You are ageless. You are nameless. You're not sure there is even a 'you.' Existence is comprised of an incomprehensible storm of emotion; shock, fear, sorrow, bitterness, regret, and rage, all primal and strong. There is something else, too; something calm and warm waiting beyond the periphery. It summons, gently and steadily, drawing closer and closer.
All of a sudden you – and there is a you, now – are resisting, pulling back, fighting against the lure. You don't want to go there, wherever there is. You want to return; to precisely what, you don't know, but to being, to whatever existed before, to whatever was just lost.
No, not lost. Taken. Stolen. This wasn't supposed to happen. This is wrong. You are young; you don't want to leave just yet. You don't like this, you don't like this, youdon'tlikethis.
Your emotions are strong, bright, passionate; whatever beckons is blank, separate, impassive. You surrender to the terror, the fury, the spite; anything other than the unknown that lies beyond.
Something solidifies around you, yet remains blurred, as if viewed through thick glass. Stone walls, arched ceiling. A row of old doors with peeling paint, one of them ajar. They're oddly familiar, like your bedroom in the brief moments between sleeping and waking, when you don't know whether you've last seen it minutes or eons ago. Even more recognizable is the figure lying on the floor between the sinks and the stalls. You know the pale face, the thickly bespectacled eyes staring in blind horror. You fitted that long, dark hair into pigtails this very morning, just like every one before.
The realization drops into your chest like a weight. Instinctively you make as if to gasp, to sob, but there's no air; rather, no need for it. No lungs swelling with breath. No chest rising up and down. You can't feel anything, not the touch of your robes nor the softness of your hair against your back, not even the tears, although you know they're there. You flail about for something solid, something real, but find no support. Your hand plunges through the wall of the cubicle as if it were water. You expect yourself to keel over onto the floor, having lost your balance, but quickly find out there's no balance to lose, and no floor to hit. There's no anything. You're nothing.
You can't think what to do. You can't even think what to feel. All you can do is float there, crying imperceptibly, over your own body.
You're still there hours later, when Olive Hornby comes strolling through the door, calling out with pronounced apathy: "Are you in here again, sulking, Myrtle? Because Professor Dippet asked me to look for you"– Her gaze, searching lazily about the room, freezes on the corpse and what floats above it.
She blinks. Her head cocks to one side. The whiteness begins, deliciously slowly, to creep through her face.
"Figured it out yet?" You spit the words with a venom you never knew in life. "Or would a nice, loud 'boo!' make it more obvious?"
And Olive Hornby whirls on her heel and runs, screaming, out the door.
You are thirteen years old, says the roll of parchment the coroners place on Headmaster Dippet's desk. Or, at least, you were. You're not sure how age works now, if it goes any further or just stays the same. Some things definitely don't change. Myrtle Elizabeth Warren, the certificate says. That's still you. The black-and-white photograph shows you as well, or what was once you. Someone's had the decency to close your eyes in it. Funny; it's the only picture you've seen in this school that doesn't move.
The line underneath your name is headed CAUSE OF DEATH in officious black letters, but the handwriting that follows proclaims "unknown." It was the creature, the staff whisper, but no one is any closer to figuring out exactly what that means. That doesn't matter to you. You know perfectly well who is to blame, and she's monster enough.
The most you can say on Olive's behalf is that she wasted no time letting the entire school know what happened. Professor Dippet and several other teachers reach the bathroom before any other students can arrive. The headmaster actually stumbles when he sees what has happened, tottering back against Professor Merrythought with a hand clutched to his heart. The school nurse falls on her knees to examine your pulse, check your heartbeat, and give the verdict everyone already knows. Dumbledore's tall figure looks somberly from girl to ghost, eyes heavy with sorrow and anger and – when staring directly at you – a flicker of what might even be disappointment. One of the staff members picks up your wand, lifeless as its owner, and remarks that it's always the case with those hazel-and-unicorn-hairs, they can't survive without their master. Then the nurse issues a long shroud out of the tip of her wand, and they wrap you up and carry you away, as if the spirit before them doesn't even exist.
