Chapter Six: Stood on a Bridge, Tied to the Noose
5th June 1997
‘I’m sure they’ll find him, Ginny,’ Ron mutters, patting his sister’s back; ‘he can’t just have disappeared without a trace and for no reason.’
Hermione narrows her eyes; she has not spoken to Ginny these few days, despite wanting desperately to – about Harry, about Groan. But she cannot bring herself to, staring into the golden-flecked eyes that have suddenly become so foreign. And Harry…Harry holds himself away before all of them, even as Malfoy, being examined by Madam Pomfrey from across the living room, peers and leans forward ever so imperceptibly. There is something heartbreaking in Harry’s reversion to apparent indifference –
Hermione knows that despite everything else about his lack of speech, and his body language, he has not turned away from the smaller girl opposite him. Hermione knows that kind of tingling, barely suppressed pain, her own fingers having gripped the edges of a school desk so many times.
Why can’t Ginny see it?
Hermione gets up, unable to face the burden of the events about her any longer. Everything seems to be coalescing, she finds herself thinking; shaking her head slightly, she begins to absent-mindedly finger the upper frame of the fireplace…
Abruptly, something ricochets in her mind – quickly, Hermione bends down and reaches her hands into the inside of the fireplace. There is no soot, nothing except dust…dust that has settled in a perfect layer, undisturbed for days until Hermione intruded.
Mrs. Weasley has been too busy with everything to attend to the cleaning the way she would…
Suddenly, despite the warm summer weather, Hermione feels very cold.
She knows now – Timothy Groan never arrived by Floo.
He never arrived by any earthly method at all.
~
Harry wants to shake Ginny, but looking at her only seems to make it harder for him to even think.
And it’s difficult to watch her like this – caring so much for Groan, no matter how selfish that sounds even to himself. Harry closes his eyes. His head has started to hurt; he hasn’t been feeling very – very stable of late.
It must be the shock from yesterday…and the shock at Godric’s Hollow, he thinks, the shock of the Dementors…
But even he knows that it is more than that – even more than the true shock that he had first felt when he had stepped off the train onto the platform at the train station nearest to Godric’s Hollow, the surreal sensation of being somehow so close, although he didn’t – couldn’t – admit it. It has been so difficult to keep himself in check; he has been having these headaches, and he has been feeling so easily tired…he cannot even bring himself to fight Ginny any more.
Harry opens his eyes again, focusing on Ginny, Ron. Ron is still patting Ginny’s back, every bit the concerned brother – but Harry remembers what Ron muttered the other night, about something being wrong, and even then he had somehow known the taller boy had meant something being wrong about Ginny, something wrong happening to her. And Ron had not slept well the night before. Harry had woken up in the middle of the night, when they had finally been sent to slept by Mrs. Weasley, turned away from Ginny’s room, to the loud creaks from his friend’s bed, and had turned to find him folded in a foetal position, hands clenched against the sheets, eyes tightly shut.
The pain begins to creep around the back of his head again, and Harry groans silently to himself. There is just so much.
~
And then Terence Higgs comes down the stairs, and announces that he has found Timothy Groan.
‘Where?’ Ginny demands. She stands up quickly, and her eyes are wide, making her look younger than she really is. ‘Where is he?’
Higgs seems almost to pause before answering; his quietly handsome countenance seemingly bland, he says, ‘In a far corner of your attic. Seems he sleepwalks. He didn’t even wake with the din the ghost up there was making.’
‘How did you find him, then?’ asks Hermione, even as Ginny pushes past everyone, running up the stairs, Harry’s and Malfoy’s eyes following her. Ron looks at Hermione, his clear blue eyes unusually keen.
‘The ghost rather unhappily mentioned it to me when I walked up on a hunch,’ replies Higgs evenly, and his hands are still, grasped together.
Hermione’s eyes meet Ron’s; without speaking, they turn to glance at Harry. The black-haired boy nods at them, even as his eyes are hooded, tired.
When the three of them leave together, Draco Malfoy turns his back on Madam Pomfrey, and begins to stand up as well.
~
Perhaps it is the first time that Ginny has seen Timothy in this state. His shock of pale hair is unkempt, the parting having somehow changed from right to left, and the usually well-ironed clothes are rumpled, draping over the limbs in an emphasis of the almost girlish, vulnerable slenderness of the boy. In the late morning sunlight, his eyes are a strange violet. She doesn’t quite remember them being of that shade of colour.
‘Timothy?’ she asks, bending down towards him. He is seated on the floor, and there is still a disconcerting look of disorientation on his face. ‘Are you alright?’
Abruptly any trace of disorientation is wiped clean from his face, and Ginny almost glimpses a kind of harsh shrewdness in his features before he turns fully, smiling, at her.
‘I’m quite fine, Ginny,’ he says, ‘I’m also very sorry.’ The smile turns rueful. ‘It seems I have rather…disturbed the family with my little midnight sojourn.’
‘I never knew you sleepwalked,’ says Ginny. She reaches out a hand for him, and he takes it; with a little effort she helps him up on to his feet.
‘Well,’ says Timothy, his tone light, ‘I never quite knew myself the seriousness of the condition.’
