Chapter 7
7.
Swallowing, Ginny steels herself and looks down. Wide, watery blue eyes look up at her, blinking, sliding towards the cupboard and then back to her.
“Luna?” Ginny breathes.
“Was there,” Luna starts. Stops. “I thought I saw…”
Ginny stares into her eyes, struggling to focus on hers. She wants… she wants to believe it’s Luna, not Tom, playing some trick; she tries to think of something to ask, but what is there? What is there that Luna would know, that Tom would not? He saw into her mind, her memories, and everything important, Ginny told him—she’s such a fool—
“Ginny?” Luna asks again. “The potion, did it…?”
She tries to sit up, and for a moment, Ginny thinks to hold her back. But it’s… Luna. Luna, who Ginny just slapped across the face with a wet mop, whose skin and hair are mottled with that oily black potion. She lets go, and watches Luna struggle, watches her wince and reach up towards her head. “Did it explode?” she finally manages to ask, drawing her hand away again and finding her fingers inky black. Spotting the mess made of the room.
“What do you remember?” Ginny asks.
“There was… we were brewing,” Luna says. “All day, it… time was blurring. There was something, we had to… we had to finish it. Did we finish it?”
“Yeah, he told us to add…”
The frown deepens. “The flower. The… faebells. We went to add them, and… it exploded.” She stops, looking around the room, and—oh, God; it looks just like before—
“I think,” Luna says, eyes settling on Ginny again. “I think I saw my mother.”
Is that not the most unexpected—and horrifying—thing Luna could have possibly said?
“What?"
“She said… he couldn’t have me. He couldn’t have you. He was, he was trying to take over,” she says, and her voice quickens, and she glances down at herself, tugging at her clothes. “He was—Ginny, Ginny he was—he was in me—”
“He’s gone,” Ginny says, in an exhale, though Luna doesn’t seem to hear; she’s searching all over herself, as though she expects to find some sign of him. “Luna, he’s gone,” she says, more forcefully. “He was trying to, he wanted to, but you fought him off, and now he’s gone, back to where he—”
But she cuts off. She looks back over her shoulder. Slowly, she stands up, ignoring the pain in her neck and her head, and creeps slowly around the workbench, peering into the black puddle, glimmering now only with the orange glow of the flame. There, where she’d dropped it, sits the diary.
Her hand is shaking as she picks it up, and droplets of the potion cascade off of it. She sets it on the table, and slowly flips it open. It looks as it had this morning. There’s no sign of the instructions for the potion, or any of the conversation they’d been having—before. No command to wish to finally see his face.
“Is he—is he in there?” Luna asks hoarsely, straining to pull herself up.
Ginny leans back, not wanting to turn her back—not on the diary, nor on Luna, just yet—and slowly pries open one of the drawers by the brewing station, and reaches in, finding one of the many vials of the buckthorn ink they had brewed. Slowly she uncorks it, stretches her arm out, and tilts her hand so that the ink splashes down onto the blank pages. It sits there for a moment, glistening with firelight, as dark as the potion she is standing in, and then, slowly, it begins to fade. In moments, the diary is unmarked. Unchanged.
“He’s in there,” Ginny says.
“He didn’t… say anything.”
“I don’t think he has to. Maybe he’s… tired. Sleeping.”
“Then we should…” But Luna doesn’t say it. Instead she looks up at Ginny. “Are you okay?” she asks.
“I don’t know,” Ginny says. “Are you?”
“He isn’t my friend.” Luna starts to wrap her arms around herself, but starts, looks down, sees the black stains from the explosion and the marks where Tom had pulled her clothes against her body, and her whole body rocks with a horribly visible shudder. “Ginny," she says, voice just barely resisting breaking, "what happened?”
Ginny swallows over the lump in her throat and closes the diary. It’s just a book, she tells herself. Just a horrible, angry, evil book. She’ll never write in it again. In fact, the thought of doing so—even though a day ago it had made her so angry, to be stuck with Ron and not able to for a few short hours—feels utterly repulsive.
