[A/N: Chapter 11 Part 2

Trigger warning: attempted suicide

Ginny's first term is basically a horror movie.]

September 1992 – Thursday, 11 February 1993

["Help me, Tom! I think I'm going mad…" In which Ginny's life story is revealed, all out of order.]

"Who are you?" The book had written, and Ginny wrote back, sealing her fate.

Ginevra Phyllis, "Ginny" Weasley was the youngest of seven children, and the only girl. She had a very hard time thinking of herself outside of the context of her family, which was fair, because she had never been apart from them. She lived with her mother and father and any number of brothers in a ramshackle farmhouse which had been built up and added-on-to over the years with more magic than architectural integrity, defying physics and all rational principles of engineering. There was never a time when she was not aware of Hogwarts, and it was her greatest desire in life to go there, like her brothers and cousins and parents before her, and get away from her overbearing mother and muggle-obsessed father and the farm and the too-familiar muggle town of Ottery St. Catchpole.

Ginny's father, Arthur, was the youngest son of the Lord Weasley, neither the heir nor the spare, nor even the third son, but the fifth. His eldest brother, along with the third and fourth, had died in the War, like Molly's brothers and her baby sister, Alice, who was as good as dead. But Arthur's second-eldest brother had two grown sons of his own, and House Weasley never had much money anyway, at least not compared to the Blacks or Malfoys or even the McKinnons, so Arthur and his family were on their own, so far as making their way in the world went. Arthur had been resigned to this at a young age. He had never expected to have to support a family of nine, but when his Hogwarts sweetheart had gotten pregnant at the age of twenty, just at the start of the hostilities, he squared his shoulders and got a job at the Ministry, and offered to make an honest woman of her. They were married three months before their first son was born.

Ginny's mother, Molly, was a housewitch of the first order, and had no greater ambition than to raise a happy, healthy family. She was a Prewett, before her marriage, and her temper was legendary. Arthur and Molly were, in many ways, or so it seemed in the beginning, perfect complements to each other. Where she was fiery and tempestuous and demanding, he was calm and easygoing and giving. He was often an overgrown boy, always playing with his muggle gadgets, an inveterate hobbyist, while she was normally the epitome of a responsible matron (even if she was twenty-one and pregnant at her wedding). As the eldest child of four, with three mischievous younger siblings and rather neglectful parents, she had become rather strict at a very young age. Arthur helped Molly relax, and she managed their household, keeping the family together and out of the goblins' hands at the end of the day, if only just. She was the loving mother, while he was the somewhat absentminded, beloved father. Somewhere along the line of their lives together, however, these differences which seemed so complementary at the beginning of their marriage became points of contention and strife.

When Ginny was very young, she couldn't remember her parents arguing at all, though she asked Bill once after he moved out, and he said that was because before he graduated, they made sure to keep their "little talks" outside, away from little pitchers with big ears and their fragile, under-enchanted home. By the time she left for school, Ginny thought it was clear they still loved each other (if only because that was the only explanation for why they were still together), but they probably shouldn't be left alone in a room together for more than a few minutes.

The year she was home alone with them was the worst year of her short life to that point, always tense and strained. It always came back to money in the end. Molly worried about their finances, while Arthur resented her for growing into a nagging harpy. He said that she should get a real job of her own, if she was so worried about the money, and she raged about how being a mother was a real job. He told her the kids didn't need her full time anymore (which Ginny agreed with), and Molly retaliated saying that no one had ever needed him, and his job was a joke, or sometimes just threw plates at him. She spent her time in the house and the garden, and he spent his at work or in the shed, tinkering with his muggle bits and bobs. Molly and Ginny ate dinner alone, with Arthur's food left under a stasis spell. He only came in when he knew the coast was clear. When the kids were all home for the holidays, their parents made a show of getting along like the perfect family, but thought they never talked about it, all the children (except maybe Ron) knew how things really were.

Ginny wasn't certain she would ever forgive Ron for leaving her alone with them while he went off to Hogwarts a whole year before her.

The only reason the house hadn't collapsed under its own weight and the periodic explosions from her parents' arguments, or from the twins' room (when they finally got their own room) was that her eldest brother, Bill, spent every spare moment whenever he was home carving tiny glyphs and runes into the walls, enchanting it to stay upright. Bill was Ginny's favorite brother, but then, he was everyone's favorite brother except Charlie. He had started school the year Ginny was born, and graduated when she was seven, although she thought he must have started enchanting the house before then, because she couldn't ever remember a time when he hadn't sat quietly for hour on hour, meticulously marking out the runes in chalk and charcoal before carefully carving them and filling them with magic, tying their home to the land and fields and the river Ottery. He did the same thing for a little wardcrafting company most days of the week back then, but he said he always saved his best work for his family.

