Chapter Text
Chapter One: The Ghost
“I’m searching for something I can’t reach. My Ghost, where’d you go?”
It started with a whisper, so soft he hadn’t realized it was there. It grew, over time so slowly he didn’t really notice it until it was a dull roar that came and went. By the time he was consciously aware there was some kind of voice in his head that wasn’t his and probably wasn’t Voldemort’s he didn’t think that telling anyone about it was really going to accomplish anything anyways. There were bigger problems to worry about these days than whether Harry Potter had gone completely mental.
Besides, he had all kinds of visions and voices in his head while he was sleeping. Everyone knew that already, and while they certainly didn’t like it, they had determined, with his failed occlumency lessons the previous term, there wasn't exactly much to be done about it.
So, did it really matter that he could hear a voice in his head while he was awake too? It's not like he could understand it, it wasn’t in English and it did have a tendency to mumble.
Harry didn’t exactly mind because everything was terrible all of the time and sometimes it was nice having a distraction in his head. Even if he couldn’t understand any of what it was saying, and it sounded like it was complaining at least ninety percent of the time.
It’s not like he even heard it everyday. It would drift in and out at random with long silent spells that got more and more noticeable as time went on. Harry always felt like when it went silent something bad had happened. Really though, he had no way of knowing.
The end of term, as always, came on far too fast. In the past week the invasion of Hogwarts and Dumbledore's death, made the end of term feel rather like falling off a cliff or running at full speed straight into a wall. Harry felt like the breath had been permanently knocked out of him. The last thing he was worried about at the moment was that the voice in his head was back and had been grumbling on and off all day.
Harry had drifted through the morning, it felt like he was looking through a blurry mirror, and his feet were weighted down with lead boots. Meanwhile all around him the rest of the castle raced around packing up last minute misplaced school books and socks.
The rapidly approaching departure of the students had lifted with the heavy feeling of despair that had descended on the castle like a thick fog since Dumbledore death.
“That’s when Bill decided he was leaving Fleur for a Hippogriff. You aren’t even listening are you?”
Harry started, banging his elbow on the wall of the train compartment and swore under his breath. He looked at Ginny with wide eyes, and she laughed.
“Guess that answers that question,” she said, she smirked and jabbed him in the side.
“What are you even on about?” he muttered, shuffling in his seat trying to get away from her wickedly sharp fingers.
Ginny raised her eyebrows and very pointedly looked over at Hermione on the other side of the train compartment, talking passionately, her hands waving animatedly about while she spoke.
Harry had most certainly not been listening to Hermione. Actually he hadn’t really been listening to anything. Once he had settled into his seat on the train he leaned into the exhaustion that had been plaguing him for most of the term and listlessly watched as Hogsmeade drifted by the windows.
He hadn’t even realized that Ginny had joined them. He glanced around at his friends, their compartment was rather fuller then he remembered it being. Both lengths of seats were filled, everyone crammed together, elbows pressing into each other sides. Dean, who did not have a seat, leaned up against the door, trying not to laugh at something Luna had just said.
Harry leaned into Ginny's shoulder, he was very firmly wedged into the corner. She didn’t give him an inch.
“So are you going to fill me or not? He asked directly into her ear.
“Nah,” she said, bumping his shoulder, “ honestly I lost the thread a while ago and you were my last hope.”
“Sorry Gin, I’ve let us both down. I hope you can find it in your heart to forgive me.”
She snorted, “Some savior you are, can’t even follow a simple conversation. How are you supposed to defeat a dark lord?”
“I’ll have you know, I have a lot more experience defeating dark lords than I do listening to lectures.”
She threw her head back and cackled, her eyes going all crinkly at the corners, “God, Potter that isn’t reassuring,” she said.
Harry shrugged and scratched his nose.
“I never said I was a good savior, but I’m the only one you’ve got. So erm, I guess we’d better hope for the best?”
Twenty minutes later when the train started to pull into the station, Ginny was fast asleep on his shoulder. Harry was half asleep himself, the side of his face pressed firmly into the window. The voice was muttering in his head again, and it was lulling him to sleep, “OH, for ever loving Christ,-!”
It went silent. He sat up sharply and blinked. That was very clearly English.
Harry had the entirety of the summer to contemplate the fact that the voice in his head could apparently also speak English. On the very long and boring ride back to number four privet drive he had a sudden and very worrying thought. Could the voice hear him too?
And if it could, what did it hear?
Everyday since Harry had returned to Dursleys passed slowly. He spent most of his time in his room being quiet and pretending he didn’t exist.
