Chapter Text
Ginny Weasley didn’t want to write in the diary at first. She really didn’t. Her first day at Hogwarts had just been so awful, all of the girls in the dormitory seeing right through her attempts to hide her feelings for Harry Potter.
Making fun of her rusty cauldron and hand-me-down school books. Laughing at her, mocking her, leaving her in tears. They should have understood! It was Harry bloody Potter, the saviour of all wizardkind, with his humble slouch instead of perfect posture, and the noble way that he scrunched up his nose when he did his Potions homework.
Ginny really didn’t mean to do it, really! It wasn’t her fault that one day, when she was sobbing at how utterly unfair her life was, she’d dropped her rusty cauldron on the floor and all of her books had tumbled to the ground. In her scramble to return them to their rightful places, she’d discovered the diary.
She didn’t fully comprehend it at first, but as she was about to shove it back into her cauldron, two things hit her at once.
The first was that the book was new and clean, all sleek, and black, and shiny. She caught herself wondering, longing for a second. She was the youngest after all, and the only girl, and all of her siblings always referred to her as the favourite. Could her parents really have gotten her something… no.
Ginny ran her fingers over the fancy lettering that looked suspiciously golden, and she knew. Ginny Weasley may have had a hopeless crush on a hero and only hand-me-down books, but she wasn’t daft.
This book didn’t belong to her. Someone rich had slipped it into her cauldron, probably, when she wasn’t looking, but who?
Her mind immediately went to Alsephina Hatt, a rich, snobby Gryffindor girl who had nothing but snide remarks about Ginny, and her loyal group of goons, but… the diary had a name on it. T. M. Riddle.
Riddle, Riddle. Ginny closed her eyes and ran the surname Riddle through all of the rich pureblood family line names she could remember.
Just because she was a Weasley, part of the family that people like the Malfoys and the Parkinsons used as the very epitome of everything their children should aspire not to be, didn’t mean that she didn’t have basic knowledge of influential politicians and names of famous death eaters that she should watch out for. Nothing.
She was really only curious, at first. Riddle wasn’t a common pureblood surname, so how did this T. M. Riddle come into possession of money like this? Gold lettering, what looked to be wards for preservation… this must have cost Galleons.
If T. M. Riddle was a muggleborn or a halfblood, then how the bloody hell did he get so rich? Ginny trusted the diary about as far as she could throw it, (and Ginny was very skinny, a fact that her mother was constantly baffled and frustrated by, and not very strong, so she couldn’t throw it more then maybe four inches away.)
She really wasn’t going to write in it.
Really.
It was just… she shouldn’t be made fun of for something that should’ve been so common. For a crush on a bloody hero.
At the very least, her brothers should have been there on the hard days, when Snape took 20 points from Gryffindor just because she couldn’t answer a question because she was daydreaming of the exquisite Harry Potter (which might have been her fault but still, extreme,) and they should have been there when stupid, stupid rich-arse Alsephina and her thugs tore her apart for it.
Instead, after Fred snorted about wishing she had been in Slytherin so he didn’t have to deal with a little sister that lost them the house cup because she was busy mooning after Harry Potter, and she tore it out of her cauldron and started scribbling her thoughts down furiously, before George made a comment about aw, pouring your feelings into a diary, how kiddish of you, Ginny, and hot tears threatened to spill from her eyes, she slammed the diary shut, and stormed out of the room.
(Unbeknownst to her, Gred and Forge had winced as soon as they saw her tears. “Too far?” “Yeah.” “Shit.”)
She ran past Alsephina and her merry band of clowns. She had no idea where she was going, she just had to get out.
She ended up running to the second floor girls’ bathroom, giving Myrtle the finger when she tried to make a snide remark about Ginny’s appearance, and was about to lock herself into a bathroom stall and cry for a few hours when she ran into a spacey-looking Ravenclaw girl.
“Hello,” she said, dizzily, “I’m looking for nargles. Have you seen any?”
Ginny blinked at her in astonishment. “Uh, no?”
