ONE:
It had been a long time since Ginny had written in the little leather bound book. She couldn't remember where she had gotten it from. It had appeared in her book pile in first year. A muck up with the salesman, probably.
She was alone in her dorm, sitting on her bed, her trunk half unpacked next to her. The curtains were drawn, but sun shone through them, filling the space with a soft red glow.
The book was open to an open page, and for half a second Ginny wondered if the boy inside could see her. It was a foolish thought, but she had been eleven years old when she had first written in the diary.
A lot had changed in five years. She had matured, both physically and ,mentally. Her childhood crush on Harry Potter had disappeared, pushed somewhere to the back of her mind for her to feel embarrassed over when she tried to fall asleep. No longer was her mind occupied with unrealistic dreams of being a dragon tamer or headmistress of Hogwarts.
Anxiously, the redhead held the quill over the page. Would he know I haven't written to him?
She would write to him every now and then, but not nearly as regularly as she had all those years ago.
Hello, Tom.
She watched the ink sink into the page.
Nothing.
It was probably unhealthy to form an attachment to a soul stuck in a diary. But with her friends barely talking to her, and a general disregard for introducing herself to new people, the boy within the diary was someone familiar.
It's been a while.
The words appeared on the page slowly, maybe they were supposed to be sarcastic.
She could reply with a myriad of excuses, that she had been busy with school, lost the book, or whatever else she could come up with. He wouldn't believe her. For a seventeen year old trapped in a book, Tom was too smart.
I'm sorry…
She didn't bother explaining herself. She had turned to him because she was lonely when she was eleven. Five years later and her motivations were no different. Only this time she had real people she could talk to. Harry or Hermione, Luna and Neville. But they had all been so distant lately. Harry was madly in love with Cho, Hermione and Ron were always speaking in whispers, shutting up whenever she walked past. Luna and Neville were nice, but there was only so much confusing rambling and stuttering Ginny could handle.
And so she had turned back to her old friend in the pages.
It's been lonely without you, Ginevra.
His handwriting was the same, perfect looping letters that shouldn't belong to a seventeen year old.
She didn't know how to reply. Guilt inched its way into her stomach. Could he even feel the passing of time. What were five years when you could see nothing but black. How would you tell the difference between seconds and hours? Years and minutes?
I haven't had much to tell you…
She scribbled the words quickly, wanting to move past the awkwardness.
I'm still sorry Tom.
Swirls appeared on the page, idle doodling that Tom was prone to when he was thinking. In her mind she imagined him sitting at a desk, gliding the quill over the page as he chewed his lip in thought.
I'll forgive you someday. Tell me what I've missed.
So she filled him in. On everything. The distance that was slowly building between her and her friends. Her classes and teachers. She couldn't remember the last time she had written to him, so she filled him in with the mundane events of her breaks, and boy drama.
No more Harry Potter?
She could feel the teasing through the page.
Not anymore. He's not as great as I thought he was. Child infatuation, or something like that.
I've missed you, Ginny.
She ate her breakfast slowly, keeping her attention focused solely on her toast. The muted humming of conversation filled her ears, but Ginny paid no attention to it. The Great Hall was always bustling with excitement on the first day of classes.
Hogwarts had always been a magical place. Even at sixteen, Ginny hadn't lost that childish wonder as she looked around, still in awe of the ceiling covered in puffy, white clouds. If she closed her eyes she could feel the sun on her face, tinting her face pink.
She had Charms first, her best class, though it was mainly because Flitwick liked her and she was used to throwing hexes at her brothers. It was a simple enough class, but it required too much attention and Flitwick didn't tolerate any distractions. They'd be no time to write.
There it was. She was thinking about him again.
How did she manage to vacate him from her mind for so long? How did she push the memories of pouring her heart out to a boy she'd never seen. She barely knew anything about him, other than he was the recipient of a nasty curse that trapped him inside a book.
Part of her wondered if Tom only showed interest in her because there was no one else. She assumed that anyone would be welcome when you hadn't spoken to anyone for more than fifty years.
The book was tucked into her bag, hidden under a pile of parchment and textbooks. If the Hall hadn't been so crowded she'd pull it out and start writing, start listing off her concerns for the upcoming year only to be soothed by Tom's instance that she was the brightest witch he knew.
At eleven years old, being called clever and talented by a seventeen year old was enough to send her to cloud nine. Of course he had been flattering her, probably to make sure that she would come back. At eleven years old she was blind. At fifteen she was hesitant.
She knew she was good at magic. She didn't need Tom to tell her that, her test results and professors assured her that she had potential to do whatever she wanted if she put her mind to it.
But talking to Tom was different. He was knowledgeable about things she had no clue about. He was patient, mostly, and quick witted, and willing to help her with homework.
So was Hermione and Harry and Luna.
So why did she feel so drawn to the diary again?
