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Myrtle Warren was a nobody. No, that’s not quite right. If she was a nobody, then no one would bother her. Olive Hornby would just ignore her instead of taunting her, calling her ugly and fat and stupid. Like she was any better. It’s not like Hornby herself was particularly pleasant to look at, what with her big flat nose and too-wide jaw and a permanent scowl on her face. The only reason she had the rest of the Ravenclaw girls behind her was that she was a fucking pureblood and her parents were good, respectable, and upstanding members of high society. Unlike poor, muggleborn Myrtle Warren.
So no, Myrtle Warren was not a nobody. She was an outcast though. In Hogwarts and in her own house. It’s funny how the house famous for producing eccentric intellectual wizards was a house full of bullies. One would’ve thought the Ravenclaws would be the ones who would accept any eccentricities in their students. But no, apparently there’s a certain threshold of weirdness that was acceptable in Ravenclaw. Go beyond that and you’re no longer welcome in the house.
So Myrtle Warren was an outcast. But one thing about outcasts, no one would care where you are or what you’re doing. As long as you weren’t in their sight, of course. At times, if Myrtle was being very, very careful, she could go anywhere unnoticed. Observing every little thing that others would’ve missed, and hearing all sorts of stuff that were said in hushed whispers. Curiosity was a valued trait in the Ravenclaw house, after all. And it was this particular trait that enabled Myrtle to know many things about Tom Riddle.
And oh, Myrtle knew a lot about Tom Riddle. Myrtle knew Tom Riddle from before Hogwarts, back when he was just one of the poor orphans at Wool’s. You see, Hornby might have rich pureblood parents who were respected in wizarding high society. But Myrtle also has parents who were as rich as Hornby’s, if not richer. The only difference was that Myrtle’s parents were muggles, and apparently these stupid bigots can’t seem to comprehend the ideas that being a muggle and being rich could go hand in hand. They saw Myrtle’s high-quality robes and school equipment and they thought she was trying too hard to fit in. They thought her pretentious, that she was wasting her poor muggle parents' money just so she could have nice things like her schoolmates do.
But that was not the point. No, the point was Myrtle’s parents were rich, and they were one of the primary benefactors of Wool’s Orphanage. So Myrtle often found herself getting dragged behind her parents for charity visits to the orphanage, bringing whatever used toys and books that were laying around in her bedroom. And it was during one of these visits that Myrtle first saw Tom Riddle.
Myrtle could tell from the first glance that there was something… off about this particular boy. Something unnatural about the way the other children always seemed to steer away from him, and about the quiet way he moves. Myrtle could also sense something familiar about him, and she only learned that it was magic she was sensing when Professor Merrythought delivered her Hogwarts letter when she was 11.
Of course, Myrtle being a witch wasn’t much of a surprise. Sure, her parents and caretakers have noticed weird things happening around Myrtle. Like how her toys were often breaking apart too soon before fixing themselves again the next day, and how her books always stayed in pristine condition despite having been read one too many times or having tea spilled over one of the pages. But they brushed it off as it being high-quality items. Not that they were around a lot to witness it, no, but they were aware of it happening. So when Professor Merrythought told them about magic, it was just like giving a name to something that they were already familiar with. And it saves her parents from the trouble of planning her education, so there’s that.
And when she met Tom Riddle, she could feel that tingling feeling she always felt when she was breaking down her toys or holding her books to keep them pretty. Only the feeling came from outside and it was a much more intense feeling than she had ever felt before. Coming from him, it was not a particularly nice feeling. It felt heavy and clung to her body every time his eyes fell on her. But it was still a familiar feeling, so Myrtle only gave her favourite books to him with strict orders for him to keep them safe. Myrtle didn’t trust the rest of these scoundrels with her precious books.
He didn’t respond much though, not even after Myrtle gave him a brand new book just for him. A copy of The Hobbit that she bought especially for him because she loved that book too much to give it away but she still wanted to share it with him. A nod and a forced polite “thank you” was all she would get from him. But his eyes would stay at her and so would the feeling of his magic. And the other orphans stay away from her after they saw her with Riddle, so that’s nice.
