Chapter Text
When Ginny Weasley is eleven, she dies. She pours her soul into a book, and it overflows onto a damp stone floor until her body is empty. She’s rescued by the bravest boy in the world, and it would be a fairytale except that they’re just terrified children and bravery is mostly stupidity in retrospect and when her soul pours back in it comes with a bit extra tangled in it.
When Ginny is twelve, no one she knows has died yet. There are ghosts in the photos back home - Nana and Pops, Uncle Gideon and Uncle Fabian - but Ginny was born barely two months before the war ended. She’s a child of peace, and she doesn’t know anyone else who’s died.
They tell her she doesn’t understand. That she didn’t die in that Chamber, that it was a near thing but she made it out okay. Ginny knows better. She knows what it is to see the dingy, trash-filled courtyard behind the Leaky, only it’s not dingy because it’s made in shades of white and there’s no trash, to stand there staring at the familiar bricks waiting for someone to come get her and have no one show up. But they say it didn’t happen, and that she’s safe now, and just a sip of Calming Draught dear, there’s a good girl. Ginny doesn’t know anyone who’s died, but she knows a lot of other things when she’s twelve. She learns something important, too. She learns how not to talk about what she knows, how to always be okay.
(She is okay. She writes everything in a voice that isn’t hers and she is okay.)
When Ginny is thirteen she knows someone who died. He wasn’t a loved one, wasn’t a friend. Just friendly smiles in the halls and that one time he told a first year lost on the second floor and lost in her own mind how to find her way to Charms. But he’s dead in the grass, and Ginny’s first thought is to wonder if that’s what she looked like. Her second is to wonder what he sees in the white space. He stays dead, though, so she can’t ask.
(It will be another three years before she meets someone else who came back.)
When Ginny is fourteen she is made of hate. It’s not what children are supposed to be made of, but it’s what fills in the gaps where the not-okay used to be. She's made of laughter and sharp jokes and fast flight, too, but it’s hate that caulks it all together. There is a man who took her mind and her body and her peace from her, who killed the girl she was supposed to be and made her mother look at her like she’s not quite sure what she raised. And that man is still alive. He shouldn’t be. Not when that girl is dead.
The brave, stupid boy she used to think was her prince presses purpose into her hands, shaped like jinxes and curses, and this might be the saving she really needed. Her hate can blast apart the world with a single confringo, and the boy leads her to people she can aim it at, rooms she can tear down around her and feel righteous instead of broken.
When Ginny is fifteen, the world falls apart, and for the first time in five years things feel okay.
(This is what he did to her. She was supposed to be a child of peace. Now she only blooms in wartime.)
She’s terrified, but everyone is terrified. Walking down the halls that buzz with tension, sitting at breakfast where people sob over bad news from home, Ginny feels angry, and frightened, and vicious, but she also feels normal. She’s not a victim or a member of some underground resistance or a girl whose father nearly died in the Ministry for a reason she isn't allowed to know. Or, she is, but that’s not so unusual these days. She can play Quidditch and make silly faces at Slughorn’s stupid parties and date a sweet, carefree boy who thinks she’s just fun and feisty, at least until he tries one too many times to handle her like she’s breakable. Ginny isn’t breakable. She’s broken. There’s a difference.
The brave boy stops being the boy that saved her and starts being Harry. While the rest of the world starts seeing the Chosen One, Ginny spends time with Harry, moody and awkward and funny and already years into a war everyone else is just starting to play at. And still so good, somehow, even when he’s angry and lost and covered in Draco Malfoy's blood. When they’re racing around the Quidditch stadium, the world made of wind and laugher, she thinks maybe they can be broken and happy. Watching him sprint after Snape with Unforgivables on his tongue, she thinks maybe she can still count as good.
And then she’s sixteen, and there’s not much time for philosophizing.
She knows it will be bad, getting on the old, familiar train on September 1st. She is a Gryffindor, a Weasley, the girl who snogged Undesirable Number One in front of half the school, heading into a school run by Death Eaters. She knows it will be bad.
It’s worse.
