"I didn't mean-" said Tracey.

"Wizards can't be hanged-" said Colin.

"-with Muggle rope, idiot," said Peregrine.

"That's such an advanced curse, though, where-" said Lavender.

"He's an older Slytherin boy and his mother is Bellatrix Black," said Cho.

"...I'm so sorry..." said Daphne Greengrass.

"Meta Merlin..." said Harry. "I told him that I really regretted having to do this, but he should stop coming to-"

"It's not your fault, Harry," said Hermione.

"Let's see..." said Luna, shuffling some cards, which Ginny distinctly saw go in and out of each other and transform via a magic she didn't know. "The Hanged Man in The Tower... that definitely means that Death is coming."

"Death already came, Luna," said Ginny.

"No," said Luna. "It's still coming. ...I'd better warn everyone."

A student saw Lesath's corpse hanging in the Astronomy Tower before the Hogwarts administration managed to isolate the area to prepare a controlled release of information, so news spread rapidly through the student population. Nothing prevented Professor McGonagall from going back in time six hours to ensure there was no foul play involved, but of course she borrowed Hermione's cloak of invisibility to do it – if she contacted Lesath, she knew, she would be further causally linked to his death than she had to be. No direct evidence of evildoing was found; in fact, Lesath even enchanted the rope to hang a wizard himself.

Lesath left a note, which read as follows:

"To all beings:

I am faulty, not by an accident of Birth but by an Accident of Growth. I am the Scion of the Wicked and Most Reviled House of Lestrange. My Mother didn't do anything wrong, and yet you all believe that it is Her debt I must repay. In truth, I would say that it is my Fathers'. Tonight I leave this world and in your eyes complete the transition from Dark Lord to Light.

Until last year, I was mocked and scorned and beaten for the Lines that Created me. Now there are only whispers of that, though I know they are still there. Now I am feared and hated and punished for trying to start my own line, as I see naturally fit. You were all repulsed by the thought that I might someday be a Father, never mind that I don't believe I am like any of my Fathers, and being the Mother would not be made compulsory. I'm not like any of my Fathers? Am I? Your Repulsion has proven as contagious as dragon pox and I am now equally Repulsed by the thought of my Line continuing|

It has recently been confided in me that I am 'Worth More Dead Than Alive'. If you figure out Who told me this, do not punish Them. They wern't being cruel. They only told me the Truth. I will now be Worth More. I will now cease to exist. When the Philosopher's Stone has destroyed Death, the better world you create will be better for not having me in it. Don't blame my Master and don't blame my Mother.

The Last You'll See Of,

Lesath Lestrange."

Headmistress McGonagall sent the rope that Lesath used to the Ministry to be burned, as it was a contaminated, potentially critically dangerous magical artifact.

Lesath's fate got Ginny thinking about a topic she subconsciously avoided thinking about – suicide. She had long ago realized, from various reports, that suicide was a potentially fatal mental break; a sickness rather than a sin. It would be an obvious, appalling injustice if, as she was often told, "suicides went to Hell". The common justification for suicide being a sin – that your life did not belong to you, but to God, or, in a secularized context, the people around you, so there's no distinction between suicide and murder – grated terribly on Ginny; she did not feel that her sense of self-ownership was a sin, but rather a virtue. And yet it was equally clear to Ginny that failing to prevent suicide was awful, like leaving people with cancer to die, and classifying it as a sin certainly accomplished that job.

Ginny had a hard time modeling the mind of a suicidal person, because her strong aversion to dying made it easy for her to dismiss the relevant intrusive thoughts when they occurred. Only guilt could change that, and Ginny couldn't think of anything grand in scope for her to be guilty about. She supposed an over-focus on guilt could be the cause... they certainly said that had been what happened to Lesath, though Ginny suspected it was far more complicated.

But why, after all, did Ginny even have a strong aversion to dying? It was hard for her to articulate rationally a reason that she didn't desire to hasten her own death, though she certainly didn't. She believed in an afterlife; indeed, she believed that the afterlife was better than what came before it. She believed that committing suicide could not be considered unethical, and that even if it could, it could not cause exclusion from Heaven. So why not, given these axioms, point her wand at her neck and whisper "Diffindo"? If that was too direct for metaphysical comfort, why not find a club, go to a nightmarish country, and go around bothering heathens until she wound up martyred? Maybe that was where the first trolls came from...

Ginny's first thought was that her impulse to remain alive must be a less coherent form of the impulse people like Harry, who didn't believe in an afterlife, possessed. From their perspective, of course, this truly was obvious and rational. From hers, not so much; this suggested to Ginny that she still only had belief in belief – but hadn't her Patronus disproved that thought? She then decided that her survival instinct, which overpowered what otherwise seemed to be rational thought, must have come from somewhere biological, and it was certainly, on an evolutionary level, supposed to be there. So that left three options. Either Ginny was one of the few people to become sufficiently religiously enlightened to realize that suicide was the correct course of action, and she should probably let other people know on her way out... or she had made a drastic mistake at some point along her reasoning... or...

Or there was some higher purpose to the construct of life than simply giving minds a place to reside. Perhaps it was instructional – that suggested reincarnation, which Ginny didn't like one bit, particularly the part about forgetting past lives, which seemed a rather obvious, and terrifying, patch to a rather obvious problem – or perhaps it was computational. Perhaps every human being was part of a vast computer set up to solve difficult problems, to uncover mysteries... Every man, woman, and child a subroutine... That wasn't an adequate explanation alone, but it was approaching one. Ginny rested content. There was no point in fighting an irrational instinct if it caused you to further a moral good. I might belong to myself, thought Ginny, but why wreck someone's project? If I'm forty and I've gotten an intelligent computer made out of specks, finally, and it just disassembles itself, then I'd forgive it but I certainly wouldn't be happy. And it's not like I'm missing out on the afterlife by staying alive as long as possible.

Ginny's Patronus got a bit brighter that day, and thankfully for Ginny's mental wellbeing, she never quite internalized that it was the direct result of Lesath's tragedy.