Book 3: Astoria Greengrass and the Legilimens of Hogwarts
Song rec: "Did You See Me Cry?" by Boy Scouts
Notes: The Myrtle and Draco friendship in HBP is one of the scenes I absolutely needed to have more of. Draco is shown to not like his House Ghost and is, as we know, not a Muggle-born supporter, so his friendship with Myrtle is an incredible development for him. He's not quite there yet, but he's learning! Cw: Suicide is mentioned (Draco wonders if Myrtle took her own life).

"You snogged Astoria Greengrass the night you poisoned a bloke!"

This specific instance of Theodore's shouting occurred after several other shouts at Blaise, Crabbe, and Goyle to get out of the dormitory. With them gone, Theodore believed he was free to splutter in Draco's face with morning breath.

"That's a big accusation," Draco said, but it only conflagrated Theodore's rage. The skinny, scruffy hypocrite held him by the elbows. Theodore was never very tough.

"I know you were together last night because I saw you come into the common room. Her hair was a mess. Her hair is never a mess. She has no business being on curfew patrol, and you have no business being with her!"

Draco wrestled himself free, but Theodore grabbed his left wrist and pulled his sleeve upward. The Dark Mark had been waiting there to sneer at both of them. Draco didn't want to hit Theodore because it wouldn't be much of a fight.

"I know that poisoned Gryffindor was your doing… because whatever you're trying in that secret room of yours isn't working. It's the same as the cursed necklace, you pathetic git! You're gonna kill everybody in this castle except the old man, aren't you‽"

"Sit down, Theodore," Draco said, for seeing his Dark Mark often changed him.

"Like hell I will!"

Draco drew his wand first and sat Theodore down. Draco left his sleeve up still, because Theodore had to get it through his skull. Theodore had to learn the painstaking hell Draco was in every waking day. Draco could do whatever he wanted to do.

"The poison," he hissed, "was out of my hands, and I had no way of knowing when it would reach the old man. I used probability. And yes, Theodore, I guess I had no way of knowing if it would reach the old man. So tell me, since you're the early bird gone looking for gossip, who was it that was poisoned?"

"Ron Weasley," Theodore growled. "Via Slughorn! Via… I don't bloody know. I know you hate his guts, but he could've died!"

"He didn't, though!" said Draco. "It was a weak plan. I was testing the waters."

"All right, Mr Dark Mark, let's trace your steps!" Theodore said, daring to stand back up. He paced all over the room, saying, "You poison a drink; it ends up with Slughorn. Slughorn has those parties from time to time, and you know who's always invited? Astoria fucking Greengrass!"

"That's not what happened. And she wouldn't ever drink mead."

"I'm saying hypothetically. There was nothing edible about that necklace that nearly embalmed Katie Bell alive," Theodore spat.

"Astoria was nowhere near that."

This room could have used windows. There were only two of them in there, but Theodore's projectile morning breath was terrible the more he yelled.

"So you just plant these murder-traps near Gryffindors, then? God, Draco, I'll go kill the old man if it means not everyone in the school has to watch which bloody doorknob they touch!"

"You couldn't do it," Draco said firmly. "You couldn't do half of what I do."

"You're right. I couldn't put the girl I liked in danger the way you do," Theodore said to the wall.

He thinks he's above me.

"You're angry that I found somebody who isn't a fake?" Draco challenged. "You've gone on about my friends for six years — as if I didn't know that none of them gave a damn about me! But, according to you, I'm shouldn't have real relationships. I should just arse around listening to you."

"You won't have any real relationships when you get Astoria killed."

Stop.

"You're a Death Eater."

Stop.

"Do me a favour and warn me the next time you put the whole school in mortal danger again," Theodore spat. "You're lucky I don't march down there and tell her right now what you really are."

Draco grabbed Theodore by the thin, tense shoulder and faced him. Theodore's face was hard, but he wasn't going to say anything more because he didn't want it bruised. Theodore knew better. Well, Theodore knew better in more ways than one…

Snape had been all too quick to corner Draco about the poison as well. It had taken more than the day's energy to get rid of the professor, and since Draco could not convince himself that he was not being watched, he had to forfeit that Sunday's work on the Vanishing Cabinet. Astoria was off-limits, too, since she was with her friends, who had finally recovered from that wicked jinx she had put on them. The most he and Astoria talked — the most Draco could bear to talk — was him teasing her about how she had thought the Distraction spell to be an innocent charm when she cast it. But that had been at lunch. She felt so far away already. Maybe that was for the best. A dozen scenarios of her getting hurt by one of his assassination attempts on Dumbledore played through his head every hour.

