InsaneJournal

Tweak says, "vote for me for President!"

Ginevra Molly Potter (bat_bogeys) wrote in beyondthepages,
@ 2010-05-23 22:53:00

Entry tags:

!complete, 2023 10, ginny potter, neville longbottom

RP: Fretting
Characters: Ginny, Neville
Time/Date: 9ish, October 23, 2023
Location: Greenhouse 2
Warnings/Rating: Swears, I'm sure.
Summary: Ginny's having a fit and wants to talk to someone who has an idea of why
Status: Complete

She'd paced her office. Wandered to her quarters. Considered popping home, but Harry didn't need her freaking out on top of everything else. She tried to tell herself she was over-reacting, but she knew her daughter.

She knew they'd likely driven her to this by warning her so fiercely against it, that it was likely their grand plan to save her backfiring on them because of her daughter's contrary nature.

Ginny tried not to put too much stock in Rose's note. Not until she could talk to Lily herself. But if her daughter was honestly defending Tom, making arguments ... against everything they'd told her? Everything he'd done? Was she trying to justify the past or ... the potential of his future? Surely not his past. Surely not. Not her daughter. Not Harry's daughter.

Needing to get out of the castle, to a calmer place, Ginny struck out. She had vague thoughts of visiting Hagrid, but these days he usually turned in early and he was difficult to talk to with the deafness setting in like it was.

The greenhouses should be fairly quiet though. Changing the angle of her path, she lined herself up with the second greenhouse and headed in that direction. There were usually more flowers in there, and right now, she just ... wanted to go be among greenery and try to find a calm place. Moments like these, she could understand her mother amazingly well. The idea of Tom doing anything at all to her daughter ...

Stepping into the greenhouse, Ginny exhaled a shuddering breath and only then realized the lights were on. "Hello?" she called quietly, assuming Neville was here. It could just as easily be an older student, though she doubted it at this hour.

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trustingnature
2010-05-24 06:41 am UTC (link)

He was surprised to hear a voice, and he nearly dropped the plant that he was working on. He did drop the watering can he'd been holding, which clattered to the floor.

"Oops," Neville said with an awkward grin, before looking up for the source of the voice. "Ginny?" he asked, his eyebrows raised, expression bewildered. "What are you doing out here this late?"

He assumed that she was looking for him, though that might have been presumptuous of him. He didn't often see Ginny in the greenhouses, though, and it was getting fairly late for her to be out walking the grounds...

It was then that he noticed her expression. "Oh. What's wrong? Did something happen?"

He was thinking along the lines of another Quidditch injury being slept off in the infirmary, or another argument with one of her kids about being careful, but it almost looked like it might be worse than that.

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bat_bogeys
2010-05-24 01:46 pm UTC (link)

"Didn't mean to scare you," she said softly as she crossed closer to him, hands resting on the table beside him. "I ... got a note from Rose. Lily. Lily's ... talking to him. Defending him or his right to be here or ... or something. Talking to him, Neville," Ginny pressed.

She wasn't often prone to completely losing her cool like this, but this was her daughter making nice with a man who grew up into a murderer, who kept all of the wizarding world under a shroud of fear for years. Years.

"I mean what next? She starts going out with him or something? He killed her grandparents, tried to kill her father, and she's ..." Ginny looked away. She wasn't even going to touch what Tom had done to her, but it was because of that that she worried for Lily. Yes, she'd been eleven and stupid, but the point was the same. She'd been lured, nearly killed, and he could do the same to her baby girl so easily. So very easily. "It's like she's not even ... she doesn't understand what we're trying to tell her, and I just ..."

Ginny turned her brown eyes to Neville. "What if he kills her?" she whispered.

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trustingnature
2010-05-25 12:07 am UTC (link)

His expression immediately clouded, and he inhaled sharply. No wonder she looked so worried. He couldn't say, honestly, that he was exactly surprised that this had come up - Lily did have a knack for getting into trouble, and talking to Tom Riddle was probably at the top of the list - but he was concerned also.

