"Supposedly that belonged to You Know Who, but there's no proof." The pock-faced youth snorted and wiped his nose on the back of his sleeve. "O'course I could say that about anything here. The Dark Lord's tooth brush, Lord Voldemort's left shoe, He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named's beard trimmings, but then I guess I'd be a swindler or something."
"Oh, this is the real deal all right," she muttered more to herself than the vender.
"Come again, Ma'am?"
"I asked you how much you want for the phony diary?"
"Two sickles ought to do the trick," he nodded.
"Well, I'll give you one sickle and a knut for good measure, but that's all."
"All right then," he nodded again, this time with a smirk of triumph. "You mind my askin' what you plan to do with that old thing?"
The woman narrowed her gaze on the young man, and then she felt her lip curl into a strange smile, "Yes, young man," she replied. "I think I do mind your asking. Good day to you," and she began to walk away.
Inside the woman was a feeling of triumph coupled with grave horror. One reason she hadn't answered the boy was because she honestly had no idea what on earth she did plan to do with that old diary, but on the other hand there was no denying that she knew there was only one thing she could do with it.
Since she had been writing in them nearly all her life, she was a diary aficionado of sorts, but her experience with diaries, including the one she now held in her trembling hand went well beyond the realm of every day gos and woes. Oh yes, she felt her head nodding much against her will as she tucked it inside the folds of her frock and disapparated for home.
Ginny Weasley had once lived a horror of all horrors through the pages of an enchanted diary that had pushed her over the brink and nearly taken her life. Keeping a diary was something everyone had expected young Ginny to give up the year she turned twelve and opened the Chamber of Secrets at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. After all, it was the diary that had summoned the Dark Lord Voldemort that year—it was the diary that commanded Ginny to open the chamber for him. She should have shunned diary keeping altogether.
However, what many didn't understand was that the habitual act of keeping a diary was the only thing that had kept Ginny Weasley sane from the very moment she'd learned to string together sentences of words in the written format. In the beginning it had started out as a simple exercise to distance herself from living in a household full of older brothers and a mother who sometimes stifled her only daughter to the point of suffocation. In her tenth year it had become the confessional of her first crush. All things Harry Potter had gone into the pages of her secret tome that year, and then she turned eleven.
Ginny's first encounter with the enchanted diary had happened even before she left the Burrow for her first day of school at Hogwarts. Cozy in her nightgown and slippers on the eve of her first ever trip to school Ginny had taken out her quill and ink, dipped not once, but twice and drew the tip of her quill against the bottle to steady the excess ink. She then lowered it onto the antique finished parchment of the diary her father had bought her in Diagon Alley that very afternoon and wrote:
Dear Diary,
. . . but before she could go on with the recording of her day, including the fact that this diary had come to her as a gift from her parents with what she could only assume was encouragement to make the most of her school days, the ink began to fade and then eventually disappeared.
Ginny gasped and then leaned back to inspect the paper. At first she suspected that the ultimate privacy charm of the diary made all written words invisible, and yet she knew not what charm to utter to bring them back if she wished to reread them, but then she gasped again. This second gasp was a mixture of delight and fear, for the diary had written back to her spelling out the following sentence:
Tell me, what is your name?
Could it be? Ginny wasn't sure, she had never heard of such an enchantment in a diary before, or any other book for that matter. Her father had always told them that anything that could think or speak on its own was trouble, but Ginny was so fascinated that she had convinced herself straight away that the diary wasn't speaking. It was writing, and there was a definite difference.
She took up her quill again and wrote in reply:
My name is Ginny Weasley. Who are you?
Just as quickly as she had written, the diary began to form its response:
Hello, Ginny Weasley. My name is Tom Riddle
. . . and just like that it all began. A simple greeting, the exchange of names and soon the game of getting to know one another had begun. Ginny fell quickly into fascination and bewilderment with Tom Riddle, for not only did he talk to her, and offer her advice, but he also listened to her. Whenever she asked him for it, he gave her his best advice. In the end it was Tom who had told her the truth about Harry Potter—Tom had said Harry was unworthy of a young lady so true, and even after his true personage was revealed, even after all the horrible things he had persuaded Ginny to do, she still believed he had been right about that. Harry Potter was unworthy of Ginny Weasley's love, and so she never thought of Harry in that light again even though he'd nearly died to save her time and time again throughout the war with Voldemort.
The hardest thing for Ginny after that had been finding the courage to pick up another diary and quill, but in the end she'd done it, keeping to the simple disenchanted pages of a muggle diary just to be on the safe side. However, from time to time as the years passed and Ginny grew older, the strangest habit would revisit her. The first time it happened was when she was seventeen. She'd seen Michael Corner die that year, and while their romantic relations had been short-lived, it had been a horrible thing watching a boy she'd once kissed die without cause or reason.
Locked away in her room at the Burrow the day after the memorial services for Michael, Ginny had picked up her quill and written at the top of a fresh page in her diary:
Dear Tom. . .
At first she had gasped with almost as much discord as the day her diary had written back to her. What was she doing? Why would she even try to reenact the most horrid year of her life that way, but then something she hadn't expected to happen happened. She felt comfort. She took comfort in the thought that somewhere inside the pages of her diary the sweet and kind young man who had listened and befriended her was waiting for her to open up her heart again. She smoothed her hand over the dried ink and began to write to him as though it were a letter and that someday he would be able to answer her as he once had. It was stupid, and it was wrong. It confused and scared her, but it alleviated her grief in a way she'd never expected. She wrote to Tom all about her broken heart, the sorrow she felt from losing a friend in a war she had never understood, even when she had been one of its pawns.
