Disclaimer: I don't own it
A word to the wise: This is a parody of the typical time travel fic. Don't take it too seriously, just enjoy.
Albus Dumbledore wasn't the only one with a contingency plan during the Battle of Hogwarts. Oh no. Minerva McGonagall would be damned if she let a dead man one-up her. No, no.
And her tragically gay dance partner wasn't the only one who thought Horcruxes might be the source of Voldemort's power.
The grounds were in a flurry of panic. Students rushing thither and yon, a crying first year boy- why hadn't Filch taken care of the young ones as she'd asked?
She found herself governing the fighters and the student body simultaneously.
"Mr. Hornby, make your way to the Hufflepuff common room at once! This is no place for first years!"
"Yes, Shacklebolt is defending the Eastern Wing. Back him up, would you? And…oh Mister Creevy is this really the right time to be taking photographs?"
"Miss Clearwater! Mr. Macmillon! Snogging is hardly appropriate at the moment! Join your classmates!"
Though the Slytherins were tucked away nice and safe in their common room so at last that was something she didn't have to worry about. And the statues she brought to life were serving their purposes quite nicely.
But really most of this was going on in the back of her mind. Most of her energy was focused on finding the right mop of red hair in the madness… There. At the base of the stairs. Potter was right alongside of course, when were they ever apart? The pair appeared to be in the midst of a tense conversation, and this was the boy's show after all. Minerva waited patiently for Harry to run off, up the staircase, until she approached.
"Miss Weasley?"
Ginny Weasley whipped around, eyes wild, perhaps a bit teary, too. "Yes Professor?"
McGonagall second-guessed herself again. Was this really the best idea? Albus specifically said…but no. She wasn't taking orders from a painting tonight. And Ginny deserved this.
"If you will accompany me to the Headmaster's office, Ginny, I have an important project for you to complete. It may or may not decide the fate of this battle."
Ginny said nothing but followed hastily. The gargoyle guarding the office entrance required only a bit of coercion to let them pass without the password, and soon enough, Minerva was rifling through Dumbledore's desk. That slimy traitor Snape better not have touched anything so help her, or-
"Ah, here it is." McGonagall produced a large silver thingumy on a silver chain. She slipped it over Ginny's head.
"Professor, what in Merlin is that?" Ginny stared down at the contraption that Minerva was already fiddling with. "It looks a lot like a-"
"Time turner. Yes. That's because it is. A special one of course, that goes not by hours but by years. I'm sending you back in time, Ginny. I assume you can imagine exactly when you're going."
Ginny's freckles suddenly stood at an even deeper contrast with her quickly paling skin. A green tinge crept in around the young woman's cheeks.
Minerva looked away, intent on spinning the turner. She was already past sixteen turns. James and Lily were alive again. Now they were first years. "You're going to kill Tom Riddle before he kills Myrtle with the Basilisk. Before any of this is set into motion."
"Professor, no. You can't! I don't even- how can I face him?"
"Oh hush, it's not all that hard. Killing a man." Minerva paused in her turning for a fraction of a second. "Not that I'd know anything about that."
Ginny fumbled at the time turner but McGonagall slapped her hands away. "Professor please, I'm not the right person for this. Ask Harry! Harry's made for this kind of thing!"
"Now Ginny, be realistic! This requires far too much previous thought for Harry to manage. Besides, if anyone is made for this job, it's you. You know the inner workings of his head better than anybody." Turn turn turn. Just a few more now. A terrible sound echoed through the castle. That would be the shields giving…
"You know the Killing Curse, Ginny?"
"Of course I do. I had Mad-Eye in my third year, didn't I? Well- Crouch…but. Er. Yes. I know the words."
Minerva stole a breath and looked up to Ginny's face. She'd regained some color. Good, because she was about to travel back in time more than fifty years.
"Professor, you knew him back then…"
Well, knew was a bit strong of a word, but-
"Any advice?" Ginny asked, already fading away.
