Chapter Text
It’s not that Ginny hates her mother– far from it. She’s not even angry with her, really. It’s just that Molly Weasley is on the fast track to becoming an empty nester, it’s that Bill’s getting married and Charlie lives in another country, it’s that no one has talked to Percy in months.
It’s that Ginny is the youngest and her mother is suffocating her.
“Just for a few days,” she tells Fred and George. They both glance at each other and shrug.
“Beats the time you tried to hide in Percy’s trunk,” Fred says.
“If only you’d come to us,” George laments. “We would have smuggled you into Hogwarts, dear sister.”
Ginny rolls her eyes and affectionately shoves through them to drag her suitcase up the stairs. “Wasn’t that the year you tried to sneak in itching powder and the packet burst?”
“I don’t remember anything like that,” says George, flicking his wand to levitate Ginny’s bag. She lets it go and turns to skip up the stairs. “What do you think, Fred?”
“Me neither,” says Fred, gesturing for George to go ahead with an exaggerated bow. “I definitely don’t remember it poofing up in a cloud of malicious itchiness when we unpacked.”
“No, of course not,” says George. “I have absolutely no recollection of Mum sending us a howler about contaminating the entire dorm, either.”
The flat over Weasleys Wizard Wheezes has only one bedroom, and the living in room is filled with boxes. Fred picks a box off the couch, drops it on the floor, and makes a big show of fluffing the pillows for Ginny.
“Home sweet home,” he says.
--
A week later, Ginny is still crashing on her brothers’ couch, and her father has visited twice to try to persuade her to come home.
“I can’t even do my homework without Mum hovering over me,” Ginny tells him. “Besides, Fred and George need help. Have you seen this place?”
She waves a hand at the mild chaos of the living room. They’ve got a store room in the back that’s even worse.
Not that Ginny has actually been helping them. She’s mostly been wandering Diagon Alley– making faces at bird in the Owl Emporium, working through her homework over cups of ice cream, and sitting in the back of Flourish and Blott’s and reading through The Scandalous, Scintillating, Sumptuous Life of Gilderoy Lockhart . She doesn’t read the last couple of chapters about his year at Hogwarts because it brings up memories that make her stomach twist, but she does look at the pictures.
He was too handsome for his own good , she writes to Luna. Remember Patil offering Creevey a whole galleon for photographs? His photos don’t even move!
She hesitates on the next part of her letter, rolling her quill between her fingers.
It’s boring here without you. When are you coming to visit?
It is boring, she realizes, now that’s she’s written it. Fred and George are fun, but they’re always working. She finally has the freedom to do whatever she wants, and she wastes it in the same handful of shops every day.
She cooks dinner for Fred and George (which she burns and they tease her relentlessly about, but they eat anyway) and asks if she can help them, with something.
“As long as you promise never to step foot in our kitchen again,” George tells her solemnly.
--
There’s a large box in the stockroom labeled “ASK BILL,” which contains a collection of random junk Fred and George definitely should not have.
Apparently they’d successfully snuck into Knockturn Alley more times than even Ginny had known; a lot of the things are just stuff they thought looked interesting when they were younger. There’s also a probably-cursed tea set they’d lifted off a Slytherin classmate “for the good of mankind,” two artifacts left over from their trip to Egypt, and a hand mirror that was probably a prank but might also be showing her her death.
Ginny examines the mirror. In it, she sees herself drowning, seaweed wrapped around her and preventing her from swimming.
Boring , she thinks, and that thought is enough to make her think the mirror is probably harmless. She wraps it carefully in parchment to run down to Fleur at Gringotts. Hopefully there’s nothing so dangerous she can’t just walk it over to be passed on to Bill at the end of the day.
The probably-cursed tea set starts hissing and heats up to glowing temperatures when she pokes a cup with her wand, so she very carefully moves them into a box she charms against burning. The painstaking process of moving the set piece by piece without burning herself is reminiscent of her past summer, cleaning up that horrible house on Grimmauld Place. She remembers feeling controlled and locked away then, too, but at least she had excitement around her.
Ginny sighs heavily and moves on to the two objects the twins pilfered from Egypt. She thinks they probably thought the cursebreakers would catch them. They’ve ended up with stolen items they didn’t want before because they’d assumed they’d be caught. It was a dangerous way to conduct business, and they’d mostly grown out of it.
The first object she’s pretty sure is a toy. It’s shaped vaguely like a crocodile. She casts a few diagnostic spells on it– she learned a lot of those last summer– and they all come up negative. She wraps it in paper and turns to the other item.
It’s a large gold ring, a little smaller than her hand outstretched. Five decorative spikes dangle from it, also gold. In the center is a molded eye, which she dimly recognizes as a symbol of protection. The eye of… someone. She didn’t take Ancient Runes.
(Luna did. Ginny should have waited on sending that letter. Luna would know, and if she didn’t, she’d have some highly entertaining theories.)
He diagnostic spells all come up negative, so she wraps the ring in paper and puts it with the toy and the mirror.
