Author's note: My promise to update every two weeks didn't last very long, huh? I got this up as quickly as possible, this last month has been chaotic. Thank God it's over. Hopefully, the next update will be in two weeks, and I'll try and keep that as fixed as posible.

He who blinded by ambition, raises himself to a position whence he cannot mount higher, must thereafer fall with the greatest loss - Niccolo Machiavelli.

CHAPTER THREE: Ambition

Ginny gestured for Colin to enter ahead of her, mimicking Snape's desire for theatrics.

Colin shook his head and smiled at her antics. He slipped in before her and sat down at the desk Ginny and Jake chose at last year. It was perfectly positioned, far enough from Snape's desk for safety but not so far, that Snape haunted them for daring to try get away. It was on the left of the classroom, convenientely out of sight from Snape's glower. It made Potions slightly more bearable.

Ginny flopped down on a stool and watched Colin. He set out his equipment with deliberate carefulness. He looked the scales and then his hands froze in midair. Something flashed through his eyes, and Colin set the scales down with a quiet thump. The moment passed, both of them ignoring it, because then it might not exist; and the facade Colin created would be perfect. Organised and in control.

Finally everyone arrived; Jake and Mary darting in just before the bell, she was slightly out of breath. They must have ran the entire way, and were rewarded by the worst desk in the classroom, the one right in front of Snape's desk that no one was suicidal enough to choose. It was the only available desk. Jake made a face and slumped down on the desk, grudgingly accepting of his faith. Mary lingered, dark frown on her face, not willing to give in so easily but Snape's black eyes sent her scurrying to the seat.

Snape surveyed the class, lip curled up into a sneer, equally unimpressed as he had been last year. He didn't make a speech this time, just took the register, and started the lesson. He scanned the class, narrowing his selection down to two victims. Ginny felt Colin tense up beside her. He cast a despairing eye at his book, as though hoping that whatever question he might be asked, that the answer was conveniently opened on that particular page.

Ginny didn't have the will to do the same. A sinking feeling developed in her stomach. Fifty-fifty chance. It was going to be her. Inevitable.

"Weasley! What would the Abeotinctan Aromatic be used for?"

Despite her grim acceptance, she couldn't help but start upon hearing her name. She glanced around the dungeon for inspiration. The name didn't sound vaguely familiar, nothing she could attempt to waffle about, and maybe that was for the best. The twenty cauldrons crouched between wooden desks, on which brass scales stood and jars of ingredients, didn't help. Nor did the picked animals floating in jars around the walls. Although they were a great distraction. Her and Jake used to waste class guessing what was in each jar.

Finally, Ginny met Snape's eyes. His trademark sneer was firmly in place. This was her punishment for asking him the question. Children should be seen and not heard, preferably not seen either. Snape lived and would die by that motto. Why did Dumbledore hire him? The man hated children and was a poor teacher. Brilliant maybe, but the most brilliant were really any good of teachers.

"I don't know, sir."

"Didn't even think of opening Magical Drafts and Potions over the summer? Perhaps you think you're special after last year, but not in my class," said Snape. His voice was chilling, cold and cutting.

Ginny took a sharp intake of breath, and from a sudden whoosh, she knew that she wasn't the only one. The whole class was either staring at her or Snape now, Colin alternating between of them. Ginny tried to swallow a lump in her throat, and failing that, just shook her head. She couldn't tear her gaze away from his, drawn into a dark, treacherous lake. There was something that he wasn't saying. Ginny didn't say anything either, not with an audience practically twitching in anticipation for something to gossip about.

Snape broke the silence in the manner of a monk ending his vow of silence after years and just kneeling down and praying. He explained about the Abeotinctan Aromatic. His words were rapid, flowing from his mouth, muffled only by scratching quills, and during an infrequent pause, only silence echoed. The second half of the class was spent preparing the potion.

It was an awkward sort of thing, requiring exact measurements, and Ginny was certain that Snape picked it just to be cruel. Make them suffer. Colin was coping despite his worries, but he had always been good at potions.

Practise, he told Ginny something last year, with a wry smile. "I cook," he elaborated with a modest shrug. "It's very similar..."

