Chapter 96: The Understanding Big Sister
Night finally fell over The Burrow, bringing with it a relative, grudging quiet.
Of course, quiet in the Weasley household was a highly subjective term. Compared to the daytime chaos—which sounded suspiciously like a horde of Cornish pixies throwing a drunken riot—the evening was merely a dull roar.
For Tamara, whose standards of tranquility were forged in the freezing, tomb-like silence of the Slytherin dungeons and the bleak, lifeless halls of Wool's Orphanage, the ambient noise of this dilapidated house was enough to induce a slow, agonizing migraine.
Up in the attic, the resident ghoul was apparently suffering from a bout of severe insomnia. It spent the hours rhythmically hammering against the rusty water pipes, sending hollow, metallic thuds echoing through the floorboards. Thump. Thump. Thump. Outside the window, the garden gnomes that had not been hurled quite far enough over the hedge were engaged in a squeaky, expletive-laden turf war among the cabbages.
Yet, the true source of Tamara's suffocating misery was the room itself.
Ginny Weasley's bedroom.
As the youngest child and only daughter of the sprawling, poverty-stricken clan, her living quarters were claustrophobically cramped. The peeling wallpaper was plastered with garish, moving posters of the Weird Sisters band. The floorboards were practically invisible beneath haphazard piles of battered textbooks and frayed, second-hand robes that had yet to be put away. The air hung heavy with a cloying, inescapable scent of cheap lye soap and aggressively dried lavender.
"Um... if you feel too crowded, I can sleep on the floor."
Ginny stood awkwardly by the edge of the narrow mattress, hugging a lumpy pillow to her chest. Her freckled face burned a brilliant, patchy scarlet. She kept her gaze fixed firmly on the floorboards, absolutely refusing to meet Tamara's eyes, while her fingers twisted the frayed hem of her pajamas into nervous knots.
Sitting gracefully on the edge of the bed, slowly running a comb through her silken black hair, Tamara looked utterly alien in the squalid little room. She was a marble statue of dark elegance that had somehow been misplaced in a slum, radiating an aristocratic perfection that only made the surrounding poverty feel all the more pathetic.
"It is perfectly fine."
Tamara lowered the comb, her lips curving into a flawless, mathematically calculated smile of pure, angelic gentleness.
"It is very... cozy here."
'Cozy.' She mentally gagged. The word tasted like ash and vomit on her tongue.
But she would endure this squalor for one very specific reason. Tamara's dark eyes swept in a slow, imperceptible glide toward the chaotic pile of clutter resting on Ginny's bedside table.
There, wedged beneath several tattered, spine-broken volumes of A History of Magic, a single corner of faded black leather peeked out.
Her diary.
Her sixteen-year-old soul.
It rested right there, agonizingly close, practically humming with dark resonance, silently screaming her name.
Beneath the threadbare bedsheets, Tamara's pale fingers twitched.
Wandless magic. A mere flick of her will, and that precious piece of her fractured soul would fly straight into her waiting palm.
[Ding! Detected that the host harbors a strong intention to steal.]
The System's obnoxiously cheerful, mechanical voice chimed directly inside her skull.
[Warning: As the chosen host of the Virtue System, you must strictly adhere to the fundamental principles of honesty and trustworthiness! Stealing a minor roommate's personal belongings is highly immoral behavior!]
[This item must be voluntarily given or lent to you by Ginny Weasley to be considered legally obtained. Otherwise, the System will forcibly confiscate the item and administer a Level 4 Electric Shock Punishment to the host!]
The gentle, angelic smile on Tamara's face froze, the muscles in her cheeks locking tight.
'Damn this infernal parasite.'
She drew in a slow, measured breath through her nose, violently wrestling down the surging, bloodthirsty urge to cast a localized explosion curse and reduce both the System and this wretched room to a crater of smoking ash.
If brute force and petty theft were off the table, she would simply have to resort to deception. When it came to bewitching the weak-minded, the great Lord Voldemort bowed to absolutely no one.
"Ginny."
Tamara's voice dropped half an octave, softening into a velvet purr of seductive, older-sisterly concern.
"Can you not sleep? I noticed you have been staring at that little notebook in a daze."
Ginny had just crawled beneath her own covers. One hand gripped a battered, half-bald quill, while the other was inching toward the stack of books, fingertips just brushing the black leather of the diary.
At the sound of Tamara's voice, the red-haired girl jumped violently. Looking exactly like a toddler caught stealing sweets, she snatched her hand back and hastily shoved the diary deep under her pillow.
"N-no... it is nothing!" Ginny stammered, her face instantly flushing the color of a violently ripe tomato. "I just... I just wanted to write down some thoughts."