‘You mean you’ve never sleepwalked this far before?’
There is a pause, as Timothy runs his hands down his clothes, brushing off dirt, but Ginny cannot but help feel that he is avoiding her question. Finally, he says, ‘Hmm, perhaps, yes.’
‘Another perfectly non-committal answer, I see,’ cuts in a new voice; Ginny turns around to see Hermione, with Ron and Harry directly behind her, standing at the threshold. Hermione. Ginny hasn’t spoken to her in a while, and seeing her at the doorway leading into the attic Ginny almost forgets her previous anger towards the older girl.
Timothy is facing Hermione calmly, his face almost blank.
‘Why don’t you start giving some real answers, Groan?’ says Hermione, and her face, Ginny realises, in the sunlight, is becoming harder, looking more and more like a woman’s. ‘Like how you got here in the first place?’
‘I sleepwalk, Miss Granger,’ says Timothy slowly, and Ginny can hear the antagonistic condescension that is laced into his tone.
‘Hermione,’ Ginny finds herself saying, ‘Maybe we should do this some other time – perhaps Timothy ought to be getting a rest first before you start asking him such questions…’
‘Timothy Groan,’ interrupts Hermione, and her tone is emphatic, ‘You will tell us how exactly you managed to get into this house.’
Behind her and Ron and Harry, Ginny sees Malfoy’s white-blond head lingering at the end of the landing.
‘I have already elaborated on that,’ replies Timothy, but Ginny is beginning to feel the unfurling sense of apprehension blossoming within her. Yet unconsciously she takes a step closer to him.
‘The grate at the fireplace, Groan, is covered by a smooth layer of dust,’ Hermione says, her voice level and almost patient, ‘a smooth layer of dust,’ she repeats, ‘which has not been disturbed for days, perhaps weeks. You did not come here by Floo, Groan. Now, in case you did not already know, but I’m so very sure you do, the Burrow allows for Apparition only of the members of the Order of the Phoenix and the Weasley family. So you couldn’t have come by that means, either. And the wards on the Burrow have made it almost, if imperfectly so, Unplottable, so you could not very well have found it on a map, either, unless you had very ancient – and in that case, very inaccessible and backward maps on the Weasley family’s ancestral grounds – and entered into the house by physical means,’ Hermione pauses. Her eyes narrow. ‘I don’t like to not know about things, Groan. So why don’t you illuminate me?’
There is a resounding silence.
‘Harry,’ Hermione says, without turning around, ‘look very carefully at Groan, and talk to him.’
‘Hermione, what do you mean? Shouldn’t we interrogate him further?’ expostulates Ron. ‘Shouldn’t the Order know about this?’
‘Harry,’ Hermione says firmly. Then she steps aside, letting Harry face Timothy directly. Ginny feels as if she is rooted to the spot. There is a perplexed, yet angry expression on Harry’s face; there is unhappiness and confusion and so much anger.
And then abruptly, Harry’s face clears. For the longest time, Ginny stares at him, stares at his brilliant green eyes which are intent on Timothy. Then he opens his mouth to speak.
A sibilant hiss comes out.
~
‘Let me tell you the story, of a boy who shouldn’t have lived.’
‘He shouldn’t have lived, you see, for what he had seen, but unfortunately for him he did. He made a choice, and it was uninformed and misinformed, but it was a choice nonetheless. He was friends – very close friends – with an older housemate named Tom Riddle, and he fancied Tom liked him more than most, or at least appeared to like him more than most, because this boy wasn’t always very impressed with Tom like the others were. This boy didn’t hang on to Tom’s coattails. Most of the time Tom sought him out, not the other way around. But they were good friends, like many other good friends, and confided in one another, the older Tom helping the younger boy in his schoolwork, the younger boy listening to the older Tom about his troubles at the orphanage he was in. This boy understood Tom’s anger like no one else did, because he would always just listen quietly to all that sound and fury that poured off Tom’s tongue. He absorbed Tom’s anger, quietly. And Tom needed him for that; he couldn’t have contained all of that pain and anger all by himself, not at that age. He might have self-destructed.
‘But the boy didn’t know the extent of Tom’s ambitions, even as he listened to Tom’s stories and dreams and memories. The boy was like an undiscerning mirror to Tom, after a fashion, and after a while when Tom looked at him he saw himself. And by that time Tom had begun to make plans, but he also wanted security. He wanted something to preserve his memory in, a mirror of his soul, a perfect copy of himself and of his memories.
‘So he chose to perform a terrible variant of Necromancy on an old diary he had found at his orphanage a long time ago. It would have been such a perfectly ironic choice of medium, if not quite so very unpredictable. Tom as a sixteen-year-old had still been given to dramatics. And finally, his unwilling witness, and in some part, unwilling sacrifice, was the boy.
‘Something needed to be exchanged for Tom to tear his soul and make it undyingly sixteen in the pages of an old diary, ready for pain and emotion to poured into, and for him to become human on those alone again. He needed the boy for all that pain and emotion he had absorbed so uncomplainingly from him. But he also needed the boy as sacrifice for the help of the most capricious of common spirits.