At eleven years old she suffered from nightmares. A cold, damp room that stank of blood and made her stomach tie itself into knots. In her dreams tiny snakes would slide over her skin, biting into her flesh and sucking the blood out of her body.
When Mrs Norris appeared on the wall completely frozen, even little naive Ginny knew it was a bad omen.
She hadn't blamed Tom, not entirely. She blamed the book, the dark magic that swirled around it. So she had hid the book in the depths of her room, refusing to bring it up to anyone in case they thought she was insane.
Knowing Tom, he wouldn't respond if someone else demanded him to.
A hand waved in her face, snapping her away from her thoughts.
"You alright in there Ginny?" It was Carla, one of her roomates.
The girl was one of those people that had always been pretty. Darkly tanned skin, dark almond shaped eyes framed with thick eyelashes, and a head of black hair in tight curls that framed her face.
"Yeah. I'm just tired."
Dumbledore decided then to start his usual start of year speech, saving Ginny from adding anything else to the conversation.
As per usual, he droned on about how this year was for excellence, and that the Forbidden Forest was strictly out of bounds.
It was only when he moved onto introducing the new Defence Against The Dark Arts teacher that things became interesting.
"Professor Dolores Umbridge."
A loud hem hem masked the sounds of snickering and gasping.
A middle aged woman strode to the podium with deliberate steps. The first word that came to Ginny's mind was toad. The second was atrocious.
Her face was round, her eyes deep in her face and beady. Her hair was the colour of mud, probably curled with rollers.
Worst of all was her choice of clothing. She wore a dark pink pencil skirt with a tweed blouse tucked into it. The outfit was topped off with a fuzzy pink cardigan that not even Ginny's Aunt Marjorie wouldn't be caught wearing.
"Merlin's Beard," she muttered, not entirely believing what she was seeing.
"Where in the everloving hell did she come from?" Carla whispered, just as shocked as she was.
The dreadfully pink woman launched into a speech that was obviously pre prepared.
Oh great, a ministry approved teacher.
Once her ramblings were completed, polite applause filled the room. It was going to be a long year, Ginny decided as she stood to walk to her first class.
It wasn't going to become a habit. Or at least that's what she was telling herself.
The diary sat on her lap. The quill already in her fingers, but no words on the page. She wondered again just how sentient he was. Could he see her deliberating over her words? Could he see her hesitation? Could he tell that she was afraid she'd start sleepwalking and dreaming about strangling roosters to death?
There were some secrets that a girl couldn't even share with her diary. Especially when they had a habit of talking back.
Far too much thinking was going into this. The idea of it was so ludicrous that giggles rose up in her throat. No one was supposed to put this much thought into their diary entries.
We have a new defence teacher. She's vile. Everyone says the position is cursed. They never last longer than a year.
Her first defence teacher mysteriously lost all his memories, Lupin turned out to be a werewolf and left, and Mad Eye Moody wasn't Moody at all. By the end of the year something was going to happen to Umbridge.
Tell me about her.
She filled Tom in, describing in detail her pink outfit and her multiple jobs within the ministry.
She's a walking pompom Tom.
The Ministry should know better than to interfere with Hogwarts. None of them know what they're doing.
Part of her wanted to remind him that her father worked in the Ministry, but another reminded her that he was a Slytherin, and would probably think that the Head of the Misuse of Muggle Artifacts was the most useless job of all.
She stared at the words, the perfect looping letters. She had a vague idea of what he looked like. She'd seen him in her dreams before, long faced and dark haired.
I'll talk to you tomorrow, Tom, she wrote. I've already gotten homework.
Until tomorrow, Ginevra.
The classroom was stuffy, despite the autumn weather. Through the window Ginny could see a mostly clear sky, dotted with only a few clouds. The humidity reflected how she felt. Something between apprehension and dread floated in her stomach. She'd overheard Harry and Ron talking about Umbridge, how she made them stow their wands away and forbade any sort of practice.
The woman in question floated into the room. Instead of her usual pink attire, the witch was clad in a lavender skirt and a darker purple blouse. This was covered with her usual fuzzy cardigan of course.
Just the sight of her was enough to make Ginny feel sick. She was far too bright, a buzzing fluorescent light in a dark room.
"Wands away! We won't be needing them today." The woman waved her own wand, causing the piece of chalk to lift into the air and start writing on the blackboard.
Introduction of Defence Against the Dark Arts for Fourth Years.
Umbridge moved to the centre of the room, the stick of chalk hovering above her.
"From this point onward," her voice was sugary sweet, cherry flavoured rat poison. "We will be following a Ministry approved, structured, curriculum."
The students reached into their bags to pull out parchment and quills, already understanding that there was going to be nothing practical about the lesson.
Ginny wrote the date in the corner of her page, wishing that she was writing to Tom instead.
