Ginny was back in the Gryffindor common room in under five minutes.
The two house common rooms sat in towers, far enough apart that the corridors between them felt longer at night. Hogwarts had towers for everything, as if the castle enjoyed placing its most important rooms in the most inconvenient places. Ginny barely noticed. She slipped through the Fat Lady's portrait with the diary heavy in her pocket and her thoughts already running ahead of her.
A few older students looked up as she entered. Percy, stationed by the fire like he'd appointed himself the evening's warden, frowned the moment he saw her.
"Ginny? Weren't you in detention with Ron and the others?"
"That's right," Ginny said quickly, before he could wind himself into a lecture. "But Professor Flitwick said my spellwork was excellent, and I shouldn't waste time sitting through detention."
Percy's expression brightened at once, as if she had handed him proof of a point he'd been trying to make all year.
"Well done. I always said being a good student never goes wrong." He straightened, pleased with himself. "Look, Hermione didn't get punished either. If you ask me, it's up to you and me to uphold the Weasley family."
He started toward the portrait hole.
"Where are you going so late?" Ginny asked, more out of habit than interest.
"Just a small matter," Percy said, in the tone that meant it was either none of her business or he didn't want to admit what he was doing.
Ginny let him go. She was already halfway to the stairs.
In the dormitory, the other girls were asleep, their breathing soft and even. Ginny moved as quietly as she could, hands a little clumsy with urgency. She drew open her trunk, murmured the spell that loosened the drawer's latch, and pulled out the black diary.
She spread it on her desk. The quill hovered above the page, ink-dark and ready, but her hand refused to move at first. Her question sat behind her teeth like a stone.
She had told herself she wouldn't make it sound like an accusation. She had promised herself she wouldn't let fear speak for her. That, more than anything, was the problem: fear had already made a home in her chest, quiet and stubborn.
Ginny breathed in, then set the tip of the quill to the paper.
"Mr. Riddle, there's something I want to ask you…"
She didn't wait for the ink to vanish. The next line followed immediately, and then the next, as if the act of writing had finally cut a thread inside her and everything she'd been holding back was spilling out.
"I lost a day of memory. I remember it was Thursday when I went to sleep, but when I woke up, it was Saturday. Everyone says I took Friday off, but I don't remember it at all. What do you think is wrong with me?"
The words sat there. Her heart thudded so hard she could feel it in her throat.
The ink began to fade, swallowed by the page. Ginny watched it go with the sick certainty of someone watching a door close, not knowing what would be on the other side when it opened again.
For a moment, nothing happened.
...
I've been discovered?
In the memory-space, Elijah read the paragraph as it formed, and felt the smallest shift in the air around him.
So. She had noticed.
Elijah's first instinct was to calculate the easiest path forward: deny, deflect, offer an alternative explanation that sounded plausible in a child's world. Confusion, exhaustion, stress. Hogwarts did strange things to time. Anything, really, would do. Ginny wanted to believe him. That was the simplest truth of the situation.
And because it was true, it was also dangerous.
He considered the shape of her question. The careful phrasing. The effort she'd made not to point the wand of suspicion directly at him.
She didn't know. Not fully.
Not yet.
Reverse psychology it is...
Elijah decided, after a brief pause, to give her the one thing she would least expect from him.
Honesty.
Sometimes the truth was sharper than a lie. Sometimes it cut deeper and made the victim hold the blade themselves.
He wrote.
"You found out. I was going to keep it a secret. I'm sorry, Ginny."
He let the line hang a beat longer than necessary, as if he were struggling.
"Yes. I controlled your body. If I'm an evil thing, then you should destroy me."
The ink vanished.
Ginny stared at the empty page, then at the new words that replaced it, and felt her stomach drop as if she'd missed a stair in the dark.
"It really was you…"
She wrote it slowly, as though writing might make it less real.
"But—why?"
Elijah didn't answer the question. Not yet. He answered the fear behind it.
"Ginny, no matter the reason, it's unforgivable. A magic item controlling a witch's body. If it happened to me, I'd destroy it immediately."
The quill moved again, his tone tightening into something that could pass for sincerity.
