Hard to Keep (1)
Hard to Keep
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Part one
I believe that imagination is stronger than knowledge
That myth is more potent than history
I believe that dreams are more powerful than facts -
That hope always triumphs over experience -
That laughter is the only cure for grief
And I believe that love is stronger than death.
~Robert Fulghum
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There was once an ugly little girl who spent her life thinking of horrible things and crying in bathrooms and wishing for the world to be a better place without ever lifting a finger to make it so, and one day she died to the sound of her heart beating faster than it ever had just before stopping and to the flashing of bright yellow eyes. Moments later she rose from the floor and from her body, feeling at first no change, no pain from the loss and indeed no different than she ever had before, and so she prepared to sit back and watch the years rush past her, finding it hard to keep track of the months and the days in a world measured by cracked porcelain tiles and long copper pipes.
A Dark Lord fell, and a Dark Lord rose after him and fell and rose again, and as she heard him spoken of from her hiding places behind the walls and beneath the sinks and toilets, she remembered only a dark-haired boy with a terrible smile who looked over her dead body and laughed and called her a stupid Mudblood and laughed more when he found her floating between the cubicles in the bathroom where she spent most of her days. Time continued to pass, as she knew it would, and to pass her by, as it had even when she was alive, and whisperers carried through the halls of powers she could never imagine, while all around children made plans for their futures- plans that failed and plans that succeeded entirely by luck or chance and plans and that slowly transfigured themselves into other plans, new and odd and unexpected. Rarely, when she brought herself to care and to really think, she would wonder how frightening it must be standing before an uncertain future, how hard to keep from turning back when so many strange and different paths branch out ahead and to keep guessing and hoping and changing, and she almost let herself be thankful that she would never have to do such things. She was never one of the ambitious ones.
Sometimes a stream of rushing water swept her through the pipes and out into the lake, and the mermaids there would poke through her with their pointed tridents and shoo her away with dismissive flicks of their webbed hands as soon as they saw her there, but they did see her, and she could feel the huge eyes of the giant squid looking down on her, and that was enough. She would turn quickly and make her way back to the castle without ever breaking the surface or looking up into the sky.
She would speak to students sometimes, and sometimes they would laugh at her. There was another dark-haired boy, one who reminded her of the first but wore glasses like hers, and she was sure he would die and hoped that he would join her then. She imagined them together in the prefect’s bath and the Great Hall at night, rushing through the corridors and hidden tunnels and floating up to the highest towers as she showed him the secret world of the castle, but he lived as he always had, with the help of a sword and a hat and a Phoenix and of knowing what he was to face, and for her nothing changed. She spent her time thinking of horrible things and crying in bathrooms and wishing for the world to be a better place without lifting a finger to make it so, only now she had the excuse of knowing the world she had bound herself to had cast her aside like and old memory spilled from a Pensieve- a silver thread floating through the darkness, and her hands could hold nothing but air.
~*~*~*~*~*~
There are the shadows that stretch long and the very short, squat shadows that form only when light is shone directly overhead and the soft, grey shadows that move and swirl like dust blown by the wind in the empty places where they make their homes, and the Chamber of Secrets is full of them all. There are the shadows that change from one moment to the next and the shadows that come at night and flow like cold water across the floor until the darkness fills every corner, and there is Draco’s own shadow, and it is fading.
The skeleton of the Basilisk lies covered in dust on the floor, and Snape runs his long, yellow-stained fingers over the bones, hoping against reason for a few precious scales to remain after the long years of neglect to add to the secret potions he brews in cauldrons lined along the far wall, and their smoke rises up in clouds paler than the darkness that surrounds it before being swallowed by the huge, open mouth of Salazar Slytherin, who coughs and hisses and shuts his eyes tight, and Draco shuts his eyes too and listens to the noises in the pipes and dreams of water.
