Harry Potter. Tom Riddle/Ginny Weasley. 019. White.
Title: Gwenhwyfar
Fandom: Harry Potter
Characters: Tom Riddle/Ginny Weasley
Prompt: 019. White.
Word Count: 3,766
Rating: PG-13
Summary: Ginny yields her control and Tom bides his time, but it still ends in White.
Author's Notes: Beta-read by Apache Rose and carpe_savium. Thank you both for your wonderful work!
My Little Damn Table can be found here.
Word got around fast in Little Hangleton. Within twenty-four hours of Mary Fisher's pregnancy test, every villager would know that she was pregnant, would have a good guess of who the father was, and would be thinking up names for the baby. Within nine hours of George Little's cow's labour, every villager would know how many calves she had given birth to and how many of them were up for sale. Within one hour of Mrs. Hapscomb's failed haircut, every villager would know what the problem was, what colour wig she would wear to hide it, and which barber pleaded guilty of this heinous crime. Especially which barber pleaded guilty of this heinous crime.
It would not be long before someone latched on the news that ownership of the Riddle House had swapped hands.
With this in mind, Tom took all the necessary precautions to avoid being seen, lest his face be connected with his past or, indeed, his future murders. Let the villagers believe that an upstart bought the estate; furthermore, let them believe that he kept it for "tax reasons." Tom fired the single remaining servant, Obliviated anyone old enough to recognize him, and resolved to always Apparate directly inside the house.
Yet as invisible ropes tightened around his body and his limbs went limp and asphyxia settled in the cushion of his throat and he pictured Death grazing his cheek with teeth like Poe's notorious pendulum, he began to regret that last decision. For all of Tom's skills and trophies, Apparition still strained his sixteen-year-old body and mind; the seconds of helplessness before his feet hit solid ground chilled him to the bone.
Slumped as he ended up against the mansion's front door, with his respiration coming in long, quiet sighs and his eyes squeezed shut (for he could allow himself this luxury, in the blessed privacy of this building), Tom wanted to forget all about the prospect of Apparating on a regular basis.
Soon enough, he was given an excuse to.
The sight that greeted him when he opened his eyes flung Apparition irrevocably out of his mind -- aside from a moment's consideration of its after-effects, in case they included hallucinations.
Right in the middle of the hall, clad only in white robes, legs straddling and arms resting on the back of a chair, sat Ginny Weasley. The rays spilling from the large mullioned windows into the otherwise dark hall made her glow with an unearthly light; her long sleeves, perched atop the chair like snowy pigeons, were only rivaled in radiance by her large, wet eyes.
As crazy, absurd and positively dumb as this vision seemed, Tom did not think it impossible - nothing was impossible. And so, where others would have screamed or fled, Tom surveyed the redhead with an outward calm (although he suspected his face had gone pale).
Ginny's cheeks, on the contrary, had flushed with colour at a glimpse of him, and stayed that way through her ice-breaking preamble: "Tom," followed by an euphoric smile she would have reserved for a long-lost brother, "I thought you'd never come," followed by a grimace she would have reserved for a long-lost brother who had yet to get wind of their parents' death. "There's something I have to tell you."
"Ginevra. I must say the Giant Squid would have been less of a surprise." Gears were beginning to turn in the boy's head. He deliberately ignored her last statement, and prodded her mind for something else, something... ah, yes. "Have you been waiting for me?"
"Oh, yes... I've been waiting since our last meeting. Listen, Tom --"
"Here?" he cut her off.
"Yes, here. Tom..."
"Why? How is this place important to you?"
At first, the redhead furrowed her brow, as though deliberating whether the question might be rhetorical. "It's important to you," she answered in the end, matter-of-factly. "You told me so in the diary -- remember? -- when you described those murders to intimidate me. You told me about your life... your father..."
Tom had already dropped her gaze and slackened the fingers creeping towards his wand, for the girl was obviously harmless. Now he simply stared at that bare, impossibly pale foot of hers playing peek-a-boo behind a chair-leg.
And wondered.
Maybe a minute had passed before he spoke, without looking up: "You're a funny kid, Ginny." From a corner of his consciousness, he registered Ginny nestling her chin in the crook of her elbow to hide a blush. "Unfortunately, I have no use for you this time, thus no obligation to endure a second round of your dramatics." He did look up then, all steel and charcoal.
Ginny's eyes got the crux of it, coming to resemble deep brown wounds. "Tom, can I just speak to you for a second?" she pleaded in a small voice, as she watched him move towards the staircase.
"You are speaking to me," he replied, unflinching in his stride. As harmless as she was, she certainly knew how to make a nuisance of herself. "What you should instead be asking yourself is, would I rather you weren't? I should think the answer obvious."
