Walk On (The Poor Unfortunate Souls Remix)
Myrtle sat on one of the sinks in her bathroom and moaned. She did it quite a lot. She didn't really remember exactly why, anymore, but she had always been Moaning Myrtle and always would be. So she moaned.
Sometimes she watched the war out the window, a sprawling battlefield littered with scales and feathers, the ground charred and broken. The lake was long gone, but the squid hadn't gone with it; limp bits of tentacles dripped down the side of the castle once in a while, which made Myrtle moan with some emotion. She couldn't quite be bothered to decide which.
The heroes of Hogwarts battled the forces of Voldemort outside, and no one visited poor Myrtle. There had been a girl, once, who came to the bathroom and talked to her, sometimes. Myrtle moaned. She honestly had no idea how else to react. Perhaps, at one point, she had done things other than moan; she remembered books, and a wand, and dancing to the beat of an ancient drum. The memories made her moan, too, not with loss or regret but with confusion, for she had always been in this toilet and no one had ever brought a drum for her.
She screamed a little more, on the offchance someone would notice, and hovered in the middle of the room with an ear cocked for footsteps outside. The faint crackle and sonic booms of truly powerful spells outside were the only sounds that reached her ears.
There was a blast, then everything went silent. Myrtle peeked out the window to gaze briefly at the battlefield, pockmarked and littered with broken bodies. As if on cue, the sun rose, drenching the ground, and Myrtle gasped at the rain of debris that came crashing down all around the castle in the sudden light.
Myrtle slunk back to the stalls to moan. Perhaps she'd get some company in here, now.
Myrtle didn't remember anything anymore, not the girl who visited her or the celebrity who took the book someone threw through her head or even the distant roar and silence of the war. She sometimes forgot even to moan; no one ever came to her bathroom, and they shied away from the hallway outside it, so what was the purpose of moaning?
Perhaps there were still students and teachers in the castle. Perhaps children still snuck quietly through the dark halls to search for hidden chambers. Perhaps they told stories about Moaning Myrtle and her toilet, sometimes. Perhaps. She didn't really think they did. She was a bit character and she knew it.
And then, one day, the girl returned.
Memories long undisturbed welled up in Myrtle's mind and she moaned and screamed for all she was worth with the joy of it, tumbling through stalls and walls and the sink pedestals, the sound echoing alarmingly against aging tile. She remembered this girl, the one who turned into a cat and visited Myrtle often, once upon a time. But the door didn't creak open when Hermione stepped in, and her feet made no sound on the cracked floor.
Myrtle understood, then, and it drove her close to madness with glee. The girl was dead, Myrtle was dead, they were both in the bathroom together, and she wouldn't have to be lonely again!
"Hey, Myrtle," Hermione said.
Myrtle moaned.
"Would you stop that? Please? You're giving me a headache."
Myrtle moaned quietly.
"Fine. I'll just go haunt Ron, then."
Myrtle gave in and struggled to silence, perching transparently on the sinks.
"You sound like Ginny," Hermione muttered.
"You're dead!" shrieked Myrtle.
"I've been dead thirty years!" Hermione yelled back. "Don't you remember when Voldemort attacked the last time?"
Myrtle flinched at the name, but she thrummed with happiness anyway. "Dead, dead, dead, dead..." she sang, softly. "There once was a girl with long brown hair who took on more than she could dare and now she's come to share my lair!"
Hermione muttered under her breath and turned to leave, but Myrtle stopped her with a sigh. "Yes?" she prompted, facing the door.
"If you died down there," Myrtle grinned, "you're welcome to share my toilet."
"It's a very nice toilet," Hermione told her, "but why? Wouldn't you be more comfortable haunting a common room or something?"
Myrtle looked confused. "I died here. So here I haunt."
"Well, I died out on the front lawn," Hermione pointed out. "You can see the statue and everything. But here I am up several flights of stairs and not a blade of grass in sight." Myrtle shrieked a little, out of habit. "I didn't even stay in the country," Hermione continued, reflectively. "Remember Ron? He married a nice, quiet girl. Joanne. Bookish type, you'd've loved her. That was in America. I suppose I could go to India, would that prove my point?"
Myrtle gurgled a little and adjusted her phantom glasses. "Dead, dead," she sang. "But still she talks, talks to Myrtle! Poor, unloved Myrtle..."
Hermione, seeing more moaning on the horizon, hurriedly interjected. "How about Harry? Remember him? You do, I'm sure of it. He married Ginny Weasley. The girl who threw the book through your head, surely you remember." Myrtle took a deep windup breath and Hermione hastily continued. "Two children! Lily and James, appropriate, don't you think? They must be in their seventies, now." She rejected outright the temptation to wax morose about all the funerals; Dumbledore and McGonagall, Hagrid and Snape, Lupin and Cornelius Fudge, the Weasley boys, Cho Chang and Seamus Finnigan and Neville Longbottom and everyone else. Three generations of aging and mortality and not a one of them had ended up stuck to the world like she had. If she talked about it, Myrtle would moan, and while she quite liked Myrtle the Moaning part was getting grating. "No more dementors, or hypogriffs, or dragons. I thought I saw a Patronus charm once, a long time ago, but it turned out to be my reflection."
She trailed off. Myrtle was floating silently in the middle of the room scrutinizing her and giving no sign of any intention to break the silence. "I'm older than I look," she said, gravely.
"I know," Hermione answered. "But you're younger than you seem."
Myrtle's smile was radiant. It polished the mirrors behind the sinks and fluttered out the window to dance with the stars. Hermione couldn't help but grin back, dazzled, as Myrtle floated forward to meet her.
She had been dead for ninety years, and she was just a little bored with being alone.
"I don't understand how it's physically possible!" whined the nurse, smoothing her apron with pudgy gloved hands. "They're ghosts!"
"And the sound! What will the children think?" continued the Transfiguration master, chewing the tip of a long finger, presumably his own.
Head Wizard Albus Meharra, the greatest wizard of his age or any other in all probability, sucked on a hard candy in his office and surveyed his staff, a grave expression on his face.
"It has come to my attention," he said, "that there have been rumors circulating the school about a certain sound we have all been hearing in certain hallways." The phoenix on the perch behind him preened perfect feathers with utter unconcern for the proceedings below him. "I consider it of the utmost importance that my staff be familiar with all the more... lively... representatives of our otherworldly residents."
Moaning Myrtle wasn't the only one moaning, for once. The sound snuck up behind the silences in the hallways and crept in at the edges of conversation.
"You see," Meharra continued, "when a ghost loves another ghost very much..."