Chapter 137: Be Strong
Ginny Weasley's mind flatlined. The cold, damp air of the bathroom pressed against her skin, but it was nothing compared to the suffocating weight in the room. She could not comprehend what Tamara meant by the word masterpiece. She understood even less about being homesick.
To Ginny, the gentle older girl who had crossed house boundaries just to comfort her during her darkest hours had vanished. In her place stood a stranger. Tamara was scrutinizing her with an intensity that felt less like a gaze and more like a physical weight. A terrifying, ancient pressure radiated from the depths of the older girl's soul, crushing the air from Ginny's lungs. Her knees shook. Every instinct screamed at her to drop to the floor and beg for mercy.
"I... I didn't..." Ginny stammered, her jaw trembling violently. Hot tears spilled over her freckled cheeks, splashing onto her robes. Her small body shrank backward, her shoulders pressing so hard against the damp, tiled wall it seemed as though she were trying to fuse with the stone itself. "Please... don't hate me..."
Tamara stared down at the shivering first-year. The little redhead looked entirely ready to empty the contents of her stomach right there on the floor. Tamara's brow twitched with raw impatience. Deep within the girl's magical signature, the parasitic remnant soul was playing dead.
How utterly pathetic. That cunning, fragmented piece of garbage knew exactly who was standing in front of it. It knew that the moment it dared to surface, its original self would obliterate it with a strike so devastating it would cease to exist. So, the diary horcrux chose the most cowardly, shameless tactic available. It burrowed deep into the cracks of the little girl's fragile mind, clinging to her life force like a bloated tick, absolutely refusing to budge.
"What exactly are you crying for?" Tamara sneered, the sound sharp and cold in the echoing bathroom. The fingers she had pressed against Ginny's cheek did not withdraw. Instead, her grip tightened just enough to force the trembling girl's chin up. Ginny had no choice but to look directly into those bottomless, pitch-black eyes.
With her free hand, Tamara reached into the pocket of her Slytherin robes. Her fingers closed around the crudely carved wooden amulet she had prepared. She yanked it out, the rough twine dangling from her pale fingers.
"This is a return gift." Her voice was entirely devoid of the gentle warmth expected of a caring senior. It was flat, rigid, and carried the heavy finality of a judge reading a death sentence. "Since you presented me with such an... unforgettable gift, as your senior, I simply cannot be impolite."
She did not wait for a response. She did not care if the girl wanted it. Tamara shoved the rough wooden block forward, looping the coarse string roughly over Ginny's messy red hair and letting it drop against her collarbone.
"Wear it." The command snapped through the air. "This is an order."
Ginny froze entirely, her breath hitching in her throat. The heavy, unpolished wood settled against her skin. She squeezed her eyes shut, bracing for a stinging hex or a dark curse to rip through her veins.
Nothing happened.
Or rather, the exact opposite happened.
A sudden, pure surge of magic bloomed from the amulet. It carried a crisp, mint-like coolness that flooded straight through her chest and into her racing heart. For months, a foul, gloomy fog had lingered at the edges of her consciousness, leaving her constantly dazed, paranoid, and suffocating in fear. The moment the magic touched her, that oily darkness was violently suppressed, completely extinguished like a cursed fire taking a bucket of ice water directly to the center.
Ginny gasped loudly. The sensation was identical to a drowning victim finally breaking the surface of a black lake, dragging in that first desperate, agonizing lungful of fresh air. The heavy sludge clogging her thoughts dissolved. Her mind, muddled for so long, achieved a sudden, crystal clarity.
"This... what is this?" Ginny whispered, her trembling fingers rising to brush against the rough grain of the wood. Her pupils, previously blown wide and unfocused from sheer terror, contracted and sharpened as she stared at the older girl.
"An amulet." Tamara released the girl's chin. She took a deliberate step back, her hands elegantly brushing non-existent dust from her pristine robes. "It can assist you in... dispelling certain unclean things. Like those incessant noises screaming inside your head."
Ginny stared blankly. Her mouth parted slightly, but no sound came out.
She had never expected this. Tamara knew. Tamara had seen right through her, realized how utterly abnormal and broken she was, and yet... she did not look at her with disgust. Instead, she had gone out of her way to craft such a precious, powerful magical item just to protect her?
