Whimsically Ginny

Additional A/N: As in all prologues, this chapter basically involves a general setting the scene - dreams, homework blues, random contemplations on Harry and Sirius, some closure on past events, and possible significant plot feeders...anyway, please be patient about this chapter's comparative lack of dialogue - chapter one's going to have more, promise!

P.S. DO read and review!

Prologue: Girl, Introduced

meus -a -um [my, mine]

There it was.

The tiny sphere, filigree gold wings beating as furiously as her heart, zoomed past her, dipping downwards in almost a 90° dive, hurtling towards the bottom of the pitch...

She didn't hesitate, gripping on to her broom tightly - a heartbeat later, her eyes were smarting from the harsh upward force of wind, as she went down after the Snitch, fingers almost desperately outstretched, going towards it; she could taste the faint sweetness of blood as she bit painfully on her lip, trying to perform an aerodynamic miracle, her body grappling with her slipping balance.

Then her eyes widened. From not too far away on the pitch, a few pink figures were running across the expense of green - no way. She blinked. The few pink figures were still there.

Professor Dumbledore, Professor McGonagall, Professor Sprout, Professor Flitwick, and - her brown pupils almost popped out behind her corneas - Professor Snape, seemed to be jubilantly racing from over the horizon to across the dewy grass in the...

At that moment, the Snitch could have danced a tango in front of her in bright purple polka-dotted tutu and she would have paid as much attention to it as she would -

Draco Malfoy?!

Malfoy was hauling her arm, pulling her backwards, screaming something indecipherable at her - she looked down again; then she screamed, as her broom seemed to melt into thin air, below her was an entirety of gaping shining blackness -- bubbling, reaching towards her. Malfoy's grip was vice-like, his voice ringing, ringing...

Wait. Ringing?

~

Riiiiiiiing!

Screeched the bedside alarm clock, a detestable lime green lump of metal shaped somewhat like a lopsided heart.

Virginia Isabel Weasley, or Ginny as she was more commonly known, woke with a start, panting in a manner most contradictory to her ladylike first and middle names. As for whether or not her panting coincided well with her last name, that would depend from whose perspective you were looking from.

A few moments later, having recovered her cool as well as her breath, Ginny stumbled out of bed, relieved that, as far as her memory could do her justice, she could not remember any explicit images from her last *cough* traumatic *cough* dream. Nightmare, more appropriately - anything that involved Hogwarts teachers prancing around naked (the mere implication of her having dreamt that was going to scar her forever) and Malfoy (choke) saving her from certain death (if that was what the black pool was) veritably qualified as a nightmare.

Then Ginny's head snapped up again as she remembered the date. The 24^th of August.

Oh bloody hell.

24^th of August - meaning only eight more days of trying to do Arithmancy homework, as well as losing the most part of today, considering the Weasleys were going to fetch Harry from the "Terrible Dursleys", as Molly Weasley referred to them, after which they would be meeting the rest of the Order of the Phoenix at Number 12, Grimmauld Place, otherwise known as the House of Black. Hermione had yet been invited to Viktor Krum's Bulgarian summer getaway, and she had accepted...although no one was about to tell Ron that yet (he was under the impression that she was under a special mentorship programme with Professor Sprout, studying Invisible South-East Asian Snozzyumpers with Luna Lovegood - whom he had forgotten had gone to Sweden with her father in search of the Crumple-Horned Snorkack -- in the coral reef of Chek Jawa, off the sunny Singaporean island of Pulau Ubin - that information courtesy of Fred and George Weasley. They had even gone so far as to send him a postcard of Singapore's Changi Airport, and forging Hermione's handwriting and signature along with it: they had found the postcard somewhere in Arthur Weasley's secret stashes of Muggle treasure. ). Anyway, she would be back in only two days' time, which made the total length of stay at Viktor's to be four days, which, considering how long it took for Viktor to ask Hermione out for the Yule Ball in Ginny's third year, was too short a time frame for Viktor to have done anything drastic, like propose to Hermione or pledge his everlasting love.

Great. Which would make that around 7 days, or only 168 hours, to complete 250 more Arithmancy questions on cyclic quads and calculus spell variations. Not counting all the distractions which would follow Harry's, and later Hermione's arrivals - it wasn't that Ginny did not like Harry's company - Mrs. Weasley always fussed about him too much to notice any (most) of the Weasley children's other discrepancies -- it was just that it only proved her lesser motivation to complete any work. As for Hermione, considering it was so convenient that she was a girl, and an older one at that, Ginny had always found herself compelled to end up chatting with her for hours on end instead of doing anything substantial. As well as considering that Molly Weasley had somehow came up with brilliant notion through the summer that Hermione would make an ideal daughter-in-law...

