The Beginning is the End
by: Slytherclaw Coffee Ninja
"He's so perfect."
Myrtle rolled her eyes, and pretended to be absorbed in her copy of The Standard Book of Spells: Grade 5. Olive Hornsby, and her gang of fifth year Ravenclaw girls were sitting towards the end of the table, and while Myrtle had made a point of not sitting anywhere near them, she still heard their voices. They were talking about him again.
"He has the most gorgeous eyes, and I think he's absolutely brilliant. It's no wonder he was chosen to be prefect."
Myrtle didn't have friends. She was more the type that preferred to observe other people, and if there was one thing that she observed during her five years at Hogwarts, it was that every one on the face of the Earth was in love with Tom Riddle. Everything he said was brilliant; everything he did was perfect, and, part of her despised him. He was surrounded by a group of friends, no, worshippers, that seemed to follow him around whereever he went. No one hated him, except for the boys in Gryffindor, it seemed, but many of the girls simply deemed them as jealous, while the Gryffindor boys would proclaim that he was just as evil as Grindelwald, if not worse.
And he was orphaned, and had to grow up in a muggle orphanage when he was younger, and had to return there every summer.
To everyone at Hogwarts, that was positively the epitome of tragedy.
But to Myrtle, there was no way that anyone could surpass those odds, and not have something that irks them. Something that tugs at the edge of their mind when they're just about to fall asleep.
And that was the Tom she saw. The frightened Tom, the one that's always on the brink of a breakdown. The one so scarred by his earlier life that he refuses to acknowledge that it even happened.
For a moment, she put her book down, and gazed over at the Slytherin table. He was sitting in the middle of a crowd of his friends, all of them talking about something, and each one of them trying to drag his attention towards their particular angle of the conversation. He seemed as though he was trying to be engaged, trying to care about what each and every one of them were saying, and yet...he really didn't. He was absorbed in his own thoughts, preoccupied with his own sadness and nervousness, but none of his 'friends' could tell.
Only she could see it.
"Hey, Four-Eyes, what are you staring at?" Olive inquired, smirking.
Giggles.
"I think she's in love," said Jane, snickering.
"...I'm not," Myrtle muttered, her eyes downcast. The last thing that she wanted Olive and her friends to think was that she was in love with the boy that practically every girl in Hogwarts wanted to be with.
"I bet she is," Hedy chimed in. Myrtle kept staring at the floor, and gathered up her books to leave the Great Hall. However, just before she heard Jane mutter under her breath:
"Too bad for her. Tom's already asked Olive to Hogsmeade."
Biting her lip, and trying to keep herself from crying, she ran off, hearing the snickers of Olive and her friends behind her. Even when she turned a corner, she could still hear them, but she knew they were back in the Great Hall.
She couldn't go back to the Ravenclaw common room. They were there too. They didn't deserve to, but they were. Instead, she didn't go to the third floor, and got off the staircase on the second floor. She had to find a place to get away from them. A place where she could have some solace before having to go to Transfiguration with the rest of the Ravenclaws.
Throwing the door to the bathroom at the end of the hall, Myrtle ran in, and slumped against the wall, slidding down until she was sitting on the floor, and hugged her knees. She didn't want to get upset. She didn't at all. She was always running off and crying whenever Olive said something mean to her, and this time, regardless of how brave she had attempted to be, it had ended the same way.
She wasn't in love with Tom. She knew that much. Part of her found him fascinating. But she had seen enough of relationships around Hogwarts to know that that wasn't what you were supposed to feel when you were in love with someone. You weren't supposed to think they were interesting - that their past was intriguing, and think that they had some sort of undisclosed sadness that people were too stupid to see.
No.
That wasn't supposed to happen at all.
"Aren't you supposed to be in class?"
Myrtle looked up, and saw the face of a fifth year, Slytherin prefect.
Tom.
"I could ask you the same thing," Myrtle said, amazed at how different she sounded. "Especially since this is the girls' bathroom."
"Professor Dumbledore sent me to look for you," he says, sounding as though he was bored by the whole conversation.
For a moment, she dared to believe that Tom had been looking especially for her. That he had been worried about her. However, she knew better than anyone that he would have never come to look for her. Despite the fact that they had a few classes together here and there, the two of them had never spoken.
Myrtle gathered her things, and left the bathroom after Tom did. By the time they were in Transfiguration, and Professor Dumbledore was discussing Animagi, Myrtle's mind was still going over the entire incident.
Professor Dumbledore sent Tom.
Looking for me.
Me.
He didn't send Hedy, even though she's a girl, and a Ravenclaw prefect.
He sent Tom.
"Class is over."