It’s empty seats on the train and blood magic in the curriculum and walking past bloody friends in the halls so you’re not late for class. It’s absolute silence in the Great Hall, and the wide-eyed, betrayed terror in the eyes of eleven year olds who spent their whole lives dreaming of Hogwarts. It’s late nights sneaking out for DA missions and burns as she tries to brew a proper Invigoration Draught in their dorm bathroom so no one gets caught yawning the next day. It’s learning the convulsing, aching, burning pain of the cruciatus, and the weight of responsibility when they start smuggling targeted students into the Room of Requirement. And the only silver lining is that she’s fighting against Voldemort every day, so she doesn’t feel as guilty when Tom’s in her head every night. She is her actions, not her thoughts. Not her dreams. She has to believe that.
It’s not until mid morning on May second that she looks around at the smoldering Hogwarts courtyard and realizes she’d spent six years certain she wouldn’t leave the castle alive.
-
This isn’t what winning is supposed to feel like.
And Ginny knows exactly what it’s supposed to feel like. Some girls plan their weddings. Ginny planned the day Voldemort would finally be put down like the mad dog he was. It was going to feel like every House Cup she’d cheered for and every Quidditch game she’d won and every time she’d managed to pin something on Fred and George, all rolled into one. It was going to be loud cheering and warm hugs and not even remembering what fear feels like.
Winning, it turns out, is a lot like travel. Wherever you go, whatever you vanquish, you’re still you. In Egypt you’re still a scared little girl with ink and chicken blood on your fingers, and in victory you’re still a slightly older girl who knows the monster had a first name.
There are no hugs. Her dad’s guiding her mom around with gentle hands so she doesn’t crumple or simply float off in her grief-stricken haze, and Percy’s holding George who’s holding Fred and it’s not a hug if you can’t hug back, and Bill’s off looking for his wife (and Bill is married, in everything that happened this year she hadn’t had a chance to get used to that), and Charlie’s leaving as fast as he can like always, and Ron doesn’t do hugs with people who aren’t Hermione, so there are no hugs. Just standing in the Hogwarts courtyard, cold and alone.
No, not cold. It’s May. It’s spring, midmorning and almost balmy. There’s no chill in the air, no reason to be shivering. We’ve won.
Not alone either. Or, at least, alone together. Harry’s still there, where the body fell. Would’ve fallen, if there’d been a body. Everyone’s pretending it’s not happening, carefully looking away, but he hasn’t moved since Tom died.
She’s shaking like it’s fucking February and he’s finally on his knees now that there’s no Voldemort to demand it and maybe she should’ve spent all that time dreaming up a wedding because even if that sucks at least she’ll get to wear a nice dress.
-
There’s something you’re supposed to do when you leave a grave, something that keeps it from following you home. But this isn’t a graveyard. It’s a school. There should be a difference.
-
After, there is nowhere to be. There was so much before – classes and detentions and DA meetings and times strictly set aside to lock the door of the broom cupboard on the seventh floor and take great, heaving sobs before spelling away the tear tracks. Now, nowhere.
They end up at Grimmauld Place, because there is no way in hell she’s going back to the Burrow right now (the pumpkin juice Fred knocked over when he apparated in to warn them to run must still be pooled there, evaporated into a sticky memory) and it’s the only other place either of them have any sort of claim.
There’s a rotting Death Eater in the parlor.
Someone, months ago, must’ve been pissed the house wasn’t offering up more of the Order’s secrets. The body’s too messy for Tom. Honestly, it looks like the Carrow’s handywork, but maybe that’s just standard Death Eater stress relief procedure. The air is thick and stale and really doesn’t taste all that different from the last time the Order was there. It should, but it doesn’t.
Harry doesn’t even stop, just walks right on up the stairs. Thirty-four groaning steps in the silence, and a door opening. It doesn’t close. There must be other sound, because they weren’t quiet coming in and the portrait curtains are open and no one’s told Walburga that the blood traitors won, but Ginny can’t hear anything because there’s a body on the carpet and she can’t even tell who the fuck it was and that’s what Sophia Spinnet is going to look like in a couple months.
But she doesn't have to think about it. Any of it. It can all go away.
Magic is beautiful, really. You think, and twitch, and something happens. A word, and the body is gone. And the rug. And the armchair behind it. And the piano, because what the actual fuck, and Walburga’s portrait where the mouth is moving like a silent movie, and the whole wall when that doesn’t work, and then it’s easier to just keep going until the bottom two floors are gutted of every single thing, just ward-skin and wall-bone left, and there’s a bed she can’t vanish because she doesn’t have any magic left and also Harry’s in it.
