Heart's Poison

Where to begin but at the beginning, or is this the conclusion?

That I can't truly say. Not when it is so hard to differentiate between the two, beginnings to every end, and endings to every beginning. They lead to each other with no escape, until eventually you have to accept what faces you or risk getting left behind, with the past the only way through which you can perceive your future.

To change, to begin anew, is as much about greetings as it is farewells.

I have a reputation for being a bit absentminded, always leaving something behind wherever I go, whether it be a notebook in a classroom or my sweater in the Great Hall. What gets left behind now on this last trip will make a sweater and a notebook look inconsequential by comparison. My mind will be erased. I will forget him, all of this, and maybe that will cause me to warp on the outside, but on the inside, I think I will always have in my heart of hearts an outline of what once was. It won't matter that I love blindly, an abstract idea more than a person, because with Tom that is how it has always been.

All I can tell you is that here, now, some part of me will go missing and that what takes its place will never quite fill the emptiness it creates.

I will die so that I can live again without him. Tom will die so the world can live again without him, saving the world from himself. He's giving me a chance to start over, to relive all I have without the diary, without the threat of Voldemort. I am being given the opportunity to be ordinary, as is Harry, no events or thoughts to set me apart from the rest. Without Voldemort, Harry will no longer have the pressures of The Boy Who Lived, he will simply be The Boy. And even without a scar, and without a conflict, I will still love him.

I don't know if I ever loved Tom as I love Harry. I need Tom. I am unclear as to why. Perhaps he made it that I need him. This connection I feel could be nothing more than a spell that refuses to fade or yield. Spell or no, I want one day to be free of the strings that bind me to him.

Are you confused? You should be. Life is only simple when you choose not to think about it. He never thinks about it. Life is easy for him; death is easy for him-apathy is the only he could kill without guilt.

It is his mouth that condemns me, his hands that kill me. Without either, I would not be able to be born again to a future where he swore he will not exist. He has control of me through the diary, my own emotions have a shape and that shape is Tom and together they have control of me. Who am I is not a question I need to ask, it's What Have I become? The longer I am with him, the more who I was before I opened that diary becomes of no interest.

I trust him, even though I know most of Tom's oaths are useless. To reiterate what I said before, it's a blind kind of love, the kind that is painful in its wanting, and deadly in its devotion and obsession. There's poison in every touch and though I know it will kill me, I keep coming back for a draught more. I would run from it if all of me had not been paralyzed by its grip from the start.

"The potion is ready. Are you?" Tom's voice slides over my thoughts as effortlessly as the wind fluttering a curtain. His voice seems as if it has always been there. Did he speak aloud? The words seem have never been uttered, but to have always been a seamless fit to the rest of my thoughts.

"I am." I speak out loud (even though it is not necessary with Tom) to give strength and conviction to my words. Tom, however, knows my doubt even though I put no voice to it.

He knows fears, weaknesses, better than anyone. They are what he exploits. Doubting him, I see that as a strength I should practice in abundance. So why am I allowing myself to die, placing my life in his hands because I expect he will make things better?

It sounds like such stupidity when you put it like that, but no matter how I state it in black and white; I can't view it that way.

Tom puts a gentle finger to my forehead, smoothing out imaginary wrinkles. "So eager for me to be gone from your life, but yet so sad. Poor girl, you feel too much.

Don't be worried..so soon. I told you I will die as you will."

"I'm not worried. I just.."

"You shouldn't be afraid of death, Virginia. After all, death is a far more friendly alternative to what would happen should you wish not to end it. Or would you prefer to become me as you-yes, you, don't shake your head or try and deny it- are already starting to do even now?"

"I know I am becoming you. You're the part of me that wants this."

"Ah, so that is why you hesitate. Yes, I want this. If there was any other method by which to fray this connection that would kill you and leave me living, I would use it readily, but there is not. I need you to die just as I must die."

It was all so wrong, so horribly wrong, but I can not straighten my thoughts from the patterns into which Tom's words had twisted them. "I believe you on that."

"I knew you would. I have never doubted your confidence in me. Do you doubt yours?"

"Yes." The words seem wrenched forth from me, even as I close my mouth to refuse them. There is something too intimate about admitting I do not trust Tom, something too secret. Once the words were uttered, it feels as if I will never be able to recall them back again as thoughts within recesses of my own mind.

"Good. You should. It's high time, Ginny my dear that you grew up."

Then the potion is in his hands, in my hands, the beaker has crashed to the floor, and the potion is in my throat and it burnsburnsburns. My vision is sharp of raw pain and fire.

There. He has finished chanting the spell, necromancy with a few alterations. It will bring me back from the dead, but not to this life, to another one, one the same as this and yet quite different; my past. After death, I am to be born again, once more, to the same past minus one important component...Tom.

He is confident in his abilities that this will work, and reassures me of this often, drunk on the prospect of infallibility, of no longer having a weakness that wears my face to counter his strengths. I am not so optimistic. If there's anything I've learned about Tom, it's that his words and what he feels are usually in direct opposition. You don't get in Slytherin by being a forthright and honest soul. I'm worried, not so sure can live without Tom, and not so sure I can die without him, either.

