Tacky, All of It
Jack was going to fucking kill somebody.
Well, he probably wasn’t going to actually kill somebody. That would be awfully tacky. But the idea was tempting him. Instead he brandished his wand and started casting Avada Kedavra at the walls. Nothing happened—probably because Avada Kedavra was the killing curse and he sincerely doubted that the suffocating paper prison he was trapped in was made of some sort of terminable organic material. But Avada Kedavra was one of only two spells he knew from Harry Potter. Which he was in. He was in Harry Potter. He was living in the world of world-famous intellectual property Harry Potter, and this fact had nearly sent him over the edge.
Anyways, Avada Kedavra and Wingardium Leviosa were the only two spells he actually knew. He’d absorbed them via pop-culture osmosis, because Jack had never given much of a shit about Harry Potter. He may or may not have seen a few of the films at the cinema, but he certainly did not remember. And the books? Please.
In fact, he may have never even known that he was in Harry Potter if it had not been for his one saving grace, his blessing in disguise, his one respite from eternal despair… Ginny Weasley.
She was the only one who could tell him anything about the outside of the paper purgatory—the paper-gatory (‘that’s tacky’, Jack thought as soon as it crossed his mind. He wasn’t ever going to call it that ever again.)—and she was single handedly helping him maintain his rapidly dwindling sanity. He could kiss her.
… ugh. Maybe not. He was quite certain that she was about eleven, and he had no desire to kiss an eleven year old. Jack only kissed rich, attractive, of age women. And blokes. On occasion.
Ginny hadn’t written in a while, actually, so he felt especially miserable. He didn’t go on Avada Kedavra fits unless he’d been absolutely miserable. Ginny had left him on his own for a few hours, which was notable considering she could never seem to put the diary down. Not that he was complaining—he fanned the flames of her obvious crush on him daily so that he wasn’t alone all of the time. Jack would rather have an alarming codependency with a eleven year old than go insane. What would his friends think of him if he was insane?
‘JackI’msosorry!!’ appeared in front of his eyes on one paper wall, the paper distending inward with each stroke of ink. He immediately pocketed his wand, sighing.
“Where did you go? I missed you.” he said aloud, and it was somewhat sincere. He was not a fan of being sincere. He saw his words appear backwards on the page. Ginny started writing, crossed it out, and started again.
‘Detention! I know you hate it when I’m gone for so long, but Snape got on my case for writing in my diary instead of taking proper notes. It would’ve been embarrassing if I wasn’t worrying about you the whole time he was barking at me.’
“Hm. Perhaps it’s my fault you got such a punishment; always telling you to message me whenever possible. Focus in class, instead, you deviant.”
‘Alright. You should know I’m laughing a bit at you—you seem mad.’
“How could you possibly know that?”
‘Your handwriting gets all shaky when you’re mad.’
“You’re crazy,” Jack squinted at the backwards writing. It was a bit shaky. “It looks fine to me.”
‘Shut up!’
He and Ginny continued to talk for the next few hours, until he insisted she went to bed. He wasn’t happy about it, but it would be bad for the both of them if she got detention again for falling asleep in class.
Jack was left to ruminate on his current, shitty situation. He wished he had a cosmopolitan.
When he’d awoken to find himself in a diary-purgatory, he’d lost his shit. Half figured he’d died and gone to hell, until Ginny had started writing to him. He’d introduced himself as Jack, and she had told him:
‘But the first page says T.M. Riddle?’
“Yes, he was my dad.” he’d lied, and felt, frankly, brilliant for it.
‘I looked your father up in the student records. He was handsome. Are you?’ Ginny asked sometime later. At that point, Jack had recognized that she had a juvenile crush on him. He had lifted his hands and touched his face. Felt his bone structure, his skin, the shape of his nose, his brows, his lips…
‘Very handsome. Are you in love with me yet?’ he’d said.
Unfortunately, even as he came to learn that Ginny went to Hogwarts and had a crush on Harry Potter, he never really gained much more out of it. Perhaps he would be less useless if he’d ever cared about Harry Potter. He’d been right in the age range for it, a ‘95 kid himself. He recalled being ten and his class being divided between the kids who cared about the school rugby play-offs and the kids who cared about the… sixth? Harry Potter book release. He was of the former.
