Sleeping on the Edge of the Sky

Chapter 2: Forget What You Can't Play

Something was different. He was surrounded by darkness and felt weightless, but that was no different from how he'd been before. He'd been floating in darkness for as long as he could remember, it seemed, and then all of a sudden he had felt something shift, as if the very universe had been thrown momentarily off balance. There was something...something was off...and then Draco realized that the air around him was cool and smelt like earth. He felt the air and he smelled it, and he couldn't remember the last time he'd done those things.

Tentatively he reached out, trying to touch his surroundings, and realized with a start that he could see his hand. It looked very pale, but in an odd pearly sort of way. In fact, it seemed slightly transparent; he could see some of the black filtering through his hand. Then he remembered the faint scent of nightshade and the Room of Hidden Things, and he knew. He was dead. He was dead but he was moving his hand and he could see through said hand. He was a ghost; there was no other explanation.

Experimentally, he sat up; he could feel earth and wood surrounding him, but the feelings were hardly tangible, as if he were somehow feeling them from some great distance. Earth...wood...a ghost—he was buried! Horrified, Draco jumped away from what he now knew to be his body...and kept floating up through the coffin lid and the dirt piled on top of it, and straight out into the grey autumn sky. Even though the sun was mostly blocked by thick clouds the sudden light was blinding and he immediately had to squeeze his eyes shut, he was so overwhelmed by the abrupt activation of his senses.

He took a deep calming breath then remembered that he didn't need to breathe. Merlin's pants, this was weird. He paused, considering; he'd just been in a coffin with his own dead body, and some morbid part of him was wondering what that body looked like. Actually, no, he really didn't want to see that, because even if he'd been buried for only a few days his body would already be starting to decay. Gross. How long had he been dead? And where was he?

Draco straightened and glanced around him. Green hills glittered with morning frost, and not too far away was a still, dark forest. It looked a lot like the Forbidden Forest, actually. He tried to remember if there had been a forest near the Malfoy family plot. He was pretty sure there wasn't. He turned slowly around and saw...Hogwarts? It looked exactly as he remembered it; not a single stone was different. But his being at buried at Hogwarts made no sense. It might not even be legal. But he'd committed suicide (Draco winced at that thought), and in doing so had dishonored the Malfoy family name. There was some unspoken rule that Malfoys did not admit defeat or show weakness, and killing oneself was a surefire way to break that rule. His father had probably refused to bury Draco on family ground.

Draco stared at the castle. It looked so peaceful, a sanctuary that held that answers to his questions. He may have been dead for three days or three hundred, but at the moment Draco did not care what year it was. He started for the castle, briefly noting that his feet glided a good meter off the ground. It wasn't like he had anything to lose, he mused as he floated straight through the front doors. He was already dead.

The entrance hall had not changed from his days as a student, and the school corridors still held the mixed scents of parchment and pumpkin, with a faint underlay of owls and Dungbombs. From farther down the corridor there floated a faint roar, as if a great river was rushing tumultuously past, but it was really the roar of hundreds of students conversing while they ate their food in the Great Hall. Cautious but curious, Draco glided toward the Hall, eager to see if he would recognize anyone there and also a bit anxious about what he would do if he ran into one of his old friends. What did a ghost say if a living friend asked why he had killed himself?

The ceiling of the Great Hall was the same dull grey as the sky outside was, and thousands of candles hovered high above the tables. It took a moment for him to register at first, as the uniforms the students wore were of the same style as the uniform he did, but none of the students' faces were familiar ones. As he peered around the door, he noticed that some of the younger students at the nearby Hufflepuff table were pointing at him. He glared at them and they quickly turned, their widened eyes attesting to how intimidating his glare was even though he was nothing but vapor.

He was smirking to himself when he saw McGonagall. The Professor's face was drained of color as she gazed at him, and beside her Snape looked like he was on the verge of a conniption fit. And even from this distance, it was not hard to see that Dumbledore's eyes were definitely not twinkling. Bugger. He'd forgotten about the teachers. Suddenly ashamed, he turned his back to the Great Hall and fled. Even as he flew away he felt a faint tugging at his back, like someone was trying to pull him back to the hall, but he continued his flight.

He did not want to be seen.

XxXxXxXxXx

Hermione was in a surprisingly cheerful mood when the trio when down to breakfast. Her explanation was that none of them had been caught wandering around last night, and none of them had been hurt when the potion exploded. "But we really must start another batch of the potion tonight," she'd added, heaping sausage on Ron's plate and pouring herself some pumpkin juice. Harry didn't question her explanation; he was already trying not to fall asleep. History of Magic was going to be Hell today.