His head may have been quiet during the day, ever since the voice had abruptly cut off mid sentence on the train. But that did not mean his head was quiet at night. If anything his nightmares seemed to get louder and sharper and it got harder and harder to keep digging himself out of them.
He was grateful to be ignored, and content to lull around on his bed. He was exhausted. He was always exhausted. Sometimes he thought he’d never not been exhausted. Often wondering what it was like to wake up in the morning, and not be more tired than when he’d gone to sleep.
He was propped up against his head board, trying to get a start on his transfiguration homework. While he was entirely convinced he wasn’t going back to Hogwarts this year - instead he planned on running about the countryside with his friends looking for wayward pieces of Voldemort's soul. He didn’t like to put all of his eggs in one basket. Nothing had ever gone the way he thought it would, so why would it start now?
It's not like he had anything else to do anyways. While he was making a valiant effort, he hadn’t even finished the first chapter of the standard book of spells, year seven and he was pretty sure he’d read the same page at least three times.
He sighed, rolling his quill back and forth between his fingers. He really wasn’t going to miss writing essays.
His thoughts turned to the missing voice inside of his head, and away from things like his still looming pile of homework and ever imminent prospect of what his future might look like.
That is if he got to have a future.
He started to call the voice in his head the Ghost, because he had to call it something. To help reassure himself that it wasn't a figment of his imagination, or worse Voldemort.
The ghost had gone silent often enough throughout the year. Sometimes for periods much longer than two weeks, and while at school Harry had had enough distractions he hadn’t really put that much thought into it. But now that he really didn’t have anything to do except ignore his homework, he had questions.
He wanted to talk to his ghost. Well, he wanted to try and talk to his ghost. He was pretty sure whatever kind of connection they had going on was one sided.
Still he was going to try. What's the worst that could happen? He could get possessed by the dark lord? That had already happened, and while it had not been remotely pleasant, Harry had certainly suffered worse.
Besides, what the fuck- why did he have to have a ghost living in his head. Could he just be normal in like one thing? Just one singular thing. Just once couldn’t be someone else who had a voice they couldn't understand muttering in their head?
He waited, he wasn’t really sure what else he could do. He was almost positive his ghost couldn’t hear him. He shuttered a little at the thought that, somewhere there was someone and he could hear all their thoughts- most of their thoughts? He’d hate for someone out there to be listening to even some of his. Even if they couldn’t understand any of them at all.
It took another three days for the ghost to start muttering again. Harry didn’t notice at first. It started like it always did as a soft whisper in the back of his head, he’d grown so used to it that it had taken him hours to realize it was back.
He paused his quill on his parchment and listened. He could still barely hear it, the soft unintelligible muttering, but it was there. The longer he focused on it the clearer it became. It sounded slightly slurred, and very annoyed.
Harry swallowed, clenching his hand around his quill. He wasn’t sure why he was so nervous about trying to speak to the ghost, it wasn’t real. Maybe it was. Harry really wasn’t sure what his ghost was at all, and unless he tried to speak to him, he wasn’t going to get any answers.
Harry took one very shaky breath, and then thought very hard, “Hello? Ghost? Are you there?”
The muttering stopped.
“Hello?” thought Harry as hard as he could, screwing up his eyes in concentration, “am I in your head too?”
Silence. Harry waited. Thinking loudly was a lot harder than he’d anticipated.
“What are you?”
Harry jumped. He could hear the ghost so clearly now. It was like he was standing next to him.
“I’m just a person,” Harry thought, sitting up straighter on the bed, “what are you? You’ve been in my head all year.”
“ How are you doing this?”
“Where are you? There is no one else here, for miles. No ones going to be here for hours. You’re not on the coms, I checked.”
“ What the hell do you mean I’ve been in your head all year?!”
Harry ran a shaky hand through his already perpetually windswept hair. His ghost was talking to him. He was real. He was really, really real and not a figment of his imagination.
“I’m in Surrey, and I’ve been hearing you since last…. September? Well, I noticed at the end of September but you were so quiet, I wouldn’t have noticed before then. I didn’t know you spoke English until a few weeks ago or I would have tried to say something sooner but then you went silent. You do that, you’ll just go silent for weeks.”
“ Surrey, as in England? I think in Russian. How did you get into my head?”
“I didn’t. You got into my head.” thought Harry, “Yes, Surrey as in England. Where are you?
“ Christ, I’m going insane. Get out of my head ghost.”
It went silent again.
Harry kept working on his essay and tried not to be too disappointed. He supposed he would have been shocked hearing a voice in his head too once upon a time.
Three days later the Ghost spoke.
“Hey spook, you there?”
