Hard to Keep (2)

[magicicada]

Part two

~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~

If there were just one place in all the world no one could expect them to hide, Draco supposes the Chamber might be it. Most doubt its existence, and those who don’t are convinced that it can no longer be reached by any magic still practiced. Some are sure that Snape would never return to the school that he so hated with no one to hold him there, even under threat of death, and some are sure he would never return to the scene of his crime, while the rest, the ones who really know him, think he’s far too clever to hide anywhere so obvious. But he’s not the one who really needs hiding. He has the skill and the ruthlessness and the secrecy to deal with any threats. It is Draco who failed once already and will likely fail again at far greater cost, and as soon as they reached the bottom of the Chamber that first time, Snape snatched his wand away from him, sneering and muttering that it could do nothing but get him into trouble, and he glared back, feeling very much like a petulant child, and the days began to slip away from them like cold water pouring down through the pipes, and the start of the summer becomes nothing more than a blur of memories of two people hiding in spaces too small for one and nights spent running in the dark.

Snape rarely speaks, choosing instead to spend most of his time bent silently over his potions, and Draco never listens to what he has to say, but tries to get his attention as much as he can. He traces words into the dust on the floor and whistles to himself when the smoke isn’t so thick that he can do nothing but cough, and once they both played a rather nasty game of Gobstones that left his fingers so burned by acid that he could hardly move them for the next three days.

The Basilisk’s bones are close set where none are missing, and Draco finds leaning his back against the inward curve of the skeleton’s ribs rather more comfortable than settling himself against the straight stones of the wall. He climbs inside as Snape continues tracing the words of ancient scrolls with his unburned fingers, and Draco wonders again if he must read with his hands rather than his eyes, but those eyes don’t move to look at him as he stumbles and lands on the floor with an undignified moan. “Look,” he says, laughing as he stretches out and rolls his eyes back. “Look. I’m a Mudblood brought to my proper end.”

“Mooncalf tongue is required for a Disabling Draught,” Snape says, still not looking up from his scrolls, even when Slytherin gives a particularly unpleasant hiss. “But I do believe if more caterpillar bristles were added to compensate, I could make use of local sources.”

Draco sits up again, waving the smoke from his face, and he clears his throat, and he wonders why Snape can’t just threaten to chop his tongue out like a normal person would. But Snape’s isn’t a normal person. He stands still for hours while Draco can do nothing but pace along the Chamber’s walls like a caged animal, and he reads books in a writing that appear as pictures that move in dizzying patterns when Draco tries to look at them and sticks his hand right into the center of fires to test their heat without being burned, and Draco watches as he rolls the dusty scrolls before him with more gentleness than he’s ever shown anything living and then turns to a set of shining golden scales and begins weighing some of the flakes of stone he collected off the floor.

There’s magic in everything here. It moves with the smoke and the dust, and Draco breathes it in and shivers as it rises up from the ancient stones beneath him like a current running through his veins, and he feels it fizzle in the water that trickles down from the ceiling. He sits beneath the main drip and catches it in the palm of his hand and wonders if the magic is strong enough for him to use it as a wand and use it to escape, but he never really thinks of trying. Instead he stares down at it and sees indistinct gray figures dancing or swimming or floating away on the wind, but even they fade as the water shifts and as it spills from the spaces between his fingers, shimmering like unicorn blood before falling to the floor and evaporating away or lingering in dull, dusty puddles, and Snape is quick to push him back against the wall and set a huge cauldron under the drip to catch it and light a white-flamed fire beneath, but the fire must be charmed somehow or the shimmering powder he adds to the water must be heavy with enchantments, because there is no steam or smoke coming from this cauldron like there is from the others, and he watches as the tiny pool of water at the cauldron’s bottom swirls and slowly rises and never reaches a boil, and that is how he measures his life.

