There was one thing that was known. A fact, indisputable. Ginerva Weasley was going to marry Harry Potter. He was strong and smart and adventurous, and he was going to be hers.

She kept up with his books, always asking for them for birthdays and Christmas. She put up with her brothers' teasing about the books. She read them over and over again. She envied Ron, who would be going to Hogwarts the same year as Harry Potter.

She did other things, of course. Her life wasn't solely dedicated to thinking about her future husband. That was just a far-off certainty, a backdrop against which the boring chores and unfair moments and frustrating days were set against. She kept her one bookshelf orderly and tidy, she read her favorites of the series whenever she felt like getting away from her brothers and her parents and the Burrow, and other than that she lived like any other little girl. Any other girl with an obsession, that was.

Harry Potter was going to be hers, to sweep her off her feet the day they first met, and she wouldn't hear otherwise.

Ron went off to Hogwarts, and Harry Potter was supposed to be there too, but when she asked her mum her mum said Ron hadn't mentioned him in any of his letters. Ginny knew that those letters only numbered three, even though it had been months, so she assumed there was just so much to say about Harry Potter that Ron was saving it all to tell them in person. When he came back for the holidays, she took the first chance she got to corner him.

"Did you meet Harry Potter? What was he like? Does he really have the Sword of Gryffindor like the books say? Does his scar glow?"

Ron paused, his sandwich halfway to his mouth. "Uh… no?"

Ginny waited while he took a bite and chewed. Ron didn't have table manners, and she wasn't going to be put off just because he started spewing spittle and breadcrumbs at her face. The moment his mouth was clear again, she pressed on. "No to which?"

"I didn't, well, it's kind of odd," Ron said, his words a garbled mess as he tried to explain. "There's a bloke called Harry in my year, but he's Harry Hebert. He has a scar and kinda looks like Harry Potter is supposed to, but he says he's a Muggleborn and doesn't know who Potter is, and I believe him."

"But if he has the scar…" The pictures on the covers of her books always had his – perfectly styled – hair swept aside to display it as he performed whatever brave deed the book was about.

"Like I said, weird," Ron shrugged. "He had to correct the teachers, Snape still insists on calling him Potter, but he's not. He's just a quiet Hufflepuff who hangs out with an annoying Ravenclaw girl and nobody else. Harry Potter's supposed to be Gryffindor and heroic and whatnot, so Hebert can't be him, can he?"

Ginny frowned, her hopes squashed. "But… Maybe he's going to come a year late?"

"Maybe," Ron agreed. "His name was on the roll this year, might've been a mistake and they meant to put him on next year. Would love to meet him, he'd put Malfoy in his place. Just last month, the git said…"

Ginny let Ron's subsequent rant wash over her, not hearing a word of it. Harry Potter wasn't at Hogwarts. Yet.

That might mean he wasn't going to attend. Or it might mean he was just young enough that he couldn't start until next year… In the same year as her!

She knew what she was going to hope for.

Harry Potter was not in her year. There wasn't anyone remotely like him among the new first-years. Even Harry Hebert, the Hufflepuff some people still thought was Potter, didn't look like him. He had a scar and the right hair and eye color, but he wasn't dashingly handsome. He was just… there. Doing his schoolwork. Talking to that one Ravenclaw and sometimes Neville Longbottom.

Harry Potter was sociable and suave and amazing. Harry Hebert was not. He was just a kid.

Ginny tried to put it out of her mind, Harry Potter was probably going to some amazing private school to fit in the time for all of the adventures in the books, but it was hard. She had so been looking forward to meeting him, and she didn't have much else.

She wrote out her frustrations in the new diary one of her brothers had secretly given her – probably Percy, it was the sort of thing he would do in secret so nobody could tease him – and was surprised to see it writing back.

'Why do you think this Hufflepuff Harry is not Harry Potter?' the diary asked. 'He could be lying.'

Ginny explained. The Diary didn't really seem to believe her, but at least she had someone to talk to about it. At length. The Diary couldn't run off or get bored, it was just a book.

She was just tired.

