Authors Note: Warning for self-harm, stalking, and suicidal thoughts, but nothing too graphic. Please read at your own risk if any of these things could trigger you, safety first.
cat and mouse
the after: october 1997
The only thing that registers in Ginny's mind during her psychiatric checkup is that the psychiatrist thinks she's gone mad.
"Do you remember what happened to you?" The psychiatrist asks, her words calm. Too calm. She's fair-skinned and freckled and she kneels down to Ginny's level when she talks to her. Supposedly it's a sign of respect, but it merely comes off as condescending.
"Well, You know what they say about truth and the appearance of truth being opposites." Ginny watches her, head tilted in a way that conveys pure mockery. The women flinches.
Her own memory comes in fragments: Laughter in enclosed spaces in January; blood on a collar in February. Her chapped lips in March, drowning in her own blood in April. May comes slower—kissing a pretty boy, a knife. She doesn't remember June. July is falling, the feeling of being weightless in mid-air. August is the exact pitch her voice hits when she's screaming. In September, she cuts out her own lungs and tries to sell her heart.
"Tom Riddle tried to kill me," Ginny says. The psychiatrist flinches, blood rushing from her face, and Ginny smiles, gleaming white teeth showing. "He may have succeeded."
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the before: january 1997
It takes her eight days to realize she is being followed.
The feeling starts off as a faint impression, the same way she knows when someone is staring at the back of her head; it is very easy to ignore. She does just that, throws herself into the two varsity sports she plays simultaneously and her ever-growing pile of homework. By the time she stumbles onto the bus home, late at night on a Friday, she barely even notices the boy sitting beside her.
It's the smell of cologne that gets to her first. She opens her eyes wearily and sees his Chesire cat smile.
"You play football." He speaks like he's the one teaching her something, even when the topic is her. "Are you any good, Ms. Weasley?"
It's the use of her name that strikes her as odd, makes her feel off balance. It's illogical to be surprised by that, her name is written on her jersey and printed on her bag, but the hair on the back of her neck stands on end regardless.
"I am." Ginny shifts in her seat uncomfortably. "Have we met before?"
He laughs at that, but it doesn't reach his eyes. He reminds her of the old marble statues attempting to portray the human face of gods, marble and unfeeling. "Perhaps we have. Perhaps we will."
The bus is empty, she hadn't noticed that earlier. It's just them and the driver focused on the road. "That's not really an answer."
"It was not much of a question." He leans in closer. "My name is Tom, Ginevra."
This time, she doesn't ask how he knows it. It's almost her stop and she stands up to get up in a hurry. He watches her with a lazy intensity, mouth pursed in silent amusement.
"One last question before you go," he says, "do you enjoy games, Ginevra?"
Ginny glares at him, gesturing to her uniform. "Clearly," she snaps, and storms off the bus without even thanking the driver, the sound of his laughter following her all the way home.
She forgets about the entire interaction less than a week later, lost to the haze of being a teenager.
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the before: february 1997
It feels like slow motion. She follows the whole football play perfectly but still ends up on the ground, covered in her own blood and sweat.
Her teammates crowd around her, the medic checks her for a concussion, and Ginny feels the world blur. It's during that blur that she sees him, all dark-hair and smug mockery, watching her from behind the bleachers.
"Do you see him?" she asks Angelina Johnson but the girl just frowns in confusion and accompanies her to the hospital.
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Ginny doesn't tell anyone what she saw, too scared of getting benched, but she finds blood on her clothes for weeks, staining her world red. Her mother begins to talk about her quitting playing sports and the fight Ginny puts up isn't as strong as usual.
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the before: march 1997
The sprawling but small Weasley household is a sanctuary and a war zone, Ginny's pride and joy while simultaneously her greatest shame.
She loves the Burrow but sometimes she thinks she really is slowly going mad from the boredom. Without sports, her body begins to heal, but her mind gets worse.
There is a boy at the corner of her eye. He is faster than her, or perhaps just more clever, but no one ever sees him. She doesn't even see him, never fully at least.
Ginny wakes up at seven every morning and the window is always open, despite her closing it. Nothing ever remains in its proper place for long, and her mother snaps at her for being messy. One day, she finds a footprint in the center of the room and digs her nails into her own thighs in terror.