--
Ginny remembers walking to Gringotts with two boxes piled on top of each other. She remembers an incredibly awkward and passive aggressive conversation with Fleur. She remembers walking out of the bank.
And then, next thing she knows, it’s dark and she’s in the middle of a muggle park.
Her breath catches and she has a few moments of panic. Her world spins and she hears his voice in her head again, all silky and reasonable and telling her terrible things–
She crashes into a rubbish bin, a metal installment in the park, and bounces off. She blinks down at it. Muggle. Park. Night.
She looks around her. There’s no one in sight, but London’s skyline produces enough light pollution that she can see perfectly well. There are well manicured pathways and grass someone’s obviously been tending.
Her body is weak with its own trembling, and she sits on a bench. She’s fine, she tells herself. He can’t be back; Harry destroyed the diary. She’s fine.
She pats herself down to reassure herself. Legs– still there, if shakey. She still has her wand.
She’s wearing the ring.
It’s hanging from her neck on a leather cord, which she doesn’t remember it having before.
Her hands still.
She is not doing this again. She rips the ring from her neck and slams it into the bin with all the force of a beater batting off a bludger. She draws her wand and sets the entire receptacle on fire.
Her legs are stiff and she lopes away as fast as she can in a random direction. She’ll get somewhere eventually.
--
She eventually gets to the fence ringing the park, which she follows to a locked gate. She climbs it easily enough, and a sign on the other side informs her that she has just escaped from Hyde Park.
That is, at least, a famous enough place that she’s heard of it. It doesn’t do her much good, though, because the only muggle landmark she really knows in London is King’s Cross.
The surrounding neighborhood seems fairly posh, all fancy looking white row houses, so she’s surprised to find several hostels. She goes into one that still has its office lit up, and a clock on the wall behind the desk informs her it’s past three o’clock in the morning.
“Hi,” she greets, and the man behind the desk looks up from his magazine. The cover has some glossy photo of a muggle celebrity, staring up at Ginny with her creepy unmoving eyes. “Do you have any rooms free?”
The man squints at her. Ginny knows she is a fifteen year old girl alone in a big city late at night, and that is strange. She smiles encouragingly at him.
“Right,” the man finally says with the intonation of someone who’s too tired to ask. “We’ve got a spare bed in the six person dorm, and two in the twelve person…”
He goes on to describe several other types of dorms, each more uncomfortable than the last, and Ginny wonders if she should just go back outside and hail the Knight Bus. But she’s also very, very tired, crashing from the rush of panic, and she’s rather just fall asleep in the nearest available bed.
“I’ll take the cheapest one,” she says, reaching into her pocket. She realizes she’s never touched muggle currency in her life. She pulls out her coin purse, fully prepared to illegally transfigure up some muggle coins. It’s been stuffed full with paper.
“I have…” she says, staring at her coin purse in disbelief, “...money.”
The paper is, indeed, muggle bills. She has no idea where they came from. When she gets to her shared room, she slips into the bathroom and strips off her clothes. She has a bruise across one shin. There’s a card from the muggle underground in her sock. Her back pocket contains a plastic card with numbers whose purpose she cannot guess.
Ginny sits on the toilet lid. This is not something to cry about. It’s not. There is a perfectly reasonable explanation for this. She just has to think of one.
She splashes some cold water on her face and goes to bed.
--
A woman wakes her in the morning, yelling for her to get out so she can clean. Ginny leaves the hostel and wanders around muggle London for a bit– she finds a street market, with all sorts of interesting muggle things. She uses her mysteriously procured money to buy her father a handheld vacuum, then buys herself a pair of gaudy sunglasses.
She gets back in time to pass some muggle fried goods on to her brothers for lunch.
“Where’d you get off to?” Fred asks, shoving chips in his face.
“Got a little lost,” Ginny says. She still hasn’t taken her sunglasses off. “Stayed in a muggle hostel.”
“Mum’s gonna have a heart attack,” George says approvingly.
She doesn’t tell them about the ring because she knows that will get her sent back home immediately. It wasn’t really dangerous, she thinks. She gets weird bruises all the time from Quidditch, and her little romp in the park turned into a fun adventure.
Besides, she got rid of it immediately. She’d learned her lesson, the last time.
George teaches her how to run the register in the afternoon, and at dinner time a bat appears with Luna’s reply. The twins make a big fuss over it– Luna’s Mercutio is a rust-colored flying fox and quite striking.
Luna’s letter is three full pages, and Ginny reads them while curled up under her covers on the couch. Two of the pages are just Luna describing the appearance and personalities of the different flobberworms she’s found in her garden. She asks Ginny for opinions on names for them all.
Ginny falls asleep with a grin on her face.
--
What are you?
The voice jolts Ginny awake. She gropes for her wand and casts lumos to illuminate the room. No one is there.
Her heart is still pounding. She definitely heard a voice. It had been– it had had a hint of wonder in it, but it had been–
It had been in her head .
Her wand hand is shaking, sending erratic shadows across the room.
It wasn’t his voice, though. Too rough. The wrong accent. She takes ten deep breaths, counting on the inhale and exhale.
She glances down at herself. The ring is on her lap.
