There are many times in life where the events that transpire shape a person.
The first event—the first scarring—that shaped Ginny into the woman she had become happened all those years ago at the young age of eleven, when she had been young and naïve and desperate. Desperate for someone, anyone, to look at her—to want to know her. To be seen in ways that Ginny had never trusted anyone before. Ultimately, Ginny mused, she had wanted to be loved.
The idea of Harry Potter might have been her first fantasies. The actual boy she had met with his name had been her first crush.
… but in the end, really, Tom Marvolo Riddle had been her first love.
Tom had been the first event. The first wound. The first scar. That year had shaped her in many ways. The true content of her character had always been there (perhaps unneeded, kept in a dark attic covered in dust), but it was only now in her sunset years that the quality of that content shined through like a dying star.
Age may have curled her fingers, and the slow strangling death of magic may have bent her back… but none of that truly changed what she was.
Ginny inhaled deeply and blew out the candle of clarity on her desk. She used a hand and waved the swirling lines of smoke away as she stood up in her office. Musing and planning like this was always greatly helped by these candles. She needed them now, more than ever. She was older now, and the years were only getting harder.
But look at her all the same! Still clawing at her life. Grasping for any meager leg up that she could. Ginny had her strengths, of course. But her weaknesses were many. The greatest weakness of all was the most well-known and most vulnerable of them all. Ginny didn’t look at the large photo of a family portrait on her desk. Instead, she went for a smaller and more subtly framed one and took it with her to the night blacked window. It was so dark outside, and the candles too vibrantly bright that the window was as a mirror should be.
She hesitated for a long time before she turned her head to the photo she had brought with her—one of her most precious photos of her husband. Harry, red cheeked and glowingly healthy. Green eyes crinkled with joy and his arms wrapped around their four very young children. All of them flushed with toothy grins. Ginny had taken this photo herself. It should have been the start of their happy life together. It should have been the start of their happy ever after.
It had only been the calm before the storm.
Truthfully, Ginny would have preferred Voldemort to win than this. At times she contemplated a time turner, but knew that there was nothing to support going so far into the past… and knowing that the person most likely to succeed, the person with the most knowledge, currently had a fried memory and all such thoughts was a useless time waste. One could not truly change the past, after all… but sometimes at night before she slept, she admitted to herself that a world where Voldemort won could not be too far off the current dystopia that they had.
The musing was as unforgiveable as it always was.
She twisted the ring on her finger.
“Oh, it’s you again.” Tom Riddle spoke, a shade fully formed with the false flush of life on his young face (as she best remembered him), standing next to her at the window. Ginny could see him out of the corner of her eye—although when had she ever not been haunted by Tom Riddle?—and did not need to look him in the face to intimately know what he looked like.
She still dreamed of him, sometimes. More often than not.
“Can you really remember how many times I’ve summoned you?” Ginny asked as her eyes descended to look upon Harry’s visage once more. A crooked finger came up to trace the contours of his face.
Tom released a sound that should have been labeled a scoff, but there was the irrefutable fact that Tom no longer needed breath and therefore the sound was more an imitation and could be anywhere between loathing, amusement, or a nothing imitation since Tom had mimicked so much, even at a young age when he felt empty. “Are you really so ignorant that you would dream up an inferior product rather than acknowledge that you have summoned forth the base essence of my being?”
“I would say less my ignorance, and more of a nod to the fact that you are but a damaged thing. You ripped yourself to shreds in life, how could I trust that you are functional?”
Ginny noticed him shift out of the corner of her eye.
“… we shall let the discussion rest once more, then. Since we still appear to not see eye to eye.” Tom spoke, and of course the parting shot came soon after, “although I do note that, as I look at you—indeed, there is damage that comes with age and self-flagellation. It appears that I am not alone in this.”
Why was that statement almost comforting?
Tom Riddle crossed his arms, “well then, shall we carry on? What is it that you wish of me this time?”
Ginny smiled, and from her reflection in the dark window, knew it was humorless.
“The hounds are baying at the door, but the golden goose is still healing. He needs more time. But I can no longer safely say I can defend the nest. Casualties are bound to happen soon.” Ginny placed her hand over Harry’s face and closed her eyes. Her golden goose, her Harry, was still recovering from the accident. He was raving mad, conniving, and desperate. The more he struggled, the tighter the noose became.