“Luna, I’m so sorry,” she says, coming around the table again. “He… he lied to me. He tricked me. He made me believe… and because I did, he almost had you.”
The room blurs with tears she can't hold back, and she tells Luna everything that happened, exactly what Tom had said, as best as she can remember it. “And I’m sorry for… whacking you in the face with a mop,” she says at last, scrubbing at her eyes with the back of her wrists, the only part of her hands not stained black. “I hope it doesn't hurt too bad…”
“I think,” Luna says at long last, “that there must have been something to this potion. Something I didn’t see. I’m… I only know what my mother taught me, and she died years ago, Ginny, but he—he knows so much more. If he was intending the potion to… to knock my soul out of my body somehow—”
“Your soul?” Ginny exclaims.
“Or essential spirit, if you want the book term—”
Books? Books! Sure, Xenophilius’s workspace is full floor-to-ceiling of books on topics that Ginny can hardly imagine what might make someone crazy enough to go and write them, and Luna’s read them all, but—but—you can’t just knock someone’s soul out of their body! Ginny knows enough about ghosts to know it doesn’t just—
That’s death! Luna would be dead!
“—but, I don’t think it worked entirely,” Luna says. “If he said I was still in there. But I think it might have knocked him loose, and I think maybe it made a bit of a gap in me. He’s right, in a way—I have always been more… open. Susceptible to people. Creatures. That’s why my mother was always afraid to…” She shakes her head. “If the potion knocked us both loose, and he tried to jump into my body, to take over…”
“But—you were fighting him, Luna,” Ginny says. “He kept—he couldn’t control you, he— he grabbed me, and that knife, and—”
Luna is quiet for a moment. Then she points towards the door that leads to the stairs and the rest of the house. “That’s where my mother died,” she says. “The wards in here are—were—some of the strongest in the country. If she had stayed where she was, they would have wrapped around her, but then there was—me.” She pauses. “I was at the door, I called for her to come out, and she was startled and dropped something into her cauldron. And she—she wasn’t thinking, she was afraid, and she ran to try to save me. To protect me.”
Ginny opens and closes her mouth. She wants to say she’s sorry, but it wouldn’t be enough. Not nearly enough. “You think… you think it was your mother, trying to protect you from him?” she asks.
“I think that this room has a lot of protective magic woven into it, and a lot of memories,” Luna says, even quieter than before. “And I think you hitting me in the face with that mop might have knocked him loose again. I think you’re a lot more magical than he’s ever given you credit for, and I think if you wanted me back…”
“I did,” Ginny says. “I do. He…”
“Thank you,” Luna says. She reaches up and touches her face, and winces a bit. “But… would you mind helping me wash this off? There’s some bruise paste in the toilet, but I don’t want to get any of this potion anywhere Daddy might see it…”
Together, they wash Luna’s face and hair in the washbasin, though it is difficult to tell where her skin is stained from the potion and where it is beginning to bruise until she tiptoes off down the stairs to get the bruise paste. She comes back up with her hair tied up and yellow paste caked onto her cheeks, dressed in fresh clothes, carrying some others, which she offers to Ginny, and Ginny realizes that she, too, is almost completely covered in black goo—more, now that she’s been trying to clean it up a bit. Luna offers to help wash her hair too, but Ginny hesitates.
The thought of Luna’s hands… in her hair… when he had grabbed her like that, dragged her—aside from the fact that her scalp is still a bit tender, it feels… vulnerable.
She doesn’t like that. Feeling like Luna is somehow going to hurt her. Luna has never once hurt Ginny in her life.
“Could you,” she starts. “Would you mind—I want it gone.”
“What gone?”
“My hair,” she says. “I want it short. As short as, as Ron’s. I don’t want anyone to be able to…”
Luna understands without her saying anything more. She opens another drawer and brings out a heavy-looking pair of shears and passes them to Ginny, and Ginny gathers as much of her hair as she can and pulls it into a ponytail, twisting it as tight as she can without making it hurt again, and puts the shears up and starts to saw through it. After a moment, Luna comes around and takes the shears from her, so Ginny can get a better grip on her hair, and carefully she cuts through the rest. Ginny is left with long strands of red hair sticking to the black gunk on her shoulders and the rest of the tail, as long as her forearm, in her hands.
