Disclaimer: If you recognise it, it's not mine.

AN: Another wait! But in the meantime my beta has come up with some astonishing Harry Potter music videos – be sure to check them out at her youtube page, linked on my profile (for some reason this chapter won't let me post the links) - particularly Lucky You, which is in my opinion one of the best Tom/Ginny fanvids out there. If you need a laugh after all the creepiness, check out the vid Housing the Enemy.

In Print

Families were pouring in from everywhere, inundating Hogsmeade with a flood of worried newspaper-clutchers. Dumbledore was billeting them in the village because he had not seen fit to let them into the castle, and this worried Hermione. The paper had turned everything upside down; yesterday this was their terrible secret, today Percy stared at the pictures of his sister and Tom Riddle and said nothing to anyone. Poor bloody Percy, Hermione thought. Poor bloody Penny; Hermione remembered looking with her into her hand mirror, peering around the corner at a great yellow-eyed Death. That horrible voice coming from Ginny. The way Ginny hadn't said a word when they'd heard what Percy had found in the bathroom of his flat.

It was so real now. That was what Hermione was still trying to grasp; it was now a fact of life that Lord Voldemort was back and that Ginny was with him. It was a fact of news, even, and somehow seeing it in print made her very frightened.

She smoothed the paper and skimmed it again, for the umpteenth time. It felt like she could recite it under exam conditions – after the facts of his return and capture of Ginny were laid out on the front page, Tom Riddle made a cool, reasonable argument for a totally insular wizarding world. His demands for education, community, and pride were so sane and logical that by the time he suggested stealing young witches and wizards from Muggle families as soon as they were born, as they'd done in the old days, you had almost forgotten that he was completely barking mad and led an army of masked psychopaths.

And Ginny was with him.

But what Hermione thought of that now, she couldn't really be sure.

"They say he's You-Know-Who, but I don't know, I don't think he's scary or weird. He's hot. And this stuff he's saying sort of makes sense, when you think about it – I mean, frankly, Muggle stuff is crap. Getting rid of all that wouldn't be a huge loss, if you ask me."

"You sound like a Slytherin! Go join your friends, go on – "

The girls Hermione overheard were scared and trying to disguise it with their good-natured teasing and squealing, but there was a thoughtful undertone in the first girl's voice Hermione didn't like. Muggle stuff was kind of ugly; she did admit that, especially when you came back to it after a school year among the lovely and strange things at Hogwarts. But to Hermione it was stuff that meant home. Things like the telephone, and batteries, and her mother's credit cards, and fluorescent lighting. Going to the supermarket, and using plastic bags – just the home stuff that she'd grown up with, had had a reasonably happy childhood with. Maybe if she'd been in Harry's position . . .

Which brought her to another thought. Hogwarts is my home, Harry had said to her once, late at night. You know who else said that? Tom Riddle. He grew up in an orphanage. He stopped killing people with the basilisk because if Hogwarts closed, he would have had to go back there.

And she'd said, answering the question he hadn't asked, You're not like him. You've got a home, here, at the Burrow. Ron had brought Harry home, and the Weasleys had adopted him, and they were his family.

But that had made her think, even then, that the summer Ron had brought Harry home, Ginny had brought someone else. It wasn't a very pleasant thought then. It was very, deeply unpleasant now, when Harry lay silent and staring on the bed Ginny had slept in, and the Weasleys were Tom Riddle's family by incontestable legal right.

In Harry's place like a changeling, a half-blood descendant of Salazar Slytherin, with a pureblood wife whom he'd married in a Muggle ceremony, giving her his Muggle name, drawing her into his crazy scheme for wizarding purity. The two worlds were inextricably entwined; he must be a madman to think that anyone could ever have separated them. A madman, yes, but it was a persuasive and, in its cold-blooded logic, even tempting madness. In the old days they'd stolen wizarding babies from Muggle families. Sometimes they'd leave a Squib, or a transfigured simulacrum of a dead child, or just an empty cradle. And that wasn't right, or reasonable, in any way. Of course as a Muggle-born witch (or a Mudblood witch, she reminded herself, in Draco Malfoy's voice,) Hermione knew what it was like to feel like a changeling. Being bullied at school because she was smart, and the strange things that sometimes happened then that frightened her, and her parents' fear and her own confusion about what on earth was wrong with her. She could only imagine what it must have been like for people whose parents hadn't been worried and anxious to help. Or who, like the Dursleys, hated and punished displays of magic. That was what it must have been like for everyone in the old days. When witches were burned or hanged or beheaded.

