Author's Note: You thought Ginny was powerful before...check this out.... 3 please review you guys make me soo happy!!!
***
It took a moment before Ginny knew she was breathing.
"I'm alive?" It was a serious question, she had no idea, and she received no answers. Then she found her eyes were open, and everyone was exactly where they'd been a second ago before the spell had hit.
The thing was, they were frozen.
It was as though a lock was around her. She could move, a little, but not far from the spot where she stood, the green beam suspended eerily in front of her ready to take her. Draco- his face a picture of pain and anguish- was still frozen; crumpled behind her shielding stance. No one, not even Bella in her maniacal half-cursing form, was able to move, or hear, or even was aware that Ginny was alive. She came to the conclusion that time had somehow, and god knows how, frozen in the moment before she died.
"Hello." Ginny's eyes snapped into focus.
"Holy crap!" She was staring at herself, "You're…how are you….no…you can't be, what, I mean how the- what are you?" She babbled, desperately trying to pull herself together as she looked her exact double.
"I'm you." Ginny gasped, then her eyes narrowed slightly. If she wasn't dead, well, then she was up for believing anything, but there was something wrong.
"No you're not…" She said slowly. "Your eyes are darker, your hair is darker, you're a little taller than me and you don't have any freckles." Ginny thought it was necessary to point these things out. The thing smiled.
"No you're right." She lowered herself to the floor, crossed her legs and tucked her hair behind her ears. "But I am a part of you. Not a part you were ever meant to have." Ginny too dropped to the floor; she reached her arm out to find it went right through the thing in front of her.
"You're not real." She insisted,
"Then how are you talking to me?" Ginny shrugged and stared at the floor,
"A part I wasn't meant to have?"
"A part Tom Riddle hid inside you. Now I am out, it's your choice about what happens next." Ginny swallowed hard,
"There is a next?"
"Oh yes, you're not dead yet, not for a few seconds anyway. A few seconds of their time." She waved a hand at the frozen spectators. "So what happens to me and you and all of them is now your call."
"Bugger."
-*-
Ginny was silent for quite a while.
"So you are a part of Tom?"
"And a part of you." Ginny paused and her brain began to slowly tick back into action,
"Can you…die?" The thing that looked like her let a slow smile creep onto her face,
"Now you're getting the idea." Ginny held her head.
"If I didn't jump, they would have killed Draco-"
"You wouldn't have let it happen. You'd never 'not' have jumped." She looked at herself in slight annoyance.
"I'm not seeing the positive- in, how ever long, this few seconds will end, I'll stand back up and put myself between the jet of light and Draco and then bang, flash, sound of rushing wind and no more Ginny." She frowned, meeting eyes with her second self. "Now I really think I am getting it." She whispered. "We stand up, we jump in front of the beam of light and-," She faltered. "We die?" The spirit-Ginny stood up and looked down at her. She turned to face the beam of light.
"It'll hit me first wont it?" She turned back and raised an eyebrow.
"You're spirit." Real-Ginny was exasperated. She stood up and punched a fist right through spirit-Ginny's stomach, "The spell will go right through you. Unless you can explain something I don't know."
"What has Harry told you about how his mum died?"
"She used herself as a shield so Harry couldn't die. Oh…" She sucked breath in sharply, "You'd do that for me?"
"I am you. Course I would." They exchanged an identical smile.
"That just leaves me with the small problem of me and Draco and everybody else defenceless and Voldemort and Bellatrix bearing down upon us. Wow, that's depressing." Ginny's smile waned a little.
"Think Ginny, think." Her other-self's voice became more commanding, reminding her a little of her late headmaster. She told herself to think like Dumbledore and Harry, always a plan, always a key bit of information…always something that Tom Riddle had over looked; and above all, always-
"Love! That's just it: love. He loved me when he gave me himself, gave me us…" The other-Ginny nodded excitedly, and Ginny began to see that it reflected whatever feelings were her own, it wasn't real at all. "So if you die then…"
"Kill the heart. No heart, no beat, no life and that basically means no Voldemort." Ginny sighed,
"But you're a metaphorical heart, that can't really work, can it?"
"This is magic. Everything 'works' if you believe hard enough. Are you ready?" Ginny barely had time to catch her breath,
"Ready? For what?" But time was coming back and the thing in front of her was no more than a mirage. The scene around her wobbled for a fraction of a second and she was numb with fright; Ginny saw the jet of green burst back into life with a scream. Everything else around her was so noisy it was painful and all she could do was yell her best hope,
"PROTEGO!" Her lungs itched for lack of breath and there was a second of stillness before the explosion. Ginny's arms were wide, stood sacrificial, in front of Draco's helpless body. "Oh my god…" She whispered.
-*-
After the stillness there was a burst of light, like another sun had exploded into being, radiating right from Ginny. Her hair flew back like it always did after a powerful spell, and she felt a nice rush than she'd been expecting. Then she laughed. Just as she caught Bella's shocked, horrified face as the green spell hit its first, unintentional target. Her 'audience' gave a unified gasp. The other-Ginny appeared in front of her, she was her own shield, a white, glowing, patronus-like force that that absorbed the green and turned it golden. A beautiful, exciting mystery that caught everyone spellbound, even Ginny. Then other-Ginny and Tom, in unison, let out an identical and horrifying scream that Ginny felt torn from her own heart. She'd never burnt or hurt this badly as all three fell to the floor.
Only one of the three managed to rake in a breath again. Other Ginny lay crippled in an odd pile on the floor, Tom sprawled, still looking shocked at defeat, his face said; it can't be! And Ginny, through all her agony, amazement, horror and elation felt a realisation.
"It can be…" She hadn't meant to say it out loud. She looked at the strange phenomenon that was herself dead before her. "I'm even more powerful than I thought."
"Ginny?" A very shaky Draco was getting up behind her. He raised a curious hand and laid it on Ginny's arm. "Gin, you're impossible."
The sight of his stunningly grey eyes made her own cry as she gently touched his face, disbelieving. "And you're alive." She could finally sigh.