PART ONE
There is a thrill creeping up her spine when Dumbledore looks her dead in the eye and says solemnly, "You are our strongest hope, Ms. Weasley. He underestimated you once; you have been one of the few to best him. It will be dangerous, but I have the greatest faith that you can do it once more. We all do." He places the artifact in her palm, wraps her fingers around it gently, and pats her hand twice. His own hand is cool, dry and papery-thin. The past few years have aged him more than the previous two decades, and the Order of the Phoenix has become more desperate as they watch their leader begin to wither away.
Ginny does not remind Dumbledore that she had been just a girl, and he merely a fragment of a boy. That managing her trauma alone in a rowdy house mostly meant locking the memories—and lack of memories—away, and avoiding her quill in the following years, and practicing reckless moves on a stolen broomstick in the dead of night, over and over until her lungs burned and her hands ached from her grip. Dumbledore is dying in front of her. She looks him in the eye, and says, "I understand, sir," and she sees the relief she is probably not meant to see. He turns away before she can see the guilt, too.
Ginny's send-off is quiet; partly because she wants it that way, and partly because there aren't many left to send her off anyways. She has Hermione's beaded handbag, filled with clothes and books and maps and more books and keys to safe houses that may or may not be safe houses when she accesses them. Everything they can think of, which honestly isn't much. No galleons (the goblins would immediately notice the anomalous serial numbers) but she does have a few vault keys.
Hermione is so involved in debating whether Ginny should take this edition or that edition that she nearly misses the farewell, and Ginny blurs out of existence before Hermione can shove the preferred book into her hands. The small group looks at each other, terror in their eyes despite their false, hopeful smiles, and disperses, wondering silently if ruining their timeline will hurt, or if they will all simply disappear one morning.
Ginny lives so many lives she can't even remember them all. Most of them end when she dies; some she skips out early. She wakes up back in headquarters, except it's not headquarters, it's just Grimmauld Place. The townhouse is always empty, dusty, and cold. She's never been able to figure out exactly when this Grimmauld Place exists, either. She's not overly curious, though, she has a purpose. After a while she forgets the name of the place. It's just the townhouse, now.
She's been pureblood, halfblood, heiress to immense wealth and prestige (that first time was a bit of an indulgence, she has to admit). Once she was Ginny Weasley, only daughter of Molly and Arthur Weasley, youngest of six brothers. She left that one early.
Several times she's tried growing up with Tom in the orphanage, mostly as a fellow magical, but occasionally muggle. A few times she's saved Merope Gaunt from her lonely death; sometimes having the mother helps, sometimes it makes it all so much worse. She's adopted Tom herself. Once, she does kill him, but she looks at the still, small body and turns her wand on herself. Nobody has managed to use Avada Kedavra on themselves, but that's not the only curse that kills. She never kills the child Tom again.
After several dozen—she can't remember exactly how many—attempts, she switches tactics entirely. She becomes a potioneer, a seamstress, a famous Quidditch player; she leaves for other continents; she becomes too old or too young or too mundane for Tom's interest, but somehow he catches up to her nearly every time. Once she dies of old age. The next turn, she feels so guilty she goes after him in a direct confrontation. Their battle lasts for several hours before ending with a dirty trick from a bystander. She is surprised, really, not that she died, but that she lasted that long at all.
They've been lovers, enemies, siblings, strangers; she knows him better than she knows herself. She thinks through conversations and confrontation and she can hear his voice in her head responding to her. More often than not, she gets him right. She likes fighting him as much as she likes fucking him; he always surprises her, either way, despite their time together. Always, though, Tom builds his power, through violence or politics or wealth, and he changes wizarding Britain. And when she changes him, when Tom is not the despot, there's some other person who rises up in his stead. The goal is overly simple: She has to stop Lord Voldemort and his anti-Muggleborn movement.
She goes by Ginny when she starts, then Virginia and Guinevere, but she moves on in time. Isolde, Amaryllis, Ophelia; she's gone by Persephone a few times, but that felt too obvious, too cursed, for her to use that for long. Cassandra has become her favorite, lately, but she'll probably move on eventually. She tends to go through phases.
When she started forgetting her family she had an embarrassing habit of stalking little Molly Prewett and Arthur Weasley (and sometimes their parents or their children) as they all grow up, but eventually she lets go of that, too. It was too upsetting whenever her parents didn't end up together. No matter how she changes her lives, she always wakes up in the townhouse with her own face and her red hair, the same color as a dying sunset.