"Tom, please --"
"Later."
"It's important," Ginny pressed, disentangling herself from the chair.
The boy paused on the first step and regarded her with faint amusement. Now that she had retired from the puddle of light, he could confirm that it had not accounted for her pallor; the girl still looked as if she had not seen the sun for weeks. An image flashed in Tom's mind of her likeness, with hollowed cheeks and skin as white as the paper she was writing on, waving off a tall, bespectacled redhead, because oh, she wasn't hungry, she had eaten earlier that day, and well, it was no wonder he hadn’t seen her in the Great Hall, you see Mandy had carried her some snacks upstairs, really, honestly, cross her heart and hope to die...
He hastily locked it back in its special drawer with the rest of his trinkets (a snake's sibilant melody; two girls' murders; the forbidden taste of his own blood; his father's dying scream).
"Tom, I've waited so long to tell you..."
He briefly toyed with the idea of stringing her along, making her beg, crawl, regret ever addressing him by that filthy monosyllabic name... but he already knew all he wanted to. Before proceeding to more important things, he gave the answer to her pleas -- there was only one answer:
"Later."
Some minutes later, she reprised her request, and Tom his response. Some hours later, she sidled up to him, only to be rebuffed by a hard look. Some days later, she clasped her hands and dropped to her knees before him, as if in prayer, but her god reproached her about "how low one could sink."
Some weeks later, she caught herself before as much as mouthing his name.
- - -
Time flies when you're having fun, and in Tom's mind, "world domination" was the very definition of "fun." Few people could have found pleasure in poring over books and scrolls for hours on end, but when in his armchair, in the room at the far end of the landing, he had no thought for anything else -- least of all the redhead sitting by the hearth. Days blended into each other, differentiated only by the angle of the light entering through the window, the varying patterns it revealed on the carpet, the change in smell from parchment to paper... the increasing proximity of Ginny's body to his chair.
Until the window allowed entrance to more than sunlight; it did to a leaf. A red one.
It was like a bucketful of cold water after a three-month slumber -- and he really must have been sleeping, Tom mused; or else why had he not taken notice of Ginny, who now sat close enough to lay her head upon his knee...?
Tom bolted up, ignoring the redhead's surprised little squeak, and stalked from the room.
He brought a girl home that same day. Just picked her right off the street, with a smooth smile and a promise of tea and sympathy. He had known what she needed the instant he had spotted her: leaning against the wall of a side-alley, with blood-shot eyes and peeling make-up and the thought of revenge fresh in her mind. She was a Muggle, a peasant and a lover -- all of humanity's filth realized in her oblique angles and boisterous voice -- but she would serve her purposes.
Moonlight washed over the pair as he led the girl uphill ("Where are we -- is that the Riddle House? Oh! Oh! Are you Riddle's son, Tom?") and it would have been romantic, if Tom hadn't been the sort to spend Valentine's Day hoodwinking enemies through enchanted diaries. Thankfully, his companion did not seem perturbed by anything -- neither his silence nor the garden's straggly, scratching flora -- in light of another girl's Paradise, with speckless floors and satin pillows.
Ever the gentleman, Tom unlocked the door and let her go first. He followed behind, putting an encouraging hand on the girl's back, but stopped just outside the doorframe when he felt her flinch. In hopes that this was only a brief sparkle of second-thinking, Tom granted her a few seconds' time to step forward. Her hand groped for his in the dark, but her feet remained static.
"What's the matter?" the boy inquired, not bothering to mask his annoyance. At her extended unresponsiveness, he made an impatient sound and pushed her aside.
In retrospect, he was surprised all she had done was flinch.
Ginny was standing -- not sitting, standing -- on the banister, and if the sun's rays had made her look unearthly, the moon's rays made her look unholy. She had been staring at him in bemusement, until they locked eyes and she realized that the party was over and she now had to clean its nasty remnants from the floor.
Tom met her midway up the stairs, just as she came floating down.
"Child," he rumbled, knowing it would smart more than any obscenity.
"I just used a balancing charm --"
"I know what you used."
"Well, how was I supposed to guess that you weren't home, or that you would bring..." She left that part unsaid.
"Please. You and I both know your whole world revolves around me, Ginny. Galileo would have to revamp his cosmological theory where you're concerned."
"Oh, that's just like you! That's Tom Riddle all over, playing smart by using big words and... and Greek names!"
"Italian, you daft girl. As to my intelligence, even addressing a vapid, droll mediocrity like you is an affront to it. I don't know why I even give you the time of the day --"
"What the bloody Hell is going on here?"