When she was nine, her second-oldest brother, Charlie, graduated as well. Charlie and Bill never got along. They were rivals, Ginny thought, in a way, before all the others had come along. She knew him least well out of all of them. Charlie decided long before he graduated that he was going to work in a dragon sanctuary, and moved to Romania that same summer. Later that year, Bill came home with an earring, and the news that he had gotten a job working for Gringott's as a cursebreaker. He was off to wherever they might send him, seeking out exotic adventures. At the time, Ginny thought that he had been trying to compete with Charlie, whose job was, by definition, awesome. In hindsight, though, it might have had more to do with the also-recently-graduated Nymphadora Tonks rejecting his proposal of marriage. Regardless of the reason, Bill was very good at cursebreaking, and along with enchanting the house, he had made a habit of sliding his father a cut of his paycheck, without which Ginny was almost positive they would have lost the house at least once. Her parents didn't know that she knew.

Percy was who Ginny always thought of when anyone mentioned the idea of an older brother. Bill was so much older he was like an uncle or a cousin, and she had never really been around Charlie much. Percy was the oldest brother she could actually remember before he went to Hogwarts when she was six. She never liked him much, even back then. He was always too serious and responsible and swotty. He looked around their little tumbledown house, and saw a life he was ashamed of. He was, she thought, terrified to end up with a life like his father. It would never happen, of course. He was too much like their mother, without her absurd fantasy of having an enormous (perfect) family. Bill and Charlie were much more like their father in personality, but Percy was driven. The twins with their chaos were the bane of his existence, though Ron had followed him around more than he had any of the others when they were little, and for the first few years after Percy went off to school, whenever he was home for the hols.

Ginny had spent more time with the twins before Hogwarts than with Percy. They were troublemakers, Fred and George. Molly had a habit of calling them by her dead brothers' names, Fabian and Gideon. She said they got the Black sense of humor from Molly's mother, which was why their jokes were a little cruel sometimes. Ron had followed them around, too, once Percy left, and the four of them became much more rough-and-tumble than they ever had been when Percy was there to keep them in line, roaming the nearby fields and scrubby woods in search of trouble. If Ginny had to pick who among her brothers she was most like, she thought it was probably the twins. Molly said she was more like Aunt Alice than the boys, if Aunt Alice had been allowed to run wild for half her childhood, but Ginny knew that wasn't true.

From her mother's stories, Aunt Alice was the good girl, nice and kind, with the Prewett temper, but a bone-deep love of justice and fairness. She had been a true Hufflepuff. Ginny, on the other hand, knew herself to have a mean streak, and the same cruel sense of humor as the twins. She fought and played as hard as any of the boys, and her temper drove her not to justice, but revenge. Her mother only wanted her daughter to be like the little sister she had lost. It didn't matter at all to Molly that that simply wasn't Ginny.

Ginny was quite certain her childhood could be divided into two parts: The early part that she didn't remember too clearly before Percy left, where things were much more controlled around the house, and her parents never argued; and after Percy left, when it seemed like Molly stopped trying to control her children at all, letting the twins run wild and drag Ron and Ginny after them in their madcap adventures. Even Bill's return didn't make up for Percy's absence – he was a grown-up, and had work and things to do besides run after them and ruin their fun all day.

The twins went to Hogwarts when Ginny was eight, after two years of running wild with the boys. Molly tried, then, to break her youngest children to the pureblood manners they would be expected to have in the world outside their little homestead, but she was too late. Ron had so many bad habits at nine that it wasn't worth the trouble of trying to mold him into a young gentleman, and Ginny was even further from being a proper young lady. Tomboy might have been an understatement. Their mother had settled for teaching them the "Three R's" and sent them out of the house after lessons so that she could do whatever she had become accustomed to doing all day. For another two years, Ginny and Ron had been the only kids in the house, most of the time. They were, because of that, Ginny thought, closer to each other for those two years than to any of the others. The twins made jokes about their youngest siblings becoming more alike than themselves.

That, perhaps, was why Ron's going off to school felt like so much more of a betrayal than it had when any of the others left. Or perhaps it was the fact that she was certain she was smarter and more mature than Ron, and that if he could go, she ought to be able to go as well. Or perhaps it was that, in hindsight, Ron leaving was the point where her perfect childhood, full of adventure and freedom, began to go to hell.

