's old house, and he also didn't know who the Potter's were. All he knew was the house Lucius had moved the family into had recently been renovated, and was a tad smaller than the home they'd had in America. Draco didn't mind though, because it had a purely English charm to it that he'd been deprived of for two long years.
"Well," Crabbe had smiled knowingly at Goyle, who was giggling with glee, "Let's hope it wasn't the Potter's house you moved into. That place is haunted. With a ghost."
"Not haunted with bats?" Draco had been unable to snap back, irritated that Crabbe thought he wouldn't understand that when he said haunted, he meant by a ghost and not some other evil creature that haunted things.
"Haunted by bats? Bats don't haunt." Crabbe had replied seriously, giving Draco worrying looks for the rest of the lesson like he was the superior one because he didn't mix up bats and ghosts.
Two seconds into the newest chapter of his life, and already he'd heard the word ghost. Draco couldn't understand the fascination with the subject, or why people chose to believe in such nonsense. Ghosts weren't real. If Draco had indeed moved into the Potter's house, which he doubted, he wasn't going to walk down one of its corridors to find a ghost hanging about to scare him anytime in the near future. Because ghosts weren't real. Because Draco Malfoy, son of Lucius and Narcissa Malfoy and heir to the Malfoy fortune, didn't believe in such rubbish.
Unfortunately for Draco, disbelief wasn't going to save him from the ghost of the Potter Mansion.