Minerva didn't really know what she was saying when she blurted it out. But it was all she could think of. A phrase she often repeated to herself, back in her school days when forced to face the infamous Tom Riddle.
"For god's sake girl, don't meet his eyes!"
Ginny was gone. Minerva almost hoped she hadn't heard. But it was good advice.
She couldn't count on her fingers and toes the number of men and women who met their downfall in those eyes.
May 2, 1943
Ginny Weasley opened her eyes and promptly got sick all over Armando Dippet's office floor. Good thing was- he wasn't there.
Ginny dry-heaved for a bit and then used Scourgify to clean the sick away. She felt like a blast-ended skrewt had taken up residence in her guts.
"Ughh." What was that McGonagall said before she left?
For god's sake girl, don't-
"Ughh," she was going to be sick again. Ginny couldn't remember. She slumped onto the floor and held her head in her hands.
The hell was she supposed to do now? March into the Great Hall and off him in the middle of dinner? Ginny looked up at the clock over Dippet's desk. Actually, dinner was almost over.
She pictured Voldemort eating a treacle dessert with his little Death Eater minions, and this inspired her to stand up. Flee the office.
Getting caught in the headmaster's office was the last thing she needed. She took the spiral staircase two steps at a time and burst into the corridor. Okay. She still had her school uniform, however tattered it was. So she could blend in for a little while. Ginny just had to hang around long enough to bump into the future Dark Lord and strike him down in cold blood before he murdered his first Mudblood.
Piece of cake.
She didn't know his timeline as well as she would have liked. He opened the Chamber when he was…sixteen? Yeah, she knew that from all his crazy ranting from the diary. Born on New Year's Eve he said once, so…he was a fifth year in 1943. And everyone always went on about how he was a Prefect and how strange it was that such a bad man could have been a Prefect, when wankers like Malfoy could be Prefects in her time, too.
"Focus, Ginny," she scolded herself. Anyway, Prefect. This was a complication since it meant he might not immediately go back to the Slytherin common room after dinner. He might go make his rounds. She skulked her way to the dungeons anyway. It was the only the lead she had. Though for the life of her, she didn't know where a common room could be hiding around down there.
Ronald refused to tell her where the Slytherins slithered to after his Polyjuice adventures. Even the twins didn't know that one. Probably the talking point of his whole existence, that.
Ginny wandered for a bit until she heard voices. Then she ducked into a shadowy
alcove, hoping she'd stumbled across some Slyhtherins on their way to their lair.
The first voice belonged to a girl. "-and I told him. I said, 'Slughorn's not going to fancy you inviting her to his end of the year party like that. He absolutely loathes her.' But did he listen to me? No."
"I completely agree," said the second voice, also a girl's. "He should have listened to you. Pureblood."
Suddenly there was a grating noise, and greenish light spilled out into the dungeon corridor, completely illuminating the two girls. And Ginny in her hiding place.
Two pair of Slytherin eyes immediately gravitated to her. There was a blonde one and a ginger like her.
Well. She found the common room at least.
"Er," the first girl- the ginger- looked Ginny up and down. "What are you wearing?"
"More importantly, what are you creeping around here for, Gryffindor?" The blonde crossed her arms. "And who are you? I've never seen you before."
Oh god oh god oh god, make up a name. Her mother's maiden name! Yes. "I'm Lucy Prewett, and I…"
"Well that's a lie," the ginger cut her off.
Ginny's ears burned. "Oh, you think so?"
"I know so." The ginger turned her wand on Ginny and scrutinized her further.
"And how's that?"
"Because I'm a Prewett, you daft bimbo. And I've never met you in my life."
It occurred to Ginny that she was talking to one of her ancestors. Tetchy lot.
"You can't be a new student. We never have new students," the blonde said. She turned to Ginny's great-aunt-or-whatever-she-was. "I don't like this. I think we should take her to the headmaster."
Ginny's future, the future of all witch and wizard-kind, crumbled before her eyes, ruined by two gossipy Slytherin bitches.
