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Split-Half Reliability: Ch 6 [HP]
Title: Split-Half Reliability
Fandom: Harry Potter
Pairing/Characters: Ginny & Tom, Harry/Ginny, Tomarry
Rating: M
Chapter Word Count: 1,692
Chapter Count: 6 / 7 | Chapter 1 | Chapter 2 | Chapter 3 | Chapter 4 | Chapter 5
Summary: Prequel to Liminality. Ginny navigates life after her humiliating first year in Hogwarts. Along the way, she discovers that she’s much less alone than she thought she was, and she has to learn how to make peace with the teenaged, wannabe Dark Lord who's taken up a permanent residence in her head. -or- When Tom’s diary is destroyed, he’s already almost completely left it. With no place else to go, Tom Marvolo Riddle is thrown back into the only other container he has a link to: Ginny Weasley.
Notes: This thing.
Even as she’s living it, Ginny barely remembers anything about her 7th year. It seems fitting, somehow, that her final year at Hogwarts should mirror her first year in this way. But this time, her haziness isn’t because she’s possessed by a mad teenager—though she is, she absolutely still is. There’s something about this postbellum state that makes going about normal activities, acting like a normal human, feel like she’s acting a part in a play. Any moment now, the curtain will fall, and Alecto Carrow will be smiling at her from the shadows, her wand already raised.
But that never happens. Instead, she attends her classes, she smiles at her friends, she sits her NEWTs, and everything is normal as normal should be.
When she goes home to the rebuilt Burrow, everything is normal there, too.
“Ginny, you get the sides started while I handle the roast, there’s a love.”
Ginny’s birthday is so late in the summer that she’d barely been able to celebrate being able to use magic at home last year. Regardless, this is not how she would choose to use her new legality. Even with magic, she still hates cooking.
Fortunately, not all of her feels the same.
Tom smiles at Mum, eyes crinkling at the corners. “Are you sure you trust me that far?” he asks. Ginny always thinks that, even with the same voice, there should be some inflection, some intonation, something that sounds different from her when Tom is in complete control. But even she herself can hear nothing. Tom sounds like her. Tom is her. Just another side of her. “You’re a brave witch, Mum.”
Mum laughs, shaking her head. “Oh, you’ve gotten so much better in the past few years. I still remember how you were as a child… I can’t understand how you got such good marks in potions and yet couldn’t keep a soup from curdling!”
“It’s not all the same,” Tom says.
Tom and Mum continue to make pleasant small talk while they cook together, but Ginny doesn’t really listen until she hears Mum say, “—And I’ll need your help on Sunday, of course. You know that Bill and Fleur are coming over for brunch.”
“No, Mum, I have tryouts on Sunday, remember?” says Ginny, and she feels that wave of disorientation that comes whenever she and Tom have very different feelings about something. It comes less and less often, these days.
“Oh, you’re not still doing that, are you? Surely you can take a break, spend a little time at home,” says Mum.
Ginny knows what Mum is really saying. Mum doesn’t want Ginny to work. Mum wants Ginny to stay at the Burrow until a suitable wizard appears to ask for her hand in marriage, at which time she’ll go live with him and make a million—or at least seven—redheaded, green-eyed babies.
At least Mum and Ginny agree on the preferred suitor.
Ginny smiles tightly at Mum. Even Tom is irritated at the renewed topic, for all his disdain toward the sport and occupation. He doesn’t want to be idle anymore than Ginny does, and they have plans in place to keep them both occupied and on track to their goals.
“I still am, yes,” she says, keeping her voice calm as Tom turns back toward the cutting board and picks up the knife again. It’s easier to suppress her irritation when she’s no longer looking directly at Mum. “This Sunday’s tryouts are for my first-choice team, so of course I’m going.”
From near the kitchen door, a voice says, “With the Harpies, right? Congratulations.”
Mum and Ginny both jump.
“Harry, dear, I didn’t know you were coming over tonight!” says Mum, glowing with joy. She rushes over to him to wrap him in a hug. “How have you been? Oh, it’s been ages!”
Harry tentatively hugs her back. He’s not very good at physical displays of affection, Ginny knows. Or any displays of affection, really. But he seems worse now than he has been for years.
Ginny hasn’t seen him since the trials after the Battle of Hogwarts last year. To be fair, no one had seen him for months. He simply disappeared one day, and all Ron and Hermione would say or write on the subject was that he needed some time to himself.
When Mum finally lets him go, Harry says, “I’m sorry for not calling ahead,” which is such a strange turn of phrase. Ginny assumes he means a fire call in the Floo, but it’s still an odd way to put it. “I hope you don’t mind me just showing up like this.”
“Oh, not at all, dear, not at all! Why don’t you go keep Arthur company while we women finish up in the kitchen?”
