Be Careful
69: How You Tempt
By Anne B. Walsh
A plume of smoke billowed upwards from the place where Ginny’s hand rested on the rim of Hufflepuff’s cup and took shape before the friends’ appalled eyes. Tom Riddle, the young man with hungry eyes Harry remembered from the memory involving Hephzibah Smith, smiled coldly at them, then turned his attention to Ginny, who was staring up at him as though under Imperius.
“No!” Harry shouted again, this time to Ron and Hermione, who had both started forward, drawing their wands. “Don’t! She has to do this herself!”
I think. I hope.
But the sword came to her. That counts for something.
“She can do this,” he said, spreading his arms to hold them back. “We have to let her.”
“Such a touching display of faith,” Riddle said, shaking his head. “A pity it comes too late. Ginny, my darling, at last we meet again...”
“I’m not your darling,” Ginny whispered. “You used me.”
“I was young then.” Riddle’s eyes darted sideways to Harry for an instant. “Foolish. I thought you were like all the others, weak, childish, fettered by ancient rules and constructs. But now I see my mistake. I treated you shamefully, Ginny, but I have not been the only one.”
“What are you talking about?”
“People have tried to lock you away ‘for your own good,’ Ginny.” The words dripped disdain. “They have treated you like a jewel which must be kept in a Gringotts vault, an artifact hidden in a secret room at Hogwarts for safekeeping. Like a thing, instead of a person with rights and a mind of your own.”
“They didn’t mean it that way.” Ginny’s eyes were fixed unwaveringly on the figure towering above her. “They only wanted me to be safe.”
“But you want to be free.” Riddle knelt down, bringing his face closer to Ginny’s. “You want to be treated as the young lady of spirit we both know you are. Not as a child, to whom doors must be closed and secrets denied.”
Slowly, as if it were against her will, Ginny nodded.
“I can offer you that freedom.” Riddle’s voice was as honeyed as it had been when he flattered Hephzibah, his smile as coaxing. “I know—who better?—that age is no ironclad indicator of ability. I would give you the respect, the honor, that your courage and intelligence deserve, and that others fail to afford you for lack of a few months’ time. There need be no false choice between your freedom and your safety, for once you are under my protection, who would dare to attack you?” A smoky hand was extended towards Ginny, palm up. “Give me your other hand, Ginny Weasley, and I will give you your heart’s true desire.”
“My heart’s true desire,” repeated Ginny, her face calm as she gazed up at Riddle. “What about my family?”
“They will not be harmed,” Riddle promised. “Unless they break my laws, in which case they must of course suffer the consequences.”
“Of course. No one is above the law.” Ginny closed her eyes and opened them again, a languid blink to match the feeling that time had slowed around her and the smoke-figure of Tom Riddle. “And all I have to do is give you my other hand.”
“Yes.” The final letter was held a moment longer than it had to be. “Your other hand, beautiful Ginny. And then the world is yours.”
Ron shook his head in tiny, frantic motions. Blood ran down Hermione’s knuckles where she’d bitten through the skin. Harry could hear his heart thundering against the inside of his ears.
“My other hand it is.” Ginny smiled up at Riddle. “Enjoy.”
Her right hand swung the sword of Gryffindor high and slammed it into the exact center of the cup.
Riddle shrieked, the exact sound he had made in the Chamber of Secrets when Harry used the basilisk’s fang on the diary. Ginny’s teeth were bared, both hands white-knuckled on the hilt of the sword as she leaned her weight against it, shoving it deeper into the cup. Above her, the shade of Tom Riddle writhed, howling in pain—
And then he was gone. The sword stood upright in the cup, which was deforming around the point of contact with the blade, as if the silver were red-hot. Ginny let go of the hilt, blinked a few times at the palms of her hands, and slowly began to topple over.
Harry dashed forward and caught her before she hit the floor, dropping to his knees and cradling her against his chest. She smiled sleepily up at him, lifting a hand to touch the side of his face. “You need a shave,” she whispered.
“You did it, Ginny,” said Ron in awe, bending over them. “You killed it.”
“He could only get a little way into my head this time.” Ginny yawned deeply. “So he was trying to get me with all the wrong things. Promising me my heart’s true desire, when since my first year that’s been to help bring him down for good.”
“And the rest of it?” asked Hermione, leaning across Harry’s other shoulder.
“He offered me the world.” Ginny looked from Hermione to Ron, then up at Harry again. “But the only world I want already belongs to me.”
Her eyelids drifted shut, and she nuzzled her face into Harry’s robes and sighed in contentment before her breathing settled into the soft, regular pattern of sleep.
Hermione chuckled. “Weasleys two, Horcruxes zero,” she said. “Three if you count the snake.”
“That means the last one’s yours, whenever we find it,” said Ron. “Since Harry had his turn way back in second year. But that leaves us right back where we were—we don’t know where the last one is, or even what it is, and we haven’t got a clue where to start looking...”
“Don’t we?” said Harry, still looking down at Ginny’s sleeping face.
