Disclaimer: I do not write for pay. I write for entertainment purposes only with no claim of ownership to any of the Harry Potter universe.

Author's Note: Yes, I'm still around and slowly working on different stories. I hope you'll forgive the delay in posting, but I do intend to continue updating this story. I just can't guarantee any strict posting timeline right now as life's a little busy with three kids and summer barreling on. In any event, I've been writing on this story some more, so I hope to get some more updates out to you all. Enjoy this chapter!

Prisoner 79934: Ginevra Weasley

- A Harry Potter Story -

By: Rae

After her most recent Dementor visit, Ginny woke up after passing out from the intensity of her memories. She felt ill and lay alone in her cell, trying to process her first year at Hogwarts for the umpteenth time. After a while of lying alone, she realized there were no screams or calls from the hag behind the wall.

Her arm itched, and she scratched at it absently, refusing to move the sleeve and see her new tattoo. It was one of the things she'd noticed after arriving at Azkaban, a tattoo of a number on her upper arm, branding her a prisoner. She'd memorized the numbers: 79934. Her arm still itched despite the magical branding, and she tried not to think about it.

She stood up to stretch and realized she'd been neglecting her body since arriving in her new home. Feeling her limbs protest at the movement, Ginny came to a decision. If she was going to be here for three years, she would do everything in her power to keep her sanity so she didn't wind up like the hag behind the wall. She stood up and jogged in place, her feet slapping on the ground and the movement brushing the cobwebs from her brain. She grew warm quickly and began panting after only a few minutes of work and had to stop, disgusted with herself.

Ginny sat on the pallet and began to construct a schedule for herself. Even as a small child, her mother had always kept the Weasleys on a rigid routine, more to keep the Burrow running smoothly than anything, but the structure always made Ginny feel safe and cared for. She knew that after waking them all, her mother would go downstairs and put together a hearty breakfast, serving them all enough to feed an army before shooing them upstairs to get dressed for the day. She assigned each of them chores during the summers, and everyone did their fair share in the running of the home while Molly was the glue that held everything together.

Now here in Azkaban, Ginny realized the lack of any structure to her day was going to slowly drive her insane. The only constants had been the food and water provided morning and evening and her Sunday visits with the Dementors. She needed more than that, though. The short jog she'd done had got her thinking, and now she knew that without something to occupy her time, she would not last long here.

Digging under her pallet, she pulled out the piece of charcoal. She wrote down a rudimentary schedule, removing and replacing things as she went. She began and ended her "schedule" with her two feeding windows and filled the hours between with her idea of what she could do.

After satisfying herself with her new routine, Ginny decided to try and fill out her "exercise hour" a bit more and stood up to do some more running in place. When she tired of that-still too soon for her liking,-Ginny retrieved the charcoal and began to practice her first year charms and incantations. She used the charcoal like a wand and waved it, practicing each charm she could remember from Flitwick over and over again until she finally heard it.

"Ickle firstie practicing her charms, oh how sweet," the sickening voice crooned, and she paused mid-flick of her charcoal. Ginny glared at the crack in the wall, and the hag behind the wall continued, "They broke your wand and you think you'll be able to do magic when you get out?" She cackled around her own words, "Girl, you won't be leaving Azkaban. Ever." Her laughter grew into a fever pitch as Ginny sat down on the ground.

"I'm getting out in three years," Ginny told her when she finally stopped cackling.

"You'd like to think that, wouldn't you?"

"I am," Ginny repeated stubbornly.

"What'd you say your name was?" The woman asked her, a strange tone to her voice.

"Ginny," she replied miserably, wondering why she'd bothered to engage the other woman.

"Ginny what?"

"Ginny Weasley," she said, wondering what the woman was getting at. "What's your name, then?"

Ignoring the question, the woman barked a laugh and said, "A Weasley opened the Chamber of Secrets? Little girl, you're never leaving here. Might as well practice changing the future if you think that will help, but your wee spells aren't going to get you out of here, and if you're a Weasley, your parents haven't got the money to break you out of here, either." She snorted a laugh.

Feeling frustrated and perhaps a bit nervous that this other prisoner knew something she didn't, Ginny pushed herself to her feet, determined to ignore her. She began practicing her spells next, ignoring her when the woman continued to make derisive comments, and eventually moving onto the different subjects she'd been taught at Hogwarts.

By the end of the day, Ginny had practiced almost every charm she knew and given herself a mental lecture on every dark creature she'd learned about in school. The hag behind the wall remained silent the rest of the day after their talk, but every so often, Ginny thought she heard a short snort or chuckle that galvanized her into continuing her self-education.

Over the next few days, Ginny refined her routine, adding more intervals of jogging in place and trying to think up other ways to get in some movement in her day to help her feel better. She realized some of the fog of simply being stuck in the prison cell with the monotony of the day as her company could be lifted by movement, so she clung to that in her jogging. She also continued to practice any and every spell, charm, and incantation she could recall, even attempting to figure out how to do ones she'd heard her brothers and parents perform.

