Warnings and Disclaimers: I'm afraid I had to mention that one-sided Harry/Cho thing from canon. Gags Also, the second half of this I wrote on my dad's computer, which only has Wordpad, and thus no Spellcheck. If you see any glaring errors, please point them out so I can fix them.

The clock blinked.

10:47, it told him in bright red numbers.

Just like it had the last time he'd looked. Duo groaned and rolled away from the clock, burying his face in his pillow. Midnight wasn't going to get here any time soon if he kept watching the clock, but he couldn't sleep…

He blamed Harry. His life had been nice and simple… okay, not nice by any stretch of the imagination, but being a Gundam pilot was actually fairly simple, if stressful. Now he was lying awake at night waiting for a meeting with a ghost to talk about what was wrong with magical wards.

Duo had had some pretty weird thoughts run through his head before, but that one had to take the cake, the platter, and all the nice pretty candles with it. Now all he needed was for Dracula to show up with some of his werewolf buddies to make the night complete.

For Christ's sake, Maxwell, don't jinx it!

He groaned again and determinedly shut his eyes. Maybe if he just counted sheep, or something…

-

Harry's eyes opened as he felt a distant something in his perceptions twist and then right itself. Fresh power trickled into him, and he smiled. The resetting of the wards always felt strange, but the results more than made up for it.

Still smiling, he pushed himself upwards, drifting through the ceiling of the cupboard and then the landing above. The Chinese boy who seemed so familiar had already gone to bed, his lights off. There weren't any lights on in the master bedroom, either, but as he passed the ghost heard sounds coming from behind it that made him hurry past, wearing a silvery blush.

When Harry slipped through the door of his old room, he found Duo slumbering restlessly, lying on his back with an arm flung above his head and little frown lines between his eyebrows. Harry spent a moment watching him thoughtfully, before a truly evil plan entered his mind. Smirking, he bent down and thrust his arm through the mattress up to the elbow.

Once he was in position, he slowly brought his hand up, until he was cupping the back of Duo's neck.

Now, what ghosts are made of is called ectoplasm, a substance that, while not quite antimatter, is certainly not matter as the term is generally understood. Scholarly wizards had long before determined that it was, in fact, pure magic given not-quite-corporeal form. This presented a bit of a quandary, for as everyone knew, magic proceeded from life. Ghosts were, by definition, not at all alive, so how could their very firmament consist of something they could not produce?

It was at this point that an enterprising young witch- a muggleborn, actually- noted the much greater concentration of specters, spirits, and spooks in highly magical locations. After a few years of the magical world ignoring her theory, a wizard, who was this time a proper pureblood, stumbled across her notes. He postulated that ghosts in fact fed off of the magic in their surroundings, using it to maintain their identities and non-physical selves.

This was indeed the correct theory, and was accepted by those in the general population who were actually interested in such things.

The other half of Harry's diabolical scheme was better explained by muggle physics. More specifically, energy's tendency to transfer from an area of high energy to an area of low, until equilibrium is reached; this is commonly called conduction, or more accurately in this case, convection. As stated earlier, ghosts absorb magic, along with other, less usable forms of energy from the world around them. In order to facilitate the transfer, ghosts remained at as low an energy level as possible, so as to entice energy to cross over.

The most common manifestation of moving energy is known as heat. In other words, for Harry the Ghost to absorb his needed magic, which usually came in the form of heat, he himself needed to be at as low a temperature as possible. This left his barely-physical self, as it would later be described, "colder than a witch's tit," which he found more than a bit insulting on behalf of his witch friends.

Thus, when Harry put his plan into motion, it was quite understandable why the American went suddenly airborne with a blood-curdling yell.

-

For a moment the house was silent, as Duo struggled to untangle himself from his blankets. Then two doors slammed open, three adrenaline-pumping Gundam pilots piled into the room with drawn weapons, and one ghost wisely decided to return to invisibility.

The others were just in time to see Duo jump to his feet, his violet eyes flashing. "I swear I'm going to kill him!" he snarled, searching the room for his intended victim. "I swear I will! I'll wring his scrawny little neck…"

Trowa glided to the window, making sure the room was covered from all angles. "Who?" he asked, his gun ready in his hand.

"Harry!"

For a minute no one said anything; they just stared at the braided teenager. Finally Wufei uncocked his pistol and stepped further inside. "Maxwell, you do realize he's already dead?" he asked, a growing smirk on his face. "And untouchable besides?"

Duo growled at him, and the martial artist felt an unexpected spark of glee. At last, the American was getting a taste of his own medicine!

If this was the kind of thing they could expect, perhaps sharing a house with a… a ghost, wouldn't be as bad as he'd thought.