~*~*~*~*~*~
He met her first after the necklace had failed and before the mead that would be sent to the school was poisoned. He was tired then, just as he is now, and there was a sense of apprehension about him that gave way to nervous fumbling and stupid mistakes, but that was before his fate was sealed, when no matter how desperate he became there was still some faint possibility of success that burned slow in the back of his mind like a simmering cauldron and whispered that whether by chance or by choice, he would be saved from all of it, but that voice wasn’t always so strong, and one morning, feeling overcome by his doubts and feeling sick and exhausted and dizzy and finding it too hard to keep walking up the moving staircases, he rushed into her bathroom on his way to Charms and threw up in her toilet.
“It’s hopeless,” he had whispered to himself. “Everything’s hopeless. I’m going to die. I’m going to die, and there’s nothing else I can do.” He wiped his mouth hard and his eyes harder, and he stood up, and that was when he first saw her hovering above him. She had drab, messy hair and old, thick glasses and skin that was clear only in the way that made it see-through but was otherwise rather spotty, and she, at first, seemed to have a manner as detached from him as she was from the ground, until she opened her mouth.
“You have to leave!” she shrieked, waving her arms.
“What?” he’d snapped at her and then and waited long moments to catch his breath.
“No boys are allowed here! Get out!”
“Oh, shut up, will you.” He dropped his books to the tiles and slammed his elbow against the cubicle wall. “I’m sure I’ll be dead soon enough.”
“I know,” she said in a sad, unsteady voice, the kind where the sadness doesn’t seem forced so much as drawn from things that have long passed. “It is absolutely terrible, isn’t it?”
He tried to move away from her but tripped over the toilet and fell back-first onto the floor. “What on earth are you?”
“I wouldn’t expect you to know me,” she said, sounding only a breath away from crying. “Practically nobody else does. They just look straight through me and pretend my voice is nothing but a- nothing but a creaky pipe. I’m Myrtle . . . Moaning Myrtle. I’m a ghost.”
“Well of course you are,” he said, because it was clear enough that she was, and he was feeling rather ridiculous at having been startled when he had far more fearsome ghosts back his family’s at mansion and had managed to hold perfectly civil discussions with them about the decline of wizarding culture and the importance of keeping bloodlines pure and Quidditch and sometimes about what an utter prats Potter and his friends could be, and though he was sure he would get no such conversation from her, Draco pulled himself up with what dignity he could still manage and straightened his robes. “Malfoy . . . Draco Malfoy, I’m a Slytherin,” he said, holding out his hand, and instead of taking it she crossed her arms over her chest scowled. “You’re rather gloomy, aren’t you?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “You’re the one who said he was going to die and that everything is hopeless.” And before he could blink or say anything back, she swooped further above him and vanished behind the next stall.
“Yes . . . well, I didn’t know anyone was listening, and you don’t seem very concerned about my fate, do you? I suppose you’ll be glad to be rid of me.”
There was another rush of silent motion, and before his eyes caught up with him and saw her peeking over the cubicle wall from behind her foggy glasses. “I . . . I didn’t mean that.”
Draco stood straighter and sighed and rubbed the sweat from his forehead with the back of his hand, thinking about the class he was late for and the others he had missed earlier in the year and telling himself that he’ll likely miss much more than classes soon enough and realizing for the first time since Myrtle shrieked at him that he was speaking to someone who was dead- who had died a long time ago and could still talk and move and make herself completely annoying, and he wiped his eyes again and forced a smile. “Then what did you mean?”
“I was only agreeing with you,” she said in an odd, watery sort of voice. “And I was telling the truth. It is absolutely terrible. And you were right, anyway. Everyone will die . . . eventually.”
“Well,” he said, feeling his smile fall and his throat tighten. “Well, this has been spectacularly cheerful. I-I’ll go amuse myself a bit more by planning my funeral, shall I? I’ll let you know if I want any of your suggestions.”
“You will?” she asks. “You really will?”
Draco blinked, and he tried to open the stall, but his hands were shaking, and his fingers felt as if they had tangled together, and he turned back fast when he heard her talk, frustrated and angry that she could suddenly sound so much closer to cheerful than he could think to manage. “What?”