When he can, he sneaks out to the library and stares at the rows of books, perfect and untouched and is always too worried that Snape will catch one out of place to brush his fingers against anything but the dust jackets. He walks through the same back hallways to get there each time, carefully dodging Peeves and keeping close to the walls and never setting foot on any of the moving stairways, and when he gets back he’s so relieved to be uncaught that he promises himself he’ll never go out again, but he always breaks those promises.

There’s a war on somewhere where mothers will die to protect their children and enemies can turn to allies in the blink of an eye or the twitch of a wand, but Draco knows none of it. Each day he wakes up on the floor and waves the smoke away from his face and stares into the cauldron to see just how much the higher the water has risen and thinks that it might be his last time doing all of it. He defies Snape. He visits Myrtle when he must and walks to the library when he knows he shouldn’t, and that is his great show of bravery, and for someone already marked for death, it’s enough.

~*~*~*~*~*~

Draco doesn’t know when or if Snape bathes. He’s in and out these days and never looks as if he’s showered or slept or ate. Draco sometimes wonders if he’ll die too and what will become of them both after, but he doesn’t think on it long. It’s too hard to keep his mind focused on a single thought, and it’s not very likely, after all, Snape is very good at doing whatever he must to keep himself alive, so Draco looks forward to dying alone.

His heart is beating fast when he takes a different turn in the hallway, and a part of him wants to get back to the Chamber as quiet and quick as possible and another wants to keep going to the library and browse the titles in the Divination Section, but there are ashes in his hair and dirt beneath his fingernails and the smell of mold covering his skin and his clothes, and it’s hard to keep his mind on anything else, so he runs the rest of the way to the prefects’ bathroom before locking the door tight and jumping into the tub as the pretty mermaid hanging in her frame above him laughs and splashes up painted water with her tail.

The real water is hot, and the bubbles have a sickly-sweet smell that reminds him of Honeydukes in the summer and all the treats in the packages his mother used to send him every week, and he wonders where she is and whether she’s safe and whether he’ll ever see another letter from her again, and he’s trying to remember what she looked like the last time he saw her when a voice from right beside his ear startles him so much he falls back under the water and floats down to the bottom of the tub. “You’re avoiding me, aren’t you?”

“What?” he tries to say, “how?” But bubbles come out of his mouth instead of words and he coughs and sputters and uselessly struggles to breathe through the water, and he blinks up at Myrtle, rubbing the sting of soap from his eyes and wondering how her voice managed to reach him at the bottom of the tub.

“You are,” she says, sighing and picking at her chin. “You’re avoiding me just like everyone else always has.”

“No,” Draco says after finally surfacing as he gasps for air and squeezes water out of his nose. “No, I’m taking a bath.” And he looks at Myrtle, floating above him as she bites her lip and glances down at the ripples in the tub and sniffles as if she’s about to cry.

“Well, I guess you don’t want my help anymore.”

“Myrtle, the Dark Lord is going to kill me,” he says sinking neck-deep into the water and hoping his face doesn’t look as pink as it feels, as pink as at always gets when he’s not quite telling the truth. “What possible help could you be?”

“That’s right,” she says, voice shaking. “That’s right. I’m useless. Poor Myrtle can’t do anything at all. I’ll just go back to my bathroom and never talk to you again.” And she floats across the room until she’s just above the stalls and dives down into one of the toilets with a large splash and begins to let out a few choked sobs.

Draco rolls his eyes and pokes at the bubbles clinging to his skin and tries not to laugh. He knows there is one way she can help him, however useless she is, but he hasn’t yet thought of how to ask her and hasn’t yet decided if he should. “Myrtle,” he says. “I know you’re still there.”

“I’m not,” she wails from the toilet or the pipes just below it. “I’m not, and I don’t want to talk to you, not ever again.”

Draco swims to the end of the tub and props his elbows up on the ledge. “It’s just that I’ve never died before, you see. I’m rather worried about it.” And suddenly Myrtle’s floating on the air right in front of him once more.