"You should do the same. Destroy me. I'm just a diary."
Ginny's fingers clenched around the quill hard enough to hurt.
"No!"
The word dug into the paper.
"I don't think you're evil. If you were truly evil, why didn't you do anything? Helping me finish my homework can hardly be called an evil act. You have a reason. You must."
Elijah watched her do it for him, watched her build the defence she needed before he even offered one. He almost felt something like amusement, but kept it buried. A child's loyalty was not difficult to earn. Once earned, it was difficult for them to surrender even when it turned against them.
He waited. He let the silence stretch until it would feel heavy to her, until she would fill it with her own worry.
Then he wrote, and he made the words gentle.
"You're right. I should have told you."
He allowed a softer truth to slip into the lie, because it made the lie easier to swallow.
"I'm only a fragment of Tom Riddle's memory left in this diary."
"…Mm."
"Then you've probably wondered where the real Tom Riddle is now."
"The real Tom Riddle…" she wrote, as if testing the words. Then, after a pause: "Mr. Riddle… are you already…?"
Elijah answered with the quiet finality she expected.
"Yes. I've been dead for many years."
He let the next line arrive like an afterthought, a sorrow that had been forced into confession.
"My death was connected to You-Know-Who. He was powerful in that era."
Ginny's reply came almost instantly, too eager, too ready to make the story a tragedy instead of a warning.
"So You-Know-Who killed you?"
Elijah didn't confirm it. He didn't need to. A child would take the shape of a story and complete it herself.
"Those things are in the past," he wrote instead. "I was made into this diary while I was still a student."
He let longing bleed through the ink.
"So many years have passed, Ginny. I miss the world. I've wanted to breathe fresh air again, to feel sunlight, to exist as something alive."
Ginny's vision blurred. Tears slipped down her cheeks before she noticed them. A part of her tried to hold on to the sensible voice that said this was dangerous, that nothing trapped in a diary could be trusted.
But another part of her, louder now, felt only the aching unfairness of it: a boy killed young, sealed away, left alone for decades.
"Mr. Riddle…" she wrote, and the ink wobbled where her hand shook.
Elijah pressed harder, not with cruelty, but with precision.
"No matter what, my actions can't be forgiven," he wrote. "You should destroy me, or give me to a professor."
Then he added the hook, carefully baited with gratitude.
"But before you do… I want to see you."
...
Meet Mr. Riddle?
Ginny froze over the page.
Her instincts, the small hard part of her that had survived being the youngest in a loud family, whispered sharply: Don't. That's foolish. That's how children die in stories.
But her curiosity rose just as quickly, bright and sharp, like a cat's paw reaching toward a moving thing.
She had been talking to ink and paper. She had never truly seen him. She had never known what he was. Now there was a way to make it real.
"But how do I do it?" she wrote.
Elijah's satisfaction was immediate.
"You only need to bury your face in the diary," he wrote. "I'll bring you into my memories."
The diary's pages flipped without her touching them, a sudden gust of unseen force riffling through paper until it stopped on a single page.
Ginny stared.
The paper had changed. A tiny rectangle of shifting darkness and light, like a miniature screen.
Her hands trembled as she lifted the diary. She hesitated only long enough to feel her pulse in her fingertips, then brought her face closer.
The rectangle seemed to swell, growing larger as she leaned in. The edge of the page pulled at her, not like a hand, but like gravity.
Ginny's chair scraped softly as her body tipped forward. Her head passed through the opening as though the paper had turned to water, and the world broke into spinning colour.
Light, then shadow. Motion without ground. A dizzying rush, like falling through a dream.
Then it stopped.
Ginny landed on nothing.
She was standing in a dim grey space filled with silver mist, thin as morning fog and yet strangely heavy, like breath held too long. It drifted around her in slow currents, shifting without wind.
She turned, searching, heart hammering.
Elijah stood a short distance away, not hiding, as if he had always been there. He held a wand that looked wrong in his hand, more like an idea of a wand than something real. His posture was relaxed, almost amused, head tilted slightly as he watched her.
"Mr. Riddle?" Ginny said, her voice small in the emptiness.
