This is for Round 10 of the 4th season of QLFC. I'm a reserve Keeper for the Appleby Arrows, and the overall theme for this round was "Of Ghosts and Portraits". My prompt was Sir Nicholas de Mimsy-Porpington.
Word count is 1,145.
He always stuck out. Always, like a sore thumb, shoved onto a pedestal to be mocked by the crowd, and he was absolutely sick of it.
Sometimes it was his fault, sometimes it wasn't.
It started with a small mistake. His own fault, being petty and inconsiderate. Because, really, what's in a name?
. . . . .
He approached Hogwarts for the first time with a sense of dread already coiled in his stomach.
"Hello? Is anyone sitting here?" A scrawny girl poked her freckled nose through the door as he stared glumly out the window at the thestrals that were getting ready to take off.
"Wha-? Yeah! Yeah, of course - I mean, no, no one's sitting there, you - you can sit, I mean, if you want to, that is to say - it's fine with me…" he trailed off, pink with embarrassment, caught off guard, stunned that someone wanted to sit with him, of all people.
She sat, folding her dress under her, promptly sticking out hand. "Margaret Woodbury. What's your name?"
He flinched, startled that the question had come so very soon. Then a solitary thought struck him like a bolt out of the blue, immediate and overwhelming. Deceitful, yes, but what was he to do?
He smiled easily, and shook her hand.
"Patrick Mills."
. . . . .
"Patrick, can I tell you something?"
He took a moment to realize she was talking to him, and then looked up, startled. Margaret had stopped talking for the first time in quite a few hours. He nodded, unsure what to say.
"I was worried," she admitted, biting her lip. "I thought I would end up, well... They say I talk too much, and…" He sat quietly, waiting for her to confess something more than this. A lack of friends, he thought, could hardly be warranting the glossy sheen that had overtaken her wide eyes.
"My papa went to jail."
He said nothing, but something in the back of his mind was protesting.
"He… they say he killed…" she couldn't finish.
Stop. He didn't want to hear her spill her heart out to him, spill her tears to him. Him, so unworthy of her blind trust.
He already knew how the sentence would end, anyways. Her dress was old, her hair had obviously done by her own hand, untrained and unloved.
"I promised myself I wouldn't tell anyone."
He knew the feeling.
"But that's what friends do, right? They trust each other."
Friends, trust, friends, trust. No trust. No friends?
His secret was minuscule compared to hers. Compared to hers, his problems didn't exist.
And that was the time, surely, to tell her.
He had lied. It barely mattered, but he had lied.
. . . . .
Even now, centuries later, he remembered the look on her face.
By the time they had reached the castle, he was rather flustered, torn between uncomfortable guilt and pleasure at a newfound friendship.
What he hadn't counted on was the Sorting Hat.
"Alwen, Catherine!" was called, and he had a horrible realization.
And then, just a few minutes later, "de Mimsy-Porpington, Nicholas!"
He didn't focus on the giggles were already rising through the hall as he stepped forward, barely even noticed the children laughing and pointing, craning their necks to get a glimpse of the first year with the funny name.
One girl wasn't laughing.
Why, why had he been so desperate to escape a mere two minutes of embarassment?
Later that night, the very last remnants of hope that he had been clinging to slipped away quietly out of his eyes, falling softly onto his pillow.
It was going to be a very long year.
. . . . .
The second mistake was very likely the worst he would ever make.
He woke up, cold and clammy with sweat, clinging to the last remnants of some distant nightmare. Intent on finding something to eat, he stood up, gliding to the door of his bedroom.
…He wasn't in his bedroom.
Gliding?
Gradually, Nicholas became aware of an odd floating feeling that had overcome him, almost like the sensation of riding a broomstick, but accompanied with a certain chill.
Trembling all over, as if scared of what he might find, he lifted an arm and stared at it.
Pale, pearly. Translucent.
What have I done?
In a sudden rush, every memory from the night before flooded his mind.
Why was he outside?
There was pain. Pain so intense it couldn't possibly be real. Flashes. Noise. Laughs? Screams. His?
Why had he gone outside?
There had been a light in the woods, he had seen it through the window. A lantern, maybe?
A thought entered his mind, unbidden. Curiosity killed the cat.
Pain, dark, silence. And then what?
He had chosen to stay.
It was then that he realized where he was, and, if his assumptions were correct, where he would be spending the rest of eternity.
Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry.
It was fitting, he supposed.
He was being punished for his cowardry, forced to stay forever in the place where he had always been most alone.
. . . . .
Months and years passed. Decades, centuries.
There was not a day that went by where he didn't wish that he hadn't been so weak, so foolish. He would never know the secrets of death, never be able to have a true friend again.
The other Hogwarts ghosts were not at all the type of people he would associate with. He did make friends with students, but 7 years was nothing. It was as if he met them, knew them for 10 minutes, and then they graduated, and he never saw them again, nor knew of what became of them. He'd wait 20 years and then lo and behold, a new student would turn up bearing their name.
And so it went.
And he was sick of it.
. . . . .
Sir Nicholas de Mimsy-Porpington made two rather large mistakes, one in life and one in death. One could argue that the latter had considerably worse effects, but the former mistake was, in many ways, even more devastating. The former mistake was one that encompassed all the "What if?" questions of Nick's life.
What if he hadn't lied?
What if he and Margaret had grown closer?
What if he would have ended up as something other than a lonely, albeit wealthy man, bleeding to death on the side of a Scottish loch?
But alas, it was not to be.
. . . . .
A brief respite came in the form of an attack.
Nicholas had come to terms with this particular instance because, as far as he was concerned, he had gotten quite a good deal out of it. For the first time in hundreds of years, he lost all forms of consciousness. For months, he was able to drift in that peaceful oblivion that had for so long eluded him. At the same time, he saved the life of a second year student.
He was quite disappointed when they "rescued" him.
Rescued from what, exactly?
As it happened, the best thing that happened to Nicholas after he died was when he died again.