BONUS TRACK

[Hermione Granger x Barty Crouch Jr]

It's where we go
It's where we'll be
I know if I'm onto you, I'm onto you
Onto you, I'm onto you
Onto you, you must be onto me

Haunted / Beyonce [2013]

Luck had never been a friend of Barty Crouch Jr, but then again, maybe the good lady had merely been biding her time.

He had been thrown across the room in a jerking mass of limbs. Then his blood seemed to fizz with a familiar tingle as his outward disguise melted away. The next moment Dumbledore was standing, no, looming over him, and demanding an explanation. As if the old bastard didn't already know everything.

Harry Potter was cowering in the corner with a look of pure astonishment on his face and Barty supposed he should have felt fear. After all, this was the end, wasn't it? There didn't appear to be any way out now. Yet all his mind registered was elation. His Lord, his master, had done it. He was back. Voldemort had a corporeal form again. It didn't matter what happened to him now. As far as Barty was concerned, he had served his purpose. The plan had never included an exit for him, and he had known what that meant at the time he was given his orders. Barty was glad to do it. He was glad to do anything that furthered their cause.

Barty saw his wand on the other side of the room and wondered why Dumbledore didn't point his own under his chin. He could have incapacitated him a hundred times over by now, and yet he stood there watching proceedings without once becoming the true aggressor Barty knew him to be.

Still affecting the visage of a wise old grandfatherly headmaster then? And people thought his Lord was twisted.

But then a door crashed open, and the tension in the small dark room shifted. It didn't disappear. It was as if the pressure in the air rippled before crashing down again in a different pattern.

The game board had been reset.

Barty had expected backup, McGonagall, Flitwick or maybe even an official from the tournament, but instead, a panting Ron Weasley and Hermione Granger all but fell into the space.

It was an opening, a minute one, but Barty had worked with less.

He disarmed the headmaster with a single wave of his hand. A push of magic timed to perfection. It shouldn't have worked, but it did, Barty took it as a mark of fate's desire to smile on him. He was long overdue such a blessing.

Barty only had a split second to decide on what to do next. Killing the boy was out of the question, killing Dumbledore was too off-piste, even for him. It hadn't been part of the plan. There was a sequence to how these things needed to be done, everything at the right time.

Barty fired a hex, and the headmaster froze in space, a look of surprise just visible in the gentle raise of his brow. Barty had the urge to spit at him. But he didn't, there wasn't time. The magic wouldn't last long; Dumbledore was too strong.

The students in the corner of the room scrambled, all talking over each other and Barty honed in on them.

"Eeny, Meeny, Miny, Mo," he cooed manically, waving his wand between the two teenagers that were still up for grabs.

When his wand point landed on the girl with the wild hair, he shrugged. "Hard luck, Miss Granger."

His shot was accurate: how could it not be in such close quarters? Hermione Granger fell to the floor with a thud that knocked the remaining air from the room.

Then there were screams.

"Be seeing you," Barty said to Potter as he walked out of the door. The boy was too stunned to move, and Barty cursed for the hundredth time that year that he couldn't kill him himself, and save his Lord the trouble.

Barty was already at the end of the corridor when he heard rushing feet in the other direction.

It sounded like the cavalry was about to arrive.

What a pity they were too late.

When his Lord heard what Barty had done when he left Hogwarts behind as little more than a fever dream, he laughed. The sound was raspy, and far less precise and intoxicating than it had been when Barty first joined his side, but it was thrilling all the same. He was back. He was real.

Barty knelt next to the grand chair in the Malfoy's ground floor sitting room as Lord Voldemort's fingers danced against the back of his skull. His grip tightened as he huffed out his amusement and Barty clenched his fists to keep himself calm.

Physical contact was… problematic. It had always been that way. Barty found he craved touch and feared it in almost equal measure. He existed in a constant state of starvation, but at the same time, forever worried that the next piece of bread might be the one that would break him.

"I am pleased you have returned, Barty," Lord Voldemort said. His words were a whisper in the wind. "You will be needed."

It was a command more than an observation, but one that Barty was happy and eager to obey.

"I am my Lord's faithful servant," Barty replied, and his Lord smiled.

"That you are."

Barty knew he could have been spared the trip to Azkaban for the breakout; he would have been granted a reprieve, he was sure of it. After all, he was currently enjoying the unrivalled privilege of being his Lord's favourite. One word and his Lord would have told him he could help elsewhere. But Barty never asked. He wanted, more than anything, to be useful.