That was all. Tired. She slept late, and was so groggy she didn't remember getting out of bed. She went to bed early, and if she didn't remember actually returning to her room, then that just meant she needed the extra sleep. Learning magic was exhausting.

Maybe she was snapping at people more. Maybe growing up with her brothers made her touchy. It was their fault.

She was forgetful, but that was normal. Nobody remembered Binns' class, right? Or walking back to her room after dinner in the Great Hall. Or what happened on Thursday.

She went through the motions, learned and did rather better in her classes than she thought she should have, given how disinterested she was, but it all felt… distant. There was talk of an heir of Slytherin and a monster, but it all washed by her ears, glancing off her thoughts.

Ron faced Malfoy in a duel in front of everybody, and Malfoy sent a snake at him. The snake hissed "bite and kill" as it dropped down into the crowd, and she stepped forward to pick it up before she was properly thinking about it, whispering "no, don't do that" to ensure she didn't get bitten.

"Yes, speaker," the snake conceded, and then Ron was claiming he could speak Parseltongue, of all things. Something about the heir… heir of what? She didn't remember. Tom from the Diary didn't know. Or if he did, she didn't remember him explaining. She didn't remember the following night, either.

Going home for Christmas was a reprieve; she felt more like herself in the cheery, never-silent ruckus of the Burrow. She put Diary Tom away and explained to her mum that no, she didn't speak Parseltongue, she had just assumed the snake would like someone who picked it up and hissed at it.

Though she wasn't sure why she denied it. She didn't really remember that day. It was clearer than most, but not clear in an absolute sense. A partially-fogged window compared to a whole collection of windows that had been painted over from the outside.

When she returned to Hogwarts, the days she did remember anything about became a rarity, rather than the majority. She thought something might be wrong. There were Hufflepuffs everywhere, and sometimes she felt herself on the verge of drifting off to sleep even though she was in the middle of a conversation. She kept talking despite the feeling, like nothing was wrong.

She tried to go to the infirmary, but her legs took her to the bathroom instead, and she looked at herself in the mirror. "Won't be long now," she told herself, though she didn't know what she meant.

The Hufflepuffs were always around. One tutored her in Charms. She could remember those lessons. Not so much the time after, or why her knuckles hurt like she had been punching the walls of the castle. She caught herself scowling when nobody was looking, even though she was too tired and distant to really be angry about anything.

Life flowed around her like a river, and she slowly began to break up, a clump of dirt jostled from the riverbank by the ever-increasing flood.

She smiled and frowned and went to classes, but if it were up to her she would sleep until the term was over.

It wasn't up to her anymore.

When she finally did fall asleep, truly asleep even as her body moved, she thought she heard herself laughing.

Life after Tom started with a jolt, a splash of color and understanding more vibrant and terrible than anything she had ever felt. All those days, all those missing hours, the pain, the things she did and said that weren't her doing or saying them, the Basilisk, the Diary, ambushing people and ghosts and stalking the halls and fading away as a cruel spirit mocked her and drained her of vitality, turning her into a walking shell of herself–

Someone spoke, and she shattered, her eyes screwing up and her chest tightening as it all came crashing down on her.

Some time later, Harry Hebert asked her how to get out. She could barely think, so many thoughts crowded her head, but she knew that. She knew it and she could say it. She did say it. Her mouth didn't speak words other than what she meant.

He took her to the infirmary – she had tried to go before, but this was the first time her legs didn't turn her around when she got too close – and Madam Pomphrey gave her a potion that dulled the fear without dulling her memories.

She had been possessed, Pomphrey said. Harry had saved her. She was safe now. She was fine.

She didn't feel safe, not even now when she couldn't feel much of anything. She lay in the infirmary cot, surrounded by draping curtains, and blinked away spontaneous tears while Pomphrey puttered about. The potion began to wear off. She asked to see Harry.

Maybe he would understand. He had saved her life. He had cast a spell at her specifically designed to exorcize spirits from people. He must have known what was happening to her.

The moment she was able, she rushed to Harry and clung to him, her bedridden rock. "Thank you," she said, again and again, the terror slowly leeching back into her.

