March 15th, 1893 — Asphodel Cemetery

Natty gently ran his fingers along the top of her gravestone, his fingertips picking up frost and leaving behind a narrow trail. The piercing coldness felt good, like a memory.

He straightened up, and took a walk through the cemetery. He liked to do that when he visited, taking a proper walk in this place of sombre peace. It was cold — he reckoned a last bite of frost before Spring — and the sky was grey but bright. Beneath his feet crunched green grass, and around the gravestones gathered new clumps of snowdrops.

The moment would be entirely one of serenity... if it weren't for a sudden prickling feeling of unease that unexpectedly descended.

  

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He could never quite pretend he was a soul at peace, but when Barnaby felt especially restless a spirit, a drift through the cemetery never hurt. It was some respite from the impudence of Life and noise of the rest of Hogsmeade, the hasty pace of lives briefly lived; and if he encountered anyone in these not-quite-fields of Asphodel, at least one could count on the visitors to be appropriately sombre about Life and Death.

Mostly, Barnaby came here when he needed a little due awe and attention afforded him – those in mourning were typically more interested in his opinions than those getting on quite happily in mundanity.

Today, however, he had fancied this a place quiet enough to delve better into his thoughts and into a recent composition he was working through. “...heals,” he echoed to himself, a muttered refrain as he contemplated how best to continue. “Wheels – keels – ideals – ordeals...”

He had been flitting through these musings so all-consumedly that he hadn’t noticed his phantom form sweeping dangerously close to a body until he was practically breathing down the man’s neck. “Ah, if it isn’t a live one!” Barnaby exclaimed, abruptly shaken out of his reverie – never mind the man’s.

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It was already cold, but this was a different kind of cold, an otherworldly feel sent from the ether. Natty somehow kept composure, but his heart did give an unpleasant lurch of fright as he spotted, suddenly close, a ghost. The spirit was of a fell man in his prime, and he spoke directly to Natty with the mildly curious air of someone who'd found a four-leafed clover on a walk.

For a moment Natty could only look at him, alarmed. He'd never spoken to a ghost before, and the only ones he'd ever seen had been the House ghosts at Hogwarts. And he could barely remember them, as he'd only been there for his First Year, and that had been well over twenty-five years ago.

"Did you say... ordeals?" Natty said unexpectedly, recalling the word the ghost had inexplicably spoken before the living man laid eyes on him. The ghost wasn't planning to be an ordeal here, was he...?

  

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His look of alarm was hardly fair: if anyone had a right to be in the cemetery, surely the dead had priority, and second the living? He supposed the fellow was here for a reason, but Barnaby’s priority was, as usual, his own, so he didn’t inquire.

Instead he floated up a few inches further above the grass to match the man’s height. “Live on in your blessings, your destiny’s been won,” Barnaby lamented at him, woefully paraphrasing Virgil for dramatic effect, “– but my ordeals go on and on.”

In his defence, that was mostly true. But he added, conversationally, “I am looking for a rhyme.”

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Natty's gaze followed the ghost uneasily as he floated upward, but he felt no desire to freeze or flee. Or indeed fight, of course. He had never spoken to a ghost before, and was very interested.

... Did the ghost just quote Roman poetry? Wait, maybe he was a Roman poet? No, he did not seem it — but Natty was ill-educated in history, he could not place the period of the man's garb or wordage.

"Wheels – keels – ideals – ordeals -" "Feels", Natty suggested, the verb springing to mind almost at once. It seemed obvious, to him, that a ghost, a writer, a poet, would dwell on what he feels. And indeed on what he could no longer feel.

He slightly opened his mouth to speak again, only to close it. He had many, many questions for the dead. But they were on the ghost's turf, and the author did not wish to disrupt a poet's musings.

  

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Ah, so the fellow was of some use! Barnaby plucked the word from him at once, making use of the silence that had lingered to turn it over in his mind until the clay lumps of feelings he was trying to express had fallen into better form.