‘A kelpie, with its power of shapeshifting, really has so much capacity for sympathetic magic; it reaches into the fears and desires of its victims, after all, for inspiration of its form. And its power is really so much more concentrated than that of an ordinary, half-witted boggart’s. Tom needed that reflected sensitivity in that diary to complement the bit of soul he tore out of himself to place into it, so that it was the ultimate legacy. And the kelpie wanted to live forever, too. It wanted the most vulnerable and yet most invulnerable form – it wanted a permanent human form. A form that holds the most power over all living creatures.
‘This boy was their compromise. But he was not a blank canvass for them to imprint their ambitions onto him completely. This boy became too powerful for them. He became the worst thing of all.
‘In the darkest magic of that hour, he became what was distilled from all three of them the worst thing imaginable. He was the boy and he was Tom’s hurt and anger of sixteen short years and he was the Kelpie’s unnatural long life and instinct all at once.
‘That boy was Titus Groan.
‘I am Titus Groan.’
~
‘Merlin,’ whispers Ron, as Timothy – Titus Groan ¬– finishes his story. The few of them has been quiet at the small landing leading into the attic all this time, listening to him. Even Malfoy’s presence hasn’t been questioned; he is nearest to Ginny, having moved up to better hear the story.
‘That’s why the Kelpie came yesterday,’ says Hermione, her voice strangely young-sounding compared to its tone of firmness previously. ‘It was coming for you, not Ginny or Malfoy. It had sensed your presence and had tailed you here. And that’s why Harry would know to speak Parseltongue to you. It’s instinctual. Kelpies understand Parseltongue.’
‘What happened to Tom when what happened to you…happened?’ asks Ginny, her voice breaking, her words coming out almost garbled and stumbling and incoherent.
‘Nothing,’ says Timothy – Titus – almost distantly, ‘he didn’t really know what he was doing. I didn’t really know what had happened.’
‘What are you doing here, then?’ interrupts Malfoy, very abruptly.
‘I needed to wait for all pieces of that particular magic that Tom employed to come together,’ replies Timothy – Titus. ‘I waited years for Ginny to surface; the magic of the diary does not follow linear time, you see. Tom had given it to Lucius a long time ago because of that, to pass it to the suitable candidate. And I waited years for your – mishap – to happen. Tom forgets, I think, in his corrupted form, what he wields with ink and blood.’
‘What do you want to do with Ginny?’ demands Harry.
‘I only want to help her destroy what’s left within her that is Tom’s hurt and anger.’ It is a simple reply, but Ginny feels very cold despite the summer heat.
‘And why would you want to do that?’ asks Malfoy, leaning forward. He is so close to Ginny now she almost feels his breath on her skin. She shivers.
Timothy – Titus, Ginny doesn’t know which, turns to him. That is almost a peaceful expression on his face.
‘I want to do that, Malfoy,’ he begins slowly, and then pauses.
‘I want to do that because I want to die.’
~
After Timothy – Titus’s words, the silence hangs sickeningly heavy, until Ginny finally breaks it by saying, as if despite herself, ‘Did you know that it would be me when you waited for the magic of the diary to resurface?’
The boy – not quite a boy – turns to her, and Ginny wonders if she sees friendship or pity in them, and she abruptly wonders which would be worse. Thankfully though, there is still that detachment in his gaze, a hardness that Ginny has become used to and finds herself strangely understanding.
‘No,’ says Timothy – Timothy, thinks Ginny, suddenly firmly, because I know him as Timothy, despite everything that has now changed – ‘I didn’t know. I could only bide my time and wait for it.’
‘Did Dumbledore know, then?’ asks Harry. His voice is surprisingly level. ‘Did Dumbledore know that – well, that you’re not quite human?’
Ginny almost thinks she imagines the flinch that passes through Timothy’s features like quicksilver; in a moment, though, Timothy’s face is blank and calm again, and he replies, ‘Dumbledore knew. He trusts me.’
Harry shakes his head abruptly, agitatedly at that, and then says, ‘I’m not even going to ask why that’s so. Why do you want to die, then?’
‘Harry,’ Ginny finds herself saying, ‘how can you…?’
‘It’s alright, Ginny,’ interrupts Timothy. He turns to face Harry directly, and there is an almost business-like hardness to his expression. ‘I doubt I can begin to explain it to you if you can’t already imagine it. Perhaps you could see it as a suitable revenge. Even so, my death would definitely be of benefit to you.’
Harry studies him through narrowed eyes. ‘In what way?’
‘Think about it, Potter,’ begins Timothy, and a ghost of a sneer settles on his features, ‘If we can reverse the spell that erases the perverted kelpie powers within me that prevents my death through physical means, and at the same time releases that bit of Tom’s soul kept alive by whatever pain and emotion I – and now Ginny and in some way Draco – have harboured for him, that would be the equivalent of making vulnerable the most dangerous and volatile of Tom’s Horcruxes for you to destroy.’
‘The spell is dark magic, isn’t it?’ says Ron, finally. There is something considering to his countenance, something Ginny finds herself, selfishly, almost sad to see is grown-up; it is as if Ron is just that much further away from her again.
‘Yes,’ replies Timothy clearly, ‘it is.’
‘Then there must be some other way,’ says Ron, his voice equally clear.
