Disclaimer: This work is done with due respect to the original creator of the Harry Potter universe, JK Rowling.
Post war, A/U
Cruel Lessons
There are no choices in blindness.
Hurtling as they were through the whirlwind of events, they had each grappled at their surroundings and passed through uncertainty. They did not walk in those days. At the end, what the war had erased was gone forever, and for the living only the dull pain of bereavement remained.
There were no choices in real life.
Ginny knew this, because Tom had told her.
A choice means that every outcome, every thread of possibility is foreseen. It meant no guesses, maybes or vague human divination. A choice is when every single nuance of reality, in every single circumstance—the ripple of every butterfly's wing accounted—was presented well in advance for you, before you select the one predestined thread from the pleated fabric of life, and followed it to its end.
In that world, where you can choose, when people die it is always someone's fault. There is responsibility, blame and credit.
Not in real life.
There are neither choices, nor choosers. There is only hope—painful, desperate hope—and there is exhaustion.
Puppets and lies, Tom had told her, pointing to the shimmering image of hundreds of years of students walking the halls of Hogwarts. Flailing under invisible strings, and so full of hope that everything would turn out for them. Tom used to replay such idle scenes over and over, and laugh at them as if he knew something they did not.
Ginny had known, too, and she had hated Tom for it. There was little of that hate now that she accepted it too. With Voldemort presumed dead; with Harry smiling again, Fred rancid and sallow beneath the earth, mom listless and bereft, Ginny realized the superficiality of choices. For every one of them had made choices—to stay by Harry, to help, to serve, to fight— and yet none of them chose what turned out. She saw this in all the colors and sounds around her, and suddenly those long ago words of her fallen angel crept into her mind again. He had told her.
Like a fish caught and dropped back into the ocean, Ginny felt her spinning world right itself only to find that what she was plunged back into was not water, but an ocean of oil. Reality choked her; its sharp darkness washing everything she saw, and as the paint thickened, it weighed the world down on her.
In quiet moments, she thought she could hear her bones creak.
And it was just one more reason for her to hide; to closet herself, box her emotions and drag through the echoing days of her stifling life, and treasure, in secret, his long-ago words in her darkest of pasts.
Because Tom had always spoken truth, and he was never wrong. Because he had reduced her world, so artistically, to an unfeeling bareness. Because he had known everything, and she understood it all, now; too late.
He had long ago torn through the cozy protection of her brothers and home, and taken her where no puppet had been—to the atom of concepts and the grain of beliefs. He had stretched out her world, inflated it to such a point of clarity, that, now that it was finally sinking in, she could feel it all, elated by so many of her sickly-sweet emotions: her laughter and her lightness, shrinking, it's crumpling corners biting into her skin.
And it was as Tom had said—always, it was as he said— that no amount of chivalry meant anything, in the end. Because when people did not choose, they were chosen for. And when life was nothing but a prearranged hall for the blind man to blunder through, every twist, every turn already set, nothing could mean anything, anymore.
So she blundered on, Ginny. She woke up from a sleepless night, every morning. Smiled her brilliant, meaningless smile every breakfast. She wrote to Harry, little lies; went to class, sat in class, listened to the shallow ripples of a dazed world, and went to the common room. In the common room, she sat and counted time. She counted not the seconds that passed by, or the hour, or her days left until the summer break. In the common room, staring into the infernal pits of the merry fire, she counted her moments, her thoughts, her shadows, since Tom's voice.
And she felt guilty. Each day the weight draped over her like blankets in the summer. She slept with her eyes open, each night and day smudged into one. In class, she dreamed of sleep. At night, she prayed for the day to come. She wrapped the faces of Fred, Lupin, Tonks, Dumbledore and a limp Harry in the arms of Hagrid around her, everywhere she went. In her head, she lived inside the dingy halls of Grimwauld Place, inside the thin, slanted writing that had promised to ward off Tom Riddle.
But when the sun glinted on the horizon, and day and night would not know better, she would delve in deeper, plunge into her guilt, past her shame. And there she would find him again. His voice, his touch, his life. And she would curl herself up, inside that piece of him she still kept, and dream of the choices no one could make.
Tom did not let people inside his head.