"Damn your cooking skills then," said Ginny.

His smile turned sad, and then vanished completely, like it either hurt his heart or facial muscles too much to smile. Ginny didn't say anything, and since then it had become a disgusting habit, always letting things slide because it was easier. Safer.

Colin chopped a root into precise slices. His forehead was crinkled in concentration and each bit fell on the tray into exact pieces. Ginny admired his focus, she couldn't find it in herself.

Colin noticed her stare, and waved vaguely at the potion, that she should bestow more attention on. "Is that ready?"

Ginny peered into its murky depths and shrugged. "As much as it will ever be."

Colin leaned over and with a wooden spoon gave the cauldron's contents a poke. It rippled, and whatever he saw pleased him. Colin added the roots, continuously stirring, and the potion lightened to a dark blue colour, and developed into a sludgier texture. Bubbles danced across the surface, but Ginny quickly reduced the heat. The method was very adamant about not letting the potion boil over, and Ginny wasn't inclined to find out why.

Snape glided by. He spared a glance at their potion and gave a grudging nod, and paused then to criticise Jake and Mary. Jake wasn't bad at potions, at any rate he could follow instructions, but curiosity in this instance really did kill the cat. Experimentation was bad, and substitutions were a lot worse. Jake walked the line, and it made potions class a terrifying but fascinating thing.

"We're mostly done," said Colin.

Ginny glanced down at her notes, and raised an eyebrow. He was right. They must have got ahead somehow, because there was still plenty of time left in class.

"No last minute frantic rush – how wrong," Ginny remarked.

"You have to stop getting distracted by the floating stuff."

"I'm telling you. It's a hand. Honest."

"You need a biology book," Colin scoffed.

"It's been in a jar full of some mad liquid for probably years. Of course it's slighty less…"

"Like a hand?"

"Yeah. Well no. Once upon a time it was a hand, and then it got into Snape's path, and then it was a hand without a body."

"Hands without bodies don't look like that," Colin disagreed. Although his tone was hollow at this recurrent conversation, his eyes were alight, basking in the soothing familiarity. Something to fall back on when the silence became too long. "Haven't you ever seen The Adams Family?"

"Who?"

"It's a TV program...if you say what I will dump that potion over your head," said Colin. He tagged on the last bit hastily but with no little amount of vehemence.

Ginny hid a grin as she pretended to check the temperature, as though reading a thermometer required a certain amount of concentration. She noted the reading and plucked it out of the cauldron, holding it between two fingers and at a distance before placing it down on a desk. "It's twenty-seven."

"Um, Ginny," said Colin almost nervously.

Ginny followed his finger, and saw the thermometer burn through parchment, taking not only the ink away but parchment and all. The desk got a bit singed, but thankfully the burning smell was hidden by the Abeotinctan Aromatics.

Ginny bit her lip, but the damage was done. In the notes that she could salvage, she read something about cleaning off the thermometer. Well, damn.

"I guess this is why it's made in two parts," said Colin. He eyed the cauldron, and then pulled on gloves, visions of it attacking his skin running through his mind. He carefully hoisted up the cauldron. Ginny pulled her eyes away from her ruined notes and grabbed a large beaker from the side of the desk and sieve.

Colin poured the concoction gently into the sieve, hand shaking slightly at the weight of the cauldron. Some of it seeped through into the beaker. Ginny paused, allowing the potion to separate, and patience spent, dumped the sludge in the sieve into her cauldron. The process of separation needed to be carried out several times before Colin's cauldron was empty, and the beaker half-full of the seperant. Ginny scribbled a label on the beaker and dropped it up to Snape's desk, smirking, aware of Colin's struggle with the clinging bits of sludge left in the cauldron.

The watery liquid was an unnecessary component of the potion, but one Snape claimed he had a use for. Ginny didn't want it, not since it destroyed her notes, didn't trust its contents. She placed it gently on the desk.

"Finished?" Snape enquired softly, appearing almost as if by Apparation behind her. His face was expressionless, no sneer now, everything hidden away.

