Sometimes the hurt is so deep deep deep

You think that you're gonna drown.

Sometimes all I can do is weep weep weep

With all this rain coming down

Patty Griffin - "Rain"

Harry gave rapid, shallow breaths as everything around him exploded into motion. The voices around him were muffled oddly, as if his ears were plugged, the only sound coming through clearly was that of his own rapid heartbeat. Conversely, everything around him was overwhelmingly bright and vivid, making his eyes hurt and his head throb. He squinted, flinching away weakly when unknown hands gripped and prodded him and he gave a whimper he couldn't hear.

There were too many people. They were looking at him and Harry wanted desperately to disappear. Everyone was always looking at him; never leaving him alone. He just wanted to be left alone for once. Forever. And now here were strangers touching him as if he were a commodity and his head was fuzzy and his stomach curiously hollow and Harry didn't understand why he was here in this tiny room. He didn't remember how he'd gotten here.

He turned his head; he was lying down. Had he always been lying down?

"Draco?" he called to the blond figure sat beside his bed but he didn't know if he made any sound.

"You're okay, Harry," said the other boy, curiously gentle. His voice was clearer than those of the strangers bustling around him, but the words slipped out of Harry's grasp like water.

"Make them go away," he begged, but Draco only shook his head, wincing.

"You have to go to hospital," Draco said firmly, voice brooking no argument.

Harry couldn't go to hospital. They would find him. They always found him wherever he went. He'd be in the papers again.

"You can't let them see me!" Harry yelled. He reached across the cavernous distance between them and grabbed Draco's pale arm. "The Prophet-!"

"The Prophet won't find out, Harry. No one will know you're there. I promised, only strangers. No one who knows you will see you," Draco promised. "No one will see you." He repeated the words until they sunk into Harry's muddled mind .

No one would see him.

Harry exhaled, sighing as all the tension left his body at once. No one could see him.

He stared into Draco's cloudy eyes. No one could see him except Draco. He was invisible. He was a ghost.

He was a ghost.

He remembered now: he had died, at Hogwarts. He remembered the train station. Remembered the shock of green and then nothing. He existed in the aether where no one could see him and no one could hurt him.

He lost himself in the grey.

Draco watched, terrified as Harry's eyes fluttered shut. Strangely, he'd felt more secure with a helpless Harry Potter than he did now that he was essentially alone in this strange carriage with its machines and the medi-muggles doing Asclepius only knew what to the prone figure on the cot beside him.

The ride to the hospital took less time than Draco might have thought but still longer than he was comfortable staying in the cramped space inside the carriage. He passed the time counting Harry's faint, rapid heartbeat under the thin skin of his wrist.

The chaos truly began when the carriage stopped. The muggles threw the door opened and quickly rolled Harry out and through a door to a brightly lit interior. Draco himself was ushered along beside them until Harry, the muggles speaking rapidly to the hospital staff, saying words Draco didn't understand and couldn't follow.

Finally, they were parked and Draco was approached by a young woman with her brown hair pulled back sensibly.

"Can you tell us anything about what happened to your friend?" she asked him, and Draco didn't bother to correct her that they could hardly be called friends. The complicated reality of their relationship wouldn't interest her, at least not now.

Draco shook his head. "I saw him last month," he admitted. "I don't remember him looking so bad then, but he's always been thin. His… housekeeper," Draco didn't want to say 'elf', "came to my mother and I just an hour or so ago, worried about him. We knew each other at school, Harry and I. He inherited his house from my mother's cousin. When… when his housekeeper came, I went over and Harry was like this, only worse. He clearly hadn't eaten or bathed in days. I gave him some water and a bath and, and called for someone to come take him here," he stuttered out, raking his fingers through his hair.

"You said his name is Harry?" she asked him and he nodded.

"Harry James Potter, born the 31st of July, 1990."

The woman looked up at him, "So not quite eighteen, then. Does he have any other family?"

"No, his parents died in 1991. He was raised by an extended family member. And aunt, I think. His mother's sister. I don't know her name, though. I never met his family. He lives alone now."

He watched as another blue-dressed muggle, a thin, dark-skinned man inserted an odd tube into Harry's nostrils. "What is that? What are you doing to him?" he demanded, panicking.

"It's a nasogastric tube," the man explained patiently, as if he dealt with hysterics on a daily basis, which Draco assumed he must. "It's going to let us pump some nutrients and medication into his stomach. I'm going to give him an I.V. of saline as well, for the dehydration."

His colleague prompted him once more. "The paramedic mentioned something about delusions?"

Gods, how could he have forgotten. "He thinks he's dead," Draco explained simply. "When I got there he thought I had died as well, since I could see him. He was convinced he was a ghost. I think he was a bit more lucid toward the end, but I can't be sure."

"He… thinks he's dead?" she asked dubiously and Draco shrugged.

"That's what he told me. When I tried to give him water he said he didn't need it because he was already dead. I told him to just pretend and that worked but he fought me all the way. He didn't understand why I was bothering."