Tamara's dark eyes narrowed to dangerous slits.
She felt it.
In that brief fraction of a second when Ginny's skin made contact with the leather cover, a faint, sickly-sweet pulse of extremely familiar magic had bled into the air.
Sixteen-year-old Tom Riddle.
That young, handsome, devastatingly charming ghost of her past was already sinking his venomous little fangs into the naive girl's mind, attempting to bewitch her.
'If I do not intervene, this foolish child will become the diary's mindless puppet within the month,' Tamara analyzed with cold, clinical precision.
Under normal circumstances, this was an outcome she would have eagerly helped. Using a disposable Weasley to crack open the Chamber of Secrets and purge the Hogwarts halls of filthy Mudbloods? It was a delightful masterstroke.
But the entity sealed within those pages was not a mindless weapon. It was a sixteen-year-old Tom Riddle. Her most youthful, arrogant, and viciously ambitious era.
If the diary managed to completely dominate Ginny's soul, it would drain the girl's life force dry to reconstruct a physical body. And then? Then there would be a second, entirely independent, utterly uncontrollable version of herself running loose, competing for the absolute mantle of the Dark Lord.
Unacceptable.
There could only be one Lord Voldemort in this world. She would never allow anyone—not even her own past self—to usurp the absolute power that rightfully belonged to her.
"Do you want to talk about it?"
Tamara shifted, leaning her back gracefully against the wooden headboard. The dim lamplight caught in her pitch-black eyes, making them pool with an irresistible, hypnotic depth.
"You see, I cannot sleep either, and..."
She let the sentence trail off, allowing a heavy, intimate silence to stretch between them before delivering the killing blow in a tone of deep, soul-piercing understanding.
"Some thoughts are simply not safe to trap on paper, Ginny. Sometimes, the only way to truly release them is to speak them aloud to someone who understands."
Ginny froze, her breath hitching in her throat.
She stared at Tamara. Bathed in the warm, flickering glow of the bedside lamp, the older Slytherin girl looked impossibly perfect. She was breathtakingly beautiful, undeniably powerful, and carried the legendary rumor of having stood shoulder-to-shoulder with Harry Potter to defeat You-Know-Who.
In Ginny's starstruck eyes, Tamara Riddle was the absolute pinnacle of everything she desperately dreamed of becoming.
"Tamara..."
Ginny whispered, her lower lip trembling slightly. After a long moment of agonizing hesitation, her fingers uncurled, dropping the battered quill onto the mattress.
The dark, whispering allure of the diary hidden beneath her pillow instantly evaporated.
After all, compared to pouring her heart out to a cold, inanimate notebook, how could she possibly refuse the warm, living presence of such a gentle, charming, and understanding older sister?
"Actually..." Ginny pulled her knees up to her chest, wrapping her arms tightly around her shins. Her voice dropped to a shy, squeaky whisper, barely louder than the buzz of a mosquito. "I was thinking about... about Harry."
The sympathetic, sisterly smile plastered across Tamara's face instantly turned to stone.
Who?
Harry?
Harry Potter?
That insufferable, pathetic excuse for a savior? That miserable little brat with a stupid lightning bolt scar plastered on his forehead, held together by broken glasses and entirely sustained by sheer, infuriating dumb luck?
"Oh."
Tamara managed to force a single, painfully ambiguous syllable past her gritted teeth. A sharp, phantom pain began to throb behind her eyes, accompanied by a sudden, violent ache in her stomach.
She was enduring the stench of poverty, wrestling with a psychotic moral-policing System, and carefully plotting the retrieval of her own severed soul—she was absolutely not here to host a pathetic midnight fan club meeting for The Boy Who Lived!
"I just feel... like he does not even notice me at all," Ginny sniffled.
Completely oblivious to the brief, terrifying flash of pure, unadulterated killing intent that sparked in Tamara's dark eyes, the young Gryffindor plunged headfirst into her maidenly melancholy.
"Today at Flourish and Blotts, I was standing right next to him. But his eyes were only on that Lockhart professor, and Hermione... and even you."
Ginny finally lifted her head, her brown eyes swimming with a potent mixture of deep envy and crushing inferiority.
"Tamara, you are really amazing. Harry looks at you so differently. It is... it is this incredibly respectful look. Like you are someone important."
She buried her face back into her knees, her voice muffling into the fabric of her pajamas.
"But when he looks at me, it is just like he is looking at Ron's annoying little sister who has not grown up yet."
Ginny peeked up through her messy red bangs, her expression painfully earnest.
"Tell me... what kind of person do you think Harry would actually like?"
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