CHAPTER TWO: 1993

Ginny's life was over. It was completely, officially over. Her only options now were to flee the country or to drown herself in the lake.

She was trying her absolute best to become invisible in her little corner of the common room, but practically everyone there kept stealing her sideways glances before sniggering with their friends. While she had been retreating to Gryffindor Tower, a group of Slytherin girls had flung a pickled toad into her hair. "We heard it's your favorite color!" they called after her as she had sprinted the rest of the way to the Fat Lady in tears.

As time went on, the students around her eventually got bored with laughing at her humiliation and resigned to just ignoring her, which is how she preferred it.

But then, of course, the twins happened.

The portrait hole swung open, and with a swooping sensation in her stomach, Ginny saw Harry climb through it, followed closely by Ron and Hermione. Harry, who today seemed to be the only boy in the whole school not laughing at her, a fact she had been desperately holding onto.

"THERE HE IS!" boomed George's voice, getting the whole room's attention again, "Romeo himself! You put something in your hair, Harry? It's looking darker than ever, wouldn't you say, Gred?"

"As a blackboard, Forge!" exclaimed Fred, clapping a hand on Harry's shoulder, "our future brother-in-law is looking positively divine!"

Harry shrugged off Fred's hand and his face turned the same shade of scarlet that Ginny was sure she was sporting herself. Her now-constant embarrassment and fear mixed with guilt over embarrassing him as well.

Then Harry, looking around for an escape, locked eyes with Ginny across the room, and she forgot how to breathe.

Acting on instinct, she bolted out of her armchair and ran up the stairs to the first year girls dormitory, the sound of the twins' duet of her "poetry" carrying up the staircase after her. She slammed the door shut behind her and felt her eyes welling with tears, grateful that the room was empty.

How could she be so bloody stupid? Who the hell wants to be compared to pickled toads!? The idea of the singing valentines sounded so grand and romantic when Professor Lockhart had announced the idea. Ginny thought if she could break the ice in the most dramatic way possible then just talking to him would be no big deal, but now she was more sure than ever that Harry would never see her as anything but Ron's annoying little sister. Not to mention how the whole school now knew her as a dim-witted fangirl.

She crossed the room and threw herself down onto her bed and sobbed into her pillow. But as much as the embarrassment hurt, she clutched onto it, calling herself all matter of terrible names, because as long as she thought about the embarrassment of the poem, that would stop her from thinking about….

The diary.

Through some cruel twist of fate from a universe bent toward making her suffer, Harry had somehow found the diary. And if he started writing in it, and Tom responded, Harry could learn all of the secrets she poured into that stupid book. As friendly as Tom had seemed at first, betraying her deepest desires just to be cruel now sounded like something he would do. If Harry thought she was just Ron's annoying sister now, she couldn't imagine what he would think of her if Tom told him about Ginny practicing signing her name as "Ginny Potter."

And even worse than that, the diary was dangerous. If Harry started using it and Tom got his claws into him, then it might be Harry who's waking up covered with blood with gaps in his memory. Harry was in harms way and it was all her fault, all because of her stupid daydreams and insecurities.

You could warn him. Tell him the Truth. A cold voice from the back of her mind mocked her.

...No. She wished she was strong enough, but she couldn't. If anyone found out that she was responsible for the attacks, she would be expelled, and her life would be ruined.

She had only one option: she had to get the diary back. She had to steal it back, then never open it again.

…..Okay, she had to write in it one more time to find out if Tom had told Harry anything, then she'd hide it away forever.

Her tears had stopped now, her insides filling with a cold resolve now that she had a goal. She rolled onto her back, and scowled up at the canopy as she started to form a plan.

Hermione's fists clenched as she saw Fred and George continue to make their jokes, even as their sister bolted across the room and up the stairs and Harry looked like he wanted to sink into the floor.

"Shall we harmonize, dear brother?" asked Fred.

"Oh yes, let's," agreed George.

