𝐔𝐍𝐃𝐄𝐑𝐖𝐎𝐑𝐋𝐃

𝙲𝚑𝚊𝚙𝚝𝚎𝚛 𝟷𝟹 - 𝙻𝚎 𝙼𝚊𝚕 𝚍𝚞 𝚂𝚒è𝚌𝚕𝚎

Draco Malfoy

Time, music, dramas, classes, thursday nights, killing, surviving, we had our mind busy but Hecie's mind seemed way more busier than mine was. Since that february day, she was living in her own world, she had created herself a safe shell where she went every time things were too hard or too boring. A tiny space in her mind where only she could go. Things were going as right as it could be with Pansy, young lovers never got bored and as long as Pansy was there, so was Hecie.

She had replaced her meeting with Granger by studying the Dark Arts or reading french literature, her new hobby. It was mostly from the Romantic Era.

Ah French and their romance, I first thought but then she explained the myth behind the title and all romance was gone.

The Romantic Era in France was about writers, depressed, alcoholic, stoned writers. Writers who were too young to have known the ecstasy behind the French Revolution but too old to not care about it. They were walking in the street in a post war-world, searching their paths, searching for clues, searching for reasons to live their life, to feel their life. They called it Le Mal du siècle - the sickness of the century. They were so bored, so intoxicated by their own era. Those young people were suicidal, made of insanity. No artistic period could help them and the afterwards of the Enlightenment century had bad consequences on them. So they wrote, they wrote their sadness in poems, plays or novels, they wrote the misery of living in a time that isn't ours, the misery of living through memories and souvenirs, the misery of just being alive, for some of them. They wrote about a material society where possessing and loving were two close words and where you couldn't separate one from the other.

The Romantic Era was Hecie's new hobby, she who used to live for the future, for her mighty destiny, was stuck in nostalgia. She, who used to be pleased by her life, was searching a new way to please herself, her life was obviously not enough anymore. And so she read. She read Balzac, she read Musset, she read Beaudelaire and Stendhal. She found comfort in Confession of a Child Of the Century. She found thrilling emotions in The Horla. She found herself in this era and I could not blame her for that.

As for me, my hobby has been the same since September, sitting in the Room of Requirement, trying to fix what was unfixable. I was that close to finish it, I was that close to be successful, but as always it only was 'that close'.

I took all my things and left for the room, making a stop to one of my secret friends.

"Finally, you came," said a feminin voice from the window's bathroom.

I took a few steps and answered, "How are you feeling, Myrtle ?"

"Lonely and sad but it vanishes away every time you're here," she said, happily flying between the sinks. She stopped in front of me and said, "Oh boy, have you cried again ?"

"It's this cabinet, Myrtle. It's just so hard. I am always close to finishing it, to repair it and every time I try it, nothing happens. Last week I even killed a singing bird, a tiny, innocent, singing bird. It drives me mad," I cried, falling against the wall, my ghost friend by my side.

She told me she died in this bathroom about fifty years ago, no one ever came to see her, to talk with her. I was wondering how she didn't turn more dead than she already was. She had nowhere else to go, she couldn't die again, she was doomed to stay here, to rest in a place everyone avoided. Years ago, Potter used to visit her, but she said it only was for information, not because he was trying to be friendly, letting me wonder why people thought he was the good guy.

She was all alone, days and nights, she couldn't sleep to forget, she couldn't leave to escape. She was living her Mal du Siècle, doomed to live between nostalgia and envy.