The 1991-1992 school year was horrible for Ginny. Her mother tried to trap her in the house every morning, giving her chores meant to make her practice the more feminine arts: re-hemming Charlie's old school robes by hand, or making dinner, or tending the kitchen garden. When Ginny refused, or ran off halfway through or after doing a terrible job, Molly yelled at her and lectured for hours on how she was a disappointment as a daughter. Yelling back about how unfair it was that the boys never had to do anything like this never seemed to help.

By October, Ginny had taken to sneaking out at five in the morning to steal one of the boys' old brooms and fly in to town (making sure to land and hide her broom well away from any muggles) or to the Lovegoods' or the Diggorys', or to anywhere in the countryside that wasn't home. She had never spent so much time alone before, and she hated it. She missed a lot of meals that year, but she thought it was worth it to avoid being told what a failure she was as a girl every time she turned around. Eventually the only rule Molly insisted on was that Ginny had to be present for dinner, so that she could be sure her youngest child hadn't died in the course of the day. Even receiving a Hogwarts toilet seat by owl post for her birthday from the twins didn't make it better (though her mother's reaction was very funny, as for once it was not directed at her).

Between the running battle between her mother and herself and the growing tensions between her parents, Ginny was pleased when she first heard they would be going to visit Charlie for Christmas. She was only slightly disappointed when she realized that she would not be going with her parents – she would still have time away from her mother, and perhaps they would receive a Christmas miracle, and the elder Weasleys would work out some of their problems.

It was not to be.

Ginny was shipped off to their nearest neighbors, the Lovegoods, to spend the holidays with the strange and unsettling Luna and her equally strange and offputting father, Xeno. She had visited them often over the fall, as she had nothing better to do, but she would much rather have stayed alone at the Burrow than been subjected to the Lovegoods' idea of holiday cooking.

When Molly and Arthur returned, they were angrier than ever. Arthur had let it slip that he had spent nearly two-hundred Galleons on a muggle automobile, which he had been hiding in his shed and tinkering with for months. When Molly asked where he'd gotten the money, he had been forced to admit that he had been holding back part of what Bill (and Charlie, on occasion) sent home to help their family.

Molly saw this as a betrayal of the highest order, and had threatened both Bill's and Arthur's lives if Bill ever gave his father money again. If he wanted to help the family (because God knew his father wasn't doing his part), he could send money directly to her. She went to Gringott's and opened a new vault, transferring all of the family's funds out of Arthur's control. She even refused to cook for Arthur, who spent the entire spring term exiled to his shed, sleeping in his precious "car."

Ginny felt a bit sorry for her father, but she couldn't help but think it had been a stupid thing to do, endangering their already perilous finances (not to mention his marriage) for his hobby. The atmosphere in the house was even more suffocating than it had been before the ill-fated Christmas Trip, and Ginny used even the slimmest of excuses to stay out of the house, spending nights with Luna Lovegood or Tabby Diggory or (when she felt she'd outstayed her welcome at the Diggorys' and couldn't stand any more looniness), saying that she was staying with one of her friends, while actually camping in the woods between her house and the Lovegoods'.

She was more relieved than she could say when the boys returned at the end of June, but that faded quickly. Everything had changed, over the past ten months.

The play her parents put on of being the perfect, happy family fell flat when she knew that her father had been kept out of the house for five months, and had only been allowed back for his sons' benefit. It was pathetic that they even tried anymore, and, though she was loathe to admit it, it hurt that they put in the effort to pretend for the boys, but not for her.

Percy disappeared into his room, and hardly ever came out except for meals. Ginny had to wonder if he knew about their parents' stupidity as well. Maybe Bill had written him. Ginny hadn't, and she doubted either of their parents would have mentioned it.

Ron was like a different person, and no fun at all. He didn't want to do anything with Ginny anymore because she was a girl, and younger than him, even though that had never mattered before. Neville Longbottom, who was Aunt Alice's son and Ron's friend at school, came over once or twice to spend the day with him, and then Ron wanted to do all the things he said he wasn't interested in doing with Ginny, flying and exploring and even showing the fat little rich boy how to de-gnome the garden. Ginny spent the summer mostly not speaking to him.

She had followed the twins around instead, helping them with pranks, showing off how well she had learned to fly in their absence, and stealing Percy's wand so that they could teach her different jinxes and some of the first-year wandwork. The boys taught themselves how to drive the muggle car, taking it out for joy rides on the back roads around the muggle town. (Ginny wasn't tall enough to work the pedals, but the twins let her shift and steer sometimes.) With Fred and George, Ginny was almost able to pretend the horrible year never happened. Almost.

