Ginny decided to say nothing to her husband, when she woke up in the early hours. He was the bigger war hero, after all, and she knew better than anyone what followed his dreams every night. How he jumped at a sharply closed door. Winced at the green lights in London. Raised his voice to his boss. (Ginny hid it better, she thought, quietly sipping a white wine with Luna to Harry's wild nights out with Ron.) They'd started brewing draughts for a dreamless sleep every few weeks. Ginny took swigs of the cool lavender mixture before bed when he wasn't looking.
It wasn't that Harry couldn't understand what Ginny was going through, rather, that he knew it too well. He would have dropped everything to ease her nights and waking hours. That's why she couldn't tell him, she told herself, why he mustn't know. He had been on the tail of a dark wizard for weeks. They had been another rally— a muggleborn and a few muggles hurt— reading the papers made her ill at heart, hadn't they learned? It'd been five years since Voldemort was destroyed. Did their memories fade so quickly? (If only hers did.) Right now, Harry needed to focus. She was a distraction.
Ginny certainly did not maintain her silence to entrench herself in the intrusions in her mind, so she could pick at every decade-old scar, to read every foul word of the inhuman catastrophe had committed to paper—the inhuman catastrophe that had been inside her, that she had strengthened with each naïve sentence of her shaking quill, that had her write hate speech in blood, that had watched her sleep with flashing black eyes, those eyes that she'd found handsome and comforting as an eleven-year-old.
It would have been unhealthy, to dwell.
It was May, late May. When these thoughts chased themselves in the lonely moments before dawn. Three days before the 29th. Every day closer was a puncture to her chest, deflating her slowly. It was a landmark day, she supposed. Ten years.
Harry had noticed last night; asking if something was bothering her. She'd said no too quickly, too obviously. He'd frowned at her, his scar bunching up with the twist of his eyebrows, saying he'd be there if she wanted to talk. He didn't want to push. Ginny appreciated that. They'd ordered out to her favorite muggle restaurant, seen a muggle movie on the television.
She enjoyed these moments of another world, wholly unlike her own reality. She suspected Harry had similar reasons. Sci-fi fascinated her. Muggles shunned the very idea of magic, disproving myths left and right, and yet they built their own tools to make the impossible happen. (Harry had smiled when she told him this, saying her father would appreciate the thought.) She'd laughed and hugged him, and he'd kissed her in return; and for the next hour and a half before they went to bed, nothing in the world existed but Ginny and Harry and the spaces between them, closing the gaps with the warmth of their hands and the soft weight of their words. She'd fallen asleep next to him, early for once, thinking only of Harry's promises of a wonderfully un-nutritious muggle breakfast, no dreamless potion consumed that night.
/
The Dream always started roughly the same way: Ginny opened a diary and found an elegant script greeting her personally. She knew the handwriting. She'd memorized each slant of the letters, the dramatic punctuation, the heavy defiance of the down strokes and the confidence in each looping bend. Dear Ginny, the diary began, did you really graduate Hogwarts?
Strange dream-stage memories appeared in the theatre of the nightmare, when she picked up the diary. Memories she'd stuffed in drawers and drowned in Riesling. Crying alone in the Gryffindor Tower with hand-me down robes and failing potions. Eleven years old. Her diary was filled with angry rants: how dare they, how dare they talk to her like that, she'd show all of them— and the diary with its sheltering leather binding, her trusted companion, told her not to worry, they were all children who could not detect greatness within her. He was close, so close, like no one had ever been before. She imagined holding his large pale hands when she tucked the diary under her pillow. The Dream lingered here frequently, with a sickening hue. Soft light, soft heart, softness in her nighttime chest the way she'd felt as a girl. Her hair alit from behind in the moonlight. As if her mind didn't know that was Voldemort, crushing a child in his coils trying to stabilize his true form. (Did that even truly happen; Ginny would wonder when she woke up. Did Voldemort, cause of the second wizard war, really scheme for an eleven-year-old to be infatuated with him, with a pop-star glint in his eye?)
Dear Ginny, did you grow up, get married, become a woman? You and Potter? But he never appreciated you the way I did, did he? He couldn't see what made you special. He didn't love you as a little girl, didn't soothe those wounds the way I would, doesn't know your very mind inside and out—
Sometimes she closed the diary immediately. Walked away. The Dream would end and she would wake up. Sometimes she would leave the diary in whatever dusty corner she found it in, but something dragged her back, some sick curiosity she could not curb.
Dear Ginny, is it true you're being scouted by Quidditch teams internationally? I knew you were destined for great things the moment you caressed your little hand onto my pages—
The script varied. In one dream she poured her heart out, how she'd grown, how he wouldn't even recognize her anymore; the poor little Ginny who trusted strange men and got her soul scooped out by Tom Riddle. In another, she stabbed the diary with the basilisk fang at the first swooping "g" train. (Her favorite dream.) But in most, she was reluctant, and yet she wrote anyway. Something inside of her needed to see what would happen. A figure materialized out of the gloom; a boy with inky hair and pitch eyes, too glossed and carefully built to be real. Always she shrunk back at the first touch, rarely she grasped his beckoning hand in a sick fascination. Her age was never consistent. Eleven-year- old Ginny might coolly tell Tom how she'd gotten an offer from the Hollyheaded Harpies and twenty-one-year-old Ginny might tremble in fear at the looming teenager.
(It occurred to her that she was older than that Tom Riddle now. How did age work inside a Horcrux? Was he always an older man pretending to be a teenager? Was the diary forever a snapshot of a sixteen-year-old?)
Dear Ginny, talk to me, tell me everything, tell me if you still think about me when you're holding Harry's hand, tell me how Harry shivers at dark robes and loud noises, tell me about how you threw up once seeing his dark hair from behind, how you couldn't stop imagining it was me—
Dear Tom, she wrote that night, I don't know what growing up means anymore. I watched you murder hundreds of people at the battle of Hogwarts. I was sixteen then. I dream of you still. I dream of you from the diary, trying to enthrall a child. Is that what you wanted to read, Tom Riddle, Voldemort, whatever you want to call yourself?
A response bloomed out of emerald ink, shining on the crumpled pages. Yes.