So, uh, sorry about the late chapter?

I was supposed to post it last week and I did, on AO3, but I forgot to post it here too oops.

(About the quote: Many online sources says this is a Japanese Proverb, but while I searched for the line in the original language, I discovered that it in fact originated from a Chinese saying. Some level of irony there, since it's about not believing everything you read.)

Pairings: Potential Hadria (FemHarry) x Tom Riddle, but more platonic than romantic, other pairings undecided.

Disclaimer: I do not own Harry Potter

Currently un-beta-ed. Let me know if you spot any mistakes, thanks.

Chapter Two: Ginny Weasley

"尽信书，不如无书。" It is better to have no books at all than believe in everything you read. — Chinese Proverb

Most wizarding children born around the 1980s (both before and after) grew up listening to stories about Harriet Potter, alongside fairy tales like those written by Beedle the Bard.

Harriet Potter, a little girl brought up by fantastic but loving witches and wizards, who lived in a palace with unicorns and pegasi, who was such a beautiful and enchanting child that firebirds would perch in the trees of her palace gardens just to see her. Even the Fair Folk would include her in their play and mischief, and blessed her with many gifts.

When Ginevra Weasley was very young and small, she dreamed of meeting this fairy princess named Harriet Potter, who she was told was actually real, and only one year older than her. She would then have a lovely older sister who would play with her, and use her fairy magic on her annoying older brothers, and she wouldn't be lonely anymore.

Then, when Ginny grew slightly older, the stories also changed. After all, children's stories were told and adapted for their intended audience.

Harriet Potter became the girl—still a princess of a palace—who would get kidnapped by dragons or other dangerous beast, and then, she would use her wits and magic to defeat her kidnappers, before riding away on a fine steed—usually still a unicorn, or a pegasus—into the sunset. And then she would reunite her wizarding guardians along the way home, who had been worried sick for her as they searched for her, and they would go home together and have dinner, and live happily ever after.

It was also around this time that one of her older brothers, Charlie, went and chose to study dragons in Romania. He would write many letters home, and her dad would read them aloud at dinner. There were many stories about this dragon or that, and what a wonderful time he was having there. It was also by that time that her eldest brother, Bill, had had many adventures of his own to tell, with his Curse-Breaking job with Gringotts.

It wasn't as if Ginny had never known about her brothers' interests—they were a big family in a big-but-not-nearly-big-enough house. But dragons and curses were the stuff of horrors. As not only the youngest but also the only girl in the family, it wasn't strange that her parents, like most protective parents, told her many exaggerated tales about dangerous beasts and the like. After all, it was the most common and traditional way of ensuring that these little children never walked oblivious to their deaths.

So her brothers, who were much older than her, had always seemed even bigger, because they were able to talk about scary things like these with as much interest—or even more—as they would with Quidditch. They were her Older Brothers, and that was what Older Brothers were like. Cool, and brave, and an entirely different species.

But then the fairytales changed, that was when Ginny, aged nine, decided that she too could be like them. She could be like Harriet, the heroine of many stories. If Harriet were a monster-defeating princess, Ginny would be her monster-defeating knight.

So Ginny, who had already been sneaking out on her brothers' brooms for a few years now, began to practice flying with even more determination. Quidditch flying wasn't enough, not when up against a mighty foe.

She also began to ask her brothers more questions, eager to soak up as much knowledge as possible. After all, books were expensive, and it was easier to find out more from her brothers' experience.

One practical, tangible, benefit that came out of this was when she learned how Bill used to fend off the twins. She was still too young and inexperienced for the more complicated magics, but she was able to pick up a few tricks to deal with some of the enchanted objects her brothers would use every now and then.

(Of course, this meant that the twins were then challenged to make their enchantments more complex and this would eventually lead to the creation of products like their Wildfire Whizbangs that doesn't get Stunned when hit by a Stunner nor Vanished when hit by a Vanishing spell, but that would come later.)

Then Ron Weasley, her brother one year older than her, went to Hogwarts. And he wrote back about an awful rich and spoiled brat by the name of Hadria Potter, who was always at the centre of attention. She was a Slytherin, and worst of all, she was good friends with Draco Malfoy. And they all knew what the Malfoys were like.

There were good Slytherins, though few, as their father had tried to impress on them, and then there were the Malfoys.

She was also friends with Pansy Parkinson, another snobbish Pureblood (not as snobbish as the Malfoys, but few could compare to them anyway), and Blaise Zabini, who everyone knew was the son of the infamous Black Widow.

She's Dark as they come, no doubt, Ron had said in his letter.

I tried to befriend her, I tried. Because she was with Malfoy, and I mean, she's the Girl-Who-Lived! I thought she was probably being forced to be there or something, or maybe she was just being polite. And then Malfoy was being a prat, no surprises there, but she didn't say anything, not even when Malfoy was bad-mouthing our family, and then she even threw a spider at my feet from Merlin knows where!