I don't pretend to understand why I'm even writing this to you. I must be half mad to even think about you at all, and yet a part of me still remembers how kind you were to me when I had no one there to listen. Even worse to me is that I know Tom Riddle and Lord Voldemort are the same person, but I don't feel that way. I still feel you, Tom, inside my heart, and I believe there is a part of you that's as good as you once pretended to be with me. I will never stop believing that. I will never stop imagining that far away there is a place that Tom Riddle, the young man I knew back then, has found peace. As for me, I may never know peace, but I am content to believe in it as a possibility.
And then she had signed the passage without a thought:
With Hope and Love from Afar,
Your old friend Ginny
Michael Corner's death was the first, but not the last instance in which Ginny wrote to Tom. After that she found great comfort in the memory of writing to him, and whenever things went severely wrong, or even if she simply had a bad day she would sit down with her diary and write a long letter to her lost friend. It made her feel happy, and she never understood quite why.
After the war it was difficult to stay in touch with everyone that had fought beside her. Harry had died in the war, and after Ron and Hermione were married, they moved thousands of miles away and made very little effort to keep in touch. Fred and George had taken to traveling to establish business ties all over the world, and Percy, Bill and Charlie just didn't make the effort anymore. It was just Ginny then all alone at the burrow. What once had been a lively and vivacious home full of family, laughter and love was now a burden left to lay upon a young woman's heart, and in her solitude she turned again to writing letters in her diary to Tom.
Dear Tom,
No matter how I try to blame you for all that has gone wrong in my
life, I cannot. In my heart you are still Tom Riddle, and though the
monstrosity you later became is the very fire that burned the life
around me into a barren wasteland I forgive you. I feel so stupid
writing to you. I feel so silly and small, insecure and young, but once
again I have no one else, and I know that wherever you are, in this
world or the next, you can hear me and you are listening.
It's wrong of me to wish for the old familiar answer of your script, but I would give anything just to see you say hello again. I know it's even more wrong of me, but I've been having dreams about you. Strange dreams, Tom, in which our lives turn out so different than where we really ended up. In them I am with you, and there was never any war. I was enough for you to understand that love would see you through, and while the darkness always called to you, I was enough to hold you in the light.
It's stupid, I know. I'm a fool to even wish for something so horribly wrong, but I am so alone, more alone than I have ever been before. I miss my family and my friends, but more than any of that I miss having you to listen to me when I feel afraid. And I am afraid, Tom. I'm afraid I'll die here, young and alone in this broken down old house. I'd give anything to see you say hello, but for now I sit and stare at empty pages.
Even as she reread what she had written later and tried to convince herself that it was madness that wrote so strange and vile a request, she didn't believe it. Tom had been there for her. He had listened, and the dreams of them together. . . dear Merlin they were so real. Her teardrops slipped over her chin and dropped onto the parchment in her diary, making a smeared splotch upon his name.
For years Ginny had written and carried on with a man who had truly never existed. She had molded and shaped Tom Riddle into something he was never meant to be, and in her heart he was the man she dreamed. She became convinced that her dreams were a small portrait of reality, of something the very well might have been if only she had been there at the time, young, beautiful and powerful enough to show Tom Riddle that love was all he needed to get him through. But the years grew stale, and Ginny grew older and more alone than ever, and then one day she saw it. A strange ad in the Evening Prophet had jumped out at her: War Relics and Antiques and it was followed by an address in Knockturn Alley.
She wasn't sure why the had had compelled her at first, but once she had arrived, and she laid eyes upon the remnants of a diary that had remained in tact despite all it had been through, Ginny knew that somehow the Tom of her dreams had been calling out to her find him. She had the diary in her hands, and as she walked several blocks to the nearest apparation point she could feel her heart thumping loudly in her ears. It was stupid of her to even think that the diary would have maintained its magic. After all it had been destroyed by the very monster Tom had intended to feed her to, hadn't it? One page. One unharmed page at the back of the diary was all that remained whole in Tom Riddle's diary, and while she knew it was wrong in more ways than she could count, she had hope for what would happen when she lowered her quill to that one page.
For days after the acquisition of that diary, Ginny carried it close to her body, within the folds of her frock while contemplating the right time, the right way to bring it about. She had great doubt that it would even work, but at last the suspense built to proportions that made it impossible for her to go on living unless she knew the truth. She lit two candles and sat down at the table in the kitchen in the very place she had once sat to write when she was young. She flipped the brittle pages, felt the dry, singed parchment crack and crumble in her fingertips until she reached the final page of the diary, the only one left unharmed by Harry Potter's act of destruction that day.
Ginny drew in a deep breath and reached for her quill. She had no idea what she planned to say to him, or if writing to him would even work, but she absolutely had to know. Gripping the quill in her hand she watched her fingers tremble, the feather wavering but the tip glided steadily over the ancient parchment before her:
Dear Tom,
I do not know if you will even hear me, but I had to try and reach out
to you. I've felt great emptiness inside of me ever since the day we
were torn apart. . .
Ginny waited and watched as the ink she had only just laid down upon the parchment seep inside and then disappear. Seconds ticked by and became minutes, and nothing happened. Another sigh escaped her, and she lowered her head, the long tendrils of her auburn hair falling into her face to hide her disappointment, but then she saw it, movement like the forming of words upon the paper, and when she looked down it read:
Hello, Ginny. . .I've been waiting for you.
A/N: This is just a short note to explain to everyone that this is only
a one-shot and I will not be adding anymore to it. I truly feel that to
maintain the level of creepiness it is best to end it right here and
leave what happened next up to the readers' imaginations.