Difficulties of Avoidance

by dead2self

A/N: Yay we're back! I hope the wait wasn't too long (well, I guess if you've been reading here, one month has not been my longest hiatus!), but something big is coming up and I needed to wait to edit these chapters until I had gotten that written. There's a lot I like in this one, I hope you enjoy! I love hearing what you think, so if you've been around for awhile or just started reading now, shoot me a review!

Potterwatch had lit a fire in the D.A. Constant Vigilance was scrawled in more than one corridor the next night, though Filch caught one Ravenclaw, who earned a full week of detention. He ate all his meals in a kind of stupor, flinching at anyone brushing past. Ginny made a note to pass Luna some of the Dr. Ubbly's Oblivious Unction that Pomfrey had given her. It was brilliant for soothing the paranoia the Curse could tend to leave.

But more important than petty vandalism, Potterwatch had turned the focus of their meetings fully to getting the Muggle-borns out safely at the end of the term. It had been made clear to all of them that whatever protection they had at school was temporary. No one understood why the Muggle-born Registration Committee had been kept out of Hogwarts thus far, but everyone agreed that as soon as they walked off the school grounds, they would be targets. The seventh years of age could simply Apparate away once they were clear of the grounds, but for younger students, they needed a plan.

They had gotten a hold of Neville with the D.A. coin to start, seeing as he was helping Muggle-borns escape. He had responded in seconds, four words: "My family is theirs." They could not write much with the coins, but they got by doing it phrase by phrase. If they could get the students to Neville, he could get them to safety. Evidently one of his great-uncles had worked until retirement in the Ministry making Portkeys, and knew the work-arounds to making Unauthorized ones.

Unless Neville could somehow get all the Portkeys to Hogsmeade or Hogwarts, which he thought unlikely given the new dementor presence in the village, they still needed to get the students to London. Short of stealing the entire herd of thestrals, the best idea they had was adapting their idea for Tom, enlarging their trunks. As it turned out, the Muggle-borns brought a particular expertise to the table.

"You fly to London at the start of every term?"

"Sometimes. The Knight Bus doesn't run in Ireland and the Ministry goes back and forth on whether or not Muggle fireplaces can be connected to the Floo network," Colin said as he hauled his trunk up onto the bed. "You can request Portkeys from the Ministry, but they make Mum sick."

"Dad hates it," piped in Dennis. "He's written a letter to Dumbledore every year to complain that the Hogwarts Express can't pick us up someplace cheaper."

"So how is it you can take your trunk on a Muggle flying machine?" asked Demelza, eying the large and clearly magical object.

"That's what I'm saying, look," said Colin, flipping a switch on his trunk. It shrunk considerably and grew wheels. Pulling it open he revealed inside were several sets of clothes, uniforms for a boarding school, shoes, and toiletries. "They sell trunks for Muggle-borns that have a hidden switch on it. If you have it switched on, when security scans your luggage, they'll just see Muggle school things. Then when you switch it off, it's a regular Extended school trunk." He closed the trunk again, flipped the switch, and opened it to reveal what he said.

"That's brilliant," said Ginny, getting closer. If Luna could incorporate this idea into their trunk for Tom, it would be even better.

"And this is just the base model," said Dennis. "You can lock the switch with your wand so Muggles can't toggle it, but it's still a pretty easy to find if you know it's there. There's nicer ones where you can't see the switch. A Ravenclaw in my year made his own. You're not really supposed to tamper with them, you waive your warranty on things getting permanently lost inside, but his is brilliant, I saw it on the train."

"Exactly," said Colin. "We could tamper with some that have hidden switches, but instead of Muggles clothes, it would be another compartment big enough for a person."

Gregory folded his arms. "So on the train, or maybe before, the Muggle-borns can get in our trunks, and we'll flip the switches so no one will find them if they check our things. Then we can let them out in London, once we're clear of King's Cross."

It was not a horrible plan, certainly not foolproof, but the best they had at the moment. Indeed, with the combined resources of the Hufflepuffs and Ravenclaws, they already had enough trunks prepared for the first- and second-years. Their efforts with Tom, however, had taken a turn.

Tom was acting strangely with Ginny after their fight.