--
She leaves immediately. Whatever this is, she doesn’t want Fred and George in danger. She marches out of the shop, her wand in one hand and the ring in the other.
The sun hasn’t even risen properly, and all the shops on Diagon Alley are still closed. Her first instinct is to run to Gringotts and demand Fleur produce Bill, but not even the bank is open, and she’s fairly certain Bill is on business in Spain.
Her second instinct is to go the ministry and turn the ring in. That could go wrong for her in a lot of ways, though. She’d have to explain where the ring came from, first of all, and that could get Fred and George in trouble. And she’d have to admit to her mum and dad she’d fallen for the same trick twice, that she was still just a silly child in a dangerous world.
She bites her lip and heads toward Knockturn Alley.
The shops here are just as closed, but there are more people wandering around– weird people, the type she doesn’t want to talk to. Or make eye-contact with.
She paces the alley twice before a shop opens, and she goes inside and dumps the ring on the counter.
“I’d like to sell this,” she says. She pitches her voice low to hide her fear, and it comes out sounding like she’d been smoking her entire life.
The woman behind the desk– who looks like she’s probably at least part hag– eyes Ginny for a beat before peering down at the ring. She takes out her wand and hovers it over it, muttering charms that aren’t the Latin-based ones Ginny’s learned all her life.
“I need to speak to the proprietor,” the woman says, finally. “He’ll want to examine it.”
She reaches to pick up the ring.
Don’t let her, the voice in Ginny’s head demands.
Ginny smiles and nods. She doesn’t care if the woman steals the ring, as long as she steals it well enough it doesn’t reappear on Ginny’s person.
Don’t let her, the voice repeats, and Ginny blacks out.
--
She comes back, and it’s like trying to swim through pudding. Her brain is sluggish and all her senses are dull, but the light outside hasn’t changed much, so she’s either only lost a few minutes or an entire twenty-four hours.
The ring is around her neck now. The hag-woman and a man are both collapsed on the floor.
You’re back, the voice says, surprised.
“Who are you?” Ginny snarls. “Get out of my head!”
I’m a thief, the voice says simply and ignores her command. You should be thanking me. They would have hurt you for my ring.
Ginny scowls the the ring. That’s entirely possible in this part of town, but she’s also not inclined to take the word of a disembodied spirit.
“I can take care of myself,” she says.
I’m sure you can, the thief says in a way that makes her imagine him examining his nails. But I like to repay my landlords.
“What did you do to them?” Ginny asks. They’re breathing, at least.
We just played a game, the voice promises in such an innocuous way that it sends chills down Ginny’s spine. They lost.
Ginny crosses the room in three long steps. There’s three pots of floo powder on the mantle of the fireplace, and one’s marked for international deliveries. She tosses a handful in.
“Moscow,” she says, and tosses in the ring. It disappears into a roar of blue-green flames.
--
Ginny writes back to Luna with names for her flobberworms, most of which she gets from a book on ancient magics of Northern Africa. She doesn’t find anything about the ring in the book, but she does learn the eye is probably either the Eye of Horus or the Eye of Ra, depending if it’s the left or the right.
She doesn’t think the eye has a right or a left, and she sketches it for Luna.
This thing had an awful lot to say , she writes. It’s an innocent enough statement– things talk in the wizarding world all the time. Is there a way to test the intelligence of inanimate objects, I wonder? Do you think I could use it to sing me awake with Weird Witches in the morning?
Luna writes back with updates on all the flobberworms: Thoth has died, and Nekhbet and Bast are in mourning. She also writes a page on the famous work of Darnell Flowers, who adapted the work of a muggle named Alan Turing to test speaking objects for sentience.
When Ginny asks about it at Flourish and Blotts, no one has heard of a Darnell Flowers. Luckily, Luna has recommended an obscure book on the matter, and they order a copy for Ginny.
Summer isn’t even half over, and Ginny has already finished her summer homework and ordered a book for extra research. She feels remarkably and disgustingly like Hermione Granger, who, now that she thinks about it, is scheduled to visit the Burrow in a few weeks.
Maybe she’ll go visit then. With both Hermione and Harry to distract her mother, the Burrow might be bearable again. Besides, Ron and Harry and Hermione are probably all good candidates for helping her with the ring issue.
Or maybe she won’t. She’ll see how she feels.
--
She notices it this time when the ring reappears. It’s a violent rip through her mind, like hearing a scream from far away.
She’s organizing the stock room when she feels it, and sure enough, it’s sitting on top of the next box of Peruvian darkness powder she goes to open.
You’re back, she thinks dully at it.
That was quite a trip, it says back to her. Its tone has a bizarre combination of anger and amusement in it. You know you could send me to the bottom of the sea and I’d come back. You’re my landlord.
And how are you paying rent? Ginny asks. I didn’t like my last tenant so much, so I threw him out.
There is a long silence form the ring.
Ah, it says eventually. So that’s why you’re so strong.
Damn straight, Ginny thinks back. It’s silent for the several days.