‘There isn’t,’ says Timothy. ‘Everything must be undone the same way it was put together.’
‘There has to be.’
His voice is of a tone and certainty that brooks no argument
~
That night, he watches her through the hole in the wall, his forehead and his neck strangely hot even in the warm summer night.
At first, as she comes close to the hole by entering the room through her door, he can see only her bare, slender ankles, white against the scratched parquet; he watches how she lifts the arch of her feet, resting her weight on the balls of her feet as she reaches for something at the top of her dresser – it is out of his sight, that – and he observes how the moonlight trips over the slim shapes of her calves as she moves further away from the hole.
Quietly he cranes his neck, pushing himself deeper behind the headboard, one elbow propped painfully onto the top of the bed’s metal frame.
She shifts away; comes back in old shorts and an oversized T-shirt, colour faded, and the only thing bright about her is the whiteness of her skin in the moonlight, and the deep red of her long hair. She seems distracted; she moves around the room, then abruptly turns on her heel and stops facing a different direction.
He can hear almost hear her steady breathing.
And suddenly, for no apparent reason that he can logically think of, he wants to ask her, shout through the tiny hole that just slips off into Sylvia Plath’s line at her, if she can tell him about Timothy Groan who was her friend and not her friend, and Harry Potter who so obviously and painfully loved her but whom he hated, and Tom Riddle who had sought to destroy him.
Perhaps because, inexplicably, all of Draco Malfoy’s questions now unerringly find themselves at Ginny Weasley’s doorstep.
~
Then she turns, and walks out of the room again.
In a moment he is out of his bed, too.
~
He hears footsteps pad softly across the landing. Beside him Ron is sleeping soundly.
He knows that Hermione is usually a sound sleeper too, and that it is unlikely that any of the other sleepers would be out, at this time. Terence Higgs is stationed outside the house.
Quietly, his head still pounding, he gropes for his spectacles on the side of his bed, and slips off.
~
‘Ginny,’ says Harry’s voice, and Ginny almost jumps; Harry always has such a quiet way of walking she never hears him, especially not when her head is full to burst with thoughts and questions and a strange sadness and sense of loss.
‘Hey,’ he says again, and reaches her. They are standing at the threshold of the kitchen, half in the flooding light from within the room.
‘Hey Harry,’ Ginny does not turn around, but her voice is kept light. She knows that despite everything that has changed, and all her guilt, she misses him; she misses his brilliant green eyes twinkling at her, she misses the way he never quite knows how to express himself, she misses how he smells so much like a boy should, like cut grass and rain.
She realizes all of this in this moment, with him so near to her, and almost feels as if something tightens in her chest.
It almost feels real, what it was between them.
‘Can’t sleep?’ she tries to say the words, but they come out choked instead. Horrified, she still doesn’t turn around, and her hands fly to her mouth and a half-formed sound comes out from somewhere in her throat.
‘Ginny,’ repeats Harry, and this time he pulls her around. In the half-light his brilliant green eyes are so bright and so full of something her heart almost lifts and she almost forgets the indifference with which he has treated her for the past hours.
But even so there is something too sharp about the way his eyes are so bright. Almost feverish-looking, Ginny thinks, fleetingly, is Hermione still administering the potion? And then, the thought, we haven’t all of us been very right in the head…
Then he smiles, a boyish, rueful smile. ‘A lot of things have happened, haven’t they?’
‘Things,’ Ginny repeats, helplessly, and she feels the ghost of a wan smile try to escape her lips.
‘Things,’ repeats Harry more resolutely, and the way he says it makes Ginny want to believe that these things will come to pass.
‘I’m sorry,’ Ginny blurts, suddenly, and then she wonders what she is apologizing for, before wondering how she can even start to apologize.
Harry looks at her levelly this time, and his hands are still over her wrists. She is suddenly aware of that, too. ‘The last few days were crazy, weren’t they?’
Ginny finds herself nodding fervently.
‘I was talking to Ron and Hermione,’ says Harry, ‘and we were thinking that perhaps it’s safest to stay at the Burrow and try to help Groan figure out what to do with himself – and Malfoy and…’
‘And me,’ finishes Ginny for him, and she almost surprises herself by hearing a note of bemusement in her tone.
‘And you,’ says Harry, nodding mock-gravely, then – he smiles again, and this time it is brilliant.
Ginny feels like her heart might break at any moment.
But Harry leans forward, and Ginny can see the brilliant green beneath his straight black lashes when he kisses her.
~
He has seen this happen before.
He once saw them, during the school term when the dew was still clinging to his robes and he could still feel the tiredness around his eyes after a Pepper-up Potion, as he walked quietly down the corridor back towards his dorms.
Ginny Weasley with her back almost ramrod straight, spelling uncertainty in her very posture, Harry Potter smiling and leaning forward.
Later, she smiled back at Potter.
Draco Malfoy could have told either of them that she wasn’t really happy.
That night, when he thought about it again, it somehow made him very, very angry.
That night, he found the route through which the Death Eaters could enter, and felt the feverish, coursing satisfaction that everything was going to be right in the world.
~
A/N: all the additional stuff about Necromancy and the Kelpie are of my own invention.
