A Ghost Story

[Disclaimer] Characters belong to JK Rowling. No money is being made from this story.

The details of Lucius Malfoy\'s death were neither particularly interesting nor puzzling. After being imprisoned in Azkaban, the elder Malfoy attempted a late-game redemption. He was to reveal the names and locations of several prominent Death Eaters in a bid to win back his life and his property, hoping desperately that the Ministry would take care of the band of rebels either by arrest or death. Of course, finding his body eviscerated in his cell the next morning only seemed particularly shocking to the Ministry. Anyone else could have seen it coming a mile away.

Much later in the game, his son Draco Malfoy, followed through with a genuine redemption, pledging his allegiance to the Order under the auspices of Harry Potter. Tragically, in spite of the earnestness and fervor of his turnabout, the cost of his rebellion was the same as his progenitor. Both he and Harry had died in the war. Hermione lost Ron as well. Even Neville had perished in some skirmish or another. Of late, Hermione had a hard time keeping track.

In order to ease the pain of her losses, Hermione had tried several quite imprudent things, the last of which was attempting to Obliviate her associations with all of the people she couldn\'t seem to move past. Especially Ron. Sweet Ron. She\'d never been able to tell him how she really felt. They were so doomed in their-where were they again? It was dark; there was green smoke and screaming. She was trying to speak but the din blurred her words beyond comprehension. She was trying to tell him she loved him. Hermione screamed at the top of her lungs, but Ron kept staring at her blankly. He didn\'t understand, did he? She had to make him understand. She grabbed the front of his sweat-soaked shirt and yanked him forward. His limp body followed. He would never know.

At first she just tried to cope. Intellectualize the pain. Reason out her loss. However, it was too much. Her heart was sinking through what she\'d come to regard as her treacherous sentient corpse. Hermione couldn\'t study nor read. She was separated from her second greatest love: learning. So she tried drinking potions. She tried alcohol. For a mad while she tried Muggle pharmaceuticals. Her grief drove her to places where she didn\'t even know who she was anymore. All that she saw in herself was her grief. It was all that drove her. Eventually it drove her to take her wand to her own temple and her tear-chapped lips cried out, \"Obliviate\" as her brown eyes glared to the ceiling.

A few days later she woke up at St. Mungo\'s addled, but not mad. Addled. It was a funny word. A nice way of saying that she\'d clipped her own wings. Her intelligence had been who she was, and in spite of removing that, the pain was still there. Only now, she wasn\'t entirely sure who she was mourning half of the time, or why they died. She only remembered that pure moment of anguish over Ron and strangely the expected death of Lucius Malfoy.

Mostly it was Fred who looked after her. Much of his sense of humor had died with his twin, however, and there were times when he needed to be alone. Particularly when Hermione got into an agitated state such as she was in now. Her inability to think clearly frustrated her because on some level she remembered being able to think clearly. Now she couldn\'t, and she didn\'t know why. Fred did what he could, but everyone had his or her limits. Today he had reached his. He took Hermione with him to the cemetery, allowing her to wander as he headed into the hero\'s segment to sit and try to talk to George.

Saints and sinners were buried in adjacent plots of land. Mourners could visit their loved ones, leave them flowers and trinkets and then easily venture to the next section of land, cordoned off by a rusty gate, to spit on the graves of Death Eaters. Hermione tittered that Voldemort\'s minions were now all full of death, as George brushed past the statue of brave Harry Potter that marked his grave. Next to him was the grave of his lover, Draco, who had only once left Harry\'s side during the battle, and that was to move in front of him to take the blow of the Killing Curse so that Harry could take aim at Voldemort.

Of course, once Voldemort was down and the prophecy had been fulfilled, there was nothing in particular protecting Harry. With Draco down, there was no one to watch his back. A boy redeems his family name. A hero shot in the back. It was the tale of legends, the stuff books are written about. It was the stuff that Hermione had mostly obliterated. She stared up at the perplexing but familiar visage of the best friend she\'d forgotten and at the lesser-decorated grave of his blond lover. Out of the corner of her eye she saw something silvery and familiar. A form she knew but didn\'t know.

Her head tilted to the side and she followed the form, slipping out of the hero\'s plot and into the Death Eater\'s area. She wandered around for a few moments, watching the rooks perch and squabble with one another. The bird-shit stained stone tablets read with familiar names crudely drawn into them. \"Lucius Malfoy,\" she said, as she looked at the stone that read, \"Bellatrix Black.\"

\"You see me, then,\" drawled the eviscerated ghost. He pulled his shirt around him to make his appearance less shocking. Normally ghosts haunted where they died or where they lived. However Lucius had no particular binding to Azkaban, and Draco had burned down the mansion after finding out that it had secret rooms that housed Death Eaters. Five had died that night. It was a boon for the Order, but left both corporeal son and phantom father homeless. So he had this graveyard. If anyone saw him before this, they didn\'t speak it. She was the first to say anything to Lucius since he had passed on.