--
She tries leaving the ring under a couch cushion, but it inevitably reappears in her bag while she’s out, or in a kitchen drawer when she’s making sandwiches, or in the medicine cabinet while she’s in the shower. She gives up and starts wearing it everywhere.
On Friday Fred and George go out with Lee Jordan for some sort of summertime nonsense, so Ginny’s alone for the night. She blasts the radio and goes through some standard floor exercises. Most of the boxes have migrated downstairs to give her room, and she will be in peak condition for quidditch.
Then, in the middle of doing crunches, there’s a boy staring down at her. Ginny yelps, flips herself over, and shoots a stunning charm at him. It goes right through.
The boy just raises his eyebrows at her, unimpressed. He’s darkly tan, with wild white hair and deep scars on his face. He’s also transparent, and slightly faded around the edges.
“Oh,” says Ginny, pretending to relax. “It’s you.”
The boy is a few years older than her, but on the short side. He’s wearing some type of skirt and a red coat with no shirt underneath.
“Are you really from ancient Egypt?” Ginny asks, incredulous.
He doesn’t acknowledge the question, instead looking her up and down critically. He crosses his arms over his chest and leans against the wall casually.
“Who was your last tenant?” he asks.
“Landlords keep their tenants’ information confidential,” Ginny answers smartly. She mimics his casualness by stretching. The boy eyes her suspiciously.
“I’m sure it’s no one you know,” Ginny says helpfully. “Unless you know a lot of mid-century British wizards.”
She doubts this, as Fred and George supposedly found the ring in some tomb. She remembered it, vaguely, once her brothers told her the story– muggle interference had caused the entrance to collapse, and the artefacts to all shift and get lost in the sand. Bill’s team had been surveying it for wizarding crafts before the local authorities sealed it all back up.
The boy seems a bit less tense after that, then turns to look out the window.
“No offense,” Ginny says, stretching in the opposite direction now, “but if you’re an evil spirit, I’d rather you just be upfront about it.”
The boy snorts, derisive.
“I’m not going to hurt you or your silly brothers,” he says. A mean smile curls at his lips. “I’m a grateful tenant.”
He flickers out of existence. Ginny absolutely does not like his tone, but she believes him enough to feel less guilty about keeping him in the house.
True horrors, after all, never lie. They don’t need to.
--
Luna finally writes that she’s going to visit, and Ginny decides to go into muggle London in order to find her something really bizarre.
She’ll also get some batteries for the vacuum she bought her father. She’s not really sure what batteries are, exactly, but word on the street is he’ll need them to get the vacuum working.
She goes into the first electronics store she sees, and sort of blindly wanders through the narrow aisles. She has absolutely no idea what anything is. The shop is stuffy and the smell of mildew is barely covered by a scent like vapors from a misbrewed potion.
You just passed the batteries , the ring spirit says. She can’t decide if he’s mocking her or not.
How does an ancient spirit know what a battery is? Ginny asks, backtracking to examine the display. To her dismay, muggles have lots of different types of batteries, and she doesn’t know which type she needs.
You think you’re my first landlord?
Ginny hums and picks out an array of batteries, hoping at least one works.
That’s interesting information, she thinks. So someone must’ve taken him out of that tomb, and then put him back. Who would do that? Why?
Did the ring stop stalking them once it was returned?
The batteries are more expensive than she expects. She has to put two back and uses up almost all her muggle money. The ring spirit laughs at her.
Was that my money you used? He asks as she leaves the shop, weird crinkly plastic bag in hand. She’s sure now he’s definitely mocking her.
What’s it to you? Ginny asks. It’s part of your rent.
She’s halfway back to the Leaky Cauldron when the ring spirit asks, Do you want more?
Ginny pauses. Saying yes is a bad idea. It’s a trick, and she knows it. But. Well. She does want more money– she’d blown through her muggle money quickly because it felt like toy money to her. She gets pocket change from working at the twins’ shop, which is fine for occasionally buying herself new socks or a glass of pumpkin juice, but she doesn’t have the minimum to convert to muggle currency.
She had been really looking forward to giving Luna something.
Alright, she agrees. Show me what you’ve got.
She knows what’s coming, and this time she manages to hang on when he wrestles her body away from her mind. It’s like clinging to the back of a broomstick as it zooms through a storm, but she can do it. She’s done it before.
(Tom Riddle never let her stay awake when he made her do terrible things, never told her what those terrible things were– but she remembers some of the later possessions, the way she remembers childhood nightmares.)
She justifies it to herself: she needs to know what this entity is capable of, and she’d rather have a precedent of him asking to possess her than just taking her over whenever he feels.
The spirit walks her body into the London Underground and casually hops a turnstile. Ginny has been on the tube once, as a sort of family adventure with her parents and Ron to pick her other brothers up from school one year. She remembers it being terrifying and exciting; London has more people than the entirety of Great Britain’s wizarding population, and that meant more noise and chaos than Ginny had ever seen in her life.
It’s still a little exciting, she thinks, and that excitement she feels deep in her mind clashes with how calm her body is under the ring spirit’s control. Either the spirit has nerves of steel, or whoever was this spirit’s previous victim must have lived in a big city.
