Listen
Myrtle listens to Luna. And Luna listens back.
She doesn't know how it started, she doesn't remember the first time it happened (though now she wishes she did, so she could implant the memory in her ghost mind and keep it forever). But sometime around Christmas, Myrtle realized that she had a friend.
She doesn't know why it took her so long to realize it. Maybe, she thinks, it's because she's never really had a friend before. Harry doesn't count, Myrtle reminds herself sternly, and neither do any of the prefects she watches in the bath.
Myrtle thought she had a friend once before. Last year, when Draco Malfoy used to come into the bathroom on the seventh floor and look into the mirror, staring at his own face and his own tortured expression as his hands gripped the porcelain edges of the sink tighter and tighter till all the blood had drained out of them and that part of him at least was as translucent as Myrtle.
Tears would slip sometimes, and tremble with his voice, along his cheekbones, onto his chin, as he said, over and over again, "I can't do it. It's not working. I just can't."
He never told her what he was doing, exactly, but Myrtle knows it had to be something really big, really important. Myrtle had thought (hoped) quite a few times that maybe he would die and then he really would be just like her and they could be together forever.
But he doesn't ever come around this year. Just like Harry and his friends never came around once they didn't need to use her bathroom for that smelly potion anymore.
No, Myrtle has definitely never had a friend. Until Luna.
She tells Luna about all this, about Draco and about Harry and even about Tom. And Luna fills in the parts of the stories that Myrtle never knew and Luna's hand slips through her shoulder when she tries to pat it.
Somehow, it is still comforting.
Myrtle listens to Luna too. She has always been a good listener. So she listens as Luna's eyes grow bright and her hands flutter up and down (sometimes getting caught in her gossamer hair) and she talks faster and faster and the words spill out, about thestrals and nargles and how the Rotfang Conspiracy has already begun to put their plans in action. She listens too when Luna's eyes dim slightly and her voice grows flat and matter of fact and her hands grip her knees and then twist the fabric of her robes in her lap and she talks about the Order and the Death Eaters and the war and how Hogwarts is falling to pieces.
Myrtle knows that Luna has other friends. She has seen her walking about the hallways sometimes (during those rare times when Myrtle leaves the bathroom at all, which are getting rarer all the time), skulking about outside the headmaster's office or ducking into hidden doorways with Ginny Weasley and Neville Longbottom and sometimes Justin Finch-Fletchley or Ernie Macmillan. But Myrtle has never seen Luna's eyes grow bright or her hands flutter up and down or her words spill out faster and faster when she talks to any of them and Myrtle wonders if Luna's friends really listen to her at all.
But Myrtle does. It is not anything new, the way Myrtle listens. She has always been a good listener, and it is no different with Luna. But what is different is the way Luna listens back, the sympathetic tilt of her head and the hands that never connect yet soothe anyway. It is this, not the listening, but the being listened to, that makes Myrtle sure that this, this is what having a friend feels like.
And, for the first time in years, in maybe ever, Myrtle chokes out a sob that is not self-pitying but happy, happy, happy.
xXx
A/N: I actually wrote this story a long time ago, over winter break, after being inspired by the song "Nargles in the Mistletoe" by the Moaning Myrtles. Which is an excellent song by an awesome band, by the way. Anyway, I'm rather pleased with how the story turned out. Review?