A massive, overwhelming tidal wave of emotion and raw grievance shattered the dam in Ginny's chest. For an entire year, she had been ruthlessly tormented by that diary. She had been terrified to close her eyes at night, terrified to speak to her own brothers. Even Ron had absolutely no idea what kind of hell she was living in. She had been drowning in absolute darkness, clawing at the walls of her own mind, entirely convinced she was going insane.
And now, finally, someone had looked into the dark. Someone had seen her silent agony and reached out a hand.
"Waaah!"
A broken, ugly sob ripped from Ginny's throat. She lost every ounce of her self-control. Acting purely on the desperate instinct of a lost child finally finding a parent in a crowd, she lunged forward. She threw her entire body weight directly into Tamara, burying her face into the older girl's chest, and began to wail with absolute abandon.
Tamara went entirely rigid. Her spine locked into place.
It felt as though someone had just detonated a massive, slime-filled dungbomb directly against her ribcage. The wretched little redhead had locked her arms in a death grip around Tamara's waist, aggressively rubbing a disgusting mixture of hot tears and snot straight into the expensive fabric of her Slytherin uniform.
Get off me!
Tamara's mind roared with pure, unadulterated revulsion. Her immediate instinct was to violently fling this weeping human parasite into the nearest toilet stall. The dark magic responded to her fury instantly. The destructive sparks of a highly overpowered Knockback Jinx began to crackle invisibly at the very tips of her fingers.
However.
[Ding! Detected that Ginny Weasley has developed a massive amount of affection for you!]
[This is the true power of mutual aid in times of trouble! Friendship is magic!]
[System Reward: Love +1!]
[Current Love: 30.]
[Congratulations on unlocking a new spell: Incarcerous!]
[Task Hint: Please maintain this posture and give your junior the warmest, most comforting embrace until she stops crying. If the target is forcefully pushed away, the newly acquired Love points will be permanently deducted, and the spell will be immediately revoked.]
The crackling magic at Tamara's fingertips fizzled out. Her hand hovered awkwardly in mid-air, her pale fingers twitching violently with the suppressed urge to commit murder. But in the end, she could not bring her hand down to strike the girl.
For the sake of the spell. For the sake of power. She would endure this humiliation.
Tamara dragged in a long, ragged breath, using every ounce of her legendary occlumency shields to forcefully crush the volcanic killing intent churning in her chest. She stood there, as stiff and unyielding as a petrified wooden post, absolutely refusing to return the hug, while Ginny proceeded to thoroughly soak a massive patch of her robes with salty tears.
"Wooo... Senior... I'm so scared..." Ginny sobbed, the sound raw and heart-wrenching. Her fingers dug into Tamara's back. "I don't know what's wrong with me... I just keep having these awful nightmares... I feel like there is something else living inside my body..."
Listening to the pathetic lament of the Weasley girl, Tamara's dark eyes flickered toward the ceiling. This simply could not go on. She refused to waste her incredibly precious time acting as a glorified therapy cushion for a weeping Gryffindor. Her brilliant mind raced, rapidly calculating a permanent solution to this annoyance. Internally, she barked at the glowing interface in her mind.
'System.'Tamara's mental voice was ice.'If I were to reach in, directly rip the remnant soul out of her skull, and crush it in my bare hands right this second... what would be the exact consequences?'
[System Reply: Warning! This action is classified as a high-risk operation!]
[Considering the host's current magical capacity and the extreme fragility of Ginny Weasley's mortal soul, forced extraction carries a 99.9% probability of causing the subject's soul to completely shatter, instantly reducing her to a drooling imbecile or a permanent vegetable.]
[, given that this action severely violates the core principle of "Caring for Fellow Students," the system will immediately initiate the highest level of disciplinary punishment—continuous, high-voltage electric currents—until the host's own IQ drops to absolute zero.]
Tamara rolled her eyes so hard they nearly ached.
She knew it. The damned glowing box was entirely predictable. There were never any convenient shortcuts when dealing with this cursed virtue magic. Brute force was off the table. If she could not simply rip the problem out by the roots, then she would have to resort to a different angle.
Tamara slowly lowered her gaze to the top of Ginny's messy red head, still buried in her chest. She waited. She waited until the violent, wracking sobs finally began to subside into pathetic little hiccups.
"Are you quite finished crying?"
Tamara finally spoke, her voice dropping the temperature of the room by several degrees. She had not softened in the slightest from the prolonged embrace. If anything, her tone had grown infinitely more detached and indifferent.
