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At times, Ginny thinks that she was the only one able not only to see, but to observe all that occurred in those happier times, when smiles, laughs, and studies were all that mattered; when the fear of Lord Voldemort was one of so many nocturnal nightmares that are destroyed upon waking and belong to the realm of fantasy and unreality.
(When the world was brightly colored, with a luminous path to the glorious future. To happiness.)
This isn’t to say that she was some great observer, who analyzed the lives of each person as soon as she met them; but she did think that she was the only one who had the time to see the essential fact, a fact which escaped even the wisest. Or, at the very least, she saw it all before the rest. She was able to look at Harry Potter beyond the name, the smiles, the brilliant dashing gaze that had her so in love. She was able to notice the darkest corners of his soul without even thoroughly knowing the boy, although for a long time he was the best friend of her brother, part of her family.
Probably, she was the only one who watched it consume him, without him even realizing.
It wasn’t always like that, of course. Harry Potter had been a dream, made real in her own mind, for as long as she could remember. The prince in red and gold who she hoped to be able to touch someday with her very own hands. The fairytale who brought glory and prosperity to the Magical World. How could it be possible that that boy, so full of good, could be destroyed? How a child who had every path of light open to him could decide to turn, to venture into the gray and become lost in the depths of black, of darkness and fire?
The answer came in pieces during her time at Hogwarts. At first, it was wrapped in a yellow-paged diary, in emotions, in her scattered soul, delivered on a silver platter to a young man who would appear in her dreams: elegant, handsome, with those black eyes that left her empty, trembling with the need to serve him, to confess up to the very last every secret hidden in her heart and her memory. It was he who began it all (although this she found out later, much later). Perhaps she herself had, when she decided to abandon the diary, to allow it to be picked up by other innocent hands.
(How was she to know that it would be Harry who would suffer that vile fate? She was terrified, and only wanted to rid herself of that book!)
Nowadays, everything is a blur, interspersed with incoherent memories, but she knows that there was a moment, from when she abandoned the diary until she learned that Harry had it, in which it all started. In that lapse of time, something changed, something that Tom gave to Harry which began to destroy the illusion and the beauty that the boy had in his eyes. Something wicked and dark and completely ferocious which began to tie itself between his shoulders, in the shadows of his glances, in the increasingly distant smiles she saw whenever he had to face the entire school, which spurned him for gifts that he never asked for.
She saw how Harry withdrew, how he silenced something that seemed to eat away at his insides; but she said nothing. She couldn’t. Tom Riddle took her, dragged her to the Chamber, to oblivion, and to a death that she escaped only by luck. When she thought Harry was out of her reach, he - covered in mud, fear, insecurity, and blood - saved her. And Ginny believed that everything would be alright, that her tiny, unfounded fears had no reason to exist.
Nevertheless she saw the spark of doubt, something strange and uncertain that left her with a sensation of dread in her stomach after she awoke completely from the marvelous horror that was Tom Riddle.
She didn’t expect that things would change, that they would twist in impossible angles and challenge a story which always seemed to have a happy ending.
(From the stories her mother told her to fall asleep, there was Harry, the good, the noble, the valiant, the Gryffindor who would vanquish the darkness, the pure and vicious evil reincarnate in He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named.
There never was any other version.)
In any case, she continued watching Harry, cultivating from afar a love that tangled up her insides and stupefied her head. She watched how his school years passed, how he met a godfather, lost him, and found himself involved in a Tournament in which he was too young to compete. She saw him venture onward with an expression that was far from being a child’s, that was pervaded with hurts she didn’t imagine, with fears she didn’t want to know and terrors that masked the unspeakable.
The spark of doubt, of that strangeness she saw in her first year, stayed alive in Harry’s green gaze; each time they locked eyes, she felt something shiver inside her, something that knew what was happening but was too far away to be reached with her fingers and understood.
Voldemort became the only thing that was talked about in her family; between the walls of all the homes of the Order of the Phoenix whispers ran that Harry was in danger and that he had to be protected in the shelter of ignorance. When the temperament, hurt, and agony of matters she did not comprehend caught up with Harry and became a permanent weight on his body, only then did she understand what followed.
(But she didn’t want to understand. She refused to think and finish the “what if” in her mind.)
Everything changed when, while cleaning the ancestral home of the Blacks, Harry was able to open a locket. He claimed it as part of his property with the knowledge of one who has something invaluable in their hands.
No one said anything, really. No one wanted to believe that the trinket in his hand was wicked, dark and cruel; that Harry would in time stop being himself. She saw it, doubted, wanted to speak, but she didn’t do as she should have, since conversation between the two was simply an acceptance of the powers of the elder; it was necessary for him to learn to become familiar with the darker parts of his heart.
(What did it matter that he shared features with Tom Riddle, that that shine of doubt still remained in his eyes? Who would have cared about that strange idea, about the fact that she stood on the brink of denouncing that dangerous thing, but opted for silence?)
Harry was still a symbol of hope, of happiness, of light, of the perfect anguish which her love was leaving inside her, blinding her to the very events that were opening her eyes. It was hardly important that from that day on he kept a locket with an “S” around his neck, or that his bright green glances each day turned darker, or that his mannerisms became more taciturn and his sudden actions awoke suspicions and recriminations, or…
None of it mattered. Harry kept being Harry. She wanted to go on believing that.