And Ginny was left to fumble with the crumbling bits of her past ideas—dreams, illusions—she had of Harriet, attempting to reconcile them with the terrible—real—pieces of Potter she had obtained from Ron. They didn't fit very well.

Heartbrokenness was a concept she'd only read about in storybooks, which she had been so confused about, until one of her brothers had explained that no, hearts don't literally break, not like that. It was just a metaphor, which meant that it was a fancy way of describing something, and heartbreak was a fancy way of describing a kind of sadness.

But now she wondered if this was what heartbreak felt like.

Then the twins wrote back. One letter for the family, and a separate one for her, as they have always done. She didn't know if they ever wrote similar personal letters for her other brothers, but they always wrote a different one for her, where they would tell her about all the pranks they've done and all the trouble they've got up to, all the things they avoid sharing with their mother.

They had pranked the Slytherin table first thing on Monday morning, because they had heard that someone had magicked a spider at Ron, and that had somehow escalated into a school-wide prank war.

Don't listen to Ron. Actually, we don't know what Ron's been writing but it can't be good. It's probably half right though. Ickle Hadria is awful and she's somehow friends with Malfoy and we love it. He gets offended by so many things it's hilarious.

But don't worry, she's also friends with a Muggleborn and Neville Longbottom—don't know if you remember him, but his family is one of our lot—timid sort, very Hufflepuff, at least at first. Don't know what she's been feeding him but it's doing wonders.

Halloween is gonna be a blast.

And Ginny, who was stuck at home—one more year, she would remind herself—spent her time collecting these letters from Ron and the twins, comparing them, coming up with her own conclusions, practising more on Charlie's old broom, and reading her brothers' old textbooks.

Percy didn't write home anything about Hadria Potter, except once, about some prank that involved a lot of mirrors that he got so frustrated by because many first years lost their way because of them.

Christmas—or Yule—came and went.

Her brothers came home with more tales to tell, and Hadria and the twins were apparently good enough friends for her to Owl them a Christmas gift. It came in a large parcel that required five owls to transport, and when they unwrapped it, after doing a quick check for anything malicious, there sat an entire toilet seat and bowl, made of something transparent and glass-like, with a lively goldfish swimming merrily in the clear water of the toilet bowl.

The twins had been beside themselves with joy, and were even more delighted when they read the accompanying note that said the fish was actually some kind of enchanted slime that had been charmed to look like a fish and behave like a fish—swimming, leaping out of water, and all.

The problem that Hadria had yet to solve was how to set it up, and she was leaving it to the twins to figure out a way to, ideally, have it in liquid form which could be poured into someone's toilet, and have it remain like that, unnoticed, until a person sits on the toilet, which is when it would take shape and come to life.

Ginny had to admit that it was the sort of thing that was right up their street. Their mother wasn't pleased, to no one's surprise, but their father persuaded her to let the twins have their fun with the toilet bowl and fish because it was, after all, a gift.

When she asked the twins what they gave Hadria for Christmas, they said they had gotten her a red t-shirt and had stitched a slightly crooked golden letter H on it, in imitation of their Weasley jumpers. They'd gotten themselves matching red shirts with F and G on them.

"It can't beat Mum's jumpers," said one of them—probably-George—with a wry smile. "But we reckon we should get ourselves something as a set. To commemorate our partnership."

"—And rivalry—"

"And rivalry, yes."

"And we can now line ourselves up," probably-Fred had added with a chortle. "F, G and H."

Ginny suddenly, very intensely, wished her name started with an E or an I. But then again, she comforted herself, she didn't really care that much for pranking, so it was alright.

This however assured her that Hadria Potter really couldn't be that bad. The shirts were evidence of this. She couldn't imagine her brothers doing this for anyone they didn't actually like a lot. After all, the only other person she knew that had received from them something similarly meaningful had been Lee, back when they were still in first-year.

(They'd casually asked eight-year-old-her what she would make to commemorate a friendship, and she had, just as casually, said "friendship bracelets." She didn't expect them to actually take her suggestion seriously and make friendship bracelets out of tawny leather cords and red-dyed wooden beads.)

However, Ginny had to ask, "Why red and gold? Isn't Hadria a Slytherin?"

"Oh," probably-Fred had said with a dismissive wave of his hand, even as probably-George stifled a laugh. "That's just to annoy Malfoy and the other Slytherins. I'm sure it'll be an eyesore every time she wears it."

The year passed, with the twins continuing to report back on their adventures, which included watching an actual dragon hatching, live, first hand. Charlie was apparently also informed of this, as the school had contacted the dragon sanctuary he was working at regarding the acquisition of the baby dragon.

Ginny couldn't believe she had to miss such a thing. It was a dragon. How many people could claim to have seen a dragon face-to-face, let alone watch a hatching?

