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Hermione stared at Ginny where she sat across the table in the Gryffindor common room. The younger girl had been sitting with her quill hovering over a blank piece of parchment for ten minutes without actually writing anything. Hermione bit her lip, wondering if she should intervene.
Ginny had been released from the hospital wing in time to sit her exams, but the colour hadn’t really returned to her cheeks since Tom Riddle had kidnapped her. She always looked like she was a moment away from bursting into tears, and Hermione had taken it upon herself to make sure someone was keeping an eye on her at all times. She worried about what might happen if she was left alone too long.
“Ginny?” she said hesitantly.
Ginny glanced up at her, her eyes abnormally wide. Her grip on the quill tightened.
“Are you alright?” Hermione asked.
Ginny glanced around the common room without answering. For a second, Hermione thought she’d drifted off into her own thoughts and wouldn’t answer. It was something that had happened a lot when she was still in the hospital wing, but she’d been getting better at remaining present. Finally, Ginny took a shaky breath and responded.
“Sometimes I feel fine,” she said slowly. “Other times, it’s like I’m right back there all over again.” She looked down at the parchment in front of her. “Blank parchment is the worst. I can’t bring myself to write on it. What if there’s a person on the other side prepared to write back?”
Hermione reached out, covering Ginny’s hand with hers. “There isn’t,” she said, though she had a feeling that the promise was worthless to Ginny. “Dumbledore said that he’d never encountered magic like that diary before. If Dumbledore had never seen it, there probably isn’t another one in the whole world. That’s just a regular old piece of parchment. There’s nothing magical about it.”
Ginny nodded, her eyes not leaving the table. “Logically, I get that, but it doesn’t stop me from being paranoid. I keep thinking that he’s going to talk to me again. I tried to get rid of him before, remember? How can I trust that he’s really gone?” She took a long, shaky breath, letting her eyes flutter shut. “I just want things to go back to normal. It’s pathetic to be scared of parchment.”
“It’s not!” Hermione squeezed her hand. “What happened with that diary was horrible. It makes complete sense that you’d be scared after that.”
“But like you said, this is just parchment.” She picked the parchment up, waving it around before letting it fall unceremoniously to the table again. “I know that, yet I can’t stop thinking about Riddle being on the other side.”
Hermione didn’t know what to do. She wanted to assure Ginny that her fears made perfect sense, considering what she’d gone through, but she was worried that she’d validate Ginny’s feelings to the point that Ginny would only come to believe them further. On the other hand, she wanted to assure her that everything was okay and the parchment was perfectly ordinary, but she was afraid that Ginny would take it as Hermione minimising her fears.
Then, an idea hit her.
“Would it be easier to write on Muggle paper instead of parchment?”
Ginny’s eyebrows rose. “I don’t know. I’ve never used it before.”
There was a pang of hope in Hermione’s chest. “Wait here.” Not wasting any time, she rushed up to her dormitory.
She’d stuck some Muggle notebooks into her trunk before her first year, not sure if she’d find a use for them at Hogwarts or not. She hadn’t, but she also hadn’t bothered to empty them out of her trunk over the summer, bringing them back with her for her second year.
She dug through her trunk to the very bottom, where the two notebooks sat buried by the other possessions she rarely used. With them in hand, she hurried back down to the common room. Ginny sat where Hermione had left her, watching her return with a look of amusement that assured Hermione further that everything would be okay.