You follow. People stare, far more than they did in life; some even scream. It doesn't matter. You overtake the professors in no time and tug at Headmaster Dippet's robes, not caring that your fingers are sinking right through them; you beg them to stop, to do something, to save you. Surely they can fix this. The petrified students didn't die; why did you?
Professor Dippet turns towards you with the most wretched eyes you've ever seen and tells you, in a quiet voice, to go. People are staring, he says. They mustn't find out this way. He'll tell the school, make sure it's broken gently, but first of all you have to leave.
He keeps his promise. All of the students are ordered back to their common rooms; the headmaster's voice is magically modified to echo throughout the school, so that everyone, even you in your bathroom, can hear the announcement.
"Students and staff of Hogwarts School, it grieves me deeply to report that this morning, June the thirteenth, at approximately eight-thirty, a second-year Ravenclaw student, Myrtle Warren, was found dead in the first-floor girl's bathroom. All classes have been cancelled. You are forbidden to leave your common rooms until further notice. Your heads of house are available if you need someone to speak to. If you have any information regarding this attack, we urge you, upon the honour of our school, in the memory of the deceased, and in the defense of the living, to step forwards and make it known immediately. Thank you for your attention."
It is Professor Dumbledore, not Dippet, who returns to find you in your stall later. He sighs and says he is sorry. This was not supposed to happen. He has tried to protect his students and failed. He will do all that is in his power to ensure that the murderer is caught and justice enacted. The Ministry has been contacted, as well as your parents. They will be here tomorrow to pick up the body. You may decide what you want done with it, as well as where you would like to go afterwards. Your Head of House has informed your classmates personally of your death and will pack up or dispose of your possessions as you see fit. If there is anything at all he can do for you, you need only ask.
"Turn me back," is your only request.
Dumbledore meets your eyes, agony etched into his features. "I'm so sorry, Miss Warren. You know that is impossible."
"There's got to be something you can do. There's some spell, or something, you're all just hiding it from me-"
"It is as I said, Myrtle. I'm afraid there is no magic which can reawaken the dead."
"But I'm here now, aren't I?" You're screaming at this point; every recess of the bathroom reverberates with your desperation. "I'm still here! Put me back in my body! Please! Please…"
"The dead have two choices," Dumbledore says gently, his voice so quiet you have to hush to hear it. "They can either move on or remain behind. For whatever reason, which is not mine to know if you do not wish it, you have chosen to stay. Nothing can change that now."
The finality in his voice sinks through you like a stone.
"Then I want to see my parents," you say. "And Murcia."
"They will be here tomorrow," the professor repeats. "As for your friends … please believe me when I say it is best to give them time. You are welcome to spend the night in my office, but-"
You can't listen to any more of this. Dumbledore's voice stops abruptly as you shoot through the ceiling. Floors and chambers streak by in quick succession, soon giving way to the stairs of Ravenclaw tower. You need some semblance of normality, be it Murcia's face, your belongings, even your four-poster bed in the dorm room; you need to see it now, and maybe this nightmare will go away–
She's not there. Not among the blur of horrified faces in the common room; not in her dormitory, not even in yours. The only person there – and of course it's her, who else would have the audacity to come back to the room where you lived on the very day you died – is the one you least want to see.
"Get away from those!" you scream, mindless with rage. Olive is rooted to the spot, hunched on the floor next to your bed with her hands all over your books. Her eyes stare at you as if not really seeing.
"I w-was putting them away," she manages to get out. "They were lying on the ground – y-you were lying on the ground –"
You look over her. She's shaking, tearing up. Pitiable. Even remorseful.
You don't care.
"Rot in hell, Olive Hornby," you hiss, packing the bitterness of two years of torment into those five words, and descend through the floor.
You are still thirteen years old (plus one more day, one day that you never lived) the next morning, when Professor Dippet announces they've caught your killer.
Rubeus Hagrid. The name's vaguely familiar. You can't remember his face, but you'd have to be blind not to know of him. A tall boy from Gryffindor, a year ahead of you, the one they say is half-giant. You've glimpsed him across the Great Hall on occasion, or heard Murcia mention something he did in Care of Magical Creatures class.
You don't have the faintest idea why he would want you dead.
