Different

Ginny first realises that she is different from the rest of her siblings when she is five years old. She accidentally walks into the bathroom during Ron's bathtime and is immediately hustled out by her mother. Her mother sits her down and explains to her that she shouldn't walk in while other people are in the bathroom. Ginny protests that Fred and George and Percy and Bill and Charlie do it all the time and her mother gives a flustered explanation about how she is a girl and how they are all boys.

Ginny wonders whether she can change into a boy just so she doesn't have to knock whenever she wants to use the bathroom.

As she grows older, Ginny realises that it is simply foolish thinking and that she will always be a girl in a family of boys. Different, yet unique. Most of the time Ginny enjoys it. She is coddled, loved, adored by her family but there is something missing.

The word, Ginny discovers, is comradeship. She doesn't have the same happy-go-lucky relationship with her brothers that they have between each other. She always feels that something isn't there, that something is being held back. It's in the pauses between sentences, in the soliciting smiles when she can't kick off as hard as her brothers - never mind that they are several years older than her - but most of all it's in the things she's given for being the only girl.

Ginny notices the half-envious, half-proud look Ron gives her as she walks from Madam Malkin's with brand new robes and something within her withers.

She doesn't want to be different.

Sometimes Ginny wonders whether Bill feels the same way as she does, but she doesn't think so. There is nothing in his expression that shows anything of what Ginny feels inside. Then again, Ginny wonders whether or not she is simply blind to it. After all, nobody seems to notice when her throat is so tight that it feels like it is being squeezed by the hand of an ogre and she wants to scream but can't, or won't.

Ginny thinks she has finally met somebody who understands her when the shining blood-red words of Tom appear daily - hourly - on her diary.

But Tom's betrayal of her still sits bitter in her stomach and she wonders why she still thinks of him.

She can see some of Tom in Harry Potter so she tries to get to know Ron's friend a little better. But it is no use. Once the glamour of knowing the Boy-Who-Lived wears off, Ginny can see that despite the similarity, Harry and Tom will go in completely different directions. She supposes that the wizarding world should be glad for that. They don't need another You-Know-Who.

After her fourth year, Ginny sees some of her pain mirrored in Percy as he comes back, penitent and ashamed, into the family fold. There is the same hesitation in her other brothers as they talk to Percy. They pretend that it is the same as before, but Ginny knows it isn't.

Still, despite all this, Ginny continues to smile and she knows her family thinks she's forgotten Tom. Ginny is careful to cast the silencing spells every night. She learned them at the beginning of her second year when she woke up her roommates with her whimpering.

Ginny never screams in her sleep. Tom wouldn't let her.

She watches with hollow eyes as Harry becomes more and less like Tom every day and a bit of her dies every time he smiles or talks to her. She has become proficient at hiding this under a mask of shyness and hero worship. Despite Michael and Dean, her brothers still think that she likes Harry that way.

Ginny knows that she can't like Harry that way. That was why she began dating Michael in her fourth year. He was safe. She wouldn't be thinking of Tom when she was with Michael.

But she was wrong.

Even Dean - sweet, loving, nice, decent Dean - reminds her of Tom and she doesn't even know why.

Ginny wishes she could talk to her family about it but it is five years too late for that and they simply wouldn't understand her feeling of her personality being siphoned off, bit by bit, for Tom to savour and gloat over. Tom is a parasite, she realises and is glad to finally put a name to it.

Yet, Ginny knows she is simply lying to herself. She is stronger now, both magically and physically, because of Tom. So what if she had to sacrifice her emotional well-being?

There is something funny about her and Tom being symbiotes, funny in a perverse horrible way, and Ginny gives a sharp little giggle as she sits alone by the lakeside. She tosses a smooth round pebble across the lake and watches as it skims easily across the surface. The squid lifts a lazy tentacle out of the lake and grabs the pebble at its last bounce and Ginny waves uselessly at it.

This spot beside her lake is her sanctuary. It's a beautiful quiet spot, and she feels safe here with her back to the big oak tree.

Ginny doesn't feel as safe inside Hogwarts, especially not inside the Great Hall during her sixth year. She watches as Ministry owls soar overhead, their claws clutching black envelopes. She watches as an eagle owl - or several eagle owls, she can't tell - delivers letters, one by one to the Sytherins. She watches as their faces become impassive. She watches as Dumbledore shakes his head sadly while noting something down on the notebook that seems to always be beside him nowadays. Ginny wonders why You-Know-Who doesn't pick a better way of communicating with his followers. The Tom she knew was far more intelligent than that.

And then one day, she watches with a pale face as the eagle owl wheels around overhead and wings over to the Gryffindor table to drop a letter in her lap. Ginny lifts her head and notes Dumbledore's grave face. Nobody else notices, except for a pair of sharp gray eyes over at the Slytherin table.

Ginny looks at the elegant script spelling out Ginevra Weasley on the front of the envelope and is tempted to simply rip it up and burn it on one of the many hovering candles. But she doesn't. She simply tucks the envelope safely inside her robes and stands up to leave. She will read the letter in a more private location. Ginny finds it ironic that Tom has finally noticed her after all these years and then she wonders whether You-Know-Who can access Tom's memories.

Dumbledore stops her on the way out of the hall and gives her a grave look. "Miss Weasley," he says, "I believe you received correspondence this morning."

Ginny nods and her hands shake within her robe pockets.

"I cannot request that you show the letter to me," Dumbledore says quietly, "but I hope that you will find it in your heart to do the right thing." He walks away.

Ginny ends up burning the letter, unread.

Unreasonably, she wishes that she had read it.

