Ah! I uploaded the wrong version of this chapter, the one from before my beta-reader worked her beta-readery magic on it. The other one had grammar mistakes, and mistypings! Noooo! I have had to barricade myself within my house, because Voldemort's poltergeist is trying to kill me, for depicting a story in which he appears in a way that does not satiate his anal-retentive, nerdy Head Boy dislike for errors.

Dear Tom. M. Riddle: I am flattered to have elicited such a prompt response directly from the Dark Lord's adolescent representative (see reviews). You are indeed much more attractive than your adult counterpart. Despite your good looks, however, and subpoena or no, I find it much more amusing to continue to represent you in a way that you loathe, as your rather inaccurate view of your own actions is one of the reasons I am intrigued by you, and is one of the reasons I am writing this fic. And please tell your wife, "Thank you", for me, as I would much rather die later than now.

Disclaimer: I own none of the characters, nor the basis of my plot, which is the Harry Potter Novels. If I were J.K Rowling, I would definitely not be writing fanfiction. I also am not making money off of anything below.

Thank you to my wonderfully insane beta-reader Betsy; without her anal retentive attention to detail where grammar is concerned, Voldemort's poltergeist would rape me, and I would die (doesn't Tom Riddle seem like the type who would get overly upset where grammar mistakes are concerned? It is (was) an inside joke between Betsy and I, that if either one of us makes a grammar mistake, Voldemorts poltergeist would take great offense. Er...don't ask.).

Also, to anyone who is wondering, the Hogwarts, a History detail from the last chapter is explained in the second part of this one.

In sleep he sang to me,

in dreams he came...

that voice which calls to me

and speaks my name...

And do I dream again?

For now I find

the Phantom of the Opera is there—

inside my mind...

Those who have seen your face

draw back in fear...

(An excerpt from the musical, The Phantom of the Opera, music by Andrew Lloyd Webber, lyrics by Charles Hart)

Through Extra Eyes

Harry Potter watched from beneath the folds of his invisibility cloak in incrementing apprehension as Ginny Weasley finally halted her bizarre, macabre spiraling dance of arcane precision in the middle of the ghost-silver field of wave like, dew-beaded grass. There was something that...tasted or felt, he wasn't sure which...inherently unnatural and wrong about the ritual she had now come so close to completing; with each footstep she had taken, he had felt his skin crawl anew; it had felt to him like spiders were skittering up his spine, to the base of his neck and back down again, making his hair stand on end in inexplicable unease.

The dance of the ritual had turned her like a puppet without visible strings, had thrown her into its turns like a doll with all animation sucked dry from once vivacious, life filled eyes. What was left when she had danced had been something that had no understanding of life, or love, or hate. It just existed, interminably within its plastic shell. Upon halting her bizarre dance, some small semblance of who he had come to know in the last year or so, since she had started talking around him, as Ginny Weasley...the vivacity, the intuitiveness, the reason others seemed to implicitly trust her...returned to her face and eyes as he could sense her listening and waiting for something that evidently no one but she had the understanding and perspective to sense before it was present. The ritual dance of her silent, delicate footsteps seemed at once to him a masterpiece of puppet choreography, and a dance of the tragedy of life diminished by a holding, stilling memory, a memory stifling writhing life within its grasp. Harry felt a sudden uneasiness float upon him with the chill of a distant dementor, quickly followed by a stab of his scar. A memory? Where had he equated the ritual with some type of memory? Where had that thought originated? Or in whom had it originated, was actually the better question. He had had one too many experiences with a malignant memory, not his own ...

Something clicked in his mind, and he grasped out for her, his unfounded fear that she wasn't safe gripping him suddenly, but before he could act on his instincts, a glint of light that he saw out of the corner of his eye distracted him.

Something silver was dripping from the raven, velvety sky like a liquid moonbeam. Liquid light spilled into Ginny's open, porcelain palm, slowly solidifying into a strand of gossamer yarn, seemingly infused with a misty, ethereal silver glow.

