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Resonance

Chapter 2 – A Life worth Living

She opened her eyes, but still saw darkness. "Where am I?" she asked nervously, sure that she wouldn't like the answer. Sitting up quickly, she brushed her flaming red hair away from her face and gasped in horror. She knew exactly where she was, and she really wished she didn't.

It was the Chamber of Secrets.

The huge cavern was lit with an eerie green glow that reflected off the puddles on the floor. The sound of water dripping slowly could be heard in the background. She looked around and had to stifle a gasp when she saw somebody lying near her in a puddle of liquid that could only be blood. She crawled closer, but nearly collapsed when she saw his emerald eyes staring blankly at the ceiling. Harry Potter himself was lying next to her, his face frozen in a shocked expression, mouth and eyes wide open. The redhead leaned towards him.

"Harry?" she asked in a quiet whisper. "Harry, are you—"

He wasn't breathing. The blood puddle wasn't expanding. He wasn't bleeding any more, as his heart had already stopped pumping a very long time ago.

He was dead.

"What happened?!" she screamed as she scooted back from him in abject horror. She attempted to run away but stumbled and fell down.

"You killed him," a calm voice said from behind her. She turned to see none other than Tom Riddle himself standing behind her. "He saved your life. He killed the basilisk and destroyed my diary, but when you woke up, you killed him." He smiled vindictively at her. "You would have made a fine Slytherin, you know."

She looked back at Harry and finally noticed the gaping hole in his chest. Collapsing to her knees, she felt as if she was going to puke as the memory blossomed in her mind.

"Ginny! Are you alright?"

Ginny looked up at Harry and smiled slightly. "Thanks for saving me," she said. "Is he...is he gone?"

He turned away from her to point at the diary, lying in tatters and bleeding ink. While his back was turned, her thankful expression turned into a mask of cold fury, and she picked up the sword he had dropped on the ground.

"Ginny?" he asked when he turned back around to see her holding his newfound sword. "Ginny, snap out of it!"

She grinned as she held the sword in front of his heart and pushed it straight through his chest.

"How could I?" she sputtered as her breathing quickened. "How could I do something like that? How could I...kill him?"

"You thought you were free of me," Tom said, still grinning at her, "but now you know better. When I possessed you, I changed you. You're tainted. You're infected. You're mine, now and forever, and there is nothing you can do to change that."

Everything around her blurred and she saw that she was suddenly sitting on a little stool in front of the entire student body of Hogwarts in the Great Hall. A hat was placed on her head, covering her eyes and nose as it was much too big for her. It was the Sorting Hat. Everything went dark and silent, but then—

"Ah, another Weasley," it whispered into her ear as she tried not to jerk in surprise. "I should know what to do with you, but you are different from the rest of your family. You are cunning and have a thirst to prove yourself. I would have put you in Gryffindor, but you are too weak for that house. You are a coward. Your heart tells me that you deserve..."

"SLYTHERIN!!!"

"I told you..." Riddle's voice whispered as everything faded to black and she felt a falling sensation. "You'll never be free of me. I am a part of you, the darkness within your soul. You're mine now."

Ginny screamed as she sat up, staring blankly at a dark wall. Breathing hard, still half-crazy with absolute terror, she looked around wildly to see that she was back in her own bedroom at the Burrow. She took a very deep breath and let it out slowly, then repeated the process several times until her adrenaline rush was over and she began to calm down. Looking down, she saw that her bedding was askew, shoved almost completely off her bed while she was flailing around in the tight grip of her nightmare. With a sigh, she tugged at her sheets until they were covering her again and attempted to fall back to sleep. Eventually she did, but after a similar nightmare, she gave up and went outside to watch the sun rise.

That was the first night she'd had such a dream, on the very first night of summer. When she awoke the morning after that, tired, pale, and scared senseless, she knew that it was just the first of many horrible nights to come.

She was right.

For the first week after school let out, Ginny was absolutely miserable. Every time she saw anyone, she could see their unending pity for her, which she could never bear for long. She never had an appetite and barely slept. No conversation with her lasted longer than a few words, as she almost completely refused to speak. She spent all of her time staring blankly at the wall of her bedroom or sitting in the branches of a tree in the nearby forest. She simply couldn't stand being around her family. She hated being seen as weak. She hated their sad gazes and despised their pity. It just made her feel even worse than before.

After two weeks of horrible nightmares and lonely days, she sat at the desk in her room and gazed at a blank piece of parchment, wondering exactly how she was going to word her letter. She eventually just put quill to parchment and hoped it would come out right.

