Round 2 - Unspoken
3rd Place
The scent is always first. Something offensive drowned in sweetness, cloying and choking. She never speaks until he does first.
"I know you're there."
"Hello, Draco."
The wizard looks up to find a ghostly apparition floating just beyond his desk. Hogwarts is quiet this time of year, summer heat suffused into the very stones of the walls. He spends most days alone. Except, of course, for the ghost of Hermione Granger.
"Hello, Granger." He lays the quill down beside his parchments, lesson plans for next year that have no reason to be rushed. "Care for a game?"
She grins and if the face of a dead woman can light, it does. "If you're ready to lose," she postures in turn, and Draco smiles, indulgent.
Hermione is rubbish at chess.
She loses, of course. Five games in a row. In the quiet following their last match, Draco sips tea and his opponent pouts, transparent arms folded over her chest. He's struck, as he often is, by how young she is. Even as Draco approaches his 30th birthday, she is forever nineteen. Forever beautiful, though a stain of dark color mars her jumper and an angry gash appears to eternally bleed on her arm.
"Why do you stay?" he asks. He never has before, though the curiosity has been there. She looks at him in question.
"Oh, I apologize. Did you need to get back to work?"
Draco shakes his head. "No, I mean… Why haven't you moved on? Across the veil?"
She blinks at him, face earnest and serene. "I stay for you."
"For me?" He blinks right back, confusion settling into the furrow between his eyes. "Why on earth would you stay for me? Don't misunderstand," he adds quickly. "I quite enjoy it when you visit." (It wouldn't do to have an angry spirit haunt him after all.) "But it's not as though I gave you any reason to care for me when you were alive."
"And yet, here I remain," she says, shrugging her thin shoulders.
She leaves soon after, offering no more insight, and Draco falls back into his routine until she returns. She always returns eventually, and the years pass.
They pass until he has aged through his career and sits as head of Slytherin house. They pass as he realizes his days to sire an heir are behind him. They pass, and she is constant, playing chess and smiling at him, forever bleeding from her tattered arm. Forever beautiful, floating inches off the ground.
When his years end, when Draco thinks to rise in the morning only to look down and see his aged body left behind, she's standing there, the ever-present scent of Gardenia surrounding her, and she offers him her hand.
"I was here for you," she reminds him, and he finally understands: Affection unspoken that he has come to share.
Sliding his hand into hers, she has form and warmth once again, and he follows her across the veil.