“Really?” The girl tilted her head, her blonde hair swishing in a mildly mesmerising way. Her eyes seemed to both darken and fill with light at the same time. “I wouldn’t have guessed. You’re surrounded by them right now.”
“I-” Ginny didn’t like this. This girl stared right at her, but it seemed like she was staring through her.
“Luna Lovegood,” the girl said, sticking out her hand as if she expected Ginny to shake it. She then turned her gaze onto the diary, eyes glinting with fascination. “What’s that?”
“Oh, um,” Ginny shuffled awkwardly, “Just… some diary I guess. I don’t have a bleeding clue whose it is, because it’s certainly not mine, and I can’t figure it out. I don’t really need it, I guess. You can have it if you want.”
“It’s green.”
“What?”
“Avada Kedavra green. Nargles and bad vibes all around.”
“Uhmm…” Looking at the scary light in Luna’s eyes, Ginny began to understand the supposed muggle idea of ‘mad geniuses.’
“It’s fascinating.” Luna frantically dug in a pocket in her robes. “How much?”
“Erm, for free, I suppose? It’s of no use to me, anyhow.”
“Thankyouthankyouthankyouthankyou thankyou!” Luna bounced up and down with excitement. “I won’t forget this.”
“You’re welcome?” Ginny half-said, half-asked, not entirely sure how this helped the blonde girl at all. “Here’s your diary then.”
Luna Lovegood eyed the diary now in her hands hungrily. “Thank you,” she repeated. Her silver eyes glowed ominously. “You won’t regret it.”
The sixteen-year-old in the diary was oh so very bored. He really didn’t know what he was thinking all those (years? months? decades, perhaps?) ago when he had decided to kill some muggleborn who was always such a bitch to him about not having parents, dooming half of his soul to float aimlessly around the bleak and desolate realm of the diary.
The diary realm would get more interesting, of course, when someone began to write in it.
At first, the teenager had plotted for an enemy to somehow catch hold of the diary, wanting to gain their trust and then weaponize their secrets against them, but now, he would take anyone, really. Even boring old Abraxas would do. Just someone, anyone, to make things more interesting.
How many Horcruxes had he been planning to make again? Around seven. When you made a Horcrux, it split exactly one half of whatever soul you had before you made the specific Horcrux, so, if he did the maths right, that would be around… 1/128th of his soul. 1/128th of his smarts and his cunning.
Damn, he really didn’t think that through. It was a shit move, to be honest.
At the very least, the entity thought, closing his eyes mournfully, he probably should have waited to split the biggest part of his soul until he had given himself a name. Then he would have known, at least, the sort of badass name that he was walking around with. Even if he lost, a badass martyr would be how he was remembered by dark wizarding families.
If the 1/2 of the Dark Lord’s soul that now floated around the vast grey diary realm had any input on what his name should’ve been, it should have been something cool and powerful that also matched the aesthetic of the Dark Mark, (he was fourteen and going through a very angsty period of his life when he created the mark, okay, so his uncreativeness could be excused,) like Thanatos.
Oh, well. He was sure that his older self had realised far before him that splitting his soul into clean halves so many times was really fucking stupid.
He was probably ruling over the Wixen World, all benevolent and cool right now. Maybe he had even taken dangerous love potions out of the Hogwarts curriculum like he had always wanted to.
(Tom swore he didn’t have a clue why 15-16 year olds would need to know how to brew Amortentia, or as he liked to refer to it, Consent-be-gone Potion.)
Anyways, the entity was bored. Very bored. And then he saw it. A flash of angry red light, and then a voice thundering through the realm, the words it spoke appearing in electric red strokes.
Dear diary, if that’s what you are, it’s just so unfair! They should understand! Why don’t they understand!
Tom eagerly awaited the next few words, but there was a very long pause. Damn it. Back to floating and agonising boredom, he supposed. Then a few minutes later, a much calmer, more airy, different voice echoed softly around the realm, in a lovely alice blue, the words it spoke making Tom’s blood run cold.
Dear Tommy…