Harry paled as he recognized the materialized thought for what it was. The thought, like everything else about the ritual, repulsed him for a reason that was enigmatic to his understanding, and a wave of sickly dread rose in him as he laid his eyes on it. The apprehension provoked in him by his well-used instincts was nettled and inflamed further into fear by the unknown quality of the cause of her unusual behavior, coupled with the unusually biting sting of his scar. Forgetting the trick he had been planning to play on her when he had followed her out here, he reached for Ginny, fearing, for some reason, that she would vanish from him or come to harm and that something irreversible would happen to her if he let her go alone. When his hand was a mere breadth away from hers, what he had dreaded and somehow predicted became a reality. She vanished from the field, vapor and air the only thing he clutched in his sweaty grasp.

Not knowing anything he could do for her himself now, the part of him that always stayed sensible when things like this transpired compelled him to run as fast as he could to Dumbledore's office, never mind the late hour and the fact that he would most likely get in trouble for wandering around this late at night. He saw the looming castle grow larger and come up upon him as he dizzily ascended the grounds and then the steps. The craggy corridors whirred by, and the thought of why he had followed her in the first place loomed in his mind and followed his progress through the halls and his mind as obsessively as the fact that she had vanished. He had been there, and he still hadn't been able to prevent her disappearance, whether it had been willing or whether she had been kidnapped; he could not discern which it had been with the limited information he possessed.

He had at first followed her because he had wanted to play a trick on her...see how high she would jump if he were to sneak up on her, invisible, while pretending to be the Bloody Baron, or some other insidious Hogwarts specter. At least that had been what he had first convinced himself. He had actually followed her because he was lonely, he had soon realized. He had been wandering the halls like one of the ghosts since the beginning of the year, and sometimes outside too, too troubled to sleep, simultaneously attempting to think and not think of The Prophecy and what it entailed. He hadn't wanted to wake Ron and Hermione, and ask them to join him in his nighttime wanderings. This was his problem, and he didn't want to deprive them of sleep because of it.

Besides, they were much too observant for his liking already, even without certain knowledge of just how often he was too restless to sleep the night through. Hermione would think it was about Sirius, and try to talk to him about it, and Ron would just look at him suspiciously, guessing too accurately for Harry's liking that his unease had its root in something else entirely. Harry didn't know why Ron had decided to use his one profound insight into human nature on him, but he felt strangely flattered, as well as annoyed and uncomfortable with the fact. His best friend's suspicious, sometimes randomly and disconcertingly accurate questioning was irksome, not only because his suspicions were well founded, but because Harry was not in the least ready to tell his friends about the Prophecy, not until he had integrated it into his own brain, come to terms with the necessity of choosing between two seemingly impossible options.

He had seen Ginny wandering the halls before, and had guessed that her reasons for being up that late were much the same as his. He had guessed that she was seeking peace from those reasons, which they were both constantly reminded of every morning with the arrival of the papers and the talk in school, now that Voldemort was not only back, but active as a consistent, malignant presence in Wizarding society. She, too, had had her mind invaded in a very personal way by Voldemort, and since he did not think she would want to be disturbed in her almost nightly escapes from the happenings of the outside world which regularly involved him, he had never bothered her in her late night walks, deliberately choosing a route that he could see, from the Marauder's Map, that she was not taking. Tonight, however, he had followed her almost without realizing he was doing so at first, an unconscious urge to end his solitude overtaking him with unprecedented intensity. He had needed to spend his time with someone, suddenly, even if it was just Ron's little sister, someone who he didn't know especially well.

Dizzily, he was ripped from his thoughts as he came around the last corner and set his eyes on the entrance to Dumbledore's office; his feet had carried him to the stone gargoyle out of habit almost without him realizing it. The gargoyle bowed and moved out of the way when he came directly in front of it before he could shout the password. He barely paused in action or thought to ponder this strange behavior, and ran up the stairs as hastily as he could force his legs to carry him, opening the door without knocking.

"Professor! Professor! Prof—" he stopped mid-word as he realized after searching the pitch black room frantically but carefully with his eyes that there was no one there; the office was empty, even of Fawkes. The coals in the fire, however, were still smoking. Harry wondered if Dumbledore had traveled somewhere by Floo Powder.