Before, she would only be able to name one person she knew—Charlie. Now, she could add Fred and George to the list. And it had become very evident that it really wasn't an Older Brother Thing, since there had been three girls only a year older than her at the scene, one of whom was Hadria.

Her brothers came home at the end of June.

Ron didn't have a lot to say about Hadria and her group of friends, aside from a comment that she had corrupted a fine Hufflepuff and somehow, a Muggleborn as well. It seemed like they didn't actually have a lot of interactions, which was surprising, considering they did have an unofficial feud with the Malfoys, and Ron wasn't the most polite Weasley around.

(To be fair, neither were the twins, but it appeared that either the Slytherins were accepting of their particular brand of humour, or… they were simply forced to accept it.)

But it didn't matter anymore though, because Ginny was already determined to join the "club." She had no idea how to go about it, since there didn't seem to be any requirement of any sort, and she couldn't identify any single common point between the "members," but she figured she'd find some way. Somehow.

Perhaps she could get the twins to introduce her?

Ginny sat on her bed, flipping through her new-but-actually-mostly-second-hand textbooks, though her mind was elsewhere, rather than on A Beginner's Guide to Transfiguration. Her textbooks were strewn across the covers, and she had gone through them all at least once already, despite remembering nothing about any of them.

Because she got to meet the Hadria Potter!

Certainly, the trip to Diagon Alley had been exciting on its own, since it was finally her turn, and she was going to be buying her textbooks, and this was just the start! Then there would be the Hogwarts Express, which she would finally get to ride, and then she would take the boat across the Black Lake, and maybe meet the Giant Squid, and then she would be entering Hogwarts .

But first, it was the trip to Diagon Alley, and she got to meet a Hogwarts Professor there—a handsome and charming man, author of a few of her textbooks, who was going to be their new Defence Professor—and she thought that would be the highlight of her trip. It wasn't, because just as they were exiting Flourish and Blotts, she met Hadria Potter.

"Met" wasn't quite the right word. The twins, who had been ahead of the family, had been the ones to actually meet her. She couldn't catch what they said, for she had still been surrounded by the clamouring crowd and some late reporters, but she had seen them say something to a girl before leaving. And of course she had paid attention to the girl they spoke to, because she was small, about her size, and evidently not someone from their year.

The first thing Ginny had noticed was that the girl was with a group of other children—a black-haired girl with light wheat skin, a black haired boy with dark skin (and a volcanic-patterned snake around his neck), and a white-blonde boy with pale skin who was very obviously a Malfoy. And there was a stern-looking lady dressed in fine robes—the most elegant and definitely expensive she'd ever seen—with a fair face and fairer hair. Ginny couldn't remember her name, but she was certain the lady was Mrs Malfoy, Draco Malfoy's mother.

Having identified the Malfoys, it wasn't hard to deduce who the rest of them were, from her brothers' descriptions, which meant that the girl—dark haired like the rest of the non-Malfoys, and fair—was Hadria Potter. She couldn't see the scar, as it was covered by her fringe, but then she noticed her eyes, and so it couldn't possibly be anyone else.

Hadria's eyes were a startling green, the kind that makes you think, that can't be real. Ginny had seen green eyes before, after all. They were rather rare, but not that rare, and magic did have a funny way with genes. But they were usually a forest green, sometimes a warm leafy kind of green. Hadria's eyes were obvious, eye-catching , because they were the kind of green you'd only expect from cats, or no, maybe not even cats. Snakes, perhaps.

Ginny must have stared for a good long while, even as she was jostled out of the crowd of Flourish and Blotts, which was probably rude, but thankfully nobody noticed.

And not too long later, when Mr Malfoy started taunting her father—and wasn't it curious? He was so snobbish and rude and awful, the perfect example of what she knew of the Malfoys, and yet, there on the other side of the store stood Mrs Malfoy and the kids, watching them from afar with apparent disinterest. As if whatever Mr Malfoy was doing was… trivial. Beneath them, even. Mrs Malfoy's face never changed once, and it was very odd to see her stare at her own husband with the same look of indifference as she did with everyone else.

But she digresses. Mr Malfoy was a terrible person, she had no doubt about that, and Ginny thought she would've felt worse about it all if she hadn't been watching Mrs Malfoy, Hadria and company as much as she was doing. The moment the brawl started, the first thing Ginny felt wasn't dismay, although she should have, but rather some level of incredulousness, not just because it was so ridiculous—who would imagine that Mr Malfoy all prim and proper would get into a physical fight on the street?—but also because the other kids were sharing jelly beans while watching, and Mrs Malfoy… Well, if Mrs Malfoy had seemed somewhat indifferent before, she now looked rather… cold, to put it politely.