Ron had said that midsummer madness had got to her head, but Ginny had caught him blushing furiously as he did.

Enormously tired just by thinking of all these, Ginny felt like sinking back into bed again.

Still, rousing her reluctantly drowsy body, she completed the odious task of making her way in the general direction of the bathroom with newly pressed clothes from her drawer. By the time she had willed herself into getting to the bathroom, Fred, George and Ron were already doing their routine morning argument as to who got to enter first.

"Bloody git, Fred... I got here first!"

"Gimme my shirt, George...where's my wand?!"

"I told you we should have Apparated inside first..."

Silently and nonchalantly, Ginny slipped past the three tousle-haired ones and let herself into the bathroom, locking it behind her.

None too surprisingly, chaos again ensued even more fiercely as soon she had done so.

~

Standing in front of the creaking (everything in the Weasley house was creaking, so that adjective was rather irrelevant), slightly senile mirror in striped blue and yellow flannel pyjamas, Ginny ignored the mirror's age-old rant about the decadence of its soiled burnished gold backing (its backing was made of cheap wood), mechanically letting her toothbrush and toothpaste brush her teeth. Not wanting to think about the horrendous 250 questions (each of which were split into parts a), b) and c), along with a special supplementary discussion topic after every twenty sums), Ginny decided to anticipate Harry instead. After all, he was going to meet them later.

Harry. Messy black hair, bright bottle-green eyes with, at least the last time she had seen him, grey shadows lurking beneath them, lanky (or was it lean?) frame. Ginny supposed Harry was not really quite good-looking - perhaps more to just "decent". Presentable. Ginny never thought so much about Harry's physical looks - Harry always seemed so much more than that. Surely not handsome like Michael Corner had been or spectacular like Draco *cringe* Malfoy...but Harry was on any other count better than those two.

Ginny cringed, occasionally, when she thought of how much she used to moon over Harry. Utterly embarrassing to think of how she used to be unable to talk with him around - Ginny's cheeks flushed at the memory of that. Still, there was a certain quality of Harry's which she still found unique to Harry, and very nearly beautiful -

Ginny had seen Harry looking angry, Harry looking embarrassed, Harry looking peeved, Harry looking happy, sad, worried, anxious, confused, desperate, exhausted...it was not that she had never seen such expressions on other people's faces before - she had six brothers all unskilled in hiding their emotions, after all - but when it came to Harry, it felt different watching him. Especially when Harry looked sad or defeated - it seemed as if the entire world had ended, that very moment when Harry's eyes lost their characteristic spark, his entire face seeming to close off.

Harry always wore his heart on his sleeve, so when Ginny watched him, particularly when he was upset, it would be heartbreaking. It was just that Harry poured his heart into his every emotion.

That was the only evidence that showed Harry's naked naïveté.

Even the year before, when she had thought herself completely immune to him already, she had had to stop herself from staring helplessly as Harry caved in time after time. That year had been the worst - especially with Sirius's death.

Ginny hadn't known Sirius very well, just knew that he had loved Harry dearly, and vice versa. Though it struck Ginny sometimes that Sirius could be rather selfish in their relationship - but Ginny, on afterthought, would always think that e being an outsider would probably not be able to understand their relationship, and hence had no right to judge.

After all, Sirius had spent more than a decade in Azkaban, running away from things he never did.

Ginny had even felt, when Sirius was alive, when she had spied, at times, that peculiarly hollow look in his dark eyes - that she could identify with him.

Perhaps, Ginny thought but wasn't ever very sure of, he could be able to identify with her as well - Sirius had probably been chased by endless ghosts of the past, as Ginny had been chased by the endless ghost and memory of Tom Riddle.

Anyway, now she would never know.

Ginny had cried, when she had heard the news. A little. Not enough to cover for Harry's lost, she supposed, thinking upon it later, but she didn't have enough emotional attachment to Sirius. It was more like crying for the lost of another life that had walked this earth. Yet when she had cried, it was definitely not in front of Harry, because Ginny knew that Harry, one way or another, would blame himself for everyone's - as well as his own - misery.

And all the time she had been crying she could only think of Harry's possible suffering.

Ginny unconsciously shrugged as she gurgled her mouth with water - perhaps Harry would always hold a certain kind of strange importance in her heart. Not the kind she had at first mistaken it to be; another kind of significance, most likely.