He did not have a heart, so his head he fortified jealously. Even the Death Eaters closest to him were never let inside. He trusted no one, because he did not play the games of their world. They were sheep and he was the sun; what need did he have for trust and companionship? Were he a poor man begging on the street, they would not surround him so loyally; were he just another man, or even a man at all, they would not tremble in his presence. Worshiping him—sapping off his notorious anomaly. They only craved him because he was of their origins, but removed. They envied him because his self-excommunication exempted him from the powers that governed their race.
He was a puppet with no strings. He could not allow his secrets to be seen. So he had long closed his mind, and shut tight the gates of his thoughts.
He had no heart, so how was anyone to sneak in?
But he did have a soul: a fragment of a soul, and Ginny had long ago slipped inside that. And once inside, she had crept over his barriers, scaled quietly the brittle and guarded walls, and stepped into his mind. As, with silken words, he had tried to lull her into nothingness, he had thought he was, as always, the master plucking off her old strings and sewing on his own. But having removed her from the world, the only ground she had had to rest her tired feet on had been his essence. And as he fastened her new strings, he tied a knot that bound him eternally to her, as it did her to him.
And people always had a tendency to overlook the littlest Weasley. People had a habit of judging her by her size, her stature and ushering her quickly to the periphery. And Tom... Tom was perfect, he was godly, but to her he was also exactly like every other man in her life. In his arrogance, and bid to dominate, he had woven his web wide and greedy. He had dreamed for so long of reigning over the mighty, that he had overlooked all the pockmarked holes that laced through his silken enclosure. So he had wound around her, presuming his victory early on; but, crawling on her hands and knees, in a cold and fading Chamber, she had slithered through, and left her own mark there.A golden ball of string, to always bring her back.
This was the stuff of magic. Not mastery, but chaos.
Perhaps, he had thought that his strength would win him, like always. Or perhaps he had forgotten that parasites only pinned themselves to the better and stronger; but Ginny lived inside his mind and soul. Even dead, she still kept him alive.
Tom did not forget things often, but perhaps, there had never been any choice.
And now she was a puppet who had breached the caverns of freedom. Cut adrift then sewn to a corpse, she had seen the shadowy existence of the pariah; haunted the cold halls of loneliness- and there she had found the withered remains of his heart.
It had been dead, even then, but that was alright. He had killed it himself, she knew, but that was also alright.
She, too, after so long in the toxic waters, had lost her heart. If there was ever a fault, that too, was his. But it was alright. It was okay because he had never chosen this.
One day, when she closed her eyes at the first blink of light, and sunk within herself, she thought maybe that is why he had told her everything. Because he knew what was going to happen; he had known what he was doing to her. "There are no choices" sounded rather like he had no choice.
And suddenly that idea seemed profound. A phantom beat inside her drew her back to that ancient Chamber where he waited.
He had no choice. It was not his fault. In an absurd sense it was, she thought, an apology.
As the brilliant fingers of the dawn splashed over the brimming horizon, and trialed over the Forbidden Forest to the base of the Gryffindor tower, she had a moment—an instant of keen awareness wherein she saw all that she was, inside and out. She was in the chamber, hands wound tight around a 17 year old Tom- both of them neither solid, nor apparition. She was in her room, fist clenched, head bent low, over a little beaten book, eyes plastered onto flipping pages the images of a Hogwarts of long ago. And she saw herself as herself, lying on the four-poster bed, knees drawn up to her chin, blue veins shimmering through gaunt skin: a Weasley, a hero's girlfriend, a student, and a wraith. The moment came, and it was time. The light was strengthening, and it was time to hasten back out; To climbed out of the frigid cocoon of him like every other day for the past two thousand, five hundred and fifty-five days.
The world was still, and the entire weight of the earth teetered upon an instant. Impatient, the morning light tugged at her, but the broken strings gave away limp. The world called, and no phantom beat seemed to answer. In the hush, the world grinded to a start again. The sunlight snaked up the walls, blazing in through the window, and Ginny Weasley did not wake up.
From beneath spilled red hair, pale eyelids smudged with oily paint, where two withered hearts and a ripped up soul lay, Ginny emerged no more.
And with one last thought, inside the arms of her Tom, she sighed:
There never had been a choice.
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