Once she’s scrubbed herself down a bit—Luna recommends she use the bruise paste on her scalp, which helps, but is a pain to wash out—and changed into the clothes Luna brought her, rinsed hers out and hung them over the windowsill, they turn again to the workbench. The diary sits on it, still, unmoving. No sign that it is more than a book. But Ginny knows that Tom has returned to it. If she just wrote—
She jerks her head violently, shaking it. “What do we do with that?” she asks. “It’s dangerous. He’s dangerous.”
“Yes,” Luna agrees.
“But he said it was nearly indestructible,” Ginny says. “And I don’t, maybe we could look at Hogwarts, for some way to destroy nearly indestructible things holding… people, but…”
“You don’t want to kill him.”
Ginny takes a deep breath. “I… he was my friend…”
“I don’t want to kill him either,” Luna says. “I don’t want to be a killer. Someone put him in that book, and I think I understand why, after… what he did to you—”
“To me!” Ginny exclaims.
“To both of us,” Luna amends. “I think he is harder to kill than we would be capable of, even if either of us wanted to. I think if we tried, we might risk letting him out again. I think he very much wants to get out of there.”
Ginny shudders. “He does. He says—he said it’s so lonely in there, just him and his memories…”
“Well, maybe someday we’ll have figured out how to destroy him, and maybe by then we’ll look at it as setting him free.”
“And what about now?” Ginny asks. “What do we do with him?”
Luna glances around. She cleaned up the worst of the spilled potion while Ginny was washing her things, but the cabinets have dark stains on them, and the soap Luna has to take out ink stains only works on living beings. Luna goes to one, opens it, closes it again; goes to another, and begins to shift things about. Then she beckons Ginny over, and she brings the diary, and they set it down, burying it amidst stacks of long-forgotten notes and books. Luna closes the cupboard, and leads Ginny to collect her clothes from the cracked window, and closes that, too, and leads the way out of the room. From under her shirt, she produces the little key on its string, and leans in to lock the room.
“I think,” she says, “Daddy was right all along. We don’t go in there. It doesn’t even exist anymore. Not until we’re ready to face him again.”
You'd be forgiven for thinking time will make things easier, because it does, in some ways. But it's not like the kiss, where once Ginny's calmed down and gotten some distance the actual moment became so faded and dreamlike it might not have even happened. No. Not even though it might be easier, to have this sink into the haze of a nightmare.
Instead, it's perfectly, horribly, crystal-clear. A record seared into her brain of every second from the moment the potion exploded onwards. Luna's bruise cream and soaps did away with the marks, but as much as the breeze chilling Ginny's bared neck is enough to confirm that her hair has been cut, every breath, every step, every thought that takes her on from Tom's unexpected betrayal is only further proof that it was real.
What's unreal isn't what happened, it's saying goodbye, it's walking home, it's going inside and coming into the middle of a conversation about Charlie’s upcoming return as the twins peel potatoes by hand for some trouble they’ve caused, no doubt, and how life just… goes on. Everything exactly as it was left, before.
“Ginny!” Mum had exclaimed on seeing her. “Your hair…”
“Luna helped me,” Ginny’d said, rather tersely.
Mum had stared at her for a long moment, and finally managed to say, “Sweetheart, not that she hasn’t done an… efficient job… If short’s how you’d like it, maybe after a spot of dinner I could even up the ends for you?”
And somehow it doesn't end in a screaming match or Ginny storming back to her room and shaking the house slamming her door, or even Mum telling her off for being back too late or for staining her cut-offs. She sits through a whole dinner with Fred and George acting like they can't tell her and Ron apart—a lot of rot, that; Percy's the one she looks the most alike, except maybe Bill. Dad's brought home a book of muggle inventions someone’s given him and he pulls it out and they all spend an hour talking over it at the kitchen table, Mum whipping up some pudding even though it's just a regular Saturday night, and it's well after the dishes are washed and everyone else is upstairs getting ready for bed before Ginny perches herself on a stool in the middle of the kitchen, Mum methodically working through her hair with an enchanted comb and deftly handled fabric shears.