“Ron?” he mumbles sleepily when she dips the mattress. “Hermione? Time for my watch?”
No , is what she should say. There’re no more watches, the war is over. We’re safe.
In the silent, empty house, she’s never felt less safe. There’s something there in the dark, something that’s not the memory of the dead or a house elf skulking around. Something she can feel watching as she strips off blood-stiff robes and slips between the sheets, something that makes her dream of eyes – eyes across battlefields and eyes under heavy hoods and glowing eyes that should kill her with a glance but don’t because of the words her tongue twists into and eyes growing on that tongue and down her throat so they can see inside her, so they can own what they find, until she’s grateful when Harry wakes her up screaming.
-
“I like what you’ve done with the place,” Harry says the next morning, smiling over the rim of his coffee mug like there aren’t red scratches across his forehead from where he was clawing at it in the night.
Yesterday’s shirt has long sleeves. He can’t see the matching red lines on her forearms. She won’t try to hold him down again.
“There’s more where that came from,” is all Ginny’s caffeine-deprived brain can come up with, and so that’s the next two days. Steadily vanishing everything in sight, all the heavy, dark wood furniture and priceless heirlooms and maybe the air that doesn’t even notice a rotting body too, until they’re living like squatters with only a half-stocked kitchen and a bed.
“It’s like the Department of Mysteries,” Harry says, staring down a blank hallway, and for a moment she’s worried he’ll make them move some furniture back in. But he looks steady, and his hand is warm against her skin.
The hallways are like the sewers under Hogwarts, the small, still rooms like Riddle Manor, Harry says, the echoing ballroom the Great Hall empty of house tables and ready for another round of screaming children to face their punishment. Like all the places they never really left.
It’s better.
“We should probably get some stuff. Clothes, at least.” She doesn’t want to say it, doesn’t want anything cluttering up their new hollowness. But after three days scourgify isn’t enough to keep her school robes from sticking to her skin, and Harry had already smelled bad stepping into the Room of Requirement what feels like a lifetime ago.
Harry stares at her a moment, gaze slowly thawing from confused to surprised. “I don’t have any.”
“What?”
“I don’t have any clothes. I mean, there might be a few shirts in Hermione’s bag, but I have no idea what shape they're in.”
Which, well, makes sense when you think about it. He’s been a wanted fugitive for most of the last year.
She’s living in an abandoned house with her dropout boyfriend who doesn’t even own a second pair of pants. The thought sends Ginny into a cackling laugh that might classify as hysterics and leaves her puddled on the floor with Harry beside her, gasping too. And then she hauls them up, finally floos them to the Burrow where the pumpkin juice has been mopped up, and shoves two bags full of clothes that used to be her favorite for her and a bag of brother hand-me-downs for Harry.
And that is how Ginny, the baby of the Weasley family, moves out at the age of sixteen. She doesn’t think ‘moved in with her boyfriend,’ given ‘moved in’ is a strong term for their existence at Grimmauld. But she’s certainly moved out, clearing her old room for George, who’s finally made it off the couch but still won’t go into Fred’s room.
Her mother would be having a heart attack if she wasn’t busy planning a funeral.
-
She feels clean.
It’s not just the freshly laundered button down she’s wearing as a dress, though that probably has a lot to do with it. It’s that all the windows are open, and Harry is kissing her for the first time since his seventeenth birthday.
Or, well, more accurately, she kissed him. But she can feel his smile against her lips as she pulls him closer, and his body feels different - she didn’t think he could get bonier - but somehow he still tastes the same, like sunshine and sour cherries, and for a moment it feels like they’re okay.
There’s laughter. She thinks it’s Harry, at first, but his lips are on hers and anyway it’s not his quiet, breathy chuckle. It’s rich but somehow sharp, with hard edges.
“Did you hear…” she asks, pulling back but not away.
“What?”
“Nothing. I thought I heard something. Someone…”
“No, I didn’t.”
“Yeah, no, me either.”
They’re both terrible at lying.
-
Some days, they just drift through the house, staring at rooms where important things happened that don’t matter anymore and at rooms where stupid things happened that they’ll never forget. Days like that usually end with them both sitting at the long, scarred kitchen table in silence, remembering meals with people they’ll never see again.