"Did she say what about?" Neville asked carefully. "They never... experienced it, not the same way we did. Maybe they really feel like he's from a point in his life when he's innocent."

Neville didn't. Neville didn't believe for a moment that it had been entirely events that had occurred once he got out of school that had turned him into the evil monster he had become. He knew that was closed-minded, but he had heard too many stories about Tom Riddle's time at Hogwarts, and experience too much pain at the hands of his followers to believe for a moment that it was a smart idea to have him in a school with a whole bunch of easily influenced children who had never been through a war.

Stupid.

"He won't," Neville said firmly, his eyes narrowing sharply. "He wouldn't dare. The sheer hell that we would rain down on him if he even tried, and he has to know it. He isn't stupid, Ginny." He exhaled. "It is perhaps not the most comforting reason to take comfort in, but it's true. He has to know that threatening her means threatening you and Harry, and I can't think of anything that would be more frightening to evil-doers."

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bat_bogeys
2010-05-25 12:32 am UTC (link)

"No," Ginny said. "She's not even certain, completely certain, that they did talk, but just that Lily's been ..." Ginny gestured slightly. "Supportive of him."

Ginny smirked slightly and shook her head again. "I know. I ... he won't kill her now. Maybe he wouldn't even do it directly, and I hope to Merlin she's smart enough not to blindly follow any instructions he gives her, if it even comes to that point, but I ... would rather she not be raising this kind of concern."

Family history aside, it was just damn odd to have someone who wasn't a Death Eater making any sort of pro-Tom arguments. Odd, and worrisome.

"I ... I guess I'll have to talk to her. Again. Maybe get Harry to talk to her." She glanced up to Neville. "Might not hurt, if you had time, if you sat her down, too. Just ... I don't know. Try to emphasize how bad, how really bad things got."

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trustingnature
2010-05-25 03:32 am UTC (link)

"She's smart enough to know better," he said with a nod. "And she's listened to enough lectures and heard enough stories that I doubt that she wouldn't at least think about any instructions he gave her." The problems, he thought, would arise when she thought about it and still thought it was okay. 'Can you pick something up for me in Hogsmade? Just a joke book...' could seem like a perfectly innocent request, but if he had someone on the outside switch out the books in the store...

He hesitated, very very slightly, when Ginny mentioned she'd talk to Lily again, his face contorting in a frown. "Maybe you... and don't take this the wrong way, Ginny, really... but maybe talking to her isn't the answer. I mean we can lecture Lily until we're blue in the face and she'll still end up doing her own thing."

He didn't know if it was that she had a problem with authority, or if she just thought she knew better and didn't have to listen, but he knew that was true.

"Is there a way she can hear it from someone she wouldn't... expect to hear it from?" he asked. "One of the ghosts, even. Someone who's had personal experience." A thought occurred to him, and he frowned. "Probably not Myrtle, but... maybe Nick, or the Friar could be convinced to tell her about Tom's time in school with the perspective that we have now."

He didn't want to come right out and say it, but Lily was clearly not listening to her parents. He wasn't sure what sort of new approach needed to be taken, but doing the same thing over and over seemed to not be working.

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bat_bogeys
2010-05-25 03:50 am UTC (link)

Ginny sighed. "I wonder if she has. Heard enough stories. If she really understands." Ginny supposed that Lily understood, at least intellectually, but there were often times when what she knew didn't line up at all with what she did. It never failed to baffle Ginny when Lily Luna did things that she knew would end badly.

Talking wasn't going to work. "I know," she said quietly to Neville. "I just ... I don't know what else to do. Borrow some of Snape's memories of what went on at Death Eater meetings? Make her watch what he grew up into? To see first hand how he killed people? What can I do, Nev?" She snorted. "Maybe I'll get her grandmother to sit her down with Snape and scare her."

