Chapter Text
Trigger Warning: suicide
"That makes sense. Kazumi's magical attribute is destruction, and Niko's is reformation. It fits the hot-and-icy requirements."
-- Juubey
"The key to victory... is fried ice cream!"
-- Niko Kanna
She was panicking, blood spinning through her veins like tiny racing brooms, but she was tired, so tired that her eyes didn't even dart around wildly. Somehow she felt there wouldn't be much to see. Initially, there would be a giant stone chamber, wet and dark like a sewer, and shortly afterward there would be nothing. She was panicking, but it was like an afterthought; like she just knew she should be panicking.
Ginny's eyelids were mostly down. She was lying uncomfortably, bent in the small of the back like an L, but moving was the furthest thing from her mind. Her attention was on the ephemeral stream of energy, or life-force, or something, sliding through the space between her and her diary - which, of course, was really Tom's diary, and always had been. She had trusted Tom way, way too much, and when you reach out there's a chance that a person will just keep taking and you won't realize until you have nothing left, and it was unfair, she thought, that life had met her with such a test when she was too young to have known that very important lesson.
She must have known it in a sense, though, because she had never trusted Harry Potter. She trusted him to be a good person, of course - that was kind of his whole thing. That was some of what made him so amazing. What she did not trust him to do was like her back. So, maybe her past self wasn't so foolish after all.
Ginny was dying in the Chamber of Secrets, and she could feel her mind leaving her body. Her intake of sensory information was lessening, like her nerves were dying or shutting off. She focused her attention on her face, where she could still feel the air and even her breath, and found that something was pressing against it insistently.
It was a paw. Hitting her in the cheek. A cat? She didn't want to open her eyes. She was too tired.
The paw smacked her ear and pushed at her nose. She pulled her eyes open.
It wasn't a cat.
"Are you telling me that in order to save yourself from one creepy, suspicious, magical being, you made a deal with a second creepy, suspicious, magical being?"
-- Arthur Weasley
"Don't worry, Dad! I could see where this one's brain was!"
-- Ginny Weasley