Sometime during the fall of 1938, Myrtle was following her parents for another visit to the orphanage, as usual, carrying a few old books to give to Riddle. Only this time she couldn’t find him, not a sight of his hair nor a feeling of his usual magic. He went to a special boarding school, the Matron said, and so Myrtle went back home still holding her books. Her mother scolded her, telling her that she was supposed to give the books away to the children, not bring them back home. Myrtle just held her books tightly and refused to budge when her mother tried to pry the books from her hands. There’s no way Myrtle would give them away to those dirty rascals. They can’t possibly take care of them properly, not like Riddle could.
All throughout the year, Myrtle came to the orphanage a few more times only to be disappointed that Riddle was still not there. The Matron told her over and over that yes, Riddle was still at school, it was a boarding school after all, and couldn’t she just give the books she brought to the other children, they would appreciate it just as Riddle would, if not more. And Myrtle told her over and over that no, these books were only for Riddle, the other children could have Myrtle’s old toys, but they will not touch her books.
It was only until summer the next year that Myrtle saw Riddle again, back from whatever special school he went to, the Matron didn’t even know the name of the school. Myrtle saw him for the first time in so many months, and she saw a different boy from the one she knew months before. Riddle still looks mostly the same, with ink black hair and dark brown eyes that seemed to pierce right through her. He wasn’t as thin as she remembered, and there was a new glow in his eyes, as if he knew things no other people do.
But what caught Myrtle off guard was the increasing intensity in the magic that she felt. Where it felt heavy and clutching at her before, now it was suffocating like the power behind it has doubled throughout the year. Myrtle reached him and handed him her books. He took the books from her and stared at them as if contemplating whether he would keep them or not. He looked back at her.
“Thank you for the books, but you don’t need to give more to me. I have my own books now,” he said.
Myrtle scowled, “from your new special school?”
“Yes.”
Well, fine. Myrtle won’t be bringing any more books to the orphanage, then.
“What is this special school, anyway?” asked Myrtle.
“I can’t tell you,” Riddle scrunched his eyebrows and stared at her, “though I suppose you’ll find out soon enough. Maybe they’ll come for you when you turn eleven.”
Myrtle thought he was toying with her. A super secret school that only an eleven-year-old could know seemed hard to believe. But he was telling the truth and soon enough, Myrtle got a letter from Hogwarts, a school of witchcraft and wizardry.
Myrtle was excited! She got to spend 7 years learning magic. She got to get away from this shitty town, up there in the Scottish Highland. She will no longer be stuck playing the nice daughter of the Warrens, following her parents quietly from one meaningless social event to another. And most importantly, she got to be with her own kind, those like her and Riddle, those who have power at their fingertips and are able to command the world to their will.
She brought the Hogwarts letter the next time she visited the orphanage, just weeks before school started. She found Riddle in his usual corner in the yard and showed him the letter with a smug grin on her face.
Riddle raised his eyebrows at the letter. “Congratulations, I suppose,” he said. A book Myrtle didn’t recognize sitting open on his lap.
“So I was right, then? This is the special school you went to? And is that book about magic?” said Myrtle, excited that she got another thing to share with Riddle. She sat on the ground next to him and reached out to grab his book, only for him to close it shut harshly and hold it out of her reach.
“No,” he said, glaring at her, “this is mine.”
Well, that was rude. She had been sharing her books with him for years and this is what she got in return.
“Bloody hell, Riddle. I’m not going to take it, I just want to look,” she frowned, leaning back in her seat. Riddle was always fussy about people getting too close to him, Myrtle noticed.
He held the book close to his chest and seemed to scrutinise Myrtle for a few long seconds, before sighing and showing the cover of the book to Myrtle, still holding it tightly in his hands.
Calculating The Future with Arithmancy . What in the world is Arithmancy? Well, a magic school might have different subjects than a normal one, she guessed. All the more exciting for her. She was quite fed up with her current tutor anyway, always droning on and on about proper lady etiquettes.
“What is Arithmancy?” asked Myrtle.
Riddle opened the book and showed her the page listing the content of the book. Numbers Are More Than Just Numbers, Basic Numerology to Get You Started, Divining Your Next Day With Number Sequences… So it was basically maths with extra magic sprinkled on it.
“They teach this in Hogwarts?” she looked back up to Riddle, mostly to stop herself from reading more and more and grabbing the book from him.
“It was an elective you could choose in your third year,” answered Riddle, closing the book and holding it back close to his chest.
“Great,” she scoffed, “I’ll just have to wait two years to learn it, then.”
“I’m sure you’ll have enough subjects to keep you occupied in your first two years,” drawled Riddle.
