Nightmares and Dreamscapes

When Ginny opened her eyes, she was somewhere else.

The sky was a blurry grey, reaching down so far from the heavens that Ginny could nearly feel the clouds brush her hair.

Ginny thought that it should feel crowded here, with the sky in her hair and the rocky ground pushing painfully into her feet, but she felt comforted by her surroundings. She knew, somehow, that no harm could come to her while she walked through this grey world.

She didn't know where she was going, so she moved steadily forward through the rocky terrain, looking for something familiar.

What she found was the last thing she expected.

It was lying on the ground, wedged between two large rocks. The rocks were the same slate grey as everything else here, except for a few bright drops of red and black, slowly sliding down the grainy surface.

Ink and blood.

Ginny kneeled, leaning forward and grasping it firmly with one hand, paler than normal. She tried to pull it free of its rocky prison, but her fingers slid across the ink and blood soaked leather, unable to grip. She tried to dig her nails into the cover, tried to use the basilisk fang mark as an anchor, but the diary would not budge.

"It's meant to stay there," said a voice, an achingly familiar voice that caused her to jerk her head up and stare.

Tom stood over her, monstrously tall from her kneeling position. He was dressed the same, in his outdated Hogwarts robes with the serpents proudly writhing on the patch on his chest.

"It's destroyed," Ginny said, letting go of the diary. "It was destroyed and you with it."

Tom's laugh was clear and bright in their dim surroundings. Ginny slowly rose, keeping her soiled hands held stiffly away from her body.

"You aren't real," Ginny said. "You never were."

"I was real enough to you," Tom replied. "Isn't what you think more important than what the world says?"

"Not when you were just a lie," Ginny said, old feelings of betrayal and violation slithering through her heart like vipers.

"Are you really anything more than I am?" Tom asked. He held out his hand, pristine and pale, with neatly trimmed nails and the slightest hint of callouses from writing.

Ginny did not accept his offer, could not ally herself with him. Because of him, her memory was incomplete, because of him she had lost hours and friends and trust, had bloodied her hands and had betrayed herself. Sold herself short. Lost a year of her life to loneliness and false hope.

She kept her soiled hands to herself, did not attempt to cleanse the sticky, drying mess.

Wounds that she had thought long healed festered as she stared into Tom's clear eyes, and she imagined that she knew him well enough to see his amusement tainting every aspect of his face.

"I am real," Ginny said. "I exist. I have a soul of my own, a body of my own, a mind of my own. I am more than you'll ever be."

Tom laughed, and stepped closer. She had thought he was beautiful when his visage had appeared in her mind when she was eleven years old, clutching a quill and scrawling her deepest fears and hates and loves into a treacherous book. She had thought of him as an angel, still thought of him as an angel - of mercy, of death, the strong guardian and the broken, fallen rebel all wrapped up in ethereal, phantom memory.

He was less and more beautiful to her now. She was older, and saw that he wasn't a man like she had thought as a child, but merely a child himself. There was an innocence and a gentleness to his features that belied the ruthlessness he possessed and that she knew all to well.

Now, when she looked at him, he seemed infinitely more reachable, yet at the same time he no longer comforted her as he had when she had been naive. He was the same as her, only she was half-destroyed by war and he reveled in the thought of starting wars.

"Leave me be," Ginny whispered. Tom had moved unbearably close, was standing toe-to-toe with her, smiling down at her. She noticed, irrelevantly, that his teeth were just the slightest bit crooked, that his white, white skin was not flawless and that his clear, wicked eyes were trained on her in a way that made her feel distinctly uncomfortable.

"We're the only ones here," he replied. His hand carefully touched her arm, his skin tepid, running his fingers along the sensitive skin inside her arm like raindrops in a storm.

"I'm the only one here," Ginny said staunchly. "You aren't real."

"Let's not have this conversation again," Tom said with a smile, like an old lover, lifting her arm and staring at her hand. Blood and ink had congealed and dried, forming a grotesque glove lacing over her fingers. Tom lifted her hand further, and kissed her knuckles softly as though she would break.

His mouth had the slightest hint of ink on the bow of his lip, and his tongue darted out to lick it thoughtlessly.

"You don't exist, Tom," Ginny said as his hand tightened around her wrist. "You were only a memory to begin with. You're just a memory now."

He leaned forward, and Ginny slid her free hand across his cheek, leaving a smear of black and red. "We don't mix well," she said, staring at the way the black ink overpowered the blood's rich color, how the red and black smeared together on the pale palette of his cheek.

"We could if you would let it," Tom replied, but Ginny just shook her head.

"I have to destroy the diary. If you're gone, I can leave," she said with certainty.

"Why can't you leave me here?" he asked, stepping back, stepping dangerously close to the diary.

"You know why," Ginny said. Tom was too dangerous to be allowed free reign. Even after everything that had happened, even after everything she knew and everything that he was to become, she still felt the urge to spill her meager secrets to him. She wanted his assurance and his friendship and above all she wanted his love, and she felt filthy for it.

She was the soiled one here. Tom was pure, true to himself. She lied. She told the world she was fine, she told herself the past was forgotten. She thought herself innocent and unsullied but she was neither.

Ginny was the worst because she wanted to be good, but allowed herself to fall again and again. Here she was, fallen again when she should be doing something. She should be fighting, she should be powerful and strong. but instead she was just a weak little girl still devoted to a memory in a diary while the world collapsed around her.

