Hogwarts (Challenges and Assignments).
Assignment 6 — Media Studies — task 11 — write about a haunting (no canon ghosts)
Writing Club — Disney Challenge — The Little Mermaid — themes — pretending to be somebody else — write about using Polyjuice potion
Writing Club — Showtime — Mister Cellophane — (character) Neville Longbottom
A/N: This is supposed to be funny and is not meant to be taken seriously by any means. Please note that I have never, not once, written a crack fic or anything like this before. That being said...please enjoy!
Death was really very boring. Dolores had nothing to do — no one to make write with her precious blood quills, no students to smile sweetly at and insult in a voice dripping with sugar and honey...
She couldn't remember much from before she died; she was a fairly new ghost, and still hadn't figured out how to move. Which meant that she had been stuck in the exact spot where she was killed for days.
Bloody plant, she thought irritably. She would get Longbottom back if it was the last thing she did!
And then she realized for the fifth time that, since she was a ghost, she had eternity to fulfill her desire to see Longbottom get what he so rightfully deserved.
It was partially her fault — but Dolores never admitted her wrongdoings. Ever. She'd been under the disguise of a middle-aged woman from the Ministry (using Polyjuice, of course) inspecting the greenhouses, and had been attacked by one of Longbottom's hybrids which was apparently a mix between the Venomous Tentacula and some other horrible plant that didn't deserve to live.
If not for the plant, she would still be alive.
She wondered briefly how the other woman had died while Dolores was under the Polyjuice potion. She understood why she herself had been killed — after all, it was her in there, desire her temporary appearance — but she couldn't grasp the concept of how Sharon Mosdra had been found in her flat, very much dead, but body completely unmarked.
Something that no one could figure out was how Sharon had been killed by the hybrid plant, with Neville Longbottom as a (horrified) witness, and yet was also in her flat. The mystery still hadn't been solved, and Dolores was, for once, thankful that the entire Ministry was incompetent. (Which, of course, had nothing to do with her.) It also could have helped that she had been taken away quickly and hadn't yet changed back into her own body.
She really hated her body. Not the shape — the color. People could see right through her. How indecent! Besides that, she could barely see the pink of her cardigan. Her hair was in its perfectly coiffed curls with the opaque/black bow perched on top. She patted the curls down with her hands, which she had found quite by accident went through everything except very light objects and herself. She had once walked in on the Bloody Baron and the Grey Lady snogging in an abandoned classroom during her time at Hogwarts teaching, so she assumed that ghosts were able to touch one another.
Not that Dolores had any desire to touch dead people who were too scared of death to actually die.
She had finally figured out how to move.
She had first tried swimming through the air, which didn't work at all. In fact, it made her move backward half the time — and sideways the other half! Then she observed the Hogwarts ghosts from afar and learned that they didn't need to move any part of their bodies to glide. All they had to do was tilt forward — or sideways or backwards — and they would begin to float in that direction. The more tilted their bodies, the faster they went.
Up and down was a bit trickier, but Dolores prided herself upon her ability to master any task she set her mind to. She had to lean back, but the angle had to be just right or she would end up either losing her balance or moving backwards.
She also learned that body heat was almost unbearable to ghosts. When a live human touched a ghost, the person felt like that body part had been dunked in ice cold water. When a person walked through a ghost, it felt as if they had been held in that water, and stayed that way for several seconds.
But when ghosts touched the living person — or animal, for that matter — they felt like they were burning up. It felt like flames licking at the place where the dead and living had touched. People walking through them felt an easy quadruple of that.
And to make matters even worse for Longbottom, he did just that.
"Oh, I'm terribly sorry —" Neville stopped abruptly as he realized exactly whom he had walked through. His teeth chattered slightly from Dolores' cold vapors, but she didn't feel the least bit sorry for him. He killed her; thus, he deserved it. "Madam Umbridge!"
She turned to face the hapless boy, arms crossed. "Longbottom," she returned. The Herbology assistant glanced around helplessly before giving up any hope that someone else might rescue him from Umbridge's ghost.
"It's lovely to see you again," he offered. Dolores scoffed. The boy had never been a good lier.
"You as well," she lied through her teeth. "Now, if you'll excuse me..."
He jumped and moved out of her way. "Of course!" He sounded very relieved, and she hid a smirk as she tilted forward and glided away.
He wouldn't be relieved long. She was starting her haunting.
As she had been killed in the greenhouse — number 4, to be exact — Dolores was mostly stuck there. Ghosts couldn't leave the grounds of the place they had been killed or had died. So that meant that she had all of Hogwarts, but couldn't go into the Forbidden Forest.
She learned that she enjoyed going through solid objects, although the thicker the object, the harder it was and the worse headache she got afterward. A door gave her a mild throbbing, but a wall could sometimes give her a migraine. It had looked like so much fun while she had been living — but now that she was one of them, she realized why the ghosts didn't do it very often.
The next day was a class taught by Longbottom, Professor Sprout's apprentice and assistant, and Dolores was looking forward to beginning her slow torture of him.
"You should never, ever listen to a mandrake cry without earmuffs," instructed Longbottom seriously. He passed out fluffy grey earmuffs, silently thanking Pomona for listening to him when he said that the kids of this generation would rebel if they had to use the pink ones that he had had to.
Dolores floated outside, watching her former student show them how to pull the mandrakes, and regarded the second-years in amusement as they struggled to re-pot the squalling plants. She stayed low as she went through the glass walls, which were thankfully thin enough that it barely affected her, and picked up a pebble. She threw it at the back of Longbottom's head and stifled an unladylike snort as he flinched when it hit him and whirled around with a look of confusion on his face. The glass was unbroken, so that ruled out that way. The doors were all shut and locked from the inside, and no one was hiding behind the huge pots that he could see.
He shrugged and turned back to the second-years. Dolores giggled silently, like a schoolgirl afraid of being caught kissing her boyfriend, and dove back out through the glass.
Over the next six months, Dolores ccontinued to make Longbottom's life a complete hell. She uprooted his precious hybrid flower supposedly worth thousands of Galleons, tipped mud from the Great Lake on his head on dozens of occasions, and even inlisted Peeves' help with water balloons and the throwing of food. She still couldn't understand why the poltergeist could pick up heavier items and the other ghosts couldn't, but dismissed it. Together, the two ghosts made an amazing team, and Peeves listened to her and was scared if her more than even the Bloody Baron (who did not appreciate that at all).
Then, one day, she somehow managed to knock the earmuffs off his ears when he and Pomona were digging up fully-grown mandrakes for Potion ingredients, and he died instantly from the cry.
She had only wanted to make him grow donkey ears, but she didn't feel the least bit sorry. She and Peeves continued to be Hogwarts' best/worst team of mishief makers that McGonagall had ever seen — even including the Marauders.
They had food fights that pit each year against the others (of which the firsties won), snowball fights (where the seventh-years enchanted the snowballs to attack everyone else), and generally caused havoc.
Dolores had finally found her purpose in death.