The spirit switches to another car, subtly eyeing its occupants. Ginny suddenly realizes what he’s planning to do.
Just make sure it’s a rich bastard, she tells him. Or she tries to tell him; her mental voice is weak and he doesn’t acknowledge her.
He follows a man in an expensive looking suit off the train, and slips the man’s wallet out of his pocket. Ginny is impressed; even though she can see all the same details, she hadn’t been able to pick out where the man’s billfold was. The spirit removes something from the wallet and then calls for the old man.
“Excuse me, sir,” he says, making her voice sound sweeter than she’s ever managed. “You dropped this.”
The man thanks the spirit, then shoves his wallet back in his pocket and pats her shoulder. The spirit stiffens ever so slightly at his touch but keeps smiling.
People do that when you’re a girl, Ginny tells him sarcastically. I hope you got a lot off him.
The spirit just grunts and then her body slips into the crowd exiting to aboveground. It’s busy outside, busier than Hogwarts when classes are changing, and the spirit plucks money out of the pockets of a group of American tourists he winds through. Their guide doesn’t even notice him.
The spirit then wanders through the streets a bit, pausing once to examine the window of a game shop, and Ginny considers demanding her body back. Then he enters a fancy restaurant and asks for a table for one.
The host looks critical– Ginny is wearing one of her nicer dresses, but it’s secondhand and threadbare– but the spirit flashes a plastic card he took off the man on the tube.
“Daddy’s paying,” he says nicely with Ginny’s voice.
Ginny has no idea what any of that means. Are those plastic cards some type of muggle money she doesn’t know about? She asks the spirit.
It’s a credit card, he tells her. Don’t you know basic things?
Ginny doesn’t really see why she should bother with muggle things like that, but she badgers the spirit for an explanation anyway while he skims the menu.
It’s basically unlimited money until that man cancels it, he says cagily. Ginny thinks he probably doesn’t understand how it works either. She says as much, and he proves her right by changing the conversation all together. I don’t like the way he treated us. Don’t you want revenge?
She does, a little bit, but she doesn’t admit it. Instead she tells him to get the most expensive item on the menu, then.
He orders his steak extra rare, which gets a raised eyebrow from the waiter and is not at all what Ginny would have picked. Then again, the spirit also convinces them to bring a full bottle of wine, which she appreciates.
The spirit gives her her body back after he pays, and she walks out of the restaurant feeling very full and kind of drunk.
Hurry up and buy what you want with that card, the spirit tells her, then he goes silent.
Ginny blunders into a clothing store and buys two sparkling vests, one covered in gold sequins and one in silver. They’re hideous and too heavy to be comfortable and expensive for no reason. Luna is going to love hers.
Ginny uses cash to buy herself a bag of candies in a muggle grocery store which she wastes almost half an hour in because it is fascinating , and her inebriated brain suddenly and briefly understands something about her father.
A handful of “gummy bears” later, Ginny is sober enough to realize she should get a head start on Christmas shopping while she can. She tries to by her mother a new pan set and the store clerk informs her the card has been rejected.
“So it doesn’t work anymore?” Ginny asks, squinting.
“You should call your card provider,” the clerk says dully. “Have you got another method of payment?”
Ginny just leaves then, and goes back to Diagon Alley. She’s two hours late for the shift she promised she’d work.
--
“Father’s got some business at Gringotts,” Luna says breezily, “so we’ve got all day.”
Ginny grins and leads her back to Weasleys Wizard Wheezes, where Fred and George spot them through the window and both fight to open the door for them. Ginny gets to it first.
Luna laughs at the silver vest and puts it on immediately. Ginny slips her own gold one on, and they go back out into Diagon Alley looking like queens.
“The light will probably confuse wrackspurts,” Luna says as they head for the Magical Menagerie. “Which is good for us now, but I’ll have to remember to take it off to help father test his new Spectrespecs.”
Ginny listens attentively as Luna explains the dreaded wrackspurt and the new spectacles her father has developed to see them. The Lovegoods are going to test them later in the summer, instead of their usual quest to find crumple-horned snorkacks.
“I think it will be a good change of pace,” Luna concludes. “What about you? Is your change of pace a good one?”
Ginny shrugs. “I got all my homework done already, and I’m keeping busy, so that’s good.”
“You don’t sound like it’s good,” Luna observes in her sort of neutral, dreamy voice. “Oh look, they’ve got pidwiddles.”
Ginny is not hugely fond of animals, but Luna is and the collection at the Menagerie reminds Ginny of when Charlie used to bring all sorts of strange things home. Luna rattles off interesting facts about them, which Ginny doesn’t have the attention span to absorb fully, but it’s still soothing. She nods along.
When they’ve wasted a couple hours wandering the alley, Ginny admits she’s spent some time exploring muggle London and asks Luna if she’d like to go to lunch there.
“I think that would make my father quite nervous,” Luna says, blinking at the Leaky Cauldron in the distance. “Let’s go.”
Ginny doesn’t have much affection for London, but she does have a wad of muggle cash and a voice in her head that can advice her on how to spend it. It helps endear the idea of socializing with muggles to her.