Ginny nodded, hiding a flinch at his sudden appearance. "Just have to tidy up," she added, feeling that she should say something.

Snape nodded, but he was already distracted by the beaker. His black eyes peered into it, long pale fingers twisting the beaker around to examine in from a different angle. Ginny had no illusions that he wasn't carefully cataloguing her every expression and movement.

"Must be because I'm so special, sir," Ginny quipped.

"Unfortunately it doesn't improve your potion making skills in any regard. The consistency of this is deplorable," replied Snape. The words rolled off his tongue effortlessly and with a ruthless indifference.

"It fulfils its function," Ginny maintained. She shifted from foot to foot, arms crossed defensively in front of her chest. She stared at it too, but couldn't see whatever Snape did. She didn't have that expertise.

"By being barely adequate? That merely leads to incompetence. Your ambition?"

"I could only dream."

"Yet the very substance of the ambitious is merely the shadow of a dream," Snape quoted. He replaced the beaker on his desk, his attention on Ginny now, as if he thought his words might impress her.

Ginny arched an eyebrow at what surely must be a Slytherin motto. Very poetic. She didn't have a motto, but she could quote. Dad got a calendar, one with a quote for every day, and despite the superior amusement displayed by everyone else; they couldn't help but be attracted to the peculiar Muggle device. Pages ripped off to see the next inspiring or wry quote.

"Nothing truly valuable arises from ambition or from a mere sense of duty, it stems rather from love and devotion towards men and towards objective things," Ginny quoted, wracking her mind for the exact wording of a page that flitted away in the wind years ago.

"A man's worth is no greater than the worth of his ambitions."

"Most people would succeed in small things if they were not troubled with great ambitions."

"Something small like a potion?"

A beat passed, and Ginny scrambled to edge out of the corner Snape backed her into. "Perhaps I feel that this potion is something major and important, because my priorities aren't distorted by ambition. He who sacrifices his conscience to ambition burns a picture to obtain the ashes."

"When you go in search for honey you must expect to be stung by bees."

Ginny saw the back of Snape's eyes, looked beyond the abyss and saw the brown rim. A prettier way of saying the end justifies the means. The exact way Tom Riddle operated, the way every bad person seemed to, and despite his mean demeanour, Ginny didn't think that Snape was bad. Dumbledore saw something in him. Believed that Snape wasn't like that, and it was good enough for her.

Very quietly she said, "Vaulting ambition, which o'erleaps itself and falls on the other side."

Tom mentioned the play to her, and to impress him Ginny went off and found it. That was the easy part. Reading it wan an entirely different matter although she did get a sense of glee reading the witches' scenes. The Wyrd Sisters. The band probably hadn't read the play, but she appreciated the irony anyway.

She didn't wait to see Snape's reaction, just turned away and rejoined Colin who was still cleaning up. She grabbed his notes, and proceeded to rewrite them out. She didn't meet his eyes, because that might encourage him to ask what that was about, and to be honest, Ginny wasn't sure either.

And now she had to urge to reread Macbeth. Set things straight in her head, reclaim any thoughts that Tom Riddle might have poisoned, but mostly just to look at it from a different context. She might understand it this time.

Colin remained quiet. When Ginny risked a furtive glance to her side, he was absorbed in his Potions textbook. His yellow highlighter hovered in the air, darting down occasionally to highlight a sentence It was counterproductive. The bits that stood out to Ginny the most were the non-highlighted ones, but this method worked for Colin. Ginny thought that maybe he just liked using the Muggle object seeing as he was forbidden from writing essays in Biro. He complained continuouisley after the novelty of a quill wore off in first year.

Even now, his notes were in Biro. Snape didn't say a word to him about that, somehow a silent truce had been reached. As long as Snape didn't have to read anything written by Biro, he wouldn't complain. Everyone was happy.

Ginny returned to the notes. If she didn't finish it in class it would be work for tonight. Her quill scribbled rapidly across the page, only pausing to be dipped into ink, and then it was off again. Ginny barely reflected on the words. It was just some potion to remove permanent ink. She had a similar store bought version in her bag, nothing particularly noteworthy. Unless she wanted to get a tattoo and remove it before going home so Mum would never find out, but Ginny didn't want a tattoo. She already had one to mar her body.

