A/N: Hey guys, this will be a short femHarry Severitus story (three-four chapters). I've had this idea in mind for a while and finally got down to writing it. It's currently still in draft form, so apologies for any mistakes, but I really wanted to share. I will come back to edit at a later stage.

Obviously, everything belongs to the amazing J. K. Rowling. I'm just playing with her toys.

Warning: mention of self-harm and substance use/abuse.

I hope you enjoy reading it and please review!

Merope :)

My Friend Myrtle

Chapter One

First-floor girls' lavatory, Hogwarts Castle, Scotland, Great Britain.

12:45 am, Thursday, September 5th, 1996.

The ventilation grilles set in the stone floor remind Harriet of her cupboard and the years spent watching the Dursleys through the small grate in the door. Birthday parties, dinners, Christmas mornings—all spent on her knees with her nose stuck to the tiny door, her eyes drinking in the details: the ribbons on Dudley's presents, Aunt Petunia's apple pies, the TV in the corner, the film nights, the sugary snacks. Sometimes, if she closed her eyes and focused really, really hard, one of the sweets would inconspicuously float out of her cousin's oversized bowl and levitate itself towards her cupboard. And that was even before she knew she was a witch. She kept the wrappers like trophies, hidden underneath the broken mattress that was her bed. It didn't last long, of course, this disgusting show of freakiness, and once they noticed, Uncle Vernon covered the grate in the door with a thick block of wood and that was that. She doesn't exactly remember the lecture, but the darkness that came afterwards…well that she remembers with astute clarity. It was a darkness that only made her nightmares brighter.

Stretching her legs on the floor, Harriet leans her head against the wooden door of the toilet cubicle and closes her eyes. For a moment, the silence in her mind is almost soothing, but then it happens again, that fitful drop in her stomach, the breathlessness, the irrational feeling of imminent danger. She is drowning in her own life as spasmodic memories fill her mind and emotions entangle like twines around her neck, making it hard to breathe, hard to see, hard to be.

But she is.

And she is reminded of her earthly presence each morning when tired green eyes stare back at her from the mirror; shoulders slouch each day more with this weight of being, of being anchored in a world she is slowly starting to hate. A world in which he stopped being cannot be right. She should not be where he is not.

Ignoring the way her hands shake, Harriet places a cigarette in between her lips and lights it with the tip of her wand. The action is less awkward than the night before, less childish as if living through another day has visibly aged her. She breaths in and the bitter, burning sensation curls throughout her lungs and throat, ripping its way to her head until she finally lets it out in a grey cloud. As it undulates through the air, the smoke takes on the features of those who died because of her: Mum, Dad, Cedric, Sirius…their faces blur, distort, mix together and then finally morph into that of their murderer. Voldemort.

The name itself is enough to make her blood cold and she can't quite forget the way it felt to have him inside her head. It was as if her magical core was on fire, sending shots of burning pain through her body, making her eyes water. Her sternum felt like it had been cut out of her chest, allowing her ribs to poke inwardly through her lungs, making every breath a struggle.

But she did breathe, painful as it was, she breathed through his jeering words and his cold laughter and somehow thinking of the love she felt for her friends was enough to make him stop.

Because there was nothing he despised quite as much as love.

You're a fool, Harriet Potter. And you will lose everything, he promised before disapparating from the Ministry, leaving her sprawled on the floor in a pile of sand, wishing she were already dead.

Harriet puts the half-finished cigarette out on the floor with more force than absolutely necessary, ignoring the way her fingers shake as they press the bud into the stone. She is tired, her body is asking for sleep, but she must deprive herself of this until the point of exhaustion. Because if she is not tired enough she dreams, and if she dreams she kills him. Every night she pushes him through the veil, every night she wakes the entire dorm with her screams. Every night she takes her Potions scalpel to the bathroom, or an abandoned classroom, or the Astronomy Tower, and draws symmetrical red lines on her arms.