After that his ghost started talking to him. Not all the time, he still faded in and out and spent half of the time mumbling in Russian. Harry didn’t mind. Having someone to talk to sometimes was better than never. Even if sometimes was, more often than not at three in the morning.
He didn’t expect to get any letters that summer, it wasn’t worth the risk. So he was grateful to have someone to talk to even for a little while. He knew he wasn’t going to be staying at the Dursley’s long, but the wait was grueling. Harry wasn’t very good at waiting, but talking to his Ghost helped. Even if referring to the voice in his head as his ghost made him feel slightly unhinged.
Harry lazily dragged his feet through the dirt. He was sitting on the one unbroken swing at the park in Magnolia Crescent. He tried not to leave the Dursleys very often, what with a war being on and all. When he did leave he didn’t go very far. Still, he couldn't stay in his room all the time, and after he had got caught lying in the garden in fifth year trying to listen to the news, if he was outside it had better be out of sight from the kitchen window.
His ghost had been chatty today, he answered more than half the questions Harry asked. He would sometimes fade out mid-conversation, and by the time he came back he’d have forgotten what they had been talking about.
Harry was mostly convinced his ghost was an actual person, not a figment of his imagination and he was entirely certain he was not Voldemort.
If he was a person, then he had a name. Harry decided that it would be a lot better, in terms of preserving his sanity if he could refer to his ghost by name. For reasons. Mostly because when he thought about it too hard he could hear the echo of Hermione's voice from second year, “Hearing voices isn’t good Harry,” she said. And well, she hadn’t been wrong.
He kicked off the ground, swaying slightly in the warm muggy summer air, and decided that unless he asked, he wouldn’t know and so he asked his ghost if he had a name.
“Name?”
“You know, what people call you,” said Harry
“Soldat.”
“That's not a name.”
“It’s what they call me.”
“What do you call yourself?”
“ I don’t.”
There was a beat of silence.
“A long time ago somebody called me Bucky?”
He’d said it like it was a question. Harry paused, one toe making a pattern in the dust, “Can I call you Bucky?”
“It's better than Soldat,”
Harry agreed, it certainly was better than Soldat, it was also better then Ghost.
Bucky trailed off into Russian.
“What are you doing?”
“ Climbing.”
“Climbing? Climbing what, a tree?”
“They say climb the tree Soldat. I climb the tree. They say, shoot the gun Soldat. I shoot the gun. I don’t ask. They tell me and I do.”
“What happens if you don’t?”
“If I don't?”
“Do what you’re told.”
“Pain. Quiet, I focus now.”
Later when Harry was laying on his bed, long after he should have been asleep Bucky words echoed in his head.
“I don’t ask. They tell me, and I do.”
Talking to Bucky was frustrating. Every time Harry asked him a question it felt like the answer only ever led to more questions, or it didn’t make any sense. Harry could never tell if Bucky was lying either, his voice was always steady and even, the only variation was when he’d fade out completely or trail off into Russian. Which happened frequently, and when Harry had asked about it earlier that week he’d been told it was mostly complaints about the weather.
“They have me up in this fucking tree all day, and all it does is rain. I can’t see for shit.”
When Harry had asked who they were he got a very unsatisfactory answer.
“I don’t know.”
“How can you not know? You work for them, right? ”
“I don’t know. This is all I can remember doing.”
“So what do you know?”
“Not much. That it’s still raining and I’ve got some English ass hole in my head. That I’ve been waiting for over twelve hours today and they haven’t told me what I’m waiting for.”
Harry sighed, “Doesn’t it bother you not knowing?”
There was a long pause.
“Of course it bothers me. There isn’t much I can do about it,”
“My name’s Harry. Not, English arsehole.”
“Harry huh? I’m still not convinced I didn’t just make you up.”
“I promise I’m real, if you promise you’re real.”
“Cross my heart, darlin. I’m pretty sure I’m real, anyway.”
And that's how Harry had found out the confusing muggle on the other side of whatever connection they had going on had decided they were soul mates. In order to justify having a voice talking to him in his head.
“But soulmates aren’t real!”
“Whatever you say, Sweetheart.”
Harry couldn’t entirely blame him. Having someone talking to you in your head was unheard of even in the wizarding world. He couldn’t even fathom trying to rationalize what was happening as a muggle. Harry didn’t have a clue why he could hear Bucky, but he had faced enough weirdness in the last six years, he just shrugged this one off. After all, what was one more impossible thing?
He hadn’t really given much thought to what Bucky might think was causing it. Soul mates, while not real, were certainly not the worst explanation a muggle could have come up with, and Bucky certainly didn’t seem to mind.