5th June 1997
‘I’m sure they’ll find him, Ginny,’ Ron mutters, patting his sister’s back; ‘he can’t just have disappeared without a trace and for no reason.’
Hermione narrows her eyes; she has not spoken to Ginny these few days, despite wanting desperately to – about Harry, about Groan. But she cannot bring herself to, staring into the golden-flecked eyes that have suddenly become so foreign. And Harry…Harry holds himself away before all of them, even as Malfoy, being examined by Madam Pomfrey from across the living room, peers and leans forward ever so imperceptibly. There is something heartbreaking in Harry’s reversion to apparent indifference –
Hermione knows that despite everything else about his lack of speech, and his body language, he has not turned away from the smaller girl opposite him. Hermione knows that kind of tingling, barely suppressed pain, her own fingers having gripped the edges of a school desk so many times.
Why can’t Ginny see it?
Hermione gets up, unable to face the burden of the events about her any longer. Everything seems to be coalescing, she finds herself thinking; shaking her head slightly, she begins to absent-mindedly finger the upper frame of the fireplace…
Abruptly, something ricochets in her mind – quickly, Hermione bends down and reaches her hands into the inside of the fireplace. There is no soot, nothing except dust…dust that has settled in a perfect layer, undisturbed for days until Hermione intruded.
Mrs. Weasley has been too busy with everything to attend to the cleaning the way she would…
Suddenly, despite the warm summer weather, Hermione feels very cold.
She knows now – Timothy Groan never arrived by Floo.
He never arrived by any earthly method at all.
~
Harry wants to shake Ginny, but looking at her only seems to make it harder for him to even think.
And it’s difficult to watch her like this – caring so much for Groan, no matter how selfish that sounds even to himself. Harry closes his eyes. His head has started to hurt; he hasn’t been feeling very – very stable of late.
It must be the shock from yesterday…and the shock at Godric’s Hollow, he thinks, the shock of the Dementors…
But even he knows that it is more than that – even more than the true shock that he had first felt when he had stepped off the train onto the platform at the train station nearest to Godric’s Hollow, the surreal sensation of being somehow so close, although he didn’t – couldn’t – admit it. It has been so difficult to keep himself in check; he has been having these headaches, and he has been feeling so easily tired…he cannot even bring himself to fight Ginny any more.
Harry opens his eyes again, focusing on Ginny, Ron. Ron is still patting Ginny’s back, every bit the concerned brother – but Harry remembers what Ron muttered the other night, about something being wrong, and even then he had somehow known the taller boy had meant something being wrong about Ginny, something wrong happening to her. And Ron had not slept well the night before. Harry had woken up in the middle of the night, when they had finally been sent to slept by Mrs. Weasley, turned away from Ginny’s room, to the loud creaks from his friend’s bed, and had turned to find him folded in a foetal position, hands clenched against the sheets, eyes tightly shut.
The pain begins to creep around the back of his head again, and Harry groans silently to himself. There is just so much.
~
And then Terence Higgs comes down the stairs, and announces that he has found Timothy Groan.
‘Where?’ Ginny demands. She stands up quickly, and her eyes are wide, making her look younger than she really is. ‘Where is he?’
Higgs seems almost to pause before answering; his quietly handsome countenance seemingly bland, he says, ‘In a far corner of your attic. Seems he sleepwalks. He didn’t even wake with the din the ghost up there was making.’
‘How did you find him, then?’ asks Hermione, even as Ginny pushes past everyone, running up the stairs, Harry’s and Malfoy’s eyes following her. Ron looks at Hermione, his clear blue eyes unusually keen.
‘The ghost rather unhappily mentioned it to me when I walked up on a hunch,’ replies Higgs evenly, and his hands are still, grasped together.
Hermione’s eyes meet Ron’s; without speaking, they turn to glance at Harry. The black-haired boy nods at them, even as his eyes are hooded, tired.
When the three of them leave together, Draco Malfoy turns his back on Madam Pomfrey, and begins to stand up as well.
~
Perhaps it is the first time that Ginny has seen Timothy in this state. His shock of pale hair is unkempt, the parting having somehow changed from right to left, and the usually well-ironed clothes are rumpled, draping over the limbs in an emphasis of the almost girlish, vulnerable slenderness of the boy. In the late morning sunlight, his eyes are a strange violet. She doesn’t quite remember them being of that shade of colour.
‘Timothy?’ she asks, bending down towards him. He is seated on the floor, and there is still a disconcerting look of disorientation on his face. ‘Are you alright?’
Abruptly any trace of disorientation is wiped clean from his face, and Ginny almost glimpses a kind of harsh shrewdness in his features before he turns fully, smiling, at her.
‘I’m quite fine, Ginny,’ he says, ‘I’m also very sorry.’ The smile turns rueful. ‘It seems I have rather…disturbed the family with my little midnight sojourn.’
‘I never knew you sleepwalked,’ says Ginny. She reaches out a hand for him, and he takes it; with a little effort she helps him up on to his feet.
‘Well,’ says Timothy, his tone light, ‘I never quite knew myself the seriousness of the condition.’
‘You mean you’ve never sleepwalked this far before?’