Some days, though, they’re Harry and Ginny, and empty houses are good for lots of things. Sock skating and screening movies on blank walls with her dad’s (stolen) muggle projector and, if you’re good enough to turn the sharp corners, broom racing that more often than not ends in a tangled pile of limbs and a good snog.
And some days, unfortunately, other people show up.
“What the hell?” Ron says, the first time he walks into the new-and-removed Grimmauld Place, before Hermione can shut him up.
“It’s certainly…different,” Hermione offers, looking for all the world like she hasn’t noticed she’s standing on Ron’s foot. “Did you give them a proper burial?” she asks, nodding to the wall that used to hold the house elf heads.
“Of course,” Ginny lies, because she’s not up for a lecture on speciesism right now, and they got the same burial as the human in the next room. Hermione gives her a tight little smile of gratitude that might make Ginny feel guilty if she was up for feeling much of anything these days.
“Where’s Kreacher?” Ron asks. “I’m surprised he let you touch anything.”
“Oh, Kreacher’s not here,” Ginny says, waving them towards the kitchen that still has a couple benches.
“He’s working for the Malfoys now. I did owe Draco a house elf,” Harry says, shoving Ron forward a little, and for a moment his eyes find Ginny’s and she knows they’re both thinking about Narcissa Malfoy’s face when Kreacher called her a weak-willed backstabber the moment the contract was signed and for a second things are good.
“I won’t be surprised if they evacuate the Manor in a month,” she says, and Harry almost laughs. The elf had done right by them in the end, but that doesn’t mean he isn’t mad as bats.
But talk of Kreacher leads to talk of Dobby, which leads to talk of the war, which they all insist on talking about in the past tense. Ron and Hermione talk about finding her parents, and when he comes Neville talks about Hogwarts cleanup and taming the greenhouse that went wild while his grandma was on the run, and Percy drops by to drone on about Ministry reorganization, and even Luna wants to talk about the rebound in the moon frog population. They all want to talk about regrowing, about the future and what will fill it. None of them seem to understand that there’s nothing left.
Harry gets it. He feels the emptiness too, the sudden cliff everyone else is stepping over and insisting it’s solid ground. He tries his best, tries with everyone, even manages an hour or two of serious nods or small smiles. But eventually he disappears off into their empty labyrinth.
“How is he?” they all ask, the moment they have her alone. “How is he holding up?”
No one asks him directly. And no one ever asks how are you? There’s no reason to. She’s the same as the rest of them, tattered and mourning but on the mend. There’s nothing complicated about her grief. Not like Harry.
(“Well, that was a bit stupid of you, seeing as you don’t know anyone but me who’s been possessed by You-Know-Who.”
“I forgot.”
“Lucky you.”)
Nothing complicated at all.
Poor Ginevra, a voice that isn’t there whispers, pooling through her body like molasses, sweet and slow.
She likes it better when it’s just the two of them.
-
Except that it’s not just the two of them.
-
They don’t notice what it is, at first. Who it is. Or maybe they do, and they’re both just too comfortable with the idea of being mad to consider he might be real. She’s Weirdo Weasley and he’s the Boy Who Lied, and it’s easy to ignore the way the air goes suddenly cold in spots or how the shadows like to pretend to be a man.
Ginny is good at believing, and she believes, sincerely and earnestly, that there’s a boggart in this house with no cupboards or trunks or writing desks to hide in, and that she fell off her broom because she’s not a good enough flier to make that turn and not because she was trying to swerve around the man who was suddenly standing at the top of the stairs. And Harry doesn’t say anything when their eyes track the same spot of nothing or when the lights go out all of a sudden and if no one says anything then nothing is happening.
And it’s working. It is. Until it’s not.
They’re in the kitchen, and it’s a rattling day where the air feels crowded with Order members and missions long since executed. Ginny is dicing her orange into smaller and smaller cubes and Harry is trying to fit his Quidditch magazine in front of him without shifting his cereal bowl further to the left.
“Can you not?” Harry snaps at the air that is definitely empty and definitely not doing a remarkable impression of a young man perching on their kitchen table right next to his cereal bowl.
“You’re the ones who vanished all the furniture,” the shade-that-is-certainly-not-there says back, and suddenly it’s real.