Tom turned to the source of the third voice and Obliviated her before she could muster another word. Her dilated pupils and unfocused gaze pleased him in the way Pavlov's dog must have pleased its master. Complete. And. Utter. Control. (Not like Ginny's head on his knee, on his knee...)
As soon as she was "fixed," Tom proceeded to drag her, stumbling and wobbling, up the stairs.
"Who's she?" the girl -- he had not even bothered to get her name -- asked when they passed Ginny by. By the looks of it, Ginny could ask the same of her.
"My little sister," he replied steadily. Before the redhead could protest, he added: "Let's go to my room, darling," and steered the other girl towards the bedroom.
"But Tom," she drew out the 'o' whiningly, "you said we would have tea before I..."
"We can have tea later," he interjected with a strained smile. She would be lucky if she even remembered what tea was, with the deluge of Memory Charms she would "later" endure.
"Oh, all right..."
"Tom... what am I to do...?" uttered Ginny, lost. He wondered how the peasant could have believed she was related to him; not only her looks, but her very essence contrasted with his in the most glaring way, so that Tom felt a twinge of guilt for what he was about to -- no.
"If you want to leave, leave; if you want to stay..." he sneered "...leave."
Tom strode off, but not without a backward glance first, to catch Ginny slipping into the next-door bathroom. Satisfied, he burrowed into the bedroom... then the sheets... then the girl.
It had been a long while -- so long, in fact, that it might as well have been his first time -- yet he was only remotely aware of the act, like he was of breathing or of walking. The little girl in the next room had all of his attention.
He hoped she was listening. He hoped she was counting the cries, the groans, the thrusts, the rise and fall, rise and fall...
...while he counted her sobs.
- - -
On the day when the first snowflake drifted into the room in the red leaves' stead, he was missing her. It came as a frustrating realization, because he had just concluded a meeting with one of his faithful, and there were simply too many preoccupations of equal gravity to squander time on the redhead. Still, her absence nibbled at the back of his mind, like the removal of a piece of furniture from a room one has spent his whole life in. He had only glimpsed her sporadically ever since the "incident," and never heard a word from her, although she normally never shut up. Perhaps his makeshift plan had been too efficient.
Tom proceeded to comb through the mansion with the pretext of searching for a roll of parchment. Half an hour later, he had found enough rolls of parchment to handwrite the Britannica, but not a sign of Ginny.
So he went outside, more ruffled than he would admit even to himself, and soon enough spotted her -- but not in the garden. In the churchyard. That mane of red hair was not exactly easy to miss, even from a distance.
He found the churchyard's gate gaping open when he arrived there. There was naught but a sprinkle of snow atop the ground so far, but combined with the tombstones and the sky's murky gray, it was enough to lend the landscape an unsettling aura. Even the small church looked foreboding, tucked behind a dark yew tree.
And yet, Ginny seemed more at home there than she ever had in the Riddle House.
Pinpricks of white bedecked her hair, twinkling momentarily, before melting to make way for others, as human lives must do. Her body was swathed only in her thin white robe, but she did not appear to sense the cold that was now slicing Tom's cheeks, debilitating his legs. On the contrary, energy overflowed from her like an erroneously mixed potion from a cauldron.
"Ginny, come back inside, you'll freeze out here --" Tom began, feeling like Mrs. Cole picking up a five-year old from the orphanage's courtyard, but stopped short when he realized what and where Ginny was playing.
Hopscotch on his father's grave.
Mute and immobile, Tom could only watch as the tiny ballerina in-training hopped on two feet -- one -- two -- one -- none -- then floated, floated with her crimson hair and sheer habit and unforgiving eyes, like a bloody mist over a crime scene. What really set him (the criminal) off, however, was not the tell-tale blood-stains Ginny left on his hands -- she could disembowel the whole cloud-maze to taint him red, for all he cared -- but the claim she pretended to have on his father (the spoils), the way she dared Tom to question the sacrilege, the hopsotch-turned-deathmarch, the rise and fall, rise and fall...
"Stop it," he hissed, seeing red, "stop it, he’s mine!"
Teeth bared like a boar-hound, he lunged for her, but all it took to evade him was a dip of the toes and an easy half-turn. Just when he wheeled around for another, less awkward charge, Ginny caught him off-guard:
"No, Tom," she said with an ice-shard in her eye, as if from a rub-in with the Snow Queen. "You are mine."
For many minutes after Ginny had padded off towards the mansion, Tom stared at his name -- Riddle -- engraved on each of the courtyard's tombstones, and thought about death.
- - -
He next saw her in the library, later that evening. He was leaning against the bookcase with a novel in his hands, staring incomprehensively at a word for so long that it started to float before his eyes, and when he looked up, Ginny was framed in the doorway. Upside-down. Feet barely touching the ceiling. Robes defying the law of gravity, along with their owner.