Puzzled, and berating himself for not checking his father's map before, he pulled out the Marauder's map to ascertain the location of the absent Headmaster.

A dot with a label of, "Albus Dumbledore," was nowhere to be found on the map, on any of the floors, in any of the rooms or secret passageways. One name did catch his eyes at the top corner of a room, however, and made the breath catch in his throat and not make it all the way to his lungs for a moment.

"Ginevra Weasley? That has to be Ginny. There's no other...unless I don't know of some distant cousin, or something...no, it has to be..." he mumbled to himself. Shaking his head to clear it, for he felt slightly disconcerted and off balance from all of the strange things that had happened tonight without any clearly visible reason, he turned and rushed out of the room, forgetting the strange absence of Albus Dumbledore, and ran to the infirmary to talk to the one who seemed to be the focal point of all these strange occurrences.

---------

Arthur sighed, looking into his fifteen year old daughter's accusing bright brown eyes as they faded into the rubble-strewn background of the dusty cabin that was decorated with a strange assortment of mundane muggle and esoteric wizarding inventions, some of which he recognized, some of which he wished he didn't.

What is the importance of this place to He-Who Must—oh, bugger it, to Lord Voldemort? What made Ginny come here, when she has never attempted memories in this manner before? It just isn't like her to be so easily lured into something like this after what she went through, he rambled to himself, partially to keep his mind off the contents of the room he was in, partially to keep himself from thinking too long on how, if he and the others had arrived at the cabin a moment later, he might have lost his youngest child forever.

Why is it always my youngest two? They are always the ones drawn into these things. Why? They are too young! My oldest children, at least, would be better able to defend themselves in the situations Ron and Ginny get themselves into!

Then is it right to say that I would rather Bill or Charlie face Lord Voldemort? Many full-grown wizards have faced him and died! They wouldn't be any better off. Would I rather my older children die than my younger children? I wouldn't! I don't want any of them to die! Why do any of them even have to be in danger of dying in some unnatural way at their young ages? How is that fair?

Calm down and stop panicking Arthur, or you'll start sounding like a woman, he scolded himself, and a mere second after the thought passed through his mind it conjured up the slightly scary but also endearing vision of both his wife and his daughter turning red in the face from berating him were that thought ever to escape his lips. The humor this image conjured in this less than humorous situation sparked in his chest for a moment and then died, its sudden absence causing him to laugh in a hollow, grating manner that echoed in his ears and sunk into his thoughts in the surreal manner of a darkening spiral, the little mirth that his laughter might have held at first gradually bled dry by his deepening unease. His own mirthless laughter gave him a shiver that made him feel a cold thrill of ice had slipped beneath his skin and started gnawing on his bones. His teeth started to chatter, and as he realized he was, on the surface at least, taking his daughter's near death experience much worse than Ginny herself was, he did the only thing he could to distract himself, and that was focus on his anger at Dumbledore, and at this...Tom person, or whatever it was the Dark Lord used to call himself.

Taking one last disdainful look around the neglected cabin at its insidious decor, he concentrated on picturing Dumbledore's office in his mind as clearly as he could remember it, down to the very last shattered magical contraption, and discarded, half finished lemon drop. He pictured himself being there, just as one was supposed to do in order to Apparate, but just after he felt himself leave the prison close walls of the wooden cage, he felt the weight of both of the spaces he was occupying crush him at once. First he felt the crush of a barrier that was trying to push him back to the space he had only partially left. He felt himself collide with the substantial weight it seemed to possess, though it was not physical; he was sure the wall that blocked his path of Apparation was stronger and more permanent than any physical wall could possibly be. Then he felt a second weight squeeze and bend whatever he was made up of smaller than it was supposed to be for a split second as his body was forced back into the space that the surrounding air had already rushed into when he had left it for that short period of time.

Why can't I do it? I was lucky I wasn't splinched! But why...why can't I Apparate to Dumbledore's office? I didn't even fail the first time I took my test; this doesn't make any...

