A/N: For the Random Characters Challenge. Again. I know, I know...I'm as obsessed as my characters...
Disclaimer: None of this is mine.
"Oh, Draco, I'm sure it'll be alright…" she croons as he sobs at the sink. His cries break her heart a bit every time—the only boy who ever cared for her.
"No, no, no! It won't—it can't be—it's Blaise's fault!" The yell comes from him as though forced out, something he has never told anyone and has never planned to tell her.
"Whatever do you mean?" she asks, for the first time not sympathetic or crying with him.
He shakes his head and stares at his hands. So, so long later, he whispers, "H-he and I were fr—companions as children. M-my father was his father's…acquaintance." She notices his hesitations—none of this can be called friendship. "We used to overhear Dad and Mr. Zabini y-yelling about You-Know-Who." He shivers and begins to cry again, and she cannot get the rest of the story from him.
In all honesty, she isn't sure she wants to. He's just a silly young boy who needs her comfort and care. But she needs him, too, needs his tears and confessions and dark thoughts whispered in her ear. She needs him like a drug, and she cannot go into withdrawal—not now, not after she's already gone from the earth and hanging around like a leech on the bathroom wall.
It's years later that Scorpius Malfoy walks into her bathroom accidentally and glares up at her. "Who're you?" he asks.
"Oh, that's kind!" she says, sniffing. He reminds her of something, someone, a nothing in the back of her long memory that attacks her sometimes, unawares.
"I'm Scorpius Malfoy. You must be Moaning Myrtle then, right? The girl who spends all day sobbing in here?" He looks around in interest. "My dad tells me stories. How he used to talk to a ghost when he—" the boy gets a dramatic look on his face—"had no one else! Oh, the pain!"
She doesn't appreciate his sarcasm. "Be quiet, boy. I don't know your—Wait. Wait, hold everything for just one moment." She crosses her eyes and leans back her head, trying to catch that elusive half-thought floating through her head as though it has a right to. "Draco Malfoy." Her body gets rigid, and slowly, slowly, slowly she floats to the ground. "Your father is Draco Malfoy."
Scorpius rolls his eyes. "Yes, idiot. What did you think?"
Her face scrunches up and she starts to cry.
"Oh, shut it." He walks towards her, and she floats away hurriedly.
"I don't want to talk to you any more. Go away. Get away!" She's on the ceiling, and he stares up at her with his father's eyes. Her heart breaks a little bit more. "Your father never loved me. He loved that idiot Greengrass girl the whole time—the one who he'd never acknowledge. But oh, he talked of her day and night. Her and You-Know-Who, the two he was in love with." Her voice is unbearably bitter.
"What? He hates You-Know-Who."
"He was obsessed," she says disdainfully. "Obsessed with all of his power, all of his fearsome energy. He was obsessed with the thought of him, but the real him was something else entirely."
"But you—you loved him! You loved my father!" Scorpius looks at her wonderingly.
"I was obsessed," she says quickly, looking away. "I didn't love him."
"I love him," Scorpius says, as if this will clear everything up. "He doesn't like to say so, but he loves me too."
"I'm sure he does, little Greengrass-spawn like you!" she says angrily.
"Greengrass-spawn? Is that the best you can do?" he says mockingly.
"Tell me the Blaise Zabini story. Tell me of how your father and Mr. Zabini used to play together when they were young. Tell how Mr. Malfoy used to yell at Blaise's father about You-Know-Who." She remembers the beginning of that story so well, suddenly. She needs to know the end.
Scorpius looks at her doubtfully. "Why?"
"Because! I need to know."
"Fine. Um… Mr. Zabini and Dad used to be…well, they were stuck with each other for the first seven years of their lives. Then the older Mr. Zabini married Ophelia Otis, the half-blood, and Granddad said he was unsuitable. But, before all that, Granddad and Old Mr. Z used to yell about You-Know-Who. They used to get so angry, and Mr. Zabini wanted to know why. So Dad and him went and asked—which was dumb in the first place, I think. Granddad said, 'We don't associate with him anymore.' And then, that night, Granddad told Dad that if You-Know-Who came back, they'd have to support him again, because he'd expect it. So for awhile Dad blamed Mr. Zabini for it all."
She breathes out, a long, slow breath of everything in her combined with this new information. "Obsessed," she murmurs, and Scorpius shrugs.
"If you say so." He's still doubtful.
"No! No, your father was obsessed with me!" Her words are suddenly joyful. "Yes, yes, yes! He needed me like I needed him! He needed to tell me that, and that's how you ended up here! He still needs me!"
Scorpius stares at her some more. Finally, he takes a deep breath. "He needs my mum, Moaning Myrtle, not you. I'm sorry."
He's not sorry, though, this boy who doesn't understand obsession or anguish.
"No! He's obsessed with me! He always will be!" She cannot listen to reason. She is beyond reason. She needs this shred of hope like she once needed him.
Scorpius finally gives up trying to tell her that his father is happily married. He gives up trying to stop her obsession before it goes too far, but it's too late.
She's beyond reason, fear, convincing, everything. She's finally gone beyond, to where she was once meant to go.
But she brings her obsession along.