She never told any of her brothers how bad it had been, trying to survive their parents without them. They wouldn't understand, and it was over, now, anyway.

}{-}{-}{-}{-}{

Ginny's Hogwarts letter came in the middle of July, and her mother was appalled that they were expected to buy a full set of Lockhart's books. Molly loved the celebrity author, thought he was brilliant, and very handsome, but his books were more than a bit pricey. Ginny thought he was full of shite. She had already been resigned to getting most things second-hand. None of the old family wands worked for her, so they would already have to buy her a new wand, which meant used robes and books at least. But if they really did have to get a load of Lockhart's rubbish, she would be lucky to get a proper potions kit at all, even used. She definitely wouldn't be able to get a pet, even one as useless as Scabbers. Perhaps she could adopt one of the stray cats at Hogwarts.

They didn't end up going to the Alley for almost another month: Molly wanted to wait and get everything at once, and the boys' letters didn't come until August. On seeing Molly's expression when she realized that every year would need the Lockhart books, Percy had called a family meeting for all the kids. The next morning, he and the twins offered to forego the overly expensive books altogether, and get them from the library or share with their friends as needed. Ron and Ginny would share one set with each other, since Ron didn't want to commit to mooching off Neville without asking him first, and Ginny didn't have any friends at Hogwarts yet. Loony Lovegood, who was the only girl Ginny knew in her year, would probably show up with a stack of Quibblers instead of her required texts. Molly had protested, but only weakly. They really didn't have the money for thirty-five DADA texts.

The trip to the Alley had been good-exciting at first, because it was always fun to go to the Alley – there were always interesting things to see, and the twins almost always managed to make some sort of mischief. Finally getting her very own wand (9 inches, willow and dragon heart-string) only made it better. Percy had run into Mary Potter with Catherine Urquhart in the Leaky Cauldron, so even he, who normally moped any time he had to be seen in public with his family, was in a good mood, puffed up with self-importance. He disappeared around lunch time, and Ginny thought she saw him walking with a curvy brunette girl on her way to the book store from Ollivander's.

Then, in Flourish and Blotts', the day had become bad-exciting, as Ginny's mother fawned over Gilderoy Lockhart and her father rose to Lucius Malfoy's taunts and picked a fight in the middle of the store. Books had been knocked everywhere, and all the Weasleys had been banned for life (or at least until the owner forgot he had banned them. The twins had been banned for life twice already). The shopkeepers looked like they wanted to ban Malfoy as well, but didn't quite dare.

When the family finally returned home, Ginny had packed all of her school supplies carefully in her trunk, setting it aside. She considered reading through her textbooks, but decided she probably wouldn't be expected to have read them by the first day. The last two weeks of summer seemed to drag on forever as she became ever-more-excited to go to Hogwarts. The twins told her all sorts of horror stories about the sorting, and she pretended to be afraid (but if Ron could manage it, it couldn't be difficult). Percy gave her all sorts of unwanted advice, and even Ron got in on the act, calling her ickle Ginny-kins for three days before she hit him with a Tripping Jinx that led to him getting bitten on the nose by a gnome. Her mother tried to take her aside at least four times to tell her something, but never seemed to quite spit it out, whatever it was, and her father patted her on the head absentmindedly more often than usual, though that might have been just because he saw her at dinner more often.

At King's Cross, Molly had wailed about her last baby leaving her, and Arthur had been publicly supportive, which Ginny considered a load of toss on both their parts. She was certain her mother was as happy to be rid of her as she was to go. The boys disappeared as soon as they reached the platform to do whatever it was they did on the train. Ginny had found a compartment with a bunch of other new first year girls, though Fred and George had come to kidnap her just before lunch, and dragged her off to meet Mary Potter. She had been quite embarrassed by their antics, though Mary and her friends seemed more amused than anything else, even the one who spent ten minutes telling the twins off for interrupting her reading. They had made small talk for a while, and then she escaped back to the other first-years, who wanted to know all about the famous girl.

She had been sorted into Gryffindor, even after telling the Hat that she wanted to be in Slytherin to spite her mother and Ron, along with eleven other girls and thirteen boys. The girls had an enormous room half-way up Gryffindor Tower. It was definitely larger than it possibly could have been, though Ginny didn't realize that until she woke up in the morning. She found a bed between Janine Abbott and Caitlin Morsette, neither of whom, she quickly realized, were the sort of girl she wanted to be friends with, though they quickly became friends with each other, and developed a nasty habit of talking past her.

