Disclaimer: All hail J.K. Rowling, creator and owner of everything Harry Potter! I claim nothing of this and make no financial profit.
A/N: SPOILER for Deathly Hallows. Though, if you have not finished the book, why are you out reading HP fanfic instead?
o sister they'll never believe you
Ginny wanted to give Harry the part of herself that she could no longer control.
It was not a matter of propriety. She had no delusions of a romantic soundtrack accompanying her efforts on the night of Harry Potter's seventeenth birthday. He was characteristically dim about girlish charms, and she could only articulate her gift to him in platitudes.
Neither of them sighed to the sounds of skin on skin, white-edged fingernails scraping his scalp, one green eye floating through her field of vision. Had she wanted to do what he undoubtedly thought she wanted to do, she would have led him to a different room in The Burrow.
Later, when It Was All Over, she likened her gift to a Horcrux. She wanted to split her own soul. She wanted rid of the part of her that felt like an extra limb.
In the darkest hours of the great wizarding war, she wanted rid of the part that still felt Voldemort inside of her.
A Coldness
She had seen Lucius Malfoy drop the diary into her possession. She raised her head for a retort, which came readily to her lips, and was immediately paralyzed in fright. Cold wrapped around her words before they could come out, made a burning box on her tongue.
She saw only a black glove, the long index finger pointed at her throat.
It hurt to swallow. It never stopped hurting.
Lucius Malfoy was more than competent at curses. The Cassandra Curse had been created and then gone into disuse long before Voldemort's time. It was not very practical, but Lucius liked to know curses like this one because, every once in a while, it allowed for the most exquisite torture.
There was a thin wailing inside Ginny that hummed in her head for days afterwards. o sister they'll never believe you but i see his head smashed in and a long serpent pulls the skin off his bones o inch by inch and hair you see it too. It was coming from inside the box. No, it was the box, the wailing drowned out her own fears and her retort and any idea of telling her family what Lucius Malfoy was doing to her as his own cold voice washed over them in a flood of insults.
He looked down at her before he turned to leave. All she saw were yellow eyes, and all she felt was the breath of cold wailing inside her, and knowledge of the dark.
A Darkness
She awoke behind a couch in the Gryffindor common room. This time, she did not scramble to her feet, screaming, covered in sweat. This time, she curled her legs until they met her chest, and lay her bony elbow under her head.
She could not figure out what, exactly, had caused her black out on a handful of days.
Ginny knew these deranged incidents were caused by the diary that Lucius Malfoy had thrust upon her. She also knew that she came back to herself in a different place every time because she was doing very, very bad things.
And the diary needed her. It did not want her to get caught. They did not want her to get caught.
Ginny also knew she could not tell anyone that she was responsible for the accidents that had been happening in Hogwarts because of the curse on her knowledge. Ginny did not want to tell anyone.
She turned her head so that she looked up at the beams in the ceiling. Students had thrown quills and bits of putty so that they made a weird collage over the wood.
Whom would she tell, if she could? Her family might do something dangerous to retaliate against the Malfoys. She often felt she was in bad favor with the teachers at Hogwarts. Harry…
What would it mean that someone was using her for black magic? Were the bad times come again because of her?
And what if, by staying quiet, she was preserved from everything to come…
Someone certainly knew what they were doing with her. She stayed curled on the rug, where she fell again into a sleep not of dreams, but of darkness.
A Loudness
Ginny took to walking around the Burrow, again and again, after Harry, Ron, and Hermione fled. The night they disappeared, while her mother wept silently and her father gathered Order members together, Ginny circled the house, still wearing her dress from the wedding.
The moment Tom Riddle's diary was destroyed she felt the knowledge curse break. She had given over to wave after wave of explanation that came from she knew not where. Their reactions had not been what she had expected, but then, they were not exactly what she would have wanted. At least the wailing whisper had left her.
Now, she had no explanation, no memory, no knowledge for the rising cry within her.
Only her instinctive feeling told her it came from a physical need. She had tried and failed to let loose the cry when she had met Harry's mouth with her own. It kept her up at nights, gave her more energy than ever before, so that she walked miles and miles around their property and could satisfy the noise that filled her.
Ginny sat near the chicken coop, put her hands in the pockets of her sweatshirt, and watched the night sky, seeing out when others could not see in.
She sat still even as the loudness began to crash through her system, becoming a roar and growing beyond even that; she felt her forehead and left forearm burning, and an unknown hissing desiring to erupt from her throat. She could not see the night sky anymore, but she saw yellow eyes and a forked tongue and a great beast slithering from a man on the floor.
She would not cry for Harry, whose own loudness was not the same. She felt nothing at all from the dark man left bleeding copiously on a broken floor in the Scottish highlands.
Ginny put her head in her hands and cried great sobs for the part of her that must be damaged, must be dying, that would be killed by the boy she loved.
The part that she had forgotten how to do without.
She knew when she stood up she would go to him and destroy that which had taken over her life. But when It Was All Over, what would she have left inside of herself to share with Harry?