A fluttering at her dorm window that evening wakes Ginny up from a light sleep. She rises and walks over to see the same eagle owl perched on the windowsill. In its beak is another letter. With a hasty glance around, Ginny unlatches the window and takes the letter. The owl flies away, its wings creating a breeze that flutters her nightgown. She shivers and quickly closes the window.

Ginny quietly steps down to the common room and curls up beside the fire to read the letter. The words are innocuous enough, simply an invitation to Malfoy Manor to discuss business arrangements. She knows that she should show the letter to Dumbledore but something within her refuses.

When she passes Dumbledore in the corridor the next day, Ginny gives him a shy smile and tells him that she burned the letter unread. He looks happy and Ginny wonders why she refrained from mentioning the second letter.

Ginny feels a slight movement of air beside her as she sits by the lake in late afternoon and without opening her eyes, she asks, "What do you want?"

She is surprised by the smooth reply, "Are you coming?"

Opening her eyes, Ginny sees Draco Malfoy sitting there beside her. She wonders what they must look like to other people. A lovers rendezvous, she thinks, faintly amused. "I'm not sure," she replies honestly, not needing to ask what he was referring to.

He nods, not looking surprised at all. "There is no harm in simply attending," he says as he gets up and brushes off his robes. Ginny watches as he walks off.

The function is on a Hogsmeade day and Ginny knows that she will not be missed that evening. With a pale face, Ginny draws up the hood of her robes and slips down to the front gates of the school. There is already a small gathering, five people at most, standing there. She looks into a pair of familiar gray eyes.

"You came," Draco says evenly.

Ginny cannot tell whether he is disappointed or glad. She suspects that he is both.

The evening is surprisingly mundane. Ginny knows that the other Hogwarts students are surprised, and just slightly fearful, to see her there. "Don't worry," she says, "I'm not a spy." They look slightly surprised at her statement and Ginny wonders why she even said it.

Ginny isn't sure what she thought the evening was about, but there was little politics in the air and what there was, it was surprisingly close to her own personal beliefs. She had seen first-hand the dangers of Muggle technology. Ginny finds herself nodding when Lucius Malfoy told them that Muggle technology and magic simply had no business mixing. How many times was her father injured by Muggle technology? Ginny has lost count by now.

Draco's mother spends a surprising amount of time fussing over her. "Are you all right?" Narcissa asks her as she excuses herself from the table after dinner.

Ginny nods. "I just need to use the bathroom."

Narcissa nods and excuses herself as well. "I'll take you there," she tells Ginny as she leads the girl by the hand through winding passages. "This old mausoleum is so easy to get lost in." As they arrive at the door of the bathroom, Narcissa gives her a smile and says, "I can't say how glad I am that you came."

Ginny smiles in return and doesn't know what to say.

She wonders whether her eyes were closed all these years and only now are they opening. And then she wonders whether the opposite may be true.

"We aren't all extremists," a Ravenclaw seventh year tells her as they head back to Hogwarts. His voice is solemn.

She nods and slips away back to Gryffindor tower.

Ginny watches the next few months as the Order bustles around waiting for the next Death Eater attack. She is faintly amused because she knows that the next attack won't happen for nearly another three months and that all this worry is simply tiring them out. She wonders whether she should say something. Narcissa promised that her family wouldn't be harmed and Ginny trusts her new friend. They get along surprisingly well for people with such a large age gap. Sometimes Ginny even thinks that they might become something more but she doesn't know what Lucius might say.

"You seem different," Ron says to her one day, almost accusingly.

She gives him a faint smile. "I'm the same as always." And this, Ginny realises, is true. Tom has finally stopped haunting her dreams.

But what Ron says is true as well. The old Ginny would have never relished spitting out Crucio at Aurors. The old Ginny actually wanted to become an Auror once. But the old Ginny disappeared the day she began to write in the diary.

The world is changing and Ginny watches and twitches the strings.

The Daily Prophet rolls out article after article on the possibility of Harry Potter becoming the next Dark Lord and Harry walks around with a long face and heavy shoulders.

How can we trust a boy who tried to use an Unforgivable in his fifth year?

Ginny smiles when she reads this and agrees absentmindedly with Ron as he scowls and calls The Daily Prophet a "pile of trash".

Nobody, not even Dumbledore, realised their mistake of trusting her until it was too late. Far too late.

Ginny only remembers images from the last battle. Images with photo-like clarity, imprinted on her mind. The image of panicked children, scrambling for safety. The image of the Order standing there, wands upright, faces resolute. The image of Dumbledore's anguished face as she threw back her cloak and screamed Avada Kedavra. The image of Harry falling, twisting, under the final bolt of green light.

As supervises the final clean-up, Ginny wonders why Tom didn't win earlier. Then again, she thinks as she casts yet another Stupefy, they never had their current advantage.

"We will begin anew," Tom told them, his voice quiet as they gather together in the Great Hall. Ginny assiduously ignores the bodies piled up around them. After the last of the still-alive prisoners are moved out of the school, Ginny strikes a match and watches as Hogwarts blazes.

Days later, Ginny's red hair streams out behind her as she stares at the smouldering ruins of Hogwarts and her eyes gleam. The eyes of her family ask her why as she orders them to be led away to Azkaban but Ginny ignores them. She can't listen to their questions because she doesn't have the answers.

Narcissa gives her a wild smile and kisses her on the cheek. "I'm so glad we finally won. Finally we can take decisive action to stop the Muggles from taking over our world."

Ginny smiles back and deliberately doesn't think of people like Hermione Granger who now face a choice of either bound magical powers or life in the Muggle world.

They won. That's all that matters.

Ginny is different from her family and she is glad for it.