"This is going to be interesting," she muttered under her breath, and Draco couldn't help but agree.

Harry faded back in to a different room. He didn't know how much time had passed, but that was nothing new.

"Where am I?" he croaked, blinking slowly at someone in blue-green scrubs.

"Hello, Mr. Potter, it's good to see you awake," said the young woman coming over to study him intently. "You're at St. Bart's Hospital. How are you feeling?"

"How did I get here?" Harry asked.

"I called someone to bring you here," came a familiar voice and Harry turned his head, dark spots colouring his vision for a moment at the too-quick movement before his eyes cleared and Draco Malfoy came into view.

"You… called someone? On a phone?" He thought he remembered Draco earlier but he couldn't place when the memory took place, the events fuzzy.

"Yes. I asked your next-door neighbour."

"Mr. Potter, when was the last time you ate?" the nurse cut in. Harry swung his head slowly back around to the woman.

"I… I don't remember." Why couldn't he remember? Draco Malfoy used a telephone to call what Harry could only assume was an ambulance to bring him to a muggle Hospital, and Harry had no idea why. Had he been injured? Why did it matter when he'd last eaten? He wasn't even hungry. "Why am I here?"

"They're trying to bring you back."

There, at the foot of his bed, was Tom.

Of course.

They must have found some way to bring him back. "But I don't want to go back," Harry said, voice cracking. He felt his face heat and he started to shake. He moved his arm and felt and uncomfortable tug. "What is that?" he asked of the I.V. picking at the tape holding it in place.

"Mr. Potter, please don't mess with that," the nurse gently moved his hand away from the injection site.

"I don't want it," he asserted. He tugged at the tube in his nose, "I don't want these. I don't want to be here. I don't need this!"

The nurse took his hands, holding him still. "Calm down, Mr. Potter. This is a feeding tube. You're in a state of acute malnutrition. It is vitally important that you keep these in."

"Harry, you've got to let her take care of you," Draco added.

"You know what will happen if they bring you back," came Tom's voice over it all.

"You can't bring me back or he'll return! Draco, we're tied! You can't let them bring us back. Just let us go!"

"Where do you not want to go back to, Mr. Potter?" asked the nurse calmly.

"Back to life!" Harry was gasping for breath now. "Just leave me. I can't come back. I don't want to!" He struggled in the nurse's grasp but he was still too incorporeal to have much of an effect on this world. "I want to go back to the dark," he whimpered.

"What did I tell you, Harry," Tom whispered into his ear. "We are the same. We are cursed to repeat what we've done. You will follow in my footsteps because it is your destiny. I will be reborn in you."

"No! I'm not you! I won't let you come back again!"

"Harry!" Draco's voice cut through as more hands came to hold him down, restraining him with leather cuffs. "Stop listening to him, he's not real!"

"Oh, I'm real, Harry. You know as well as I do that I am more real than you are. What are you but a shade? You're nothing. You've never been anything but my shadow. Everything you are is because of me, and when your body is revived it will be me living your life. Just like I always have. Isn't that right, Harry?"

"No…" he tugged against the cuffs, squeezing his eyes shut as he desperately tried to pull them back into the aether.

"Just give in. It's out of your hands now. Stop fighting. Isn't that what you've always wanted? To just… stop? Do that now. Then, when we wake up you just let me do all the work for you."

"Go fuck yourself, Tom," Harry spit. "I won't let them revive us. We're gone for good, so just get used to it."

The next three days didn't get any better.

Draco called Mimsy over from the Manor to help Kreature in getting Grimmauld place back to living condition. Unable to get the floo working, Draco had taken to staying in the sty so that he might be better able to keep an eye on Harry, utilising the Knight Bus to ferry him to and from Saint Bartholomew's Hospital.

Harry faded in and out of lucidity inconsistently.

The delusions brought with them the phantom of the Dark Lord constantly whispering poison that only Harry could hear. He constantly fought with the healers (they called themselves 'doctors' here), claiming not to need the potions they gave him as he was already dead, unable to rationalise his fantasy with the reality of the hospital.

His lucid periods were scarcely any better, however. Fortunately, Draco himself was deemed safe enough, but he grew tense with the medi-muggle ('nurse'?) and outright refused to speak with any of the various doctors. At one point he begged Draco for his cloak and Draco heard the desperation in his voice as he fell asleep that night, eyes catching on the cloak each time he passed it, singing a siren song that he couldn't hear.

Draco didn't know what to make of Harry's fear of being seen, but he suspected it was not a new development. How many times had he sought solace in invisibility? He knew that Harry took no pleasure in his fame and the attention it brought, but he wondered now if his discomfort ran deeper than being merely unsuited to celebrity.

It was on the third day when Harry was officially sanctioned that Draco knew this was not a problem that would be resolved quickly.

If it could be resolved at all.

He didn't know where Harry's friends were, but he suspected it was up to him and the muggles to ensure that Harry Potter wasn't lost forever.

If they couldn't repair what had been broken, Harry really would be nothing more than the ghost he believed he was.