She shrugged. Myrtle has read a few school books she got from Diagon Alley. Some were interesting, like Charms and Potions, others were dreadfully boring. Myrtle was sure she would’ve finished most of it by the time school started. She seriously doubted just the regular school subjects would keep her busy. But the professor said there was a huge library in the school anyway, Myrtle would just have to make do with it.
Riddle went back to reading his book and Myrtle scooted closer to take another peek at what he was reading. He glanced to see her stretching her neck to read, sighed, and silently opened the book wider and slid it slightly to her so they both could read comfortably. They stayed like that until it was time for her to go home, only the slight rustling of pages breaking the silence.
Her mother called out to her and so Myrtle stood up with a heavy sigh. She was about to walk away when Riddle called her, holding out her Hogwarts letter that she left forgotten on the ground.
“A bit of advice, don’t go into Slytherin. They hate our kind,” Riddle said.
Myrtle frowned, “Our kind?”
“Mudbloods,” answered Riddle, and then he looked up at her intensely, “mudbloods who were better than them.”
Myrtle didn’t go into Slytherin, the hat never offered anyway. It sorted her to Ravenclaw almost instantly after she sat on the stool. So much curiosity , the hat chuckled at her. Myrtle just shrugged and walked to the tables with blue-tied students. She didn’t particularly care which house she was sorted in, as long as she could get her hands on fascinating books and magic.
Oh, and Riddle was wrong about the houses. Yes, Slytherin seemed to hate mudbloods on principle, but they weren’t the only ones. The other Ravenclaws in her years were nice at first. Olive Hornby , she introduced herself sweetly, and these are my friends Isobel Lynch and Mollie Brown. They asked nicely about her, where did she come from, was she a muggleborn, and what was it like in the muggle world. And Myrtle answered nicely as well, as nice as her parents taught her to be when they were visiting relatives or having a fancy dinner with important people. And everything was going well for a while.
Until they saw Myrtle showing up in class and answering every question the teachers throw at them, turning in perfectly written essays and gaining full marks on quizzes. Magical subjects, Myrtle learned, were not much more complicated than the muggle ones her tutor taught her. If anything, it was much simpler, everything coming down to saying the pronunciation and doing the wand movement correctly. The theory of it was also so easily understood, nothing much more complicated than knowing the whys and the hows of the spell. And the other kids were so bad at writing essays that Myrtle almost found it repulsive. Did these fancy snobby purebloods not have tutors who taught them how to write properly structured essays?
And speaking of Riddle, Myrtle found him to be a whole other person than the one she knew before. She felt something quite like a deja vu from seeing Riddle again, similar to the one she felt after he went back from Hogwarts the first time. Only this time the magic from him felt the same, and it was his appearance and demeanour that threw Myrtle off. Gone was the shabby lonesome boy from the orphanage, and in his place stood another boy so charming and immaculate sitting between the wealthy pureblood at the Slytherin table.
It was weird. Seeing him talk and smile and being part of a group. Myrtle was so used to seeing him alone in the corner of the room. So she watched him, from her very first day in Hogwarts, and every day since. Nothing really makes sense about him. He told her that the Slytherins hate mudbloods, yet he walked around them with no problem. He was respected, even. Myrtle could see how those Slytherins revolved around him, listened to his every word, and moved to his command.
Myrtle watched Riddle every day, and he never glanced at her, not even once, since she got to Hogwarts. It was as if she was invisible to him. Maybe he was playing a part, trying to fit in the Slytherin crowd by not interacting with another mudblood. Maybe he simply didn’t care about her now that he got new sources of fascinating books. But Myrtle can be sure that Riddle was not enjoying his time socialising with his group of friends.
Myrtle could see it in the way Riddle’s smile seemed to freeze after he finished his sentence, in the way his hands twitched and clenched when he didn’t like what he was hearing, and in the way his gaze emptied while conversations ran around him. It must’ve been so hard, to shift from being the lone orphan feared by everyone to being a model student rising to the top of the social ladder.
Well, his loss, Myrtle thought. Myrtle was happy enough to stay as the outcast that she is. No one paid any attention to her and she was free to roam the forgotten corners of the library or lock herself up in an out-of-the-way girls’ bathroom learning new spells she got from books nicked from the restricted section. And if Myrtle ends up giving herself pimples that won’t go away for months, no one has to know. Let them think that it was just teenage hormones acting out and called her pimply Myrtle. She won’t bother herself with the opinion of these idiots, anyway.