Future Dark Lord Tom Riddle was feeling rather satisfactory after dinner that night. He'd had some sort of fabulous lemon meringue something or other. Merlin, he loved lemon meringue something or others. He was walking back to the common room with his goons in tow, thinking about the following day, when he would officially try out the Basilisk on somebody. He hadn't picked who just yet. He didn't want to ruin it by planning too much.
Anyway, Tom was walking back to the common room, thinking about killing filthy Mudbloods, when he had this sudden feeling- that at that precise moment in exactly fifty-four year's time, some ginger bloke was standing at the entrance of the Chamber of Secrets and gagging out the word "open" like he was coughing up a hairball. And then this frizzy-hair woman with a gold cup in her hand was shrieking as she slid down into the secret passage that opened from the sinks.
Also there was this really whiny ghost girl who reminded him of someone.
Tom was still trying to decide whether or not he liked the idea of other people going into his chamber, when he spotted Dippet talking to that Prewett wench and some other girl he'd never seen before. She looked really familiar. Staggeringly familiar.
Hold up. Tom Riddle stopped in his tracks, causing all the Knights of Walpurgis to bumble into each other as they avoided bumbling into him. Something wasn't right here. The gears in Riddle's head turned. Finally, he said to nobody in particular, "Where are all these bloody gingers coming from?"
The new girl that he didn't recognize turned her attention away from her argument with Dippet and zeroed in on Tom. Tom had the sudden urge to quirk up his eyebrows, go to the library a lot, and smolder at people. He felt an inexplicable need to pay unnecessary attention to this girl under the ruse that he needed to find out all of her secrets because she was so mysterious, when in reality he would be experiencing a completely unrealistic turn-around in his personality and behavior. And then at some point he would acknowledge that he had fallen in love and he would completely forget about killing Mudbloods. But that was a lot to fit in a few seconds.
So Tom settled on raising his eyebrow for now. Hmm. Yes…he was quite good at that.
He was vaguely aware of Mulciber asking him if he had swallowed a bug or something, when the girl rushed at him, brandishing her wand.
The girls took Ginny to Dippet, who was conveniently enough loitering in the Great Hall. Ginny could tell almost immediately that this Dippet character was a few bricks shy of a Dumbledore, so she didn't even try to reason with him about time travel and evil lords. She figured she could put her mother's genes to use and argue loudly until Tom Riddle walked by. Surprisingly, this didn't take long at all.
She didn't notice him at first, because he was surrounded by a group of rangy-looking baby Death Eaters. But then he pulled a brake-check and caused the gaggle to slam into each other.
"Young lady, I don't know where you got that strange school uniform, but I am quite certain you aren't a student here. You must accompany me at once to the…." The blather faded away when Ginny realized that Tom Riddle was staring at her.
Having not heard the rest of McGonagall's advice, she didn't know not to look back into his dark, stormy eyes, set into a handsome face framed by dark, stormy fringe.
Ginny felt the sudden urge to completely forget her mission, and attempt to change Tom Riddle's ways by:
- joining the Slytherin house as a new student
-taking all his classes
-getting potions tutoring from him
-accidentally letting slip that she knew a lot about his future
Eventually, after many wacky escapades and a few isolated incidents of dating violence, Ginny would introduce Tom Riddle to love. And everything would be better.
Then Tom did this douchey thing where he raised his left eyebrow.
All the hate and death and pain Tom Riddle would cause rushed back into Ginny's mind. She snatched her wand from her robes and ran at him, in the process mustering all the hatred her body could manage into six little syllables.
"Avada Kedavra!"
The green jet of light hit Tom Riddle square in the chest and he crumpled into a heap on the Great Hall floor. Dead.
Ginny Weasley smiled, pleased with herself. Around her, people screamed. Ginny's great-aunt-or-whatever-she-was tackled her to the ground and wrestled her wand away. Whatever.
All she could think was, "There. That wasn't so hard, was it?"
And it wasn't.