Ginny grimaces, and Harry sees. His eyes brighten in a smile. She looks away, feeling—she doesn’t really know what she’s feeling right now. Something, though.
“Is there anything I can do to help? It looks like Ginny has a mountain of potatoes to deal with over there.”
It’s very clear from Mum’s brief silence that she’s struggling between her instinctive belief that men do not belong in her kitchen and her desire to forward her plans for grandchildren. The grandchildren win. “What a lovely thought, dear. Ginny, why don’t you show Harry how to peel a potato?”
Harry comes up beside her, moving slowly. “Is this okay?” he asks softly.
Ginny nods, not looking up.
Harry hesitates, but he picks up a potato. “I admit, although I’ve peeled more potatoes than I can count, I’ve never done it with magic before. How does this work? What’s the spell?”
“There are spells, certainly,” says Tom. “But they’re guided by intentions. If you know how to do it by hand, it shouldn’t be hard to convert that to a spell. You simply hold the potato in one hand and imagine the potato being peeled. You imagine it in such detail that you can almost feel yourself peeling it. Let your wand mimic the movements of the knife. And then—yes, like that.”
“Hmm,” says Harry. “It’s easier than I thought. Or maybe you’re just that good of a teacher.” He looks up at Ginny from beneath his mess of black hair.
Ginny shrugs. “It took me ages to get it right, so I’ve heard just about every explanation possible at this point.”
Harry laughs. “Oh yeah?” They work in silence for a moment, while Mum hovers in the background. “So the Harpies? That’s pretty great.”
“I’m not in yet.”
“Ron says your chances are excellent.”
Ginny allows herself a tiny smile. “Yeah.”
“I’m just about finished with auror training now, even though I started so late,” says Harry. He doesn’t mention where he was or what he was doing. His mouth twists. “Fast-tracked.”
Ginny looks at him. At his ducked head, his tense shoulders. “Have you considered that you were fast-tracked because you deserve it, and not because you’re the Chosen Boy Who Lived?” asks Tom.
Harry shrugs uncomfortably. “I mean, the training isn’t that hard. I’m not sure why everyone is expected to take as long as they do.”
Ginny snorts. “Or maybe it’s just that you’ve already experienced a lot of this training living a life on the run from Dark wizards?” she says, prodding him with her elbow.
“I guess?” says Harry, flushing a little.
Ginny grins at him, and they turn back to their tasks together as the mood relaxes around them.
Dinner at the Burrow isn’t the loud madhouse it once was, even with Ron, Harry, Hermione, and George in attendance, but it isn’t the frozen, stilted affair that it had been the previous summer, either.
Afterwards, Harry follows Ginny outside, and they stand together watching the stars begin to show.
“I, er—I still like you, Ginny,” says Harry. It’s hard to make out his face in the growing darkness, but Ginny suspects he’s probably bright red.
Finally.
Ginny smiles. “I still like you, too, Harry,” she replies easily.
Harry clears his throat nervously. “I’m not really ready for much right now. It’s been a struggle to… to get back into the swing of things, I guess. But, if you’re interested, maybe we could… Date? Sometimes?”
Smooth, he is not.
Tom’s fondness rises and mingles with her own.
“I’m interested,” she says.
Harry breathes in sharply. “And… it’ll be different now, I promise. I’m just me, now.”
Ginny frowns at him.
“I mean, you know how we used to always joke, oh, Voldemort is a part of us? Well, it’s just me, now. So you wouldn’t have to worry about me suddenly going around the bend again, or—yeah. You’d just be dating me. Harry Potter.”
Ginny looks away. She doesn’t know what to say, and Tom is equally silent. Finally, she whispers, “I can’t really say the same.”
“Ginny—” Harry hesitates, and then he reaches out to carefully gather her in his arms. She holds him back much less carefully, and he stiffens, then relaxes slowly. “Ginny, you’ll be alright. We’ll be alright. He’s gone now.”
“He was just a memory, he said,” says Tom. “I suppose that’s truer than ever now.”
“Memories only have the power that we give them,” says Harry firmly.
Ginny closes her eyes. “I’ve given these memories a lot of power.” She continues quickly, before he can respond. “And I don’t regret it, either.”
Harry strokes his hand through her hair. The moment is slightly ruined when his hand gets caught in the tangles, and they both laugh. “That’s fair, I suppose.”
“I like you, Harry Potter,” says Ginny. “And the Tom Riddle who lives in my head likes you, too.”
Harry laughs against her neck. “Does he? I’m, er, flattered, I guess.”
You should be. I’m not known for liking people, after all.
Ginny pulls away a little so that she can look down into Harry’s eyes. “So, it’s just you, me, and cute Voldemort, then? I can live with that.”
Harry grins at her. “Sure,” he says fondly. “Just the ‘three’ of us.”