Punishment. A longing for atonement.

The forgiveness of a dead man.

In the hours immediately following her return from the Department of Mysteries, Harriet spent three hours in the shower. The stench of death was embroiled deep within her bones and she couldn't stand it. She could even smell it on the bristly soap she used to scrub her body raw. She can still smell it. Sometimes she thinks that it is coming from within her, as her insides are slowly rotting, corroding everything around them, infesting those close to her with the promise of certain death only because they have the misfortune of knowing her.

There wasn't even a body to bury.

Nothing left of him. Almost as if he never even existed.

Sirius.

Even thinking of his name makes the knot in her stomach twist like a pretzel. But she can't quite stop herself.

He had changed her world, coming into it the way he did, at a time when all she wanted was a father figure. With his grizzled locks and dated jokes, there remained a certain charm about him despite the twelve years he spent in Azkaban. He was thin and he was tired, but in the short time they had together, Harriet never failed to see just how alive he was. The desire to live was so deeply buried within him that it shone through his bad teeth, his overindulgence in Firewhiskey, his propensity to act rashly, to go knee deep into treacherous waters. Nothing mattered and yet everything did matter because he was free.

Sirius understood the paradoxes of her existence. He did not find it odd that even though she hated small, narrow spaces, she sometimes missed her cupboard and the musty smell of old bed sheets. He too had learnt to find comfort in his imprisonment. He couldn't sleep in beds anymore, he had said. He preferred the hard surface of the floor. His showers cold, his food sweet. They ate more chocolate over the Christmas holiday than she ever did before.

He never questioned her reticence to speak of her family, but the look in his eyes was knowing enough. And then one frosty morning during the Christmas break, as Harriet came downstairs for breakfast, he had promised the very thing that she had always yearned for. What would you say, pup, if I were to ask Dumbledore to let you live with me instead of the Dursleys?

He never did get the chance to speak to the Headmaster, Harriet muses as she takes another puff of her cigarette, closing her eyes against the bitter taste in her mouth.

Yet for all his wise words, for all his promises and stories, Sirius never quite became the father figure she longed for. It became clear after a while, abundantly clear in fact, that he was stuck in the past, that Azkaban hadn't aged him but preserved him. He wanted to pick up the pieces and continue living from the precise point where his life was interrupted. Sirius Black was, for all extents and purposes, an embittered twenty-one-year-old.

It was only natural then that the confusion itself became confusing. And the more they laughed together, the more they spoke of Quidditch, bonded over Exploding Snap, the more Harriet came to realize that her eyes took in too many details; the way his hair hung on his shoulders, the playful glint in his eyes when reminiscing about something, the sheepish smile when he swore in front of her. It annoyed her, the way her heart fluttered when she saw him, the way her face erupted in a fierce blush when he kissed the top of her forehead. Because he had tried to be paternal, to be a mentor. She could see it in his gait, the struggle to act his age, to be responsible, to make up for lost time. To be there.

But it was awkward. It didn't come naturally and for all his good intentions, Harriet was relieved when he stopped trying so hard. Yet the conflicting thoughts still didn't go away.

She shouldn't have felt like that, he was supposed to be a parental figure, not a crush. It was wrong, yet it wasn't enough to stop her imagining his face each time she took a shower, each time her hands timidly felt her rapidly changing body.

He would have been the same age as her father, had James been alive. But he was dead. They were both dead. Dead because of her. So it really didn't matter that she had had a crush on Sirius. Nothing really mattered anymore.

"What are you thinking about?"

The voice startles her because she hasn't felt the customary drop in temperature associated with the apparition of a ghost. And yet there she is, half emerged from the adjacent toilet basin, her head resting on her translucent hands, watching her with the intensity of a deranged stalker.

"Nothing."

"Doesn't look like nothing to me. Is that a cigarette?"

"Go away, Myrtle!" Harriet snaps, her eyes pointing in aversion at the transparent, pig-tailed apparition.