On one of his stress walks, Draco saw Blaise at the end of the hallway and started panicking in earnest. They had not spoken much since Draco had split with Parkinson. Blaise could read between the lines of anything. He had turned Daphne Greengrass down instantly the second she hinted at disloyalty to her blood. The thought that he might now see Draco, the Malfoy heir, as a blood-traitor, haunted him. Draco despised knowing that Blaise would make a better Death Eater than he. What all did Blaise know about Astoria? Draco should have never told him he was a Death Eater. It had been ignorant bragging. Draco hated how he had gone from a braggart to a coward. He hid in the lavatory before Blaise could catch him alone.

"Can't a girl cry in private?"

At first Draco thought he had walked into the girls' room, but his aversion to ghosts was multiplied when he caught the sight and sound of Moaning Myrtle. Usually, one could tell which lavatories not to use based on the echoes of her nearly constant sobbing. She had caught him by surprise this time. He had no idea who had given her the agency to roam the boys' rooms.

"Oooh, trying to hide from somebody, are we?" Myrtle asked, quickly lowering her voice to about a third of the volume.

"I'm not hiding."

"Oh, I guess not. You're Draco Malfoy, aren't you?"

He didn't like how she said that so pointedly. But he'd been here six years. She was bound to hear his name eventually, right? He knew her name. She was a small, but loud, legend in a huge old castle.

Neither Myrtle nor he moved or spoke. She didn't need to know he didn't want alone time with Blaise. Myrtle smoothed down her ghostly robes — they must have dated back to the thirties or forties and had accumulated every possible wrinkle in the interim. Draco didn't understand how time worked for ghosts. He'd never looked at one for this long. And unlike Astoria, he certainly hadn't gone ghost hunting.

"You must be Draco Malfoy or you'd have said 'no,'" Myrtle clucked.

As ghosts go, she seemed the least threatening. But did Draco ever know how loud she could scream. Sometimes, her cries disturbed classrooms. He didn't know why she wailed so horribly. No one living could cry that way. That's what he disliked about ghosts. Their sadness had had so much time to stew, and their calls were not normal but funerary. He didn't want to set her off.

"I went to school with Abraxas," said Myrtle, then she howled with laughter. "Oh! Your face! It's so darling! He was younger than me when I died. I never knew him. You thought I was going to blame you for something he did, didn't you?"

Draco didn't answer. Myrtle floated all round the chandelier, then rested on it, stomach down. Draco likened her behaviour to a cat. She stared down at him with a smile and told him that he was one of the few people who had lasted this long in her presence without getting scared or being mean to her. Again, he didn't know what to say or if her statement was even true. Myrtle sunk clean through the chandelier and stood (floated, rather) right in front of him. He thought she might scream.

"You do give me the impression that I'm the intruder into your haunting grounds," she pondered. "Is there something the matter, Draco?"

Yeah, it was that Myrtle was probably Astoria's age when she died. And unlike the House ghosts, Myrtle probably died right on site in one of the bathrooms. Had she killed herself? How else would somebody die in a bathroom? He wasn't going to find out simply by staring at her.

It wasn't possible to tell which House she had been in, since the whole of her spectre was silvery, so he went ahead and asked her to ease the tension. It didn't really matter, but she was the only one in the whole castle Draco felt like he was allowed to talk to on that grey day. If Astoria could communicate with an ancient, flower-killing phantom, surely Draco could talk to Moaning Myrtle.

"I'm Ravenclaw," said the ghost proudly. "There's not a common room riddle I haven't solved in fifty-nine years and counting!"

"You've been here fifty-nine years?" he asked carefully.

He realised there was nowhere to sit in this room except the actual toilets, so he leaned against the wall.

"Five of those years I was alive, mind you," Myrtle said. "And sometimes I would leave the castle to go haunt the people who bullied me. I'm not allowed to do that anymore."

"I think you ought to be," Draco said, searching for his starved sense of humour. "You went through all the trouble to become a ghost. You ought to be able to haunt people you don't like. Isn't that the fun of it?"