“It’ll be wretched,” she hisses, glaring at him from behind her thick, foggy glasses. “It hurts terribly, of course.”

“Shut up!” he says and hurls a soapy sponge right through her shoulder. “Just shut up!”

“That’s right throw things at me,” she whimpers, wiping tears from her cheeks. “I can’t catch them. Hold out your hand again, why don’t you? You know I can’t feel it or touch it. You must love reminding me of that. Poor, stupid, ugly Myrtle, she can’t do anything at all!”

“You made a splash,” Draco whispers, because he doesn’t want to shout anymore or hear her shout and because he remembers how nervous he was about being caught here and why.

“What?” she asks stiffly.

“You made the water splash, just now,” he says, pointing to the clear puddles on the floor below the stall she dove into.

“I can’t-” She begins shaking her head, and he shakes his along with it and smiles.

“But you did you made the water-”

“That’s different.”

“No,” he says, holding his hand out again. “I don’t think it is.”

“What are you doing?” she asks, still shaking her head, and he shrugs.

“I only what to see what happens,” he says, and he nods down at his outstretched hand and wiggles his fingers.

She wipes her eyes and wrings her hands together and begins to back away from him just a bit more. “Nothing will.”

“I just want to find out.”

“You’ll visit me again?” she asks, looking nervous and unsteady, and he wants to tell her it doesn’t matter anymore, because she’s already quieted down, but it’s not the chance of being caught that makes Draco anxious now, and he’s not sure when his fascination started or why it’s suddenly grown so strong, but he has to know more of the answers. He has to know just what she can do.

“Yes,” he says a bit louder than he meant to, and she jolts back a few more inches.

She says, “I don’t believe you.” And she narrows her eyes at him. “The others said they would, and they lied. I can’t tell if you’re lying.”

“I’m not,” he says, slipping underwater and back up again, and she shakes her head and stares at him, and they stay still for a few moments, him in the sunken tub and her hovering above it, moving only with the water and the faint wind that blows in through the vents until she nods once and floats closer, and he can’t tell when her hand meets his, because he doesn’t feel it. He doesn’t feel anything but the tiny hairs on the back of his neck rising as a chill passes through him and when he looks down he sees his hand, still held out expectantly, but somehow also stretching through her shoulder, and he can feel it when her hand slips down into the water, because it suddenly becomes very cold.

He jumps back then and so does she, clutching her hand to her chest, and there’s an odd sinking feeling in his stomach, because he really expected to feel something- to touch her, and from her expression and her sudden stiffness and the way she kept reaching through him, he knows that she expected she would be able to touch him too. He opens his mouth to speak, but the words freeze in his throat, just as his body feels like it might freeze in the cold water, and it doesn’t really matter, because she’s already gone, already gliding away through the pipes.

Draco thinks first about getting out of the tub, but his arms feel too weak to pull the rest of him up from the ledge, and the pretty mermaid gives him a sad stare from her frame before diving in to the water below her and swimming away. The soap bubbles are all gone now, and the wind pouring in form the vents feels cooler and stronger than before, and Draco stays in the tub until he grows accustomed to the cold and then numb from it. Then he starts to move, holding his breath and sliding through the clear water. He’s swum many times but never like he does now. This is no summer garden lake or rolling ocean wrapped in a sun-warmed beach. If such places still exist in the world, they must be very far away. There are no sounds save for the water moving when his head rises above it, and underneath he can hear nothing at all, and he’s alone, in the cold and the dark and the silence, he’s more alone than he’s ever been before.

He moves slowly across the tub, doing flips off the bottom and corkscrew turns off the walls until he no longer needs that contact with solidness. The sun is shining somewhere, but through the slit widows it only manages to brighten the dust motes floating in the air, and eventually Draco closes his eyes. He wonders, for a few moments, if he should feel foolish for behaving in such a way, but this is no childish game- it’s an experiment, and he’s careful as Snape must be with his most delicate potions. He measures his breaths and his strokes across the tub and the aches that spread down his legs and through his arms and whisper to him that he won’t be able to keep floating- to go on forever, and the whole time he wonders if it’s like the kind of floating ghosts do or if they’re more like the water itself, clear and fluid and easy to pass straight through and if maybe that’s why Myrtle’s drawn to wet things like toilets and pipes and Draco when he’s crying.

