OK
SO i was texting a friend @lacewingballad that absolute fiend and we were talking about this fanfic we’ve been reading that’s amazing (highly recommend, read Survival is a Talent from ShanaStoryteller) but we got to talking about characterizations of Ginny (she’s amazing in siat, all the characters have depth and personality even if they’re side characters and you root for all of them and it’s so well done and the worldbuilding and everything) and ended up brainstorming a concept we REALLY want someone to write. if not we at least want to share it.
after the end of the whole chamber of secrets debacle in ginny’s first year the horcrux is gone, but because tom riddle was possessing her for so long she ends up with like a ghost/remnant of him constantly following her around and linked to her. he can’t actually touch things and she’s the only one that can see or hear him, and both of them hate it.
and like, okay, it sucks for pretty much all of ginny’s second year. the dementors just make things worse and she’s obviously traumatized by what happened but he just is constantly sarcastic and insulting in a vaguely endearing way and doesn’t give a shit about ginny near the beginning and has just decided that since he’s stuck like this he’s NOT going to mute himself and this thoughts. and ginny hates it for a long time but then starts to get used to it and realizes that yeah he possessed her but he’s harmless right now and kind of just wants attention instead of to be ignored even if he’s SO annoying in class
“really, he’s teaching it like THAT? there’s more to learn on a chocolate forg card. i can do it in half the time.”
“ginny ignore severus he’s being a twat. add some occamy eyes to your potion instead.”
“minerva FUCKING mcgonagall that bitch, you know she ruined my perfect record at hogwarts??? i would have been top of the class in everything every year but that scottish pile of basilisk dung always beat me in transfiguration.”
Ginny: just SHUT UP!
*everyone turns to stare at ginny*
Tom: oooooo Ginny’s in trroublllee
like, her 2nd year and a lot of her third are hard but she slowly gets better and more used to it, and he’s actually very helpful with the dementors and during the quidditch up attack. he’s all—”you’re my only link to the world without you I’ll disappear so you’re not allowed to die, even if you are incompetent. don’t be so selfish” and she slowly realizes that yeah he’s being a dick but he is scared of disappearing and he’s slowly growing on her like a parasitic mold.
Ginny keeps hexing walls because she tries to throw curses at him and they go right through and he gets so fed up he’s like, “NO, you’re stance is wrong. let me fix it.” and accidentally ends up teaching her a bunch of stuff.
and he also has opinions about people. like the amount of blackmail and judgement he has is astounding and he’s not afraid to call people about because this is sixth year tom, not yet voldemort, just a very salty teenage boy.
Tom, grudgingly impressed: “the goyle line is still going? do they look like the hapsburgs yet?
“it’s leviosA, not leviOsa. honestly ginny your classmates are idiots. has the collective intelligence of the wizarding world gone down since i was alive?
“aaaah, i remember crabbe and goyle. i think they were still following around malfoys in my day; i kind of wis hi had just poisoned them instead of cultivating them as minions. look at them. a mountain troll has more intelligence. i’d rather people marry mudbloods than those two, sweet merlin.”
around the middle of her third year she has to prepare for the yule ball but has no idea how to dance and he spends like three days insulting her, “what sort of pureblood witch doesn’t know how to dance? were you raised in a sty? were you too busy balancing out the idiocy in your entire household brought upon by all that red hair to learn basic manners?” until she finally challenges him to do better. he’s like FINE and just grabs her and spins her around and empty room and they’re spitting insults the whole time and purposely stepping on each other’s feet.
“what if someone sees?”
“you dancing by yourself? eh, so maybe you’ve had a drink”
“merlin to do this, i’ll need more than one.”
“madam rosmerta is very easily bribed if you want firewhisky”
and they finish dancing up and realize that they don’t hate each other so much anymore and don’t acknowledge it, it’s just awkward and quiet and they don’t talk about it but ginny’s a great dancer by the yule ball even if tom spends half of it running around the room collecting gossip and blackmail like a magpie and the other half insulting neville but being begrudgingly impressed by neville’s dancing skills. ginny originally spent all of second year learning occlumency on her own so that she could tune out and get rid of tom when necessary because she’s incredibly determined and scared after being possessed by the diary, but as time goes on she realizes that she doesn’t need to use occlumency against tom and stops, lets him teach her legilimency so that she can defend her mind as much as possible.
