He took her soul when she was eleven. She'd poured it out and he'd drunk it up and poured a little bit of his own back into her.

Not a lot.

Not enough to keep his later, monstrous self from death.

But he'd never taken it all back and it sat there. It sat and settled and germinated and grew and she was its soil and she was its fertilizer and she was its sun and its rain.

Her mum had always said gardens had weeds and volunteers, both plants that pushed their way into your bed uninvited. Weeds you didn't want. Volunteers you did.

When she was eleven and still recovering from his possession, Ginny would have said that the tendrils of Tom Riddle that worked their way into her mind, taking root in every crevice they found, belonged to a weed.

By 16, though, she wasn't so sure. By 16, she appreciated the dark, mocking voice of the boy in her head who held everyone in contempt. By sixteen she was pretty sure he counted as a volunteer.

"I wish you were real," she would say - think - at him.

"I'm realer than that pathetic boyfriend with his clumsy, groping fingers," Tom would reply. "I'm realer than your would-be savior with his damp mouth and sweaty palms."

By 18, when Tom's other self had been killed, when she had graduated, when it was clear that Harry could not compete with the brilliant ghost that knew every thought she had, every dream, every fear, she was quite sure he counted as a volunteer.

"If you were real," she would ask, "would you stay?"

"Forever," he would whisper. "But I need a body."

He'd had seven years, after all. Seven years and nearly unfettered access to the library at Hogwarts and he'd wanted to find just one thing: how to live again. How to take this consciousness and put it into a body of its own. By the end he could have pushed Ginny out, but by the end he wanted her too. He had gotten attached.

So he needed a body and he told her how.

Ginny eyed the dark-haired, green-eyed man who shared her bed, who her mother adored, who she'd come to despise for the very purity he'd used to save them all, and she raised her pale brows.

There are many ways to pour your soul into a new vessel. Ginny watched as Harry's eyes went wide with fear at the familiar intrusion, as he struggled, as he failed.

"I suppose," Harry – Tom – said with a smirk, "he – I – should have paid more attention in Occlumency classes." She laughed at that and he yanked Ginny to him, his fingers tight in her red hair. She whimpered at the touch, opened her mouth to his swirling tongue, fell back onto the bed under his welcome assault.

Darkness. Possession. A weed transplanted with care to a new pot where it flourished and grew.

People remarked for years how happy Harry and Ginny seemed, how devoted to one another. How they were so close it was as if they could almost read one another's minds. As if they knew everything about one another.

Though it was strange how they never seemed to age.