Someone noticed her, eventually. Not just someone, though, Riddle noticed her. More precisely, Riddle noticed her going in and out of the second-floor girls' bathroom, which was weird, because it was a girls' bathroom and Riddle wasn’t supposed to pay much attention to it. But Myrtle bumped into him quite often when she was going to or leaving the bathroom. He just stopped and let her pass silently whenever they crossed paths in the second-floor corridor. Often, she squinted and waited for him to say something, but he never did. So it seemed that she must be the one who says the first word, like always.
“Why are you here, Riddle?” Myrtle asked, done with waiting for him to speak.
“Oh, was I not allowed here, Warren?” Riddle retorted with that charming perfect prefect voice of his.
“Seeing as there’s nothing here but the girls’ bathroom, I’d say yes, you’re not allowed here,” said Myrtle. And he just smiled, gave her that stupid fake friendly smile he uses to fool all the student population of Hogwarts into thinking him nice and friendly.
“Just run along, Warren,” said Riddle, stepping aside to give space for her to cross, “and you’re supposed to practice the Relentless Boils Jinx on others, not yourself.”
Myrtle swallowed the urge to groan loudly and stomp her feet like a child. She glared at him as she passed him by. She was so done with this pretentious bastard.
“You might want to take a look at Jinxes for the Jinxed .”
Myrtle gave in to her urge and groaned loudly, “shut up, Riddle.”
The petrification started not long after their little exchange. Oh, and Myrtle found Jinxes for the Jinxed in the library and managed to stop the pimples coming out on her face. It was placed right on the front shelf in the Charms section, which explained why Myrtle didn’t find it before Riddle mentioned it to her. She stopped browsing those boring parts of the library by the end of her first year. She had no reason to, not when she could easily hide in the dusty corners full of forgotten books or sneak in the Restricted Section so easily.
Anyway, yes, the petrification. Three students were found petrified. They were found separately, spread out in various places across the castle. It was all the students would talk about for months. They talked about how there was a monster roaming around the school, spreading terrors and attacking mudbloods. The teachers tried to hush it up, of course, but it didn’t work. What power could these teachers have over the brainless gossipy population of Hogwarts’ students?
It was blown out of proportion, Myrtle thought. So what if a few students were petrified by some unknown kind of magic? And it wasn’t even dangerous, they were just literally frozen in place with no side effects endangering their lives. Myrtle assumed it was just a prank played by some very bored but creative student. She just hoped that the perpetrator would attack Hornby just so she would stop chattering with her awful shrill voice.
Or maybe Myrtle could just ask this perpetrator to do that. She had a feeling that she knew exactly who the perpetrator was. Someone very bored but creative, and powerful too, if he managed to freeze the victims for such a long time. Riddle did look very smug every time they announced a new victim of the petrification. Though no one else probably noticed the very subtle satisfied expression on his face. No one has been observing Riddle very closely for years like Myrtle did, after all. He might even tell her what spell he used to petrify the students.
So Myrtle waited for hours in the girls’ bathroom on the second-floor corridor, hidden in one of the stalls until she could hear Riddle coming. He would never enter the room if he sensed that Myrtle was still in there, always waiting for her to leave first before coming in to do whatever it is he did. Honestly, if any other person saw him they would think he was a pervert, always going in and out of a girls’ bathroom. But Myrtle knows better than most better, knows the ever-familiar feeling of his magic that was left in the room.
And here he was, Myrtle heard the almost silent and constant steps of Riddle, heard him stopping shortly after entering the bathroom. Myrtle was just about to open the stall door when she heard… was that hissing? Myrtle knew Riddle was weird, but not actually this level of weird. Or maybe the hissing was part of his magic? Some sort of a magical language, perhaps. She remembered reading about that, about how magical creatures sometimes have a magical language that was completely incomprehensible to wizards, like how mermaids would screech or how faes would chime.
Whatever it was Riddle was doing with the hissing would have to wait. Myrtle came here to ask him for a favour and to find out what spell he was using in these petrifications. She would ask about his hissing that could’ve been a magical language later.
Myrtle opened the stall door and found Riddle standing by the sink in the middle of the bathroom. His surprised face was the last thing Myrtle saw before her gaze went to the bright yellow eyes behind him.
Myrtle Warren was no more.
Myrtle Warren was now eternal.