Just the three of us.
---
—
Fandom: Harry Potter
Pairing/Characters: Ginny & Tom, Harry/Ginny, Tomarry
Rating: M
Chapter Word Count: 1,692
Chapter Count: 6 / 7 | Chapter 1 | Chapter 2 | Chapter 3 | Chapter 4 | Chapter 5
Summary: Prequel to Liminality. Ginny navigates life after her humiliating first year in Hogwarts. Along the way, she discovers that she’s much less alone than she thought she was, and she has to learn how to make peace with the teenaged, wannabe Dark Lord who's taken up a permanent residence in her head. -or- When Tom’s diary is destroyed, he’s already almost completely left it. With no place else to go, Tom Marvolo Riddle is thrown back into the only other container he has a link to: Ginny Weasley.
Notes: This thing.
Even as she’s living it, Ginny barely remembers anything about her 7th year. It seems fitting, somehow, that her final year at Hogwarts should mirror her first year in this way. But this time, her haziness isn’t because she’s possessed by a mad teenager—though she is, she absolutely still is. There’s something about this postbellum state that makes going about normal activities, acting like a normal human, feel like she’s acting a part in a play. Any moment now, the curtain will fall, and Alecto Carrow will be smiling at her from the shadows, her wand already raised.
But that never happens. Instead, she attends her classes, she smiles at her friends, she sits her NEWTs, and everything is normal as normal should be.
When she goes home to the rebuilt Burrow, everything is normal there, too.
“Ginny, you get the sides started while I handle the roast, there’s a love.”
Ginny’s birthday is so late in the summer that she’d barely been able to celebrate being able to use magic at home last year. Regardless, this is not how she would choose to use her new legality. Even with magic, she still hates cooking.
Fortunately, not all of her feels the same.
Tom smiles at Mum, eyes crinkling at the corners. “Are you sure you trust me that far?” he asks. Ginny always thinks that, even with the same voice, there should be some inflection, some intonation, something that sounds different from her when Tom is in complete control. But even she herself can hear nothing. Tom sounds like her. Tom is her. Just another side of her. “You’re a brave witch, Mum.”
Mum laughs, shaking her head. “Oh, you’ve gotten so much better in the past few years. I still remember how you were as a child… I can’t understand how you got such good marks in potions and yet couldn’t keep a soup from curdling!”
“It’s not all the same,” Tom says.
Tom and Mum continue to make pleasant small talk while they cook together, but Ginny doesn’t really listen until she hears Mum say, “—And I’ll need your help on Sunday, of course. You know that Bill and Fleur are coming over for brunch.”
“No, Mum, I have tryouts on Sunday, remember?” says Ginny, and she feels that wave of disorientation that comes whenever she and Tom have very different feelings about something. It comes less and less often, these days.
“Oh, you’re not still doing that, are you? Surely you can take a break, spend a little time at home,” says Mum.
Ginny knows what Mum is really saying. Mum doesn’t want Ginny to work. Mum wants Ginny to stay at the Burrow until a suitable wizard appears to ask for her hand in marriage, at which time she’ll go live with him and make a million—or at least seven—redheaded, green-eyed babies.
At least Mum and Ginny agree on the preferred suitor.
Ginny smiles tightly at Mum. Even Tom is irritated at the renewed topic, for all his disdain toward the sport and occupation. He doesn’t want to be idle anymore than Ginny does, and they have plans in place to keep them both occupied and on track to their goals.
“I still am, yes,” she says, keeping her voice calm as Tom turns back toward the cutting board and picks up the knife again. It’s easier to suppress her irritation when she’s no longer looking directly at Mum. “This Sunday’s tryouts are for my first-choice team, so of course I’m going.”
From near the kitchen door, a voice says, “With the Harpies, right? Congratulations.”
Mum and Ginny both jump.
“Harry, dear, I didn’t know you were coming over tonight!” says Mum, glowing with joy. She rushes over to him to wrap him in a hug. “How have you been? Oh, it’s been ages!”
Harry tentatively hugs her back. He’s not very good at physical displays of affection, Ginny knows. Or any displays of affection, really. But he seems worse now than he has been for years.
Ginny hasn’t seen him since the trials after the Battle of Hogwarts last year. To be fair, no one had seen him for months. He simply disappeared one day, and all Ron and Hermione would say or write on the subject was that he needed some time to himself.
When Mum finally lets him go, Harry says, “I’m sorry for not calling ahead,” which is such a strange turn of phrase. Ginny assumes he means a fire call in the Floo, but it’s still an odd way to put it. “I hope you don’t mind me just showing up like this.”
“Oh, not at all, dear, not at all! Why don’t you go keep Arthur company while we women finish up in the kitchen?”
