House: Slytherin
Category: Drabble
Prompt: Thestrals [Creature]
Word Count (excluding A/N): 691
Summary: When she dies, Myrtle knows enough not to get on the horse's back, even if it does have wings.
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"I just remember seeing a pair of great big yellow eyes. My whole body sort of seized up and then I was floating away… and then I came back again. I was determined to haunt Olive Hornby, you see. Oh, she was sorry she'd ever laughed at my glasses."
-JK Rowling, The Chamber of Secrets
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Someone entered the bathroom, and Myrtle stifled a sob. No doubt it was Olive Hornby or one of her sidekicks here to torment her again.
But then a low, sibilant hiss echoed throughout the room.
Myrtle lifted her tear-streaked face, confusion in her grey eyes. Then the bathroom shook, as if the walls were shifting and sliding and rearranging themselves, and Myrtle let out a little cry of shock as she tumbled to the floor.
"Who— who's there?" she asked in a quavering voice.
A dark chuckle sounded. "Why don't you find out?"
"Are you a boy? Oh, you don't belong here." Her sorrow forgotten, Myrtle was now almost wriggling with glee. His voice was changing, so he was definitely older; if she was lucky, he was one of Olive's beaus. And she got to boss him around. "Get out. This is my bathroom."
"Aren't you Myrtle Warren, that little third year? Why don't you make me?"
Puffing out her chest in self-important indignation — for she wasn't a measly third year, but rather a grown-up fourth year — Myrtle stepped out of the stall, ready to give the boy a piece of her mind.
And gazed into two great big yellow eyes.
She was vaguely aware of her body crumpling to the floor like an unwieldy sack of potatoes, but only vaguely so, for her entire conscious was focused on those deep, dark, venomous yellow eyes looking into her, as if they could see into her soul. Finally, the boy hissed again and those hypnotising yellow eyes looked away.
Myrtle floated there, hardly aware of anything, oblivious to the boy and his monstrous snake leaving the room, barely even noticing Olive Hornby stepping into the bathroom minutes later and turning white as a sheet, as if she'd seen a ghost, and the ensuing hubbub of teachers and students and ghosts examining her own still cooling body. The crowd's movement pushed her into the U-bend, and even after they dispersed she remained there, shell-shocked.
It was only when a black, skeletal, winged horse landed before her that Myrtle remembered where she was and what she had seen.
Those entrancing yellow eyes.
The horse whinnied before her, and, driven by some indescribable compulsion, Myrtle almost mounted it. But something stopped her. She wanted revenge. Revenge on Olive Hornby. She'd be sorry for laughing at her glasses. "I'm sorry, Black Beauty," she murmured, running her fingers through its stringy mane. "But I can't go yet."
The stallion whinnied again, more indignantly this time, and bit her hand.
"What was that for?" Myrtle cried, inspecting her hand. She was dead, so no one should be able to hurt her, but somehow that old nag had managed to do so. A thick, silvery liquid that she could only assume was blood ran down her arm. "Go away!" she said petulantly, making shooing motions with her uninjured hand.
Whinnying even more urgently, the horse spread its bat-like wings and narrowed its white, glowing eyes. Myrtle lost herself in its gaze, feeling as if she were in a dream as she stumbled forward, but when her hand placed itself on the stallion's back and the horse nuzzled her blood-covered arm, she remembered herself. She couldn't leave, not yet.
"N-no!" she stammered, jerking away from the stallion. "I can't c-come with you..."
The horse bared its teeth at her, then snorted and turned away. With one powerful flap of its wings, it soared to the ceiling and, after wheeling around once, it darted out the door, leaving Myrtle alone in the empty bathroom.
She watched it go with an indescribable feeling in her chest. Somehow, she felt she'd done something that, one day, someday, she might regret. But for now, she was a ghost.
And Olive would be sorry.