But it was still an unconscionable practice, Hermione told herself, and it was – well, not a Slytherin thing to think, particularly, but certainly a dangerously plausible one. A Slytherin thing. You sound like a Slytherin. Funny how they all did that, using the house names as convenient shorthand for uglier words – evil; pompous; plodding; reckless.

Statistically, Hermione knew, Slytherins had accounted for the majority of He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named's followers, but it was by a small margin. All the Hogwarts houses had been represented – yes, even good, noble and brave Gryffindor – in fact, Hufflepuffs were the least likely people to be involved in his army. Of course once they signed up they were doggedly loyal til death. But Slytherin and Death Eater were not the interchangeable terms the other houses seemed to think they were.

The bloody map was taking too long; all Hermione could do was sit here and think, waiting for the rest of the Order to arrive, waiting for Dumbledore to call her to his office. So she thought, reluctantly, as everyone in the school was doing, about Ginny.

It had taken a long time for Ginny to become comfortable with Tom Riddle's victims. Sharing her bedroom in the holidays had been incredibly awkward the first year after; she hadn't spoken much to Colin or Justin until the DA was started; she'd never really been easy with Penny or Nearly-Headless Nick ever again. Or Mrs Norris, but then, no one was easy with Mrs Norris.

It had taken Hermione a long time to convince Ginny that she didn't blame her; probably because a small scared part of her did. She dreamt about it sometimes, less often now that it was no longer the only serious attempt that had been made on her life. But disconnected things still popped into her head when she was with Ginny. Thinking about the red paint that said enemies of the heir, beware, and about Ginny scrubbing paint off her hands and not knowing how it got there. Suspicion, probably. And then – reassurance? Something plausible?

Ginny eating cherries in the summer. Hermione thought the stains on her fingers must have reminded her of that red paint, or of ink, because she sat alone with her cherries and wore a thoughtful expression. If Hermione had been Ginny she would have gone to wander around near Harry, like that – with her lips dark and her eyes distant like that, even the densest boy would have noticed . . . well, something to really notice. But she never did.

Something was wrong there, though Hermione had not been able to place it. But now the Daily Prophet showed her Ginny's distant, cherry-stained look in a series of black-and-white photographs that posed her under the possessive dark shadow of Tom Riddle.

The photos. She didn't know quite what it was about them – some quirk of expression, maybe, or something subtle in the way they moved – but those photos had showed the Weasleys and their friends something far more damaging than the articles had. They were hurt. Hermione was hurt, and didn't know how. They were just pictures of Ginny and a handsome, cold-looking boy framed in a half-circle of robed and masked Death Eaters. But there was a sense of authority to them. With this boy, you could imagine Ginny actually saying those ridiculous things she'd said to Rita Skeeter, and meaning them; even Hermione, who knew first-hand how very good Ginny could be, felt a little cold tingle of doubt. Very much united. A brighter future.

The picture they'd chosen for the front page, though, wasn't quite the same as the others. Mr and Mrs Weasley looked at that one, once they'd seen them all, and never left the papers open at any other page. It was much like the rest, except that while the Dark Lord looked steadily at the camera, Ginny kept looking somewhere to the right, and her eyes never quite made it to the viewers'. Wistfully, maybe, or maybe like she was trying to avoid her parents' gaze. Harry had looked a long time at that one, as though he thought it were going to change. As though she was only really there in the one photo where she didn't look.

Later, in Dumbledore's office, Hermione asked him something she hadn't considered before the morning edition had come out. "Can he be saved?"

"That's an interesting question, Miss Granger. Why do you ask it?"

"I don't know, sir." Half-true.

Dumbledore, who knew half- and full- and three-quarter truths better than anyone, gave her a searching look. "I believe," he said carefully, "that he can be stopped. I suppose that he can, perhaps, be contained, if only for a time. I hope that he can be saved, Miss Granger, but only because I must hope. Do you understand?"

"Yes, sir." At best, a quarter-truth, but his time was precious now.

Hermione left Dumbledore's office without quite knowing what she had come to hear.