"You go away! This is my bathroom!" Myrtle wails, plunging from the toilet with a ferocious splash of water and stopping inches away from Harriet's face. "Or does that not matter to you? Of course, it doesn't matter! Why should Myrtle Warren need a bathroom in the first place? She's already dead! Let's all go ruin her peace and quiet!"

"You're the one wailing like a bloody Mandrake!" Harriet exclaims as she stands abruptly and snatches her bag off the bathroom floor.

"I am DEAD!" Myrtle suddenly shouts. "I am allowed to lament my lack of substance! You don't realise how lucky you are—being able to eat and drink and sleep! All I do is float and even then people laugh and throw things at me!" Without further notice, Myrtle erupts in a flood of tears and loud bawling that makes Harriet wince.

"I'll leave you to it, Myrtle," she says quickly, clutching her bag and heading towards the bathroom exit.

"Don't you dare walk out that door, Harriet!" Myrtle exclaims, rapidly floating towards Harriet and placing herself between the bespectacled girl and the exit, successfully managing to halt her escape.

"I thought you wanted your space," Harriet says, managing, with a huge force of will, to not roll her eyes. Just walk through her, just walk through her, just walk through her. The chilling, tingling feeling never lasted more than a few hours anyway. She could live with that.

"What sort of friend are you? Leaving me in this state, not knowing what—"

"I'm not your friend, Myrtle…"

"—what I might do. I could kill myself! Have you no remorse?"

"You're already dead, I'm sure you'll manage to get over it, whatever it is. Goodnight."

"If you walk out of this bathroom I'll tell everyone that you cut your arms with you Potions scalpel."

For a moment, Harriet can hear nothing but the sound of her own pounding heart; the blood is roaring so loud in her ears that she fails to focus on anything else. "I don't know what you're talking about," she eventually manages in a careful, controlled tone.

"I don't believe you for a second," Myrtle says as a small smirk appears on her face. "I followed you last night when you went to the Astronomy Tower. I was excited at the prospect of you jumping and me finally having a dead companion that was my age. When I saw that you weren't about to kill yourself, I got bored and wanted to leave, but then a silvery glimmer caught my eye and before I had time to react, you had already cut your arm. I'm surprised the blood doesn't make you squeamish…you're such a skinny little thing."

"Myrtle-"

"Don't test me, Harriet! I will tell everyone. Imagine the gossip!" Myrtle exclaims excitedly, floating away and sitting cross-legged on top of the nearest toilet cubicle. When she looks down at Harriet, there is a triumphant glint in her grey-hued, transparent eyes. "The story that I started! People will come to my bathroom to hear me tell them the gory details and I will be so popular!"

"That was an accident!" Harriet exclaims, wishing that for once her voice could be more assertive, her body language more confident.

"We both know that's not true."

"Myrtle please don't do this," Harriet says, running a hand through her hair, a gesture that betrays her growing anxiety. Her self-inflicted punishment had never felt quite so real before or quite so shaming. The thought of anyone else knowing what lays underneath the sleeves of her school jumper is enough to make her want to crawl into her own trunk. She feels as though what had seemed like normal or mundane a day ago has been suddenly blown out of proportion as if the branches of trees could move despite the absence of wind. As if the sky could tumble on top of her, making it impossible to be. As if she could cut herself and feel no real pain.

"I could be persuaded not to," Myrtle offers after a moment of studying Harriet.

"What do you want?" she bristles, reminding herself to keep breathing, to keep calm, to ignore the tingling in her arms.

"You."

"Me…?"

"Be my friend and I won't tell anyone about your….little secret," Myrtle says and for all the nonchalance in her voice, her gaze is intense enough to make Harriet inwardly shudder.

"You want me to be your friend," she repeats slowly, as though trying to decipher some hidden meaning in the ghost's words.