“Well then, can he not continue along on his merry way?” Tom shifted, turning his back to the windowsill and leaning against it. A casual slouch of teenage confidence. Ginny had felt the shift and found herself more turned to face him. The more she looked, the more the breath of absence resonated with her. Her chest felt tight.
“He could. But not unscathed,” she murmured as she tucked the photograph under her arm.
“A game, then. Hide and go seek.” Tom offered as he tilted his head back to look upon the enchanted ceiling.
“He would not comply for long.”
Tom hummed, “why would he not comply, when he thinks of it himself?”
Ginny paused briefly before she sighed and returned to her seat. She took a long look at Harry's young face once she settled—she watched the repeating memory of his smile before she put him face down on the table.
It was here, in this moment, that she raised her head and looked to Tom Riddle head on. Her nightmare. Her dream. Her longest memory.
The expressionless face was comforting. Smooth as an egg. She would say he looked bored if she could ever admit it to herself. The soft slant of his cheek, the smooth plane between his brow—the slow arc of his eyes as he glanced around for something to occupy the brilliant mind within that skill.
Ginny didn’t filter herself as much as she probably should, but what would a dead man say, and with who? “Is this how you imagined the afterlife?”
The slow wandering of Tom’s gaze came to an end, and leisurely he shifted and looked upon her. He stood from his lean against the sill and stepped toward her desk. Moved to stand above her, as if that could give a shade power over a living. “I did not waste my precious time imagining a life after my own. I was to be forever.” He spoke with assurance, his voice deepening slightly as if he was to age… but he did not. He was forever a boy to Ginny. He would stay that way, for her. Even in this.
“But you are a forever, in your own way. We all will be.” She said as she steepled her hands together upon her desk.
Tom Riddle flicked a hand, “don’t be obtuse. We are but fleeting blinks of an eye. A breath of fog dissipating upon the earth. Finite.”
“But you left your mark. Your ideals. Your name is a forever,” Ginny would never forget Tom Riddle. History would never forget him.
Ginny would never forget him.
And she knew Harry could never forget him.
“…I was never meant to be just a name in a book.” Tom Riddle’s eyes fluttered, and his body lowered into the waiting chair in front of her desk. Perhaps he was imitating a look of sorrow, this time. He didn’t quite get it right.
“You aren’t just a name, not to me.” Or to Harry. But didn’t Tom Riddle already know this?
“You are but a mere blink of an existence,” Tom hissed.
Ginny smiled, “am I not an ocean?”
“You are but a ripple in a smooth pond. Finite.” Tom looked her in the eye once more.
“Now you’re just being cruel. I am a tsunami,” Ginny chuckled. She rather understood Harry’s careless bantering now. It made one feel powerful, in its own way. But, given a few beats of a heart, even Ginny knew that that statement was slightly off. True, but not true. Slowly, Ginny shook her head to amend herself. “Let me re-phrase that. We are a tsunami. We’ve been together for an age and then some, haven’t we Tom?”
Tom lowered his eyes to the files and photographs strewn over her desk and did not give her a reply.
Harry’s new face and hair, his injuries and progress and reports—all documented for her to see.
… she could not stomach looking at him in person and knowing that there would be no recognition in his eyes.
“… we could be unstoppable, you and I. A diary, much like my own. You could be an eternity, with myself by your side.” Tom took his chance in the faint lull of conversation. He thought he saw a weakness in her—he should know better, by now. Harry might be her weakness, but he was the light to her angler fish.
“The blood on your hands could fill a continent. You’ve destroyed just as many lives as I, if not more. Why not stay and maintain your iron fisted grasp? You’ve done away with more than one contender to your power, why not maintain it?” Tom continued and Ginny let him. Sometimes, the sensation of nostalgia was something she found comforting.
Death had not changed Tom Riddle.
“If not more”, Ginny agreed softly and didn’t regret any of it for a second.
She knew hunger. A hunger that her children would never understand. For she had always been hungry for love and recognition and power. If Harry hadn’t given her all of those... his love and recognition and support… things would be very different. She would have, likely, been very different.
(Her and her siblings had not been cut from the same cloth, despite the appearance that it was so. She may not have been the only child that had grown up wanting, but she had been infinitely more desperate because of it.)
Tom, her shadow and shade and a target of want—stood tall once again.
Even he, not a whole person by half, knew when the conversation was futile and done.
“I will have them introduce the concept of games. My husband always loved children’s games. I’m sure this version of him will be all the more happy for them.” Ginny’s eyes went to the photograph that she had turned face down. Her Harry… gone from her sight, but was just there. Just out of sight.
