Chapter 165: A Girl's Thoughts
The sharp, earthy stench of Essence of Dittany collided with the acrid bite of Invigorating Potions, flooding her senses before she even managed to pry her eyelids apart.
Tamara slowly opened her eyes. The familiar, sterile white ceiling of the Hospital Wing swam into focus.
A raw, burning sting clawed at her throat with every breath. Frowning slightly, she pressed one pale hand against the soft mattress, forcing her aching muscles to cooperate as she propped herself up with visible difficulty.
A tight circle of people immediately crowded around the foot of her bed.
Dumbledore stood tall and quiet, flanked by a stern-faced Professor McGonagall and the entirety of the Weasley family, whose eyes were uniformly bloodshot and puffy from crying. Harry and Ron lingered a few paces back, shifting awkwardly on their feet, while Draco remained completely silent, half-swallowed by the shadows of a tall medicine cabinet with his arms tightly crossed over his chest.
"Oh, thank Merlin! You're finally awake, you brave, dear child! You saved our Ginny!"
The moment Tamara sat up, Molly Weasley gasped, her hands flying to cover her mouth to stifle a fresh wave of tearful exclamations. The warm-hearted matriarch leaned forward, her arms twitching. Had she not been utterly terrified of breaking the fragile-looking girl into pieces, she undoubtedly would have thrown herself forward to crush Tamara in a bone-crushing hug.
"I am fine, Mrs. Weasley. It was nothing," Tamara replied. Her voice was a raspy, broken whisper. She let her gaze drift past the weeping mother, landing softly on the adjacent hospital bed.
Ginny Weasley was awake as well.
The youngest Weasley looked exceptionally frail, her small frame sinking deep into the oversized white pillows. Under Dumbledore's gentle, encouraging gaze, she was sobbing uncontrollably, her voice hitching as she fitfully recounted the nightmare of her past year.
"...It was me. I found a black diary."
Ginny's voice faltered. She paused, her breath catching as she sensed Tamara's quiet gaze resting upon her.
A flurry of blurred, fragmented memories flashed through the young Gryffindor's mind. She remembered the gentle, comforting tenderness of the Tom residing inside the diary—a tenderness that felt identical to the warmth Senior Tamara had shown her. She remembered the protective amulet that had granted her fleeting moments of peace, and she remembered the faded surname embossed on the leather cover, a detail she had foolishly ignored for months.
But Ginny did not speak a word of this aloud.
Her childish intuition warned her that dragging those specific details into the light would bring catastrophic trouble down upon Tamara's head. Without a second thought, Ginny instinctively chose to deceive the greatest wizard of the age. She buried the truth deep, convincing herself that this was an unspeakable, sacred secret belonging solely to her and Senior Tamara.
Swallowing the name 'Tom Riddle' like a bitter pill, Ginny let out another heart-wrenching sob, deliberately blurring the edges of her confession.
"There was... there was something in the diary. I wrote all my thoughts into it... but every time we finished talking, I would lose time. I would just lose consciousness..."
"Later, I found dead rooster feathers on my robes... I was so terrified. I didn't know what was happening to me, so I threw it away. I threw it in that broken girl's bathroom on the second floor..."
"But it didn't work... that thing found me. It controlled me again and dragged me down into the Chamber of Secrets..."
Ginny buried her face in her trembling hands, her cries echoing with raw, endless regret and total psychological breakdown.
"I am so sorry... I hurt all those people. I even hurt Senior Tamara... I am so, so sorry..."
The vast, quiet space of the Hospital Wing amplified the young girl's heartbroken wails. Everyone present felt a heavy ache in their chests, their faces softening with deep pity for this poor, innocent victim of dark magic.
But from a low angle, completely invisible to the adults and the boys, Ginny's tear-drenched eyes peered through the gaps in her fingers. Her gaze slipped past her parents' shoulders and quietly, deliberately, locked onto Tamara.
More accurately, her eyes fixated on Tamara's slightly open collar.
There, a ring of hideous, purple-black strangulation marks wrapped around Tamara's pale, otherwise perfect neck like an ugly, venomous snake.
Ginny knew exactly who had left those bruises.
They were the marks she had violently crushed into the older girl's flesh with her own bare hands during her final, desperate moments under the diary's control. It was the physical manifestation of a Black Magic backlash, born from the violent collision of two souls originating from the exact same source—a lingering curse that even Madam Pomfrey's most potent healing salves could not immediately erase.
Staring at that glaring, ugly scar, Ginny maintained her facade of heart-wrenching guilt and sorrow.
Yet deep within the darkest recesses of her heart—a heart that had been quietly warped and twisted by months of intimate contact with a Horcrux—an indescribable, intoxicating sense of gratification began to bloom.
She was hurt.
The untouchable, peerless Senior Tamara, who always seemed so far above everyone else, had been seriously injured because of her. On that flawless, pristine body, a permanent mark belonging exclusively to Ginny Weasley had been violently carved.
To Ginny's corrupted logic, this meant that no matter how cold, distant, or annoyed Tamara acted toward her in the future, an indelible, blood-scented bond had been forged between them. This almost pathological sense of control and dark connection sent a literal shiver of pleasure down Ginny's spine, cutting straight through her genuine guilt.
'Sick little freak.'Tamara's sharp eyes caught that fleeting, feverish abnormality dancing in the younger girl's gaze. She suppressed a cold sneer, her internal monologue dripping with absolute disgust.'Every single Gryffindor in this castle is completely unhinged.'