Except everything was falling apart so fast. Another year passed and Ginny saw how far Harry was from being the prince in gold and emerald who she had dreamed of as a girl. Now he was an inky and slightly sinister shadow who shut himself away in his studies. He learned from books that, upon being opened, showed nothing more than blank pages which only he was capable of reading. Why would he want to hide his knowledge? Was he studying something prohibited? Something malicious? She muffled her doubts and tried to ignore her thoughts in order to concentrate solely on her hopes.
These doubts overflowed when, in a moment when she thought was falling into the most horrific madness, Ginny began to see the figure and shadow of Tom Riddle at Harry’s side. He was subtle, soft at the edges and painfully familiar yet completely unknown all at once. An older Tom Riddle, slightly aged each time she looked at Harry, stood there, his head upon the boy’s shoulder, whispering into his ear, with his arms around his waist in a possessive gesture that she did not understand until it was too late.
She didn’t think he was real. And she never asked him about it, although her expression surely spoke for her; as such, Harry began to avoid her.
As suddenly as she had seen that shadow, it vanished, and for a time she attributed her vision to a growing fear that Harry seemed to look each day more and more like Tom Riddle.
She never asked herself if there was some connection that gave Harry the title of “Chosen One;” those matters far exceeded what was natural and she never had the interest. But there existed, there was something that shimmered in Harry’s gaze whenever Tom was mentioned. Fear? Rage? Revenge? Horror? Admiration? She could never identify it; it was a spark that lit in the back of his eyes, an emotion that no one else watched envelop him when the subject of You Know Who was in the air.
She always wanted to convince herself it was nothing. That it was a childish obsession Harry didn’t even know he had. He Who Must Not Be Named had killed his parents, after all. It was normal that he would want to know everything about the man, that he would become obsessed with finding out all there was to know about him. The only thing Harry wanted was to kill him to bring peace. To return to being the fairytale prince. The Savior.
(The human being is good at creating its own falsehoods, at blinding itself to possibilities that are in plain sight).
Ginny and everyone else always believed that Harry had a penchant for obsessions and that this was normal behavior. She should have known better. She should have been able to stop convincing herself and notice what was right in front of her adoring eyes. Each day, Harry withdrew. The weight on his shoulders increased, his face became clouded with strange desires from which she also suffered, and she didn’t want to realize that she was not the only one who saw it.
But in those years she always believed the best. Even when the evidence showed otherwise. Even when, instead of seeing the shadow of Tom Riddle behind the boy, she surprised them in an abandoned chamber where a sufficiently real Tom was kissing Harry with hunger and need.
(Although she never was very sure of the last one. She didn’t remember it well. She only knew what had existed in that moment, but was not sure if it belonged to reality or to her imagination).
And she kept on believing it was nothing. That the darkness which was now ever-present behind Harry was the fault of his obsession. Even when Dumbledore died, when the school became a war zone for people who were never prepared and heroes who were not there to pull them from the disaster. Even with all this changing the world, Ginny thought, along with everyone else, that Harry would continue being as he had in earlier years: he would save the day and all their lives with bravery drawn from the deepest parts of himself.
But it didn’t happen and without anybody truly understanding why, without anybody seeing what was happening, the world folded completely. Magical objects that were beyond their comprehension were present in the castle and the only thing anyone knew was that Harry had to destroy them, to crush them into ashes to bring an end to the long fight, to destroy Voldemort and banish the world of nightmares.
Except that Harry didn’t do it.
And no one realized, except her.
It wasn’t difficult, really; magic was flowing from wands, the world was falling to pieces along with Hogwarts. Ginny should have seen before, should have understood Harry’s dark expression, observed the way in which that boy became a man who was, at the same time, completely different. His smile was gone; his magic vibrated in the gloom, in bitter memories, in pain and hate that were unknown, but held a singular, strange attraction. Fatal.
(It was like watching a new version of Tom Riddle, but with green eyes).
She noticed when Ron grabbed something from the boy’s neck and tried to take it off. It was the locket that for years had hung around his throat. But nothing happened; Harry laughed, dark, cruel and ringing, and let the object separate from his skin.
And the answers unfolded before her eyes and those of everyone else.
In the midst of the chaos, at Harry’s side, the Tom Riddle that she had seen months ago and had considered an illusion appeared smiling, as alive and perfect as the green-eyed boy, who he took by the hand and kissed on the knuckles with reverence. With feeling, a feeling that Harry returned with a smile that should never have been directed towards Tom, a smile that should have been forbidden by fate itself.
And the world exploded, shattered itself and changed completely.
(The darkness won.
Voldemort was not overthrown. Harry had helped him in his uprising all that time).
All was lost. In what moment did things warp so quickly? When did the bright path disappear, to be replaced by utter darkness? In what second did Harry Potter, the hero, the savior, drown in the sinister brilliance of Tom Riddle? Of Voldemort? Not even Ginny, who was able to watch it all in silence, knew the answer.
And she doubts that she will ever want to find out. What would it matter, as the world is already sunken into shadows?