There are something like fifteen hundred-odd rules for Hogwarts School of Magic and Wizardry, and Percy knows all of them, has known them since he was a third year and made it his project to know them so he would be ready to be a prefect, and there is nothing in them about charming your sister into your bed. Not that Percy actually uses magic to do it, because will-compulsion spells are terribly frowned-upon when they're not out-and-out illegal, but he does make flowers sprout from the end of his wand and turns a brass Knut into a pair of tiny silver earrings.

Percy doesn't need a will-compulsion spell, though, really, because he knows the sort of things that make Ginny's heart go pitter-pat just from knowing her as long as he has -- that is, as long as she's been alive. Knows that she wants jewellery to make her feel pretty, and kisses on her cheeks to make her feel loved, and hands to finger-comb through her red hair and tell her it's the color of sunrises, not brass or carrots or anything else she tells herself. Ginny doesn't have her ears pierced, but she's thrilled to think that Percy feels like she's old enough to have them done up like that. Charm-on earrings would have been tacky and little girl, but Ginny can wear these pinned to the collar of her school blouse, clicking faintly whenever she moves her head. It makes her feel as rich as a Malfoy, with twice as many secrets to hide.

No, there's not a need for any spells or enchantments, just new earrings, new clothes, even a new diary, and kisses from her elder brother who's always so clean and whom Mum praises so much. Little Ginny is feeling like a little queen the first night that she dreams of Tom Riddle. She can believe that his smile is for her, and the way he comes and sits on the end of her bed and looks through her exercise books, pointing out the errors -- well.

Ginny learns what wise older boys are like from the time she spends as Percy's shadow. He says to her once, in the mêlée of Weasley life towards the end of the summer before her first year, when their father was out in the shed working on the car he got on a raid in June and Fred and George and Ron were conversing in a suspiciously quiet manner by the stairs, that if there's anything teachers and prefects appreciate in younger students it's efficiency. Efficiency, Ginny thinks as as she dips in a finger in the cooling rooster blood puddled in her other hand. It's wintertime, and the warmth from friction in the bird's veins is rising up and floating away to the stone ceiling; it's still as slick as Percy's lips when she smears it on the wall, though, and even though she had to look that word up in the dictionary when her brother first said it, she knows Tom appreciates this, Tom will soon appreciate her, as she crosses every t and dots every i.

It's later that Ginny learns how hard roosters are to kill. They're valiant creatures, arrogant things, all feathers and struts and strong wings and sharp beaks, and the ones Hagrid keeps on the grounds have feathers of Gryffindor red and Gryffindor gold. It's not Ginny who reaches out a hand to catches one by the neck, but it's her blood that wells up from the knuckle it pecks, and it's her chin that lifts at the voice after the neck has snapped like a twig. Tom's sitting on the edge of the chicken coop with his argyle socks showing from under the hem of his slacks, his shoes knotted with a neat little bow, robes as bloodless as his heart; she can see her reflection in the glassy black eye staring up at her, but no matter how she turns the head, she can't catch Riddle. "Dumbledore has a bird, too, you know."

So does Ravenclaw. All the Prefects' badges are the same, though Ginny swears that Tom's is a bit larger than the one that Percy wears even though they could very well be the same pin since they're kept from year to year. Penny leaves her badge on Percy's bedside table one morning, and he doesn't see it until she's dressed and has gone down to breakfast. He looks at it for a long moment and then tucks it into his pocket, lying when she later asks him about it, though he tells Ginny about it. Someone who pays that little attention to things of such importance doesn't deserve to wear that mark of excellence, he says Doesn't really deserve that superiority. Penny's frightened of being the next target for the killer, frightened of failing her classes and stumbling as a prefect.

Ginny's a brave girl, though. She tells herself this. Percy tells her this, compliments her upon it, and she wills herself to be. Brave. So brave that nothing ever makes her cry, not when she tries to throw the diary away, not when she trips on the stairs and Prefect Penny helps her stand back up. Not even -- not even when --

Ginny is on those same steps, one day, going up when Percy and two other boys are coming down. She can hear the way Percy's footsteps go on the stairs, figure them out from everybody else's, and she calls out his name up the stairwell. The boys hear her and think that it's Penelope. "Meeting Penny, are you?" one says. Before Percy can start to say anything, the other says, "She's your bird, isn't she?" Ginny stops dead in her tracks. When the curve of the wall finally brings Percy into view, she can't stop staring at him because he's smiling -- all teeth and no eyes.

It's a look she's seen on someone else, she realizes, someone far more important. Tom. Tom, Tom, Tom, with both feet on the floor last walked upon by Salazar Slytherin himself. Tom, standing in the shadow of Slytherin's statue and casting spells he doesn't need words for, spells he wrote himself when that diary wasn't enchanted and each page was covered not in the glassy two-way link to the past and future, but in loopy notes to himself and phrases he had worked into incantations.

Ginny's a brave girl. She doesn't cry, not even later that night, on those same stairs, in the dark of Hogwarts after curfew, with her kneeling on the fourth step and Percy on the landing. Not even when Percy's fingers slide straight into her, so she's bleeding, and he looks at her. They're eye to eye now, Percy with a smile as blood covers his fingertips and runs down her thigh and he says, "No, I think you're still a little young for that, aren't you?" He pins Penny's badge to her collar.

Ginny watches him not-quite touch her then, and a few hours after that, Tom watches Ginny while the basilisk coils in the statue; it won't come until it's called and she won't die until he lives, but for now her fingers twitch the way the snake's tail does; for now every memory she has, every smile she's smiled and every breath she's taken, every spark of life that has twinkled in her eyes is being replaced, one by one, with the spells and enchantments Tom has sewn between the diary's pages, until he knows that if he pulled the skin back on her arm all he'd see were words, twisting around her veins and bones and tendons, words in black ink, scribbled here and there, crossed out, re-phrased, I-like-yous turned to I-love-yous, this-is-so-nice turned to please-stop-I-hurt. Tom doesn't pull back her skin, though, and he doesn't lift her eyelids to see the inky black of her iris. He doesn't touch her at all.

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