He had done everything, and anything asked of him since taking his rightful place at his master's side, and he had impressed at every turn. It hadn't even been that hard. Considering his Lord had survived with just Wormtail, there wasn't much in the way of competition, but that was about to change.

Barty had taken great pleasure in blasting a hole into the side of a building he once believed would be his tomb. He met the steely eyes of Reuben Yaxley with a smirk that the large, severe man didn't return. Barty didn't care; he had other tasks to complete.

He knew in his blood that this would be his last time here, there was no way he would come back again, and so Barty hadn't been able to resist the pull to visit his old 'room'.

This is where she perished, Barty thought to himself as he trod on the slates he had stepped on thousands of times. There was no trace of her left behind. Not that he had honestly expected to find any. Dementors weren't big on keepsakes.

He had brought death to both of his parents in the end. His father had never expected anything less. It didn't hurt as much as it should have done, or as much as it had, in the past.

Barty pressed a hand against the cot where his mother must have laid and closed his eyes as he tried to imagine her there. He shut out the noises in the distance, the explosions and the screams, and focused on what she looked like, how he remembered her.

After a time, he thought he could feel a presence, but when he opened his eyes, they were gone.

Barty made no secret of the fact he had no time for the other Death Eaters. It took more than sharing a uniform to prompt trust and warm regards. It had never been a social club, and despite his now years of faithful service, Barty had never thought that any of the rest of them were half as dedicated or as useful as him. He hated the former prisoners less than the rest, at least they had never denounced the only fundamental truth of their lives to save their own worthless skin.

Work continued, and Barty went on missions with whoever he was assigned to without question or hesitation. Though, he couldn't stop himself from indulging in the odd bit of friendly fire, when he could get away with it, which was surprisingly often.

He heard Yaxley tell Dolohov that he was 'as mad as Bellatrix', but Barty neither cared or believed him. Bella was rabid with her devotion; he was much more effective than that.

Just when Barty felt like he was settling into the new routine, things started to change. Not the assignments, or his peers, or Merlin forbid, his Lord, but him. Something was changing with him.

At first, Barty put it down to stress; he wasn't sleeping well, which made his concentration falter often. There was just so much to do, so many ways to prove himself and he wanted to achieve them all. But he was so tired.

Whenever he had been awake, planning long into the night, Barty started to think he was seeing things. It happened repeatedly. It was just glimmers at first, a hint of something whole that would never fully form—a flash of white that would blur at the corner of his eyes and then dance away.

It started happening more and more until it was almost every day. He worried that his senses were failing, that his sanity was abandoning him, that he was becoming redundant.

Barty resolved to drink a little less and eat a little better. His time in prison had taken its toll on his body. He owed it to his mother to try and keep going. He owed it to his Lord to be as fit as he could be, the perfect vessel for the execution of his plans.

The first time he saw her, Barty thought he must have been dreaming. Lately, he had been so sleep deprived that the lines between reality and hallucinations were ever thinning. But somehow he knew he was awake when it happened.

She appeared, sitting opposite him in the library one evening as if she had every right to be there.

That was all she did. She stopped by him as Barty poured through an ancient tome, and when his hand trembled at the sight of her, she smiled. Then she was gone.

But Hermione Granger didn't stay gone.

The next time she appeared, Barty was walking down a corridor, McNair beside him, on their way to report following a boring but successful mission.

Hermione didn't even look at him; she kept up an even pace, moving in the other direction. She had a sereneness about her that reminded Barty of the grey lady, but she seemed more... whole than the Hogwarts ghost. But McNair did not make any comment that would suggest he had seen her. McNair noticed all women in his general proximity, dead or not, Hermione Granger would have warranted a mention.

When Barty turned around, she was turning at the other end of the corridor.

She didn't look back.

The pattern repeated over the next month. She bled into Barty's life like inkblots, accidentally dashed all over a freshly written page. Unwanted and derailing. Hermione Granger popped up seemingly when she felt like it, no matter where Barty would be when the mood struck her. Sometimes she looked at him, sometimes not. Sometimes her face held a small, knowing smile, other times she had no expression at all.

The first time she spoke, it was in the dead of night. Barty woke to get some water and there she was, sitting in his favoured armchair and looking out of the window.

"I've been speaking to your mother Barty," she said without even looking in his direction. "She's most disappointed in you."