(But if Ginny were to be honest, she'd say Mrs Malfoy had the look of a person staring at a pitifully wet and struggling insect, wondering if they should prod it to drier ground or kill it and put it out of its sopping misery. Or just leave it to its fate.)

And Hadria—

And Hadria was looking at her! Their eyes met, for a second, before Ginny quickly looked away because it was one thing to stare, it was another to get caught staring!

But their eyes had met!

Ginny wondered if Hadria knew who she was. If the twins had ever mentioned her.

Regardless, she needed a plan. Ideally, the twins would introduce her and that was it. But she didn't think it would be that easy. So, she needed a plan. And she remembered her mother asking the lady at the counter for any notebooks they might have.

She shuffled through her books, focused now, and found a plain black book. It looked a little old and worn, but the pages were blank. It was probably another one of those secondhand items that had either been bought or given for free as a discount. Charity discount.

There was a faint inscription on the first page of the book, and Ginny squinted a bit to make out the words: T.M. Riddle

Well, no matter who Riddle was, the book was hers now. And it would do perfectly.

She took out a quill and a bottle of ink, and wrote.

Plan A: The twins introduce me, and I first become known as Fred and George's younger sister, before establishing myself as… myself.

And for that, I need a gift.

Ginny paused, contemplating her words. The ink stayed on the surface of the paper like water droplets on wool, before slowly seeping in. She continued writing, organising her thoughts with the words she wrote, not realising the words that the page had absorbed were disappearing.

The twins had informed her that Hadria had a snowy owl and a pet Jarvey. And that she had wanted to keep the dragon from the dragon hatching event. Could she conclude that Hadria liked creatures? Preferably predatory ones? Jarveys were basically large magical ferrets, so they eat smaller animals, right? Although magical creatures were expensive to obtain.

Ginny paused again to dip her quill into more ink, and that was when she realised that her first few sentences had disappeared, and the sentences after were also fading away, until all that was left were her last few sentences.

The black boy has a snake. Seems like a Slytherin thing. Would Hadria like a larger snake?

The journal wasn't so perfect after all, it seemed. Ginny wondered if this was why the book was given up. Who would want a journal with pages that didn't keep its ink for longer than a few seconds?

(Though she could see the appeal, if the ink lasted a bit longer—some people might like the idea of their words being impermanent, especially if what they wrote was particularly personal, or something incriminating.)

Then words, words not written by her, written in a different hand, scrawled themselves across the blank pages.

On a different bed, in a different house, in a different part of England, lay another girl, with black hair and green eyes.

Hadria Potter was fretting.

She had lived a very long life before, and as such, her memory wasn't all that great for events that happened during her school days. She did recall the bigger things, like the Basilisk, and the Triwizard Tournament… and Umbridge… She couldn't forget these events if she tried. But individual smaller events were often either forgotten entirely, or only remembered when triggered by a related incident.

Nonetheless, she did manage to deduce that the Basilisk fiasco occurred in her second year (it was either the second year or the third year, but it had to have happened before she met Sirius because she couldn't remember having received any adult help back then, so second year it was). Which meant that she had two things to settle—the Basilisk, and Sirius.

She had already made most of the necessary preparations for Sirius—mainly conversations with Draco that led to discussions about their extended family and relatives, so she now had a reasonable excuse to bring up Sirius to Gellert, should it come down to it. She also had an Animagus form, which would help for sneaking into Azkaban, if it came down to it, but it would be preferable if they could get Sirius acquitted properly. This meant Peter Pettigrew. Or Scabbers.

Hadria Potter would have to either get the map from the twins this year, or get them to take a good look at said map, and discover Peter Pettigrew themselves. If she remembered correctly, George had told her years after, that they'd stopped referring to the map a year before she and Ron entered Hogwarts, which was why they never noticed him. They had memorised all the routes, and they had gotten skilled enough to avoid the Professors and Filch when planning a prank. Case in point: the year with Umbridge.

But that aside, there was the whole Basilisk problem. Ideally, she would get Tom Riddle's diary from Ginny as soon as possible, either by stealing it—which would be a challenge, since she would need to sneak into the Gryffindor dormitories without the twins somehow getting wind of it—or by directly asking for it. This would first require her to have a good reason for knowing about the diary and requiring it.

Of course, it would also be best if Ginny never wrote in it before she could acquire the diary. As it was, she probably already had the diary in her possession, after meeting Lucius Malfoy in Diagon Alley—and oh, if only Hadria had realised it then, but she only recalled that the diary had been slipped in then after they'd left.

So, Hadria could only hope that Ginny wouldn't need a diary at least until the school year starts…

Feeling spoilt enough yet? No worries, you'll be spoilt for one more chapter! Expect Chapter Three to be out in one week's time. It's already partway written.

And then I'll be taking a break from writing this, to remind you all that nothing is permanent, but especially my regular updates :)