She floated a bit higher, twisting her hands in her robes and looking very awkward. “You’ll come back and visit me again?” she asked. “Oh, no one ever visits me.”
“I can’t imagine why,” Draco said, surprised at how tired and broken his voice had become. “Sure. Should I live to see next week, I’ll make it a point to stop by.”
“You don’t mean that,” she said, suddenly right beside him. “No one ever means that. What’s wrong? I can help you.”
“I highly doubt that,” he said rubbing his eyes again and wiping his nose on his robe sleeve.
“I can,” she said, and even though his vision was blurring and her glasses were foggy, he could tell she was trying hard to keep from meeting his eyes. “Oh, don’t cry. I can.”
“I’m not crying!” he shouted. “I don’t just come into bathrooms to cry. That sounds like something you would do.” He swung a hand out to shoo her away but it went straight through her middle and slammed into the back wall, and to his surprise she laughed.
“What’s wrong?” she asked again, looking at his hand, and he knew that wasn’t what she was really asking about. “Tell me.” And he did, whether it was his pain or her laughter that caught him off guard, he couldn’t be sure, and what he said started as a whisper and grew louder as he went on longer than he ever intended to.
He told her about his father’s mistakes and his mother’s concern and Snape’s vow and about the mission he had sworn to complete and what would happen if he failed. He told her about the Dark Lord, whose eyes glowed red when he spoke of a victory over death and about Aunt Bellatrix, who was teaching him to shield his mind and the horrible memories he had found lurking in hers and about the werewolf Greyback, who ran pointed fingernails over his neck, growling and muttering about the sweetness of innocent blood, and he told her about the Headmaster with his withered, black hand and twinkling eyes and the hopeful smiles that flashed across his face whenever he caught Draco looking at him, and at this she seemed to shiver.
He told her everything that he couldn’t tell anyone else, and he knew that he shouldn’t be telling her either, that he was scared and desperate and caught in a moment of weakness, but he had been feeling weak for months before, and he could feel all the secrets he carried with him swelling and burning in his throat, and he needed to get them out, to tell someone, someone who wouldn’t sell his life for their own or for some greater cause, and he thought his secrets that had been so hard to keep would horrify her, and maybe they did, but she listened silently, and through a blur of tears, he saw her nodding, and when he had finished, dizzy and out of breath, she whispered, “What do you need?”
He blinked and wiped his nose and raked an unsteady hand through his hair and looked at her for a few moments, wondering how to answer. “There’s a cabinet,” he said finally. “There’s a cabinet in a secret room, and I can use to lead the Death Eaters here. If I can fix it, I can use it without getting caught, but I can’t fix it and time’s running out. The prefects are always around when I try to get to the room, and I only have two lookouts, and they’re far too obvious. I think people are starting to suspect me, and when they see Crabbe and Goyle out in the hallway that makes things worse.”
Then to his surprise, she smiled. “That potion,” she said. “The Polyjuice Potion- that can change what they look like, can’t it?”
“Well yes, but-but I can’t brew it myself. It’s very advanced, and it takes ages.”
“It takes only a few weeks,” she said, fiddling with her hair. “And Hermione Granger did it perfectly in her second year.”
“What?” he forced himself to stand a bit straighter, and he wondered absently if Granger could be the reason for Potter’s recently developed aptitude at potions brewing. “That Mudblood- How? Why?”
“She brewed it without a single mistake,” Myrtle said, wincing and floating about as far from him as the cubicle would allow. “Unfortunately, the hair she used was from a cat. It was rather horrible what happened to her . . .”
“A cat,” he said, laughing. “And you saw it? That must have been great.” And he tried to remember if Granger looked upset by the batch brewing in the Potions room before fully realizing that there had been a batch brewing in the Potions room and that his chances of successfully swiping it from Slughorn would be rather good, especially when the old lush was so easily distracted by perfect Potter. “I-I have to get to Charms,” he said, looking up to see Myrtle scowling down at him with her arms crossed over her chest. “Bye.”