Professor Dumbledore,

I was wondering if you could possibly send me a book on Occlumency or come to the Burrow to teach me yourself. Even though Tom's memories aren't bothering me during the day, I think they're somehow leaking out during the night, because I've had some horrible nightmares about it all. I would wait until the start of term like you asked me to, but they won't stop and they're driving me mad.

Thank you very much,

Ginny Weasley

She signed the letter and went over it carefully. Her mum had taught her how to be polite while writing a letter, so she figured she should put the lessons to good use when asking Dumbledore for a favor. Deciding that it was up to her mother's standards of politeness and, therefore, probably exceeding Dumbledore's own standards, she sealed it in an envelope and went off to hunt for Errol, hoping he was up for the journey.

She found the owl sitting in his cage. He was sleeping, as usual. She sat in front of the cage and jostled it slightly to wake him up. When he finally opened his eyes, Ginny quickly opened the cage and tied the letter to his leg.

"This is for Dumbledore, alright?" she asked. The owl glanced at her before flying out through the open window, narrowly avoiding a tree. She sighed and hoped that the old, decrepit owl would manage to deliver it without dropping dead.

"HELLO?! HELLO?! CAN YOU HEAR ME?!"

Ron's shout surprised her so much that she fell out of her chair. She quickly recovered and stood up to peer quizzically through the doorway into the kitchen. Ron was holding a telephone handset that her dad had modified to work on magic instead of electricity. Ginny raised an eyebrow as she remembered something her father had said after testing it out for the first time.

"It's amazing! It's as if they are talking right into your ear!"

She cringed, imagining that the person on the other end of the phone did not appreciate being yelled at.

"I—WANT—TO—TALK—TO—HARRY—POTTER!!!" Ron shouted at the top of his lungs. Ginny plugged her ears during the outburst and would have fled outside, but she decided that it might be fun to watch this. It was too entertaining to pass up, and not much else had happened yet during the summer, since the infamous twins hadn't stocked up on prank supplies yet. They usually started a few weeks into the summer, after their mum's guard dropped a little and she focused on other things than her troublemaking sons.

"WHO IS THIS?!" a voice bellowed from the phone. "WHO ARE YOU?!"

Ginny cringed. She had heard that voice before on the platform. It was Harry's uncle, who was possibly the meanest person under the best of circumstances. But now, he obviously sounded really hacked off, even worse than most other people would be if you shouted into their ear. Ron, on the other hand, assumed that he was doing the right thing, as his voice didn't drop in volume.

"RON—WEASLEY!!!" he hollered as Ginny cringed and covered her ears again. Harry was going to get into trouble for this. "I'M—A—FRIEND—OF—HARRY'S—FROM—SCHOOL!!!"

Bad idea, Ginny thought. She already knew that the entire Dursley family hated anything to do with magic. Before she could get to her brother to shut him up, she heard Mr. Dursley's reply.

"THERE IS NO HARRY POTTER HERE!!!" Harry's uncle roared, causing Ron to drop the phone in shock. He stared at it in confusion as the man continued to shout, "I DON'T KNOW WHAT SCHOOL YOU'RE TALKING ABOUT!!! NEVER CONTACT ME AGAIN!!! DON'T COME NEAR MY FAMILY!!!"

Ginny sighed and rolled her eyes as Ron hurriedly hung up. Suddenly she felt a pang of terror as the scar on the back of her neck began to itch terribly. She scratched at it absently and wondered why she felt afraid. The itching was nothing new, as her scar had been itchy for most of the summer, but she didn't have anything to be afraid of, right?

As the sun slowly began to set, its red-orange glow illuminated a small shape sitting high in the branches of a huge oak tree. Her red hair sparkled in the light, contrasting beautifully with the green leaves, while her face was hidden in shadow. She sat motionless, her mind obviously far away.

Besides that one incident with the telephone, Ginny had felt down all summer. She smiled and joked with her family as usual after her first couple weeks of brooding, but her heart wasn't in it. Her fake smiles and laughter seemed to easily convince her mother and father, even though she had believed at first that they, of all people, would easily see straight through her. Ron, however, she knew wouldn't be a problem. He was too thick to notice that something was wrong with her. She fooled the twins for the most part, though it was more difficult to get it past them. She fooled Percy easily, since he wasn't paying attention to...well...anybody at all except his girlfriend. She believed that she had managed to convince Charlie that everything was fine, though he'd given her a few strange looks from time to time.

And then there was Bill. She sighed as she thought of her oldest brother. Despite the fact that she hardly saw him, despite the fact that he usually lived and worked miles and miles away and rarely had time to visit, he always saw straight through her lies. He always knew how she really felt and what she was really thinking. So it was no surprise that he'd asked her what was wrong several times since he'd come back for a visit last week.

