How To Make a Ghost Disappear

Title: How To Make A Ghost Disappear
Category: Gen, with a hint of Cedric/Cho and Harry/Ginny
Rating: PG-13
Summary: It isn't that Harry Potter can't get rid of a certain ghost; it just won't rid itself of him.
Notes: For fidgetknickers, who understands the need for more Deadric; and bgeezus, who didn't roll her eyes too hard.


How To Make a Ghost Disappear

Spells

"Expecto Patronum!"

Harry Potter's stag Patronus erupts from his wand like a thought, swift and without hesitation, becoming corporeal in a fraction of a second. In the fading light of dusk, the details of its antlers and eyes glow with eerie and near-malevolent clarity. Its rack of horns is wider than the fender of Arthur Weasley's deranged Ford Anglia. The stag's mouth opens in a silent bellow as it rushes headlong into the figure perching atop the bone white gravestone of Thomas Riddle Senior.

"Damnit, Potter." The ghost of Cedric Diggory glares, offended. "I'm a ghost, not a Dementor!"

The Patronus passes through Cedric's transparent torso and, like smoke hitting a wall, explodes and dissipates in bluish wisps.

"Cedric?" Harry lowers his wand. It is battered after many a skirmish with the Dementors roaming the countryside, where they mate and nurse their fledglings. But he keeps its point aimed at Diggory, not because he's afraid but because his fears lately have found a way of exploiting the burden of his griefs.

"Yeah."

Ask For Forgiveness

They stare at each other. Harry can see in the other boy's eyes that he, too, is recalling the last time they were together: nearly three years ago, fresh from the jittery pull of a portkey and still panting from their ordeals in the Transfigured maze. This is the true Hogwarts champion. Diggory looks the way he did when he died -- his handsome face glistening with sweat and dotted with dirt, his robes torn at the sleeves and his hair ruffled -- recalling the deathday stories of the Bloody Baron and Sir Nick. His chest, Harry notices, has a curious pence-sized mark.

"That's where I was hit," Diggory answers. "Don't worry," he presses on, seeing the horror on Harry's face. "It didn't hurt. It was quick."

His Hufflepuffian earnestness shines through his colorless eyes. Harry thinks of thestrals and finally lowers his wand.

"I'm so sorry, Cedric," he says, hearing his voice crack as he picks his way through the wild weeds carpeting the Riddle Estate's garden. "I'm so, so sorry."

Do Him a Favor

"I'm stuck here," Diggory explains, leaning uselessly against the gnarled trunk of an elm tree. "I can't leave this graveyard. You know, just like Hogwarts' ghosts can't leave the castle."

Because this is where you died unjustly, Harry adds silently.

"So, will you do it?" Diggory asks, hopeful.

"I'll try. But I can't promise anything."

Harry is amazed with the way he can keep promises. Mrs. Diggory looks at him over the lip of a flawless blue teacup, and right then he sees where Diggory got his green-gray eyes and the doom-inviting belief in fair play. Mr. Diggory, locked away in his personal study, had refused to see him.

"Mr. Potter?"

When he explains, the teacup begins to shake. When she chastises him for disrespecting the dead, Harry refuses to falter, convincing himself that this is a mission and not a selfish imposition on a stranger. He has faced so much evil, but finds that Mrs. Diggory is harder to deal with than a Death Eater ambush. The orphan in him envies and is tempted to begrudge her son of this petty but important happiness, but it passes and he is again Harry Potter, Gryffindor champion, unwilling hero, and resigned to live his numbered days in a state of penitence.

"...And Cedric said that he was sorry for that row you two had the day of the Third Task," Harry continues, averting his gaze from Mrs. Diggory's quiet sobs. Did his mother cry like that for him? Would she now, had she lived? "He didn't mean it -- whatever it was, he wouldn't tell me -- and he loves you very, very much. To Mr. Diggory, he wanted to say that he always felt proud to be his son. He thanks you for his happy life."

"Oh...Oh, Cedric." Tears leak between Mrs. Diggory's fingers, disturbing the placid surface of her cold tea like raindrops.

Or Two

His reception at Chang Manor is not as warm.

Cho Chang takes one look at him and orders two barrel-chested men to show him out. Harry had been marvelling over the parlor room's austere beauty, and had been embarassed to admit that he had been expecting expensive oriental rugs, bamboo and silk screens and ink paintings of dragons and bejeweled fish, not mahogany woodwork, a Muggle-style phonograph and a vase full of gladiolas.

"Wait, Cho!" Harry calls over his shoulder as he is taken by the elbows and led toward the front door. "It's important. Please."

When they are alone, Cho looks at him expectantly. She is still the most beautiful girl he had ever laid eyes on, and he feels for a brief moment the flicker of old attraction. But he didn't get the merry, glowing Cho Cedric took to the Yule Ball; he received her as a heartbroken, hormonal mess. Harry thanks his lucky stars that he has sworn off women. Yes, even Ginny Weasley.