She loves her red hair. She loves his laugh. She always tries to kill him. Throughout the centuries she's must've lived by now, these are the constants.
PART TWO
She wakes up in the townhouse, and something is different. This is her place now, and she can immediately feel that something has shifted, like someone has sat down on the end of her mattress and the sheets are pulling her across the bed.
She finds the anomaly in the kitchen. The girl has wild brown hair and is bustling around the kitchen like she belongs there. Her fingers are trembling around her wand; she is furious, terrified, electrified. The other girl turns and shrieks, part startled, part relieved when she sees her. She is babbling, now, and the name slowly comes to her mind: "Hermione?" she interrupts.
"Yes!" Hermione's smile is wide. Her appearance feels so unreal, she absentmindedly sends a burning curse into her own thigh to make sure she's not dreaming, or trapped in another hallucination. The smell and the pain tell her it's not. Hermione screams at the sight and rushes to her side, casting a spell to contain the curse before it travels through her bloodstream. She tilts her head at the brunette, watching her work so hard to heal the wound, and forcefully pushes her away. It will heal before she leaves the townhouse.
"How are you here? Why are you here?" she snaps.
Hermione's eyes are wide. This must be early for her. She lifts up a chain from underneath her lumpy wool jumper, showing an artifact almost identical to her own, the one that the old wizard gave to her so long ago. "I came to help!" she is chirruping. "I brought supplies— and information— Dumbledore said that two might be more suspicious, but the risk could be worth the reward."
She stops listening. She prowls around the kitchen, circling Hermione, tugging at her own red hair impatiently. Hasn't she been dedicated? Loyal? She's always tried—every lifetime has been about Tom, even ones spent kilometers and years apart. The ages have been all him, only him, for their sake. They must have been certain she's failed, and will always fail, if they've sent their little genius away. She shakes her hair out, trying to clear the buzzing that's built.
Hermione has fallen silent by now, a primal fear growing in her eyes, even if she isn't quite aware of the threat.
"How long for you?" she asks.
Hermione obviously counts backwards in her head. "Seventeen months, a handful of days." She bites her lip. "Things are—were—growing... worse. Dumbledore died about a month before I left." Hermione's eyes grow glassy with tears and she turns away to busy her hands with making tea, conspicuously scrubbing at her face.
Tom will eat you, she thinks to herself. I could eat you. Then she scolds herself, forces herself to relax. "All right," she says. "There's no way you can go into Hogwarts. We'll have to think of something." Shopgirls, maybe? Eager recruits? She eyes Hermione, who is lovely and sweet and babbling about her plan to grow close to Tom, close enough to strike at the heart of the snake. She wonders what Hermione would say if she told him just how close—and how frequently close—she's gotten to Tom already. She could practically hear Tom's dry comment.
She is Ginny, again, since Hermione constantly slips when trying to call the redhead anything else. It's odd, being in this name again and having Hermione by her side, like putting on an old, favored jumper only to find it pinches in ways it didn't before. She takes the artifacts from the future's past that Hermione brought with her, crafts a story of two lovely Beauxbatons graduates, returning from a daring adventure across the continent.
Ginny created their new families with ease, but building the resources necessary to capture Tom's interest is not without incident. Hermione is horrified by what she does, how calmly she rifles through pockets and through minds. When Hermione raises her wand in defense of some rotting old woman in east Bulgaria, Ginny's temper snaps, and she is screaming, swearing, casting hexes at her unwilling partner in crime.
Eventually, Hermione is forced to agree, but she never quite regains her ease by Ginny's side. They stroll through Knockturn Alley, giggling and whispering in French, nonchalantly hexing any who dare approach, and Hermione's arm is stiff when linked in Ginny's. Tom finds them, naturally, and finds their treasures more interesting than the two girls, as expected—although Hermione seems a bit put out by this.
Ginny wonders, during a meeting one day as Hermione flushes in embarrassment from one of Tom's cutting remarks, if Hermione had genuinely expected Tom to be fascinated with a witch who has had a mere taste of war. Time has smoothed out Ginny's mind, Ginny's personality, after decades of war and decadence and mysteries. Hermione seems as innocent and fragile as an orchid petal in comparison. It doesn't surprise her when Hermione gets caught, passing along secrets to a budding resistance. Hermione is killed by Tom himself, but Abraxas kills her this time, surprisingly. She must've gotten careless, trying to mind Hermione.