When she'd come the next morning he had acted like the incident never happened, and Ginny was happy to play along. But it was stiff acting, not Riddle's best. His barbs were sharper, almost bombastic, as though he had to prove something to her. But it felt almost as though he was speaking to an audience rather than having a conversation. If she tried to draw him out, he bit his tongue, kept himself from rising to her ribbing. He cut their exchanges with loud silences, snide remarks left unsaid. She would see him getting indignant, a fire behind his eyes, and then stifle it, crush it down, and play his part. Not the perfect schoolboy, but the prisoner she expected, cruel and clever and volatile.

She hated it. She liked Riddle when he was clever, not when he was playing at it. Even the few threats she weaseled out of him did not feel like his real thoughts. It was a pantomime of what he thought she expected of him and it raked on her like nails on a chalkboard. It was a demotion, and one she did not deserve.

But the real kicker was that he did not want to help with her studies any longer, for spite.

"I hardly see why my services are needed for such a prodigious witch," he said, with little venom, focused on the Potions Manual as though reading it for the fifth time could possibly be so captivating.

The D.A. coins worked to organize the protection of the Muggle-borns, but she couldn't write about Tom with them. After all, Snape was not above using Legilimency on students. She and Luna had also definitively decided against telling McGonagall about Tom following the incident with Snape. While she could still be a help, revealing their prisoner's identity was too big a risk.

Unfortunately, writing to the Order was proving more difficult than expected. While she was confident in the Charms that hid her true message, they were not sure who to send the letter to. Consulting with Fred and George through short messages with the D.A. coin, they found that many Order members were being closely watched, in some cases not receiving their mail at all. She had yet to receive a reply from her mother to the innocuous letter she had sent the week before, and so her patience with Riddle failed quickly.

"Riddle, will you get over yourself? I don't care that you showed yourself to be human for a brief thirty seconds. I have my N.E.W.T.s in two weeks. I'm going to need you to pull it together and help me figure out why the hell my Anti-Alohomora Charm keeps fusing my locks into chunks of metal."

He raised a brow at her, refusing to answer for the umpteenth time, and Ginny was at her wit's end. It was a strange, jarring feeling, but she missed Tom Riddle. She saw him every day, but it felt as though he had built a wall between them. She knew in her bones that something important was happening with him, or else why would he be shutting down, but she could not make heads or tails of it.

N.E.W.T.s were in two weeks, and the term ended at the end of June. McGonagall must have seen the exchange on the D.A. coins, because someone had written "After Transfiguration Tuesday," and then on Friday the professor had brazenly let the coin tumble out of her pocket while stooping to pick up some fallen feathers near Ginny's desk. But even if McGonagall could help her contact the Order, they were running out of time, and she needed Tom to talk to her again.

She had one ace up her sleeve, something she knew Tom wanted, but it was risky. On the weekend she told Luna she was going to try, not a question, but a warning. Luna agreed to wait in the seventh floor corridor in case something went horribly wrong.

Ginny entered feeling as though she was marching toward her darkest nightmare. She already had trouble sleeping with all he had done this year, and she was about to invite worse. She set his food in front of him, her wand already in her hand. He was reading, noted her only briefly.

She hovered for a moment over his food, dread flooding her, and then raised her gaze to fix on him. Concentrating on the feelings of rage she knew were under the surface, steeling herself for the worst, she sighted at him down the length of her wand.

"Tom," she said, and he glanced up. She met his eyes, and struck.

"Legilimens."

He repelled her. But he did it cleanly and rudimentarily. She saw nothing of his . No horrifying images, no maze or showing her what she expected to see, which had been horror. She blinked and Tom stared back at her, so surprised that he forgot to hide it.

Bloody hell, she thought. He was not stiffly proud, reacting to their altercation. He was afraid. She had no earthly idea why, but this was the ammunition she needed.

"You won't even show me slight of hand?" she jeered, closing the distance between them, even as Tom stood to meet her. "Are you so scared of me that you're not willing to give me even what would horrify me?"

The surprise sluiced off him, but she had already put him on the defensive. "I'm not scared of you."

"Then why are you holding yourself back? It's worse than raving and spitting seeing you neuter yourself around me like this."

He lurched closer, the mask finally peeled back. He was talking to her now. "You do not scare me. I am biding my time."

"If you aren't scared of me, then why are you hiding? Ever since I tackled you, you've been hiding, terrified of even insulting me properly."

"You are beneath me, and it's high time I treated you that way."

She shot back. "No. If this was your pride, you would have showed me something awful just now. You are afraid, and the daftest part is you have no need to be. What happened last week was nothing."

