Ginny Weasley appreciates company.
She surrounds herself with friends, family, admirers, boyfriends. She weaves a careful net of connection so that she may never have to be alone. A friend to walk down the hallways with, a brother to eat with, a boy to lay with.
It's not the loneliness she is afraid of, per se. Ginny can handle herself.
It is what the isolation brings that frightens her.
She cannot be left alone with the feverish buzz of her thoughts, the noxious fumes of her dreams, the pull of her low, based desire.
All inhabited by him.
Because ever since she had put quill to paper and written her name upon the surface of a diary, each ragged breath, each dull thump of the heart, had been for two.
How could she have known when she had written, "This is the property of Ginevra Molly Weasley" that she had etched it upon the soul of a boy who took the words as gospel, that it had been the other way around too, that every breath she would breathe was into the patient, delicate mouth of a boy who rested comfortably between her shadow and her soul?
Though the diary is gone (Harry had never told her where - Dumbledore had seen a troubling glint in her eye after the chamber, a serpentine grace in her gait, and told him to refrain), debris from the annals of the chamber still remained.
Not the rotting corpse of the monster he - she - they had summoned, but the barest, lingering traces of a boy, eyes of steely obsidian, hair of darkest night, so familiar, so beautiful, resting within her ribcage, lodged within her chest, and he would not, could not leave.
.
.
.
Could she call it a haunting if she knows, deep down, in some tar-black part of her, she never wants him to leave?
Her cold, calculating self-preservation kicks in automatically (Such a Slytherin characteristic, says an amused voice at the back of her head, never quite silent) and she surrounds herself with companionship, because sharing in the thoughts and feelings of others helps her keep her demons (demon) at bay, shoving aside most of the tantalizing whispers.
Sharing a bed is helpful too; she begins to know the difference between Dean's firm touch from that of a shade's, lingering upon the underside of her palm, down the nape of her neck.
But the shame of it is that some nights, and there are too many of them to count, she knows that she loves the solitude.
To be alone with him.
The sibilant hisses that roll off her tongue, the flickering, ghosting touch across her lips; if she closes her eyes, she can imagine it as a bruising kiss, a dueling of mouths. And it is the closest thing to it that he can give her, her soul-sharer, her other half.
He has lain here so long that she could not imagine life without him, his wicked murmurs in her ear, his careful hands carding through her memories, as if flipping through the pages of a book.
A diary? he offers, amusement again coloring his speech-thought.
As if flipping through the pages of a diary, she corrects, the way she had done years ago.
Now, they are neither of them the potter or the clay. There is not enough of him left now, to pull her hands around the necks of roosters, to paint the hallways red with blood, but there is enough. Enough for a co-habitation, for a quiet bond to be formed, to link their souls and pull their hands together and dance a dead waltz.
The lines have blurred. Hell is empty and the Devil is here.
Within her soul.
And she loves him.