Tom is determined to end his life permanently after he ends mine, to cause the circle of his dependency to break apart. He thinks he has found the loophole, a way of making the closed circle open to free him from its confinement. Tom is supposed to die. This is how things are supposed to go.

I am not scared of death. I always have been stronger than people comprehend. No, what I am frightened of is this; when I am born again, I won't even be able to retrace the pattern of Tom's face or hear the tone of his voice in my thoughts. I will have forgotten all. I'll spend the rest of my life searching for a person that eludes me because he will no longer exist.

***********

Through the diary, through childish words, we became interchangeable, her and I. Not copies of one another, mind you, but two separate beings whose completion was fulfilled only when they were together. There were broken lines to the both of us that could only be finished with a different hand to draw them, gaps that could only be covered by another's.

I expected to feed off her thoughts, emotions, her very being, and thus gain the power I needed to become more than just a shadow of the night. I didn't expect to become as dependent on her as she is on me. The innocence that once was in her is gone now, but humanity lingers on as an undercurrent to her every feeling. I need the humanity, even as it disgusts me, even as she disgusts me. That's why I could not kill myself after I had killed her, I could not allow her to be in a world that I was not occupying.

So yes, I will send the world into terror and chaos again because I need Ginny. I always was a selfish bastard.

Years have passed, or is it days? They all seem so fleeting.

She does not remember.

I can view it in her face as she dances in the garden. She wishes she could remember, but she would not do so if she knew what to remember it all was like, to know that the next time I die I will forget ever having her in my arms. She is all I have to hold on to for the present and I cannot let her go. I couldn't die. I couldn't bear to forget so soon. Ginny is the human part of me. I lose her, and I will become Voldemort, no connections to make a world that should remain alien far too personal.

The murders I have committed, the crimes orchestrated, the lies I have perpetrated, none of these things bother me. They are all just events, following each other logically like a set of dominoes falling one after another after given a push. I can work with remorse, guilt, emotions of my own, I can (and have) eliminated them for the most part.

What I can't work with are the reactions..to her. With her, I have a soul, as black and unforgiving as it possible for it to be, but a soul none the less. It is my soul that I curse for all eternity, my soul that wants her back, that needs her power and emotions to live on when I have none of my own.

Every period of my life with her, every memory of every period of my life with her, it aches harder than I would have thought possible. I cannot forget my memories of her past as easily as I push away the memories of my own.

***********************************************************************

She's sitting all alone in the garden again tonight, curls falling from her head to the edge of her book, hiding her face from view. She laughs; he can hear it in the air. And then for no reason at all, she's up and dancing, spinning and cutting streaks of luminance into the dark.

It's completely uninhibited and spontaneous. He knows she would not act so if she thought anyone was watching, particularly him. She is still shy around him, in awe of him. Around him, she became hyper self aware, but out there, in the night, she can dance and exist without thinking about it. He finds it's the one way to know the true her, observing her like this. It's a sense of discovery and a sense of loss, to think you understand someone to a certain point only to realize that you don't really understand them at all.

She comes out to the garden three or maybe four times a week, simply to be alone, not realizing that he does the same. He does it to get away, from being Harry Potter, from expectations, from all of it. Questions rise to the back of his mind and stay there, burning to be asked and answered. He wonders what she is escaping from. What is going inside that guides the actions she takes, what causes her to look so peaceful, and yet so sad.

She shouldn't look so much older than her years when she is still so young, but she has experienced things no other sixteen year old has.

Hell, by the time she was eleven, she had already become intimate with the good and evil of the world. She learned life was nothing like the fairytales she read, that people couldn't be so clearly put into boxes labeled good or evil, and that occasionally, trial and error was the only way to find out who a person truly was.

Evil wasn't always the dapper villain with the moustache, she realized. Good and innocence couldn't always save you. Ginny had lost whatever precious normalcy she had. She exposed it all to a diary, to Tom, who took as much as he gave. In the world she lived in, naivete was fleeting.

Harry wanted nothing more than to protect her, from pain, from the bubble that surrendered her being popped, from her castles in the air coming inevitably tumbling down, but it was too late.

Her dance was of hope, almost as if she wished that someone were watching, anyone were watching, to ease the loneliness of being invisible. She had friends, a few, but they weren't friends to who her true self mattered. They were Ginny's friends for convenience only, to convince her and others that she wasn't so different from everyone else. Still, her guise was never complete. There was a separation there that would always be there, that caused her to hang back when she should have jumped right in, to walk a path not quite parallel with reason. Some moments, she would find herself a member of the crowd, caught up in the frenzy of Gryffindor winning a match, or whispering excitedly with a fellow sixth year over the upcoming dance. Just as often, though, Ginny wouldn't fit in at all, a piece of her that refused to jam into square space that everyone thought defined her.

Did everyone else cry in longing for something always escaping them just around the corner, or dream of being noticed while striving to remain alone? Because she did. She felt as if a part of her had never been finished, a ragged end of ribbon left twirling aimlessly in the air, was looking for a means of being secured.

