"What do you want?" she asked, with helpless eyes.
He smiled.
Alice had a diary. Or rather, she found a diary, much like a certain redhead, many years later. In fact, it might have been the same diary. No one could know for sure, however, since Alice never revealed to anyone that she had ever had it.
She liked it, much more than the boring ones her mother got her. It spoke to her, and she told it everything she knew. It returned the courtesy, or so she thought. She spent a lot of time being insignificant, being "just another Gryffindor" next to people like the Marauders or even Lily Evans. It was exhausting, not to mention disheartening, so she was very glad that someone made her feel special, even if it was an inanimate object.
The diary did say some things she questioned the truth of, secretly, but she never revealed that, for fear of losing its companionship. She came to value it greatly, over the few years that she had it.
The day it told her it was a person, was the first time she ever considered shutting it away for good. How could it - he, rather - have hidden such a fact from her? It worried her, suddenly, realising she had given away her secrets like a fool. But he had a way of reassuring her, with kind, charming words. And so she returned to it, like before, but with something different in her mind this time.
How could she have fallen in love with with a person, an entity, she never even met? She didn't know, and it gnawed away at her, even as she blushed at the beautiful sentences that appeared below her own on the old pages of the diary.
"Who are you, really?" she had asked it once.
"Your mind fascinates me," he had replied.
She hadn't brought it up again, but it had left her with an uneasy feeling.
She had cast the diary away quickly, too quickly, when Frank had told her he loved her. She loved him too. Of course she did. She had to. She wondered if her mind fascinated him too.
She had nearly forgotten about the diary. Nearly, until the moment she found herself kneeling on the bloodstained carpets of Malfoy Manor, in front of the Dark Lord and his minions.
"What do you want?" she asked, with helpless eyes.
He smiled.
"I want," he said in a voice that sounded chillingly familiar, even though she had never heard it before, "I want your mind, broken."
Notes: For SnarkyAndProudHufflepuff for...err...no good reason except that she's amazing! Also for the Pairing The Character Drabble Challenge Week 12 (Alice/Tom).