Ginny grimaces, and Harry sees. His eyes brighten in a smile. She looks away, feeling—she doesn’t really know what she’s feeling right now. Something, though.
“Is there anything I can do to help? It looks like Ginny has a mountain of potatoes to deal with over there.”
It’s very clear from Mum’s brief silence that she’s struggling between her instinctive belief that men do not belong in her kitchen and her desire to forward her plans for grandchildren. The grandchildren win. “What a lovely thought, dear. Ginny, why don’t you show Harry how to peel a potato?”
Harry comes up beside her, moving slowly. “Is this okay?” he asks softly.
Ginny nods, not looking up.
Harry hesitates, but he picks up a potato. “I admit, although I’ve peeled more potatoes than I can count, I’ve never done it with magic before. How does this work? What’s the spell?”
“There are spells, certainly,” says Tom. “But they’re guided by intentions. If you know how to do it by hand, it shouldn’t be hard to convert that to a spell. You simply hold the potato in one hand and imagine the potato being peeled. You imagine it in such detail that you can almost feel yourself peeling it. Let your wand mimic the movements of the knife. And then—yes, like that.”
“Hmm,” says Harry. “It’s easier than I thought. Or maybe you’re just that good of a teacher.” He looks up at Ginny from beneath his mess of black hair.
Ginny shrugs. “It took me ages to get it right, so I’ve heard just about every explanation possible at this point.”
Harry laughs. “Oh yeah?” They work in silence for a moment, while Mum hovers in the background. “So the Harpies? That’s pretty great.”
“I’m not in yet.”
“Ron says your chances are excellent.”
Ginny allows herself a tiny smile. “Yeah.”
“I’m just about finished with auror training now, even though I started so late,” says Harry. He doesn’t mention where he was or what he was doing. His mouth twists. “Fast-tracked.”
Ginny looks at him. At his ducked head, his tense shoulders. “Have you considered that you were fast-tracked because you deserve it, and not because you’re the Chosen Boy Who Lived?” asks Tom.
Harry shrugs uncomfortably. “I mean, the training isn’t that hard. I’m not sure why everyone is expected to take as long as they do.”
Ginny snorts. “Or maybe it’s just that you’ve already experienced a lot of this training living a life on the run from Dark wizards?” she says, prodding him with her elbow.
“I guess?” says Harry, flushing a little.
Ginny grins at him, and they turn back to their tasks together as the mood relaxes around them.
Dinner at the Burrow isn’t the loud madhouse it once was, even with Ron, Harry, Hermione, and George in attendance, but it isn’t the frozen, stilted affair that it had been the previous summer, either.
Afterwards, Harry follows Ginny outside, and they stand together watching the stars begin to show.
“I, er—I still like you, Ginny,” says Harry. It’s hard to make out his face in the growing darkness, but Ginny suspects he’s probably bright red.
Finally.
Ginny smiles. “I still like you, too, Harry,” she replies easily.
Harry clears his throat nervously. “I’m not really ready for much right now. It’s been a struggle to… to get back into the swing of things, I guess. But, if you’re interested, maybe we could… Date? Sometimes?”
Smooth, he is not.
Tom’s fondness rises and mingles with her own.
“I’m interested,” she says.
Harry breathes in sharply. “And… it’ll be different now, I promise. I’m just me, now.”
Ginny frowns at him.
“I mean, you know how we used to always joke, oh, Voldemort is a part of us? Well, it’s just me, now. So you wouldn’t have to worry about me suddenly going around the bend again, or—yeah. You’d just be dating me. Harry Potter.”
Ginny looks away. She doesn’t know what to say, and Tom is equally silent. Finally, she whispers, “I can’t really say the same.”
“Ginny—” Harry hesitates, and then he reaches out to carefully gather her in his arms. She holds him back much less carefully, and he stiffens, then relaxes slowly. “Ginny, you’ll be alright. We’ll be alright. He’s gone now.”
“He was just a memory, he said,” says Tom. “I suppose that’s truer than ever now.”
“Memories only have the power that we give them,” says Harry firmly.
Ginny closes her eyes. “I’ve given these memories a lot of power.” She continues quickly, before he can respond. “And I don’t regret it, either.”
Harry strokes his hand through her hair. The moment is slightly ruined when his hand gets caught in the tangles, and they both laugh. “That’s fair, I suppose.”
“I like you, Harry Potter,” says Ginny. “And the Tom Riddle who lives in my head likes you, too.”
Harry laughs against her neck. “Does he? I’m, er, flattered, I guess.”
You should be. I’m not known for liking people, after all.
Ginny pulls away a little so that she can look down into Harry’s eyes. “So, it’s just you, me, and cute Voldemort, then? I can live with that.”
Harry grins at her. “Sure,” he says fondly. “Just the ‘three’ of us.”
Just the three of us.
—