The tune for it was not yet clear, but Miss Chevalier would be set in song ere long. “And for any man who feels / Her softest touch, it is too much / She wounds where'er she heals,” Barnaby half-murmured, half-sang, and then, leaving himself to muse upon it a while longer, squinted at the man again. “Gramercy, my good man. A fine suggestion. A fine day, too, is it not?” Barnaby added cordially (though in utter negligence of any particularly sorrowful reasons the Living might be lurking around the cemetery alone).

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Natty watched with steady interest as the dead poet wove together words like thread, one of those words being Natty's. A modest contribution. But a most interesting result.

Eventually, the living fellow turned his gaze away, instead looking over the nearest gravestones and wondering if any belonged to the ghost. Then he was engaged again, and looked up. "Yes, a fine day indeed", he was able to agree. "The frost is welcome." The air was so cold it almost hurt. That was the sort of thing Natty sought today.

"Who is she?" He asked who the poem was about. None of his business, perhaps... but he wanted to know. And would never know if he did not at least ask.

  

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Barnaby sighed, deep and melodramatically, at the talk of frost. He imagined the world felt today like it did for him on all occasions – so biting cold there was a dampness to the earth and a chill set deep into everyone’s bones, living or dead. That cheered him, rather.

“Ah, a maid for whom I would die again at once if I were only given the chance to touch her,” he explained, always pleased for an audience to his whims and his woes. “Have you e’er known a maid like that?”

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The ghost spoke not of his relationship with the lady in question, but of his feelings for her. Poetic indeed. And Natty rarely got the chance to speak with such people, living or dead — he relished it.

Though when the question was returned, Natty's heart skipped a beat. He paused, and then looked back at the path behind him, where sat the grave of his long-departed wife. "Yes. Though she's closer to your plane than mine."

Natty returned his eyes to the spirit's. "Do you wish to speak of your maid? I'm a good listener."

  

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It look Barnaby a beat to digest that remark, for he liked listening to no voice quite so well as his own – but it, combined with the man’s long-lost look, caught his attention just enough. Ah.

That explained his presence here.

“Ah, I would,” Barnaby sighed, and he was terribly grateful for the offer, for seldom did they come his way so sincerely, “but what good are the words? She would not have me even were I –” living; that did not need saying. “I might as well be lain in mine own grave.”

“Pray,” he added, venturing a question of his own, though he did not know how welcome it would be, “how long has it been since you and she were together?”

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Natty listened with silent sympathy, then to the poet's lament — "love is pain, but I couldn't be without it." Perhaps the ghost agreed; perhaps his life (and death) would be something entirely different if it weren't for this love that so defined him.

As for Natty... "some ten years", he replied quietly, the vagueness a disservice to his stale grief. He knew exactly how long it had been since she had passed. "But at times it feels like only yesterday."

  

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“Pain beyond measure.” Barnaby nodded sombrely, perfectly happy to wallow. (He did not have people to wallow with nearly often enough – the Livings simply weren’t made for mournfulness the way he was.)

“At least she is at peace,” he said, half in comfort and half just to complain about his own plight once more – “I shall never know it, while she walks beside me so near and so impossibly far.” At least this man’s dead wife was out of sight, if not out of mind. He stood a chance of getting over her.

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Natty raised his brow slightly. "At peace"... no, his wife hadn't been at peace. The loss of her child — the child she'd had with him — had been worse than that which had killed her. That was her eternity.

But it most certainly was not a competition. Natty did not comment.

Yet he could not help ask — "why choose to keep walking? Why become a ghost?"

  

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“It all happened rather swiftly, in my case,” Barnaby said casually, although this was as weighty a confession as he could impart. “I do not know that I chose it. Not – not consciously, at any rate.”

If he had, would he have chosen this unlife at all? He liked to think so. But he didn’t know. He hadn’t anticipated just how lonely it would be, caught between one place and the other.

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Of all the answers he might have heard, Natty hadn't expected that one. The idea that the biggest decision of one's life — or death — could be a spontaneous decision...

"Are you interested in figuring it out?" he asked curiously, wondering if the ghost had been dwelling on it much.

  

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Barnaby peered at the man with some curiosity.

“How would you suggest I do so?” he inquired, not quite opposed to the notion.

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