"Yes. You know what a friend is, don't you? We giggle, we tell each other castle secrets, gossip about other people. There are so many things I could tell you about the pipes and drains of Hogwarts. You have no idea what things I tend to find down there," Myrtle says, sweeping down from the top of the toilet cubicle and landing in front of Harriet.

"And if I agree to be your friend, you won't tell anyone about what you saw?"

"I cross my heart and hope to die, stick a needle in my eye-"

"I don' think that saying counts if you're already dead!" Harriet hisses with mounting irritation.

"Take a chill pill, Harriet. I'll keep my word if you keep yours."

"Fine."

"Good! I'll see you back here tomorrow, friend," Myrtle whispers before floating away and disappearing through a wall.

Harriet is left standing in the dim moonlight seeping through the window, wondering when her life will get less complicated.

Potions Laboratory, Hogwarts Castle, Scotland, Great Britain.

9:00 am, Thursday, September 5th, 1996.

The door bangs against the wall and Snape marches into the classroom like an apocalyptic fiend from hell. His black cloak billows behind him menacingly, and everyone goes quiet. Some even stand a little straighter at their desks, watching in alarm as he abruptly turns on his heels and surveys them with distaste. His glare seems to linger on her a moment longer than on anyone else and Harriet knows almost immediately that he is not in a good mood. As if he ever is.

"Today we will be brewing Sigismund Elsholtz's Theophillic Potion," Snape begins in his familiar languid drawl. "As you would have no doubt learned from your assigned summer readings, this particular concoction if representative of the remedium family of potions."

Harriet gulps. It's not that she hasn't done the summer readings—because she has. She just doesn't remember that much from them. Hoping that she will not get called on, she tries to stay as still as possible in her seat. Blink every twenty second…that shouldn't draw too much attention.

"Mr. Zabini," Snape quickly rasps out, "what is the general purpose of a remedium potion?"

"To err…cure," the Slytherin boy stutters out. "It is an antidote to poison."

"And what makes the brewing techniques paradoxical, Miss. Potter?" Snape asks, turning his dark eyes towards Harriet so abruptly that her stomach knots.

I know this, I know this, I know this. "The ingredients?" she chances out, inwardly wincing at the uncertainty in her voice.

"Do elaborate," Snape drawls, his tone snide, his gaze unrelenting.

"The ingredients are…odd," Harriet says and from the corner of her eye, she can see Hermione sighing in exasperation.

"Odd," Snape repeats, piercing her with a derisive glare. "You never fail to awe us all with your flare for academia, Potter. It's good to see that five years of magical education have not been wasted on you. Ten points from Gryffindor for sheer stupidity."

Harriet can feel her face going red as Malfoy and a few other Slytherins snigger behind her. For a moment, she focuses on nothing but her deep-rooted hatred for Snape. She wishes she could permanently transfigure him into a fly and keep him in a jar underneath her bed, or fasten him to a tree with unbreakable chains and wait for the bark to grow over him and swallow him into its wooden depths. Because Sirius is dead. Sirius is dead and Snape is alive and the world is upside down as if she got lost in time and somehow stumbled upon the wrong reality.

Dead, dead, dead, dead. The Potions Master turns his attention away from her and begins lecturing. "Sigismund Elsholtz's Theophillic Potion is the only known concoction which uses trigger ingredients to recognise and eliminate poison in an organic body. The brewing techniques required of you to achieve a successful antidote are paradoxical because, until the penultimate stage, the antidote itself is toxic. Why is that, Mr Malfoy?" Snape asks, piercing the blonde Slytherin with an expectant gaze.

"Because the base ingredients are poisonous, sir," Malfoy says with confidence and Harriet wishes she could throw her cauldron at him.

"And who can name the three base components?" Hermione's hand shoots up in an instant but Snape ignores her, turning instead towards the Slytherin girl sitting next to Malfoy. "Miss Parkinson."

"They are poison hemlock, deadly nightshade and holcus lantus, more commonly known as velvet grass, sir," Pansy promptly answers, not missing the opportunity to give Hermione a derogatory smirk.

