but you're human tonight

one

It's over.

No .

He's gone.

No.

They're all as good as dead.

No!

She had heard the announcement Voldemort had so graciously made. She had heard it all. Harry was dead. Ron was dead. Hermione was dead. Most of the Order was dead and the remaining few had been shackled and imprisoned. It was over. He had won. But she refused to believe it. She couldn't let herself believe it. She couldn't allow herself to exist in a world where darkness had won once and for all. Where there only hope of defeating it had died a slow, miserable death. They had been so close.

And yet, here she stood, in the dark hallway beneath the Headmaster's Tower, with defeat at the castle doors.

No.

She refused to give up. She couldn't let this monster win. This couldn't be the end of everything. She refused.

She got up from the ground and marched over to the gargoyle guarding the staircase to the Headmaster's office. Ginny didn't know what she was thinking or what her plan was, she just knew that she had to do something. Anything. She couldn't just give up. She would fight till her last breath. It wasn't over. Not for her.

"Ippisky dardrum."

The gargoyle stepped aside and let her into the staircase.

The Headmasters office was empty save for a few sleeping portraits. The rest of them had seemingly vacated the premises.

Ginny started walking around the office, unsure of what she was looking for. She didn't know what she expected. This office that once represented safety and help had now been occupied by a death-eater for the past year. It offered her no warmth, no safety, and no help. She looked to Dumbledore's portrait, hoping that maybe the complicated man's portrait would offer her some help. But he too had vacated this painting.

And just like that, Ginny's exhaustion and hopelessness caught up to her. She collapsed to the floor, burning tears dripping down her face. Her heavy breaths turned into angry sobs as she slid down to the floor, burying her face into the cold concrete.

She had lost so much. She was only sixteen and yet she had lost so much. Her whole life had been clouded by one darkness after another. She thought back to the time when everything was still okay. When she was happy and unblemished by life's atrocities. Her eleventh birthday, when she had received her Hogwarts letter. She had been so happy to be finally joining her brothers at the magical school she had heard countless intriguing stories about.

How could she have known what was to transpire? How could she have known how wrong everything would go from there on out? From the moment she stepped foot into Hogwarts. From the moment a certain dairy made it into her hands.

She had been eleven when the world's darkness first laid its claim to her. And it never left.

Tom.

From the beginning till the end it was always him. Everything that went wrong in her life started from him and ended with him. No matter what names he went by now, he was still Tom.

Her one-time friend.

Her confidante, her ruining, her haunting memory.

She let out a cold laugh in between her muffled sobs.

The Lord Voldemort of now wouldn't even know who she was. He wouldn't even know of the little eleven year old girl his memory had ruined. The reckless collateral damage of his schemes.