~*~*~*~*~*~

Draco doesn’t know how long he stays in the tub before it becomes too hard to keep himself from sinking to the bottom. Of all the things he’d been counting, the minutes were the first that had been forgotten, and when he climbs out his eyes sting, and he can barely feel his legs, and slowly everything he discovered about the strange burn in his chest and the pressure in his ears and the changing weight of water slips from his mind. It doesn’t matter now.

He chooses the quickest route back, this time, instead of the safest and clutches the banister of the staircase in blue-tinted fingers as it starts moving, and in only seconds the quickest route becomes the longest. The portraits chuckle and point at him as he curses under his breath and shivers and shuffles clumsily along the empty hallways, trying not to slip on the puddles that seem to line the floor. He loses his way twice and has to brave three more moving staircases and just once is knocked on the head with a stone rolling pin by the statue of a hag, but once is enough to make the world go black for long minutes until he is able to stand and stumble away, and when he finally reaches the bathroom over the Chamber, he’s assaulted by a piercing screech and a thrown roll of toilet paper.

“What are you doing here?” Myrtle asks, ducking behind a cubicle as soon as he catches sight of her.

He shivers again, and he and pulls the sleeves of his robe down to cover his hands. “This is the only way down to the Chamber,” he says, “and the only way up from it, and I don’t think I could avoid you even if I wanted to.”

“But you do want to, don’t you? You want to avoid me. You think I’m awful.”

“I don’t,” he says, leaning against the sink for just a second before the faucets start snapping at his robes. “I-I just thought-”

“Oh, you do. You hate me. Everybody does- miserable, moping, moaning, Mudblood Myrtle, nobody likes her at all.”

Draco staggers over to the nearest cubicle door and leans against it only after examining it thoroughly to make sure it won’t somehow try to bite him. “I-You- You’re a-” Draco stops talking, not because of his shock or his tiredness or his still very real hatred of all Mudbloods, but because in his inspection of the door he had failed to notice it wasn’t properly closed, and it swings inward and sends him tumbling down onto the floor, and the fall knocks his breath and his voice out of him.

“You didn’t know,” she whispers, shaking her head. “You really didn’t know. Oh, you’re disgusted by that, aren’t you?” And she glares down at him briefly before disappearing into the toilet. “Of course, I knew you would be.” And even though he can’t see her, he can hear the tears in her voice.

Draco coughs. “Myrtle-”

“Leave me alone.”

He sighs, crawling up onto his knees, and he rests his arms on the toilet seat and his head on his arms and puts his hand in the water, and it feels even colder than she had made his bath, and he thinks that he can almost see the faint outline of her hand just below his, but if it touches him he doesn’t feel it. “I’m not disgusted,” he says, wondering if it might be true and wondering if the other hand he sees is nothing more than a distorted reflection. “I’m not, see.”

“I don’t want you to even look at me,” she hisses. “I don’t care what will happen. I really don’t.” He wonders for just a second whether it’s what will happen to him that she doesn’t care about or what will happen to her and whether anything really can happen to a ghost who can do nothing more with her hands than make small splashes, but his own hand is getting colder, and his knees ache from being pressed against the hard floor, and Myrtle’s sobs rise to the surface in bubbles.

“Are you going to come out of there?” He swishes his fingers about in the water and knocks against the porcelain and thinks only for a second that maybe if he’s going to be disgusted about something it shouldn’t be the quality of blood Myrtle had back when she was alive, but disgusted or not, his hand stays in the toilet and his knees stay on the floor.

“No,” she says. “No, just go away.”

“Are you at least going to stop crying?”