Nevertheless, you trust what the professors tell you. It was a prefect, Tom Riddle, who pinpointed Hagrid as the culprit; he's an upstanding student, they assure you, no reason to doubt his word. Hagrid has been expelled and his wand destroyed, but Dumbledore, taking pity, has secured a place for him at Hogwarts as an assistant gamekeeper. You want to ask why your murderer is allowed to walk free, but somehow you can't find the strength do to anything but listen as they load you with more meaningless information. Hagrid had been secretly raising giant spiders, undoubtedly the monsters of the Chamber. One either escaped or was intentionally set free. It happened to come across you. Fortunately, it has been disposed of. You're not to tell anyone about this.
You can't remember feeling any stinger or pincers – or anything at all, really – and you're not sure if spiders have huge yellow eyes, but the explanation is enough. It doesn't make much of a difference how you died, does it, when the end result is the same? Besides, you have a far more pressing concern.
"Where are my parents? When are they coming?"
They will arrive shortly, you are told. The protective enchantments concealing the school from Muggle eyes have been lifted for one hour today. It would be better, though, Dippet says uncomfortably, if perhaps you stayed out of the way … you never know how Muggles will react to these things, of course … and what's more, the International Statute of Wizarding Secrecy cannot be violated …
"I'm going with my family," you say simply, and float through him and out the door.
You hear that your parents are to meet with Dumbledore in a small room off the Great Hall, where your chest of belongings and your coffin await them. Peering through the wall, you watch the colossal doors of Hogwarts creak open to admit two small, mundane figures. Both clad in black, they step timidly inside, blind to the majesty of the castle around them. You've never seen them look so lost.
Something inside you breaks; you can't wait here a moment longer, not when the people you need the most are so close. Shouting for them, you surge through the door.
Your mother screams.
"Mum, Dad, it's me! It's Myrtle!"
"M-Myrtle?" mother says disbelievingly, eyes drifting in and out of focus as they take in your ethereal form.
"Yes, of course! I'm coming home with you!"
To your horror, your mother shakes her head, backing a step away. "No, you're not – you can't be – my baby girl's in heaven"–
She screams again, as if you're not still you, everything she and Dad loved, and collapses.
Time seems to both slow down and speed up. A hundred things happen around you all at once, beyond your comprehension. Professor Dippet wrings his hands, apologizing profusely, saying he'd told you to stay behind. The nurse runs to fetch a revivement potion while another teacher tugs at her sleeve, saying perhaps it's kinder just to leave it this way. Your mother sags in your father's arms. He looks up at you with no love in his eyes, only blinding pain.
"What kind of trick are you pulling here?" he roars at Dumbledore. "That – that bit of smoke-and-mirrors – that's not my daughter. What have you done with our daughter?"
Dumbledore is trying to reason with him, your father is crying and cursing with grief and rage, a teacher is gesturing towards the coffin in the antechamber explaining that no, this isn't some hoax, you're really dead, someone is yelling at you to leave now, and you are dying for the second time.
Later, when it's all over, when they've left with your body and your earthly possessions in tow and their minds wiped clean of this 'traumatic incident,' Professor Dumbledore comes to you again.
"Don't tell me," you say hollowly. "I know I should have waited."
"You know why you can't go with them."
You bow your head, wishing more than anything that you'd torn up the Hogwarts letter the instant it slipped into your bomb shelter, so you'd never have been able to choose a world your parents can never be a part of.
Dying was painless. This is anything but.
You are thirteen years old (plus two more months than before) when what should have been your third year at Hogwarts begins. The school has lain dormant over the summer, but the return of its lifeblood doesn't make it feel any less like a grave. Crackling torches no longer provide any warmth, nor do the depths of the dungeons bring a chill. The feasts which spring to being throughout the Great Hall offer neither smell nor taste. The scent of dusty library books, the roughness of rock-hewn walls, and the spongy caress of dewy grass are nothing more than memories. The very soul of the castle has been muted.
There are more changes. A new Ravenclaw second-year sleeps in your old bed. Your name has been added to a commemorative plaque for deceased students in a deserted corner of the castle. Murcia returns with a drastically different haircut and a far more subdued manner.
