Warnings and Disclaimers: Um. Lack of anything resembling a plan? I'm feeling my way through the dark, here. And that last scene just popped out of nowhere.
Wufei yelled again, toppling backwards in his shock as a hand fumbled for his gun. Getting it free, he pointed it at the apparition. "What the hell!"
Harry stared at the gun pointed at his nose, his eyes going a little cross-eyed as he tried to focus on it. "And just what do you think that will do?" he asked, caught somewhere between amusement and irritation. The ghost leaned forward and pointedly waved his hand through the weapon.
For a long moment the only sound in the room was Duo's laughter as he rolled on the bed clutching his sides. Then Quatre broke the semi-quiet. "I can feel you, Harry, but... I'm afraid I don't see you."
The American stopped laughing, and he and Harry both turned to look at the Arabian. "You can't?" they asked in unison.
He shook his head. "Neither can I," Trowa said, still searching the space Harry was standing in. "Though there is a faint shimmer when I look from the corner of my eye."
Quatre blinked and turned his head to the side. "Oh, yes, I see it. It almost looks like a heat wave..."
"You... you really can't see him?" Wufei asked, still staring at Harry in something akin to horror. His gun was still aimed, but his hand was wavering.
The blonde shook his head, oblivious to the way the ghost was now frowning. "That's quite rude, you know," he told the pilot, his voice even more clipped and accented than before. Gathering his will, Harry reached out again, and this time gently pushed the gun down.
The Oriental boy was too startled to resist. "What the hell?" he said again in a bewildered whisper.
"Harry? How are you doing that?" Duo asked, sitting up.
"Technically I'm not a ghost," Harry answered, feeling himself waver. A gun was much harder to affect than a light switch, and it was a moment before he could get the wards to give up enough magic for him to stabilize.
There wasn't much left, and he felt a familiar pang of worry. The wards wouldn't support him much longer, and after that...
No one was sure what happened to ghosts who ran out of magic. Maybe they moved on, maybe not. Harry didn't really want to find out.
"You're not?" Duo looked confused, and a little wary.
Harry shook his head. "I'm a poltergeist. If I have enough power and I work at it I can touch things. But it takes more power to appear during the day than the night."
"You managed it that first day," Duo protested. "You knocked my laptop over!"
Eyebrows raised at that, and Harry flushed silver. "Er, right. Sorry about that... I hadn't exactly exerted myself in a while, so I had some magic stored."
"Magic," Wufei muttered. His face was pained, and he seemed to have given up on getting up off the floor.
The wizard glanced at Duo. "I take it you didn't tell them about that part?"
The American shrugged. "Hey, wasn't really expectin' them to believe me about you."
"Good point."
"Would one of you please translate for us?" Quatre asked, his voice syrupy sweet with irritation. "In case you've forgotten, we can't hear him!"
The room fell to silence.
Harry carefully edged over to Duo, not taking his eyes off the little blonde. "He's... rather frightening at times, isn't he?" Wufei took the opportunity to rise and move to the far side of the room from the specter.
Duo grinned. "He says you're scary sometimes," he obediently relayed.
Quatre looked taken aback, and Trowa pulled him down to sit on his lap. "This from a ghost?" the brown-haired pilot commented.
"Poltergeist," Duo and Harry corrected together, though of course Wufei was the only other person who could hear the latter.
"What's the difference?" Quatre asked, leaning forward.
Harry thought for a moment, then stepped over to the bookshelf. The few books still resting in it were his; someone had come, during that whirlwind of insensibility that was all he could remember of the first few weeks after his murder, and removed all his clothing, but they'd missed everything else. Now, he reached out and, focusing, edged out one of the volumes.
He would have done more, but the little energy he'd gathered ran out fast. There almost wasn't enough left to sustain clear visibility until they would reset at midnight.
The other boys noticed the way he flickered, too. "Harry?" Duo asked. Even Wufei looked concerned.
"I don't have a lot of magic left," Harry answered, half of his attention on the wards. The American translated sotto voce. "The wards will regenerate at midnight, but until then..."
Aquamarine eyes widened in curiosity. "Wards?"
The ghost wasn't sure who to direct his words to now. Finally he shrugged and just turned directly to Duo. "There were blood wards set on the house when I was a baby. They were supposed to protect me-" Wufei interrupted with an eloquent snort, "but now they produce just enough magic for me to, well, not really live off of, but you get the point."
"I wonder if these wards are what is preserving the house?" Quatre murmured. "That would explain quite a lot."
Harry flickered again, and when he stabilized he was noticeably dimmer than before. Duo frowned. "Man, you weren't kidding when you said ya didn't have much left."
The ghost shook his head. "No, I wasn't."