“I’d rather not.”

“I’ll visit you again,” he says, taking a deep, shaky breath and rising to his feet. “I will.”

“I-I don’t care if you do,” she says, and he knows that she does care- that her loneliness has more sway over her than anger ever has, and he knows that she’s lying- he always knows when she’s lying, and even if all that weakness comes from her tainted blood he’s thankful for it.

He walks without tripping over to the mirror of the center sink, and in the fog on its surface he traces the words ‘I’m Sorry’ with his finger, and he stands longer than he intended, starring at his fog-blurred reflection. His skin looks paler than it had before, and there are grey circles under his eyes, and his lips look far too blue to be healthy, but he forces them to smile. “See you later, then,” he says to Myrtle before climbing back down to the Chamber on his still-unsteady legs.

~*~*~*~*~*~

The secrets in the Chamber are as thick as the smoke and the shadows that mingle together to darken the air and make Draco feel as if he won’t ever see sunlight again. Snape disappears sometimes on missions that he never speaks of and comes back injured and exhausted to suck down restorative potions before disappearing again, and Draco wonders whether he is now in or out of the Dark Lord’s favor, which can shift so easily and who the potions he brews are for and whether he is keeping Draco in the Chamber for protection or as a prisoner. The fear he feels is with him at all times. It rises and falls in his chest and slips in and out of his immediate thoughts, and he carries it always as a pain in his stomach and the trembling of his hands. He tells himself sometimes that he is not frightened or at least that there is not any reason that he should be- there is no safer place than Hogwarts, after all, and sometimes he believes it for just a little while. He knows that fear is making him stupid- making him take foolish risks, and he worries that he will do something stupider still, but that worry is soon eclipsed by so many others, and it’s hard to keep careful about everything and hard to keep calm, even when he knows he should, and it’s hard to keep comfortable enough to stay as still as Snape wants him to with cold, damp stones always against his back or beneath his feet.

Snape has been away for three days when he invites Myrtle down the makeshift stairway. He holds out his hand and hers touches it like a faint winter breeze, and she giggles and complains about the hole and the smoke and the living, who are all completely awful, and he rolls his eyes and guides her down, even though she floats several inches above the tunnel’s floor, and he thinks that that no one stays living forever.

“Oh,” Myrtle gasps when they reach the bottom, and Draco notices that here eyes are fixed on the Basilisk’s skeleton. “Oh, that’s it!” She floats closer, tentatively at first and then bolder until she’s only a few feet away, staring it right in the face. “Its eyes were yellow when it happened.”

“You were . . .” Draco tries to ask the question, but his voice is caught somewhere in his throat, and Myrtle is reaching out to trace its skull with a translucent finger. It makes sense, though. She was a Mudblood, after all, and that’s just the kind the Basilisk went after, just the kind it was meant to rid the school of, and there’s an odd twisting in his stomach when he thinks of all the times he told Crabbe and Goyle about Slytherin’s heir and how he would set the world right, and then he looks at Myrtle, who’s already inspected the Basilisk to the end of its tail. “It killed you,” he says finally. It doesn’t need to be a question anymore, but she nods and floats back to his side. “Come on,” he says, fanning smoke from his face and faking a cough. “We don’t have to do this. We can go somewhere else.”

“No,” she says, still looking at the Basilisk. “I want to.” She floats over to it again, and Draco thinks about following, but he doesn’t trust his legs to carry him there. He watches as she drifts around it again and then through it and then as she weaves between the bones in blur of motion and settles herself inside just as he had, except even sitting, she hovers inches above the ground. “I want to stay here,” she says and moves her hand along the Basilisk’s twisted spine as if she’s actually touching it. “You know, this would probably be pretty comfortable.”

Draco’s mouth feels very dry, and he tries to force another cough, but instead gulps down mouthfuls of smoke, and soon he can’t stop himself from coughing until his stomach hurts and his eyes are watering, and Myrtle watches him with an unreadable expression on her face, and when he’s finally finished, motions for him to come sit down.