(She suspects the twins keep Mum updated, even if she doesn’t. She hopes they write all about her disappearing into a huge city crawling with muggles.)
The muggles don’t give their clothes weird looks like she’d been hoping. She wonders if muggles are really that unobservant or if it’s the byproduct of living in a city with millions of people. She’s seen weirder people than her on London’s streets.
“Did you ever test your Ring?” Luna asks after they eat. Ginny orders them fancy muggle coffees as dessert.
“I had to special order the book,” Ginny says. “It hasn’t come yet.”
“That’s a shame,” Luna says. “If you want, I can help you test it today.”
The spirit in the ring, who’d been silent all day, stirs in the back of her mind. Ginny’s not sure she likes the idea of Luna talking to him.
Do you still doubt I’m real, Landlord? He asks.
Shut up, Ginny replies.
On the way back to the Leaky Cauldron, someone grabs Ginny and pulls her into a sidestreet. She tries to scream, but a rough hand covers her mouth. Whoever it is, he’s a lot bigger than her, and struggling against him is useless.
The spirit shoves her mind aside, and her legs move on their own, stomping on his foot–
No! Ginny screams back, fighting for control. My wand, my wand–
Her body jerks as she briefly regains control– the man’s been hurt and his grip loosens– and the spirit drives Ginny’s elbow into the man’s stomach. Ginny wrestles for control of her arm and only her arm, even as the man drops her, and the spirit fights her back. She stumbles and drops, dodging the red sparks of a hex by sheer accident.
The owner of that shop on Knockturn Alley is standing with the huge man, and he raises his wand at her again, and Ginny can’t control her body but she won’t let the spirit do it–
The owner takes a burst of sparks to the chest and drops, stunned. The giant man quickly follows. Luna is at her shoulder, wand raised.
Ginny relaxes. The spirit uses her moment of weakness to roll her mind away from her body and stomps forward to examine their attackers, making sure they were truly down for the count.
“Are you the spirit Ginny’s been talking to?” Luna asks, and Ginny screams at the spirit not to even think of speaking to her.
“Your friend is annoying,” the spirit says. “She nearly got us killed.”
“I think we should leave them,” Luna says lazily as the spirit rolls over the shop owner. The spirit shrugs Ginny’s shoulders and follows Luna.
“If you don’t mind,” Luna says conversationally, “I’d like to confirm you’re not just a very complex curse.”
The spirit laughs. His laughter is mean in Ginny’s mouth. “And what if I am?”
“Ginny’s brother is a cursebreaker,” Luna says mildly, “and her father works de-cursing muggle objects. I’d have to tell them.” She pauses. “But if you’re a real spirit, that’s a different story. Ghosts have rights, you know.”
The spirit snorts and shoves his hands in Ginny’s pockets. “I’m not a ghost,” he says.
“Then what are you?” Luna asks.
“I’m a thief,” the spirit says. “And a temporary renter of your friend’s body.”
Luna tilts her head. Ginny thinks she’s regained enough focus to fight the spirit again, but Luna has gotten more information out of him in five minutes than Ginny has in weeks.
“Temporary?” Luna asks.
“She’ll die eventually,” the spirit says, and sounds slightly bitter about it. “I seem to have lost that luxury.”
“Oh,” says Luna. They continue down the street, looking like a pair of completely normal muggle girls in silly vests from the outside. “Do you have a name?” she asks.
The spirit eyes her. “Bakura.”
He gives Ginny back her body. Ginny blinks at Luna, dumbfounded.
“Well,” she says, “he was chattier than usual.”
When they get back to the Leaky Cauldron, Luna comments, “Opinions about existential concepts like death usually indicate sapience.”
“Wonderful,” Ginny mutters.
--
Ginny and Luna find Xenophilius buying potions ingredients, and Luna suggests Ginny come with them to hunt wrackspurts.
“She needs some time off, I think,” Luna says, brushing one hand down Ginny’s arm. Ginny feels her cheeks go hot.
Xenophilius ascents and asks Ginny if she wouldn’t mind taking care of aerial observation. Ginny agrees immediately.
Luna smiles and kisses her on the cheek as they say good-bye. Ginny’s insides turn to liquid.
You’ve got it bad, Bakura jeers at her.
Bakura becomes more active after that, experimenting with selectively taking control of Ginny’s limbs. He does mostly innocent things– jumping over random obstacles on the street, making her fingers snap at random moments, saving her from burning toast. Then he starts stealing. He pickpockets, mostly, but he also nabs seemingly useless items: wiseacre’s has to replace the king to their display chess set almost daily, and Ginny’s pockets fill with bits and pieces of dry potions ingredients from the apothecary.
Could you not? Ginny asks more than once. When he ignores her, she tries a qualifier: Could you not with the Wheezes customers, at least?
I told you I’m a thief , Bakura says, but he starts targeting rich-looking wizards. Ginny rolls her eyes and lets him have his fun, as long as he doesn’t do anything too awful.
(She hints to him that he if he has to steal, he should at least be stealing things they need , but he ignores her.)