"You've got that right! But the Ministry said no, and they put some weird magic on me. Governing the dead! Bah!"

Myrtle floated past the sinks, turning on all the spigots without lifting a finger. It wasn't exactly magic, since ghosts couldn't use that. It was something else. Draco caught sight of his reflection and was not pleased with how pale he looked, even with Myrtle there for comparison. She must have seen him clench his jaw. She floated right back to him and put her hand on his face. It was very cold, like a winter wind that had brushed up some snow to his face, soon to melt.

"You really are very darling. I bet you're one of the popular ones. Nobody popular ever talked to me except to bully me," she said gloomily, and turned away.

The light from the window spilled through her and made her hard to see. If Draco had not already known she was there, the movements of her lucent form would have startled him.

"I'm not popular," he said. "I only have a couple of friends, and even they…"

"They're not real friends if they're unkind to you."

"No, no. They're true friends. It's not like that. I make mistakes, and they're, er, aware of them. It's probably my own fault. But I have my share of fake friends. And enemies. Sometimes I don't know which is worse. They both make me feel… er, pretty worthless, to be honest," he said.

"If you ever need a friend," said Myrtle, but then she hid her face in her hands. "What am I saying? I'm Muggle-born. How could I forget?"

"Forget what? That you're Muggle-born?"

Draco was, again, not certain of what to say. He'd never forget that he was a pure-blood. Did other races forget what they were when they died? No, that didn't make sense…

"I know I'm Muggle-born — that's why I died!" Myrtle protested. "What I forgot was that Malfoys don't talk to Muggle-borns. Malfoys rarely come through the castle. It's easy to forget these things. I can't remember every living family and all your stupid living rules. You must think I'm a waste of time!"

Myrtle wasn't doing her archetypal moaning and wailing; instead, she was crying softly into her sleeve. Draco discovered he didn't need to know whether she had been killed or had killed herself. She was Muggle-born in the mid-century. So, either way, somebody must have found a way to bring her to this. Somebody Draco's family would agree with. Draco watched a stray snowflake tear fall to the ground from Myrtle's face. He wasn't sure what would happen to it, whether it was material or merely a phantasmal shade of human sadness.

"You're not a waste of time," Draco said. "It's nice to talk to you."

Myrtle's glasses were foggy when she looked up at him, further confusing Draco's sense of what about her was real and what was shadow. He thought about how no one had any literal blood when they died and became ghosts. The blood status one enjoyed in life was similarly stripped. There was not much difference between her and the pureblood House ghosts. In fact, Myrtle was more relatable and less disquieting. Who would have thought? Maybe everyone goes the same.

"Myrtle, what is it like to die?"

"No, Draco, you don't need to know that," she said hollowly. "I'm sorry I jumped to conclusions about you."

"Really? Er…"

He'd never been let off the hook so easily in his life. Myrtle had the wrong idea about him because she couldn't decipher his attitude. That was fine. He ought to be sorry for jumping to conclusions about her, too. At first, it was difficult for him to sympathise with a Muggle-born, since it wasn't how he was brought up, but he was getting better at watching his mouth. It was surprising what could come of that with Astoria. She had a tendency to think he'd changed.

"You have a Muggle-born in Slytherin at long last," Myrtle said, wiping the last of the recent tears. "My friend Rhiannon!"

She had said it with such credit, as though Draco had personally put Clarke in the House, which was anything but true. Myrtle shut off the water in the sinks and played with the door hinges. Now Draco knew why ghosts made so much noise — there was little else to do.

"I don't think people should be cruel to one another," Myrtle said. "I stayed here out of vengeance. It's a feeling I can't shake. People stay for a reason, but they never seem to be very good reasons in the long run… I miss my mother most."

"Will you get to see her again?" Draco asked.

"I think she sees me, at least," Myrtle sniffled. "Maybe one day I'll get it right and can go find her. I'm too angry at the living now. I feel like I do nothing right."

"Me too," he acknowledged. "I'm always messing up. The worst part is someone always sees me do it. No matter what it is, I'm always getting criticism from all sides. It makes me even angrier. I end up… well, alone."

"We're very alike, Draco Malfoy."

He didn't know about that, but he promised he'd come back to see her when he could.