Ginny looked intently at the ground until the pressure on her wrist dissipated. She stared at the rocks and gravel until she couldn't feel Tom's presence anymore, and then she remained still as a mirage until she was certain he was gone.

She looked up, and the only color on the landscape was the fresh bright puddles of blood smearing the rocks around the diary. She crawled the scant distance to the diary, letting dust and grime stain her wispy white dress ambiguously grey.

This close, she could see a third liquid mixed with the ink and blood on the diary, the translucent deadly poison the basilisk had injected into Tom's ghost. She looked closely at her hands, but could not discern whether the poison was swirled with the grime already decorating them.

She looked up, and everything was the same except she was no longer alone with the diary.

Tom was smiling at her as he wrapped his arms around the blond, smiled at her as he twisted like a serpent to flick his tongue along the blond's pale neck. Ginny clenched her hands, unsure of what she was feeling as the blond, her blond gave a lazy, catlike grin while wrapped in her Tom's embrace.

"What- what are you doing?" she managed, feeling the bite of her nails as they sliced through the tough skin of her palms. Ink and blood were swirling into her veins, skin and bone were surrounding the foreign substances as they became part of her. Perhaps the poison was slithering into her very being, but her eyes did not leave the two boys who meant so much to her.

"She was mine first, you know," Tom said to Draco. His arm rested casually over his shoulder, but the lean of his body made it clear his intentions were far from casual.

"I know," Draco replied easily. "But she forgot about you when she was with me." Masculine fingers, slender and strong, twined together.

Ginny couldn't bear to watch as Tom laid the kiss he had tried to give her on her lover's unprotesting lips. Her soul screamed in fury, but no sound passed through her lips.

Draco broke the kiss, but twisted his head and licked the blood and ink that still smeared Tom's cheek with one long, languid motion.

"I'm who you really wanted, all those long terrified nights you spent with her," Tom whispered. It echoed deeply through the silent landscape, and Ginny stood corpse-still. "I'm the darkness in her that you worshiped. I'm the shadow that made her light bearable."

Draco said nothing.

"Everything of yourself that you thought you saw in her, you really saw in me," Tom said, leaning his head forward so that their foreheads met. They were twined together like mating serpents, eye-to-eye and mouth-to-mouth.

"But who am I?" Draco whispered.

Tom laughed. "The same as me. We're all the same here."

As their lips met again, Ginny scrambled across the sharp, rocky landscape, feeling her dress rip and the cuts slashed on her legs as she finally reached them. "Stop," she managed to gasp. "Stop, you aren't meant for each other, you're only meant for me!"

"We don't need you," Tom said coldly.

Draco was silent, but his grey eyes were simmering with lust and the expression on his face was unfriendly. They both were stroking each other's shoulders, sides, back in a distracted manner, as though they didn't realize what they were doing.

Ginny felt very alone.

"Draco, you love me," she tried. "He's evil and he's wrong and Draco, he's not yours."

"Do you think he's yours?" Draco asked.

"No," Ginny said, but it felt wrong. "Yes. He's his own, Draco, but he'll own you like he owns me if you let him."

"I let him a long time ago," Draco said. A sleeve was shoved up, an arm bared and an obscene tattoo revealed. "You know that."

"You can join us if you like," Tom said, holding out his hand again.

She looked back at the diary, soaked in blood and ink and poison, and then at her lovers, black and pale against the grayness of the sky. Poison could not be harmed by ink, and ink was impervious to poison. She took a half step forward, and looked down. Red hair obscured her view of Tom and Draco as she watched crimson ribbons of blood weave down her moonlight pale legs, as grey-stained tendrils of her white dress fluttered around her legs in the barest of breezes that swept past her.

Ginny was the filthy one. She was the ruined one, the one who was hurt and broken and tearful. Ink poisoned blood and blood was rotted black from poison. Tom reached out with his flawless hand and Draco reached out with his, and when she held out her hands they were still enveloped in gloves made of ink and blood and poison. The blood had dried brown and dead over most of her hands, but fresh blood whelmed from jealous crescents sliced in her palms.

Alone, they were pure, but if they touched her, they would be stained. Tainted. She was the impure one.

Tom smiled, blood on his cheek still unnaturally fresh and red as he said something, anything. Ginny was deaf. Draco's mouth had the hint of ink and a smear of blood, and Ginny couldn't bear the thought of staining him further.

"No," she said.

Their hands were unwavering, offered to her.

She shook her head, hair sliding over her shoulders. She took a stumbling step backwards, and another as her two lovers filled her vision, dark and pale against the sky.

She was panicked, now, scrambling backwards, afraid to turn away from them, for fear of them remaining there or disappearing or taking away their offer of salvation or of continuing to. Her feet were slick with blood from the cuts on her legs, and she slipped and fell and slid and hit the ground in fast succession.

Her head slammed backwards with her eyes still trained on Tom and Draco, and she felt the rock hit her skull as her vision danced away in black and light.

When she opened her eyes again, the sun shone brightly. She sat up slowly, her white dress whole and clean again, her hands spotless and her wounds healed. On the ground next to her was the diary, leather shining dully in the sunlight, the puckered basilisk fang mark a dark shadow.

A familiar hand picked up the diary, and Ginny looked up into Draco's grey eyes.

"Are you coming?" he asked quietly. His inky black robes seemed incongruous in the sunlight.

Ginny stared at the diary and stared at her lover, and thought of what her life would be without the two.

"Yes," she said, giving her pale, unmarred forearm one final look. "I'm coming."