Harry and Ginny lock eyes, and then they’re out of the house faster than you can say flibbertigibbet, Ginny’s hair still sleep mused and Harry bare-chested under his jacket. They stare at each other for a moment, wide eyed and shellshocked in the rain, and then start walking to nowhere because it’s better than going back inside.
“Did that look like…?” but she can’t make herself say it. Like speaking to the shade made him real, naming him will make it true.
“Yeah, it did,” Harry says, keeping his eyes fixed straight ahead but squeezing her fingers.
-
He’s still there, when they run out of daylight and nowhere and have to head home. Harry has his wand out and his hand in hers, and he looks more alive than he has in months. She’d gotten used to his quiet peace, the small movements of his face from calm to nostalgic to content, had thought he lit up on a broom. But he positively blazes now, stepping through their front door as an army of one. She’d forgotten his eyes were that green.
The ghost is waiting for them. His posture says nonchalant, leaned against the archway where Walburga’s portrait once stood, but there’s no other reason for him to be in the hallway.
“Harry Potter,” he purrs. It makes her want to vomit. “Cursing harmless shadows.”
“You’re not harmless.”
“Am I not? You’re still alive, aren’t you?”
Death isn’t the only way he can hurt you, but it’s the way Harry’s always had to fear, so he lowers his wand. The ghost smirks.
“Why are you here?” Harry asks. Demands.
“Why are you?” he replies, and for a moment, just a moment, his eyes might flicker to her before he disappears.
Harry knows the dangers of Voldemort. He’s felt the rush of his avada kadavera, his cold fingers on his skin and basilisk venom seeping in his veins.
But Ginny knows the dangers of Tom Riddle, knows death isn’t the worst thing he has to offer. Because as much as she hates it, as much as she wants it to be any other way, standing in the open front door dripping rainwater onto the carpet, Ginny isn’t sure if she’s upset Tom is there or that he isn’t there for her.
-
“What do we do?” Ginny whispers in the dark of their bedroom. She decides what they eat for dinner and what movie to watch and what the rules are of whatever game their playing that day. But this is the Dark Lord, and that means it’s Harry’s call.
It’s late, probably past midnight, but they’re sitting up, knees pressed together as they face each other on the bed. Ginny’s exhausted, the hollowed-out tired you get after a good sob even though she hasn’t cried, but Harry looks wide awake.
“I don’t know,” he says, but he doesn’t sound like he minds at all. “Figure out how he’s here, probably? And why he hasn’t cursed us yet. He’s been here for a while, right?” He looks at her for confirmation, all pretense of the last few weeks gone.
“Yeah,” she agrees. “I’ve been seeing him since May.” And then, because it’s an option Harry, Ron, and Hermione always seemed to forget, “Should we tell someone?”
Harry just stares at her, eyes owlish behind his glasses. “Who?” he asks simply.
And, really, who is there? Should they tell Shacklebolt, send the whole of the wizarding world spiraling back into chaos? Or Hermione, who’s laughed more in the last two weeks than the previous two years combined? Or George, who finally dragged himself out of the Burrow for the first time yesterday?
(And there’s a part of her, the part that will always be eleven and bloody and so very cold, that doesn’t want to know how they’ll look at her when she says Tom Riddle is a ghost and I’m pretty sure it’s not just in my head.)
“No one,” she says. “Until we know more.”
-
More, it turns out, is hard to come by.
They’re both sleep deprived as all hell, up in turns the night before to keep watch, and the library is hardly Ginny or Harry’s natural environment. Or, at least, researching in them isn’t. Ginny isn’t too bad at getting kicked out of them.
Which is what brings them here - five hours into a research binge and Harry closing another tome with a sigh and a puff of dust while Ginny tries to resist the urge to tear out her hair.
The Black family library (which is still fully stocked, they’re not such Gryffindors that they’d vanish hundreds of books) has plenty of texts on ghosts, their origins and habits and powers. It’d probably even be interesting if they weren’t in the middle of a crisis.
The thing is, the thing in their house isn’t a proper ghost. For one, he’s not pearly or translucent. For another, he’s not snake-faced and battleworn. Ghosts are after images, permanently stuck how they were the moment they died. They’re not supposed to get younger, or cleaner. Or, well, prettier.