"...that he won't forget you, that you're his first and last love," Harry finishes, his face burning. God, Diggory is smooth. How many blokes can use that line without getting their arses handed to them? But he understands, even as he delivers the message, that Diggory means it.

Cho, predictably, bursts into tears. But she is also smiling.

"I don't know if you're trying to have me on, Harry," she says, the burr of her accent lovely and light with reminiscence, "but tell him that I love him, too. Tell him he has nothing to regret; I have none, myself."

Being a go-between for your ex-girlfriend and her dead ex-boyfriend is not Sisiphyian or Promethean as far as punishments go, but it is still damned terrible.

Or Three

"Let me stand in you."

"What kind of a queer request is that, Diggory?"

Harry takes an involuntary step back. His shoe gets caught in a tangle of thorny weeds and he loses his balance, falling arse-first on another gravemarker. Why it didn't cross his mind that Diggory would even ask, Harry attributes to his lack of foresight. After all, didn't Moaning Myrtle and Sir Nick try it once or twice?

"It's not queer, Potter."

"'S creepy as fuck." Harry gives up. He doesn't want to waste time. "Oh, all right, fine. Just, er, be gentle."

It is like being simulatenously lanced by thousands of tiny blades, being submerged under a glacier or standing through a blizzard starkers. Diggory's ghostly limbs close over his own, the transparent arms and legs superimposing over Harry's like bleeding and overexposed Muggle negatives. The toes of his bare feet poke out of the sole of Harry's scuffed trainers.

"You're so warm," Diggory says, wistful.

Flee

Harry tells him about his parents, his pet falcon, Cho's smile and that the Tutshill Tornadoes beat Puddlemere United by a cool two hundred and three points at Bodmin Moor in Cornwall. Diggory rocks back on his heels, his eyes closed as he soaks in the news. Not even death could rob him of joy or the adolescent giddiness that comes over him when Harry repeats, numerous times at his request, what Cho had said.

"Listen, Cedric," Harry interrupts, watching Diggory fly to a naked branch. "I can't stay long. I have to keep moving, Snape and his friends were seen last night just outside St. Ottery Catchpole --" Diggory flinches -- "and I've got to get there before their trail goes cold."

"Will you come back, then?"

Harry shakes his head, his mind already on the riparian geography near The Burrow and the Lovegoods' cottage. "No."

"Ever?" Diggory looks skeptical.

"No. I don't know. There's so much to do. The world is seriously fucked up, mate."

He prepares for the inertia of Apparation.

Reason

Diggory's transparent eyes drill into Harry's green ones like shards of ice. "Yeah, fucked up."

The Muggle digital watch on Harry's wrist reads 11:22 p.m. Haste makes his shame immaterial. "I've got to go."

Harry is about to Apparate when Diggory floats to him, standing so close that he can feel the chill of limbo and an unfulfilled afterlife kiss his flesh. It ripples up the exposed skin of his arm, making it recoil with goosepimples so big his flesh puckers into millions of tiny buttons.

"You can't hold on like this, Cedric," Harry says. "You have to let go, go to the other side. It won't do you any good to stay. The living move on, so should the dead."

"I've tried," Diggory says. "I've been trying all these years."

A Prayer

Death does not become Voldemort.

The stubborn strains of the necromancy that had preserved the Dark Lord's life eats away at what remains of his body. Like acid, it dissolves and burns the thin membranes of his muscles. There is no magic left there, Harry thinks, his wand limp at his side, as around him the whole of 12 Grimmauld Place cracks and gives way under the onslaught the fire that erupted during this final confrontation.

Harry kicks aside the deformed lump of silver that once served as Wormtail's hand. It is the final horcrux, the end of a traitor's life, the end of an era.

Mrs. Black gives a final anguished screech as her painting collapses and is consumed by the same green flames that erased from this world the five-hundred-year-old tapestry tracking the rise and fall of The Most Noble and Ancient House of Black.

Harry is glad to leave the place. From a distance, he can hear Muggle sirens. Here and there, the distinct pops of numerous Apparations echo: the Hit Squad, Memory Altering Team, Aurors and Scrimgeour are arriving.

He thinks of Sirius and his bark-like laugh; of Professor Dumbledore and the twinkle of his half-moon spectacles; he thinks of his mother and father, reflected in the Mirror of Erised; and finally, he thinks of Cedric Diggory, golden even in death.

He feels a loosening in his chest, that rewarding and bittersweet release of obligation. Tomorrow at midnight, he turns eighteen. Ron and Hermione, I have to write them owls, Harry reminds himself, running in the shadows, away from the burning house.

We have to celebrate, and fuck you, world. Fuck you, I am so done.

Tears are streaming down his face, washing away the soot and blood, cleansing him of duty, a benediction. His right leg hurts; he must have torn something -- or maybe Voldemort did, who knows? -- because now the right side of his body is one collective throb of pain.

He continues to cry, but he can feel triumph break through like sunrise, like the first breath of air astride a broom, like a first kiss, like forgiveness, like a prayer.

It's done.

It's time to go home.