“You know,” Mum says after a long while, when Ginny is half-asleep beneath the gentle touches in her hair. “When I was sixteen, I let your Uncle Cooper cut my hair.”
“Really?”
They don’t see Mum’s family, much. Most of those who’d survived the war had either supported the wrong side or hadn’t come out quite the same as they’d gone in. Uncle Cooper had gotten sad, Mum once said, and he’d moved in with their squib cousin and decided to spend the rest of his life pretending magic doesn’t exist. And he’s something like ten years younger than her, which meant…
“He’d always had his hair kept short, poor dear,” Mum says fondly. “He was very studious and earnest, even at that age. He was five, and we already knew he’d go into Ravenclaw, you know. Curious about everything. I thought maybe Percy might follow him, but the Weasley will out.” She chuckles, pushing Ginny’s hair the other way, sliding the shears behind her ear. “He wanted to try, and he begged me and begged me to let him, and I could never say no to him. And he was doing a decent job, nothing I couldn’t fix with a bit of trimming, when Fab came in and distracted me with… oh, I can’t remember. Some harebrained idea of Gideon’s, no doubt. They were always arguing about the silliest things.”
Her smile warms her voice as she speaks. It’s easy enough for Ginny to imagine, her own brothers inserted in her uncles’ places, but from Mum’s old stories Fabian and Gideon were more like Bill and Percy than Fred and George. Mum will never admit it, but Great Aunt Muriel swears that she’s always been the trouble-maker in the family, running off with Dad straight after school, pulling her brothers into the war, causing all sorts of chaos in the old pureblood Prewitt family.
“What happened?” Ginny asks.
“I got so caught up in trying to set them straight, I didn’t even notice when Cooper cut my hair right down to nothing.” She reaches forward, indicating with a pinching motion a distance of no more than a millimeter. “It was this long, right at the crown of my head. A good bit longer on the sides. Gideon about pulled a muscle, he was laughing so hard.”
Ginny scrunches up her face, trying to imagine. “What’d you do?” she asks. “Hair-growing potion?”
“No. I went upstairs, got my father’s straight razor, and made Fabian shave it all off.”
“All of it?”
“I was as bald as your Uncle Thomas.”
“No.”
That’s one of Dad’s older brothers. He’s so bald, his head shines. Ginny thinks maybe he oils it to increase the effect.
“Yes. It was about a centimeter long by the time we started school up again, and the teasing was absolutely merciless. Taught me a lot about who really was my friend, and who wasn’t.”
“Why didn’t you just grow it back out?”
As long as Ginny’s been alive, the shortest Mum’s hair has ever been was just below her chin, and that only lasted a week before she brewed the potion to take it back down to her shoulders again. And considering it’s Mum—Mum who gets on the boys whenever their hair gets anywhere past their ears, and don’t get her started on Bill’s ponytail—the thought of her with a shaved head is absolutely ridiculous.
“Because they were laughing,” Mum says. “It makes it a lot easier to see what sort of person someone is when you stand out. Some of them came around, and some of them proved to be exactly the sort of person I didn’t want in my life. And some, like your Dad, asked me why I’d done it, and then stood by me all along. And,” she adds, flipping Ginny’s hair back over and giving one final walk around. “Because I’m as stubborn as anyone, though don't tell your brothers I said so. Didn’t grow it out again until Cooper saved all his allowance to send me the potion himself. He felt so bad, poor lad— Have a look, dear.”
She produces a mirror, the one that normally lives on the vanity in her and Dad’s bedroom, and gives it to Ginny. Somehow she’s managed to take the mess she and Luna had made of it and shape it into something intentional. It’s not like the haircuts she gives the boys, it’s more… feminine, for lack of a better word. Angled to suit her face.