There is a pause, as Timothy runs his hands down his clothes, brushing off dirt, but Ginny cannot but help feel that he is avoiding her question. Finally, he says, ‘Hmm, perhaps, yes.’
‘Another perfectly non-committal answer, I see,’ cuts in a new voice; Ginny turns around to see Hermione, with Ron and Harry directly behind her, standing at the threshold. Hermione. Ginny hasn’t spoken to her in a while, and seeing her at the doorway leading into the attic Ginny almost forgets her previous anger towards the older girl.
Timothy is facing Hermione calmly, his face almost blank.
‘Why don’t you start giving some real answers, Groan?’ says Hermione, and her face, Ginny realises, in the sunlight, is becoming harder, looking more and more like a woman’s. ‘Like how you got here in the first place?’
‘I sleepwalk, Miss Granger,’ says Timothy slowly, and Ginny can hear the antagonistic condescension that is laced into his tone.
‘Hermione,’ Ginny finds herself saying, ‘Maybe we should do this some other time – perhaps Timothy ought to be getting a rest first before you start asking him such questions…’
‘Timothy Groan,’ interrupts Hermione, and her tone is emphatic, ‘You will tell us how exactly you managed to get into this house.’
Behind her and Ron and Harry, Ginny sees Malfoy’s white-blond head lingering at the end of the landing.
‘I have already elaborated on that,’ replies Timothy, but Ginny is beginning to feel the unfurling sense of apprehension blossoming within her. Yet unconsciously she takes a step closer to him.
‘The grate at the fireplace, Groan, is covered by a smooth layer of dust,’ Hermione says, her voice level and almost patient, ‘a smooth layer of dust,’ she repeats, ‘which has not been disturbed for days, perhaps weeks. You did not come here by Floo, Groan. Now, in case you did not already know, but I’m so very sure you do, the Burrow allows for Apparition only of the members of the Order of the Phoenix and the Weasley family. So you couldn’t have come by that means, either. And the wards on the Burrow have made it almost, if imperfectly so, Unplottable, so you could not very well have found it on a map, either, unless you had very ancient – and in that case, very inaccessible and backward maps on the Weasley family’s ancestral grounds – and entered into the house by physical means,’ Hermione pauses. Her eyes narrow. ‘I don’t like to not know about things, Groan. So why don’t you illuminate me?’
There is a resounding silence.
‘Harry,’ Hermione says, without turning around, ‘look very carefully at Groan, and talk to him.’
‘Hermione, what do you mean? Shouldn’t we interrogate him further?’ expostulates Ron. ‘Shouldn’t the Order know about this?’
‘Harry,’ Hermione says firmly. Then she steps aside, letting Harry face Timothy directly. Ginny feels as if she is rooted to the spot. There is a perplexed, yet angry expression on Harry’s face; there is unhappiness and confusion and so much anger.
And then abruptly, Harry’s face clears. For the longest time, Ginny stares at him, stares at his brilliant green eyes which are intent on Timothy. Then he opens his mouth to speak.
A sibilant hiss comes out.
~
‘Let me tell you the story, of a boy who shouldn’t have lived.’
‘He shouldn’t have lived, you see, for what he had seen, but unfortunately for him he did. He made a choice, and it was uninformed and misinformed, but it was a choice nonetheless. He was friends – very close friends – with an older housemate named Tom Riddle, and he fancied Tom liked him more than most, or at least appeared to like him more than most, because this boy wasn’t always very impressed with Tom like the others were. This boy didn’t hang on to Tom’s coattails. Most of the time Tom sought him out, not the other way around. But they were good friends, like many other good friends, and confided in one another, the older Tom helping the younger boy in his schoolwork, the younger boy listening to the older Tom about his troubles at the orphanage he was in. This boy understood Tom’s anger like no one else did, because he would always just listen quietly to all that sound and fury that poured off Tom’s tongue. He absorbed Tom’s anger, quietly. And Tom needed him for that; he couldn’t have contained all of that pain and anger all by himself, not at that age. He might have self-destructed.
‘But the boy didn’t know the extent of Tom’s ambitions, even as he listened to Tom’s stories and dreams and memories. The boy was like an undiscerning mirror to Tom, after a fashion, and after a while when Tom looked at him he saw himself. And by that time Tom had begun to make plans, but he also wanted security. He wanted something to preserve his memory in, a mirror of his soul, a perfect copy of himself and of his memories.
‘So he chose to perform a terrible variant of Necromancy on an old diary he had found at his orphanage a long time ago. It would have been such a perfectly ironic choice of medium, if not quite so very unpredictable. Tom as a sixteen-year-old had still been given to dramatics. And finally, his unwilling witness, and in some part, unwilling sacrifice, was the boy.
‘Something needed to be exchanged for Tom to tear his soul and make it undyingly sixteen in the pages of an old diary, ready for pain and emotion to poured into, and for him to become human on those alone again. He needed the boy for all that pain and emotion he had absorbed so uncomplainingly from him. But he also needed the boy as sacrifice for the help of the most capricious of common spirits.