“It-it didn’t eat you, did it?” he asks, wiping his eyes and his nose on the back of his hand.

“No,” she says, and he nods and begins to walk over slowly to keep himself from tripping and slowly because he doesn’t know what to do when he gets there, and he’s very aware of each step and the way his feet feel in his expensive, uncomfortable shoes and against the hard floor, and he thinks how much easier it would be to float everywhere as she does so easily- as she does as if she could go on forever.

“Are you sure?” he asks, clutching at the Basilisk’s ribs to steady himself and slipping inside.

“Yes,” she says, and she folds her hands in her lap and looks at him in a way that makes him want to be anywhere else but sitting next to her. “My parents came here to take my body home for the funeral. I tried to talk to them but they couldn’t see me. They were Muggles, you know.”

“Oh,” Draco says, absently twirling a finger in the dust on the floor and then, “Ha! I-I’d like to see old Dumbledore explaining that to a bunch of Muggles.” But Dumbledore isn’t old, he’s dead, and Draco shivers at the memory of it and shivers again at the coldness of Myrtle’s frown.

“Dumbledore wasn’t the headmaster then,” she says in a voice that reminds him eerily of Granger. “Drippet was, and he didn’t explain anything. He didn’t look at me when I tried to talk to him and tell him what to say and what really happened and that it wasn’t the spider they set loose in the forest that did it. He didn’t care that there was still a monster in the pipes.”

“Oh,” Draco says again, wiping his eyes and smearing his face with dust and dirt from his fingers.

“He didn’t talk to me,” Myrtle says, “and neither did anyone else, but we had an agreement. I knew I couldn’t just keep going to classes and pretend everything was normal, and I knew they didn’t want anyone else to do it- to become ghosts, and they let me have the bathroom and use the pipes to move from place to place sometimes, so long as I didn’t cause any trouble.” She sniffles and glances through the smoke at the cauldrons lining the far wall.

“I bet you want to now, then?”

“Want to what?”

“Cause trouble,” he says, smiling as he follows her gaze over to Snape’s cauldrons, simmering unassuming in their perfectly straight lines. “Do all the things you were too scared to do before. You don’t have to worry about anything anymore, you know?”

Myrtle shakes her head and sighs. “You don’t really think it changes that much, do you?” she asks. “You don’t really think you stop being scared? It’s worse, but not different.”

“Why?” Draco asks, thinking of what it would be like to not need to worry about the Dark Lord or his Dark Mark or the dark world outside the castle that he could so easily get lost in. “Myrtle, you can do whatever you want. What can stop you?”

“Everything can,” she says, looking defeated and confused by his insistence. “When you die you lose your body. You lose being able to touch and taste and smell most things, but that’s all. Your fear is a part of you, and you don’t lose that. You don’t stop being yourself. If you’re frightened or selfish or gloomy or absolutely awful, you stay that way. You stay that way forever.”

“Oh,” Draco says, leaning back against the Basilisk’s ribs and trying to think of something a bit more cheerful to talk about. “So, do you think anyone’s died yet?”

“People die all the time, every day.”

“Yes,” he says, “but do you think anyone from school did? Anyone we knew?”

“I went to school over fifty years ago. Quite a lot of the people I knew died, but I was the first.”

“Diggory was the first,” Draco says more to himself than to her. “I might be the second unless someone else-”

“Stop it!” She straightens her glasses and narrows her eyes at him. “Stop talking like that.”

“Fine,” he says, and he is angry then- angry that she should try to tell him what to say and angry at himself for bringing her here and for being afraid and angry at Snape for making him wonder about so many things. “Fine, but I don’t believe you. People can do what they want when they’re dead. If you can’t it’s just because of something wrong with you, probably because you were a filthy little Mudblood while you were alive, and some dirt never washes off.” He thinks of all the places he wants to go without hiding and the things he wants to do without Snape breathing down his neck and of all the books he wants to read but is too scared to touch, and even though she has no reason to lie and no secrets she can keep, he refuses to believe she’s right.