\"I do. I am Hermione Granger. I think I knew you once,\" she said absently.

Lucius only looked a mournful at this and he nodded. \"You knew me of sorts. You and your friends stopped me from getting a prophecy to my Master. I was left to die. I was-\"

\"You were going to tell about the other bad people to the Ministry. I do remember you. You called me a Mudblood and tried to kill me.\"

In death, one sees the error of their ways; the silliness of what was once so dear. The word Mudblood sounded as silly as it was. Dirty blood. It was all just blood. Blood warmed you and fed you, keeping you alive so that you could touch and feel with the glorious burden of a body, to dance, to sway, to feel the breeze on your skin, to eat, to make love. Blood, dirty or not, was glorious. \"That I did say. I was set on killing you. Yes,\" he admitted as he reached out a spectral hand to slide over her cheek. Hermione shivered. \"You can feel that?\"

\"Barely. You\'re so cold,\" she reported.

\"I am dead,\" Lucius explained.

\"So is Ron,\" stated Hermione. \"May I see him?\"

\"He did not choose to walk the mortal plane,\" said Lucius as he inquisitively touched down her neck. \"You\'re warm. So very warm.\"

Hermione shivered, but does not protest the continued fondling, even as it moved to the firmness of her breasts. \"Can you talk to him for me?\" she questioned as her hands moved to her breasts to rub them warmer.

\"Ron who?\" asked Lucius as his hands roamed through her body. He felt the slick wetness of her organs and the radiant energy of her pulsating heart.

\"Weasley,\" she whimpered. Hermione was rather uncomfortable with the icy fingers probing through her body and she started to back up unsteadily as the increasingly aggressive ghost man followed her.

Ghosts on the mortal plane are as helpless to speak to those who have moved on as those who are alive. Clearly no one had communicated this fact to Hermione, or perhaps it had been another one of those pieces of knowledge that had slipped away from her with the mind sweep. \"I can. There would be a price, of course,\" he spoke to her, his drawling less dreary as he stood before her, reaching between her legs.

It felt like frost was coating her inner thigh, but the one thought, the one thing that she clung to was the hope that her message might get to Ron. \"Tell him that I love him. That I always did, but I was too silly to know,\" she said as she found herself pinned against a gravestone. Her brown eyes appeared anguished at the desperation of her message, and her want to have it get to Ron. Parting her legs, she sat back on the stone. He could have fondled her there anyways; it was more productive not to fight it.

\"I will let him know,\" promised Lucius as he gently stroked at the moist folds of skin between her thighs. Her hands clutched hard at the stone, and her nails bit into her palm as the invasion of the arctic fingers made her whimper with sensation.

She was warm, so very warm, and wet, her whole body was. It was strange that she would feel him in anything other than a remote way, but he found with her he could focus and feel sensations over his silvery form. He wondered if this extended to all body parts.

Though her clothes were on, he moved through them. Just as the basic physiology of a person is maintained when they are ghosts, so could Lucius feel the outlines of her corporeal body on his plane. Hermione didn\'t exactly feel filled in the traditional sense. The thrusting of the Malfoy ghost left her inner walls feeling misted with tendrils of wintry air. He grabbed at her breasts and slid his fingers around her nipples, dipping them around her form and occasionally through it. \"Warm... you\'re so warm,\" he groaned to her.

Hermione just inclined against the stone, shivering fiercely. Her skin was goose fleshed from the invasion and the continued movement. There was no part of her that felt warm anymore. Everything felt covered in frost, even her lips started to turn blue. This was for Ron, she reminded herself. Ron needs to know that I love him. Now he would know and he would join her when she came to him.

Lucius should have surmised that there would be no orgasm. Not in death. Orgasms created new life, or that was what they were meant to do. In death you do not fashion life, you monitor it. It was a pity that he couldn\'t have that final finish, but the chill had finally left him, and the noise of Hermione\'s teeth chattering was becoming bothersome. He pulled away and dressed himself.

It took a moment for Hermione to finally warm enough to move. \"Tell him to wait for me,\" she begged Lucius as she started to move again, making her way back to Fred.

\"That was not part of our bargain. If you want further messages conveyed, Miss Granger, you shall have to come back,\" he said.

Her brows furrowed and she looked back at the stone on which she sat, giving a reactionary twitching shiver of repulsion in memory of what had happened there. Slowly she nodded. \"Very well. But, tell me what he says to you first.\"

Somberly, Lucius nodded, already planning on what he would say to lure her back and keep her coming. \"I will do, Miss Granger,\" he promised before he faded into the half-light of the closing day. It was a pity he couldn\'t move to the hero\'s plot next to him. He would have loved to have spitefully taken her on dear Ron Weasley\'s grave.