On the eve of her fifteenth birthday, expensive silk sheets spill from a cardboard box onto Ginny's dorm-room bed and the sight, the simple picture something so unusual paints, has her stumbling backwards, pupils delatated, flight instincts overwhelming any rational thoughts.
On the eve of her fifteenth birthday, Ginny Weasley's wrists get torn apart badly and then magically sewn together and when Harry asks about the scars, concern in his green eyes, she shrugs and says Venomous Tentacles like it's nothing and she's fine.
It's not.
And she isn't.
But he believes her readily enough.
The sheets end up ripped and cut and into the wicker basket in one of the many bathrooms for the elves to take them away, away to Merlin knows where, someplace their physical presence can't come back from to hunt her. The idea that they exist though, that idea makes her twist and turn and bite into her own skin until its surface breaks and blood drags down her fingers, pooling in her palm, staining the ever uncovered mattress she lies on.
Those wounds, like her mind, never get to heal.
Ginny doesn't have any sort of beddings and, as far as her roommates are concerned, the reasons are unfathomable.
Maybe she's just weird.
Maybe she's just poor.
It's not like she ever tells anybody that the floor of the Chamber felt like rough sheets under her cheek.
It's not like she ever tells them Tom ruined her with his mind, either.
I heard Malfoy brings silk sheets from home, she remembers writing while laying on the ratty fabrics all her brothers had used. Back then, they were comfort. And You won't even find silk in our home. Back then, she didn't know how anything outside of the wool of her sweaters and the cotton of her dresses and the velvet of the drapes felt.
I never had expensive stuff either. And If I were there, Ginevra, I'd buy you all the silk sheets in the world.
He wasn't there, of course, but one day, after one of her lapses, after heaving into a toilet feeling like she had lost her mind, after scrubbing what she hoped to the gods was red paint off her hands, after plucking fine little feathers out of her hair, she came back to find pearl grey satin shimmering on her bed.
She never asked.
He never told.
And when everything ended she burned the sheets, hers, Tom's, Malfoy's, and went on with her life like she had never trusted things that hadn't shown where their brain was being kept.
On the eve of her fifteenth birthday, Ginny Weasley obsesses, burned, stabbed diary clenched between her hands, feeling the link lingering, strengthening, tugging at that piece of her soul she's careful never to tell about, never to think too much at.
On the eve of her first day at fifteen, she opens it.
How do your silk sheets sleep? he asks her, perfect writing looped around the fang.
From where she sits on the barely patched together, barely-resembling-sheets sheets, Ginny contemplates.
They sleep good, she writes back.
Gin'n'tonic. I crossed this line. I love it. Might even finish the Tomione, now.
I bow to Colubrina, whose work made the obsession blossom.