Barty froze by the side of his bed and felt the cold air eat at his threadbare pyjamas.

"Stop it," he bit out and stormed from the room.

As he paced down the corridor with his insides squirming, Barty's mind flittered back to the long white dress she had been wearing, and how it had been splattered with blood. The blotches had been illuminated in the moonlight—Red, semi-dried pools that clung to her skin.

Hermione Granger hadn't been wearing that when he killed her, Barty was sure of it, and there shouldn't have been blood. He'd killed her with a dispassionate shot of green to the chest. He hadn't wanted to waste the valuable time he had gained by taking it slow.

It didn't make sense.

When he returned to his room, having sated one kind of thirst, she was gone.

Pondering his sanity was not a new activity for Barty, and yet, although familiar, it was an action that brought him no pleasure.

The hovering at the side of his sight continued, as did the occasional words from the girl. It tapped on his nerves and grated on his resolve. There were too many questions. Why her? Why now? Hermione Granger wasn't even his latest victim, and she was far from his most noteworthy. Why was it her? Why was this girl tormenting him?

Barty took to checking all corners of his room before he went to bed at night, but it made no difference, she showed up whenever she liked and used her presence and her words like sandpaper against his senses.

He would beat this.

He would beat her.

"You're chewing your lip again Barty," the lingering sound of her voice tickled at his senses, and it made Barty drive his teeth into his lip all the harder.

"Trouble sleeping?" she all but sang as he tossed and turned in bed. The faint sound of her laughter followed him up the hall after he had thrown off his sheets and abandoned his room.

Barty kept his back straight as he knelt in front of his Lord and felt him rip through his mind. He had long grown used to submitting himself to mental evaluation at the drop of a hat, but he never got used to the pain, it was chronic.

As a child, Barty had learnt to box things up and keep them hidden away, occasionally, deliberately letting his mask slip so his father could glimpse what really lurked behind his typically impassive eyes. There was no winning in playing such games with his Lord, so Barty kept what he couldn't afford to share tucked away where even his Lord would not find it.

He was loyal; he would always be faithful. But he was broken too, and broken things didn't hold water as well as the rest. When subjected to enough pressure, Barty knew his cracks could give way to form holes. It was already happening. A slither of a girl was crushing the fine porcelain of his sanity beneath her dainty feet.

He couldn't let his Lord know that.

"Why do you keep doing this?"

Barty rested his head against a nearby tree as Hermione walked around him, idly moving in smaller and smaller circles. The air was bitterly cold, but she apparently didn't feel it. Of course, she didn't.

"You took away my life, Barty," she said with a smile he had grown to hate. "I will not rest until I take away yours."

When he got back from his latest mission with a lumbering Rodolphus, Barty found Hermione sitting at the desk in his room, studying the spines of the books he had left there.

"It must kill you," he spat. "Being able to see them but not having the ability to touch, to feel, to read, to remember who you were before I reduced you to a crumpled nothing on the ground."

Tales of her supposed intelligence were legend, Barty had never been overly impressed when he was her teacher, but then, he hadn't been focused on her.

Barty was aiming at a weak spot, and he revelled in it. He expected her to huff in annoyance or snap back at him.

She did neither.

Would he never learn?

"I wouldn't have thought you were able to grasp something as advanced as this," Hermione said, indicating the book on advanced Transfiguration theory. "I thought I understood from stories I'd been told that you were a little… what's the polite word, ah yes, dim."

"Dim?" Barty parrotted back blankly, and Hermione nodded.

"Tapped," she said, knocking a finger against her head. "Not quite the full ticket."

Barty's hands fisted, and she let out a tinkling, delighted laugh. "None of that Barty, it's not like you can hurt me now anyway."

He turned his back on her and walked to the wardrobe, taking off his coat, determined to carry on as if she wasn't there.

"I assumed you were kept around as your Lord likes panting dogs following at his feet. I don't know whether I should be impressed or cross at my poor deductions to find that you're actually somewhat functional."

"You know nothing about me," Barty seethed.

She smiled at him. "Oh, Barty, if only that were true."

Almost a year to the day after he had left Hogwarts after being exposed as a fraud, Barty was back again, part of the recovery mission sent after Lucius' milksop of a son to make sure he dispatched Dumbledore as he had been ordered to.

For once the Death Eaters were in agreement, almost anyone else would have been a better pick for this job. Even Bellatrix, for all her raving, could still pick up a wand and shoot.