If anyone could, Snape could.

Ginny ran her fingers through her hair. "Maybe," she said to his suggestion. "Maybe I'll try that. Or something like that. There has to be something."

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trustingnature
2010-05-25 05:09 am UTC (link)

"That's not bad," he remarked. "Sitting her down with Snape and getting him to put the fear of life in her. Question is whether or not he'd be up for it."

Truthfully, and he didn't want to say it outloud, he thought that if Ginny hadn't been her mother she'd have probably been the ideal one to talk to Lily. She was probably one of the few people that had first hand experience with a young Tom Riddle still being just as evil as he became when he was that age. But Lily probably hadn't listened as closely as she should have just because it was her mother talking to her.

"It's... it's unfortunate that you don't have the diary anymore," he said, quietly and carefully because he wasn't sure how to handle this topic with Ginny, but maybe it would spark something. "To have a concrete example of how easy it is to fall for this sort of thing." He shook his head, "The fact of the matter is that even if he is innocent at this point in his life, there's very little we can do to stop him from becoming the man he was. What can we give him that he didn't already have in his time? He had the support, love, admiration of almost everyone in school, a career path with tens of people ready and willing to offer him a position. Friends, even if they weren't the best friends to be having..." he shrugged his shoulders. "Sure, it was wartime, and we are in a position of tentative peace, but..." he shook his head. "Suppose I'm preaching to the choir on that one," he said with a wry smile.

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bat_bogeys
2010-05-25 01:41 pm UTC (link)

She nodded. "For that to work, it would have to be a functioning diary ..." she murmured. And that, of course, would not have helped with the whole 'Voldemort is dead' thing a quarter of a century ago. She shuddered a little at the reminder of that, wrapping her arms around herself as she did.

"Suppose the most we can do is ... keep an eye on her. Trust her cousins and Al to keep an eye on her."

Maybe she'd go talk to Al, too. He was sharing a house with Tom, after all, and so far all of their attention had been on LilyLu. She did have a son here, too.

"I should go back in," she murmured. "But thanks for ... listening." She felt marginally calmer now, though far from confident about the entire fiasco.

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trustingnature
2010-05-25 07:51 pm UTC (link)

He knew that, but he'd hoped that the idea of it could have sparked something else. Maybe if they created some kind of diarylike device that would prove to her how easy... but she'd see right through that.

Merlin but this girl was a pain sometimes.

"I'd say you should try encouraging her, but that doesn't seem like the best idea either," he said with a wry smile. "It'll get better soon, Ginny. Probably once the whole mess dies down and he stops being such a hot conversation topic, and people get used to the idea that he's here, things will calm down. Maybe he'll make some nice friends in Slytherin and she won't hold his interest anymore?" he doubted it though. Daughter of the man who'd supposedly killed you and ended all your plans? No, he was hardly going to lose interest in that. But they could hope.

"I hope it helped," he said honestly when she mentioned she should head back in. "The girl has a strong head on her shoulders, Ginny. At the very least, you should take comfort in the fact that she will most definitely surprise him when he underestimates her."

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bat_bogeys
2010-05-25 08:17 pm UTC (link)

"I thought about that," Ginny admitted. "Tried ... imagining telling her that she should talk to him. Make friends with him. Date him, if she'd like, but ... with our luck, she'd take it as permission to do what she was going to do anyway, and throw it back at me later with the infamous 'you said I could' card attached."

But he did have a point with that. Lily was a bright girl, and stubborn as anything. If she didn't think something was a good idea, she wouldn't do it. The problem was ... Ginny wondered if her daughter would know a bad idea for what it truly was if it was presented with the charming Tom Riddle twist.

"I hope so," she said softly. "Once the novelty wears off ... maybe she'll find something else interesting all on her own."

Ginny offered him a soft smile and a wave before she turned to let herself out. She doubted she'd sleep easy this week, but maybe she'd at least be able to sleep.

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