He turned the cubicle’s latch and strode out, feeling rather embarrassed to notice that he was clearly in a girl’s bathroom, and before he reached the main door he turned back to her with a smile that didn’t feel so forced and said, “See you later, then.” And she nodded just as she had when he told her everything he hadn’t meant to, looking hopeful, and it wasn’t until he had skipped halfway down the stairs that he realized must be looking hopeful too.
There would be other meetings in other bathrooms where Myrtle would tell him that everything would be okay and he would never quite believe her. There would be a curse slicing through his chest and a Phoenix attacking him as he climbed the spiral staircase of a high tower, and there would be failure in the end, and though, on his way to Charms, nearly thirty minutes late, with trembling hands and a bitter taste in his mouth, he wasn’t sure of everything that lay ahead, he knew that hope like the kind he had just discovered couldn’t last, not really, and he knows now that all of his chances have passed and that nothing can save him, but he’s thankful for it all the same, and he’s thankful that he met a dead girl in an old bathroom and told her his secrets, because it’s only a matter of time before he learns hers.
~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~
Draco climbs up from the Chamber with an odd, unbalanced feeling and finds Myrtle perched on one of the sinks, taunting the snake-head faucets, which seem to regard her with particular vehemence. The mirrors behind her are covered in thick fog from the steam and smoke that rises from Snape’s potions and hasn’t found its way out through Slytherin’s mouth, and he can’t see her reflection in them, though she may not have one at all, and asking would only upset her. Almost everything upsets her, really. “What was it like?” he asks, and she looks almost relieved as she floats down from the sink, faucet heads snapping behind her.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she says, hovering beside him, but he knows she must, because there’s one thing he’s been certain of every time he came to see her, and there’s one thing she knows and one thing she’s done that he wants to understand, no matter how much it frightens him.
“Yes,” he says, staring past her into the mirror, and thinking of her face the first time he saw her and said that he was going to die. “Yes, you do. What was it like?”
She bites her lip and shakes her head and hovers just a bit higher, “I’m not telling you. It doesn’t matter. You don’t need to worry about that for a long time.” And Draco crosses his arms over his chest without caring about how childish it must look.
“If you don’t tell me,” he says. “I’ll never come to visit you again.” He nods towards the hole in the floor where the second stand of sinks had once stood that leads down to the Chamber and to Snape and to whatever secrets it still keeps. “I won’t, and I don’t think anyone else will either.”
“You’re the best of them. Do you know that?” Myrtle floats over the hole and is lost for a moment in the thin wisps of smoke that rise from it. “You visit, and I know it must be hard to keep Snape from finding out. You’re nicer to me than anyone else, and you seem to have feelings sometimes, unlike those others. You’re the best of them. And you’re still completely awful.”
“What was it like? I bet you’d tell Potter how it happened.”
She bites her lip or at least appears to and drifts about, looking very uncomfortable. “I-”
“You did, didn’t you?” Draco smiles and then thinks about why he’s smiling and feels it fall flat. “You did- I can’t believe it.”
“I- I didn’t.”
“You can’t keep a secret at all, can you? You’re completely-”
“Transparent?” she says, raising her chin and turning her back to him. “Of course I am.”
“Just tell me.”
“I can keep a secret,” she says, peering at him over her shoulder. “I can, you know. It was dreadful, just horrible.” She’s slow to turn around, and slow to speak, but Draco waits silently, and shakes his head, knowing that for Myrtle even the simplest secrets would be too hard to keep. “I was in here crying, just there.” She points to the closest stall accusingly. “And I took off my glasses to wipe my eyes and heard something below- something moving, and then I looked down. There were lights in the water. I wasn’t sure they were real or if they were a reflection of something far away and they kept getting bigger and bigger so I turned around, and- and-” She pauses and hovers still in the air, but her lips keep moving.
“And what?”