Ginny's quill stopped moving. She rolled her eyes, the obvious solution dawning on her. If Colin witnessed the byplay in her head, he had a right to repeat his favourite handicap saying. She could remove the barcode. It would be no problem with the freshly-brewed strong potion. It was so fresh that it hadn't finished brewing, it needed to be stored overnight. She could easily take some. Snape would never know. She only needed a bit.

Ginny nodded, confirming her plan, and returned to the notes, with a half eye on Jake's dangerously simmering potion. She edged away just in case. Colin caught her eye and grinned, before he returned to frantically cramming. A small smile remained on his face. He wasn't getting any closer to Jake either. He saw what the potion did to Ginny's notes.

Hopefully the finished version wouldn't do that to her.

Ginny needed to do more research.

Ginny may have quoted Einstein but she didn't know who he was. Science was a foreign concept. She never embraced Muggle life, preferring the Wizarding World. She had little interest in mobiles, laptops and other Muggle inventions, and only had vague notions of what exactly they were. Couldn't use them, and had little desire either.

She aslo didn't know who Newton was , or why his three laws were fundamentally important. Some wizards smirked at his notions of gravity and Muggles' limitations, but Ginny was oblivious. She was oblivious to a lot of things.

She couldn't have known that the light breeze would have carried her doodle of the barcode out the window and into the dirty London streets. And if she did, she wouldn't have suspected that someone might have picked it up. It was even more improbable that the person could read the barcode. He knew a 486 once. The chances were a million to one, but luck was a fickle thing, and Ginny appeared to suffer it from both extremes.

Despite the statistical improbability (which Ginny didn't know about either, not at twelve), that course of events occurred. After years of anonymity, some knew that she still existed. An outside spectator might comment on the removal of the barcode being an act of freedom, and the discovery of the written one a form of slavery.

For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.

Perhaps she should read up on Newton. Although it would not have prevented the chain of events.

An unlucky coincidence.

Ginny half turned to eye her bare neck in the mirror. The black lines were gone. The only evidence of their former existence, was the pink tinge on her neck, but that could be written off as light sunburn. It hurt more than that, she had to sleep on her side otherwise the pillow pressed uncomfortably against her raw neck. It was gone; that was the important thing. No need to obsess over its painful removal. Ginny's fingers brushed against her neck slightly, and she gasped. Still sore.

Nonetheless, she grabbed her hairbrush, and ran it through her mane of hair. She carefully untangled her unruly hair and tied it up in a high pony. It took several attempts to smooth bumps out of hair, while holding the hair back, but Ginny managed. Ginny smiled brightly at her reflection and left the bathroom.

"Good morning," Mary mumbled through a yawn, but she was the only one who acknowledged Ginny's presence. Mary stared despairingly at her bed, trying to figure out how to smooth the bedcovers from the disarray they were in.

Emma darted into the barely vacant bathroom, grabbing it before Kate managed to pull herself out of bed. Alice had them all bet. She was already on her way out of the dormitory with a chirpy, "The early bird gets the worm."

"The second mouse gets the cheese," Ginny yelled after her. She rolled her eyes at Alice's back.. The girl made morning people look grumpy and tired. It was unnatural.

Alice stopped and half turned to give Ginny a horrified look. "Do you know how much fat is in cheese?"

"No?"

"Well either do I, but it's like fifty percent or something. I think I should cut it out altogether actually," Alice trailed off. She envisioned herself to be a twenty-stone monster, and was planning a strict diet. In all actuality, she was tiny, even Ginny towered over her in terms of height. Vertically challenged, Jake dubbed her, and in the secrecy of the Gryffindor second year girls' dormitory, she was also horizontally challenged.

"Does that mean you can have cheesecake?" Kate wondered. Her bedcovers were still pulled over her head, and muffled her voice. She was the anti-Alice, determined to sleep all those hours Alice missed.

