He Doesn't Even Go Here

Dark tendrils of magic wormed around Jack, writhing and thrashing in the confined limbo of the diary. He couldn’t see them—barely even understood how magic worked in the first place, but figured fuck it, and held out his ugly wand. 

Something grabbed onto it, and by extension him, as if his wand continued through the palm of his hand, up through his arm and into the very core of him, and he watched the paper walls of the miserable fucking diary purgatory rip to shreds around him, light bleeding through the tears. In mere seconds his vision went fully white, and a single throb of pain went through his skull. He hissed, gripping his head in his hands and stumbling forward. 

With his eyes squeezed shut and bent over like he was ninety years old and suffering from hyperkyphosis, he barely noticed the small form stumbling beside him until she let out a quiet, pained gasp. Jack slipped his hands from his face, surprised to see that the room was not nearly as obnoxiously bright as he assumed it would be, and also surprised to realize that he was no longer inside the diary. 

He marveled at the feeling of a stone ground beneath his feet, and a room that wasn’t the same hideous yellowing paper he’d been staring at for however fucking long, and jerked his head towards who could only be Ginny. She was leaning heavily against an old desk, gripping the edges of it with white knuckles and gnashing her teeth. Her hair was fiery red, and her face was muttered with freckles. Not quite what Jack had expected her to look like, but alright. 

“Are you dying?” he asked, raising a brow. She might as well have been—she looked like shit. 

“Ugh…” she said, wincing. “Whatever spell kept you in there… must’ve been really dark.” 

Her gaze roved over Jack, and a bit of color returned to her face in the blotchy spots of red that appeared on her cheeks. It was certainly weirder to face the child that had a crush on you in person, rather than from the confines of your paper prison apartment. Regardless, Jack stepped towards her, placing the back of his hand over her sweaty forehead. She felt ice cold. And wet. 

“Y—You’re freezing!” she said, and he gave a soft hum. 

“So are you.” he didn't really  know any spells, but he knew Latin (barely) so maybe he could spit out a vive puella! and she’d stop looking like she was dying of consumption. 

Except, his wand had definitely been in his hand, right? The hideous, white, bony thing, familiar in the fact that it was the only thing he had inside of the diary other than the clothes on his back. He gave himself a pat down, his brow twitching in agitation as he failed to find it.

“I really would like to help you, but I don’t know where my wand is. Did I drop it? Do you see a wand?” he asked. Ginny groaned softly.

“Use mine.” she said weakly, and held out a dark, elegant wand. Jack stared at her in undisguised jealousy, but it didn’t matter because she was too busy being afflicted with problems to notice. He snatched the wand out of her hand, and immediately got the sense that he should not be holding it. Wrong, the wand seemed to whisper. Wrong. Dark… far, far too dark… Wrong. It even shook lightly in his grasp, like it wanted to escape. And… fine. If Ginny’s beautiful wand that was better than Jack’s own wand wanted to magically bitch at him, he’d do the same. 

Shut the fuck up. He tried to project, and he apparently projected it so hard that the magic in Ginny’s wand nearly wilted in his hand, ceasing its infuriating shaking. He adjusted his grip around her wand, spinning it between his fingers. He lifted it and gently pressed the wooden tip against Ginny’s forehead, between the strings of sweat-damped hair stuck to her skin. 

“Vive puella,” he mumbled, and watched as nothing happened. Ginny blinked. Jack straightened his spine, pretended he wasn’t embarrassed, and went for a different approach, because apparently the Latin imperative wasn’t doing it’s fucking job. He tightened his grip on the wand, and turned his magic-projection-voice into something a little less annoyed and something more demanding and full of hate. The classic talking to interns voice.

I am trying to stop your master from dying because of whatever dark diary magic she unleashed. Do your job as a magical wand, and fix her. 

And there it was. Magic from the wand, or more accurately from Jack himself, poured into Ginny. Her eyes widened, and he watched in real time as proper color returned to her face and strength bled back into her body. She pushed herself away from the desk, steadying herself briefly when she stumbled by gripping onto Jack’s sleeves, before she ultimately stopped looking like she was on death’s door. 