She appeared for the first time while he was duelling with a livid, and embarrassingly shabby, Remus Lupin.

"Best hold that arm a bit higher Barty," she scolded. "He's much better than you are."

"I was good enough to kill you," he muttered, and his words drowned out by the battle raging around them,

She grinned. "Yes, I suppose you were. What a pity not all of your opponents will be fifteen-year-old students taken by surprise."

-/-/-/-

Later, once the fighting was all but over and they were planning their retreat, Barty saw her again. Hermione was standing with her head rested against one of the castle walls, or rather, hovering in front of it.

"I miss it," she breathed out, and for a moment she sounded like she had when Barty had been posing as her teacher, when she was alive.

Barty took a step towards her before he could stop himself. As soon as the clip of his boot reverberated around the walls, the moment was broken. Hermione's eyes shuttered over, and she regarded him cruelly again.

"At least I still have you, Barty. Run along now," she said, shooing him with her arms. "Wouldn't want to get left behind."

"I'll get rid of you," he said darkly. "One way or another, I'll send you packing."

"Good luck with that."

They toasted Dumbledore's demise with Elf-made wine. Draco looked sick. As well he should.

"You continue to impress me," his Lord had said to him, and for the first time, Barty faulted. He could hear her, mocking him. Her words danced around the room as clearly as the music that was playing in the background. She wasn't even there, and he was beginning to imagine she was. He was fraying, the cords of his control were pinging as they separated, snap after crushing snap.

Barty simpered, but it wasn't the same. His bow was mechanical, and his words were formulaic. His Lord regarded him for a long time before he sent him on his way, speaking to the next in line.

Barty released a breath and doubled his resolve. He had to ignore her. His life may very well depend on it.

The inner-circle met more regularly once Dumbledore was gone. They knew it wouldn't be long before they had the Ministry in their pocket. All the dominos were falling on time and in order. They were winning; there was no need to hide.

-/-/-/-

Barty scowled behind his mask as Dolohov was praised for something he deemed trivial. He would have scoffed, but the breath was robbed from his lungs as she stepped out from behind the crouching Russian and shook out her hair.

"Looks like he has a new favourite," she said with faux sweetness. "What will you do to gain his good graces now?

Barty palmed his wand. It was a reflex; he could no more have stopped his hand than he could have prevented himself from taking his next breath. She spotted it.

Hermione walked out from the middle of the circle, extending her limbs elegantly as if she was dancing. Her hand raised and rested next to his cheek.

"That won't work on me Barty, you saw to that. Now be a good boy and pay attention. Your circus is underway."

After that first breach, Hermione was forever at the meetings, polluting the very thing Barty held dearer than a religion with her inferiority.

"What would he say if he knew you were holding on to me?" she asked one night as he laid in bed and Barty threw the clock by his bedside at her. It clunked at her feet, and she looked down at it before looking back up and tsking at him like he was a badly behaved cat.

Barty hated himself for the show of weakness. He shouldn't make it so easy for her. He was better than that.

"Touched a nerve, did I?"

Barty turned over in bed and put his back to her.

It struck Barty as odd that though he had killed her, he had never seen Hermione in pain, not until the Weasley wedding. Her death had been a nothing, a task to take care of to cause confusion and buy him some time. There had been no torture or begging for her life. So he had never known what to look for, until now.

When Barty arrived with the rest of the available Death Eaters, his mind was wholly taken up by the fighting, but it didn't take him long for him to spot her.

Her dress wasn't bloody anymore, it seemed she had given up that little trick some months before… but her now plain white dress stuck out even further in the chaos. At least to his eye.

Hermione was stood next to Harry Potter and his ever-faithful Ron Weasley as the boys whispered among themselves and backed out of the tent.

Hermione gazed after them with shining eyes and one of her arms raised, stretching as if to reach out and touch them. But then, her arm dropped and fell listlessly to her side.

She never bothered to find him before she vanished.

The Ministry fell, as they all knew it would and now they were holding all of the cards. Yet, Barty felt like he was losing his grip on the simplest things. Sleep continued to prove elusive, and he lost his appetite. He couldn't seem to get a moment's peace.

He just wanted to lose himself, just for a moment.

When the others suggested a visit to a local brothel after an incredibly hard week, Barty surprised them by tagging along. It wasn't an activity he engaged in often, but the adrenaline from the prolonged fight or flight he existed in with Hermione had been building in his joints. He needed release of some kind.