One benefit in all of this is that you're no longer required to be around Olive Hornby. Instead, you alternate between following Murcia around to her classes and keeping to yourself in the bathroom. Your friend doesn't talk much beyond the first quiet "I'm so sorry," and the explanation that she was taken home early at the end of last year, but neither does she shoo you away. With her silence, she's almost as much of a ghost as you are.
You're confused the first time she heads up the marble staircase towards Ancient Runes instead of out to the grounds for Care of Magical Creatures. Shaking her head ruefully, she admits that she's dropped the course.
"I couldn't stand being around – that Hagrid boy – any longer. I can't believe they let him stay here, traipsing along after the Gamekeeper like he didn't – like he's not the reason you're –"
Steeling her face so it doesn't crumple, she strides on without another word.
Although Murcia never objects to your presence, it isn't much appreciated by the other students in her year. There always tends to be a sharp nervousness to their behaviour when you're bobbing overhead, as if they're expecting you to shatter into glass. You catch awkward stares and the tail ends of countless whispered conversations. Every one fills you with indignant fury. Why can ghosts like the Bloody Baron or the Fat Friar drift where they will without attracting a second glance, yet you cause discomfort wherever you go? Professor Binns teaches his own class, but you're hardly welcome to listen in on one? You're still technically a student, you fume. Don't you have as much right to learn magic as you ever did? Weren't you studying here, alive and well, just months ago?
Deep down, you know that's the answer. Most ghosts here are centuries-old spectres; no one is left who knew them in life. You are a reminder of tragedies everyone would rather forget.
One by one, the professors take you aside and ask you to leave. Their words are as polite as can be, wrapped in all the necessary niceties, but that ultimately means nothing to you. Stripped of all their justifications, the conclusion becomes clear. You weren't truly wanted here in life, and even less so in death.
The final proof comes from the last person you'd expect.
"Not now, Myrtle," comes Murcia's voice from the other side of the dormitory door. You float through to see that she's not working, but sitting at her bedside table with quills and parchment spread haphazardly around her. A single candle flickers, little more than an oily stump.
"I said, not now," she snaps, seeing you haven't left. "I have to think … I have to work. You heard what Professor Aphelion said; I failed my astronomy test."
She's been understandably downcast all term, but this is something far more serious. Her voice is purged of any of the life and warmth you once associated with her. That frightens you.
"I can help," you venture, "I'll read off the star chart and test you. It'll be okay."
"No, it won't, Myrtle. You can't keep doing this. It's too difficult for both of us."
A defensive tone creeps into your voice as the candle melts lower. "Doing what, exactly?"
Something snaps; Mercia breaks. "Pretending you're alive! Following me around, going to classes, acting like nothing's changed, like you can just – you can just"
All of a sudden you're in her face, screaming as loudly as she is. "What do you want me to do, then? Go lie in a coffin? Jump out of walls and scare people? Sorry I can't take my head clean off, maybe that would make you happy!"
"Just go away! That's what you can do! For one day, just let me live my life again!"
You laugh shrilly, disbelievingly. "'Live your life?' Oh, that's right, I forgot; you're the one who's dead, aren't you? Why don't you tell me what that's like; I can't imagine!"
"Fine! I can't sleep, I can't work, I can't do anything but think of the fact that you're dead, you're fucking dead" – she can barely speak for sobbing – "and I see you all the time and think that if I hadn't left you alone that night you wouldn't be like this. I think that every damn day, and I can't do it anymore, I can't."
You fly to the other side of the room, unable to speak. Nothing you can say – nothing anyone can say – could alleviate the terrible truth of her words, or the pain they bring you.
"I don't want to see you again, Myrtle," she mumbles, every word choked with regret. "Goodbye."
She gets up, leaves the room, and slams the door hard. The dwindling candlelight flickers out for good. Left alone in Murcia's wake, you plunge through the wall, into the pipes, and let the blast of sewage water carry you where it will.
You are thirteen years old when you should have turned fourteen, and still thirteen years old when you realize it's been exactly one year since you stopped aging.
That entire day is spent in the sewers. Emerging the morning after, you find a sprig of flowers lying in the sink across from your usual stall. You leave them to wither with a cruel satisfaction. If Murcia really wanted to say something, she should have showed her face.
