A/N: The Quidditch League Fanfiction Competition - Round 11 - Kenmare Kestrels - Keeper - Word Count: ~2200

Prompt: Dark!Ginny

Her Darkness

Ginny tried to keep her head down while she made her way to the lower dungeons and her Potions class. Although, to call it a "class" was debatable. It wasn't as though many people had done any real learning at Hogwarts since the school had come under Death Eater control. Ginny wasn't normally one to avoid trouble, but to face it head on in the sound belief that she was in the right, but when the Death Eaters who patrolled the halls of the school were so liberal with their own hexes and curses, avoidance was the only survival tactic.

Ginny could certainly hold her own in a fight against any of her fellow students, however. It hadn't been a few times that Ginny had been cornered by those students who were striving for a place in Voldemort's service and had had to fight her way out. She'd been taught by Harry and Hermione, after all, and she was no slouch when it came to magical skill.

Voices in the corridor up ahead sent a ripple of caution through Ginny's body and she nearly tripped in an attempt to stumble through a tapestry to the hidden corridor beyond. She hadn't made out any of the words, but she easily recognized the nastiness in the tone. She'd wait until they passed, she thought, and then she'd set off for the potions dungeons once more. Slughorn wasn't the most competent professor, but he at least did his best to make sure the students didn't fight while in class.

Ginny listened for the voices to pass, but just as they were drawing near enough for her to make out snippets of quite impolite conversation, a lighter padding of feet entered the hall from the way Ginny had come herself.

"Well, if it isn't baby Creevey," said a cruel voice Ginny recognized as Pansy's. Ginny cursed inwardly; Pansy wasn't much of a threat on her own, but she belonged to a nasty clique of Slytherin girls who really were dangerous.

Ginny cringed, but stepped out into the corridor, placing herself between Dennis and Pansy's bitch cadets. To her dismay, there were twice as many of them as Ginny has assumed, and she was outnumbered eight-to-one.

"Go, Dennis," Ginny said sternly. She was grateful that he didn't need told twice, for he turned around immediately and ran in the opposite direction.

Pansy's expression went from startled at Ginny's sudden appearance to gleaming in a predatory way Ginny didn't like.

"Look, ladies," Pansy said, her voice taking on a darker tone than the teasing one she'd used on Dennis. "Seems we've caught ourselves a blood traitor. Let's show the weasel what we think of blood traitors."

Ginny drew her wand from her sleeve too quickly for any of the Slytherins to react, and an instant later Pansy was flat on her back, blinking blearily at the ceiling and trying to remember how to breathe. Two more of her group joined her before the rest of them got over their initial shock and drew their own wands, meeting Ginny curse of curse.

Ginny held her own pretty well against the five remaining students for a while, but she was tiring quickly from being on the defensive. She'd lost ground, having had to back away from the hexes being thrown at her. Two more girls fell, but another one got to her feet, and the duel continued.

Ginny hadn't realized exactly how much ground she had lost to the girls, however, until she tried to take another step back only to trip on the stairs, landing hard on the cobblestone. She managed to hang onto her wand, but one of Pansy's cronies stepped on her wrist, and she dropped it with a cry of pain. Ginny looked up into the face of the girl standing on her wrist and saw Millicent Bulstrode glaring back down at her. Millicent smiled grimly, put her wand away, and brought one meaty fist down to meet Ginny's stomach. Ginny groaned and tried not to be sick as her head spun around the room from the force of the blow.

"Think you're so clever," Ginny heard Pansy say from the nearby. The clique queen had apparently recovered from Ginny's first attack.

Ginny couldn't help herself. "I'm quite clever," she said through gritted teeth. Millicent's weight on her wrist was beginning to make her fingertips go numb.

Pansy's face appeared in Ginny's line of sight, hovering above her as she lay on the stairs. "Yes, I can see that," Pansy replied nastily. "That would be why you're on the floor and I'm the one with my wand."

Ginny couldn't dispute the truth of those words. Her eyes flicked in the direction of her own wand, which was several inches from the fingers of her right hand, which were beginning to turn bright red from the lack of bloodflow. She looked back at Pansy and did the only thing she could think to do; she spit directly into Pansy's face.

Pansy shrieked in outrage, wiped her face roughly with the back of one hand, and then slashed fiercely at Ginny's with her wand. Color exploded in Ginny's vision, and pain seared her chest. She was vaguely aware of a warm sensation and knew that she must be bleeding. The cut was probably shallow, she thought, because the pain had already dulled to a throb in her mind, but her pain was renewed as Pansy slashed at her again.

The pain subsided once more, but a stranger sensation was bubbling up in Ginny's chest, and she didn't recognize it.

Somewhere around her, someone began to laugh. Ginny wished she would stop, because the sound was a high-pitched, unsettling laughter than echoed against the stone walls of the corridor in a way that made her dizzy. It was the laughter of someone who was somehow enjoying the chaos.

"What's so funny?" Pansy demanded, and Ginny looked around to see the girl staring at her. Had Ginny been the one laughing?

Ginny found that she was actually grinning at Pansy now. She felt possessed as she answered Pansy's clearly rhetorical question.

Ginny, one arm still pinned by Millicent, sat partially up from the stairs and said in a sing-song voice that didn't feel like her own, "I know something you don't know."

Pansy pushed her face forward into Ginny's field of vision and snarled. "Oh? And what's that?"

