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( with eyes that are ever-watching )
Something dark lived inside Ginny, and she knew its name: Harm, wrapped in a Riddle. A child had opened that diary and poured her soul inside; a fractured evil had slithered in its place. When Harry pulled her out of the shadows, the shadows had persisted, raking their claws across her mind and trying to drag her back like some helpless ragdoll—some puppet on a string.
She had been betrayed. She had been tainted with blood-stained hands when all she could remember was the oppressive crush of blackness. No chickens squawked in her thoughts, but her mind was smeared with blood on the stone, with a snake in the walls. Guilt had shaded her eyes when she looked at her classmates, no matter how far Harry’s word could go to absolve her. The association was still there—trapped in her skull.
The persistent gloom had followed her home that summer. Her mum’s fussing, her dad’s chatter, her brothers’ merry-making slid off like rain against a window. She smiled because they wanted her to be okay; she smiled because they needed her to be okay; she smiled with the hope that, someday, she could be okay.
Today was not that day.
The Burrow creaked in the night, its walls alive with soft scritches and whistling winds as the shadows slithered along the surface. Ginny’s heart was a caged bird, beating against her chest and pecking at her stomach. When she was alone in her room, the echo lingered; wrapped around her were memories of a quill scratching over the pages of Tom Riddle’s diary and the deceptive comfort of the words written back.
Ginny wrote on different parchment now, lit by the glow of her wand tip, just inches away. With one of her father’s Muggle pens in hand, she wrote letter after unsent letter to Harry. Do you hear his voice in your sleep? she scrawled. Does it stop?
For a moment, it did stop. As she penned her thoughts to Harry, the voice started to fade—but like the haunt of a spectre, she thought for a moment that the parchment had lifted its own words beneath hers, a flick of double-vision that made her heart seize. The words were no longer there when she blinked away the image, but the feeling remained. Stiffly, she crumpled the parchment and threw it in the bin.
Nothing could harm her in the Burrow, but not every moment felt safe.
( find your light and hold it tight )
In the wind and the sky, Ginny found life again. In the dark of the night, she found her light, rising on a stolen—a borrowed—broom that lifted her towards the stars. Under the blanket of night, she swept and dove, hurtled rocks between trees as her mind erected goalposts behind her eyes. She pushed until her spindly arms were toned with effort, and the stones that once fell pitifully from her hand were rocketing with precision.
Memories—or at times, the lack of memories—possessed a certain power: the power to evoke crippling fear, suffocating guilt, lingering uncertainty. She was little, some would say, just a little girl at the mercy of a nightmare. Such things could grip her if they could catch her, but she would not let them catch her. The shadows in Ginny’s mind could not hold her as she soared forth on her brother’s broom—not when the wind was roaring in her ears. For years to come, the wind would roar and roar around her until the echo started to falter.
Within Ginny Weasley, confidence bloomed like a flower. She took to the skies for her House, chasing points and throwing Quaffles; and off the pitch, what was once a small circle of friends began to grow. As the years passed, she no longer saw the wicked associations of that wretched diary in the eyes of her classmates. Chaos was no stranger to their years at Hogwarts, and her time in the Chamber was mostly forgotten, but she could still feel the lingering nightmare prickle at the back of her mind each time Harry faced Lord Voldemort—over and over again, year after year.
Do you hear his voice in your sleep? she wondered. Does it stop?
The tip of Ginny’s wand burned with unbridled ferocity, the day Voldemort descended upon Hogwarts. Outside those walls, hidden away in the natural fortress of the Forbidden Forest, Voldemort was calling for Harry’s life as if Harry was some sacrificial lamb for the slaughter. Within the walls of the school and stretched across the grounds, lights flashed purple and white and green, punctuated with cries that could rattle a person’s bones.
Inside Ginny’s chest, a wildfire blazed against the darkness, warm in its brilliance as spells flew. Maybe it was, in truth, a sort of darkness that felt delight each time a spell connected with the masked monsters overrunning their school, but with each hex that landed, she thought fiercely: This is for Colin—for Tonks—for Lupin—for Harry—for Fred. Each hex was for herself and for every broken soul that had fallen, every broken soul that had seen someone fall.
The monsters could fall, too.
The monsters would fall, too.
Ginny had not been in the forest when Harry was killed in some grand stance to save them all, snuffed out like a candle. She had not seen how he managed to shake off death when death had taken so many that day, but what she did see was a green flash rebounding off of Harry and crumpling Voldemort like a ragdoll—like a puppet with his strings cut from above.
With her eyes, she saw alabaster skin and a lifeless scarlet gaze, shrouded in robes as dark as the shadows he had brought. With her memory, she saw a boy—a boy her own age, she realised then—with brown hair and a prefect badge, trying to take her life as his own.
That boy was dead, now. Tom Riddle was dead.