Harry wanted to turn away, but he couldn't quite bring himself to. He was fascinated by her, by the turn of her hands, the carefree hair that she continually brushed in an absent manner away from her face. Even the feet that trample flowers beneath them as they dance didn't escape Harry's attention, the irony of beauty being destroyed for beauty.

He wishes he could be her, so simple and happy. It's not hard to be happy, not really, on the outside, because you can smile even through the tears. It's harder on the inside, where no one can see. For Harry, it's all about pretending. Funny that whenever you wish the most to be normal, you always feel the most separate, yet when you are singled out, you want nothing more than to melt back in to the crowd.

Just as suddenly as she began, Ginny stops dancing as if ashamed, cheeks red from the effort, her eyes averted towards something or someone that Harry does not see. Ginny's frozen like a pantomime in a play, with only her face to tell the tale. Her mind at last communicates with the rest of her and Ginny is running, feet moving across the gardens faster than when she danced, book left behind on the stone bench. A person catches her in an embrace, features made into undefined planes and murky shadows by the dark.

It all makes perfect sense to Harry then. She is meeting a boy out here at night. That's why she comes to the gardens. He feels silly and stupid for ever thinking that Ginny might be there for the same reason he was. Harry hurries away before they come too near, retracing his steps back to the Gryffindor dormitories as quietly as possible.

Ginny pulls back from the embrace, wary of this attraction that pulls her to a stranger as if she loved him. She tries to recall how and why exactly she is in this boy's arms and finds that she can't. Ginny grips him a little tighter, feeling like she is holding on to an apparition not entirely composed of reality.

"Who," she pauses, not liking the way her voice cuts through the silence and stillness, "are you?"

He stares at her in response, his eyes the sole part of his face she can make out with any certainty, a strange aquamarine color.

Ginny shakes her head, imitating the trembling of her body. Those eyes, they spark something in her mind, shed more light on a memory covered in incomprehension. There's a hint of a promise. An important promise, but she can't recall what-

Ginny makes it as far as the stone bench to retrieve her book, before falling unceremoniously with a thud to the ground. When she dreams, she dreams of those eyes, and a sacrifice that isn't really a sacrifice at all.

The shadowy figure hovers over her, making sure she is not in any position to wake up soon. He frowns at the predictability of Ginny's features. They are identical to how they used to be, as he is sure her personality is, formed by the same circumstances. He saw the fear in her eyes when she ran to him, how she wanted to run the other direction, and yet didn't. Even in sleep, Ginny sat curled up as small as possible, warding herself from demons of the imagination.

Her life is the same as it had been and the cause of the repetition rests squarely on Tom's shoulders. He stays for but a moment to guard over her, for he reasons, what is a moment when you have all of eternity?

Harry's knowledge and experiences are of evil, not of good, and of a world that is as complicated as it is simple. Every image of these experiences are painted against the inside of his mind, on the back of his eyelids, so that every time he shut his eyes to the real world, it was still there, as tangible as ever. He can't even dream of anything but nightmares.

Harry takes forever to get to sleep, to the point that Tom gets exasperated. Taking out his wand, Tom ends up using it to send a pitcher zooming across the room. Tom smiles in satisfaction as the targets hits its mark, right in the middle of Harry's forehead.

"Finally," he whispers to the air before vanishing into it, the blurry edges of his body ceasing to define him at all and simply melding with his surroundings until there is nothing left of Tom to be noticed.

Harry awoke to a fierce headache. He moved his arm forward to pull back the covers, and it reacted slowly. When Harry swung his legs over the bed to get up, they responded sluggishly, too. A letter stood out, lying haphazardly on the cobblestones, glowing bright green in the room that was all hues of black and white.

Harry walked towards the letter, other objects in the room of no interest. Though he couldn't say why, he knew that letter was of a principle emphasis and that once opened, it would instigate a landslide. The parchment is empty, but as Harry's eyes roamed over it, writing appeared as if some phantom hand was scribbling.

" Well, why didn't you just say so in the first place?" demanded Harry, feeling entirely out of sorts. "A paragraph just to get to one sentence? You don't like to mince words, do-"

Harry stopped in the middle of speaking. More of the writing was appearing.

"I am dreaming. I must be. I don't think you could contact me unless I was," pointed out Harry quietly.

"I thought you couldn't change it at all."

"Are you saying everything I've ever dreamed is going to happen? Why are you telling me all this?"

"Revenge. Hate. Simply to fuck up the world a bit. I have seen the future already and I choose not to change it. Do you know we kill each other at exactly the same time? Rather a bad miscalculation on my part."

"Thank you."

"For giving me the satisfaction of knowing that at least I'll be able to get rid of you before I die, that I will live up to people's expectations of me. Sometimes, I'm not so sure that they didn't get the wrong guy by mistake. What if I'm no one special at all and someone else could do a better job and not make a complete mess of things?"

"I think it must be harder being evil without really wanting to, being evil because it's all you've been brought up to know. Because you aren't born evil or good or anything, but if that's what your taught, that's what you become and it's almost like..like you don't have a choice."