She gets signed up for therapy. The psychiatrist is polite; she gets a diagnosis of her symptoms being merely side effects of her football concussions. Every Monday and Thursday, they discuss her feelings of being stalked and Ginny slowly bits her lips to shreds as she realizes the woman doesn't believe her.
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the before: april 1997
Her medication involves four pills, one of them for sleeping because she's tired of screaming herself hoarse every night and her therapist is tired of hearing about it.
The day she wakes up with lipstick stains all the way up her legs, Ginny doesn't even think about it before she grabs a knife and tries to cut them off her flesh.
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Self-mutilation, her therapist tells her mum, a manifestation of her desperate need for agency.
"I didn't do this to myself," Ginny pleads, holding her mother's hand the way she hasn't done since she was a child.
"You own the colour, Ginny." Her mother's face is paler than ever, the freckles standing out. "Your therapist says the lipstick stains were self-inflicted. Honey… you did this to yourself."
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The next day, the lipstick stains are back with a signature. Three letters painted in a blood-red: T.M.R.
Ginny takes a bath, watches the water turn red as the lipstick washes off, and prays to anyone listening that this ends soon.
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the before: may 1997
The party is her mother's idea, a way for Ginny to pretend to be normal again. Alicia Spinnet picks her up, with Angelina, Katie, and Demelza in tow.
They go somewhere downtown, to a house party with strobe lights and drunk teenage boys and music so loud it makes her skin crawl.
Angelina and Alicia disappear almost immediately into the crowd, greeting friends and classmates. Demelza disappears somewhere around the snack table, but Katie grabs Ginny's elbow and pulls her into the conversation she's having.
"Have you ever met Tom, Ginny?"
Ginny looks up and it's him, the boy from the bus, her waking nightmare, smiling cheerfully from behind a red solo cup. Out of all the ways she's pictured seeing him again, this has never been one of them.
"We've met," Tom says, giving that fake smile again, and Ginny wants to rage, to punch him bloody, to force the truth from his lips. "She told me she was an athlete, right Ginevra?"
Katie looks between them, whistling at the thickness of tension. "I'll leave you two alone then...catch ya later, Ginny."
As soon as she's gone, Ginny whirls around, glaring at him. "You've been stalking me, haven't you?" she demands. "You've ruined my life."
He laughs at that. "That's preposterous. We've only met once before." He pauses, leaning in and whispering. "Even if I were stalking you, Ginevra, what proof do you? A lipstick stain isn't evidence."
His words make her reel. He takes advantage of that, leaning in for a kiss, running his fingers through her red hair. Behind them, someone wolf whistles. "You're my favourite game, Ginevra. I enjoy watching you lose: your head, your mind, your feeling of safety."
She tries to punch him, but he catches her fist, pressing a kiss to her knuckles.
"See you around, my favourite player," he says, and then he's gone. She follows him, but lack of proper lighting in the room acts as an obstacle. She gets a ride home from Alicia an hour later instead, who senses her rotten mood and doesn't ask about it.
Her stalker is real. The proof she hasn't gone mad is right there, but somehow it doesn't feel as gratifying as it should be.
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the before: june 1997
Katie Bell goes missing the night after the party, her 'missing' poster printed in their local newspaper every day for months. Ginny frowns over it during breakfast under her mum's pitying glances.
"Such a nice girl," Molly Weasley remarks, "I remember her going with you to that party, she looked so pretty. I wonder what happened to her."
A flash of red.
She catches up Tom, and he grabs her hand, looking as if he has been awaiting her.
She is dizzy from lack of oxygen and then everything blurs.
Someone screams.
She stumbles into Alicia's car, feeling as if she is missing something.
"Are you okay, Ginny?" Her mother asks in concern, dragging Ginny back into the conversation.
"I'm fine, Mum," Ginny says, frowning. The memory is hazy, gone almost as soon as it came. "Just lost in my thoughts."
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the before: july 1997
The nightmares during May are different from the ones she's had before. Tom follows her like a phantom, chases her through streets and valleys, predicts her every move, pushes her off every cliff. She falls, hits the ground, breaks into pieces and wakes up with the air gone from her lungs.
Ginny begins to ask around.
"Do you know a boy named Tom?" She asks Angelina and the other girl frowns. "Katie introduced me to him at the party."
"There's no one named Tom in this school," Angelina says with a frown, "Or anyone named Tom matching that description in any schools in this area. Just let it go, Ginny. This can't be healthy"
It gets back to her mother, who tells her therapist that Ginny is searching for a boy who doesn't exist, introduced to her by a girl who is now deceased.