“You’re awful,” she says with a broken sob, and she clenches her fists and bites her lip and sits very still.

“When I die,” he says, glancing at the potions again. “I’ll do whatever I want.”

“You won’t,” she says, glaring and swallowing hard. “You won’t be a ghost.”

“Of course I will.”

“Y-you won’t. You’ll just be dead, and that’s better, Draco. That’s so much better.”

“Well, I’m not dead yet.” He takes a sandwich from his robe pocket and waves it in front of Myrtle’s face. “Do you mind if I-”

“I don’t care,” she says, looking like she cares quite a lot. “Food has to be terribly spoiled for us to even pretend to smell it.”

“Us?” Draco asks, forcing a smile as he takes a very big bite of the stale bread and pretends it’s the most delicious thing he’s ever eaten.

“Me.”

“Ha!” he says, forgetting to keep his mouth shut as he chews. “I’ll be a ghost, you’ll see, and I’ll certainly be better at it than you are.”

“You think I’m useless, don’t you?” she says. Shimmering tears begin rolling down her cheeks, and Draco tries to laugh, but can only cough and spit out bits of his sandwich, and Myrtle swoops up through the bones and over to the cauldrons and the rising smoke and Slytherin, who hisses angrily at her. “You really think I can’t do anything?” She cries harder, now, and moves so fast in and out of the smoke that Draco can hardly see her, and she floats a bit higher and then down fast, planting her arm in one of the bubbling cauldrons with a faint splash, and Draco watches the murky grey liquid change to ice and drops his sandwich on the floor and stumbles out of the skeleton to join her.

“I didn’t know you could do that,” he says running a finger over the potion’s frozen surface and through Myrtle’s arm as she pulls her hand free.

“Neither did I, not really,” she says, seeming to catch her breath, though Draco’s still fairly sure she doesn’t really need to breathe.

“Snape’s going to kill me for this,” he says, and Myrtle shrugs.

“Are you scared?” she asks, and he smiles at her over the cauldron before tipping it on its side.

“Terrified,” he says with a laugh that burbles up from that confused, nervous place inside him that he can never manage to ignore. His hands shake, and he laughs harder.

“Well, it will be awful.” She spins through the air and then swoops under two of the smallest cauldrons, instantly putting out the fires that had burned beneath them. She giggles a bit, and Draco rolls his eyes and tries to wipe some of the dust from his robes and empties a few jars of mysterious looking herbs into the cauldrons at random. There are no mirrors here to etch his half-meant apologies into, and he’s thankful for it. He wouldn’t want to catch sight of himself, face streaked with dirt and robe spotted with bread crumbs, running back and forth through the Chamber spilling Snape’s potions and slipping on the floor as Myrtle cools and freezes and changes everything she touches. He doesn’t need to speak to make her think he’s sorry for upsetting her, even if he still believes everything he’s said, and she doesn’t need to tell him she’s only started it to get him in trouble, and the smoke is black and grey and white and changing colors every second as Draco adds crushed mushrooms and beetle wings and Myrtle turns it all to ice on the floor.

“Snail salt,” Draco says, holding up the smallest jar he finds, filled with a glowing milky powder. “I bet this is pretty rare.” And he reaches with a trembling hand into the smoke and throws it down into one of the fires causing little explosions that shake the floor light up the whole Chamber, and of course, it’s that moment that Snape strides in, furious and fuming, and Draco feels his heart stop beating, but not for very long.

Snape says nothing, but he casts his eyes around the room silently to tell Draco he sees all of it and understands just as much, and Draco looks at Myrtle beside him and swallows hard and wipes his eyes and tries to find his voice. “It- it was a mistake,” he says, and Snape regards him coolly.