The first class on Monday morning was transfiguration with their Head of House, which was exactly where things started to go very wrong. If her life had been going to hell for almost a year already, that fateful class had to be the point where it jumped in a Gringott's cart and started flying down the rails, because that was where she found the Diary.

}{-}{-}{-}{-}{

The Diary had been tucked inside her Transfiguration book. The larger book was poorly bound, so she hadn't noticed the extra half-inch when she packed it away in her trunk. The journal itself was simple: black leather and rough-cut pages, clearly old, but never used, with the name TM Riddle embossed on the front. There were no composition lines, just page after page of thin, off-white, muggle paper. She had stuffed it in her bag and returned to her lesson with hardly a thought.

Lessons were not so difficult. Ginny's new wand was much better and easier to work with than Percy's, and she had managed most of the things they were learning already with his over the summer. The Potions professor was a greasy git, and Lockhart was a pastel-wearing ponce, but they were the only two who actually seemed to have expected the new firsties to have memorized their texts already, and only Snape had taken points away when he found that they hadn't.

The difficult part of Hogwarts, Ginny quickly found, was that out of the full dozen girls in her dorm, none of them wanted to be friends with her. She had never felt more out of place in her life than she did surrounded by giggling, boy-crazy, lace-wearing girls. They made fun of her for her hand-me-down jumpers and ragged, second-hand trousers and robes. They made fun of her for her used books, lazy pony-tail and loud voice, for her rude, boyish manners. They made fun of her for preferring to spend time with Zach Moray or Matthias Bumper than any of them, and the fact that she blushed whenever they pointed any of this out, her face clashing horribly with her hair. They made fun of her for not reading Witch Weekly, for not thinking that Cedric Diggory and Thom Atwell were "totes the cutest," for knowing the difference in Potions between flobberworms and earthworms, and for trying to avoid them at mealtimes by hiding with her brothers in the upper years. They called her a hick for knowing all about growing your own vegetables in Herbology, and a brown-noser for asking questions in class. The purebloods made fun of her for not knowing what she should as a pureblood, and the muggleborns made fun of her because of the little she knew about muggle gadgets like cars and televisions. She would have been better off, she soon realized, not admitting to knowing anything about muggles at all.

By the first Friday of the year, she wanted to go home. Her entire life she had wanted to get to school, to this place which, to her, represented the entire world outside her parents' house, but it was not what she had expected at all. Hogwarts itself could be the best place in the world, but she would prefer to be at the Burrow, alone forever, rather than deal with her dorm mates for another evening. She had hidden in the loo no one ever used on the second floor during dinner, sniffling and trying to decide if she was hungry enough to risk facing the other girls, when she knocked over her bag and re-discovered the Diary. And the second time, wanting nothing more than a friend to talk to, she had taken out a quill and started scribbling, writing down all the things she hated about school, and all the things she had expected, and wished it would have been, and how much she wished she could go home, or at least get out of Gryffindor, and how she really was the failure her mother had insisted all last year that she was, and why that mattered more than any of the rest of it.

And then… The Diary wrote back.

"Hello? Hello? Who are you?" it had said.

And Ginny, tears drying into salty streaks on her face, had answered. That, she thought, was the moment her fate had been sealed.

Tom had become her best friend and confidant. He gave her the courage she needed to face her dorm mates, telling her all about the world he grew up in by night, and listening whenever she needed to vent between classes.

He was born in 1926, and was raised in a muggle orphanage. He had been a Ravenclaw, he said, and had lived in Muggle London during a horrible muggle war he called the Blitz. He had to go back – he had nowhere else to go in the summers, but he had lived in terrible fear for his life. In 1943, he had made the Diary, a copy of his memories, just in case he didn't survive the muggle war, so that he would know he had left something behind. He said that he had written in the book for a while after he made it, but disappeared five years later, and never returned. The next time someone had written to him, decades had passed, and they told him Tom Riddle was dead.

Tom gave her pointers with her spellwork, and asked her about recent history. She told him all about the War, and the Dark Lord, and Mary Potter, whom she had met, albeit briefly. She told him about the family she had lost, and then the family who remained, and about her brothers and her cousin Neville and her crush on Colin Creevey who was far too excitable about everything, and ridiculously enthusiastic about the wizarding world, but so nice to her, even at the expense of his own popularity.

