Author's Notes: Fair warning that this will not be everyone's cup of tea. The rating will change with further chapters. This chapter doesn't require warnings, but the following surely will. If you are not into Tom/Ginny, turn around. If you are into Tom/Ginny, I hope you enjoy, please be so kind as to leave me a review at the end.
A Flame is Always Brighter in the Dark
She had changed during the year, and no one had seen it. She had retreated into her own more and more, a little deeper into the darkness every day. She couldn't remember it all, she had voids in her days and empty spaces in her memories, but she did not mind. Somehow, she did not care, for he had put them there.
Tom, she called him, when she wrote to him, when she saw him in her dreams, when he showed her visions for only her to see. She had put her quill to the old diary, and a new world opened before her, spread across the pages, in blotches of ink that bled through the paper, in a careful and precise calligraphy that she had grown to love and cherish. The writings of a young wizard, on the cusp of manhood, always present, ever waiting for her.
No one else had seen it, no one else had noticed. Students traversed corridors in fear, children were turned into stone by a dangerous beast that lived within the castle walls, and Ginny became Ginevra right under their noses.
"Ginevra, dear," he would always start their conversations with, "you make my days so much better." He would pull her down to the diary that smelled of old books, pull her through the pages, into the darkness with him. He would hold her close to his body, tight in his embrace, caressing her ginger tresses, tucking them behind her small, pale, freckled ears.
He was so handsome, so very handsome, with his dark eyes and high cheekbones. He was tall and lean, sinewy even. He was so very alluring, the charming young man that moved with grace and measure at all times. His hands were long, he had fingers like a fiddler, light and elongated, and he was so very careful when he used them, touching her reverently, slowly, purposefully, turning her delicate chin up towards him, so that her blue eyes could be lost in the dark pools of his.
She had fallen down the rabbit hole, and lacked any real interest in going back up, out to the world of people that ran everywhere and were perpetually loud. She had given up the most rudimentary of survival instincts once she found herself down there, alone with him, in the world he had created for her in between the pages of the diary. He often showed her a dark place in her visions, a hidden chamber, he said, somewhere in the castle, his favourite place in the whole world.
Ginny was so thirsty for more of him, for his comforting touch, for his quiet demeanour. All she wanted was him, forgotten was the Potter boy. She had grown distant from him and everyone else, becoming more and more reclusive, thirsty for silence, for the quiet in which she could write to him and be taken into their private world.
She found herself looking for things that reminded her of him, sights and smells and touches and objects Books, leather, cold, darkness, iron, blood, smoke. She had taken to walking along the edge of the Forbidden Forest, cradling the diary against her chest, hidden from sight by her robes, relishing the cold and the wet, and the briskness of the air. She craved him at all hours of the day, and she dreamed of him the whole time that she slept.
Sometimes, he let her keep the memories of their time together in that secret place of theirs, but sometimes all she had of them was that eerie feeling of emptiness, that void in her mind that longed for him to fill it.
X
"Ginevra, dear," he had written to her once more, "I have something new for you to see tonight."
"I'm coming, Tom," she wrote, placing her hands on the yellowed pages, lowering her head to the seam where the diary folded, already lost to the smell of him.
His hands reached for her cheeks, and his thumbs caressed her eyelids, prompting her to open her blue eyes and find his dark ones. She smiled openly; he gave her a composed little smile in return.
"I'm taking you on a walk through the castle tonight, Ginevra, dear. Just the two of us."
Just the two of them, she repeated in her mind. She looked up to him and found that tonight he hadn't pulled her into the diary. He had come outside. He was standing with her in the girls' washroom, feeling real under her small hands, as real as he felt when they were together inside the diary, down in the chamber. She had no recollection of leaving her dormitory, of walking here, but she still knew that she had done so with him. It was one of those voids.
He hissed words while he kept his eyes on hers, and Ginny knew that she was not being spoken to. She didn't fear his hissing, he often did it, though all of her memories of it were hazy. He kissed her after those words.
Just a light peck on her rosy lips. Her first kiss. She gasped when she felt the caress of his breath on her lips, standing on her toes to better reach him and kiss his lips in return. Just a small kiss, almost fearful. She didn't know much about this, but in that moment she knew that she loved him, that she would do anything to be loved back.
"You are so very precious to me, Ginevra, dear," he said, pushing her hair away from her face to hold her face in his hands, caressing her lips with his thumbs, "you'll do great things for me."
"I'd do anything for you, Tom. Anything, everything."
He leaned back down to her, gently capturing her lips with his. It was more than a peck, but it was still careful, measured. Ginny fell into the kiss and forgot about the world. Ginny fell into Tom's body, threading her arms around his neck out of sheer instinct. She was thirsty for his lips, she wanted to be closer. He indulged her, wrapping his arms around her and holding her tight, prolonging their kissing without deepening it.
X
Ginny felt perfectly fine, but something was amiss. She looked around and saw him, so she knew that she was safe, but then she saw a body on the floor and her heart ran.
Or it would have if she still had it. She was floating above the floor, halfway to the ceiling of a dark chamber, and her body was down there, inert on the wet floor, her bright red hair dancing in the inch of water that surrounded her body. Her eyes were closed, her breathing was almost non-existent, her body lay slumped. Ginny looked dead down there, but she felt so very alive up here.