After a slow, hard, deliberate fuck that he felt all the way down to his toes, Barty collapsed next to his paid-for company and didn't wake up till the next day.

Hermione appeared opposite him when Barty went to a cafe for breakfast and stole away his resolve in an instant.

"Do I want to know why you picked the one with brown, curly hair?" she asked innocently.

The mug in Barty's hand shattered.

When Potter had gotten away after they ambushed the wedding, his Lord had been angry, but it was nothing to his fury when Dolohov and Rowle came back empty-handed. Barty was incredulous. How had they managed to fuck up such a simple task?

By the time their Lord was finished, they were writhing on the floor. There wasn't an inch of them that wasn't stained with blood.

Barty saw Hermione looking down from between two hooded figures on the other side of the silent circle. He had a fleeting thought that she should leave, that she shouldn't see all this mess.

Hermione looked far from saddened, though. Her face remained neutral, but her eyes sparkled.

It was an expression Barty recognised.

Hermione appeared just like she always did, silently and without warning.

Barty was shaving in the mirror, using a cut-throat razor just like his father had taught him to. He supposed he could have used a spell, but it was a point of pride that he could still do this. No matter what he had injured, his hands were still steady enough.

She appeared as a reflection in the blade before he noticed her in the mirror. Barty thought that her image in the metal was more authentic. It was distorted, muted in colour and cut up by hard lines.

It was real. It was how he saw her.

Potter had been caught, and yet somehow Lucius had let him slip through his manicured fingers. Hermione was jubilant, and in her joy, she followed him around for almost a whole hour, goading him and all but skipping with delight.

"We will kill them, in the end. They'll all be dead, just like you."

Hermione's head tilted to the side and her curls scattered. "Barty, do you ever wonder if I'm not really here?" Barty stopped walking and focused on his breathing. "Do you wonder whether this is all going on in your head?"

"Ghosts are real," he forced out of his permanently gritted teeth.

"That they are, but, if that's what I am, then why can no one else see me?"

Barty stood by the window as Yaxley handed out assignments, he didn't have to pay too much attention, he'd already been pulled aside for a briefing earlier in the day.

Hermione was in the grounds, easily visible despite him peering out at her from a third-floor window.

She had positioned herself on a rustic looking swing that had been tied to an old tree and was carelessly swaying in the breeze. Every time she soared forward, her unnaturally pale limbs would cut through the air and then sweep under her when she glided backwards.

He'd always had the impression she couldn't touch things in the real world, and yet the swing was moving along with her. Maybe it was another trick?

She looked so real that Barty almost asked Severus if he could see her, but he didn't. To reveal such a thing would have been foolish in the highest degree.

Barty was no fool.

Barty craned his neck to the side as he felt his face twist. In out, in and out. That was what he had to do, once he had regulated his breathing, he could slow his heartbeat, then he'd feel more in control. He'd been prone on the floor for the better part of an hour, and the pain still hadn't abated enough to allow him to stand up and get onto the bed.

He knew from grim experience that the longer he stayed down, the worse it would be. Five more minutes, he told himself, five more minutes and then he would try again.

It was her feet that he saw first. Dainty bare toes that appeared right next to his face, almost wholly covered by the soft white of her full skirt.

"Go away," he murmured. He didn't have the energy to scold her like he usually did.

"I could," Hermione mused thoughtfully. "But I don't think you want me to."

Her playful attitude cut like knives against his already raw skin. "I don't want you here," he seethed, and she unceremoniously dropped to the floor, leaning forward and peering at him like he was an exhibit at the zoo.

"Stop, Barty," she said, placing a hand on her chest and setting her face in an expression of mock anguish. "You'll hurt my feelings."

"Bitch," Barty spat slowly, and Hermione fiddled with her fingers.

"Your father wanted to watch," she divulged and grinned knowingly as his body stilled. "I came instead."

Barty's mind screamed at him not to react, not to give her any more power over him. But then, she must have already put so many things together to have mentioned it in the first place. "How does that even work?" he asked, and she shrugged.

"I don't know all the rules."

"I thought all you cared about were the rules."

"And look where that got me," she said and gestured to herself sitting on the floor next to his trembling body. Barty felt a wave of heat pulse through him again, starting at his temples and cascading down to his toes. He needed to move, to take some potions, and to rest. He was so tired.