Jack handed her beautiful wand back, which she deftly tucked into her sleeve. She looked at Jack with wide eyes, before laughing softly. She ran forward and wrapped her arms around his middle, and pressed her sweaty head against his chest. Jack made a sound that was very close to ‘Euyugh,’ and placed his hands on her shoulders, pushing her back from him. 

“You’re very gross right now. Perhaps you can hug me after you’ve showered.” he said. Ginny twitched a little, and then went red all over again. She shook her arm, and her wand fell right back out of her sleeve and into her waiting palm. Jack felt his brow rise, and watched as Ginny pointed the wand right at herself. 

“Scourgify!” she said, and was no longer gross. She surged forward again, and Jack found no complaint he could voice properly without sounding like a big douchebag. He gave Ginny a pat on the head, and she continued to attempt to break his spine for about thirty more seconds before she stepped back. She gave him a big, wide smile, and laughed like she couldn’t believe what she was looking at. Jack placed his hands on his hips, because he didn’t quite know what to do with them. This was all very tacky, of course.

“Hi,” Ginny said breathlessly. 

“Yes, hello.” Jack said, looking around the dusty, unimpressive room they were in. Not exactly what he had wished his first sight to be when he finally escaped, but he supposed it would do. 

“You didn’t say you were a student.” Ginny said, and she sounded very concerned about this. 

“What?” Jack asked. 

“Your uniform. It’s a bit different, but…” she trailed off. “You’re a Slytherin? Merlin…” though it sounded like that last part was more to herself. Jack looked down at himself, and found that he was wearing a rather similar uniform to Ginny, one he found much more pleasant than the hideous yellow one he’d worn when he was in school, but his mostly-gray uniform differed from Ginny’s in the fact that his was more angled, less tattered, and the accents on his were green and silver, compared to her red and gold. 

Jack, of course, didn’t know exactly what Harry Potter character he was, he only knew that he was not himself, so he hadn’t been aware that he was supposed to be a student. Perhaps he was a background character, if Ginny didn’t recognize him. 

“Of course I’m a student,” he said, instead of all that. “Don’t be stupid, Ginny. Look at my uniform.” 

Ginny nodded, and placed a hand on her head. 

“Right. I guess... Damn. I must’ve been taken out by that more than I thought, if I’m all mixed up even after that spell you cast.” she said. 

“Yes, your scrambled brain is very tragic,” Jack said, and placed a hand on Ginny’s back, beginning to guide her towards the large door at the right side of the room. “Seeing as I am no doctor—we should really get you to the infirmary before you begin asking me more nonsense questions.”  

“That makes sense,” Ginny said, and Jack pushed the door open for her. He was greeted with a stone hallway and massive windows, which was improvement enough, despite the fact that it looked a bit too much the inside of a Cathedral for him to like it much. But sunlight was welcome.

“Lead the way.” Jack said when she turned to look at him, because he had no clue where the infirmary was. Ginny huffed, but began to walk. 

“I can’t believe I didn’t know you were a Slytherin,” she said. “You’re such a dick sometimes.” 

“Someone ought to be, when there are so many incompetents running around.” he said, glancing down at his shoulder when the sunlight streaming in through the windows had something glinting on his shoulder. He lifted a hand and pulled off a small badge. Prefect, it said. Jack himself had been a prefect in school, but he didn’t like the idea that he was meant to know anything about what was going on here. He wasn't sure anyone would be impressed with his apparent skills in casting Avada Kedavra or bullying little girls’ wands into submission. He tossed the badge on the floor, and when Ginny turned around to look at what had clinked against the stone, he placed a hand on her head and turned it right back around. 

“You’re hearing things, Ginny. Your brain is scrambled.” he said.

“But I didn’t say I heard anything.”

“Of course you did,” Jack tapped her on the side of the skull. “Brain. Scrambled.” 

“Alright.” Ginny said, because she was 11.