Then the bushy-haired Ravenclaw was talking loudly with Pomphrey, and Ginny was being told she was to stay in the infirmary until she could go to Saint Mungos, and the potion wore off entirely.

She cried herself to sleep, facedown on the pillows, thankful she could properly feel again.

It came as such a shock to her mum and dad when the healers told them she was not fine. When they said she was severely traumatized, that there were lingering problems, and that her violent nightmares spoke of deeper issues that needed to be investigated before she could be properly treated.

She wasn't surprised. Tom's voice whispered in the back of her head, not truly there but present in the way he would show her memories, memories that weren't hers. Memories of pain, of atrocity, of smug terror, of detached brilliance fashioned into uncaring magic and selfish plans–

They brought in a healer who knew legilimency, and even he recoiled from what Tom showed him when he entered her mind to see what was wrong. The healer sat on the side of her bed, held her hand, and told her that the wraith had left her memories, a short lifetime of them, and that she must know that the wraith was not a good person.

He offered, to her alone, to remove them from her mind. Not all, he said, because memories were interconnected building blocks and Tom's were buried too deep to entirely remove without doing real damage to her, but most. Enough that what she thought of as Tom would go away, and she wouldn't dream of the things he did.

She said yes, and when she asked what he would do if her parents said no, fearful perhaps beyond reason, he promised her that he would take them out either way, whether or not her parents allowed it. It would have to be their secret if he did it without their permission, as it wasn't strictly allowed, but he said he could bend the rules for something like this. That was how bad the memories were.

Her parents said yes, of course. Her mum in particular was happy to hear that they could just 'cut the bad out,' and would not hear of Ginny being anything less than back to normal afterward.

The healer removed Tom's memories, and Ginny got a full night's sleep for the first time in the month since she had been saved from Tom. It didn't last, but the nightmares in the nights that followed were at least her own.

She improved rapidly once the memories were gone, and the healers moved her from the observation wing to somewhere brighter, with other people. They gave back her wand, and the letters they had been holding while they evaluated her. Harry had written her, and signed 'Harry Hebert'. He wrote like a boy would, going on about things other than her situation and the hospital and the wraith he had rid her of.

She wrote back, grateful that he wasn't treating her like an invalid or like nothing had ever happened. It was a happy middle ground nobody else had found yet.

The day before her parents took her out of Saint Mungo's, the healer came back to talk with her in private. First, he told her to come back to the hospital if she ever thought she had some of Tom's memories back again. Obliviations were thorough and he didn't think there was any chance of them coming back on their own, but he didn't want her to think that it was impossible just in case something did bring them back.

She agreed to remember his advice, and took a little contact card that had his office Floo address on it.

Then he told her something else. "I took the memories, but memories make the man, or in your case the woman," he said gravely. "What colors you like, what your favorite food is, what kinds of people you find annoying or entertaining… Those are not memories, are they? But they are influenced by them, and that influence stays even if the memories that created it are obliviated. You might have some different opinions, likes and dislikes, now. Little things, probably. Big things, maybe. Things neither you nor the wraith might have had on their own, or things directly from the wraith."

Tom wasn't gone. Even now, after the healers had done all they could, little bits of his influence still lingered within her.

"Don't second-guess yourself on the small things," he suggested. "If you have urges to do things that aren't right, tell someone, but if you just do not like chocolate anymore, or do like the color green where before you didn't, I would say take that and make it yours."

"Why?" she had asked.

"Because if it's yours and you embrace it, then it can't be his anymore, can it?" he had said.

His words stayed with her all through that summer, as she weathered the misplaced optimism and equally misplaced coddling her family alternated between. They echoed in her head when she noticed that she not only knew all of her first-year magic, but also a lot of second-year and beyond. When she flipped open one of George's ignored textbooks and knew what it was talking about. When she realized, out in the garden, that she could still understand snakes.

She was not Tom. But she was not the Ginerva Weasley who had gone to Hogwarts hoping to meet her lifelong crush, either.

Ginny Weasley was not properly either of those two people. Who she was… She would have to figure that out on her own.