He couldn't keep all of his worry out of his voice, but thankfully only Duo seemed to hear it. The American studied him for a long minute, his frown deepening, but in the end he just shook his head. "You should probably rest, or whatever it is ghosts do. We can bug you later. Midnight, right?"
Harry nodded in gratitude. Ghosts couldn't really exhaust themselves, not in the normal sense anyway, but he was definitely feeling strained. "Midnight, yeah."
"Wake me up, then." Duo blinked. "Um, if ya can, I mean..."
The ghost smirked. "Oh, I can. Don't worry about that." With a nod to them, he let himself fade out of sight. The floor was no barrier to him, and he headed for his sanctuary under the stairs.
In the room behind him, Duo watched Quatre patiently. The blonde sat with his hand over his heart, concentrating. "He's gone," he finally said. "I can't feel him anymore."
The pilots relaxed as the tension in the room immediately dropped. Duo fell back until he was once again stretched out on the bed, muscles he hadn't even realized were wound tight loosening up. Oh, he liked Harry well enough. He just didn't trust him, especially since with his ability to stay invisible even to those who could see him, only Quatre could sense the ghost if he didn't want to be seen.
"He was worried about something," Quatre continued. "Very worried, but it felt as though he was trying to suppress it."
The American nodded, staring up at the ceiling. "Yeah, he sounded worried when he mentioned there wasn't much magic left. There's somethin' he's not telling us."
Wufei still twitched whenever he heard the word "magic but the reaction was beginning to lessen. "Something that could harm us?"
Duo thought for a moment, then shook his head. "Nah. He doesn't seem like the type to keep back something like that. More probably it's something about him."
"Whatever it is, try to find out later. We can't take any chances." Quatre got up off Trowa's lap and grasped his lover's hand. "Until then, though, I'm sure we all have things to be doing."
He led the other pilots out the door, leaving Duo alone in his room. Or Harry's room, whichever. Harry didn't seem to spend much of his time in it, though maybe that was really just out of consideration for Duo's privacy…
And just where did the ghost go, when he wasn't following him around? The braided boy decided to ask just that when Harry showed up again.
-
Wufei sat on his bed in the former guest bedroom, his normally good posture for once nowhere to be found as he slumped with his head in his hands. He didn't want to believe. He'd believed once, when he was very young; believed in magic, and things that he could see but no one else could.
His mother had encouraged him in it, telling him the old tales of her family every night before she tucked him into bed. She spoke of an entire world filled with people like him, one that had fallen to darkness long ago, and told him he was something truly special. But his father was a proud man, not one given to such superstition. When he found out about the stories, he forbade his wife to tell the young, impressionable boy any more of them, enforcing it when necessary with the back of his hand. When she sickened and died not more than a year later, despite all the doctors could do, he considered the matter over and done with.
Events seemed to prove the man right. The strange happenings around his only son slowed, then stopped altogether, and Wufei no longer saw things others couldn't. As the years passed, he grew to dismiss his fading memories as the daydreams and fancies of a child who'd grown up without other boys his age to play with.
But now it was happening again. He'd seen something far out of the realm of ordinary, and Maxwell shared that vision. Winner sensed him with his empathy, and even Barton could see something. Harry was real, and logic concluded, however reluctantly, that all the things he remembered from his childhood were real as well. The world had just become a very strange place, one that demanded he believe in things he'd been told were nothing more than flights of fancy.
And now Wufei, usually so confident in all that he did, didn't know what to do.
It was a supremely uncomfortable feeling.
A/N: All right, that's it, I'm just going to burn any future attempts at planning. I can't seem to follow them for more than a chapter or two anyway. Heero should be here soon, though…
I probably should work on this more, but I just got my first cavities filled in, and despite all the reassurances of the nurse the Novocaine's making my head fuzzy. I think I'll go lie down… Ta!
Our most sincere gratitude to A-Brighter-Dawn, Akua, A lilmatchgirl (Personally, I think it's because of that damn stick up his arse. Heero has one too, but he's lethal to play with.), Capricious Purple Clarity, CatClawz, Cor-chan (Yep. sighs), elusive, Fate, Firehedgehog, Goku Koneko Sage, jordan, kinguofdoragons, kirallie, LassyD, Makurayami Ookami, maleficus-lupus, Maryna, Mithros, momocolady, Omnicat, Shinigami, Shinigami-chan, Sliver of Melody, stuck-in-a-tree, Sutoomu, sydneydallas, Toki Mirage, webwever (grins I'm glad someone picked up on that before I came out and said it), VB, Wraith, and YumiAngel for reviewing.
Special thanks to Makurayami Ookami and Sutoomu for actually going through and reviewing each chapter.
14 November 2005
