Just A Girl
Chapter Four: Death
Death looked the boy in the eyes, not for the first time.
Death had not come for him.
Death had come for Ginny.
He would not let it get to her.
It was blurry from there. A slime-green serpent with sharp teeth and fangs and huge yellow eyes, that rose and fell and rose again to find him. He ran like he had never run before and Tom laughed and instructed the basilisk in a language only the three of them could understand.
If Ginny had been awake to watch and scream and hide among the creeping shadows on the cold slabs of stone she would not have understood either the language or what he was doing.
He would lead the snake to himself in her place.
If Ginny had been conscious she would have shrieked and run to him and offered herself in his place. Ginny was like that. He wondered why Tom had not thought of that.
Tom would have enjoyed watching that. The terror in the boy and the girl's eyes. The moment they looked their fates in the eye.
It was enough for Harry and he went forward like some hero from an old tale to slay the evil snake.
Except, in the stories, the hero always came out alive.
Not so this time.
Because when the snake lay gasping on the floor nearly dead, its fang went into the boy's arm and his breathing became ragged as his life's blood pooled on the stone-cold floor. Like a dream everything slowed and he tried to breathe while the poison went into his skin and he glanced over at Ginny.
So innocent. So young.
So deathly her mistake.
He lay back against the floor as if in defeat. And Tom still stood there, laughing as he watched the boy dying.
The phoenix rose as if in a dream.
Tom continued to laugh.
It drifted towards the boy. The diamond tears poured from its half-closed eyes and healed the boy.
Tom noticed nothing. It was all so hysterically laughable to his sadistic mind of cold and steel and death.
Soon to be his own.
The boy reached out and stabbed the book savagely with the fang that lay on the ground beside him – stabbed it again and again and again tirelessly, not heeding Tom's shrieks of pain and of horror.
And Ginny woke.