“We could take it a little longer in the back,” Mum begins, indicating with her fingers.
“No,” Ginny says. “I like it.” She lets the mirror drop as Mum starts brushing away a few last strands of hair that got caught on her shoulders and charming away the mess on the floor. “I’m glad I had you to fix it, instead of… Fred with a straight razor.”
“I don’t think you’d be fool enough to ever trust one of your brothers to cut your hair,” Mum says dryly. “Years of having me do it, you think they’d have learned some sense by now, but no, those boys… Now off to bed with you, young lady. It’s well past your bedtime.”
She presses a kiss into Ginny’s freshly cut hair before she goes. Ginny’s asleep the moment her head touches the pillow.
Slowly, summer stretches on. Past Charlie's return, and his increased agitation as he comes home from the Ministry every night, itching to get back to Romania with his dragons, slipping back out to the pubs the moment Mum’s back is turned, weekdays and all. Through Ginny's birthday, when Bill kidnaps her from the foyer of the Ministry after classes are over and takes her to Ollivander's, and then faces down Mum to say it's his birthday present for her, and is she really going to take that away, after all the trouble Ron went through last year? Over the shrieking that ensues when Mum finds out that when Ron's been going over to Neville Longbottom's place, they haven't been sticking to the manor, which turns into a shouting match of truly epic proportions of Ron demanding to know whether he should make sure Mum knows every time he walks down to the village when he's at home, too, which anyone with half a brain cell could tell is a terrible tactic to use on Mum when she's feeling protective and betrayed. Along with all of this, it's the last few weeks of classes at the Ministry School, and Ginny looks around at the other faces in the class and notices how they’ve all gotten a little older since she last really looked at them. Eloise Midgin’s nose still isn’t straight, but she’s gotten a new haircut, too, which really suits her, and Jacob Swanson’s grown about a foot and is finally taller than her again. Classes are still boring, and more lonely than ever, now that she doesn’t have Tom—so the Tuesday after the disaster, Ginny takes out a quill and starts writing a letter to Luna. She gives it to her that evening, and Luna makes her sit and wait while she writes a reply for Ginny to read in class the next day. This keeps up until on Monday, Ginny manages to write,
I wanted to kiss you again really bad. And I think I was in love with you, a bit.
And Luna replies,
I know, and I love you, my dearest friend, but I wasn’t ever in love with you.
And that’s that. They never talk about it face-to-face, but they keep giving each other letters, even after class has finished and Ginny’s at Luna’s house or Luna’s at the Burrow more often than not. Each one is like a fresh bandage on a slowly healing wound. Even when she’s spent all day playing quidditch with the boys and Cedric Diggory and some of Fred’ and George’s friends and she’s so tired she can barely walk up the stairs to bed, sometimes she sits there, staring over at her desk and her quill and her buckthorn ink, thinking of the diary, locked away in the potion’s studio, just as alone as she is. That’s when she takes Luna’s letters and reads through them one by one, silly stories of Luna’s adventures with her father, of creatures too strange for even the Quibbler to accept articles about, ideas for soups and recipes that Ginny can’t imagine being edible if they actually try to make them, and carefully pens her own replies, about her brothers and the Burrow and her hopes for Hogwarts and the latest news from the professional quidditch scene.
But what happened doesn't seem to fade. She wakes up in a cold sweat more times than she can count, shaking from dreams about peering into the potion and seeing reflected back at her hallways she can almost place in the Ministry before Luna's hand is in her hair pushing her down, trying to drown her in it; she stirs awake after dozing on lazy afternoons and freezes in panic when she doesn’t feel the diary, searching the floor and her clothes before she remembers what happens. Fred and George try to rig up some sort of prank with vanishing ink but it goes horribly, horribly wrong and she can't begin to explain why she runs screaming from the sight of black liquid sinking down through their floorboards and into the ceiling of her room. It doesn't fade, but scars, slowly, like a gash in a tree, thick with resin that oozes and clings to anything that gets too close. But… the things that get close are fewer and farther between. The third time she sees her mum at a cauldron in the kitchen, she doesn't even flinch as the memory rushes through her all at once. It doesn't fade, but maybe—maybe—she's growing around it, stronger.