Here, Yeats would be entitled to say the center does not hold.
"Third time's the charm, right?" Ginny quipped.
Right. There were no open windows nearby this time, no natural explanation for the light gracing Ginny's form; she literally radiated it. No balancing charms strong enough to suspend her from the ceiling, at her age; she had floated up there. No veneer of ill-health in her pearly-white skin; she could only have acquired that particular shade if she had been a corpse.
"And here comes the denouement," Tom said softly. "You needn't have waited the better part of a year for it. I knew from the first moment."
"What?" She sounded truly shocked. "How?"
"Let's see... Could it have been that you had difficulty keeping your feet on the ground while walking? No, no... That you didn't eat a crumble all these months? Or, wait... How about the fact that you passed through walls?"
"Oh," was all Ginny said, blushing silver. She mustn't have diagnosed that kink in her performance. "I thought... even though you had watched me dying in the Chamber -- even held me..." a dreamy tone took over during that last tangent "...you might have believed there had been a mistake, that I had..." Her train of thought hit an obstacle, and she frowned in confusion. "But if you knew, then why... why did you..." She appeared to have trouble vocalizing her question.
"Why did I not let you tell me whatever it was you wanted to tell me?" The girl nodded. "You did not live long enough to find this out, little Ginny, but there are few things more gratifying than control. To know that I could incite your death at any moment, or prolong your painful existence for all eternity... let's just say that you had not been that dependent on me even in our 'pen-pal' days."
This was only one of many reasons, but he could not bring himself to admit the rest: that he did not wish to stay alone in a nest of overripe ghosts; that he enjoyed her company too much to let her go; that he was terrified of what a dead girl may have stalked her murderer for.
"So, Ginevra." His speech was clear and steady, even though his heart threatened to thump itself into an explosion. "What is your 'unfinished business'? What is so important as to account for the postponement of your death?" The redhead opened her mouth to reply, and suddenly, Tom realized he wasn't ready. "Before you tell me, get down from the ceiling. The situation is ridiculous enough as it is; there's no need to turn it into an all-out farce with your acrobatic tricks."
Incredibly, Ginny shook her head. "I like it here. It gives me a different perspective of the room." How mature, how old she sounded for her years... had he really done that to her? "Yes," she said with a smile, as though in response to his internal musings. "You'd know about that, wouldn't you, Tom? You taught it to me." She took a step toward him, which triggered the butterfly effect: his surroundings melted into a Dali painting, surreal and disorienting. "You taught me not to judge a book by its cover. I had to learn my lesson the hard way, but I learned." Two more steps. Tom pressed his back against the bookcase, feeling an absurd desire to melt into one of the books, as he had into his diary. "And this is what my 'unfinished business' is about. A change of perspective." Ginny now hovered so close that he could count the freckles on her nose, if he so wished, could estimate that her eyes were level with his. Strange, to see her this way, close-up and upside-down, with all her facial characteristics in the wrong places... like looking at his reflection in a deformable mirror. Only her freckles remained reversible, natural, and he very much wished to count them now -- three, seven, nine... "I love you." And she planted a kiss on his forehead.
At eight years of age, when he had still been at the orphanage, he had caught a serious case of pneumonia. Having exhausted common treatments and medicine, one of the staff members -- Martha -- had turned to fire-cupping. She had held each glass cup inverted over a candle's flame, heating the air, then had quickly placed it on his back, to create a vacuum. Martha had said it would hurt "a bit," but would also unclog his respiration and make him feel better. The method had had only one of the promised results -- in spades, to compensate for the rest: it had hurt more than a bit.
This kiss came like a glass cup on his forehead, but with a cleansing effect which fire-cupping had lacked. Behind the uncomfortable heat and the searing pain crackled something so pure and incorruptible that he had to close his eyes against the force of it. It swept over him, encircled him, trickled into him, until he thought Tom Marvolo Riddle would peel away like a snakeskin, to be replaced with something high and true and good.
When he opened his eyes, Ginny was gone. In her stead, a small book lay on the floor, right in front of him. The boy recognized the leather cover in an instant. He picked up his old diary and hesitantly flipped through its pages. They were no longer blank; Ginny's diary entries were strewn on every page... only Ginny's. It was as if his own had never existed.
I love you, she had said. I forgive you, she now spelled out.
This was his change of perspective.
For many minutes after Ginny had vanished, Tom stared at his name -- Riddle -- on the diary's first page, and thought about something stronger than death.
Author's Notes: Please don't peek at these if you haven't read the story, as they contain spoilers.
The title -- Gwenhwyfar -- is the Welsh form of the name "Guinevere," whom Ginny is named after ("Ginevra" is her full name). It means "White Ghost" or "White Fay."