Anyway, with the Dark Lord's obvious rising this time, there wasn't really that much time to think about such things. Now that everyone in the wizarding world officially knew about He-Who-Must-Not-be-Named, the "Ministry was in utter chaos", as Arthur Weasley had said the first day he had returned from work. Households were busily stocking their homes to the brim with preventive charms and all sorts of nasty traps - Ginny supposed the surveillance companies were the toast of Gringotts' stock market now - and politicians were yammering around Cornelius Fudge's Minister of Magic position. All of them were calling for his resignation or better yet, impeachment (whichever would require more drama and involvement of the Daily Prophet), thanks to his inefficiency and choice of ignoring "obvious" evidence that He-Who-Must-Not-be-Name had risen. Each largely quoted from Harry's interview with Luna Lovegood and Rita Skeeter (Hermione had filled Ginny in on that last term, when they had all been lying around in the infirmary being fussed over by the no-nonsense Madam Pomfrey). Arthur Weasley had been rather sarcastic in his comments over the dinner table regarding how all these politicians only had the Minister's position for themselves in mind, and only months ago had been steadfastly standing against Harry's claims with Fudge himself - but Molly Weasley had shushed him, saying that the "children" had "no business knowing about such dirty business", pun, Ginny assumed, most unintended.

Ginny stepped out of her pants and underwear. She unbuttoned her shirt, shrugging off her pyjama top, after which she unhooked her bra. The cold touch of metal clanged painfully over her chest as she straightened up quickly - as they always did, her fingers automatically reached for the heavy silver pendant that was strung to the thin chord around her neck.

Studying the pendant for the millionth time since she had acquired it in her first year, she still felt the same fear taking up her heart, and the hair on the nape of her neck rose unconsciously, causing her to shiver.

The pendant was made of two separate shapes welded together - the first was a silver snake, each scale on its sleek body meticulously carved. Its tongue rose and licked into the second shape, a 'V', the length of which was around the diameter of a Snitch. The 'V' was made of a deep black stone which Ginny had always supposed was onyx, with veins of silver somehow threaded and embedded into the stone in what Ginny could only see to be a series of beautified squiggles.

Ginny could no longer clearly define in her head how she had gotten the pendant, or even the chord that held it, for that matter. The memory had fast faded, as if it were only part of a dream. She only knew that she had had it since her first year. She knew for sure Tom had given it to her. Had - here the memory was shaky again - put it around her neck. And ever since then, it had been impossible for Ginny to take it off. Not physically, or even magically, anyway.

It wasn't that Ginny hadn't tried. She had tried every single possible way to remove it. She had pulled and tugged and tried to cut it with the best pair of scissors she could lay her hands on. For every pull or tug over her head the chord only seemed to magically shrink, until at one time it had almost strangled her until she had finally let go. For every attempt at cutting the chord, the metal of the scissors had bent in instead. She had poured over every single book, with exception of those in the Restricted Section, of the Hogwarts library, making sure not to be spotted by the ever-present Hermione when she was at it. She had tried every spell within her ability. She had even, in final desperation, tried to sneak into the Restricted Section, which was considered throughout her year an easy equivalent to suicide.

Obviously Ginny had had only been able to get pass the door before she was caught by Mrs Norris, which for some reason sneaking around there as well. Ginny had only managed to save herself by the skin of her teeth.

Ginny dared not venture to question anyone about how she was to remove the pendant. Already she had had to face the stigma of being associated with the Dark Lord's ghost in a time that the memory of his power was still fresh and smarting, if not legendary for the younger generation. She had never told anyone, not even Hermione, that some of her classmates, whom she had thought were her friends, had ever since chosen to not speak to her, accusing her in their vicious rumours and gossiping the continued control of He-Who-Must-Not-be-Named over her mind.

But then Ginny herself had thought herself going insane, when at eleven she would at a moment be seeking solace in an invisible entity from a diary almost fifty years old, and at another moment return to her dormitory, her hands and robes streaked with flesh blood.

Sometimes, in the deepest of her memories and the blackest of her dreams, she still thought she could hear Tom's mellifluous voice, beckoning her. But now Ginny knew, and knew not to respond, for fear of her life and much more besides. Besides, she never knew whether it was just a case of nightmares, which it most likely was.

Ginny didn't like to think about such things. They were memories which were too dangerous for her to venture into.

Because she never knew whether anyone could save her, should she fall into them again.

Ginny stepped into the antiquated, leaking (as with all Weasley appliances which involved liquids) bathtub, filling it with warm water, a luxury which was seldom and far between, considering it was seldom and far between that the heater actually worked. Leaning back into the rapidly forming soapsuds, she watched Tom's pendant sink, yet completely unaffected by the chemical effect of the water or the soap. The chord absorbed water, grew heavier and bit rather painfully into Ginny's neck, but there wasn't much Ginny could do besides tolerate it.

Taking into account the noise and cursing from outside the bathroom, Ginny took her time to soap herself.