"That I'm just as good with my left hand as my right," Ginny said in a mock-whisper.

While Pansy worked on puzzling this statement out, Ginny brought her forehead forward to meet Pansy's nose. Pansy gasped, screamed, and fell back while Ginny dove for her wand with her left hand. At the same time, she sunk her teeth into Millicent's Achilles Heel, and the monster of a girl yelped more in surprise than pain, stumbling down the steps and off of Ginny's wrist. Ginny cradled her wrist to her chest, and in a fit of rage she couldn't control, she whipped her wand through the air and pointed it at Pansy.

"Crucio!" she cried, the word tearing out of her mouth before she'd realized what it was.

Pansy screamed in agony, writhing on the ground while the remaining girls watched in unabashed shock. Half of them ran, whether to call a teacher or simply escape Ginny wasn't sure. Millicent didn't leave, but took several steps back from the clearly mad Ginny Weasley. The rest merely watched in horror.

"Stop!" one of the girls squeaked despite her terror. "Stop, you'll kill her!"

For some reason the girl's voice seemed to travel a long distance before it reached Ginny. When she did hear it, it sounded fuzzy and distorted, as though spoken through a fan in another room. The words reached Ginny through her apparent trance, and she dropped her wand, hardly aware of what she was doing. She blinked at Pansy, whose writhing had stopped, and her wand hand began to tremble at her side. Had... Had she done that just now? Had she used the Cruciatus Curse on Pansy?

"Go!" Ginny shouted, reality sinking in. No one moved; they all stared at her with mouths wide open as though looking at some undiscovered creature. "GO!" Ginny repeated, her voice sounding harsh to herself.

The stunned girls snapped into action, then. Millicent picked up the semi-conscious Pansy and carried her over her shoulder down the hall, the rest of the girls scurrying after them.

Alone in the corridor, Ginny, looked down at the wand in her hand. It looked wrong to her. It was as if she didn't recognize it, though it looked the same in every way. With a start, Ginny realized that it wasn't her wand that looked different, but her hand. It was... paler than usual, and more slender. In a panic, she looked down at her other hand, and it matched the other. She reached up to touch her head with the strange, spindly fingers, and they met hair that was not thick, but thin and wiry. When she held it in front of her face, it wasn't red, but black.

Ginny tripped over herself in a mad dash for the nearest bathroom—the nearest mirror—but when she was in front of it, she was not mollified. The young woman in the mirror looked like her in a few ways, but her face had gone pale and sallow, her hair was a nest of black twigs, and her eyes were so deeply brown that they looked black in the candlelight.

Laughter like the sound she had made earlier rang in her ears, though her reflection didn't move. It was a laughter she recognized now, for she had heard it over the summer when Bill and Fleur's wedding had been crashed by Death Eaters. Even as she thought the name of the evil woman who she was too ashamed to admit had haunted her dreams since than day, a ghostly reflection flickered in the mirror next to her own face.

"No," Ginny breathed, turning but finding no one beside her. She looked back at the mirror to see the taunting, smiling face of Bellatrix Lestange burning a gaze through her. Ginny shook her head and closed her eyes. "You're not here," she said, more to herself than to the mirror. "You're not here."

"Of course I'm not," Bellatrix crooned softly, then pouted. "And how sorry I am that I can't be there for your special day." She cackled, belying her own words.

"Go away," Ginny said, not daring to raise her voice above a whisper.

"Now, is that any way to speak to the woman who brought you into this world?" Bellatrix asked, playing at a sulky tone. "Is that any way to speak to your mummy dearest?"

Ginny's blood froze at those words, and she felt like retching. "You're not my mother," Ginny said, leaning on the sink in front of her for balance. "You're nothing to me. Get out of my head."

"Not in your head, dear," Bellatrix said, giggling, "and certainly not nothing. Left you with those awful people. Those blood traitors. Well, of course, I had to. Best place to hide you—in the arms of two bleeding hearts who can't even properly protect themselves from memory charms." Bellatrix's laugh was halfway between a mad scientist's gloating chuckle and banshee's wail.

Ginny shook her head again, but couldn't bring herself to speak.

"Felt grand, didn't it?" Bellatrix asked gleefully. "Felt marvelous. Felt glorious! My little girl's first Unforgivable Curse," she said in the same tone mother's used to describe a child's first step or word.

"No," Ginny whispered, eyes closed, but it was half-hearted.

"No?" Bellatrix asked. "Someone's a dirty liar. You've got dark magic in your blood, my pet. You've got it in your bones."

As if to confirm Bellatrix's madness, Ginny felt feverish for an instant, and her very bones seemed to hum and vibrate. Her knuckled turned white as she clutched her wand tighter and tighter.

At that moment, the door to the bathroom opened and a younger student walked in, startling Ginny. Without meaning to, Ginny whipped around to face the student, wand raised. The girl blanched and clutched her backpack to her chest, slipping quickly back through the door and into the corridor beyond.

Ginny's mouth popped open and worked soundlessly for a moment before that maddening cackle floated to her ears again.

"It feels delicious, doesn't it?" asked the voice of Bellatrix, though the flickering image in the mirror had disappeared.

"What does?" Ginny asked.

"The darkness," Bellatrix whispered, and Ginny felt ghostly lips at her ear. "You get that from me."