Silence

Have you ever wondered if you could hear silence?

Ginny sat alone in the dark, curved into a tight knot of bodily limbs beneath her blankets. It was a cold night, and she could hear both the wind and the rain howling outside her small window. She stared out of the window, too, watching the rain attack the glass and the ground below. The night wasn't cloudy, for some strange reason, and if Ginny squinted just enough she could make out a water-blurred version of the moon surrounded by its imperial guards-the stars.

Ginny could never sleep on night like these- she was always plagued by nightmares. Nightmares depicting horrible things, horrible, dreadful, thoughtless things that sent shivers up and down her spine and made the fine hairs on the back of her neck rise and shiver off their own accord. Things that made her not want to look beneath her bed. Things that made her not want to live at all...

Sometimes Ginny would think about this world and everything bad in it. About the clumps of smoke those dreadful factories emitted into the blue skies of the world, about how the sanity of this world could be held in the hands of an old, frail woman, and how no one could care the better whether she suffered in life, as long as she kept on living.

It was a cruel world, and those were cruel things for a thirteen year old girl to be thinking, but Ginny knew that if she didn't think for herself now, no one was going to help her in the future. If she didn't eduacate herself in the horrors of this world, no one was going to, and she would grow up seeing the world through pink glasses and eventually she'd end up in a ditch somewhere with maggots sucking on her corneas...She smiled slightly at that aspect. Maybe she was exasgerating ever so slightly there...

Ginny's imagination was vivid and matured to the point that often times she scared her family members. The only ones who appreciated her zesty thoughts were Fred and George, who often incorporated them into some one of their creations. Ginny smiled, thinking about Fred and George. They had talent, those two did, talent beyond anything Hogwarts could teach them. They understood the dilemnas of this damp world and tried to dry it off again with their well thought out pranks. Though often this only got them into trouble, it was a rare thing that one of their pranks did not earn some one an inkle of laughter.

Ginny often thought of ways that she herself could improve the world, bring happiness to other people, the way the twins did, but where ever she went people seemed to only remember one thing about her: The Tom Riddle incident. Not many people even knew it, but in her mind Ginny could see the apprehension in their eyes. Or maybe, and most likely, she was paranoid.

Going through a trauma like the Tom Riddle incident at such a young age had corrupted Ginny, mentally. She was now rather pessimistic, if not more mature of mind. But it had been a hard thing to overcome, especially during the the early days after the incident, when everything seemed to remind her of Tom and his overwhelming darkness trying to consume her once again. Ginny shuddered as the thought ran through her mind, and she quickly pushed it away into some pocket of her mind she didn't have to open.

Ginny knew that trauma had ruined her pre-adolescent life. It had ruined her mind in so many ways that she could not count. It had made her more cautious, less able to have fun and enjoy herself. It had made her stricter, more contained and introspective...It had changed who she should have been today, and who she was going to be for the rest of her life.

Suddenly the rain outside stopped, startling Ginny gratefully out of her reverie. 'My god,' she though staring outside and looking around her dimmed room, no longer illuminated by the bright moon since it had been swallowed by dark clouds she hadn't noticed before, 'So abrupt.' And it had been abrupt, any one would have admitted, abrupt and strange. It was definitely one of the rarer happenings in nature, when one minute a rain storm was blasting outside your window, acsessories like the shrieking of wind and such on full blow, and then, the next minute complete and utter silence.

She looked around her room, staring at the blank grey walls, and the unusually colorless carpets. This was indeed unusual. She pulled a strand of her deep red hair infront of her eyes, only to see that it, too, was colorless. She took a sharp breath inwards, but some how, was not afraid. She sat on her bed in the quiet of the night, thinking about nothing, something she had never done before. Her thoughts about this world and what it lacked flew out her ears, and instead she thought only of what she saw-darkness, nothingness.

And strangely it was the most interesting thing she had ever thought about. It consumed her-but not in the vile, violent way that Tom had. It consumed her, and she went willingly, knowing that there could be nothing bad in something so pure...so silent. She shut her eyes, and saw nothingness, too, saw only black. She let the quiet overwhelm her in a way that she had sworn never to let anything overwhelm her again. But this didn't feel like breaking an oath to herself...it felt like doing herself a favor. The favor of a lifetime.

And then Ginny realized she was trying to do something that would make others think her mad. She finally figured out why there was a furrow in her brow, and why her head was beginning to throb a throb that came only with intense outward concentration. She was trying to hear the silence. And, strangely enough, she was doing just that. It wasn't a silent silence. By listening to it, she could hear her brothers breathing two floors down, and, she fancied she could hear the rustle of the particles as they died and were formed again on the very walls of the house. It was a wonderful feeling, this, the feeling that she knew everything that was going on in the house. It was a feeling of power, of knowledge. She liked it, and she knew that with practise the 'sixth sense' of hers could teach her many other things, as well.

Suddenly her eyes flew open, and a pale blue color had returned to her walls, the colorful pattern to her carpet. She saw her hair was back to its red color, and that nothingness had flewn by. But a piece of it remained in her, and Ginny, still fresh from the foreign experience hopped off her bed, grabbing a piece of parchment and a quille before settling down somewhere where a few meagre strands of light filtered in from the hall. She wrote down the experience, and soon enough she had before her a full three metres of quille covered with her small, scratchy hand-writing.

A few days later, Ginny Weasley pulled out another quille and piece of parchment and sat down to write the experience again, but this time in the point of view of another. She still expressed her thoughts, but only through another person-an imaginary person. A person she called Silence.

Little did Ginny Weasley know then that she had just discovered her way of bringing happiness to people. It was through her writing, and it had all begun with one small question that had always nagged the back of her mind, but one she had never followed up on:

Have you ever wondered if you could hear silence?

Author's Note: I wrote this a long time ago, though not on paper. I wrote it some where in my mind, and it didn't surface until last night played a horrible prank of deja vu on me. It was around midnight, and I had just finished my nightly reading, when the very question that themes this little one-shot shot through my mind. So I listened to the sound of the night, then, and, like Ginny, I could have sworn I heard the very movement of the particles. Its a mindless fancy, though. It really is.

Review it if you even got this far, because I'm horribly aware that it must have been awesomely boring.

LoL, it was an experiment. Review...!!