The Apparation wards! Nobody can enter or leave the grounds of Hogwarts by Apparation or Disapparation, no muggle can see the castle for what it really is, no muggle devices can work within five miles of the castle and ten if it is a device that is a danger to...he started reciting the passage on Hogwarts security from his History of Magic textbook mentally, which a still alive but elderly and incurably boring Professor Binns had made him memorize his first year at Hogwarts.

Angry for letting himself become so upset as to forget such an elementary bit of information, he Apparated to the outskirts of Hogsmeade, just outside the Hogwarts gates guarded by regal winged boars.

He saw and heard almost nothing as he was ascending to the Headmaster's office, though he thought, vaguely, that a few people he regularly talked to otherwise might have hailed him on his way to the lone gargoyle statue. As he reached it, the gargoyle jumped aside of its own accord without waiting for Arthur to give it the password. When he stood there, his mouth hanging open in surprise for a moment at the stone gargoyle's suddenly autonomous seeming intelligence, the gargoyle made an impatient gesture at him to hurry up the stairs. Still staring a bit rudely at the previously stoic, mostly inanimate statue, Arthur took the gargoyle's advice and proceeded to take the stairs two at a time, not caring if he was acting like a teenage version of himself in the midst of his haste. Arthur surprised himself at his own disrespect, though, when he found himself walking through the door without knocking, not really caring at the moment whether or not his old Headmaster had anything better to do than listen to him rant.

The office was completely devoid of noise when he entered it, as if somebody had put a freezing charm on the usual rush of activity that poured through there with near continuity. There were no visitors for once; the Headmaster was sitting quite alone behind his ornate, claw-footed mahogany desk as if expecting someone. Where was Tom Riddle? Hadn't the Aurors told him that they were going to take Tom to Dumbledore's office as soon as they arrived at Hogwarts, as he was the only person that Madam Bones, the Head of the Department of Magical Law Enforcement, trusted to be able to keep such a powerful, if young, prisoner under control?

His train of thought slowly and reluctantly returned to the aged man in front of him, who sat contemplating him silently, patiently waiting for him to speak. Arthur's eyes were drawn into the sky blue ones as if summoned there by some unheard spell. The usually hypnotically twinkling, azure orbs were devoid of their eccentric, semi-mischievous gleam, and were as grave as they had been the night Dumbledore had told The Order that he had revealed the contents of The Prophecy to Harry.

Now that he was under the scrutiny of those discerning blue eyes, half of what he had been bursting to say sounded childish and irrational to him, even in his mind.

He suppressed a shiver as the Headmaster continued to visually dissect him, and the forceful, yet empathetic stare intimidated him enough, whether it was meant to or not, to make him pause and choose his words more carefully than he had been intending to, before articulating what was on his mind. He returned the Headmaster's stare in silence before he found the courage to speak.

"You let Harry give the Diary back to Malfoy. That's why my daughter was almost killed tonight."

"Arthur...about that, I am truly sorry. Please let me explain."

"Go ahead." Do your best, he thought, but managed to keep the brazen retort from slipping past his self-restraint and escaping his mouth.

"Thank you. It is quite simple what Tom did to deceive me, really. Simple, but brilliant. As a mere precaution against getting convicted for his illegal activities if caught, he cast a mutated illusion charm around the diary, which made it seem to have the magical and physical properties of an object that had been completely destroyed by magic when touched by the skin of certain people he designated the spell to recognize. I was one of those he taught the charm to recognize. So, though the diary was physically damaged, I could not detect that the spell that had made Tom's memories animate was only partially unraveled, or that the memories in the diary were still completely intact within it's pages, with any spells of my own."

"So when you touched the diary, this...illusion charm took affect? How do you know that's what happened?"

"What I know, I found out from the bits and pieces of the truth I was able to glimpse inside Tom's mind when I was questioning him. He has not yet become proficient at Occlumency at sixteen, but guarding his secrets has always come so naturally to him that he is proficient enough at hiding what he is thinking to veil some of his thoughts from me without having to study how to do so. I...am truly sorry, Arthur. I should have been more careful, but at the time four years ago, when Lord Voldemort was not as much of a threat as he had been and now is again, seemed more important to let Harry save Dobby from a lifetime of torment with the Malfoys than to worry about a diary that to me seemed to have lost all its magical properties, and therefore its potential danger. But those are excuses. Let us not dwell on excuses. The point is, Arthur, that I am sorry I couldn't have prevented what happened tonight."