So he wasted away until Ginny came to talk to him again. He remained unaware of how much time had passed, but realized immediately that Ginny was upset. Drops of water were smudging the ink, and he realized they must’ve been tears. ‘How tacky,’ he thought despairingly.
“Ginny, I cannot read what you’re saying if you’re crying all over the page. Unless you’re going for performance art. Bravo, then.” Both the writing and the tears stopped. The writing appeared somewhere else—she’d turned the page, then.
‘Haha. Sorry. I’m just so embarrassed. And so mad. Can I curse?’
“I’m not your mum.”
‘Well… fuck! I’m so fucking angry!!! I hate Malfoy, he’s such a prick. FUCK HIM! Always going on about how we don’t have money, how we’re blood traitors… Nothing is going right this year. Everyone is making fun of me, it doesn’t matter what for!! My brothers always have something to tease me for, everyone else picks on my clothes or my books or my bag, Malfoy with this and… well, everything else about me!! I could kill someone.’
“Ginny, that’s—” Jack raised his brows in surprise as Ginny scribbled out his words before he could finish.
‘Horrible, I know!! I wouldn’t actually.’
“I was going to say tacky, Sherlock Holmes. It’s tacky. Whenever I get homicidal urges, I often find the bloke who’s pissed me off and snog his girlfriend instead.”
‘But it’s boys who’ve pissed me off. I can't kiss their girlfriends… Angelina Johnson? Pansy Parkinson? I can’t kiss them!! What do you do if a girl pisses you off, then, Jack?”
“Kiss her boyfriend. Love is love.”
‘Is it that simple??’ Ginny wrote after a heavy moment of hesitation, and Jack wondered if he’d accidentally awoken something in the girl. ‘I’ve always thought that Angelina’ she stopped writing and scribbled it out.
‘Anyways!!!’
He had.
Ginny continued complaining. He listened, because he didn’t half mind her company. She was alright, considering the fact that she was eleven. Ginny had written something particularly scathing about Malfoy and incest when he felt a jolt of… something. It did not feel dissimilar to the way he felt when he made eye contact with someone mid-makeout with their partner.
Power. It was power.
“Ginny,” Jack said, and she abruptly stopped writing about Malfoy’s eye color being a genetic defect. “I think I can feed off of your negative emotions.” There was a long, stagnant pause.
‘What.’
“I just felt it. It was magic—powerful magic. I’ve never felt it talking to you before. You’ve told me of your troubles, but you’ve never vented quite to this degree. You’re a bit like Lord Byron—”
‘Jack is this diary cursed’ she wrote. It was a bit frantic. Jack paused, and figured he could have approached the topic with a bit more tact.
“Frankly? I have no idea. I’ve just been trapped in this diary for so long,” he said. Perhaps if he dredged up a sob story she’d be more inclined to listen to him.
‘You’re trapped IN the diary?? Merlin Jack I thought you had another copy and I was writing to someone that was somewhere else!! I didn’t know… what??? Why didn’t you tell me?? I could’ve been researching how to get you out and all this time I’ve just told you about Harry Potter and his eyes and—MERLIN.’
Ah. Promising response.
“Regardless, I think we’ve found the key.” he said, even though he had no earthly clue. There was a long pause.
‘Sorry. Went somewhere more private. You said you think you can feed off of negative emotions??’ Ginny wrote. ‘Do you reckon I could get you out of there with enough negativity??’
“...Perhaps.”
‘Okay. OKAY. I’m going to try something out. I’m just going to write. I’m going to be as mean as I want—I’ll say all the stuff I feel ashamed of thinking. I wanna see what happens.’
“...Very well. Just don’t be tacky.”
‘No promises,’ Ginny wrote, even drawing a little heart beside it, and then Jack watched with increasing amusement as Ginny wrote what was possibly the most cruel, vitriolic, unhinged, and violent rant an eleven year old girl had ever conceived. He saw the word Crucio about fifteen times. He’d taken enough Latin courses in University to recognize the Latin word cruciatus. Torture.
By the end, she had written twelve entire pages, and Jack felt what he could only assume was magic crackling unstably around him, begging to reach out of its confinements. It had worked.