One morning, the first of the last week of summer before Hogwarts, Ginny wakes up late and comes downstairs and finds everyone in the kitchen. All of her brothers, including Percy and Charlie—back again just last night—and Bill, her Mum and Dad, and also several people she’s never seen before, a few in the red robes of Aurors—she thinks that one might be Bill’s friend Tonks—and one she only recognizes from pictures: Professor Dumbledore. She hesitates on the stairs, wondering, suddenly, if someone hasn’t found out about Tom, about a memory contained in a book which is certainly, as she and Luna have speculated since, incredibly dark magic—but none of them look up or seem to notice her at all.
“That’s settled, then,” Professor Dumbledore is saying. “Please do be safe, and… let us know if there are any changes.”
“Changes!” one of the aurors exclaims. “After all this—” But another one shushes her.
“Of course, of course,” Dad says.
“Then we’ll be out of your hair,” Professor Dumbledore looks up then, meets Ginny’s eye, and winks. “We’ve caused enough of a fuss this morning.”
The contingent of strangers grumbles and starts moving towards the floo, but Mum says, “Oh, Albus, you won’t stay for a bit of breakfast?”
He must offer some excuses, because as Ginny creeps down to the kitchen, one by one the strangers vanish, leaving only her family behind. Her family, and one other, she realizes, who has been completely still and silent and catches her off-guard when she spots him.
“Oh, well, Harry dear,” mum says. “Come now, sit down, love! You look like you haven’t eaten in a week.”
He—Harry Potter—nods, slowly, but he doesn’t take his eyes off Ginny as he does so. She can feel her face heating up. Harry Potter—here—he—and she’s in her jammies—
The moment Ron jostles in front of her, she turns and sprints upstairs, heart pounding a mile a minute as she presses her back up against the door.
Ron is a bloody liar, he is! He spent all those letters trying to convince her that Harry Potter is nothing like she’s imagined—but he is. The hair, and the eyes— Merlin, it was the eyes with Luna, too; she’s hopeless—
At least now she has an answer for Bill’s question. Does she like boys? If their name starts with ‘Harry’ and ends with ‘Potter’, yes, most definitely.
And she’s wearing her pyjamas!
Eventually she manages to put on something normal but not too awful—Bill’s Pink Floyd shirt and a pair of jeans she hasn’t made into cut-offs yet but are getting there—and comes back down to breakfast. Bill catches her eye and grins—fuck Bill, he’s not her favorite brother anymore. None of them are. Percy’s run off to the Ministry already, and he must have pulled Dad along with him, Charlie is arguing with Mum about his hair—Ginny cut hers, why can’t you cut yours?—and Fred and George are plotting and keep darting their eyes at her, and she’s going to have to sneak into their room for some good blackmail, isn’t she. Ron’s prattling on to Harry about everything he’s heard from ‘Nev’ and ‘Mione’ over the summer. And Harry—
She has to be imagining it. He wouldn’t honestly be staring at her, would he?
Eventually, it comes to light that Harry’s going to be staying with them for the rest of the summer. Though Mum tries to prod without a bit of subtlety at all, he’s not, apparently, inclined to tell anyone where he’s been for the last month. He’s not actually inclined to say much of anything at all, apparently. In fact, his eyes keep darting around to the exits from the room like he’s regretting coming here in the first place.
Which makes it all the more surprising when—as Fred and George are roped into doing dishes and the rest of them scurry off to get their things for a game of quidditch, while they’ve got Bill and Charlie both here, and Harry, too, and why not call Cedric over—Harry stops her at the landing on the stairs.
“Have we met before?” he asks her.
“Er, um,” she says. “I don’t think so?”
Which is flustered-speak for ‘I’d remember if we met before’.
“Only,” he says, “I had this dream, and…”
He trails away.