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"Ow, crap, bugger bugger!"
There was a clank and a scrape. Harry folded down the edge of his magazine to see Ron roll himself out from under the Anglia. "Er, all right, Ron?"
"Taking longer than I thought to make it un-fly." Ron pushed his goggles up his forehead, leaving a ring of pale skin around his eyes in his sooty face, like a reverse-raccoon. His wand was stuck to his temple, the tip glowing. "It couldn't have been this hard to make it fly in the first place, I swear. Bloody enchantments got all up in the works, don't know what Da' was thinking."
"A fairly common state in the Weasley househ--"
"Malfoy," Harry said.
Malfoy smiled sweetly at him from his workbench (antique, cost a bloody fortune to ship from Wiltshire to muggle London), his eyes huge and clear behind the omnioculars he had designed for precise work and potion making. "Yes?"
"Quit it."
Ron snapped his goggles back onto his face and shoved himself back under the car.
"Hey," Harry whispered heatedly. "You asked to come."
"I did. Compensation for sins past, blah blah."
Harry put his feet up on his desk. His desk. "And your grant at UCL ran out."
Malfoy waved a gloved hand. "Details, Potter." He licked his bottom lip, frowning at the arrangement of runes and wires in front of him. "Look, are we certain we don't want to just dispel the ghosts?"
"Yeah, we're certain." Harry thought of Cedric, suddenly, briefly, and he blinked. He hadn't thought of him in a long time.
"Fine, fine, containment it is." Malfoy sat back and rubbed his eyes with his ungloved hand, then leaned his chin into his palm and looked at Harry for a long moment.
"What?" Harry wiped the corners of his mouth with his thumb and forefinger.
"It's occurred to me that Weasley and I are the only two here with actual, marketable skills."
Harry grinned and leaned back in his chair, cupping the nape of his neck in his folded hands. "I'll have you know I'm highly trained in figure-heading. How am I doing so far?"
The phone on the empty receptionist desk rang.
Harry vaulted over his desk and scrambled for it, making sure to store in the back of his mind the fascinated look on Malfoy's face at what he referred to as the ringing device. If they were going to work together, he was going to need to start compiling a blackmail file.
"We got one!" he said excitedly to no one and then, "Ghostbusters," into the reciever.
He bit back his grin at the twin, distinct snorts from both corners of the room.
*
"Bloody car," Ron muttered.
They ended up having to Apparate into St Pancras, then walk the three blocks to the British Library.
"Symmetrical book stacking," Harry murmured when they entered and saw the odd arrangements of books lining the lobby. He remembered something like this in one of the books he read for his now defunct Auror-training. "Just like the Cambridge mass turbulence of 1947."
"No human being would stack books like this? Shocking," Malfoy said, holding up a bottle of fine ground powder and shaking it gently.
"But are you sure?" a librarian was asking Ron, behind the collections desk.
"Yes, we're sure." Harry could almost hear Ron grinding his teeth as he tried to ignore the man and take readings on Malfoy's extremely confusing device, something he called an MPKE metre.
"Because you didn't ask many questions of her," the man went on. "And she can be a bit batty and--"
"I'm going to have to ask you to stay out of the way," Ron said, very deliberately.
"Potter," Malfoy said lazily, pouring a circle of the dust on the floor between two stacks. "Now would be a fantastic time to show off all those great classes on head-honcho-ery."
Harry sighed and tried to intercept as the man was reaching for Ron's arm.
"Yes, but--"
Ron all but growled and jerked his arm away. "Back off, man, I'm a wiza-- ow, shit." He rubbed his side where Harry had quite discreetly jammed his elbow. "Scientist," he finished lamely and scowled.
The librarian looked pale and Harry wondered if they had time to work a simple memory charm before he started his freak out. But he was looking past them, towards Malfoy.
Harry and Ron both turned to see Malfoy in conversation with a woman in white, with frizzy white hair and paper-thin, white skin. They both tilted their heads a bit to the left.
Malfoy was conversing with a ghost.
The librarian started screaming. The ghost turned -- she had a pair of spectacles hanging around her neck and a book in her hand, her bun fixed with a pencil -- and shushed them.
"It's okay," Harry said desperately, patting the man ineffectually on the back. "All right there, sir."
The man continued to scream and the ghost became more agitated.
"Malfoy," Harry barked and pulled out his wand, casting a cheering charm which didn't exactly stop the man's wailing, but at least now they were reduced to sort of sobbing laughs, which were much less ear-piercing.
"Potter," Malfoy said slowly, backing away. "Weasley."
The device in Ron's hands started screeching, which set the librarian off again, and the ghost's face started to melt and warp. "What the--"
"Run," Malfoy shouted.
"What--"
"Fuck's sake!" Malfoy brandished his wand and Harry had the sense to grab the librarian's wrist. "Mobilicorpus!"
The spell dumped them out the doors of the library as it flared with a blinding glare of white light and all the windows on the east side shattered spectacularly.
"Banshee," Malfoy said after a moment, when they got their bearings again. Harry's ears were ringing.
"You're mental," Ron said, climbing to his feet. After a moment, he offered Malfoy a hand up.
"Her family had a fairy keener," Malfoy said. "She killed herself, convinced herself she's the banshee. Ironic."
It dawned on Harry. "She was a librarian."
"Purgatory is hell, Potter."
Ron groaned and looked down at the very much alive and in a state of shock librarian, who was swaying on his hands and knees.
They looked at each other.
"Okay," Harry sighed. "And then we're going home."
He raised his wand. "Obliviate."
*
The dusty bottle of Old Odgen's had been sitting under Harry's bed at Grimmauld Place, then on a shelf in his flat in Diagon Alley. Harry pulled it from his bottom desk drawer.
Ron transfigured three of Malfoy's beakers into tumblers.
Malfoy raised his glass. "To a job at least seen to, if not actually done."
"May we have many more. Actual successes, I mean," Harry added and they clinked glasses.
Harry's scar twanged for a moment and the smell of gardenias filled the room.
Ron heaved a sigh.
A moment later, green flames were blazing out of mid air, the ghastly, ghostly, severed head of Antonin Dolohov.
"Voldemort the Traveller," he intoned, "he will come in one of the pre-chosen forms. During the rectification of the Valdranaii, the traveller came as a large and moving Torr! Then, during the third reconciliation of the last of the Meketrex supplicants they chose a new form for him - that of a giant Slorr! Many Shubs and Zuuls knew what it was to be roasted in the depths of the Slorr that day, I can tell you that, I can!"
Three Deletriuses hit the spectre at the same time, and the flames collapsed into ashes, scattering across the floor.
Ron, Harry and Malfoy all looked at each other.
"Well," Malfoy said after a moment and got to his feet. "I'm for bed."
Harry pushed himself up. "Me, too, I think."
Ron gaped. "Sleep? But how?"
"Easy, Ron." Harry yawned and smiled and rubbed at his scar, which felt just the same as always, as he shuffled off after Malfoy. "I ain't afraid of no ghost."
*