They got Mill in to talk to him, which was sort of a nice trick actually considering the firmness in her voice when she'd announced that she would never be stepping foot in the Ministry again while they were getting hideously drunk the night after her last day as Minister. Given that that had been seven years ago, she'd actually done pretty well.

The weird thing was he was aware of what was going on, in a vague sense at least. Considering he was hiding in a crawlspace with walls between him and anywhere else, anyone else, that was sort of odd, but his hearing-- or, was it really his hearing? It was hard to say. He just... there were things happening on the DMLE floor, lots of fuffing around and agitated conversation and he wasn't really even paying attention, like it was background noise and he just sort of tuned it out until it was nothing but a murmur.

Even so she'd been there most of the day before he actually, finally, mustered the courage to come out of the crawlspace. She was sitting in Higgs' office with a cup of coffee and he assumed she'd been told every paltry detail about that first encounter with him over about a dozen times but she still looked... surprised, somehow, when she saw him. Sort of shocked and sad.

He should think she'd be sad. He was fucking dead. She'd basically trained him, it'd been twenty years they'd known each other, and that was a long time even for someone who was pushing the far side of sixty five, let alone his mere forty two.

He shoved his hands in his pockets and looked at her as Higgs quietly decided he had business somewhere that wasn't in his office and noticed, in a cold, detached way, that he was trembling a little.

"What happened?" she asked, and it always came back down to that, didn't it, except that her voice was softer than Higgs' had been and there was an almost-strained hurting in it that said that part of her didn't really want him to tell her. He supposed when people went missing for two weeks in the middle of a war and then turned up as ghosts, there weren't many explanations that involved fun times and laughter.

He'd spent part of the day practicing this, saying this, trying to accept this, though that bit was a hell of a lot harder. This was not how things were supposed to have worked out. There were things he hadn't done yet. He bit his lip and didn't let out a steadying breath. "I died." His voice shook, but not as much as it had the first several times. "I-- They. I can't remember what I told them. It was-- two, or three, I didn't see any of their faces, I think they were all male, and then they put me in a basement, or something and--"

At some point while he was speaking he'd folded his arms, hands out of pockets, arms wrapped tightly around his chest in a defensive gesture, and he looked down at them for a moment as he realised that there was really absolutely no decent way to describe What Had Happened. It wasn't even relevant. The fact that he'd, that he'd sometimes honestly wondered whether or not the real world actually even existed, it didn't mean anything at all because when they asked what had happened they just, really, wanted something useful.

And he didn't have anything useful. He'd died and he didn't know anything.

Mill rose from her chair, coffee mug abandoned on the edge of Higg's desk, and took a couple of steps towards him until they were standing closer together than they had in-- in a while, really. She looked like she wanted to, to hug him, or touch his arm, or something, but of course she couldn't even do that because her hands would go straight through him and that really wasn't what he meant all those times he'd said he wanted to be inside her.

"How bad was it?"

His mind went back to the basement and he knew his memories were already fading slightly at the edges, but oh god the edges were so ragged and sharp and far apart. He had years to forget it, and it would take years to forget it. "It felt... like nothing," he whispered. "Nothing except cold and pain and I knew no one was coming, ever, probably not even the Death Eaters, but I wished they would. I wished they'd start torturing me again because it would have been better than staying there alone."

He was glad to discover, then, that ghosts could still cry.