The Darnell Flowers book comes in, and Ginny reads a lot about how to tell an actual soul from an object or creature that happens to be able to talk. The entire subject has a lot of history in the wizarding community, where things like boggarts can mimic human speech and people charm their mirrors to give them compliments. Flowers claims his work has been used in cases where species try to file for “beingship” with the ministry, although Ginny’s never heard of anything like that before.
The entire thing is confusing and there are gray areas, but she concludes Bakura’s barely hidden glee at nicking galleons from dragon-hide coin purses is probably not something someone could charm into a piece of jewelry.
I think he just wants to explore, Ginny writes to Luna between ironing out the details of their great wrackspurt adventure. I don’t think his last host was a wizard, or even in Europe.
“You’re making a lot of assumptions,” Bakura snaps. He takes his semi-translucent form now, whenever Fred and George are out and Ginny’s alone in the flat.
It frightens her, a little bit. When Tom Riddle had gained enough power to do that, she’d been on the brink of death. When she’d accused Bakura of zapping her strength, though, he’d only laughed at her. What, Landlord? You think I need what little strength you have?
Ginny sticks her tongue out at him and goes back to her letter.
The thing that helps her battle back the panic every time he takes control is how different he is from Riddle’s fragment of a soul. He makes a show of being a mysterious otherworldly entity, but he also complains about how she cooks and badgers her into looking at wizarding games in shops and gets indignant when she calls him childish for walking her through a puddle. He steals money that he doesn’t seem interested in spending, but nicks three sets of gobstones and demands she explain how to play with them.
He’s very obviously a whole person.
She’s also confident she could beat him if she needed to. That’s important.
“Hey,” she says when she finishes the letter. “You never said why you picked me.”
Bakura, who has been hovering around Luna’s bat Mercutio, glances at her. “What do you mean?”
“Well,” Ginny says, folding the letter and sealing it. “You were in my brothers’ room for years. Why not them?”
Bakura turns back to Mercutio. “Very few souls are worthy of the ring,” he says. “Usually people go mad from its power. But those people are all... muggles.”
He says the last word like he’s not sure it’s an actual term.
“So I’m worthy,” Ginny says flatly. “But others aren’t?”
Bakura just shrugs. Ginny picks up a couch pillow and throws it at him. It passes right through, and both Bakura and Mercutio glare at her in annoyance.
“My last tenant told me the same thing, trying to make me feel special,” she says, eyes narrowed and tone dangerous. “It didn’t end so well.”
Bakura rolls his whole head in dismissal. “Your last tenant sounds like he was full of bullshit,” he says. “I don’t give a shit which wizard happens to pick me up, as long as I can do what I want.”
Ginny’s mouth thins. That’s troubling in a different way. She attaches her letter to Mercutio’s leg wordlessly.
“Don’t worry,” Bakura says, eyeing her with a certain meanness. “I always take good care of my landlord.”
--
Ginny goes home for a week before joining the Lovegoods. She’ll pack for the semester, then travel to Hogwarts with Luna.
Harry and Hermione are there, and her mother is in a fantastic mood. Ron got decent OWLs, she’s been able to fatten Harry up as much as possible, and Ginny is finally back.
“You look good,” her mother says and pulls her into a bear hug. “I was afraid you’d come back with blue hair.”
“Ginny has unfortunately gotten,” Fred starts and George finishes, “too clever for our tricks.”
“Did you feed her well?” Molly asks, her arms still around Ginny. “She’s so skinny.”
Save me, Ginny mouths at Ron and Harry. They both turn to hide their snickering.
Ginny helps her mother with dinner, which means she taste-tests things while her mother charms the kitchen to cook for her.
“I’ve been starting to take beef extra rare,” she says conversationally.
“What?” Molly says. “What have Fred and George done to you?”
She’s joking, Ginny thinks. But it’s hard to tell when Mum jokes about things like this, and that’s one reason she had to get out for the summer.
“You’ll come home for Christmas, right?” her mother continues. “If Hogwarts doesn’t fix your tastebuds, I will.”
“Sure,” Ginny agrees, because Christmas is months away and she thinks she might finally start missing people by then.
--
Bill and Fleur come for dinner one night, and Ron has the pleasure of destroying both of them in chess. Fleur giggles like a schoolgirl watching Bill lose, and it might have been endearing if Ginny hadn’t already decided she didn’t like the woman.
He’s good, Bakura observes of Ron. He says it neutrally, but it’s the first real compliment he’s given anyone in her presence. Ginny remembers him hovering over fancy chess sets on display in both muggle and wizarding stores. She wonders if he just likes the intricate little pieces or if he enjoys the game itself.
Do you want to have a go? She asks.
She means to let him tell her how to move the pieces, but he sort of shuffles out of her own mind and informs Ron she’s feeling lucky.
Well, she decides, it’ll be alright as long as he’s doing a decent enough job of being her no one notices.
Ron sort of teases her for a while– she’s never been much good at chess– but Bakura just rolls her eyes exactly as she would and starts setting up the board.
