Notes: Written for the 12 Days of Christmas Style challenge. Riddle Era.
Contrary to what most people believed, Myrtle was not a stupid girl. Oh, she did have a tendency to mope around a bit more than was strictly necessary, and she knew her very thick, round-framed glasses made her look a prime target for bullies. But she hadn't made it into Ravenclaw for nothing, and she had a knack for figuring out what people wanted most hidden.
Like Olive Hornby's propensity for picking her underwear out of her arse when she thought no one was looking. Or Samantha Biddles' pet snake she kept under her bed-which was also the reason rats kept going inexplicably missing from the live capture cupboard in the Potions store room.
Or the way Tom Riddle kept sneaking into the girls' bathroom on the first floor.
She couldn't figure out why, though, and it was starting to become an obsession. It wasn't like she could simply go up and ask him, was the thing. Nor could she try to trick him into being caught out-the professors and the Headmaster fawned over him, and he would be sure to have another excuse, fancied up with his winning smile and bright, bashful eyes, and if no one but her noticed the way those eyes deadened when he turned away, well...
It was a puzzle, and if there was one thing Myrtle was good at, it was solving puzzles. She took to lingering in the Great Hall solely to peek over at Tom at the Slytherin table, to following him half a corridor behind when he went off by himself. So clever, so brilliant, and so it was an enormous shock when he suddenly rounded on her, one afternoon between Transfiguration and Charms, and demanded to know why the hell she kept acting like his shadow.
"I-I don't know what you mean," Myrtle stammered, blinking owlishly and trying like mad to pretend that she hadn't the faintest what he was talking about.
"Of course you don't," he sneered. When he sneered, his face turned nearly unrecognisable, and Myrtle felt the first flutterings of real fear stir in her chest. "Stop it. Whatever you're doing, stop it."
But after that, how could she stop? She resolved to be stealthier and for a while, she was. She faded into the crumbling stone walls, practised her disillusionment charms until she nearly went cross-eyed in exhaustion (and of course, Olive Hornby teased her about that, too, asking if she needed literal bottles for her glasses next). But he didn't go near the first-floor girl's lavatory again (as far as she could tell), and she gave up. When rumours of a monster began circulating around the school, when the attacks began-she thought of Tom Riddle, but she certainly never connected his frequent trips to the girl's lav with them. He was creepy and his eyes seemed to follow you around the room without blinking, but he couldn't be like that.
And then one morning, when she ran into the girl's room, half-blinded with tears after a jab by Olive Hornby hit painfully home, she discovered how wrong she was.
Enormous yellow eyes, like lamplight, filled her blurry vision, and Myrtle fell like a stone, her glasses in her hand hitting the tiles and cracking clean in the middle. Tom Riddle looked disdainfully down at her limp body and stepped over it. He had work to do.