“Well, I don’t.” Ron sat down on the floor and leaned back against the bunk bed. “Do you?”
“I think I might.” Harry eased Ginny into a more comfortable position. “It was in what Riddle said. That we were treating Ginny like a jewel to get locked up at Gringotts, or an...”
“Artifact,” Hermione filled in. “To be hidden in a secret room at Hogwarts.” Her eyes widened. “Oh, Harry, you don’t think—”
“Why not?” Harry looked at his friends, feeling a grin sneak onto his face and not bothering to stop it. “He was talking about where he’d put something valuable. What’s more valuable to him than these?” He nodded towards the cup, now sagging to one side as the venom spread through the metal. “The last one is either at Gringotts or at Hogwarts. I’d bet my vault on it.”
“But it won’t be in your vault,” said Ron. “It’ll be in a Death Eater’s. And they’re all purebloods, old families, the kind with the vaults that’re supposed to be guarded by dragons or only opened once a decade. How’re we going to get in one of those?”
“Hogwarts isn’t much better,” Hermione added. “It’s so big, with so many secret hiding places... even Dumbledore didn’t know everything about it, and he’d been Headmaster for all those years. And it doesn’t help that we don’t know what we’re looking for. Maybe we’ve already seen it, like we did with the locket...” She frowned. “Wait, the locket. Ginny touched that, back when we were cleaning out Grimmauld Place. She even tried to open it. Why didn’t it do this to her then?”
Harry shrugged. “Kreacher said he tried to destroy it with magic,” he said. “Maybe some of that magic damaged it or put it to sleep, so that it needed to be near somebody longer to start affecting them. Or maybe not. We’ll never know. And you’re both right. We’re not finished yet. But aren’t we a lot closer than we were yesterday?”
“I think you’re just in a good mood because you got snogged today,” said Ron, trying and failing to get a decent older-brother glare going.
Hermione giggled. “It certainly works on you,” she said. “But you’re right too, Harry. We are a lot closer than we were. We have the sword, we have two places the last one might be, and who knows? Maybe Luna will send us another letter.” Her eyes were momentarily hooded. “Or maybe Luna’s friend will.”
“Whoever that is,” said Ron. “All right, Hermione, you want guard duty or dishes?”
“I’ll get the dishes started, and then there’s a passage in Secrets of the Darkest Art I wanted to reread, but after that would you like some company?”
“Company sounds good.”
Harry tuned out the ensuing affectionate banter in favor of hoisting Ginny into his arms. Even asleep and limp, she weighed hardly more than a whisper, and he lifted her easily to the bunk above Hermione’s.
“Sweet dreams,” he said, dropping a kiss on her cheek. She smiled in her sleep.
A flaw in his plan occurred to Harry at this point. If Ginny woke up suddenly, she wouldn’t know where she was, and she might fall off the bunk. He could conjure a rail for it, but he didn’t want to interrupt Ron and Hermione just to borrow one of their wands, and Ginny was lying on hers. But there was another way to make sure she wouldn’t fall...
The sun was halfway down the sky when Hermione excused herself to Ron and went back into the tent, pulling out her wand. Harry and Ginny lay side by side on the top bunk, asleep.
I know it sets off all Ron’s protective instincts to see them like this, but I think it’s sweet. Harry deserves a little happiness after all he’s been through. And maybe Ginny can get his mind off the Deathly Hallows, help him see it’s just a story and the Elder Wand can’t be real...
But whether she can or not, and whether she goes home or stays here with us, she needs to be protected. And that means letting the right people know that she’s safe, so they won’t go looking for her and accidentally find us all.
She climbed up on her own bunk and laid her wand against Ginny’s temple. Forgive me, but it’s important.
Under her breath, she whispered the incantation for copying a memory.
Ron half-turned around at the muffled popping noise from inside the tent. What is she doing in there? It sounds like she just opened a butterbeer. Something to drink would be nice...
Sure enough, a few moments later the sound was repeated, and Hermione stuck her head out the tent flap. “Hot or cold?” she said.
“You have to ask?” Ron waved a hand at the snowy landscape all around them. “Hot, please.”
“Hot it is.” Hermione emerged with two open bottles in her hand and tapped her wand against each of them before handing Ron one. “Cheers.”
“Cheers.” Ron clinked his bottle with Hermione’s and drank deeply, savoring the taste. “Damn, that’s good. What did you do, Apparate to the Three Broomsticks?”
He thought he saw an instant of panic in Hermione’s eyes before she started to laugh.
No, I’m imagining things again. Drink your butterbeer and forget about it, Weasley. Life’s got enough problems without you making up more.
And speaking of problems...
“What’re we going to do about Ginny?” he asked.
“I don’t know that we’re going to do anything. We’re not in charge.” Hermione sipped at her drink. “Though really, neither is Harry. He’s just...”
“The one with nowhere else to do and a quest to finish,” Ron supplied when she faltered. “And you know Mum’ll go spare if we keep her out here with us.”