You are thirteen years old (fifteen, actually, but it hardly matters when you haven't had a birthday party in two years) when the castle erupts in celebration. The war tearing apart both worlds, magical and muggle, has ended. It means very little to you when those worlds are no longer yours. In a vain effort to feel something, you retreat away from the cheering and the noise and stare out at the fireworks from the tallest tower. Perhaps mum and dad are celebrating under the same enraptured sky. Or perhaps it means very little to them, either.
You are thirteen years old (sixteen, you remind yourself) and it isn't until you watch the fleet of graduating students fade into the sunset on the lake that you realize Murcia was among them. You haven't spoken to her in three years. You suppose you never will again.
You are thirteen years old (and you should be seventeen, because this should be your moment as well, damn it, it was meant to be yours) and Olive Hornby signs her name in the yearbook with a flourish, receives the neatly-rolled scroll and bouquet of clipped flitterblooms, and joins all but one of her year in the little boats which take them back the way they first came. You follow, scarcely visible in the blinding sunlight, because what else can you do? You couldn't write your N.E.W.T.s even if your preteen mind could master the theory of seventh-year magic. Insubstantial hands can't wave a wand or pick up a quill. As Professor Dippet told you countless times before you gave up asking, "I'm so terribly sorry, Miss Warren, but the answer is no." Countless Wizarding laws forbid you from going anywhere near your parents. So what else is left for you, other than robbing Olive Hornby of the life she robbed from you?
The first night she spends on her own, in a tiny apartment in Diagon Alley, you wake her from a deep sleep by bursting through the wall and wailing. She doesn't have time to lunge for her wand before you've vanished again, a cackle lingering in your wake. Nor does she the second time, nor the third, nor the fourth. The forty-sixth time you materialize out of thin air – as she's trying to impress an experienced wandmaker with an open apprenticeship, no less – she whirls about and sends a leg-locking curse through your heart. It has no effect, of course, and you both know it, but you melt back into the floor regardless. The jinx isn't the only thing without a lasting impact.
You are thirteen years old (twenty-eight, really, or is it twenty-seven?) when you realize what you've been trying to deny for about a decade – scaring Olive Hornby no longer brings you any joy. (Perhaps it never really has, mutters a guilty little voice). Desperate to prove yourself wrong, you glimpse at her mail over her shoulder, peek through the letter-box, listen in on telephone calls, until the opportunity presents itself. There it is, scrawled in fussy cursive on the pastel-white card, the perfect chance at revenge. "You, Olive Hornby, are cordially invited to the wedding of Cyril Hornby and Patricia Huddleston, May 17th, 1958, St. Andrew's Parish." This will be worth it. This will make up for it all.
You swoop in through the stained glass window, shrieking and howling and moaning, just as the couple are about to kiss; you surge between Olive's brother and his muggle bride, who shrieks and stumbles into the flower girl, upsetting the bouquet. The shocked Mrs. Huddleston promptly faints, her husband bellows, and Olive, eyes alight with fire, comes tearing up the aisle, whipping her wand out of the sleeve of her bridesmaid's gown and firing curses left and right. You laugh louder to drown out everything, the yelling and sobbing and explosions and the fact that you still feel absolutely nothing.
Deep down you knew that there would be consequences, and they come in the form of a magically-enforced restraining order and a Ministry cover-up of the chaos. Memory charms are cast, the wedding is repeated and carried out smoothly, and you are required to return to Hogwarts indefinitely. You plead with the judge – there's still so much of the world you haven't seen; you don't know why you wasted so much time harassing Olive (she wasn't worth it, anyway); more than anything, you just can't go back there, not to where it happened. Nobody listens. You're hardly surprised. You gain a new appreciation for the phrase 'silent as the grave.'
You are thirteen years old (twenty-nine, then thirty, then older), and to the new generation of students at Hogwarts School, you're not a lost friend, a murdered classmate, or even a name on a plaque. You're merely one of the castle's many enchanting features, no different than a moving suit of armor, a talking picture, one of the ancient ghosts who sing about their long-ago decapitations to entertain first-years. That you once walked these halls yourself, studied in these desks, slept in this bed, doesn't occur to most of them.