She told him about the attack on Halloween, and how she found a set of her own second-hand robes, days later, stuffed under her bed and covered in red paint.

She cried her frustration and anger at him when Colin was attacked the next weekend, her only living friend ripped away by the Heir of Slytherin.

She told him how she started to have blank spots in her memory, where she couldn't remember what she was doing, for hours, sometimes, and how she woke up from a very strange dream one night to find rooster feathers in her robe pockets and in her hair.

She told him how Percy was concerned about her, and kept telling her to go talk to Madam Pomfrey, and asking if she was eating alright. Tom sympathized with her, and encouraged her to sleep more, not to write as much, to try not to stress about her classes, to go and enjoy a Quidditch match now and then. He told her, insidiously, that maybe Percy was right… had she been eating properly, without her mother hovering over her? Perhaps she ought to go ask for a draught of Dreamless Sleep, and skip her spell practice, just this once. He was sure she would be fine, but perhaps it would be better if she took a "mental health day," because, after all, it was very trying to have to deal with her room mates, he knew.

Just before the winter holidays, there was another attack, a ghost and a student, and she could not remember where she was at the time. A horrible suspicion began to dawn. Her robes, with incriminating red paint all over them… Empty places in her memories at just the wrong times...

At first she'd thought the stress of her first year was getting to her, and the robes were just her roommates, trying to frame her for the message, or playing some kind of awful joke. But what if it wasn't a joke?

She wanted more than anything for it not to be true, but she didn't remember where she'd been for any of the attacks, and there were the feathers, which were just weird, but seemed to suggest she'd been doing something she didn't remember, not just drifting off in the library or the commons, as Tom had suggested.

"Tom, help me," she wrote, desperately, hours later, unable to keep it to herself any longer. "There was another attack today, and I don't know where I was. Tom, what am I going to do? I think I'm going mad! I think… I think I'm the one attacking everyone, Tom!"

The boy in the diary had done his best to soothe her fears, but even his cool logic – "You can't be the Heir of Slytherin, Ginny. Your family's not even related to Slytherin, are they? You're a Gryffindor. The Heir of Slytherin wouldn't be a Gryffindor. Besides, you don't know anything about the Chamber of Secrets…" – was not entirely able to wipe away her panic. Eventually he had settled for convincing her not to do anything rash. If it wasn't her at all, it wouldn't do for her to turn herself in.

}{-}{-}{-}{-}{

Almost everyone went home for the holidays. Ginny, along with her brothers, stayed. Fred and George said something about wanting to give Auntie Muriel a special gift, which she could only assume was the reason her mother had told them all to stay at school. Either that, or she didn't feel like putting on a show of high spirits and congeniality with her husband. The boys were off doing whatever it was they did all day. Percy mostly wrote letters to his girlfriend, who had gone home for the Hols, but Ginny had no idea where Fred, George, and Ron kept disappearing to. Ginny, left to her own devices, found herself in the library, where, to distract herself, she decided to see what information she could find on Tom Riddle's Hogwarts.

She started with a yearbook from 1945, the year Grindelwald fell and Tom Riddle graduated. She found, almost immediately and to her horror, that Tom Riddle had been a prefect, just as he had told her, but not a Ravenclaw prefect.

Slytherin.

He had lied to her.

He had told her he couldn't lie, so that was twice. Who was to say what else he had lied about?

And a wave of cold terror washed over her as she remembered a bit of advice her father had given her, ages ago. "Don't trust anything if you can't see where it keeps its brain."

It was simple advice, meant to keep children away from Dark artifacts. Almost every pureblood child knew it, but Ginny, wrapped up in her new friend, had forgotten.

"What are you?" she wrote to Tom.

"What do you mean, Ginny? I'm your friend." If a book could sound hurt, Ginny imagined Tom would.

"Are you? You lied to me! You're not a Ravenclaw at all! How can I trust anything you say, when you said you couldn't lie to me?"

"Ginny, I…"

"No, Tom! What are you?"

"I'm sorry, Ginny! I'm a memory. A collection of memories. I've told you this. I'm a copy of a boy who used to be a Slytherin, yes, but… nobody trusts a Slytherin. I'm sorry I lied! I just wanted someone to talk to. I was so lonely… there's nothing here, no sight or sound, nobody to talk to, nothing to do. It's awful, being trapped in this book. I just… I was afraid you would leave me, throw me away. I need you, Ginny."