and ginny originally hates all the slurs but by her fifth year has just given up and has fully brought up the fact that her blood is purer than his. when he gets particularly annoying she starts pointing out all the people he hates who have purer blood than him and he can’t even run away because they’re linked. at this point even she has grown on tom, his insults have continued but gotten less pointed and he spends more time snarking at others and teaching her revenge spells “to corrupt her” even though they both know she’s not going to get very corrupted.
by her sixth year his retribution to her annoyances is to start pointing out classmates and asking to play fuck marry kill. he’s even done it with professors and on one memorable occasion when he was particularly salty, dumbledore. and while this is happening there is a war going, for the record. like, he’s showed her dark magic spells for reversing cruciatus exposure and acts as lookout for ginny and the DA during her sixth year and has such scathing insults for the Carrows ginny has burst into laughter in public. and tom helps her out as much as he can even when she yells at him that he’s stifling her and that she can take care of herself.
“but you’re so pathetic! and helpless! like a baby niffler!” and she scoffs and hexes the first bully she comes across with a vicious bat bogey hex and is like “helpless? me? bitch you’re a ghost.”
and even while the war is going on tom’s officially realized that he doesn’t want voldemort to win because then he’ll disappear and it sucks but he’s kind of invested in ginny now, she’s been there and she’s kind of what he wished a friend would have been when he was younger because everyone in slytherin either looked down on him for being a mudblood, was jealous of him for being smarter than all of them, or was scared of him. ginny has experienced the darkest parts of him and still refuses to be scared and flinch away, matches him word for word and snark for snark and he can appreciate it okay. so he starts feeding information about voldemort to ginny so she can share it with harry, who doesn’t really question where it comes from because ginny asks him to trust her and just says that she remembers some stuff from being possessed from tom as a first year. and it’s weird stuff too, like how tom lost his virginity, or tom helping to make lesson plans for the DA around grey borderline dark magic spells that can be used for healing and stuff.
harry, in the middle of the battle of the department of mysteries: “you’re scared tom. scared of what i can do to you. just like you were scared when lisa cromwell rejected your ask to the yule ball.”
*everyone else is confused*
voldemort, spitting and hissing. “whAAAtttt?? hOOOw??? tell me POTTER?? WHERE DID YOU HEAR THAT NAME??????”
tom, sitting on the side with ginny. “it was very traumatizing for us. we learned to dance for her and i’m still bitter about it.”
and HERE’S THE THING. around her fourth year ginny found a book in the room of requirement that taught her how to get rid of his ghost. but. she doesn’t. and since she can’t keep secrets from him for long, she writes herself a note, hides the book, and obliviates the knowledge from her own mind. she doesn’t want to find out or think about why she has found the book again and obliviated herself again, another two times.
the war ends and tom is still there, even though all the horcruxes are gone. and ginny does end up with harry at the end (we debated luna for a while but decided on harry as the ultimate endgame) and it’s weird because they like each other, but they can also both acknowledge that tom is part of what links them. he understands what it is like to be possessed by tom, to be seduced by his whispers and how charismatic he could be. sometimes at night he whispers that he misses the horcrux because he’ll close his eyes and feel alone but he was never alone as a kid, he always had tom, even if he didn’t know it, in the back of his mind, no matter how dark the cupboard under the stairs got. they bond over it a lot.
one day, a few years after the end of the war, after both of them have graduated, ginny sits down and explains the whole tom remnant to him, about how he is there and following her around, and how she thinks that she can modify a spell meant to send him away to make him visible to the both of them, if he wants, instead of just her. and she explains what happened after the chamber and how he’s always been there and how tom is curious to actually be able to talk to his horcrux, someone like him but not really. and harry says yes and soon tom ends up as the third weird brother in the household, not in love with either of them, just an annoying houseguest that ginny and harry both begrudgingly enjoy snarking with. just a ghost.
and the thing is that harry gets tom. because harry understands how tom became a megalomaniacal dark lord because harry was also neglected and ignored and scared. the only difference is that he had ron and hermione to teach him how to love, and value friendship, and be a normal human, and tom had no one to teach him. hogwarts was his home, but emotionally, it wasn’t any better than the orphanage.
OK WOW. that was long. we were texting for like more than an hour mind you. but now we have this idea and neither of us have the time to write it but i’m nevertheless putting it out there in case anyone wants to expand upon it or just add to it, i’d love to hear people’s thoughts about this AU, little scenes and funny tidbits.