‘A kelpie, with its power of shapeshifting, really has so much capacity for sympathetic magic; it reaches into the fears and desires of its victims, after all, for inspiration of its form. And its power is really so much more concentrated than that of an ordinary, half-witted boggart’s. Tom needed that reflected sensitivity in that diary to complement the bit of soul he tore out of himself to place into it, so that it was the ultimate legacy. And the kelpie wanted to live forever, too. It wanted the most vulnerable and yet most invulnerable form – it wanted a permanent human form. A form that holds the most power over all living creatures.
‘This boy was their compromise. But he was not a blank canvass for them to imprint their ambitions onto him completely. This boy became too powerful for them. He became the worst thing of all.
‘In the darkest magic of that hour, he became what was distilled from all three of them the worst thing imaginable. He was the boy and he was Tom’s hurt and anger of sixteen short years and he was the Kelpie’s unnatural long life and instinct all at once.
‘That boy was Titus Groan.
‘I am Titus Groan.’
~
‘Merlin,’ whispers Ron, as Timothy – Titus Groan ¬– finishes his story. The few of them has been quiet at the small landing leading into the attic all this time, listening to him. Even Malfoy’s presence hasn’t been questioned; he is nearest to Ginny, having moved up to better hear the story.
‘That’s why the Kelpie came yesterday,’ says Hermione, her voice strangely young-sounding compared to its tone of firmness previously. ‘It was coming for you, not Ginny or Malfoy. It had sensed your presence and had tailed you here. And that’s why Harry would know to speak Parseltongue to you. It’s instinctual. Kelpies understand Parseltongue.’
‘What happened to Tom when what happened to you…happened?’ asks Ginny, her voice breaking, her words coming out almost garbled and stumbling and incoherent.
‘Nothing,’ says Timothy – Titus – almost distantly, ‘he didn’t really know what he was doing. I didn’t really know what had happened.’
‘What are you doing here, then?’ interrupts Malfoy, very abruptly.
‘I needed to wait for all pieces of that particular magic that Tom employed to come together,’ replies Timothy – Titus. ‘I waited years for Ginny to surface; the magic of the diary does not follow linear time, you see. Tom had given it to Lucius a long time ago because of that, to pass it to the suitable candidate. And I waited years for your – mishap – to happen. Tom forgets, I think, in his corrupted form, what he wields with ink and blood.’
‘What do you want to do with Ginny?’ demands Harry.
‘I only want to help her destroy what’s left within her that is Tom’s hurt and anger.’ It is a simple reply, but Ginny feels very cold despite the summer heat.
‘And why would you want to do that?’ asks Malfoy, leaning forward. He is so close to Ginny now she almost feels his breath on her skin. She shivers.
Timothy – Titus, Ginny doesn’t know which, turns to him. That is almost a peaceful expression on his face.
‘I want to do that, Malfoy,’ he begins slowly, and then pauses.
‘I want to do that because I want to die.’
~
After Timothy – Titus’s words, the silence hangs sickeningly heavy, until Ginny finally breaks it by saying, as if despite herself, ‘Did you know that it would be me when you waited for the magic of the diary to resurface?’
The boy – not quite a boy – turns to her, and Ginny wonders if she sees friendship or pity in them, and she abruptly wonders which would be worse. Thankfully though, there is still that detachment in his gaze, a hardness that Ginny has become used to and finds herself strangely understanding.
‘No,’ says Timothy – Timothy, thinks Ginny, suddenly firmly, because I know him as Timothy, despite everything that has now changed – ‘I didn’t know. I could only bide my time and wait for it.’
‘Did Dumbledore know, then?’ asks Harry. His voice is surprisingly level. ‘Did Dumbledore know that – well, that you’re not quite human?’
Ginny almost thinks she imagines the flinch that passes through Timothy’s features like quicksilver; in a moment, though, Timothy’s face is blank and calm again, and he replies, ‘Dumbledore knew. He trusts me.’
Harry shakes his head abruptly, agitatedly at that, and then says, ‘I’m not even going to ask why that’s so. Why do you want to die, then?’
‘Harry,’ Ginny finds herself saying, ‘how can you…?’
‘It’s alright, Ginny,’ interrupts Timothy. He turns to face Harry directly, and there is an almost business-like hardness to his expression. ‘I doubt I can begin to explain it to you if you can’t already imagine it. Perhaps you could see it as a suitable revenge. Even so, my death would definitely be of benefit to you.’
Harry studies him through narrowed eyes. ‘In what way?’
‘Think about it, Potter,’ begins Timothy, and a ghost of a sneer settles on his features, ‘If we can reverse the spell that erases the perverted kelpie powers within me that prevents my death through physical means, and at the same time releases that bit of Tom’s soul kept alive by whatever pain and emotion I – and now Ginny and in some way Draco – have harboured for him, that would be the equivalent of making vulnerable the most dangerous and volatile of Tom’s Horcruxes for you to destroy.’
‘The spell is dark magic, isn’t it?’ says Ron, finally. There is something considering to his countenance, something Ginny finds herself, selfishly, almost sad to see is grown-up; it is as if Ron is just that much further away from her again.
‘Yes,’ replies Timothy clearly, ‘it is.’
‘Then there must be some other way,’ says Ron, his voice equally clear.