An eleven-year-old boy in red and gold comes up to you in the corridor and wants to know if he can ask you something. Taken off-guard, you aren't sure how to respond. He's spoken to his house ghost, he says, and he has a very serious question about the nature of the afterlife. He glances back at his friends, egging him on from the bend in the hallway, and his face strains with the effort not to laugh. "We – uh – we wanted to know if your head can come all the way off, like his." Their laughter rings in your ears even after you've sunk through the floor.
You're not sure what exactly starts the name-calling. Maybe someone overheard you crying while you hovered your old bed in the Ravenclaw girl's dormitory, watched the waving figure of Murcia in the graduation class photo of 1947, or floated staring at your favorite library book that, even after all these years, still won't open to ghostly fingers. Of course, you're no stranger to mockery, but that's small consolation, especially when they've decided on something as banal as 'Moaning Myrtle.' The first time you hear it, you fly screaming at the smirking sixth-year, wanting to chase him into the black lake, to make him wonder for just a moment what it would be like to die at thirteen and watch your friends and family and even enemies grow up and move on. Confrontation, however, only makes you more of a laughingstock. Unlike nearly every other bloody fad that's swept this school, the name catches on, until a chorus of ugly, miserable, moping, moaning Myrtle drives you back to your toilet for good. The old bathroom, which has never had much of a draw for Hogwarts students in the best of times, quickly becomes all but deserted.
You are thirteen years old (forty, or forty-five, but what does it matter how long you've been dead when you're still stuck in that age when one feels so alive?) and it starts to become sharply apparent to you that you've never felt love. Parental, of course, and when you're feeling charitable you might even say friendship, but not the kind your pubescent mind tells you that you need. Not the kind that blazes and growls and drives you wild with frustration that your body is no more than memory and smoke. A lonely journey through the plumbing one night delivers you to a bathroom you've never seen before, but which you come back to frequent more often than is probably appropriate. You spy on prefects from your vantage points in spouts and toilets, drinking in the muscled limbs, glistening bodies, and tousled hair, relishing this cheap imitation of the love you will never know. It comes with the risk of accidentally drifting into view and enduring the inevitable 'moaning' Myrtle jokes, or suffering the even greater insult of being flushed into the lake (horrible black, filthy water, and large lurking shapes that remind you too much of something you'd rather forget) but it's worth it.
You're always careful to keep your eyes shut when the bathers are entering and exiting the water – you still have some sense of decency, you remind yourself – but these encounters are permeated with shame regardless. Is it wrong, you wonder, a middle-aged woman with the mind and body of a teenager ogling these boys? Of course it is. Everything is wrong about this situation. Everything's always been wrong. That doesn't stop you. Eventually the guilt fades away, as so much in your life already has.
You are thirteen years old (fifty-nine, and that's still too young to hear what you are about to) when Dumbledore brings the news. It was old age, he explains, that and some disease whose overlong name you forget the moment after you hear it. Dad went first, Mum a week later. The dear old Gandalf of so long ago stands solemnly and tells the victims' murdered child of the death you wish you'd been lucky enough to have.
It doesn't hit you until later, the magnitude of how utterly and completely alone you are. They can move on to their reward. You can't. This is what you have chosen. You are never going to see them again.
You don't come out of the sewer for a year.
A/N: Thank you for reading another chapter of this! I hope that you enjoyed it, depressing as it is.
I chose a hazel-and-unicorn-hair wand for Myrtle because Pottermore states that they will wilt and 'die' upon the deaths of their owners, which was a touch I just had to add to the story.
I felt bad being so horrible to poor Hagrid in this, but it couldn't be helped; as far as Myrtle and Murcia know, he's responsible for her death, so there was no other way I could portray him in their eyes but negatively.
The Hogwarts graduation ceremony, in which the seventh-years ride back across the lake on the same boats which took them to Hogwarts in their first year, is something J.K. Rowling confirmed on Pottermore. However, I made up the yearbook, certificates and flitterboom bouquets.
The scene where Myrtle disrupts Olive's brother's wedding is based off of something she briefly alludes to during the bathroom scene in Goblet of Fire. I decided to have the brother marry a muggle so that Myrtle's appearance would cause enough of a scene to call in the Ministry, and also to suggest that perhaps Olive has moved on from her narrow-minded ways as she grew up.
Reviews and faves are always appreciated! :)