“And I died,” she says, and the words hit him like a silent, unexpected curse. They sound as normal as any other words and more pleasant than most of the ones he’s heard from her, but there’s a horrible finality to them like the opening to the Chamber caving in with stones too heavy to move. Draco takes a deep breath, and Myrtle seems lost somewhere else and doesn’t look at him at all.
“I didn’t know,” she says. “I mean, I didn’t realize at the time. And when I did, my first thought was a wish that I wore my hair differently or put on something other than these drab old school robes, because this is how I would stay forever. And the second thing I thought was that I was really dead.” Myrtle floats closer to the ceiling and further from him, and he tries to look at her eyes but can’t quite manage it because of the fog beneath her glasses and the way his vision swims in and out of focus. “My mother was very pretty, you know. And I kept thinking I would if only I was patient I would grow out of having spots or having to wear ugly glasses or grow just a bit taller. I kept forgetting I wasn’t going to no matter how long I waited, and nothing really changes anyway. And then I would keep wishing it happened somewhere else, somewhere other than a bathroom, but why should it have? I was in here often enough while I was alive . . . in here crying, just like I was then . . . just like you were when I met you.”
“Sorry,” Draco says, and he doesn’t know if he means it. He doesn’t know if she has feelings or only memories of them, and he doesn’t know why he wanted to ask her anymore. Wind pours in from the windows above him and mixes with the smoke rising up from the Chamber below, and Draco feels dizzy and sits on the floor before he has a chance to lose his balance. He was going to walk to the library after talking to her, but he doesn’t think about that. He doesn’t even think about trying to stand again.
“It doesn’t matter now,” Myrtle says, looking at him again. “There’s nothing I can do to change it, is there?”
“Well,” he says, staring hard at the floor tiles and wiping his eyes on the sleeve of his robe. “Well, you probably didn’t want to talk about it, did you?”
“Oh, but I like talking about it- about how awful it was. I didn’t think you’d really want to hear. Just because it happened to me while I was in here crying doesn’t mean that you- I don’t think it can happen like that to anyone else, not anymore.”
“I’m not crying,” he says, biting his lip and wiping his eyes again. “I’m not, and before- I wasn’t then either. I was just- well, I wasn’t crying. And I did- I did want to know, because it’s going to happen to me, not here, but it will.” He thinks of the mission he failed to complete and the way his Mark now burns with the Dark Lord’s anger, and he knows he can’t stay here forever.
Myrtle floats down and sits above the ground beside him. “Oh, don’t be scared,” she croons. “You don’t need to be. You don’t even need to think about it, not for a long time.”
He tries to put his head in her lap as he had with Pansy so many times, but it goes straight through and slams against the hard tiles of the bathroom floor, and he thinks there might be more comfort in that.
“It’s not so bad,” she says, and he pretends she’s only talking about the blood dotting his hair, and he turns his head to the side to feel the cold tiles pressing against his cheek and pretends that’s the only reason he’s crying.
~*~*~*~*~*~*~
Snape hates Myrtle more than Draco thought could be possible with so much of his hate already spent on Potter and scattered among the least competent Death Eaters. He tries to pretend she’s beneath his notice, but Draco doesn’t believe it for a second, and he wonders what she must have done to deserve it, because Potter’s seems hated only for living, and no one now could hold that against her.
They had hidden themselves first in Snape’s hovel in the Muggle village and then in the caves near Hogsmeade, surrounded by the tiny bones of dead rats and then in the Shrieking Shack where the dust was so thick Draco imagined that a fine layer would settle over him if he sat still for more than five minutes at a time, but sit still he did. When some of the children staying in town to attend the old man’s funeral had dared each other to go inside, Snape sent him to an upstairs room with a broken bed in the center and told him to be silent, and he was silent, he was silent enough to hear every shaky, terrified scream and every running footstep and every fist banging against a stuck door as Snape summoned something to frighten the children away that would no doubt haunt their nightmares for years to come.
