Ginny Weasley: A New Perspective

Chapter 19: Explanations and Endings

There was a good thirty seconds as the people in Professor McGonagall's office took in what they were seeing. There was a professor, two second year students, and one first year who they probably thought was dead, all standing in front of them, covered in muck and blood.

The first one to notice us was Mum, she yelled "Ginny!" and leapt to her feet, followed by Dad, both of them engulfing me in a hug.

Once they finally let go to go hug Harry and Ron, I got a chance to see who else was in the room. Professor McGonagal was clutching her chest in surprise by the mantlepiece. Even more surprising though, was that Dumbledore was standing next to her.

"You saved her! You saved her! How did you do it?" Mum was pestering Harry and Ron.

"I think we'd all like to know that," McGonagall added weakly.

Once Harry was freed from Mum's grasp, he set the sword, hat, and remanence of the diary on the desk in front of us, and started to explain everything.

"It was Hermione who figured it out really, right before she was petrified." He said at one point, sending me into a new wave of guilt.

"I was hearing the Basilisk through the pipes because I'm a parseltongue, and Hermione figured it out and went to the library. She was petrified before she could tell anyone, and it took Ron and I ages to figure it out. She was clutching a page about basilisks in her hand the entire time!"

Harry explained everything that had happened leading up to this point. He talked for almost fifteen minutes.

"Oh and we followed the spiders because spiders are terrified of basilisks, but we didn't know that then. We followed the spiders and found a great big spider in the forest named aragog, and he told us about Myrtle and how she died the last time the chamber was opened."

I don't know what the craziest part of his explanation was, the entrance being in a haunted girl's bathroom, or Ron willingly following spiders to a giant spider. I didn't hear a lot of Harry's explanation because I was dreading being expelled. It was coming sooner or later, it was just the waiting that killed me.

"Very well," Professor McGonagall said once Harry finished his story. "So you found out where the entrance was, breaking a hundred school rules into pieces along the way I might add, but how on earth did you all get out of there alive, Potter?" she asked.

So Harry started the second part of the explanation, which might have been crazier. He explained how a phoenix arrived giving him the sorting hat which he pulled the sword of Gryffindor from. It was all very hard to wrap my head around.

I was leaning on Mum's shoulder when Dumbledore said "What interests me most, is how Lord Voldemort managed to enchant Ginny, when my sources tell me he is currently in hiding in the forests of Albania."

It seemed like a normal sentence. Or relatively normal, considering what just happened. Until I realized that he said Lord Voldemort, not Tom Riddle. How was you know who possessing me? Was that his diary, was he acting through a fake Tom Riddle?

"W-what's that?" Dad said, with the same confusion that I felt. "You-know-who? Enchant Ginny? But Ginny's not... Ginny hasn't been... has she?"

Harry quickly explained that too, "It was this diary," he picked it up, showing everyone. "Riddle wrote it when he was sixteen."

Dumbledore took the diary from Harry, looking at it's destroyed self.

"Brilliant," he murmured, "Of course, he was probably the most brilliant student Hogwarts has ever seen" He turned around to look at us. "Very few people know that Lord Voldemort was once called Tom Riddle. I taught him myself, fifty years ago, at Hogwarts. He disappeared after leaving the school... travelled far and wide... sank so deeply into the Dark Arts, consorted with the very worst of our kind, underwent so many dangerous, magical transformations, that when he resurfaced as Lord Voldemort, he was barely recognizable. Hardly anyone connected Lord Voldemort with the clever, handsome boy who was once Head Boy here."