"There isn't cheese in cheesecake," said Mary. A trace of doubt lingered in her confident words. None of them called her on it, because while they all dug into delicious cheesecake, none of them ever considered how the House Elves actually made it. The earliness of the morning also robbed Mary of the memory that House Elves liked making beds, and she was stealing their fun.

Out of habit Ginny made her bed. Mum screamed bloody murder when any of them forgot to make their beds. It was easier to endure than the 'Do you think I have nothing better to be doing with my time?' rant/lecture. It only took a minute, although Ron liked grumbling about it.

"Maybe the word itself is fattening," said Kate. She poked out from the warm of her bed, a wicked gleam in her brown eyes. "Cheese, cheese, cheese," she chanted.

Alice clamped her hands over her ears. "I'm not listening," she shrieked, and bounced off down the stairs, the sound of Kate screeching cheese as loudly as possible, following her exit.

"CHEEEEEEEEEEEESSSSSSSSSEEEEEEEEEE."

There was a beat, and they all avoided looking into each other's eyes, knowing that if they started giggling now they wouldn't be able to stop, and they had Transfiguration first thing. McGonagall wouldn't approve, and had no qualms about deducting points from her own house for any minor event.

"Good God woman, why promote cheese when you could become a banshee," muttered Emma, emerging from the bathroom. She shook her head, completely bewildered about why they were talking about cheese.

It set them all off. Emma hardly had the right to complain about loudness. The girl was a walking high-pitched squeal. Her and Colin made a terrifying duo, and oh boy, that had been a painful encounter. Noise pollution at its worse. They yelled at each other at a volume that couldn't be natural they were so caught up in excitement about flying back in first year.

Emma rolled her eyes, and grabbed her book bag off her bed (dutifully unmade to satisfy the House Elves satisfaction, but mainly her laziness), swung it over her shoulder, regarded them all for a moment, and shook her head again in incomprehension. "I'm surrounded by crazy people," she wailed.

Ginny recovered admirably for her giggling fit, took a deep breath and fought off impeding giggles. She actually wanted to eat breakfast instead of sitting there cackling and looking like she actually was possessed this year. She grabbed her bag, and left with Emma, in twenty minutes or so the other two girls would bring up the rear.

"You hair looks great," said Emma. "You should wear it up more often. How come you don't?"

"Thanks," said Ginny, unable to hide her smile at the compliment. Her hair swung nicely, swishing off her neck. Her neck felt cool, and despite the word cheese being fattening, it almost felt like she lost ten pounds by removing the barcode. "Just hassle in the morning, one bathroom between five doesn't make a good beauty routine.

"We should rob the third years, there's only the three of them," mused Emma. If Ginny tried to sum up Emma in one word, it would squeaky. It should have been irritating but she just became immune to it and basked in Emma's loud hyperness. When everything became tense and dark last year, she was a breath of fresh air.

"Maybe," Ginny hedged. From what she heard from Ron and Hermione, Lavender and Padma were probably worse than the five of them put together. Inevitably it would get worse. Ginny didn't bother with cosmetics or creams. Six older brothers. She was used to limited bathroom time, and knew what mockery she'd have to endure. There was plenty of time for that stuff later. Why she'd want to wear it? Harry wouldn't notice her anyway. Just a waste of effort. She didn't care what anyone else though.

As was to be expected neither Jake or Colin commented on her hairstyle, although Jake did shoot her a few sidelong looks, aware that she looked different somehow but not bothered to figure out what or how or why. It wasn't an ambition of his to become a professional hairdresser, and thus not a concern.

Each to their own ambitions, and apparently that involved a methodical search for the invisible creatures they saw. Jake actually checked a book on the subject out of the library, his dark eyes browsing through it, and perhaps most terrifyingly, they were completely calm and sane now. His façade was back up again. Always cool and collected.

Ginny joined Jake. She peered over his shoulder at the book. He jokingly mentioned that the Sorting Hat flipped a coin to figure out whether to put him in Slytherin or Gryffindor once. No doubt ambition burned deep in his stomach. She'd make sure he didn't fall into the same trap as Tom Riddle, Snape and herself.

Save one life from the same reoccuring mistake.