But a twisted pre-teen was the least of her problems right now.
"The second-floor girl's bathroom..."
Harry, standing rigidly at the foot of the bed, felt a jolt of electricity shoot through his veins. A buried memory suddenly violently awakened the second those words left Ginny's mouth.
At the very beginning of the school year, inside Moaning Myrtle's flooded bathroom, he had walked in on Tamara frantically searching for a black diary near the sinks.
Harry's jaw tightened. He cast a deeply complex, conflicted glance at the pale girl sitting on the hospital bed. He opened his mouth, the question burning on his tongue, but in the end, he clamped his lips shut and quickly averted his eyes.
Yet it was precisely this heavy, conflicted glance from the Boy Who Lived that instantly caught Albus Dumbledore's attention.
Following the trajectory of Harry's gaze, the Headmaster slowly turned his head. His piercing blue eyes settled on Tamara. He watched her with a calm, terrifying stillness, looking as though he were effortlessly peeling back the layers of lies, secrets, and flesh to examine the very soul hiding beneath the shell of this twelve-year-old girl.
'Curse you to hell, Potter.'Tamara's mind raced, venom flooding her thoughts.'The damned savior's brain actually decides to function at the most critical, inconvenient moments.'
It was time for extreme crisis management.
Tamara drew in a shallow, shaky breath. Her facial expression management instantly locked into place, elevating to a level that would put seasoned stage actors to shame.
She did not flinch away from Harry's lingering guilt, nor did she dodge Dumbledore's heavy, x-ray scrutiny. Instead, her dark eyes widened just a fraction, trembling slightly as they pooled with moisture. She projected the exact, calculated amount of vulnerability—a masterful blend of residual shock, confusion, and lingering terror.
She ducked her head, her shoulders curling inward as if she were suddenly assaulted by the horrific memory of the Chamber. Her small body shrank back against the pillows.
Slowly, she raised one long, pale hand. Her fingertips shook visibly in the air before gently, almost fearfully, brushing against the shocking black strangulation marks bruising her throat.
She vividly, flawlessly painted the portrait of a traumatized, innocent victim. A brave girl who had risked everything to save a fellow student, only to have her soul nearly ripped from her body by an ancient evil, leaving her entirely broken and shaken in its aftermath.
It was a performance so utterly perfect that the Virtue System chimed in her head, cheerfully suggesting it should mint a special trophy for 'Best Actress of the Year for Touching Hogwarts.'
Dumbledore remained silent, his eyes tracking Tamara's every micro-expression.
The wise old wizard, who had handled the treacherous waters of human deception for over a century, let his gaze drift back and forth between the girl's exquisite, terrified face and the fatal, obvious wound wrapped around her neck.
A long, suffocating silence stretched across the room.
Finally, the hard edge in Dumbledore's eyes softened. He let out a very quiet, very heavy sigh.
No matter what secrets these children were burying in the dark, one absolute truth remained indisputable. The inherently selfish, parasitic nature of Black Magic could never, under any circumstances, fake a sacrifice that bordered so closely on mutual destruction.
"It seems that diary, filled to the brim with such evil power, has been flushed down the pipes and into the bottomless abyss."
Dumbledore's calm voice finally broke the tension, officially ending his invisible interrogation.
"But that no longer matters. Most, the children have survived safely. That, my friends, is the greatest miracle of tonight."
Hearing the Headmaster's verdict, Tamara did not relax a single muscle. Her outward expression remained perfectly fragile, but her mind was already barking orders.
'System. What is Dumbledore's current suspicion level toward me?'
[Ding—Querying Albus Dumbledore's suspicion level toward the host...]
[Current suspicion level: 15%]
'Exactly as I thought...'
Tamara sneered inwardly, her metaphorical fangs bared. Even after she had practically bled out on the cold stone floor, nearly sacrificing this second life to play the hero, this paranoid old fossil still harbored an ineradicable wariness toward her.
Fifteen percent.
For any ordinary Hogwarts student, a fifteen percent suspicion rating might just equate to a negligible bit of curiosity from an eccentric Headmaster.
But for a reborn Dark Lord? As long as that number remained above zero, it was a literal Sword of Damocles dangling by a thread over her neck. It was a threat severe enough to ensure she would never eat or sleep in peace again.
The old fox's intuition was simply too sharp. Just moments ago, despite her acting being entirely devoid of flaws, Dumbledore had instantly caught the shift in the room's atmosphere. He had traced the anomaly straight back to her, all because that brainless idiot Potter could not control his facial features and had to shoot her a 'complex' look!
If Potter acted stupidly a few more times... if he showed just a fraction more of that hesitant, guilty expression in the corridors...
Even if she played her role flawlessly until graduation, this terrifying old man would undoubtedly follow the breadcrumbs Potter left behind. He would dig his hands into the mire and forcibly drag the truth of the Chamber of Secrets—and perhaps even the impossible secret of her resurrection—into the blinding light of day.
Tamara lowered her eyelashes, casting long shadows over her cheeks to conceal the absolute, freezing wariness pooling deep in her eyes.
'As long as Dumbledore remains at Hogwarts...'Her fingers curled into the white bedsheets, gripping the fabric until her knuckles turned white.'This damned place will never be considered safe.'
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