Ron tugged at the sleeve of Harry's robe. "Look!" He pointed to the doors, and Harry and Hermione looked over and saw a ghost drifting in the doorway. Ghosts were common at Hogwarts; Harry was friends with Nearly Headless Nick, the Gryffindor ghost, and had been teased by Ron on several occasions about the fact that Moaning Myrtle clearly had a crush on him. The Fat Friar was a friendly Hufflepuff ghost, the Grey Lady was the aloof Ravenclaw spectre, and the Bloody Baron was the creepy Slytherin ghost. There were other ghosts floating around, but the ghost at the doors of the Great Hall did not look familiar.

He was boy, quite tall and thin, and his pearly translucence made it hard to tell what his coloring had been when he was alive. His face was slim and pointed and his hair was smooth and combed. What was shocking about him, however, was the clothing he wore. They were Hogwarts robes, replete with a crest on the left side of the chest. The only ghost he'd seen who wore Hogwarts robes was Moaning Myrtle. Harry couldn't tell what House the boy had been in, and even as he leaned closer to try and examine the crest, the ghost boy vanished.

As soon as the boy disappeared from sight, Harry felt a tug in his chest, like an icy finger wrapping around his heart and pulling him forward. "Do you guys feel that?" A swift glance at Ron and Hermione told Harry that they did, and Harry clambered out of his seat, abandoning his kippers and juice. "Come on!" Without glancing back to see if his two friends were following, Harry strode toward the spot where the ghost boy had been standing. The tugging was more insistent now, and by the time they reached the doors they were running. Harry followed corridors, led by the icy feeling but having no idea where he was headed. He needed to find the ghostly boy; that would make the ice go away...he ran up a lengthy flight of stairs and made a sharp right, and stopped. They were on the seventh floor, and a few paces ahead was the wall that masked the Room of Requirement.

Heart thudding, Harry leaned against the wall to catch his breath. Hermione staggered beside him, clutching a stitch in her side. Ron leaned against the wall beside Harry, breathing raggedly.

"Did you see the teachers' faces?" Hermione asked once she had regained her breath.

"No," said Harry, nettled that she was thinking about teachers when the ghostly boy was clearly more important at the moment.

"Huh?" wheezed Ron.

"The teachers," snapped Hermione. "When they saw the boy. Snape looked like he was going to faint."

Harry had a sudden mental image of Snape swooning to the floor in front of the entirety of the Great Hall. The thought cheered him considerably, but his glee was quickly dashed when Hermione asked, "Don't you understand what's going on here?"

"No." Ron was breathing steadily now, although his face was still quite as red as his hair.

"It was that potion! I was doing the incantation when it exploded!"

"And?"

"I think it worked! I think it healed that dead boy enough that his spirit was brought back to life!"

"Then what's with the--?" Ron gestured to his chest to indicate the tugging feeling.

Harry blinked. "Then how do we know we didn't bring anyone else to life?"

"It wasn't a very strong spell, Harry. I don't think it reached very far. And I think..." she hesitated before plowing on. "I think we felt that...feeling... because we brought him to life. We're connected to him."

Harry and Ron exchanged glances, and Hermione huffed.

"I don't know about you two, but I'm going to the library." And she marched off.

XxXxXxXxXx

"Necromancy," murmured Hermione while flipping through a large black book with pages yellowed and warped with age. It seemed to emit a soft whimpering sound with every turn of the page. "We are connected to him. We can control him."

Harry turned a page in his own book, which had a lot of grisly pictures of corpses brought back to life by necromancers. It was quite horrible to look at, and he was skimming through it as fast as he could. "But how do we send him back?"

"Well...ghosts are spirits who chose to stay on earth..."

"He didn't choose to stay," Harry reminded her.

She shrugged. "There must be something..." She bent over the book and continued perusing, leaving Harry to put the rest of the unhelpful books back on the shelves.

While slipping Theurgic Magic and the Occult back onto its shelf, Harry caught a glimpse of bright red Weasley hair. Ron was standing not in the Restricted section but in front of a row of shelves that contained hundreds of thin books. As he neared the shelf, Harry saw that they were yearbooks; they all bore the Hogwarts crest and House colors, and few had the school motto etched onto their front covers. Many of the older ones were evidently being held together only with magic; their bindings were loose and slumped hopelessly.

"Look at this," Ron shoved the yearbook he was holding at Harry, open to a page that showed several bored-looking sixth years, all of them bedecked in Slytherin robes. "This one," added Ron, jabbing a finger at a boy in the third row of photos. "Draco Malfoy," Harry read, training his eyes on the picture.

Malfoy had the same slim, pointed features as the ghost boy; his hair was also smooth and sleek, and his skin and hair were so fair that he didn't look much darker than he did in ghost form. He peered up at them curiously, silver eyes searching them as they examined him. Harry imagined it must be very boring to live in a yearbook.

"That's him." Harry glanced at the front cover of the yearbook. It was from early 1983, and the school motto was emblazoned below the year.

Draco Dormiens Nunquam Titillandus.

Never Tickle a Sleeping Dragon.

Too late for that.