She snapped back to the classroom, and realized that she was the only one there, and that Professor Dumbledore was smiling kindly at her, trying to get her to leave the classroom before his next class arrived.
Blushing, she hopped out of her seat, and left the classroom in a hurry, forgetting to acknowledge the fact that Professor Dumbledore had asked her if there was anything she wanted to tell him.
While Myrtle was normally the sort of student that professors loved to have in their classes, during the rest of the day, she was "in her head" as one professor put it. She didn't respond when questions were asked of her, and if she realized that a question had been asked, she would respond minutes later, when the class had already moved past that point in their discussion.
There were certain times during each of her classes where she would think for just a moment that Tom had glanced in her direction, and she would turn her head for a moment, and then realize that he was looking off in a different direction - at one of his cronies, or at the page in a textbook that they were supposed to be studying.
After classes were over for the day, Myrtle ran up to the third floor, hoping to get to the common room before Olive and her friends did. At least while everyone was at dinner, she would have the chance to do some studying.
"Hey, where do you think you're going?"
For an instant, she dared to believe that it was Tom. Her eyes lit up, and as she turned around to face the person, she realized that it was Olive.
Myrtle was of the opinion that Olive had once been a beautiful girl. Her hair fell in black ringlets that framed her round face, and her eyes were large, and a bright blue. There was an internal ugliness that Myrtle saw, and only Myrtle saw. An ugliness that marred her features and showed the person that she really was.
A bully.
"You're the person who's been stealing in our dorm!"
Myrtle gave Olive a confused look. "I don't know what you're talking about," she said in a small voice, and started walking away from the Ravenclaw when she stopped her.
"Yes, you do," Olive said, her eyes flashing with anger. "You do know what I'm talking about. You took Jane's scarf, and Hedy's brooch, and my hatpin!"
"I said, I don't know what you're talking about!" Myrtle repeated, nearly screaming. Tears flew from her eyes as she pushed past Olive, and, instead of going into the Ravenclaw common room, she turned down the stairs, and ran.
"Come back here!" Olive called, running after her. "Four-Eyes, come back here!"
Myrtle kept running until she returned to the second floor bathroom, and threw the doors open. She dropped her books on the floor, and ignored the loud thud they made when they made contact with the marble.
She sat down on the U-bend, and held her head in her hands, sobbing and breathing heavily. It was at that precise moment that she heard the doors to the bathroom creak open.
"Go away!" she screamed, her throat raw from crying.
"It's me," the voice said simply. "Tom."
"Go away!" Myrtle repeated. "This is the girls' toliet."
She could almost see him smirk. He was perfection, and she was beginning to hate it.
"No, I don't believe I will."
She could hear hissing. She assumed that Tom was in on whatever scheme Olive and her friends had cooked up, and had sent a snake into the room.
"...would you come out for a moment?"
And yet, all the hatred towards his facade that she harbored, every bit of any time that they had seen each other in the corridors, every bit of any piece of gossip that had been shared about either of them...
...fell away.
It was just the two of them. Just the two of them, and no distractions, no nothing. It was just them.
She hesitated for a moment. She was about to open the door, when she remembered that she was still wearing her glasses, and took them off, and put them in her pocket, before opening the door a crack.
"I won't bite," Tom said plainly.
Edging ever so carefully out of the stall, Myrtle found herself face to face with the Slytherin prefect for the second time that day. She stood there for a few moments, unsure of what to say.
Finally, Tom bent down, and picked up a black, leather-bound journal on the floor by the sinks. "Is this yours?"
For a brief moment, Myrtle didn't know what to say. She was at a loss for words, and when she tried to say something, she found that she couldn't.
"It's a nice journal."
"I...guess...it...is," she managed to say, breathing heavier than she normally did. Instead of putting the small journal down, he pocketed it, and the two of them stood there in silence.
"You've been wondering about me," Tom said, and it seemed to Myrtle that he was almost internalizing the action of rolling his eyes at her.
"No, I haven't," Myrtle lied, shaking her head. There was something so frigthening about Tom up close. While he was more handsome than the other boys at Hogwarts, there was a sinister monster writhing inside him just waiting to devour her.
He reached out for a moment, and touched her arm with his long fingers, and Myrtle almost pulled her arm away. "You're different, you're special."
The last word came out sounding like a hiss, and Myrtle's insides squirmed.
"No...go away," she muttered. "You're not even supposed to be here."
Tom looked confused.
"Go away!" she shrieked. "Tom?"
He was gone.
She started walking towards the doors, but before she had even wandered a foot towards the exit, she heard a voice.
Goodbye Myrtle.
All she saw was a pair of bright, yellow eyes.
And just like that, she was gone.