Her diagnosis changes for the worst.
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the before: august 1997
"'I reserve actual terror for only the most special of occasions," Tom says, and he is sitting on the end of her bed, smirking, and then Ginny is screaming and hurling a lamp at his head, and something glass breaks into shards, and somehow she ends up on the floor, pointing at air, when her parents find her.
Her vocal cords are declared by the doctor to be permanently damaged and perhaps that's what makes her snap, makes her blood boil with white-hot rage.
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Ginny finds Tom on a Tuesday.
She takes the fight to him on a Wednesday.
There is a point in every victim's life where they realize they are worthy, where they realize they are dangerous too, where they have been pushed just a tad too far and break.
"I don't want to be insignificant anymore," Ginny whispers to herself like a mantra.
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the before: september 1997
The Riddle house is a crime scene. Strands of Ginevra Weasley's hair are everywhere, every surface is smashed, blood pools on the hardwood floor from a stab wound.
"He tried to kill her," the paramedic on scene says later, sitting down with her supervisor.
"We found evidence he stalked her," the police officer tells his boss, who rubs her forehead in exhaustion.
"I'm sorry," Molly Weasley tells her daughter as she lies in a hospital bed. "I'm sorry I didn't believe you. My daughter, I'm so sorry."
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the after: october 1997
Ginny visits him in jail against the desire of both her mother and her team of mental health professionals, just slips out of her room one night, ignoring the way her stitches are still sore and bleeding as she hails a cab.
He's in a cell when she finally gets in, after signing her name on his visitor's list, watching her with proud eyes.
"I didn't think you had the guts for it," he says, leaning back in the chair, madmen having gone bored.
Ginny leans across the table. "I am what you made me, Tom. I am a product of a monster. You stalked me, you invaded my home, and I'm sure you killed Katie, and then I won your stupid game."
"Did you?" He asks politely. "How long do you think it will take for me to escape, if you had to make an educated guess?"
Against her better judgement, she casts a look around the prison. The walls are steel and the bars are solid, but Tom is smart, scheming. Her bet is on him, and that terrifies her.
"You're still a murderer."
"And you faked your own stabbing in my house, after breaking in," Tom points out, his eyes lighting up like a child in a candy shop. "I see the poetic irony in it. Well played, my pet. Your crimes balance out mine."
"No, they don't! I'm nothing like you," Ginny shouts. "I did it because I was scared of you."
Tom's hands are shackled to the table, but he leans towards her as if he's free to touch her. "Are you sure, Ginny? Do you remember exactly what happened to Katie Bell?"
She is chasing Tom through the hallway to the patio, grabbing a hockey stick that is sticking out from the hallway closet on her way.
They are yelling at each other, her and Tom, anger dripping off their tongues.
Something shatters.
Katie follows them outside in concern.
Tom pulls out a knife, still smiling that sickening grin, and then her vision goes red and she swings the stick at his head and Katie opens her mouth to say something and Tom thrusts the knife forward.
In the end, it is only Katie who crumbles to the ground, no words coming out of her open mouth.
"You killed her," Ginny whispers, reeling back in shock. "It was you, I remember now for sure."
Tom smirks and the clock on the wall strikes midnight. "Are you sure?"
Right before Tom's knife thrusts into Katie's skin, Ginny's hockey stick collides with her head.
There is a sickening crack.
Ginny wakes up an hour later on the ground, with no memory of the night, and somehow manages to get into Alicia's car and goes home.
Goes home the way Katie never does.
He's watching as she remembers, giddy with it. His mad laughter fills the room and every inch of her skin goes pale with the knowledge of the past.
"Oh, Ginevra," he says, "I did ask if you liked games."
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QLFC Round 4: "The bounce has gone from his bungee." — Wallace and Gromit: A Close Shave.
A/N: I interpreted the prompt as someone losing their mind, hence the 'bounce' going from their bungee.
Additional Prompts:
[quote] 'I reserve actual terror for only the most special of occasions.' — Monstress, Marjorie Liu & Sana Takeda,
[quote] 'You know what they say about truth and the appearance of truth being opposites.' — The Power, Naomi Alderman
[quote] 'She didn't want to be insignificant anymore' — Circle of Shadows, Evelyn Skye
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