Fandom: Harry Potter
Characters: Tom Riddle/Ginny Weasley
Prompt: 019. White.
Word Count: 3,766
Rating: PG-13
Summary: Ginny yields her control and Tom bides his time, but it still ends in White.
Author's Notes: Beta-read by Apache Rose and carpe_savium. Thank you both for your wonderful work!
My Little Damn Table can be found here.
Word got around fast in Little Hangleton. Within twenty-four hours of Mary Fisher's pregnancy test, every villager would know that she was pregnant, would have a good guess of who the father was, and would be thinking up names for the baby. Within nine hours of George Little's cow's labour, every villager would know how many calves she had given birth to and how many of them were up for sale. Within one hour of Mrs. Hapscomb's failed haircut, every villager would know what the problem was, what colour wig she would wear to hide it, and which barber pleaded guilty of this heinous crime. Especially which barber pleaded guilty of this heinous crime.
It would not be long before someone latched on the news that ownership of the Riddle House had swapped hands.
With this in mind, Tom took all the necessary precautions to avoid being seen, lest his face be connected with his past or, indeed, his future murders. Let the villagers believe that an upstart bought the estate; furthermore, let them believe that he kept it for "tax reasons." Tom fired the single remaining servant, Obliviated anyone old enough to recognize him, and resolved to always Apparate directly inside the house.
Yet as invisible ropes tightened around his body and his limbs went limp and asphyxia settled in the cushion of his throat and he pictured Death grazing his cheek with teeth like Poe's notorious pendulum, he began to regret that last decision. For all of Tom's skills and trophies, Apparition still strained his sixteen-year-old body and mind; the seconds of helplessness before his feet hit solid ground chilled him to the bone.
Slumped as he ended up against the mansion's front door, with his respiration coming in long, quiet sighs and his eyes squeezed shut (for he could allow himself this luxury, in the blessed privacy of this building), Tom wanted to forget all about the prospect of Apparating on a regular basis.
Soon enough, he was given an excuse to.
The sight that greeted him when he opened his eyes flung Apparition irrevocably out of his mind -- aside from a moment's consideration of its after-effects, in case they included hallucinations.
Right in the middle of the hall, clad only in white robes, legs straddling and arms resting on the back of a chair, sat Ginny Weasley. The rays spilling from the large mullioned windows into the otherwise dark hall made her glow with an unearthly light; her long sleeves, perched atop the chair like snowy pigeons, were only rivaled in radiance by her large, wet eyes.
As crazy, absurd and positively dumb as this vision seemed, Tom did not think it impossible - nothing was impossible. And so, where others would have screamed or fled, Tom surveyed the redhead with an outward calm (although he suspected his face had gone pale).
Ginny's cheeks, on the contrary, had flushed with colour at a glimpse of him, and stayed that way through her ice-breaking preamble: "Tom," followed by an euphoric smile she would have reserved for a long-lost brother, "I thought you'd never come," followed by a grimace she would have reserved for a long-lost brother who had yet to get wind of their parents' death. "There's something I have to tell you."
"Ginevra. I must say the Giant Squid would have been less of a surprise." Gears were beginning to turn in the boy's head. He deliberately ignored her last statement, and prodded her mind for something else, something... ah, yes. "Have you been waiting for me?"
"Oh, yes... I've been waiting since our last meeting. Listen, Tom --"
"Here?" he cut her off.
"Yes, here. Tom..."
"Why? How is this place important to you?"
At first, the redhead furrowed her brow, as though deliberating whether the question might be rhetorical. "It's important to you," she answered in the end, matter-of-factly. "You told me so in the diary -- remember? -- when you described those murders to intimidate me. You told me about your life... your father..."
Tom had already dropped her gaze and slackened the fingers creeping towards his wand, for the girl was obviously harmless. Now he simply stared at that bare, impossibly pale foot of hers playing peek-a-boo behind a chair-leg.
And wondered.
Maybe a minute had passed before he spoke, without looking up: "You're a funny kid, Ginny." From a corner of his consciousness, he registered Ginny nestling her chin in the crook of her elbow to hide a blush. "Unfortunately, I have no use for you this time, thus no obligation to endure a second round of your dramatics." He did look up then, all steel and charcoal.
Ginny's eyes got the crux of it, coming to resemble deep brown wounds. "Tom, can I just speak to you for a second?" she pleaded in a small voice, as she watched him move towards the staircase.
"You are speaking to me," he replied, unflinching in his stride. As harmless as she was, she certainly knew how to make a nuisance of herself. "What you should instead be asking yourself is, would I rather you weren't? I should think the answer obvious."
"Tom, please --"
"Later."