“If by that you mean my decision to put even the tiniest shred of trust in you, then I must agree,” he says, and though Draco knows that he’s the one being spoken to, Snape’s eyes are fixed on Myrtle.

“She didn’t have anything to do with it,” he says, but nothing of Snape’s face changes. “It was my fault- my mistake.”

“Why is she here?” Snape asks, and his voice makes it clear he doesn’t believe a word Draco says.

“I invited her.”

“Why?”

“She didn’t do anything wrong.”

“That,” Snape hisses, “is not what I asked.”

“Then- then I don’t see why I should have to answer you.” Draco’s fists are clenched, and his heart is beating fast, and his voice wavers with the odd, giddy thrill of defiance, and when he turns smile at Myrtle, nothing about it is forced, but Myrtle’s floating higher now, staring transfixed into the huge cauldron below the drip.

“So many memories,” she whispers before turning back to Draco with a strange sort of smile that he doesn’t understand, because she’s never been in the Chamber before and no memories she has of what was once there could be pleasant, but Snape must know what she’s talking about, because he’s quick to silence her with a glare.

“She is not the kind of company you should be keeping,” Snape says, and Draco rolls his eyes without looking back at him.

“She’s fine.”

“She is a Mudblood.”

Myrtle bites her lip and looks down into the huge cauldron, and Draco, still smiling holds out his hand. “I don’t see how that matters,” he says as her cold fingers pass right through his palm before pulling back and settling themselves on top of it. “She hasn’t got any blood at all now, has she?”

“She’s dead, Draco,” Snape says, and there’s a tiredness in his voice that overwhelms the anger, and Draco turns and stares back at him, and feels his smile fall.

“I’ll be dead soon enough,” he says, sticking out his chin. “You know that as well as I do.”

“No!” Snape shouts with all the fury he can muster, and Myrtle looks back and forth between them as if she’d rather be anywhere else, and Draco keeps staring. “No, I have not sworn on my life to keep you safe only to have you throw it away over some-some . . .” He trails off and looks at Myrtle as if he’s not able to find a word horrible enough to describe her.

“Well it’s my choice, isn’t it?”

“It’s not a choice you should be trusted to make,” Snape says softly, rubbing his left arm, and Draco’s not quite sure whether he’s speaking to him, and Snape winces, and his face twists in an expression of complete anguish. “Get out!” he screams at Myrtle, Clutching his arm harder. “Get out, I said! Go!” But she doesn’t go her eyes are shut tight, and pale tears are running down her face and collecting under her chin, and her hand is still hovering just above Draco’s closed fist.

“Don’t listen to him,” Draco says. “What could he do to you?”

“Get out!” Snape screams again, drawing his wand, and she begins to shiver and whisper to herself in a voice so soft Draco can’t make out the words. “Leave,” Snape shouts, and she turns to look at Draco wide-eyed for hardly a second before bolting up into the smoke and flying and out of the tunnel opening.

“What did you expect?” Snape asks, turning and limping away. He stumbles as he walks, leaning heavily on the cauldron Myrtle had been looking into and pauses for a few moments to catch his breath with his head bent over it as if there is something other than water to see inside- something fascinating. “People don’t change, Draco,” he says, straightening himself, “the dead least of all.” And Draco doesn’t move, not even to bring his hand back down to his side, and he keeps glaring after Snape until he’s halfway across the Chamber.

Draco walks to the Basilisk, minutes later, with his back straight and his arms stiffly at his sides, and he stares into the empty holes where its eyes had once been and wonders what they would look like glowing yellow, how terrible they must have been to kill a person after even the slightest glimpse and how anyone could see them and not be afraid after, and then he crawls back inside the skeleton, and makes a show of not lifting a finger to help as Snape picks through the potions by hand, searching desperately for any salvageable ingredients. Draco plays a game of Exploding Snap against himself and loses and wonders how to become a ghost after he dies and tries to cast the shadow of his hands as the shape of a snake on the wall, but all he can see of it is a faint grey blur.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~

Part three