It took the rest of break and three more gaps in her memory for Ginny to realize that the Diary was the cause of her faltering sanity. She tried, then, to burn it, and then, when that didn't work, she stabbed it with her potions knife, dumped acid on it, and threw it out a window. The cut repaired itself before her eyes, and the acid simply sank into the pages like ink. She immediately regretted throwing it out the window, and dug around in the snow outside for ages looking for it. She couldn't leave it anywhere anyone else could find it. He had fooled her. He could fool someone else.

She thought she probably tried to get rid of it more often than that, because there were lots of little holes in her memory, where the infernal book had taken her over and stopped her, erasing whatever it was she tried to do.

He let her remember the futility of going to McGonagall or Dumbledore, or even Madam Pince, who ought to know all about cursed books, leaving her the memory of approaching them, and leaving, the diary safely in hand. She thought about throwing it in the lake, but it was frozen solid. She briefly tried leaving it in her room, but quickly returned to carrying it everywhere, no longer because Tom was her constant companion, but because it wouldn't do for the house elves to find it while they were cleaning, or for her brothers to come snooping around and find it and get sucked in before she could find a way to get rid of it.

He let her remember climbing the stairs to the Astronomy tower, her mind filled with determination to jump, to end his influence by ending her own life. He let her keep the note she had written, and it lay, folded in the bottom of her bag, a silent mockery when she reappeared in her own room, an indeterminate amount of time later, with no memory of how she got there. He let her remember the pain of slicing her own wrist with a potions knife, and the horror as he took over her body, healing the cut completely with her own wand and vanishing the blood from the shower stall. He had whispered inside her mind, "Stop trying, you stupid girl, it will never work. You are mine now, and I will not let you destroy this body." And she had stopped, for fear he would take her over and never give her back.

Finally, just after classes began again, in a moment of despair and utter madness, completely unplanned, she tried to flush the Diary down the toilet in Moaning Myrtle's loo, the place where the nightmare began. Surely no one would ever go into Myrtle's stall, and hopefully if they ever did, the damned book would be waterlogged and drowned, but she just couldn't take it anymore. She had to get away from it. She fled before the ghost could appear, before the Diary could realize what she had done and stop her. She managed, finally, to get far enough away that it could not force her to come back.

She told no one.

She did not want to be blamed for the attacks, and she told herself that no one had really been hurt. Colin and Justin would be un-petrified when the mandrakes were ready, and the Diary was gone, so no one would be hurt.

It was a weak argument, but she was so worn from fighting Tom that it was easy to lie to herself.

She wanted to believe it.

}{-}{-}{-}{-}{

Ginny was free of the Diary for almost a month. She threw herself into her second term schoolwork, ignoring the taunts of her classmates. If there was one thing, she thought bitterly, for which she could thank Tom, it was the fact that dealing with him put all her fellow schoolgirls' jabs in perspective. What did it matter, that she was unpopular and "boyish," compared to the threat of her body being taken completely from her control? The worst the stupid girls could do was make her hate herself. Tom made her want to kill herself, and then stopped her from managing it. She blocked her roommates out entirely, sitting with the other houses in their mixed classes and the upperclassmen at dinner. She barely noticed, anymore, when they called her name in their wretched, hateful voices. She hardly blinked when, one day in early February, the other girls moved all of her things, forcing her to change beds and sleep in the corner, as far away from the rest of them as they could put her. She would have sneered at Caitlin and Janine's overly-loud, overly pleased exclamations of delight at not having her bed between theirs anymore, but she found she couldn't be bothered.

She tried to focus on her studies, but in moments of weakness, her mind slipped back to Tom, wondering what he was doing, or if he had been found, or if he was dead. She hated him, and everything he'd done to her, and everything he made her do, but there was still some part of her (a rather larger part than she wanted to admit) that was a little bit in love with the boy in the book, the boy who had helped her through her first term, who had listened to her troubles with a sympathetic ear. The worst part was that Tom was the person she would have talked to about all this, if only he hadn't been the problem, and evil. Writing in a normal diary just wasn't the same.

She cried herself to sleep at night, quietly, behind silenced curtains, so that the other girls wouldn't notice. When she finally did sleep, she suffered hideous nightmares where she was bound and helpless, locked in a corner of her mind, while a tall, dark-haired boy directed her body all around her. She woke, shaking and nauseous, more nights than not, grateful that, at the very least, her terrors apparently let her stay silent.

Still, she must have looked or acted better than she felt, or at any rate better than she had when she had spent every spare moment writing to Tom, because Percy found the time to come and say encouraging things, like, "I must say, Gin, I'm glad you've finally started eating again. You were looking awfully peaked before the hols."