She was very far from being okay. She felt like she didn't belong in her family any more. She felt cut off from everyone. While they were talking and laughing, she couldn't bring herself to feel as they did. She joined in as much as she could, but only half-heartedly. Bill had noticed this and had mentioned it to her several times in private, though she had always managed to deflect his questions and even lie with a straight face.

Tom had always been a good liar.

She sighed again as she watched the Burrow from her tree. She really didn't know where she belonged any more.

"Hey, little one." She looked down to see Bill standing on the ground below her. "Time for dinner."

She tried to smile as she jumped down from the tree, but she knew she wasn't fooling him. She never could.

Bill watched silently as his baby sister jumped down from the tree, landing on the ground with catlike grace. When she stood up and looked at him, he shivered slightly. Her eyes were not the same innocent, wide eyes he had seen during the last summer when he came to visit. When she gazed at him, he felt uncomfortably like she was boring into his very soul, as if she could read him like an open book. He glanced away and watched as she started wandering listlessly towards the house.

He used to get along really well with his little sister, playing with her and keeping an eye on her as she grew up. He would never admit it to anyone, but she was his favorite sibling of the lot. They had trusted each other completely, always coming to each other if they had any problems. Ginny had asked him for advice many times, about everything from school assignments to dealing with her other older brothers. He'd asked her for advice a couple of times as well. She had been a pretty insightful ten-year-old, after all. She had never been able to lie to him, and he'd thought that she never would.

But now, things were different. She wasn't his little kid sister any more. She had been forced to grow up, forced to witness true evil, and it had changed her drastically. She was no longer a child. She never would be again.

A tear fell from his eye, but he quickly wiped it away and followed his sister back to the Burrow. He silently mourned the loss of her childish innocence as he went inside.

Ginny could tell without looking back at him that her eldest brother saw straight through her deception, but she couldn't do anything about it except deflect his questions with half-truths. She really wanted to tell him all about it, to have him comfort her in the way that only a big brother can, but she felt as if she couldn't trust him. She wasn't sure if she could trust anybody ever again.

Tom had done much more than merely showing her horrible things and forcing her to grow up. She had come to trust him completely, more than she had ever trusted anybody including her own family. She had told him all of her deepest, darkest secrets (which seemed quite a bit less deep and dark now) and shared the most intimate details of her life, dreams, and nightmares. She had told him about her crush on Harry, about her fear of not living up to her family's expectations...everything. She bared her soul for him, and he betrayed her. He corrupted her, violating her mind and soul in a way that left her unable to ever fully recover.

"WE WON!!!"

Ginny blinked as she opened the front door to hear her father's jubilant exclamation. Looking up, she saw him reading a letter with a huge smile on his face. Her eyebrows vanished into her hair when she saw it was from the Daily Prophet.

"We won the grand prize! Seven hundred galleons!"

Oh, that, Ginny realized. She had completely forgotten that her dad entered that contest in the Daily Prophet. She hadn't really been paying attention that day. She was a little preoccupied lately, ever since she woke up in the Chamber of Secrets...

She shook her head. There I go again, she thought. I'm sick of pitying myself! I'm sick of crying about it! Go away, she told her memories of the past year. Go away and stop bothering me!

She took a moment to put a convincing smile on her face and decided that she might actually be able to meet his eyes for once. She hadn't looked straight at anybody's eyes in over a month, now. So she looked up and caught his gaze for a moment, and flash!

Images, emotions, thoughts not her own, all played across the surface of her mind. Suddenly she knew exactly how her dad wanted to celebrate winning. She knew that he'd be spending a little more time with their mum. She knew that the kids would be going to bed early, and that there would be a silencing charm around their bedroom throughout the night. She saw what he wanted to do with his wife, and what he had done before—

She broke eye contact and ran into her room, sobbing uncontrollably as other memories, memories of Tom's, played across her closed eyelids. Disgusting, horrific images flashed by in her head. She knew, without a doubt, that they were what Tom had shown her in the past, while the thoughts she had seen before were her own father's.

She slept even worse than usual that night.

It took Ginny another two weeks to figure out what had happened between her and her father that day, because she was distracted from her thoughts when they left for Egypt a week later. She'd been too busy packing and traveling by the International Floo Network, which is incredibly nauseating. Then it happened again when she looked into a stranger's eyes in the Cairo Floo Junction Point. He was a young man with a beautiful wife, but he was cheating on her with another woman. Then her mind moved on after breaking eye contact to some of Tom's own memories, which horrified her every time she saw them.

She finally realized what was happening about a week into their vacation. She knew why she could see other peoples' darkest memories. It was the darkness within her, the part of her that had been forever corrupted by Tom's influence, reaching out and recognizing the darkness within others. It was a wild, uncontrollable, but very specific type of Legilimency. Once she identified the problem though, it was easy enough to fix.