“Yes, but how are we going to get her back to the Burrow without being caught?”
“I suppose we could take her to Bill and Fleur’s...”
“We could, but then what?” Hermione held her bottle between her hands, warming them. “She still can’t go home, because the Ministry’s watching your family and the instant they see her they’ll arrest her for running away from school. So she’ll be stuck at Shell Cottage, and you know how she feels about Fleur.”
“Yeah.” Ron examined the label on his bottle. “One or the other of them would end up at the bottom of the ocean inside ten days.”
“Besides...” Hermione’s voice dropped. “Ron, Harry’s happy with her here. When was the last time you saw him smile? Really smile? He’s in there now, asleep, and he looks just like he used to before any of this started. I don’t want him to lose that.”
“Well, I don’t want my sister to get killed!”
“Neither do I, but if you’ll notice, we haven’t been found once since we’ve been out here, and I’d tend to think that means she won’t be killed because they can’t kill what they can’t find!”
“But she might mean we’ll get found, because the second she does magic that little thing called the Trace goes active on her, remember?”
“As hard as this may be for you to believe, Mr. Pureblood, a person can live without doing magic for weeks or even months at a time—”
The tent flap opened from the inside. “Keep it down out here?” Harry requested, blinking near-sightedly at them both. “Some of us are trying to sleep.”
Ron could feel himself turning red. “Sorry,” he mumbled in chorus with Hermione.
“It’s fine.” Harry shut the flap again.
Ginny slipped up beside Harry and extended first his glasses, then her wand, tapping a finger to her lips. Harry nodded, took the wand, and cast a quick “Muffliato” on the flap. “Thanks,” he said, offering it back.
Ginny waved him off. “It’s a gift. Keep it.”
“What? I can’t keep your wand!”
“Why not? I’m not going to need it, no matter what I do now.”
Harry sighed. “Yeah. We should talk about that.”
“We should.” Ginny took his hand and led him into the sitting area of the tent.
I wish I could tell you how much I love you. How much I want to be with you every second of every day. But that would only scare you right now.
Let me see if I can’t do it another way.
“Will you tell me the truth about something?” she asked when they were both sitting down.
“Mm-hmm.” Harry was inspecting her wand. “Is this pine?”
“Pine and phoenix feather, nine and three-quarter inches, and don’t change the subject. Would you send Ron and Hermione home if you thought it was safe for them to go?”
Harry’s head snapped up. “How did you know that?”
“Because I know you, Harry.” Ginny tried not to laugh at his half-panicked, half-guilty expression. “You want to take all the danger on yourself and keep the rest of the world completely safe. And at the very end, that’s how it will have to be. You versus You-Know-Who, without anybody else there to help. But Harry, this isn’t the end yet. And you still need help.”
Harry slumped in his chair. “I’m doing what he told you about, aren’t I?” he said dully. “I’m treating you like a thing. Trying to lock you up to keep you safe.”
“No!” Ginny shook her head vehemently. “Harry, no, that’s not how you think of me. You told me that yourself, just before Riddle started talking.”
“I did?”
“You did. When you told Ron and Hermione not to help me. That I had to do it on my own. You think about me like a person, a person you care about, and you wanted me to stay in a safe place because you care about me.” Ginny took a deep breath. “But it didn’t work.”
Harry twisted a handful of his armchair’s fabric out of shape. “Tell me something I don’t know.”
“All right, I will.” Ginny leaned forward, her heart beginning to race. “The war is everywhere, Harry. There are no safe places anymore. Some places are just safer than others.” She stood up and crossed to his chair, leaning down. “And the safest place in the world for me now is right by your side,” she said quietly. “Because I know what you would do to stop me from being hurt.” She cracked a smile. “Besides, you’ll fight so much better if you’re well-fed.”
Harry laughed. “And that’s not mentioning that we’d have to Stun you and drag you away to get you home at this point?” he asked, reaching up to pull her down into his lap.
“Nope. Not mentioning it at all.” Ginny kissed Harry’s neck lightly.
“I hope you know the latest Potterwatch password,” he murmured into her hair.
“Do broomsticks fly?”
“Hello, and welcome to Potterwatch. My name is River, and as always, I’ll be your host this evening. Tonight on our show, the return of the lovely Radiance and her helpful ‘Tips for Evil Overlords’! And all-new, we have Reflection the Potter Spotter and his segment on ‘Where Harry Potter’s Been’! But first, Potterwatch extends its condolences to the Weasley family on learning that Ginny Weasley has contracted spattergroit at Hogwarts, most likely from nursing her big brother Ron over the Christmas holiday just past. An alert classmate was able to get Ginny out of the castle before she became infectious, and she is currently recuperating in an undisclosed location. The Healers’ prognosis is cautiously good. And now, the news...”
Hermione is not doing anything bad, just to get that out of the way right now. However, what she’s doing will be important later. Isn’t everything?
No promises about chapter tomorrow—my boss will be back from her trip, which means I have to look like I’m working all day instead of writing. I’ll do my best, though!