Arthur took a deep breath, burning his lungs with incendiary anger that seemed to fill them as he breathed, in place of oxygen. His hands, then his entire body started to shake slightly, and he couldn't bring his muscles under his own control again and still them, no matter how hard he tried.

"It is not your fault. It's not. It's his!"

"Arthur..."

"What's going to happen to him! He tried to take Ginny from me for the second time, tonight! I'll—what kind of person would—what's wrong with him! He appears on the surface a young, brighter than normal intellectual teenage boy—innocent! But when he opens his mouth...you didn't hear him speak to Ginny, he was talking about stealing her soul and using her life as if she wasn't even human, he was discussing the incident in first year the way any normal person would talk of preparing dinner! What type of person would be able to talk about taking someone's life so casually? It's like he'd been thinking of killing her since he had been a small child, the way he spoke, it seemed so innately part of his nature to want to—"

"Arthur, and what would you have suspected from someone who grew up to become Lord Voldemort? Did you think he came to his destiny in life suddenly? He gradually became who he is today. The boy you saw is merely an earlier stage of the...no longer quite human entity that haunts the nightmares of little children and adults alike."

"Is he even human now? God, Albus, he tried to rob my little girl from me, I'll kill him—"

"Arthur, you'll do nothing of the sort! He's only one year older than Ginny, the same age as your son Ron! Granted, if it was the adult version of him, I would not argue with you, but the prisoner in the back of my office, surrounded by a half dozen Aurors threatening to take his life in the most excruciating way possible, is sixteen! There is a reason we don't send children to Azkaban!"

"What are you going to do the next time he takes another life! He's too powerful to contain, and too different from the rest of the human race to change! I am a firm believer that once you murder somebody, there is no going back to the person you were, the way you were before then! How will you feel about Azkaban when he continues the pattern he started with Myrtle? Do you think that this particular child can even feel the effect of Dementors the way a normal child could, anyway? His adult self can control them—"

"Of course—"

"So obviously at some point they started to sustain him, rather than make him weaker—"

"Yes, and how intelligent would it be to place someone in the care of dementors, who may or may not be able to bend them to his every whim? I am almost certain that Tom will not have learned to do that—yet, but he still could. Besides, it is against the International Treatise of Human Rights signed by the Minister of Magic in nineteen-seventy-four to incarcerate anyone under seventeen in a Dementor controlled facility—"

"So will you blindly follow every law even if it is more prudent to break it in the interest of the safety of innocent children?"

Albus fought the urge to be immature and role his eyes, and ended up just staring down his former student as if visually dissecting him with his gaze. Arthur Weasley knew every bit of Wizarding and Muggle Law on Human Rights better than anyone he knew besides perhaps himself and a few other members of the Wizengamot. His staunch belief in Human Rights that caused him to excel at his job in the Misuse of Muggle Artifacts Office was being severely tested right now, but Arthur was, like all of the Weasley's except for Percy, highly emotional and impulsive. He would be ready to kill Tom for perhaps a few days, but would reason himself out if it, and revert to his usual forgiving, laid back personality in an indecently short period of time. Albus had seen Arthur go through this cycle of temper and humility more times than he had cared to during Arthur's school years, and from what he had seen of him more recently through their mutual work with the order, this part of Arthur's personality hadn't changed all that drastically.

"I wrote that particular part of the Treatise, so no, I am not following it blindly," Albus heard himself say flatly, still staring his former student down with a quelling look, "and though Tom is not in any way innocent, he is still, under law, a child, and shall be treated as such by the Wizengamot—at least he will be now that Cornelius and a few of his cohorts have been removed from their seats because of corruption."

"Please explain to me, though, why you would choose his life over the lives of those he may endanger!"

"I will explain my reasoning to you, to the best of my ability. Will you listen without interrupting?"

"What—of course."