They spend three lifetimes apart, which is a relief. Then she wakes up in the townhouse, and Hermione is in the kitchen again. Hermione is less enthusiastic, less girlish; a combination of the fear she instilled in her and several (likely violent) deaths, she thinks. She realizes she's smiling when Hermione shivers.
"We'll be younger this time," she informs her. "Might as well do Hogwarts."
It goes on like this, time together, time apart. Her world has slowly broadened from Tom and attempting to end Tom to include cleaning up after Hermione. It is a nuisance. She resents her, the orchid who still believes that she will succeed where little Ginny has failed. Hermione will never understand Tom the way she does. It will be her downfall. In the meantime, it itches under her skin and makes her grind her teeth together. She misses him. She misses them, their dance. Brief respites away from Hermione never last long enough. Even when she is a lifetime away, the other girl itches in the back of her head, a nagging, looming presence she detests.
PART THREE
They are at Hogwarts again. Tom is young, still being pushed around by the older pureblood Slytherins. Hermione is Slughorn's assistant—Hermione's idea, her work, naturally—but Ginny is a student. Older than Tom, but still. Hermione insisted it would give them the perfect perspective. One pair of eyes in the staff, another in the students, close enough in age that two girls can whisper together without attention.
It's a quiet, cold evening when she goes for a stroll on a whim. She stumbles upon them suddenly. One hallway is silent, then she turns the corner and is plunged into a battle. She understands immediately. Hermione had decided to go after Tom herself, assured by his age and his friendlessness and her own arrogance, and with a quick eye she realizes Hermione might actually succeed in killing him. Tom is holding his own, for now, but there is real terror in his eyes.
She attacks without hesitation, calling up the power she's refined over the ages, twisting the stone beneath Hermione, unleashing a rope of fire, casting blood-boiling and entrail-expelling and incinerating curses. Hermione dodges, blocks, cries out in pain, and she tackles her to the ground, slamming Hermione's skull again and again into the unforgiving stone floor.
When Hermione is too dazed, too close to death to struggle, she rips away her shimmering little artifact, and tosses it to Tom, huddled in the corner, watching it all with wide-eyed interest.
"You're—warped," Hermione coughs. "Awful, as evil as him."
She laughs in the dying girl's face. "Maybe," she tells her honestly. How funny, really, that her moral code had led her to this in the first place. Murdering a child had been so repugnant, and the Death Eaters' sentiment was so prevalent, she always let Tom grow into the power he always collected, the power he so obviously deserved. In any life, Tom built his own empire; it had never been handed to him, only made more and more difficult, and still he succeeded. She had been handed a power they hadn't understood, patted on the hand, and told to focus on him and him only. Of course, of course, of course, she loved him, she realizes, calmly watching Hermione die slowly underneath her. The only real thing in the world, the voice in her head, the axis her many lives revolved around.
He had been alone in his life before her, hadn't he? She was alone, too, apart from him. They revolved around each other, Tom and her, and it had been planned this way. She had been smoothed down like a pebble on the beach until she had been molded to him, and him only. She loves fighting him, but she loves making him smile more, and she could never lose him, never kill him.
She is broken from her reverie when Hermione's head lolls to the side, and she sharply turns to watch the artifact in Tom's hands. When it does not spin, does not warm, does not react at all, she smiles, pleased to be finally, permanently finished with the witch. And the future-past, too. One was unlikely—two was shocking—three was simply impossible. If they managed to surprise her, though, it would be easy to handle, especially if she was by Tom's side.
She pulls out her own chain and began to fiddle with it. "See you later," she whispers to the boy in the corner, who watches in fascination as the redheaded teenager simply blurs out of view.
She is sitting calmly at a table in the Slytherin Common Room. She is given a wide berth by the others, who are leery of this odd girl, new to their school and yet so comfortable. She's waiting patiently, working on peeling apart a fruit, when Tom sits down next to her, and tugs on one of her long red braids.
She turns and smiles. "Hello, Tom."
"What is it?" he asks immediately, not bothering to specify.
She shrugs. "Never got a name, actually, I just call it the artifact. It's—" she stops, thinks for a moment. "I'm not sure if it bends reality or time or both. I'll give you the books."
"What do I call you?"
"I'm going by Galatea now, which is probably rather self-indulgent, really," she says with a laugh. "I moved past names a long time ago. Whatever you want, I suppose."
He smiles.
A/N: Also posted on AO3. Find me on Tumblr as 7serotonin. Thank you to kreeblimsabs, subspace-styles, and bendamneron (on Tumblr) for reading this and helping me make it better and giving me the courage to post it.