Bakura makes his first moves reluctantly, like someone who only barely knows the rules. It’s very in character for Ginny, and not very interesting, and she starts to get bored in her own mind. Even Bill, who’d been wiggling his eyebrows at them as Bakura lined up the pawns, turns to try and intervene in Fleur going to the kitchen to show their mother “ze much better cleaning spells we use in France.”
Then Ron frowns, leans forward in seat, and stares the chess board down for over a minute.
“Should we get a timer?” Bakura suggests.
“Blimey, Ginny,” Ron mutters and moves a bishop. It looks like a retreat to Ginny, but she’s never been great at strategy games. The game gets more intense after that, so much so that Hermione starts peering over her book at them and Bill and Harry come back over.
(In the kitchen, they can hear Fleur insisting, “No, no, let me do ze washing up.”)
Ginny doesn’t know how long the game continues because Bakura won’t glance at a clock for her, but eventually Ron gives a weird twitch and glares her suspiciously, and Ginny knows the ring spirit has won.
Twelve moves, he tells her. His voice is smug and confident even as he makes her face bite its lip in concentration. I’ll let you finish him off.
Ginny’s suddenly back in control of her body. She stares at the chessboard. She has no idea how to beat Ron in twelve moves.
She tentatively moves a knight into check. Ron relaxes.
Bakura’s mental voice is dripping with mock disappointment when he says, And I set that up so well for you, dear landlord.
Ginny loses in ten moves. Ron claps her on the back and says, “You had me there for a second. Have you been practicing?”
“I guess I just had divine inspiration,” Ginny replies with a dramatic sigh. “It didn’t last very long, did it?”
Divine inspiration, Bakura repeats in her head like it’s a brilliant joke.
Hush, you.
Harry suggests they play a game Ginny could kick Ron’s arse in, and Bill laughs at Ron’s reddened face as he blusters about how he’s a fine quidditch player.
“We’re all on the same team ,” Ron whines.
“Not tomorrow we’re not,” Ginny says. “The twins are coming over.”
--
Hermione plays quidditch with them to make even teams, and she mostly just hovers in one place while her teammates Ginny and Harry try to keep the ball away from her. The twins and Ron, of course, do everything in their power to send it towards her.
This isn’t as great as you made it out to be, Bakura comments dully.
Ginny ignores him. Quidditch is her favorite pastime and she’s good at it. She doesn’t care what he thinks of it.
His point that three-on-three with an unwilling player is rather dull, however, is correct. Maybe she should suggest they rotate out players and switch to two-on-two.
“Why don’t we play Lottery instead?” Bakura asks with her voice, and she swears at him.
“What’s that?” Harry asks. Ron explains it: one person throws the ball and announces a point-value while it’s midair, and the other players try to catch it to gain those points. The thrower can also label the ball things like “bludger,” which makes the catcher lose points, or “snitch,” which is an automatic win.
The thing was: Ginny has no idea how Bakura came by this information.
I pay attention, is his answer.
Had she talked about it with one of her brothers? They had played it a lot when she was a kid. It wouldn’t be weird to mention it.
The twins are excited to play a favorite childhood game, and Hermione is more than satisfied to stay on the ground and read through her new textbooks for the second time.
Ron throws first, and the twins nearly crash into each other diving for “fifty points.” Ginny nearly breaks a finger veering back from a “bludger” she mistakenly grabs for. Harry almost nabs the first “snitch” called, but it abruptly does a ninety degree turn and shoots away from him. Fred catches it, only to be bowled over by George.
“Hermione!” Ron yells. Hermione blinks innocently up at them, her wand still in her hand. Ginny nearly falls off her broom laughing.
It’s a good day. Her mother and father come out with sandwiches and they picnic on the field. Ginny can’t decide if being away long enough to find family moments like this warming rather than smothering and repressive is a good thing or a bad thing.
Distance does make the heart grow fonder, she supposes.
That was more fun than your quidditch, Bakura tells her after dinner as she’s drying dishes for her mum.
You haven’t seen real quidditch yet, she answers. She still can’t do the drying charm reliably without cracking the dishware, so she’s drying by hand. The rush of flight, the wind in your robes, everyone cheering for you. It’s the best feeling in the world.
I don’t really care about spectators , Bakura says. But I do like winning .
Ginny thinks he must like more than just winning, or else he wouldn’t have thrown the chess game. It’s what Darnell Flowers calls an “internal inconsistency of motivation” and it’s indicative of a sapient mind. It’s what makes centaurs and goblins beings but magical paintings just objects capable of speech.
It’s why, she realizes, she still has the ring. She knows it’s dangerous and could hurt her, but she also wants to solve the mystery and brave the danger and have an adventure on her own. She knows the adult and responsible thing to do is report it, but she doesn’t want to admit to making such a huge mistake the moment she tried independence.
He mother walks and sets the kettle on the stove. She pats Ginny’s upper back affectionately as she passes.
“Do you want me to fix your hair tomorrow?” her mum asks tentatively. “Since we’re going shopping and all.”
Ginny really doesn’t like the tight plaits her mum is always pulling her hair back into, but she smiles anyway. “Why not?”