Nevermore a Butterfly

Sixth Year starts, and a pall is cast over the school. Students scurry from class to class, uncertain and unsure, as if the halls and corridors and cloisters will give them some protection from the war that looms overhead. But even though Hogwarts has survived for centuries, that is all it means; that the stone is eternal, and not the blood and bone it harbours.

There are mysterious reports of things happening, and Voldemort lures a brigade of Aurors into a deserted house on the edge of Bristol. Godric's Hollow is once again violated, and soon enough, the grave of Harry's parents is disturbed. Nothing appears to be taken, and childish pranks are to blame; but then the Dursleys go missing, and there is a keener, more aware motive at play.

On the second week of the third month of the school year, Harry faints briefly in the middle of the Common Room, and when he recovers, his words are not his own. Grinning from ear to ear, he leans over to Ginny and tells her what a nice little fuck she'd be, if only she learned to spread her legs like a good girl, the way she wanted to for him in second year, and Ginny knows it could be Tom talking, or Harry.

It seems that this is Voldemort's new plan; to drive the hero insane by corrupting everything he holds dear (namely his friends) and everything he doesn't (namely himself.) In desecrating the three connections Harry has to his past, his present, his family, and the salvation that that blood offers, Voldemort leaves him with only one relationship: the link which he shares with the Dark Lord, and now there is nothing stopping Voldemort from coming and going at will.

Harry locks himself in the highest tower and the lowest dungeon as Hermione, Lupin, Dumbledore all search for the keys to this mystery. Ginny brings him his food and water, because she has known Voldemort's touch before and it is hoped she can know him again if he comes close, when others may not.

The revelation has a sick and twisted irony to it; it is Ginny who causes these episodes, dear, sweet, kind Ginny who was tainted by Tom in her first year and so awakens that part of him in Harry. The only way for it to end, they have discovered, is for her to die, or Voldemort himself be killed.

The episodes occur in greater and greater frequency, and Harry wakes again and again from a state much like dreaming to find himself in absurd or unusual places about the castle: Dumbledore's office, the Potions Classroom, Moaning Myrtle's bathroom. He falls over himself to apologise, and everyone pats him on the back and gives him a hug and assures him it's not his fault, it never is, and never could be.

One morning the school wakes to a scream: Harry Potter was found in the girls' dorms standing blankly by one of the beds, a pillow pressed against Ginny's face. The girl was quite, quite dead. Voldemort's powers are legend, and as the Heir of Slytherin he knows more about the castle than anyone living, so it's not surprising that he managed to find some way to circumvent the wards around the girls' dormitories. Still, there is relief that the ordeal is now over, even if no-one says it, and Ginny is given a hero's funeral, clad in the finest samite and burnt as in the olden days, her pyre lighting up the highlands.

Harry recovers, although he's never quite the same. He carves her name into his soul alongside Cedric and Sirius and James and Lily, and thinks she'd understand. Sacrifices have to be made, after all, and she did know what it was like, the terror of possession. The mission is everything, and Harry has no regrets.

When they meet in battle as they are destined to do, Voldemort is young again, and sleek and handsome. The dark arts have clearly been good to him, and he likes to be called Tom, if only as a conceit. Tom asks Harry what it was like, taking a life; for he alone knows the truth. In the end, Harry confides in him the sweetness of that moment, the power. His mind opens to Tom as never before, and the world changes.