All the Ghosts are Screaming

5

Draco

He's taken to wandering around the house when Harry isn't there.

Draco isn't sure why he does it, other than the fact that without school or a job or any responsibilities he's got hours worth of free time and nothing to fill it with, unless he actually wants to take Granger up on her offer of teaching him how to crochet. Kreacher had been the one to start it, showing him rooms that he couldn't get around to cleaning because of his knees or the places that he won't go anymore because they hold too many memories, and all of a sudden he was ripping down wallpaper in bathrooms and wiping away the dust that has piled up in the library, like he could scrub away the darkness if he only tried hard enough.

He finds remnants of the past whenever he least expects it. That's part of it, too, one of the reasons that he wants to take these walks through the house and stick his nose in places that Harry flat out refused to put foot in. He's gathered up knowledge like they're treasure- a baby photo of his aunt, a letter from his father tucked into a drawer- but it's not until he dares to pull himself up into the attic that he understands why Harry seems to want to fill this house up with noise so often.

It's to chase away the ghosts.

All Draco had done was move a box, and all of a sudden photos were pouring out, flooding the floor, a hundred of the same faces flashing up at him, waving, screaming. There is a much younger Professor Lupin with his arm wrapped around a clean shaven Sirius Black, a man who looked like Harry with his arm wrapped around someone who had Harry's eyes, Professor Moody when he still had that missing chunk of his nose. He thinks it is only the distant past, at first, but then he shifts through some more and finds other things- Nyphmadora Tonks holding out her hand with the smallest engagement ring he had ever seen on her finger, Ginny and Hermione leaning in to each other to pose for the picture, the Weasley family gathered around the table as someone who must be their mother yells at them. There are people he doesn't recognize and people he does- Fred Weasley, George Weasley, Professors, Dumbledore, Hermione, and Harry, always Harry at the center of things, happy and laughing.

A lot of these people are dead, He thinks, and it is not for the first time that Draco begins to fully appreciate how young they all were, how much they had to lose just a year ago. All the things that they did lose. Much too young to be soldiers.

That's how Harry finds him, sitting in the center of a sea of photographs, looking at all these faces that he knows he once knew but can no longer recognize. Draco looks up at him like he is lost and Harry is his light house, hands full of memories, photographs full of the current dead and dying.

"They didn't know what was going to happen," He says finally, after Harry has sat down across from him and reached for photographs of his own, so close that his knees were pressed up against Draco's. They have gotten to a box that is just full of the twins- the twins together at dinner, the twins in their room, the twins holding out their hands to keep their picture from being taken, the twins playing exploding snap with Ron, the twins teaming up against Bill for a game of Exploding Snap, all the tiny moments that piled up while they were living here. When they were together, and safe, and whole. "They didn't know how short it would all be."

"Ginny took most of these." Harry was crying, tears slipping down from his cheeks. The death of Fred had hit him the hardest. They were all hard, but it was especially awful to watch the shock waves that the grief sent through the Weasley family. "Her dad bought this muggle camera from a garage sale. Spent the whole summer snapping pictures."

"You all looked happy." Draco had always bought into his father's idea that he was the lucky one, that what it took to make a great man was a pocket full of gold and a big house, a beautiful wife and a respected place at the ministry. He had been groomed to follow in his father's footsteps and never even thought to question it, so its always hard to see things like this and be reminded of just how wrong he was.