"It's important," Ginny pressed, disentangling herself from the chair.
The boy paused on the first step and regarded her with faint amusement. Now that she had retired from the puddle of light, he could confirm that it had not accounted for her pallor; the girl still looked as if she had not seen the sun for weeks. An image flashed in Tom's mind of her likeness, with hollowed cheeks and skin as white as the paper she was writing on, waving off a tall, bespectacled redhead, because oh, she wasn't hungry, she had eaten earlier that day, and well, it was no wonder he hadn’t seen her in the Great Hall, you see Mandy had carried her some snacks upstairs, really, honestly, cross her heart and hope to die...
He hastily locked it back in its special drawer with the rest of his trinkets (a snake's sibilant melody; two girls' murders; the forbidden taste of his own blood; his father's dying scream).
"Tom, I've waited so long to tell you..."
He briefly toyed with the idea of stringing her along, making her beg, crawl, regret ever addressing him by that filthy monosyllabic name... but he already knew all he wanted to. Before proceeding to more important things, he gave the answer to her pleas -- there was only one answer:
"Later."
Some minutes later, she reprised her request, and Tom his response. Some hours later, she sidled up to him, only to be rebuffed by a hard look. Some days later, she clasped her hands and dropped to her knees before him, as if in prayer, but her god reproached her about "how low one could sink."
Some weeks later, she caught herself before as much as mouthing his name.
- - -
Time flies when you're having fun, and in Tom's mind, "world domination" was the very definition of "fun." Few people could have found pleasure in poring over books and scrolls for hours on end, but when in his armchair, in the room at the far end of the landing, he had no thought for anything else -- least of all the redhead sitting by the hearth. Days blended into each other, differentiated only by the angle of the light entering through the window, the varying patterns it revealed on the carpet, the change in smell from parchment to paper... the increasing proximity of Ginny's body to his chair.
Until the window allowed entrance to more than sunlight; it did to a leaf. A red one.
It was like a bucketful of cold water after a three-month slumber -- and he really must have been sleeping, Tom mused; or else why had he not taken notice of Ginny, who now sat close enough to lay her head upon his knee...?
Tom bolted up, ignoring the redhead's surprised little squeak, and stalked from the room.
He brought a girl home that same day. Just picked her right off the street, with a smooth smile and a promise of tea and sympathy. He had known what she needed the instant he had spotted her: leaning against the wall of a side-alley, with blood-shot eyes and peeling make-up and the thought of revenge fresh in her mind. She was a Muggle, a peasant and a lover -- all of humanity's filth realized in her oblique angles and boisterous voice -- but she would serve her purposes.
Moonlight washed over the pair as he led the girl uphill ("Where are we -- is that the Riddle House? Oh! Oh! Are you Riddle's son, Tom?") and it would have been romantic, if Tom hadn't been the sort to spend Valentine's Day hoodwinking enemies through enchanted diaries. Thankfully, his companion did not seem perturbed by anything -- neither his silence nor the garden's straggly, scratching flora -- in light of another girl's Paradise, with speckless floors and satin pillows.
Ever the gentleman, Tom unlocked the door and let her go first. He followed behind, putting an encouraging hand on the girl's back, but stopped just outside the doorframe when he felt her flinch. In hopes that this was only a brief sparkle of second-thinking, Tom granted her a few seconds' time to step forward. Her hand groped for his in the dark, but her feet remained static.
"What's the matter?" the boy inquired, not bothering to mask his annoyance. At her extended unresponsiveness, he made an impatient sound and pushed her aside.
In retrospect, he was surprised all she had done was flinch.
Ginny was standing -- not sitting, standing -- on the banister, and if the sun's rays had made her look unearthly, the moon's rays made her look unholy. She had been staring at him in bemusement, until they locked eyes and she realized that the party was over and she now had to clean its nasty remnants from the floor.
Tom met her midway up the stairs, just as she came floating down.
"Child," he rumbled, knowing it would smart more than any obscenity.
"I just used a balancing charm --"
"I know what you used."
"Well, how was I supposed to guess that you weren't home, or that you would bring..." She left that part unsaid.
"Please. You and I both know your whole world revolves around me, Ginny. Galileo would have to revamp his cosmological theory where you're concerned."
"Oh, that's just like you! That's Tom Riddle all over, playing smart by using big words and... and Greek names!"
"Italian, you daft girl. As to my intelligence, even addressing a vapid, droll mediocrity like you is an affront to it. I don't know why I even give you the time of the day --"
"What the bloody Hell is going on here?"
Tom turned to the source of the third voice and Obliviated her before she could muster another word. Her dilated pupils and unfocused gaze pleased him in the way Pavlov's dog must have pleased its master. Complete. And. Utter. Control. (Not like Ginny's head on his knee, on his knee...)