Tom neatly folded his arms behind himself, “Harry Potter hates to lose, if you’ve forgotten in your old age.” Oh, Ginny could tell that the other had not liked her silent rebuke of that quiet of immortality. He was getting sharp with her once again. “This will be Pandora's box, I’ll have you know. If you’ve forgotten, we have been here before—it will not end well this time as surely as it did not go well last time. Even as… intimately… as you know him, do you still have that silly idea that he will, for once, do as you hope he will?”
Harry was the master of… well, the unexpected.
“Additionally, his mind surely can’t take much more of this. These resets. He has been deteriorating. Another reset may see even worse damage than some memory problems.” Tom pointed out as he moved to return to the window. To look out in to the black of the forest there.
“Yes.. You are correct, Tom. This can’t go on for too much longer.” A breath. “Well now, what can we do about it?” Ginny mused. Most of her life had been this. Finding Harry, fixing him, losing him, and doing it all over again. She was not strong enough to keep him, but neither was the opposition.
Her reports did not paint out a pretty picture.
The fading of the undiluted basilisk venom and phoenix tears in his blood had been noted for some time. Side effects were starting to show. But it was hard to follow the progression of his condition when they kept losing him for a few months or years. The meddling potions did not much help.
It would be so much easier if Harry was Harry… or just a blank slate. Anything but what he was now—a half formed personality on the edges of a destructive madness.
“The creature in the checker mask… you track it still. You know the poison it offers,” Tom’s quiet voice brought a chill down her spine. Yes, yes she did still track it. The creature was showing up more often. Meeting humans, assessing things… although he had yet to make contact with the vestiges of wizard-kind…
“And we know what a boon Potter appears as, to multiple entities. The right place and the right time… you could end this if you so desire…” Tom offered. Tom put the idea to life—one that she had never wanted to consider. The perhaps original mission of the Ministry of Magic, then. Contact with the creature—although sometimes Ginny doubted that even the Ministry knew or knows now, why this mess had even started. Everything now was just an ouroboros, for it seemed like their fight would continue for eternity… But they did not have that kind of time. Harry did not have forever, no matter how odd his body was.
Tom Riddle did not look away from the black, but continued, “… it would start from the cradle.”
Ginny closed her eyes and leaned back in her chair with a sigh.
… yes. Yes, it seemed like it was time to finally go about this mess in a new way.
Tom said nothing then. But that was okay, for Ginny had had her fill of his cautions, insults, and brilliance. She would call him again; she did not doubt it. Often, it felt like she saw more of Tom Riddle than of her own children. Who was to blame for this situation but herself?
Ginny twisted the ring and opened her eyes to an empty room with only the enchanted swirls of a galaxy overhead. Again, Tom Riddle was but a momentary passing in her life. Once again, though, he left wounds in his wake that she very much did not expect to heal in any reasonable manner. For it was not just Tom that had done this to her, but herself.
Some choices probably should have been different, in the past. But it could not be changed now.
Instead, she had a plan to craft. Her final one.
Ginny would write it all down. To join the army of diaries she had.
She usually listened to Tom, but not in any meaningful way that she would share with the shade. He did not deserve it.
This was all for Harry. For all that was uncorrupted and good. For her love, frozen in time.
Her Harry. An image. Frozen.
She looked at Neville's report once more. Looked to what concoctions were being fed and spread on Harry and created a timeline. She had contingencies to build. Secrets to make. A future to write.
Her granddaughter was to have her engagement party soon, likely with some years yet before marriage and then pregnancy. There was time.
Ginny would see to it that her great grandchild would be raised on her own knee, built from the foundations to be her successor to all of this (and in doing this, she would need to make an empire like no other—). And with a successor, one needed a rival amongst their peerage. Ginny searched her mind and looked through the family lines in her memory and decided on the one that would be the match to her successor. She would need them so as to fulfill this plan forming in the back of her head.
First… she had to wipe this false personality from Harry’s soul… and do what had never been done before and leave him blank.
She would water him and feed him and build up his strength—and place him in the way of the creature.
This had to end.
And, perhaps, she would be able to meet her Harry on the next great journey.
She turned her head to look at the portrait of the solemn Albus Dumbledore. He looked back at her.
“Is this what you wanted, sir?” She asked.
But he did not speak.
He had stopped speaking to her some time ago, perhaps after the fifth man she had murdered upon his desk.
This would end. Ginny would make sure of it.