"Correct. Five points to Slytherin," Snape announces as he waves a lazy hand in the air; writing suddenly appears on the blackboard and everyone shifts in their see better. "You will note that this potion requires no fewer than five full doses of powdered root of asphodel to neutralise the toxicity. The viscosity, colour and temperature of your potion must be perfect prior to the addition of each dose. Done wrong and your concoction can turn volatile. I suggest you follow the procedure precisely as written. Furthermore, since this is a sixth-year class and….most of you should have surpassed the academic level of second-year dimwits, you will be brewing individually." Harriet inwardly groans and a handful of less gifted students audibly gasp, looking at one another in horror. Snape, however, is implacable. "Begin," he commands before striding to the front of the classroom, black robes fluttering in rhythmic swishes behind him.

Great, Harriet thinks as her hopes of relying on Hermione to keep her on track shatter like glass. Weary not to incur any further wrath from Snape, she begins preparing her workspace with as much precision as possible, glancing every now and again towards Hermione's table just to make sure she's on the right track.

For the next hour, she works with feverish concentration, checking and rechecking the instructions written on the blackboard. When it comes to chopping and kneading, however, her mind begins to wander. Because the poisoned hemlock really does look like parsley and Aunt Petunia had always been somewhat OCD when it came to Harriet chopping herbs or vegetables for meals she was not allowed to eat. No funny business girl, I'm warning you. Small and precise. And for goodness' sake, wash your hands before touching the parsley! I don't want the food contaminated by your freakish germs!

She got better at chopping the herbs after a while. It did not take a genius to work out that Aunt Petunia wanted to live smoothly, in a perfectly planned pattern, a life that was round and sleek and normal. When she was younger, Harriet used to think that if she chopped the parsley, the tomatoes, and the parsnips finely enough, Aunt Petunia would grow to love her. Just a little bit.

Of course, she later understood that the Dursleys could never love or accept her. How could they, when she was a constant reminder that their perfectly ordinary lives would always be tainted by abnormality? She was the freak that plagued them. The orphan draining their resources. The ungrateful whelp who polluted their home. The girl who brought death.

With these bitter thoughts in mind, Harriet begins lowering the chopped hemlock into her bubbling cauldron, not quite noticing that the surface of her potion, unlike Hermione's pristine turquoise one, is a forest green. By the time she hears the tell-tale rattling of her cauldron, it is already too late. Her potion begins bubbling viciously, sending tiny sparks of fire into the air and beginning to smoke away.

"Harriet neutralise it! It's going to explode!" Hermione shouts from across the table, but Harriet's hands are shaking and she can't add the powdered asphodel fast enough. The small sparks of fire become larger as the entire table begins vibrating with her cauldron. Snape is shouting something at her but the blood is pumping too loudly in her ears and she can't hear him. People close to her start screaming and backing away, and yet she is able to do nothing but shield her face underneath her arm when a loud bang reverberates through the Potions classroom.

I'm going to die. I'm going to die and Snape is going to kill me.

A deep, silky voice shouts protegro in the distance and even though her eyes are tightly shut behind her raised arm, Harriet can make out a powerful white light. For a split second, there is a sudden wave of heat, but it is quickly extinguished and then the silence is almost deafening. Confused, Harriet slowly lowers her arm and opens her eyes.

The classroom looks as though it has been under a Bludger attack. Her cauldron has completely melted into her work table and there are puddles of acidic potion eating away through the desk and dripping onto the floor. Remnants of ingredients have been scattered around the room, and both her notebook and textbook have been destroyed. The classroom is littered with loose pages, broken jars and thick, acrid smoke. Some of her classmates are coughing, others are rubbing their eyes with the sleeves of their school jumpers. The majority, however, are looking between Harriet and Snape with a mixture of horror and apprehension.