"Hello, Ginny."
The reply settled something inside her. Her fear didn't vanish, but it loosened. She moved toward him, half walking, half jogging, unable to stop staring.
She had not imagined him like this.
The face matched the neatness of the handwriting. It matched the confidence in the words. He was far too handsome for a thing that lived in a diary, and Ginny felt the unfairness of that too, as if the world had chosen this particular shape only to make her trust it.
"Are you really Mr. Riddle?" she asked.
Elijah's smile was effortless.
"More precisely, I'm his memory," he said, "I suppose you're surprised. You didn't expect I was Slytherin."
He gestured to his robes.
Ginny frowned, then huffed. "I didn't. And you're always telling me to break rules."
Elijah's eyes glinted. "Is that a complaint?"
Ginny should have looked away. Instead, she kept staring at him.
Then she hesitated, and her tone shifted into uncertainty.
"You look a bit like Harry," she said. "Just a little."
"Coincidences happen," Elijah replied smoothly.
He studied her for a moment, then said, as if it were nothing at all, "You're even cuter than I imagined."
Ginny's cheeks flared hot. She jerked her gaze away, suddenly aware of her own body, her own hair, her own hands, as if she'd been caught wearing something ridiculous. She didn't know what to say, so she said the first thing that didn't feel like panic.
"I-I mean.. H-Have you been stuck here for fifty years?"
Her eyes moved over the place as she spoke. It was empty. Not like an ordinary room with nothing in it, but like a world that had never been built. The mist drifted, cold and silent. Looking at it made her feel as though she couldn't quite breathe.
She swallowed. The pity in her rose so fast it hurt.
Elijah watched it happen, let it.
"It's no use, Ginny," he said quietly, when she reached out and her hand passed straight through his chest. "I can see and hear. But I can't touch. I can't feel."
His voice softened, and his expression turned wistful, almost tender.
"That day I controlled your body… I felt alive. The sky. The wind. The sun on skin. Being alive is incredible, isn't it?"
Ginny's throat tightened. She nodded too quickly.
"And yes," Elijah added, as if confessing a shame, "I had a meal in the Great Hall. A proper one. Haha~ it was great."
Tears welled again, threatening to spill. She hated herself for it, and couldn't stop.
Elijah's tone snapped abruptly into sternness.
"That's enough, Ginny."
The sharpness made her flinch. Then his voice gentled, almost immediately, as though he regretted frightening her.
"You should go back."
"But—"
"Go," Elijah said, and the firmness returned. "Staying with something like me isn't good for you. After you leave, destroy the diary. If you can't, give it to someone who can."
His outline began to fade, as if the mist were swallowing him. His body turned thin, transparent, the edges softening.
"We should say goodbye," he said. "It was a pleasure meeting you."
"No." Ginny's voice cracked. "Noooo!"
She shook her head, tears spilling freely now. The instinct that had warned her earlier was gone.
"Be obedient, Ginny," Elijah said, as if he cared. "Perhaps destruction is the only end for a memory like me."
"No!" Ginny wiped her face with her sleeve, angry at the tears and at him and at the world. "Mr. Riddle is my friend. I won't kill you."
"You'll have other friends," Elijah said. "Real ones."
"That's not the same."
His expression flickered, carefully restrained frustration beneath the tenderness, then smoothed again.
"But—"
"Are you going to harm me?" Ginny shot back, sudden and fierce. "Are you trying to take my life?"
Elijah's denial came too quickly, too strongly.
"Of course not."
It was true.
Ginny seized it like a weapon.
"Then why should I kill you?" She took a shaky breath, and when she spoke again her voice steadied, as if making the decision had made her braver. "You want to experience the real world. I.. I can help."
Elijah said nothing. He let her talk herself into it.
"I don't think lending you my body sometimes is a big deal," Ginny continued, earnest and certain. "I can do that. I can help you feel alive again."
For a moment, something in Elijah tightened, but he suppressed it and smiled, and the mist around him seemed to brighten by the smallest degree.
"Thank you, Ginny."
____
JKR described Tom Riddle as the most "handsome face" in her story.