"Defensive charms and counter-jinxes will be mentioned, however we will not be exploring them in great detail."
A hand a couple of rows in front of Ginny rose into the air. Umbridge motioned for the girl to speak.
"Don't we need to practice the charms?"
The witch giggled, a noise that Ginny was determined to never hear again.
"Why would you need to use these spells. There are no dark wizards anymore. You are all safe here."
No one in the room spoke, but Ginny was sure that they were all thinking about the untimely death of Cedric Diggory and Harry Potter's claims that You Know Who was back,
The weather was too nice to be cooped up in her dorm, so Ginny made her way outside, wearing a frayed blue shirt that had once belonged to Percy and her favourite pair of jeans. Tucked into her waistband was the diary, the leather cool against the skin of her stomach.
She found a mostly private spot, near the Forbidden Forest, but far enough away to not be deemed a violation of one of the many rules dictating where they could and couldn't go.
She sat cross legged on the grass, balancing the diary on her knee.
She's more awful that I thought .
She had grown to like the company of Tom more than her friends. Carla was nice, but her topics of conversation were usually vain or vapid. The 'getting to know you' stage of friendship was always awful. Ginny didn't care where people went on their family holidays, or why she should start reading Witches Weekly.
Tom already knew who she was and she already knew what information about himself he was willing to share. The awkwardness had already disappeared, and she was only slightly worried about the amount of comfort she felt when she wrote to Tom. If she focused really hard she was sure that she could feel the aura that the dark magic created around the little book,
She described her DADA lesson, mentioning Umbridge's refusal to actually teach themselves anything that would defend them against any dark magic.
I'd teach you if I could. I always enjoyed defense against the dark arts.
She couldn't help but smile at the page. Of course he'd offer to teach her, and she would've accepted his offer if he wasn't stuck in a diary. She wondered briefly what kind of spells he would teach her; simple at first probably, but then complex magic. Even at eleven years old he had assured her she was a capable witch.
She asked what he had learnt in his fourth year, what Hogwarts was like in his time. He described the Slytherin common room in great detail, explaining that living n the dungeon was a lot more pleasant than it sounded.
It was always cool in summer, and it was always easy to sneak into the kitchens.
She tried to imagine Tom at school, his tie skewed and his hair messy. She knew that he had been an excellent student, practically a prodigy in potions. Ginny was sure that Tom was the only student who could genuinely impress Snape.
Her daydreaming was interrupted when a shockingly blonde figure stood in front of her, hands on his hips; lips sneering.
"The She-Weasel isn't surrounded by buffoons." Malfoy, was of course, armed with Crabbe and Goyle. Their ugly faces were tinged with amusement, but Ginny was sure that they would find anything Malfoy said to be amusing.
"Ah, but the Ferret is," Ginny shot back, looking up through her eyelashes to see his reaction. While he was distracted by offense, Ginny shut the diary and moved to tuck it into the waistband of her jeans.
The action was not unnoticed by Malfoy. He reached over her and pried the book from her fingers.
The colour left Ginny's face and all her muscles went slack, her mouth drifting open and her eyes widening.
"What are you doing anyway?" He sneered, opening the book. "Writing love letters to the Boy Wonder?"
What happened next, was something Ginny never would've thought could happen.
The diary erupted in dark green flames, spitting and hissing, causing dark smoke to come flying up.
Malfoy screamed, dropping the book as quickly as he had picked it up. Angry, red blisters appeared on his hands, and popped as quick as they appeared, spewing yellow pus into his face.
Ginny sat, open mouthed, staring at the diary, ignoring the frantic reaction of Crabbe, Goyle, and Malfoy.
Malfoy clutched his hands to his chest, staring at Ginny with accusatory eyes.
"You'll pay for this," he hissed before turning away to run back to the castle.
Ginny had nothing to say, she was too busy focusing on the diary, a few feet away from where she was sitting, in perfect condition, no signs of burning at all.
She rushed to the book, frantically grabbing her quill and scribbling her message.
"Tom!" She said his name aloud, barely able to write it down.
A strange thought popped into her mind. The diary knew that it wasn't her that picked it up.
Can you see me Tom?
She could practically hear him laughing through the pages, the sound clear and cold.
Only when you need me to, Ginevra.
The concept didn't scare her as much as it should have.
So this is my first attempt at fanfic, I hope you enjoyed. Just some notes on the story for those who are interested:
Some alterations in canon. Ginny is a year older, the diary was never destroyed, and probably some other things that I can't remember. Takes place during OOTP.
I'm sure there are some plot holes I've made, but I'm not entirely concerned about them.
IMPORTANT: the relationship between Tom and Ginny isn't healthy. I am in no way attempting to romantisice or paint toxic relationships in a positive light. If anyone is interested, I will include content warnings at the start of chapters if necessary.
Happy reading