"Thank you. My reasoning is simply based on statistics, and what I have learned over time as a professor. I am sure you have noticed it also, having raised so many wonderful children. Until people are about seventeen, they have yet to develop and solidify many of the patterns of belief and thought and feeling that make adults so sure that they are always right; younger people are, therefore, easier to influence and maybe even change. Though it may be impossible to alter the personalities of some people even slightly, the chance that they can be taught to think and see life differently is still much greater when they are younger. The older they are, the more of their personality is permanent. People who continue to commit crimes in their twenties after having already broken the law as a teenager are in most cases more likely to continue their behavior into their thirties than people who simply have a juvenile offense, but none in their first decade of adulthood. Those statistics are why it has become illegal in most civilized wizarding countries, except for in some states within the United States, to incarcerate people under seventeen in Dementor guarded prisons."

"Y—yes, I know. I've read your law, and I've read the reasons behind it. I know the International Treatise of Human Rights back to front, but I just can't agree with you right now! Maybe you can't know what I'm talking about, because you've never almost lost a child to another child only—as you said—one year older than her. I can't think about this any more. I can't. Where...where is Molly?" Arthur asked Albus weakly. Every ounce of his body was pulsating with a keen and bloodless apathy, which was all that was left in him, he felt, to replace his extinguished joy and belief in the innocence and order of the world that had still been left intact by the onslaught of time even this late in his life.

"She's with Ginny in the Infirmary."

"I would like to see them. Make sure they're OK."

"Of course," Dumbledore said, standing and ushering Arthur out the door. Arthur obediently started down the spiraling stairs and stepped out into the stone hallway. The sharp sound of his own footfall echoed weirdly in his ears, disorientating him.

"On our way, we do have one more bit of information to touch upon, however," Dumbledore continued. "The Aurors wish to question your daughter."

"What? Why?"

"I explained to them that Ginny never had any willing connection with Tom Riddle or Lord Voldemort, so they will probably be civil, but it is part of their procedure to question everyone involved in a case."

"Yes, well, they better be civil. They will question them separately, I assume?"

"They are planning on using Veritaserum to question Tom shortly after they finish questioning Ginny."

"They are using Veritaserum to question Ginny? They can't do that, it's illegal!"

"It is not illegal to use it on Tom, remember? But they will not be using it on Ginny."

"Yes, I remember the law. They changed it after so many of the Death Eaters got off on their charges during the Death Eater trials of 1981 by saying they were under the Imperious curse. Since February of 1982, Aurors have been allowed to use Veritaserum in interrogations when a suspect is arrested for a violent felony."

"They will use a truth potion on Ginny that allows her to choose whether or not to be affected by the potion even after the alternate view of reality that the potion creates has taken effect, but which still allows the Aurors to know if she is letting it work or not. That way it is not classified as a Class A Restricted Use Mind-Control Potion like Veritaserum is. It also has a more pleasant taste than Veritaserum does. Tastes a bit like lemonade, actually."

"Well, that's lucky. Wouldn't want a forcibly ingested truth potion to taste too bad, now would we?"

"No, I'd say that would be quite horrible. Ah, here we are, the Infirmary."

"One more thing before we go in. Did Tom use some spell to take advantage of her need to conquer her fears, to make her act on an impulse she wouldn't have normally acted upon?"

"I don't know; I have yet to examine her. From what the others described of her actions, it does not appear that she was under the Imperius Curse, though, as you were probably able to discern when you talked to her. There is a spell, however, that would have compelled her to listen to her strongest suppressed impulse. I will have to test her for any lingering traces of it."

"Yes, well...Albus, sorry for yelling at you, I'm just—"

"It's quite alright Arthur. I understand completely. Let's go and see your wife and child, shall we? I believe you have been from their presence quite long enough."

"Thanks," he said, and without waiting for a response, he opened the door to the infirmary and rushed inside, not wanting to look at the Headmaster fully in the eyes because, no matter how polite the Headmaster was to him about it, he was still slightly embarrassed by his recent onslaught of semi-childish behavior. Dumbledore smiled knowingly, and followed him inside.