-

Duo bent down to grab his blankets, still scowling. "Well, he sure managed to touch me! Put his hand- his freaking cold hand- on the back of my goddamn neck!"

Lowering his weapon, Quatre very carefully looked away, but the pilot still caught the tiny twitch of his lips. Trowa's face was blank, but Wufei's obvious enjoyment more than made up for it.

"You did tell me to wake you up," Harry's disembodied voice echoed through the room, making both Duo and Wufei jump in surprise.

"I didn't mean like that!" Duo told him, looking around the room for their erstwhile host.

Harry faded into view in the corner of the room. "You have to admit, it's not like I have that many options," he pointed out.

The American glared at him. "You couldn't have just said somethin'?"

The ghost gave him an even look. "As I recall, I tried that before. You fell off the bed that time, too."

A choked-off laugh sounded from Wufei's direction, and Duo flushed. "Just... don't do it again, alright? Remember the little discussion we had about heart attacks and how I really don't want to be stuck haunting this hellhole?"

It was Harry's turn to flush, this time, and he nodded. "Sorry. I won't do it again, I promise, it was just..."

A tentative smile crept onto his face, lighting it up, and Duo felt his anger suddenly melt away. It really had been a good prank, now that he could think about it objectively, and Harry had to be desperate for any kind of entertainment after three hundred years alone in this place. He nodded, both accepting the apology and conceding the point.

Quatre sighed in irritation. "If no one's invading and you're not going to translate, then we're going to go back to bed. Tell us about it in the morning."

From the corner of his eye, Duo saw Harry flush again for some reason as the two of them left. He turned to the ghost with a curious expression. "What's with the blushing?"

If anything, the ghost flushed an even brighter silver. "I, er... never really thought going to bed meant making sounds like that..."

Within seconds, Duo was deep in the throes of full-blown laughter, while Wufei merely leaned against the wall, smirking. Mortified, Harry vanished again.

"No, no... come back! I'll... stop laughing, I... swear!" Duo managed to gasp out. "Eventually!"

It was a minute or so before the boy appeared again, having regained control of his blush. Instead, he was frowning at Wufei.

"What is it now?" the Chinese pilot snapped, his smirk fading into a frown.

"I know we've never met before; it's just not possible," Harry said, looking confused. "But you still seem really familiar." He continued staring at Wufei as the other two blinked, startled. "...You remind me of someone I went to school with, a girl a year ahead of me."

Wufei's eyes narrowed, his chauvinistic tendencies coming to the fore at being compared to a female, but the spirit wasn't done. "Her name was Cho Chang."

Duo grinned and started to say something, but then realized he'd never introduced the two. "Yeesh, I almost forgot. Harry Potter, meet Chang Wufei. Wanna bet they're related somehow?"

Harry gave him a startled look, and then drifted nearer to the astonished teenager to peer at him from close range. "No bet. He has her eyes." He suddenly snickered. "I should know, I spent enough time staring at them. I had the biggest crush on her the year before last."

Duo chose to ignore the chronical slippage. Dying probably did not-nice things to your memory. "She was quite the girl, then?"

Harry nodded, floating back to give an obviously-relieved Wufei more room. "She was one hell of a Seeker, and a really good witch, too."

"She was a witch?"Duo asked on autopilot, trying not to frown. Ever since the revelation that Harry had known a possible ancestor, Wufei had been suspiciously quiet... Then his mind caught up with his mouth. "Wait. You were a wizard, she was a witch, and you went to school together? What kind of school...?"

The ghost nodded again. "We both went to the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. The best one in the Western hemisphere, though I don't know about any schools in the East."

"You were organized, had schools, and no one noticed!"

Harry snorted. "We had our own world, and no one noticed because the Obliviators erased the memory of anyone who did."

There was a short, sudden intake of air from Wufei, and Duo knew the other pilot's mind had followed the same course as his own. "A world no one knew about, and you died three hundred years ago," the braided boy said slowly, putting the pieces together. "Right around the same time a war starts with no known combatants, and no visible winner. That's... one hell of a coincidence."

He kept his eyes on Harry, and was rewarded with the slightest widening of his colorless eyes. "What the hell was going on back then?" he asked, leaning forward.

"And why the hell were you involved?"

A/N: Yes, I know, been forever, yada yada. I actually enjoyed writing this chapter, though, which I hadn't the last one. Hopefully the chapter will reflect that... As noted above, please point out any spelling errors (I'm anal retentive/paranoid about 'em).

My thanks and a hug to everyone who reviewed last time.

7/8 June 2006 (it's midnight as I'm posting, take your pick)