"Another beating like this and I'm going to end up where you are," he observed through gritted teeth as his head throbbed.

"Oh, Barty," Hermione said, watching him with evident amusement. "We're not going to end up in the same place."

If there was one thing Barty loathed more than Hermione's constant interjections into his otherwise quiet existence, it was the ceremony and pageantry that came along with his chosen path as a Death Eater. He was spending yet another Saturday, cooped up in a dark room listening to other people talk.

Draco Malfoy was giving a speech. It wasn't very good. Barty didn't think Malfoy's heir had even managed to convince himself of the words he was emotionlessly spewing, let alone the room at large. He was doing it with a wand at his back, so to speak, but it was no excuse.

There was a lot of this lately, preparing them for the 'new dawn' and the recruits that would come along with it. Barty didn't much care. Having lived through a few waves of people joining he knew with some certainty, they would be just as useless as the last lot, and the lot before that.

When he was finally free from the overcrowded room, Hermione was waiting on the other side of the corridor, and she wordlessly fell into step beside him until he reached his room. Staying here was a nightmare, but there weren't many viable alternatives, not yet at least. When they won, he could go wherever he wanted. For now…

"Poor boy," Hermione said as she sat on the edge of his bed and Barty scoffed. He was sure Draco could never be considered poor in any sense of the word.

"You don't like him any more than I do."

Hermione laid her head back and looked out of the window. "I wasn't talking about him."

There was a party, an impromptu one they were permitted to have after a job well done the day before. The drinks had been following consistently for an hour, and Barty knew it wouldn't be too much longer before the fighting broke out. They just couldn't help themselves. There was too much emotion, too much ill will, too much mania in one room to be contained forever.

Barty lingered in the shadows and sipped his drink, waiting for the girl in the white dress to appear and ruin his night.

She never came.

"What can I do," Barty asked finally. His pride had ebbed away weeks before until there was nothing of it left. "How can I make it stop?"

Hermione regarded him from one of her favourite places, in his room, in his chair, by his low table. "Jump out of the window," she replied dispassionately, and Barty seethed.

"I'm not fucking joking, Hermione."

Her gaze was unflinching. "Neither am I."

His Lord was angry, very, very angry. Potter had broken into the bank and taken something, that much they all knew. The rest, well, whatever it was, it was not information likely to be shared.

"You know something," he accused Hermione, late in the night when she appeared, sitting by the side of his bed.

"Only a little something," she agreed with a smile and Barty, for the first time, wished he hadn't killed her. He wished Hermione Granger was alive and well and whole enough for him to wrap his fingers around her throat.

"The tables are turning, Barty," she said. "Better make sure you're on the right side when the music stops."

Barty looked across the Hogwarts grounds to where his Lord was lying, slumped over on the floor. Not a single noise could be heard in the vast open space around them. Even the birds had stopped squawking.

After all this time, his mind had finally cracked. He couldn't process this. He remembered the girl falling to the floor just like that, disposable and redundant.

-/-/-/-

For a brief moment, there was nothing, and then there was chaos.

When it was clear that his Lord was not getting back up, the shouting started, then the battle began afresh, then the Auror's began arriving.

Barty dispassionately watched them zoom and land. He would not go back there. He would not. Not now, not when he didn't have any reason to keep ongoing.

"Barty?"

Hermione appeared, she had a dark coloured robe over her usual gown and no smile on her face. When he didn't reply, she stood in front of him, craning her neck so she could look into his eyes.

"It's time to go."

-/-/-/-

Barty followed her out of the chaos and into the quiet of the castle. He ran his fingers over the gouges in the stone as he went, mindlessly putting one foot in front of the over.

Finally, she gestured to a door, and Barty opened it, not questioning why he was now following her command like a lost dog. He had never been a leader; there was something so endlessly comforting about following another, stronger person.

It was an empty classroom, one he initially barely recognised given the change of decor, but as he walked around, it all clicked into place. He knew where he was.

They were where it all began.

"Fitting, don't you think?" Hermione said, and Barty shrugged, he supposed it was.

"Are you ready?"

"I think so," he murmured as he sat down on one of the tables. He just didn't care anymore. He regarded her, standing exactly where she had been that night, almost behind the door. She had never looked more real.

"Will you stay… until it's done?"

"Yes, Barty, where else would I be?"

My haunted lungs
Ghost in the sheets
I know if I'm haunting you, you must be haunting me