Ginny tried to recall facts from her History of Magic class, but Binns' teaching was always so dry she rarely paid attention anyway. Instead she tried to remember facts from Potions class and Defense Against the Dark Arts. She began reciting things aloud to jog her memory, but this was a dangerous game as it sometimes caught the attention of the hag behind the wall.

"A grindylow is a dangerous creature that lives in water and attacks people by grabbing them and dragging them underwater, causing them to drown," she recited to herself, remembering the picture drawn in her textbook.

"A hag is a creature that can have the appearance of a witch but has lost her sanity from decades of magical abuse that leave her with erratic magical outbursts," she continued.

"A hag is also a witch who is stuck in Azkaban," came the voice of her prison companion. Ginny sighed.

It was almost four weeks since she'd been in prison, and Ginny was beginning to really embrace her routine. She found it incredibly helpful to her mental state and had tried to keep it up every day except Sundays. After a visit from the Dementors, she was always much too exhausted to do anything else except sleep and dream of Tom.

Today was Monday, and Dirk had reminded her of the upcoming visit from her family that week. Ginny couldn't muster much excitement after her evening visit from the Dementors, but she was trying to use their visit as a launching point in her quest to get some answers to questions she'd come up with.

Rather than use the precious charcoal to write down her questions, Ginny was trying to conserve it to mark the time between Dementor visits in a kind of morbid timeline. Instead she voiced her questions quietly over and over, trying to memorize them.

It was some few hours since Dirk delivered her breakfast, and she sat down from another bout of jogging to begin reciting her questions to herself.

"What about the writing on the wall?" She asked, having recently been reminded of the text Tom had her write about her own skeleton lying in the Chamber. She couldn't remember that having been brought up in the courtroom and wondered if maybe it was an oversight that could make a difference.

She drummed her fingers on the floor and continued. "Where did I get Tom's diary anyway?" It was the question that constantly plagued her. She couldn't think where she might have picked it up. It just seemed to appear with her things when she got home from shopping with her parents for school supplies. Ginny had racked her brains trying to figure it out, but she was none the wiser. In fact, she wasn't really sure what had happened to the diary after she woke up anyway. She only briefly recalled Harry having shown her the bloodied book with its basilisk tooth-shaped hole and the explanation he gave her before Fawkes came to their rescue.

"Who is Tom?" The hag behind the wall must have heard her despite her best efforts to be quiet.

Ginny stayed silent, not wanting to rise to the bait.

"You talk about him in your sleep, you know," the woman continued. "'Oh Tom, why did you do this to me? I thought we were friends.'" She scoffed. "I've heard you tell that guard all about it, Heir of Slytherin. You seem to think you were writing to the Dark Lord in your precious diary, but I can tell you there's no way the Dark Lord would be friends with the likes of you." Her voice came out on a hiss, and Ginny heard the sounds of her spitting.

"It doesn't matter now, does it?" The hag said thoughtfully. "Your precious Tom won't be coming to life to free you from your prison." She chuckled then and told Ginny very matter-of-factly, "Oh yes, I know what you wish more than anything else. The Dementors drag it from you each time they're here, and your shouts are the most pathetic when they do." She affected a softer, whinier tone of voice, "'Please get me out of here, Tom. I know you can do it. No one can stop you! Please save me, please, Tom! Don't leave me here!'"

The hairs on the back of Ginny's neck rose as she heard the other woman cackling again, seeming to find no end of entertainment in Ginny's pain. Her heart pounded in her chest as she pondered how the Dementors could drag out such thoughts in her, but if she was honest, deep down, she did wish Tom was alive to help her. She'd bared every thought, every pain, every fear and hope and dream to him. Of course, she wished he was here. There was something so powerful in the way he responded to her that she just knew he would have gotten out of here the moment she arrived.

She sat in silence once the hag behind the wall quieted, and she wondered to herself why her deepest, darkest dreams involved Tom and not Harry. Harry, who she'd had a crush on the first time she met him. Harry, the boy who smiled at her and treated her as an individual when she met him and not just another Weasley. Harry, who pursued her even into the Chamber of Secrets and fought a basilisk to save her life. Why Tom?

Ginny curled onto her pallet, clenching her fists as she allowed her mind to wander. She went down the same road of memories she'd been on almost daily here. But this time instead of remembering all the ways she'd been wronged, she began to think about the ways she'd participated in Tom's cruelty. She thought of the words on the page and how softly, subtly they'd begun to make her think differently of people around her, thinking perhaps being in Gryffindor wasn't quite as important as she'd always thought, that maybe the other Gryffindors didn't have such an interesting diary because none of them was worthy of it. She'd started looking down on the girls in her dorm even as she continued to write obsessively to Tom.

He became her best friend before she knew it, and Ginny admitted to herself here and now that she liked the attention, craved his words, and wondered if she would ever know someone who could make her feel the same way he had. Like she was important and valuable, like she was her own person with her own mind and choices, and like she was strong and capable.

Curled on her pallet, she let silent tears fall as she waded through her memories, and when it happened, she almost didn't hear it because it was so quiet, almost a whisper.

"I cried for him, too, at first."