The Lady or the Tiger

by Ashura

HP; drama.  Voldemort/Ginny, Ginny/Harry

Not mine, but then, you knew that.

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She sits in the middle of the red satin sheets.  Rich, deep red.  Gryffindor red.  Blood red.  (Charlie's blood Ron's blood Dean's blood Hermione's blood.  Harry's blood.)  Her dress is green velvet, trimmed in lace across a low neck, and her skirt pooled around her.  She thinks she must look like a Christmas painting from an age ago, and the Fat Lady has told her, with tears in her eyes, that she looks beautiful, like a porcelain doll.

"Ginny."  There is something about the way he says her name that made her expect to look at him and see Tom again, something earnest and eager that would have that would almost have made her feel sorry for him.  If he hadn't killed Charlie and Ron and Dean and Hermione.  If he weren't slowly killing Harry, draining his life away in the dungeons beneath the castle.

He asks her, "Do you like it?"  Tentative, almost.  The Dark Lord of the fucking universe, nervous about impressing a girl.

She looks at him coldly, and does not speak.

"I wish you would talk to me."  It is possible, she thinks, that he really does not understand why she hates him so.  How would he?  He has never loved anyone before.  He told her this himself, the first morning when she woke in the Tower instead of the dungeon.

"I can make you a queen," he continues, watching her with hope in his eyes.  "We're the same…you told me nobody could understand you the way I do.  Ginny…."  His voice goes dark and cold then, and that is Tom too, Tom at the end when he would have drained her life away to fuel his own.  He no longer needs her for that—he has Harry now, bleeding away slowly, weakening always, fading.  He had let her visit him, once.  She walked through the dungeon alone and pretended not to be looking at anyone, when really she remembers everything about them: the squalid cells and dirty faces of her schoolmates, the looks they gave her that ranged from pity to horror to hate, the stench of pain and dying that still make her stomach turn to think about.  And at the end, alone, was Harry, white and weak so soon after a bloodletting, slumped against the wall.  His eyes went wide and he managed to smile at her.  He whispered she was beautiful.  She wished she could say the same.  But then, this was Harry.  He had always been beautiful to her.

"I'm sorry," she had told him instead, and her voice cracked on the words.

He lifted a hand, it was all he could manage.  His skin was so pale she thought she could see through it, his hair was limp and falling in his face, and his eyes were dull behind his broken glasses.  But there was something in the look he gave her that told her he knew…that he understood she was just as trapped as he was.  It was a different sort of prison, a more comfortable one, with velvet dresses and Gryffindor red satin, but still a cage.

She wanted, then, to gather him up in her arms and right then and start running.  If she thought for even a moment that they might have made it out of the dungeons, she would have.

"There has to still be a way.  It can't end like this."  Ron bleeding from the head, eyes wide in disbelief because he still didn't understand; he always said he'd die for Harry if it came to it, but he wasn't expecting, didn't mean for it.  Her voice was hoarse and broken with disuse.  Harry's was just faded, fluttering, like the faint pulse beneath her fingers. 

"If there is," he whispered, "we'll find it." 

She had cupped his face in her hands, and stroked her fingers through his hair, and then His voice echoed in her head, Ginny, and she had turned away and fled.

This is what she thinks about, sitting silent on satin sheets the colour of her brothers' blood, while He stands over her, sounding like Tom but not looking like him at all.  Voldemort is an old, withered thing, though with every day, with every night spent drinking in Harry's life, he becomes a little younger, a little stronger.  And he is so very strong already.

And his voice has gone cold and hard and dark, and he tells her that she can be a queen or a prisoner, but that he will have her either way.  That her choice is between satin sheets and velvet dresses, or the cold depths of the dungeon that smell like blood and death.  She remembers the look of betrayal on Seamus Finnigan's face, staring out at her between thick rusted iron bars, because he does not understand.  She can join them, or remain in her tower, alone, a trophy.

And either way, Harry will die.

The reality of it is cruel, and twists her stomach into knots, forces tears from her eyes.  I won't, I won't cry.  I will never let Him see me cry.  But he does, and it must be strange to him; he leans close and brushes a tear from her cheek with a gaunt, wasted fingertip, lifts it to the light.  He really does not understand.

"But I can give you everything," he whispers.  The voice is Tom's, and echoes in her head.

 She has not spoken in so long, and now her voice is dry, shattered, raspy when she screams.  "I want Harry." 

He only stares when she rips the black stone from around her neck and throws it at him, and then the lamp on the table that crashes onto the floor at his feet.  She screams and screams and screams, until her voice gives out and she throws herself onto the bed, buries her head in those red sheets.  He does not move, has not moved, and only when she is rasping uneven breaths into the pillow does he settle onto the bed beside her.  He strokes her hair, long streams of red slipping between his fingers.  He whispers to her soothingly, of all that he can give her, of all that she can achieve.  Never again to be the last child, underestimated, passed over.  No more tattered books and secondhand clothes, broken broomsticks and condescending glances.  And she must understand, surely, that he cannot keep Harry Potter alive, that he needs the boy's blood to give him life, and youth.  He will be Tom again for her, he promises, the Tom she first knew, and he will have Harry Potter's blood in him, it is all of the Boy Who Once Lived that he can give her.

And if she asks it, he says, when Harry dies, he will not feel pain.

He draws her up, his arm around her, and Ginny blinks back the angry tears from her eyes.  She wonders if there is still a chance, if there is any way at all she can still save Harry.  She looks down at her arm, white skin, a dust of freckles across her wrist, and wonders if her own blood will do.  If she would even have the courage to make the attempt.

She wonders if she can save him, or if the best she can do for him is to ease his death.  He would be with Sirius again, and she knows he wanted that.  He would be with Ron and Hermione, and the thought almost makes her jealous. 

She remembers his smile, when he told her she was beautiful.

Tom kisses her hair, takes her silence as acquiescence.  He has told her he will do no more until he is young again, he has seen the way she cringes at his withered skin.  But he does not want to wait long, and Harry Potter will not have much life left in him, anyway. 

A day at most, and there her choice lies. Try to save him and perhaps they will both lose for it, or be Tom's trophy queen and ease Harry's pain.

She bows her head.

[fin.]