"What happened last week reviles me to my core," he seethed. "I am not afraid of you. I loathe that I am beginning to sink to your level."

"Beginning? Tom, we've been doing this for months."

And then she realized he had not known, had not seen the minute changes that she had. She had seen them only through the familiarity bred from possession, intense, desperate focus, and a foolish hope that only Luna Lovegood could have ignited. The young Dark Lord, so utterly convinced of his superiority, had not realized he was treating her as a worthy adversary until he had literally wrestled her to the ground. He was scared of himself.

She laughed in his face as he recoiled. His behavior scared him, but he did not see that the changes were so small as to be nearly meaningless. To him, they were significant. She had a sharp burst of inspiration and held up her hands in surrender.

"Merlin, you're being ridiculous. Listen, when I was little, I was always crying, running to Mum when my brothers were mean, always trying to catch up and never cool enough for them. Then at some point in my third year, I made Zachary Smith cry just by yelling at him after he made fun of Neville, and I realized I'm actually pretty tough. And I used to think my brother was so cool, but he just stuck around Harry and Hermione in school, barely spent time with anyone else. I know almost everyone in my year, and I get on well enough with most everyone."

He was nearly vibrating with rage now, everything he had not shown her for a week. "Enough, Ginevra, I will not abide another anecdote from your infancy—"

"The point is, I was always tough, and I was always cooler than Ron, I was just in the wrong context. You were in an orphanage, you got in scrapes, but you were always clever, always powerful, always an arrogant toe rag."

This he did not answer, because she knew that he agreed with her. She seized the moment before he could dismiss her again.

"Now, sometimes when I go home, I start acting like I did when I lived there. The first week of the summer it's like I'm eleven all over again – Ron can make me feel little and dumb, I blow up at my Mum over nothing. The context tricks me for a moment, but it's not how I really am. Maybe that's what you're doing, I don't know, but I can tell you with perfect clarity that you have not changed at all, not in the ways that matter."

His lips drew together, tight. Then he said, "I do not need you to tell me that, Weasley."

She pushed for one more point. "As for sinking to my level, the Dark Lord marked a baby as his equal because of a prophecy. I wouldn't put too much stock in the fact that you've given me the barest measure of respect."

His lips peeled back from his teeth, but he did not reply. She watched him, with effort, calm himself. It was not the same as his building a wall between them; that was demolished for now. He instead took heart, and a steeling breath, and returned to what he had promised until finally betraying her misplaced trust: homework help. Of a kind.

"I strongly advise you to not try casting Legilimens on me again unless I first teach you," he said. "It is dangerous."

"Thanks for letting me know the last time I tried," she drawled, settling back into their dynamic with ease that she did not entirely feel. She shot off her Patronus. Her skin felt too tight and she was grateful that she was a better actor than Riddle.

"Students at Hogwarts aren't practicing Occlumency," he said. "They're not going to rebound a miscast spell on you and addle your mind."

"What? You've been egging me on to do it for ages."

"I did not expect you to try without instruction," he said with some exasperation. "Don't do it again. If you go mad, I'd be truly stuck. Not even an Imperius could compel you to cast a Patronus."

Luna's rabbit came through the door in a flash, but Ginny paused one moment at the door, turning back. "So I cast it right?" He raised a brow. "I haven't gone mad. So?"

He rolled his eyes, a portrait of forbearance. "It was a pitiful attempt, but not miscast."

She smiled, finally, a smile brimming with all the victory she felt in that moment, and stepped out of the Room shaking. Bloody hell. Bloody hell, he had believed her.

Luna rushed forward, catching her. "Ginny! What did he do?"

"Bloody hell," she said out loud, seizing Luna around the neck. She burst into tears or laughter, it was hard to say, and hugged her tight. Luna stood frozen and horrified until Ginny realized that saying "bloody hell" alone did not properly express the enormity of what she had just realized.

"It's not impossible," she said, pulling back. "He was scared that we were changing his mind, and I've just convinced him that he's not different at all. But Luna, if he's had even one moment of doubt—"

"Merlin," Luna said, dawning on to the same thing at Ginny. Voldemort did not doubt his course, and until now neither had Tom. But if Tom had been afraid that their influence could change him, that meant there was a chance. Improbable as to be laughable, but Ginny had never before felt hope quite like this.