The End of Things
Outside, it is the warm night of the early summer, and Albus Dumbledore has left Hogwarts.
Draco Malfoy tastes the exquisite air of expectation; of anticipation; of the coming moment – the moment which, he knows, will be one of the defining moments of his life: tonight, he will kill Albus Dumbledore and thus prove his loyalty to the Dark Lord.
He now knows why it took him so long to arrive at this moment. It was not the want of academic prowess that held him for months; it was the want of conviction.
He didn't want to kill Albus Dumbledore before.
Even knowing who his target was; even knowing what the price of failure was; even knowing what the reward for victory was – he still, somehow, against all logic, did not want to kill Albus Dumbledore. He hid this weakness deep within his mind, so that even he would not become aware of it.
(Draco is a very good Occlumens, after all.)
But even though he wasn't aware of it, the Room of Requirement was; and the Room supplies what one requires, not what one openly professes to require.
All that is behind him now, thankfully; with a single spell, Potter removed this foolish inhibition, this... subconscious denial of his aspirations; with a single spell, he effected that which all the Dark Lord's threats and promises would not effect. For that, Draco supposes, he should be grateful to the scar-faced git.
(He is not: the dittany did not work flawlessly.)
---
And so, Draco Malfoy walks the corridors of Hogwarts from the Slytherin dungeon up to the seventh floor where the Room of Requirement is; and somewhere halfway between the two, there is a bathroom.
There is only a moment's hesitation before he enters the bathroom. He will not be here long.
---
It is dark inside the bathroom; there are some candles, but they only give off a weak, dim light. But Draco does not need to cast Lumos; he knows his way around the dark bathroom well enough. (Oddly enough, this does not come as a surprise.)
He also knows the habits of the bathroom's inhabitant well enough that he would know where to search for her even if he did not hear the muffled sobs that come from the last cubicle.
Moaning Myrtle is sitting on top of the toilet tank, unmindful to all but her own misery; at least, until she sees him. Then, she stops crying and smiles widely.
"Hello, Draco," she says cheerfully.
Draco does not reply; and Myrtle continues her chatter. "I'm so happy to see you!" she says, "I'm so happy that you are well! I've told them what happened, I've told them all!"
She looks proud of herself; proud, and a bit expectant, as if she awaited praise for her deed; Draco only replies noncommittally, "So I've heard."
Yes, he heard what she had done: but what does it matter? What does it simply matter? This is the here and now, and tonight, he will kill Albus Dumbledore.
Myrtle's face tenses slightly – this is clearly not the kind of answer she expected – and she replies anxiously, "I have done the right thing, haven't I? You're not angry, aren't you?" She begs him to reply with her wide-open eyes behind her thick, round glasses.
Draco studies the ghost coolly for a second. "No, I'm not," he says, because he isn't, because it all simply doesn't matter, all that is the part of the life that he leaves behind tonight; and then, just as Myrtle's face relaxes into a shy smile again, he picks up, flawlessly, smoothly, cruelly, "I'm not entirely sure if I could be angry with you, even if I wanted," he says; the lazy, languid drawl comes to his call easily. "You're so much... less than I am, after all," he says.
Myrtle blinks. "Less than you?" she asks, "What do you mean, Draco?"
For a second, his mind is blank; but then, the proper words return to him, just as the proper voice has come to him. "Well," he drawls nonchalantly, "to begin with, you're a ghost. A Mudblood's ghost. That's practically a nonperson already, isn't it?"
Myrtle's eyes become even larger behind the thick lenses of her glasses; Draco continues, "And that's not even to speak of your utterly repulsive excuse of a personality. And your equally nauseating looks–"
Myrtle interrupts, laughing nervously, "This is a joke, Draco, isn't it? You're joking, aren't you? Aren't you?" By the time she reaches the end, she is pleading.
"You are a joke, ghost," Draco replies, "A pathetic joke."
Myrtle's face is now a curious mix of disbelief and betrayal; but she tries again:
"But...We are friends, aren't we?"
"Friends?" Draco nearly hisses out; to Myrtle, it sounds almost like Parseltongue–
But Draco calms down immediately; and, with a cruel grimace around his mouth, he repeats, "Friends? We have never been friends, ghost. I had some use for you, that's true, but if you were pathetic enough to mistake it for friendship, that's your problem. I know who my friends are, and you aren't one of them. Why would I ever need a pathetic Mudblood ghost for a friend?"
His voice is cold and contemptuous, and Myrtle is dumbfounded as she looks into the pale, grey eyes, and does not find the slightest trace of feeling in them, and does not understand what she has done wrong, and does not comprehend why Draco treats her this way, why he discards her all of a sudden, like a snake discards its used skin–
Then, as he turns around and walks away, it is for a moment as though Myrtle would remember other words, words spoken in this selfsame bathroom, about how some people and some words are simply unimportant, irrelevant to the truth, to life, and how she should not let them upset her–
But, in the end, she remains true to her moniker – true to her self; and, as Draco Malfoy closes the bathroom door behind himself and walks off to meet his destiny, he is followed from within the bathroom by the ghost's sobs; and then, by the ghost's cry.
Fin.