As soon as she was "fixed," Tom proceeded to drag her, stumbling and wobbling, up the stairs.
"Who's she?" the girl -- he had not even bothered to get her name -- asked when they passed Ginny by. By the looks of it, Ginny could ask the same of her.
"My little sister," he replied steadily. Before the redhead could protest, he added: "Let's go to my room, darling," and steered the other girl towards the bedroom.
"But Tom," she drew out the 'o' whiningly, "you said we would have tea before I..."
"We can have tea later," he interjected with a strained smile. She would be lucky if she even remembered what tea was, with the deluge of Memory Charms she would "later" endure.
"Oh, all right..."
"Tom... what am I to do...?" uttered Ginny, lost. He wondered how the peasant could have believed she was related to him; not only her looks, but her very essence contrasted with his in the most glaring way, so that Tom felt a twinge of guilt for what he was about to -- no.
"If you want to leave, leave; if you want to stay..." he sneered "...leave."
Tom strode off, but not without a backward glance first, to catch Ginny slipping into the next-door bathroom. Satisfied, he burrowed into the bedroom... then the sheets... then the girl.
It had been a long while -- so long, in fact, that it might as well have been his first time -- yet he was only remotely aware of the act, like he was of breathing or of walking. The little girl in the next room had all of his attention.
He hoped she was listening. He hoped she was counting the cries, the groans, the thrusts, the rise and fall, rise and fall...
...while he counted her sobs.
- - -
On the day when the first snowflake drifted into the room in the red leaves' stead, he was missing her. It came as a frustrating realization, because he had just concluded a meeting with one of his faithful, and there were simply too many preoccupations of equal gravity to squander time on the redhead. Still, her absence nibbled at the back of his mind, like the removal of a piece of furniture from a room one has spent his whole life in. He had only glimpsed her sporadically ever since the "incident," and never heard a word from her, although she normally never shut up. Perhaps his makeshift plan had been too efficient.
Tom proceeded to comb through the mansion with the pretext of searching for a roll of parchment. Half an hour later, he had found enough rolls of parchment to handwrite the Britannica, but not a sign of Ginny.
So he went outside, more ruffled than he would admit even to himself, and soon enough spotted her -- but not in the garden. In the churchyard. That mane of red hair was not exactly easy to miss, even from a distance.
He found the churchyard's gate gaping open when he arrived there. There was naught but a sprinkle of snow atop the ground so far, but combined with the tombstones and the sky's murky gray, it was enough to lend the landscape an unsettling aura. Even the small church looked foreboding, tucked behind a dark yew tree.
And yet, Ginny seemed more at home there than she ever had in the Riddle House.
Pinpricks of white bedecked her hair, twinkling momentarily, before melting to make way for others, as human lives must do. Her body was swathed only in her thin white robe, but she did not appear to sense the cold that was now slicing Tom's cheeks, debilitating his legs. On the contrary, energy overflowed from her like an erroneously mixed potion from a cauldron.
"Ginny, come back inside, you'll freeze out here --" Tom began, feeling like Mrs. Cole picking up a five-year old from the orphanage's courtyard, but stopped short when he realized what and where Ginny was playing.
Hopscotch on his father's grave.
Mute and immobile, Tom could only watch as the tiny ballerina in-training hopped on two feet -- one -- two -- one -- none -- then floated, floated with her crimson hair and sheer habit and unforgiving eyes, like a bloody mist over a crime scene. What really set him (the criminal) off, however, was not the tell-tale blood-stains Ginny left on his hands -- she could disembowel the whole cloud-maze to taint him red, for all he cared -- but the claim she pretended to have on his father (the spoils), the way she dared Tom to question the sacrilege, the hopsotch-turned-deathmarch, the rise and fall, rise and fall...
"Stop it," he hissed, seeing red, "stop it, he’s mine!"
Teeth bared like a boar-hound, he lunged for her, but all it took to evade him was a dip of the toes and an easy half-turn. Just when he wheeled around for another, less awkward charge, Ginny caught him off-guard:
"No, Tom," she said with an ice-shard in her eye, as if from a rub-in with the Snow Queen. "You are mine."
For many minutes after Ginny had padded off towards the mansion, Tom stared at his name -- Riddle -- engraved on each of the courtyard's tombstones, and thought about death.
- - -
He next saw her in the library, later that evening. He was leaning against the bookcase with a novel in his hands, staring incomprehensively at a word for so long that it started to float before his eyes, and when he looked up, Ginny was framed in the doorway. Upside-down. Feet barely touching the ceiling. Robes defying the law of gravity, along with their owner.