When the students had taken the Hogwarts Express back to King’s Cross Station and the professors had left, wondering if they would ever return again, Draco followed Snape through a tunnel that lead them out beneath the Whomping Willow and then across the dark grounds and into the castle through a secret entrance that may have just been a particularly loose stone he managed to force out of place and put back when they finally made their way inside. Draco followed him up and down the staircases and through other tighter crawlspaces, and with the torches blown out and no wand held up for light, he could make out nothing of the school he had once known, with no recognizable classrooms and no chatter from students or from the portraits lining the walls and no footsteps, save his own and Snape’s- it felt eerie and empty and dead, and he was surprised that of all the rooms to choose from, Snape had led him into a girl’s bathroom and with a silent wave of his wand lit the lamps.
He was only there once before and between the haze of his sickness and the dizziness of his thoughts hadn’t had a chance to look around, but he remembered thinking that the whole bathroom was clearly designed by a Slytherin. The tiles were faded green and the faucets were shaped like water snakes on the sinks, which lined the walls, below long polished mirrors and stood along a wide column of a stand, which seemed to be the only think keeping the cracked plaster ceiling from meeting the floor, and between the words said by Snape’s silent stares and the pounding of his own heart, the walls seemed to hiss. There was a strange magic in the air then that has faded long since, and it made him wonder if the bathroom had really looked as it did when he first stumbled through its doors, but he couldn’t think on it long, and he was still trying to take in all of his surroundings when Myrtle appeared through a mirror, looking startled at first and then furious. “Get out! Murderer!” she shouted, staring at Snape with wide eyes. “Get out! I’ve heard what everyone’s been saying about you!”
“Stand aside, you wretched creature,” Snape growled and waved his wand to make the lamps glow brighter and make Myrtle fade against their light.
She stared at Draco then, though he couldn’t make out her expression, and he forced a weak smile. “Get out!” she shouted louder than before, swooping away to one of the darker corners. “This is my bathroom!”
“Leave at once,” Snape said, moving forward to the second row of sinks opposite wall. “Or if I am, as you say, a murder I shouldn’t be afraid to do it again.”
“That doesn’t matter,” Myrtle said with a grim sort of smile before moving into the light and directly in front of his wand. “I’m- I’m already-” But she was cut off by Snape’s sharp nod in Draco’s direction and covered her mouth with both hands before swooping over the walls of a cubicle fast and silent save for a very loud splash.
“You didn’t need to do that,” Draco said, but he was too tired to sound as angry as he felt and too uneasy at the sight of Snape’s wand, which was suddenly pointed at him and the look of utter loathing in Snape’s eyes that reminded him so much of the look he wore the night he killed Dumbledore that he could do nothing but stand rooted to the floor.
“Hmmm,” he said, sounding unconcerned, “Perhaps not.” And he looked to see that Draco’s eyes had followed Myrtle away and glared. “If you don’t pay attention to such annoyances, they will surely depart.”
“If you had just asked her, she would probably-”
“Stand back, Draco.” Snape instructed, lowering his wand slowly, and then he turned on his heel to face the few sinks in the corner and pointed it again as Draco, finally finding his feet, ran to hide in cubicle, barely managing to stop himself from slipping on the wet floor.
“Oh, Draco,” Myrtle whispered, floating up out of the toilet. “What’s he doing? He’s destroying it, isn’t he? He won’t really hurt you- he can’t.”
“He’s not the one I have to worry about,” Draco whispered back, hoping it might be true. “I don’t think so, anyway.” And as he said it an explosion shook the bathroom floor and he crouched with Myrtle beside him and his hands over his head as dust and porcelain and shattered stone rained down around them, and as he felt himself slipping again he tried to grab her arm to steady himself, but his hand went right through her and she glared at no one in particular before disappearing through the side wall.
Draco peered out of the cubicle to see nothing where the corner sinks had been but a giant hole that looked far deeper than it should and debris piled all around, and he watched silently as Snape fashioned a rough set of stairs from the stone and cracked sink basins to lead down to what he would later learn was the Chamber of Secrets.
~*~*~*~*~*~*~
Part two