They started singing in a duet, "His eyes are as green as a fresh pickled toad! His hair is as dark as a blackboard!"

Harry turned to Ron and Hermione, trying his best to ignore the twins. "I think I'll head to bed early tonight," he said shortly, and he quickly walked across the common room and disappeared up to the boys' dormitories.

Hermione turned to glare as hard as she could at Ron, who was laughing at the twins' antics. When he noticed her staring, his smile instantly dropped and he looked terrified.

"Will you two show just a bit of tact?" she hissed at the twins. They stopped their singing, but kept smirking, not looking at all impressed with her.

"Oh don't be so dramatic, Hermione," said Fred, "We're just performing our brotherly duty to take the mickey."

"I honestly don't know what she was expecting, with a stunt like that," said George.

"Oh I don't know," said Hermione scathingly, "Maybe for members of her own family to not meet her sincere gesture with flippant sarcasm! I mean, would it actually, literally kill you two to not turn every human emotion into an ironic joke!?"

Fred shrugged, "It's certainly possible, we're never tried it before."

"But why take the risk, really? Best to be safe," said George.

Hermione saw Ron chuckle again out of the corner of her eye and rounded on him. "Now, I expected this kind of nonsense from them, but I thought you would be kinder. I'm disappointed in you, Ron."

For a moment, Ron looked as though he had been run through, but then he furrowed his brow at her. "I don't understand why you care so much, Hermione. You don't even know Ginny, and you usually hate all the Valentine's Day stuff."

"Yes — well," Hermione stammered. She wasn't entirely sure herself why she cared so much. "She took a risk, didn't she? She was honest, and I respect that. I mean, I certainly wouldn't have been brave enough to—" she stopped mid-sentence as she caught herself.

Ron raised his eyebrows. "To what? Send a gaudy singing message via dwarf? Why, you've got some poor bloke you want to inflict that on?"

"What!? No, of course not!" she stammered, looking away from him as she felt her face get hot. And she didn't. She definitely, absolutely didn't.

"Just lighten up," said Ron, waving his hand, "I swear, you're acting like a girl."

Hermione spun toward Ron again, her nostrils flaring and her eyes narrowed in rage this time.

"Oh, yes, Ronald, silly me, just PERISH that thought!" she shouted in his face, then turned around and stormed off towards her own dormitory, leaving Ron looking very nonplussed behind her.

Harry lay on his bed, staring up at the canopy and wondered how long it would take for everyone to stop finding this whole situation hilarious. He had to admit that the whole thing was objectively humorous, he might be able to laugh about it one day, but not today.

It was really just the last line that had gotten under his skin. Rhymes about pickled toads were harmless fun, but having a singing dwarf refer to him as "the hero who conquered the Dark Lord'' in front of the whole school was just going to fuel the image people had of him of a bigheaded celebrity, the image that Lockhart and Colin were already painting. And of course, Malfoy of all people had to be there for it. He had probably spread a rumor by now that Harry had sent the valentine to himself.

However, he couldn't bring himself to be annoyed at Ginny the way he got with Colin. The look on her face during the whole fiasco told him that she regretted it even more than he did and he was mostly just worried about her and hoping that she could get over her crush.

And there seemed to be hope that she would. That was an upside to the last line of that poem, one that he was trying to focus on. It told him that Ginny didn't actually fancy him, she was just swept up in all the stories people told about him, like Colin. So if she got to know him better as time went on and he spent more time with the Weasleys, she would realize that he was just an ordinary person and nothing special, and she would be able to relax and talk around him.

He supposed this was a better reason for the school to be talking about him than the possibility that he was the Heir of Slytherin. He also supposed that the fiasco could have gone worse, if Malfoy had run off with the diary.

Harry frowned and sat up. That was another reason he had run up to the dormitory so early. He couldn't stop thinking about how the diary had been covered in spilled ink, but the pages remained blank.

He got up and began digging in his bag until he found it. He sat back down on his four-poster and began to flick through the pages….