She could never make eye contact again.

"Ginny?"

She blinked and looked up at her brother Bill, focusing determinedly on his left ear. "What?" she asked. "Sorry, but I wasn't really listening. I have a lot on my mind."

"That's alright," he said kindly. "I was just asking if you were sure about going to the tombs with us today. Some of them can be a mite...disgusting. Terrifying, sometimes."

"I've seen worse," Ginny said confidently, flashing one of the fake smiles that fooled nearly everyone into thinking she was still a little, innocent eleven-year-old girl. Bill was the only person who could see through her deception, and the only person who seemed to understand exactly how much she changed. It was no surprise when he simply nodded and left it at that, walking away with a pained expression.

All nine Weasleys left the inn together to walk to the Pyramids that were visible in the distance. They were quite far away, but nobody really complained. If Bill was right about how cool the tombs really were, everyone agreed that a little exercise was worth it. After a few minutes, they were standing at the foot of a gigantic pyramid.

"The entrances are disillusioned and have weak muggle-repelling charms so that nobody stumbles across them by accident until the cursebreakers are through with the tomb," Bill was explaining as they walked along the side of the pyramid. Finally they stopped at one section of the pyramid that looked just like the rest of it. "All of the cursebreakers have to memorize exactly where the entrance is, or we'd spend an hour looking for it every day, since we're not allowed to break the disillusionment charm..."

Ginny let his words wash over her without really paying attention to what he was saying, and she followed absentmindedly as the whole family walked through the wall like they would through the barrier at King's Cross. When she saw what was inside, she stopped dead and stared.

They were in a large chamber that was strewn with treasure of all kinds. There were gems, precious metals, necklaces, rings, bracelets, and every other kind of jewelry imaginable. In the center was a large sarcophagus.

"Now, there's no need to worry about leftover curses," Bill was saying, though Ginny barely heard him. "This pyramid was cleared last week. However, we're not supposed to take anything at all from it. Feel free to look, but don't touch, and definitely don't take anything out of the Pyramid unless you want to be hit by a nasty anti-thievery curse that we've left intact."

Ginny hid a tiny, but genuine grin as she watched Fred and George sadly pull large amounts of treasure from their pockets to place back where they originally rested. Her Mum was giving them an odd look, as if she were wondering exactly how they'd managed to grab that much stuff within just a few minutes.

"There were some really interesting jinxes on this room and the treasure inside it," Bill whispered to his sister as the rest of the Weasleys looked around in awe. "I took notes on them and thought you might want to take a look. There's some stuff about a few of the other tombs in there too." He grinned as he handed her a small notebook. "You might find something interesting to test out at school. Just promise me you won't tell anyone who you got this from, or Mum will pitch a fit."

Ginny looked up at him with an actual grin on her face. Maybe it wasn't so bad after all, she realized as she flipped through the notebook curiously. Maybe she was all grown up, maybe she couldn't have her childhood back, but she couldn't just let Tom win by ruining the rest of her life. Maybe her life was worth living.

There were no nightmares that night.

"Please?"

Molly Weasley put her foot down. "No, Ginny," she said as the small redhead's face fell. "You will not be going with them!"

"But I want to see the skele—" Ginny tried to say.

"It is not a sight fit for a little girl like yourself," her mum answered.

"But I'm not a—"

"No means no, young lady! I will not hear another word about it!"

Ginny grimaced as she stomped up to one of the rooms her parents had rented for their stay. She was lucky enough to have her own room, while the rest of her family members were paired up. Her parents had one room, Bill and Charlie had another, the twins had their own, and Ron and Percy had a fourth. While she and her mum were staying in town, the rest of the family was going to see a tomb. Bill had let slip that this one had mutant skeletons with extra limbs and heads due to the curses that used to be there, and Molly Weasley had overheard. She decided that she didn't want to see such a gruesome sight, and despite Ginny's great interest in the cursed skeletons, her mum made her stay behind as well.

The diminutive redhead laid a sheet of parchment on the desk in the room and sat down while thinking about what to write. She had gotten a present for Harry's birthday while in town, and decided to write a letter to go with it. Finally she put quill to parchment and started to write.

When she finished, she folded up the parchment and slid it into an envelope, then attached it to a small box she had wrapped earlier.

"Well," she said to herself, "that wasn't so hard. Now I just need to try to talk to him face-to-face..."

How did you like it? Once again, constructive criticism is not only welcome, but actively encouraged. This is the last chapter with excessive angst, just to let you know. There's around two more chapters of Summer stuff, and then we go back to Hogwarts.