‘There isn’t,’ says Timothy. ‘Everything must be undone the same way it was put together.’
‘There has to be.’
His voice is of a tone and certainty that brooks no argument
~
That night, he watches her through the hole in the wall, his forehead and his neck strangely hot even in the warm summer night.
At first, as she comes close to the hole by entering the room through her door, he can see only her bare, slender ankles, white against the scratched parquet; he watches how she lifts the arch of her feet, resting her weight on the balls of her feet as she reaches for something at the top of her dresser – it is out of his sight, that – and he observes how the moonlight trips over the slim shapes of her calves as she moves further away from the hole.
Quietly he cranes his neck, pushing himself deeper behind the headboard, one elbow propped painfully onto the top of the bed’s metal frame.
She shifts away; comes back in old shorts and an oversized T-shirt, colour faded, and the only thing bright about her is the whiteness of her skin in the moonlight, and the deep red of her long hair. She seems distracted; she moves around the room, then abruptly turns on her heel and stops facing a different direction.
He can hear almost hear her steady breathing.
And suddenly, for no apparent reason that he can logically think of, he wants to ask her, shout through the tiny hole that just slips off into Sylvia Plath’s line at her, if she can tell him about Timothy Groan who was her friend and not her friend, and Harry Potter who so obviously and painfully loved her but whom he hated, and Tom Riddle who had sought to destroy him.
Perhaps because, inexplicably, all of Draco Malfoy’s questions now unerringly find themselves at Ginny Weasley’s doorstep.
~
Then she turns, and walks out of the room again.
In a moment he is out of his bed, too.
~
He hears footsteps pad softly across the landing. Beside him Ron is sleeping soundly.
He knows that Hermione is usually a sound sleeper too, and that it is unlikely that any of the other sleepers would be out, at this time. Terence Higgs is stationed outside the house.
Quietly, his head still pounding, he gropes for his spectacles on the side of his bed, and slips off.
~
‘Ginny,’ says Harry’s voice, and Ginny almost jumps; Harry always has such a quiet way of walking she never hears him, especially not when her head is full to burst with thoughts and questions and a strange sadness and sense of loss.
‘Hey,’ he says again, and reaches her. They are standing at the threshold of the kitchen, half in the flooding light from within the room.
‘Hey Harry,’ Ginny does not turn around, but her voice is kept light. She knows that despite everything that has changed, and all her guilt, she misses him; she misses his brilliant green eyes twinkling at her, she misses the way he never quite knows how to express himself, she misses how he smells so much like a boy should, like cut grass and rain.
She realizes all of this in this moment, with him so near to her, and almost feels as if something tightens in her chest.
It almost feels real, what it was between them.
‘Can’t sleep?’ she tries to say the words, but they come out choked instead. Horrified, she still doesn’t turn around, and her hands fly to her mouth and a half-formed sound comes out from somewhere in her throat.
‘Ginny,’ repeats Harry, and this time he pulls her around. In the half-light his brilliant green eyes are so bright and so full of something her heart almost lifts and she almost forgets the indifference with which he has treated her for the past hours.
But even so there is something too sharp about the way his eyes are so bright. Almost feverish-looking, Ginny thinks, fleetingly, is Hermione still administering the potion? And then, the thought, we haven’t all of us been very right in the head…
Then he smiles, a boyish, rueful smile. ‘A lot of things have happened, haven’t they?’
‘Things,’ Ginny repeats, helplessly, and she feels the ghost of a wan smile try to escape her lips.
‘Things,’ repeats Harry more resolutely, and the way he says it makes Ginny want to believe that these things will come to pass.
‘I’m sorry,’ Ginny blurts, suddenly, and then she wonders what she is apologizing for, before wondering how she can even start to apologize.
Harry looks at her levelly this time, and his hands are still over her wrists. She is suddenly aware of that, too. ‘The last few days were crazy, weren’t they?’
Ginny finds herself nodding fervently.
‘I was talking to Ron and Hermione,’ says Harry, ‘and we were thinking that perhaps it’s safest to stay at the Burrow and try to help Groan figure out what to do with himself – and Malfoy and…’
‘And me,’ finishes Ginny for him, and she almost surprises herself by hearing a note of bemusement in her tone.
‘And you,’ says Harry, nodding mock-gravely, then – he smiles again, and this time it is brilliant.
Ginny feels like her heart might break at any moment.
But Harry leans forward, and Ginny can see the brilliant green beneath his straight black lashes when he kisses her.
~
He has seen this happen before.
He once saw them, during the school term when the dew was still clinging to his robes and he could still feel the tiredness around his eyes after a Pepper-up Potion, as he walked quietly down the corridor back towards his dorms.
Ginny Weasley with her back almost ramrod straight, spelling uncertainty in her very posture, Harry Potter smiling and leaning forward.
Later, she smiled back at Potter.
Draco Malfoy could have told either of them that she wasn’t really happy.
That night, when he thought about it again, it somehow made him very, very angry.
That night, he found the route through which the Death Eaters could enter, and felt the feverish, coursing satisfaction that everything was going to be right in the world.
~
A/N: all the additional stuff about Necromancy and the Kelpie are of my own invention.
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