She floated through the air until she was next to Tom, and he smiled when she wrapped her arms round one of his. His other arm was outstretched before him, holding her own wand, pointing it at her body.
"Ginevra, dear, will you help me?"
"Anything for you, Tom. Anything."
He didn't reply, simply nodded, whirling her wand through the air, mumbling words that she could not hear.
She felt lightheaded at that, but Tom extricated his arm from her hands and held her tight against his body, pressing them together, as if he meant to fuse them together. Ginny felt safe once more, tethered.
Then her world changed. It was like being pulled apart, a vicious grip clawing parts of her away. Her mind travelled between her and her body, and she could only perceive glimpses of reality.
The one thing she perceived the clearest was that they were not together anymore. Something was holding them apart. Someone.
Harry Potter. How she loathed the boy with the green eyes in that moment.
"Ginevra, dear," came Tom's voice through the haze of her fleeting mind, "I need you."
"Anything, Tom," her mind pledged back, "whatever you need. Everything."
"I need you, Ginevra."
No dear. Ginny's heart ran truly at that. He needed her, he needed help and she could not reach him. She could not see him; she didn't even know where she was, let alone where he was. All she knew was that she desperately wanted to be near him, to be close to him, to be of use to him. She had to do something, she had to keep Tom here, in the world outside his journal, but she couldn't move.
"Take me, Tom. Anything for you, just stay with me. Take everything."
She was dying and fading in the wet stone floor and then she suddenly wasn't. Her eyes felt heavy and all she could see was dark and then suddenly they weren't. Her body refused to move when all she wanted to do was run to him and then suddenly she sat up, gasping, soaked.
She saw Harry lying on the floor, unconscious. A stain of blood to his robes but no wound to be seen. He held a Basilisk fang in his flaccid hand, and there was a gaping dark hole in the diary. The mirage of her above her body was gone and she was back in it. She was out of the rabbit hole and she felt so wrong, for Tom was not here.
It was all so very wrong. She had told him that she would do anything for him, anything, and she had let him take her, so why was he not here? Why was there a gaping hole in the world he had built for her? Why was he not here? Why was she? Why was she in the chamber if Tom was not next to her?
She felt so empty, so very empty, and so, so cold. She was lighter and lighter by the second, as if floating away from existence, and then suddenly she wasn't. Something had tethered her down here. Someone.
And suddenly she felt new life stir within her, she felt darkness in those empty places Tom left her with, and the mirage of them together was gone and she missed him. Tom was no more, and she still was, despite her pledge. She had said anything, but she still had everything and Tom had nothing and this was all wrong.
Tom was gone, and Ginny mourned him.
No, not Ginny. Ginevra mourned him. Ginevra retreated into her shell, letting the world see and believe the façade of Ginny Weasley, while she further became Ginevra, while she missed him with every bit of her soul, with every bit of that new found darkness in her.
X
Ginevra mourned him. For days, and weeks, and months.
She was dragged around Egypt with her family, dreaming of 'Ginevra, dear' and waking up to 'Ginny, let's go' and what had never bothered her now became loathsome. They couldn't see her; they couldn't even tell that something was wrong with her. They had never truly known her, so how could they?
She started loathing her family and craving sleep, because her dreams were so much sweeter. In her dreams, she was not in Egypt, or at the Burrow, but in the Chamber of Secrets, and he awaited her there. He was so much softer with her than her family, so much quieter, so much more careful. She never knew how much she liked softness, she never knew she was thirsty for it, but she felt so much better, so cherished... Ginevra, dear he greeted her in her dreams every night. Tom she answered every time. In her dreams, the world he had built for her within the diary still existed, and she didn't feel so empty there, so lonely, so wrong.
She was alive and he wasn't, but she had said anything for him, so she would sleep and sleep just to keep him company, just to keep him alive in her dreams. Her family was quick to judge her attitude towards them as the aftermath of what she had gone through, as if it had been something terrifying and awful, and she hated them all the more for it. It had never been terrible or awful until Potter had shown up in the Chamber.
But by the end of the summer she had realized she didn't have to mourn him at all. She needn't even miss him anymore. She had found a little snake in the broom shed at the Burrow, like so many other times before, but for the first time in her life the snake did not hiss. The snake talked, and Ginevra replied. Because he was there. In that new life, in that darkness.
Inside her.
They didn't see it.
But she felt it, and it flourished in her. He flourished in those dark corners of her mind, cradled in the spaces in her soul, nurtured there ever since that day in the chamber.
'Ginevra, dear' called his voice inside her mind.
'Master' she replied.
Author's Notes: Prompts and Challenges
Advent Calendar: Day 18 - Magical Settings: Chamber of Secrets
Winter Funfair – Northern: Building an Igloo 1st layer Angst – (object) body; Southern: The Nice List 5. Chels - Write about sacrifice (of any kind) for the benefit of another person; Eastern Christmas Market 16. Cranberry Chutney - (Character) Ginny Weasley.
365 Prompts Challenge: 363. Words – Thirsty
December Writing Club – Character Appreciation 24. [Creature/Animal] Snake (Bonus for using Tom); Disney Challenge Themes 4. Exile - Alt, Write about someone isolating themselves; Showtime 7. One Song Glory: (emotion) desperation; Amber's Attic Rappers 5. Eminem: Write about someone adopting a secret identity; Sophie's Shelf Pairings 5. TomGinny;
Word count – 2 174