Startled by the sudden frost in the older girl's voice, Ginny jerked backward. She quickly let go of Tamara's robes, her hands flying up to haphazardly scrub the wetness from her blotchy cheeks. She hung her head low, looking exactly like a scolded child caught stealing sweets.
"S-Sorry, Senior..."
"I despise cowards." Tamara drew her wand with a sharp flick of her wrist. She tapped the tip against her ruined robes, casting a silent, aggressive Scouring Charm that instantly vanished the damp patch of tears and mucus. She leveled her gaze at Ginny, enunciating every single syllable with surgical precision. "Tears are the single most useless substance in this world. They cannot save you. They cannot change your reality. They only prove to your enemies that you are weak."
Tamara reached out, her pale index finger jabbing forcefully into the center of the wooden amulet resting against Ginny's collarbone. The impact made the younger girl flinch.
"This trinket can only shield you for a fleeting moment. It will not protect you for a lifetime." Tamara leaned in, her voice dropping to a dangerous, silken whisper. "If you are a pathetic piece of trash who cannot even guard the doors to her own mind, then do not expect a carved chunk of rotten wood to save your miserable life."
Ginny's head snapped up. Her red-rimmed eyes widened, absolute astonishment cutting through the lingering haze of her sorrow.
"If I were in your position," Tamara continued, leaning down just enough to trap the Gryffindor in her shadow. Her pitch-black eyes locked onto Ginny's, piercing straight through the girl's retinas as if dissecting her very soul. "I would not care what it was. Even if it were the devil himself rising from the deepest pit, if he dared to lay a single finger on my mind, I would tear him apart and fight him to the absolute death. Do you understand me, Weasley?"
Without waiting for an answer, Tamara straightened her spine, instantly regaining her flawless, aristocratic posture. She looked down her nose at the girl.
"If you choose to remain a weeping coward, the next time you find yourself drowning in trouble... do not come looking for me. Because even I cannot save a piece of trash that is entirely determined to die."
Having delivered her final verdict, Tamara did not spare the first-year a single backward glance. Her dark robes billowed sharply as she turned on her heel. She shoved the heavy wooden door of the bathroom open and strode out into the corridor, her footsteps echoing with rhythmic finality.
The door swung shut with a heavy thud, leaving Ginny standing entirely alone in the damp silence.
Ginny stood frozen in a daze. Slowly, her trembling hand rose to tightly grip the wooden amulet resting against her chest. Beneath her fingertips, she could feel the steady, faint warmth of the magic pulsing within the grain.
"A piece of trash... huh?" she whispered to the empty room.
She bit down hard on her lower lip. She bit down until the sharp, metallic tang of blood bloomed on her tongue.
Tamara's words had been brutally harsh. Every single syllable had felt like coarse salt being aggressively ground into her open, bleeding wounds. But strangely enough, as the older girl's dark silhouette vanished from her sight, Ginny realized she was not nearly as devastated as she should have been. Instead, beneath the sting of the insult, an unmatched, grounding sense of peace settled into her bones.
The old Tamara—the one who always wore a flawless, polite smile and spoke with measured elegance—possessed a perfection that felt exactly like a thick pane of frosted glass. It made the Slytherin girl feel entirely unreachable, untouchable, and always tinged with a faint, artificial detachment.
But today...
Ginny lowered her gaze to the ugly, roughly carved wooden block clutched in her palm.
Today, Tamara had violently ripped off that gentle, perfect mask. She had been freezing cold. She had been ruthlessly cruel. She had looked her dead in the eye, called her a piece of trash, and stared at her as though she were nothing but dirt beneath her shoes.
Yet, ironically, that naked, unfiltered malice made Ginny feel a stark reality she had never experienced before. It was a wake-up call.
Tamara was absolutely right. What was the use of crying in the dark? If she refused to fight back, if she did not even attempt to resist the monster in her head, who else could possibly save her?
Ginny raised her sleeve and aggressively wiped away the very last tear tracking down her cheek. In those brown eyes that had spent the entire year darting away in evasive, cowardly fear, a faint but incredibly steady spark ignited.
It was the stubborn, reckless flame of the Weasley bloodline—a fire that absolutely refused to lay down and die.
Ginny lifted her chin, staring directly into her own reflection in the cracked, smudge-covered mirror above the sinks. Her voice was soft, but the tremor was entirely gone.
"No matter what you are..." she whispered to the dark presence lurking in the back of her mind. "Do not think you can just control me anymore."
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