Ignoring the way her heart threatens to crawl out through her chest, Harriet slowly lifts her eyes to look at the Potions Master. His black eyes are narrowed to slits beneath eyebrows stretched into a taut, thin line, and his mouth is almost white with rage. He doesn't yell though; Harriet noticed long ago that although the volume of his voice can often shake the classroom rafters when Snape is truly angry, he prefers shredding his victim to pieces in a calm, caustic manner. Like a stealthy Basilisk.

"Well, well, Miss Potter," he begins in softest, deadliest voice Harriet has ever heard him use. She tries to not back away or flinch when he approaches her, but her hands hold on to the edge of her damaged desk until her knuckles turn white. "I find that you managed to disappoint even my lowest expectations," he continues and she feels his eyes drilling holes into her face. She doesn't look at him though, instead keeping her gaze fixed on the charred surface of her desk. Don't look at him. He's not real. He's not real.

"Are you quite through with today's display of colossal carelessness, or do you have further plans to endanger everyone in this room with your incompetence?" he asks, his voice suddenly sharp.

Harriet doesn't reply. Her eyes remain affixed onto the remnants of her cauldron—a sorry sight of distorted metal and scorched potion. Was Sirius good at brewing? She never got the chance to ask him. She never got the chance to ask him a lot of other things too.

"I suppose you think," Snape continues, his deep voice slashing through her thoughts like a razor, "that a sedulous work ethic does not apply to the Chosen One. You waltz through this school, brandishing your scar as if it were a badge of superiority, expecting us all to be awed by your mere presence. Never mind the rigorous academic standards put in place to ensure the success of those who are truly gifted. What famous Harriet Potter wants, she gets. But tell me this, Potter: have you ever thought what will happen when ten years down the line you fail to produce the right antidote or the correct counter-curse? Will you speak at the funerals of those who died because of your intrinsic laziness and arrogance?"

The air has completely abandoned the Potions lab and yet she can hear her own breathing in the absolute silence of the classroom. There is a gnawing pain in her chest and the heaviness in her stomach weighs her down as if she were full of boulders. Snape is looking at her with dark eyes pointed in aversion and for a moment Harriet fights the urge to blink away the burning white spots in the corners of her vision. There is a bitter taste in her mouth and her throat feels as though she swallowed a mouthful of sand.

And yet none of these debilitating feelings seem to matter. The truth that has been lurking at the back of her mind since Sirius's death comes suddenly to the forefront with such force that Harriet's breath hitches in her throat. There is no point in pretending. Because even though she often despises Snape more than Voldemort himself, she knows that he is right. People will die because of her. People have already died because of her. Mum, Dad, Cedric, Sirius….who will be next? Ron? Hermione? She can't afford to make another mistake. Her precipitous rush to the Ministry in the summer should have already taught her that, and yet lately she has been treating her school work with the same indifference she treats her meals.

Sirius would have been alive if you stopped for a moment to think.

As Harriet stares at the charred remains of her cauldron, another, darker realisation begins to take root, and it is one which makes her blood cold. Because really, what chance does a scrawny teenage girl with rapidly falling grades have in the face of the darkest wizards of all times?

Snape is saying something to her again. His voice is louder than a moment ago, sharper too, but she can't make out what he is saying. The same words run through her mind, over and over again, and she realises that she isn't just thinking them, but speaking them too.

"I can't do it, I can't do it, I can't do it," she rasps out, her voice no stronger than the rustle of paper drifting across a desk. "I can't do it," she repeats, this time louder, as she looks up at Snape. There is a moment of confusion on the Professor's face and then startled understanding, but it doesn't matter.

The classroom walls seem to close in on her and Harriet suddenly clutches onto her stomach as a wave of nausea incapacitates her.

"Sir, she's going to be sick!" Hermione exclaims from across the room. Harriet doesn't give Snape the chance to reply, because, in the next moment, she clutches onto the edges of her desk, bends over into the aisle and promptly empties the contents of her stomach.

You're a fool, Harriet Potter. And you will lose everything.