Red
Chapter Five: Ginny
About a year after Potter had escaped with the Stone and ignominiously defeated him- no, not defeated him. A minor setback, that was all.
About a year after Voldemort had left Quirrell, he found himself back in the forests of Albania, and his memories changed and shifted.
He remembered things he'd never remembered before. Being back at school, being sixteen again, but it was different somehow.
There was a girl there, and her copper hair lit up corridors that were otherwise dark and shadowy.
She called him Tom, and said he was her best friend.
No one had called him Tom for many years. No one had ever called him their best friend.
Voldemort watched this girl through his own eyes, eyes that saw things he didn't remember. The eyes of Tom.
He watched her open the Chamber of Secrets on his command. He watched her wake up and have no idea where she was or why she had red paint splattered on her robes. He watched her grow paler and more deathly throughout the year, but that copper-red hair stayed just as bright, illuminating darkened corners.
He watched as Tom took her down and laid her in the Chamber, her hair as red against the damp stone as Myrtle's blood would have been.
He watched, and had to see himself once again endure a humiliating defeat by Harry Potter.
He watched Potter whisk her away, little Ginny, so scared and pale. But he knew he would see her again.
oOo
His wand clatters to the floor as Lily's did so many years ago. He has once again been defeated by Potter, for good this time, he thinks, beaten by his own spell.
He drops. His arm falls in front of his eyes. He likes the way the red scratches look on his white, white skin.
Red like fire, red like blood. Red like life and red like death that wears a mask.
And as he thinks of red, it comes whipping, flying, at the edge of his vision, and there she is. Little Ginny, all grown up. Throwing herself into her hero's arms, into the future she wanted all along, while the villain dies on the ground.
And Tom realizes something, as he lies there, not sure if he's dead or alive, realizes something that, in all of his thrice-damned years of worshipping and being ruled by the color red, he failed to notice.
Red will always kill you in the end.