“You’re looking in the wrong place.”
Tom is leaning against the bookcase behind Harry, looking casual and like he belongs there and not at all like he’s just manifested into being a breath before. Harry is up from his seat like a shot, wand trained on the other man. But there’s no wand to spell out of Tom’s hands, and Harry will never curse an unarmed man, even this man, so there’s nothing for him to do, really. Just glare, and keep glaring. Tom stares back, eyes unreadable but lips quirked like he’s amused, though if that’s feigned or real is anyone’s guess.
The silence stretches, a rubber band pulled to its limit between the two men.
“What do you mean?” Ginny asks, when it feels like she might stop existing if they stare at each other for one more second.
Tom emits something that might be a snort on anyone else, but his eyes stay fixed on Harry. “Ghosts,” he says, nodding to the books strewn around the floor, “won’t help you.”
Because of course he’s not a ghost. They’ve both seen this before - an oddly real apparition balancing on the edge of corporeal. They’ve even seen it wearing this face before.
This is what a soul looks like.
“You’re a ghost. You’re dead,” Harry says. He sounds so sure, so certain. How does he do that?
“I’m dead,” Tom agrees, and his voice sounds neutral, though any hint of amusement drops from his face. “Try over there,” he says, waving at a back corner of the library before fading away into dust motes in the light.
-
There are three things Ginny learns over the next week: Tom Riddle is dead. Tom Riddle wildly underestimated the implications of soul magic. And Tom Riddle is fucking annoying when he can’t read a book he wants.
The man, it turns out, doesn’t fade in and out of existence just to be dramatic (though Harry insists that’s still a big part of it). He is varying degrees of corporeal throughout the day. Sometimes, he is nothing but a suggestion in the air, invisible and moving straight through walls and objects. Other times he is entirely solid, able to lift books like he’s drunk an entire soul or rest a hand on Harry's shoulder to send him springing across the room. Ginny still isn’t sure which version is more threatening.
Shocking absolutely no one, the section of the library Tom points them to is about soul magic. He doesn’t show up again that day, and they don’t make much progress. He manifests the next morning, however, reaching for the books they pulled on Horcruxes and hissing when they pass through his fingers.
It’s three days of being unable to so much as turn a page before Tom shares what he’s looking for.
“It must be a side effect of the Horcrux,” Tom says, glaring at the book in front of Ginny like he can make it burst into flames with his eyes. Which, in life, he probably could. That’s another thing she’s noticed since she started letting herself notice him - he hasn’t used a single spark of magic over the last few days. “No one has ever made a human Horcrux before, so the implications are not documented. There may be something illuminating in texts on soul bonds, or animal Horcruxes.”
So they throw themselves into books on magics of the most foul kind, the kind of twisted perversions that make her nose scrunch on instinct. Harry has to stop often to cross-reference terms or share particularly stomach-turning passages, but after a year in Dark Arts under Amycus Carrow Ginny finds the texts fairly readable. Troublingly so.
Then, a week after Tom starts talking, something happens that changes the game.
Tom is in his usual position looming over Ginny, reading over her shoulder because Harry won’t let him stand behind him. (And, really, what does he think Tom will do? What does he think they can do to stop whatever it is?). Harry is downstairs, brewing up another pot of coffee to keep them awake. The book in front of her has a passage about the death of Herpo the Foul, maker of the first Horcrux, and Tom leans forward slightly, reaching out to trace a finger under the paragraph, when Ginny feels it.
Not a whisper of cold air. Not a spreading of goosebumps across her skin. It’s a sleeve brushing against her arm and, underneath, skin, solid and faintly warm even through the fabric.
Ginny is by the door in seconds, heart pounding in her chest. Tom hasn’t moved, though the page crinkles slightly under the pressure of his finger. Pressure. Like he’s there.
“That’s not possible,” she says. Or tries to say. It comes out as a whisper.
If he’s here because of Harry’s time as a Horcrux, he should only be corporeal when Harry’s nearby. He shouldn’t be here with her. But there’s no creak of Harry coming up the stairs, no puff of breath from down the hall. Just Tom, with warm skin and a hungry smile cracking open his handsome face and turning it skull-like.
“Au contraire, Gineva,” he says, and for the first time she can remember Tom Riddle - Lord Voldemort - is looking just at her.