January became February, and Ginny began to heal, thinking of her tormentor less often and sleeping through the night a bit more. Some of her old fire returned. In the first week of February, she told Janine, loudly, in front of their entire Herbology class, to shut up about Ginny's family being so poor that they had to grow their own food, or Ginny would stuff the other girl's poblanos where the sun didn't shine. This had earned Ginny a detention from the appalled Professor Sprout, but it felt good to strike back at her tormentors, even if it was only verbally.

And then, in the second week of February, everything came crashing down around her again.

Ginevra, a young man's voice whispered inside her mind, Long time no see.

Ginny startled so badly she almost knocked over her telescope.

"Miss Weasley?" Professor Sinistra asked, "Are you alright?"

Ginny opened her mouth to speak, but found she couldn't. After a brief hesitation, her lips and tongue moved of their own accord. "It's nothing, Professor," Tom said smoothly. "I just lost my balance for a second."

I hate you! Get out of my head! Ginny thought fiercely at the boy. She had the impression he was smirking at her.

"Okay. I know all too well that staring up for too long can make you a bit disoriented. If you get dizzy, do sit down. That goes for everyone. Miss Lovegood, let's see your chart…"

Is that any way to treat your only true friend? Tom responded mockingly.

I don't want to be friends with you! Go away! Leave me alone!

Oh, I'd guessed that much, Ginevra, darling. You tried to, what was it? Flush my Diary down a toilet? Luckily it was found by someone amenable to persuasion, and so we have been united once again.

Who was it? Ginny was furious. She would kill whoever had brought the sick artefact back to her.

An old friend of yours, I believe, the "loony" Miss Luna of Ravenclaw?

That checked her anger. Surely Luna wouldn't have gone along with Tom on purpose. She was just crazy. Ginny couldn't blame the mad girl for being fooled by the evil book. After all, she had, and she had a fully-functioning brain.

Miss Luna is no more insane than yourself, Tom said, sounding amused. Certainly she is more resistant to my manipulations. I finally had to tell her I was worried about you, poor girl, so alone and friendless. I didn't want to leave her, of course, but I felt it was my duty as a good friend, to check up on you. Surely she could find a way to let my Diary wander back to you, as it had wandered away in the first place. He laughed, and it was a sinister sound. Ginny watched her hand mechanically completing the star chart.

I really don't think, Tom continued, that I can allow you the chance to pull such a stunt as that again.

He must have felt her shock and anger as she realized what he meant.

Oh, yes, I think I'll be keeping your body for you, at least for a few more weeks. It wouldn't do to have you derailing my plans, after all.

You'll never get away with this, Tom! You bastard! Someone will notice! My brothers! The professors! They'll save me! They'll stop you!

Oh, no, love, he said silkily, I don't really think that they will. Go to sleep, you foolish little girl. I'll run the show from now on.

And to her horror, Ginny found her consciousness retreating, following his order to sleep. She railed against it, but she was too tired – she couldn't fight it…

Ginny's body smiled. There was a lot to be said, Tom now knew, for having a body, even an unfamiliar, prepubescent, female body. He had never realized, before making his horcrux and cutting himself off from his own, but apparently it was the sort of thing one only missed when it was gone.

"What are you laughing at, Weasley?" a blonde girl snapped.

"Just your idiotic face, blondie," Tom said in Ginny's voice, his grin spreading even wider as he turned to look at her. "Tell me, do you practice looking like an apologetic puppy recently scolded for incontinence, or does that expression come naturally to you?"

He collected Ginny's books and spun on her heel, leaving the speechless blonde behind him. As much fun as taunting Gryffindor children was, he had more important things to do, like getting the esteemed Headmaster (fucking Albus Dumbledore) fired, finalizing his plans to magically construct a body for himself, and tracking down his wayward alter ego.

Tom hadn't decided yet whether he would let his older self join him in his soon-to-be-constructed body. That stupid bastard had a lot to answer for, not least among them the state of his basilisk, who used to be an intelligent creature, and the fact that he didn't come back to the Diary when he managed to blow himself up, and yet still hadn't managed to return by some other means in the past eleven years. On the one hand, he would have fifty years of knowledge that Tom didn't… but on the other, from all Ginny and Luna had said, he sounded like he had somehow lost his bloody mind, just as surely as the basilisk. Getting blown up while attacking his own apparent descendant? It was practically a fucking Greek tragedy. Idiot.