Here, Yeats would be entitled to say the center does not hold.
"Third time's the charm, right?" Ginny quipped.
Right. There were no open windows nearby this time, no natural explanation for the light gracing Ginny's form; she literally radiated it. No balancing charms strong enough to suspend her from the ceiling, at her age; she had floated up there. No veneer of ill-health in her pearly-white skin; she could only have acquired that particular shade if she had been a corpse.
"And here comes the denouement," Tom said softly. "You needn't have waited the better part of a year for it. I knew from the first moment."
"What?" She sounded truly shocked. "How?"
"Let's see... Could it have been that you had difficulty keeping your feet on the ground while walking? No, no... That you didn't eat a crumble all these months? Or, wait... How about the fact that you passed through walls?"
"Oh," was all Ginny said, blushing silver. She mustn't have diagnosed that kink in her performance. "I thought... even though you had watched me dying in the Chamber -- even held me..." a dreamy tone took over during that last tangent "...you might have believed there had been a mistake, that I had..." Her train of thought hit an obstacle, and she frowned in confusion. "But if you knew, then why... why did you..." She appeared to have trouble vocalizing her question.
"Why did I not let you tell me whatever it was you wanted to tell me?" The girl nodded. "You did not live long enough to find this out, little Ginny, but there are few things more gratifying than control. To know that I could incite your death at any moment, or prolong your painful existence for all eternity... let's just say that you had not been that dependent on me even in our 'pen-pal' days."
This was only one of many reasons, but he could not bring himself to admit the rest: that he did not wish to stay alone in a nest of overripe ghosts; that he enjoyed her company too much to let her go; that he was terrified of what a dead girl may have stalked her murderer for.
"So, Ginevra." His speech was clear and steady, even though his heart threatened to thump itself into an explosion. "What is your 'unfinished business'? What is so important as to account for the postponement of your death?" The redhead opened her mouth to reply, and suddenly, Tom realized he wasn't ready. "Before you tell me, get down from the ceiling. The situation is ridiculous enough as it is; there's no need to turn it into an all-out farce with your acrobatic tricks."
Incredibly, Ginny shook her head. "I like it here. It gives me a different perspective of the room." How mature, how old she sounded for her years... had he really done that to her? "Yes," she said with a smile, as though in response to his internal musings. "You'd know about that, wouldn't you, Tom? You taught it to me." She took a step toward him, which triggered the butterfly effect: his surroundings melted into a Dali painting, surreal and disorienting. "You taught me not to judge a book by its cover. I had to learn my lesson the hard way, but I learned." Two more steps. Tom pressed his back against the bookcase, feeling an absurd desire to melt into one of the books, as he had into his diary. "And this is what my 'unfinished business' is about. A change of perspective." Ginny now hovered so close that he could count the freckles on her nose, if he so wished, could estimate that her eyes were level with his. Strange, to see her this way, close-up and upside-down, with all her facial characteristics in the wrong places... like looking at his reflection in a deformable mirror. Only her freckles remained reversible, natural, and he very much wished to count them now -- three, seven, nine... "I love you." And she planted a kiss on his forehead.
At eight years of age, when he had still been at the orphanage, he had caught a serious case of pneumonia. Having exhausted common treatments and medicine, one of the staff members -- Martha -- had turned to fire-cupping. She had held each glass cup inverted over a candle's flame, heating the air, then had quickly placed it on his back, to create a vacuum. Martha had said it would hurt "a bit," but would also unclog his respiration and make him feel better. The method had had only one of the promised results -- in spades, to compensate for the rest: it had hurt more than a bit.
This kiss came like a glass cup on his forehead, but with a cleansing effect which fire-cupping had lacked. Behind the uncomfortable heat and the searing pain crackled something so pure and incorruptible that he had to close his eyes against the force of it. It swept over him, encircled him, trickled into him, until he thought Tom Marvolo Riddle would peel away like a snakeskin, to be replaced with something high and true and good.
When he opened his eyes, Ginny was gone. In her stead, a small book lay on the floor, right in front of him. The boy recognized the leather cover in an instant. He picked up his old diary and hesitantly flipped through its pages. They were no longer blank; Ginny's diary entries were strewn on every page... only Ginny's. It was as if his own had never existed.
I love you, she had said. I forgive you, she now spelled out.
This was his change of perspective.
For many minutes after Ginny had vanished, Tom stared at his name -- Riddle -- on the diary's first page, and thought about something stronger than death.
Author's Notes: Please don't peek at these if you haven't read the story, as they contain spoilers.
The title -- Gwenhwyfar -- is the Welsh form of the name "Guinevere," whom Ginny is named after ("Ginevra" is her full name). It means "White Ghost" or "White Fay."