Ginny requested a meeting with the Headmistress within an hour, and quickly attempted to organize her thoughts. She did not succeed.

"Headmistress," said Ginny, finally, "with all due respect – it's about Luna. I don't think she's actually the one behind it all. It just doesn't seem right." McGonagall nodded, though Ginny didn't quite notice. "I've been reading about what happened to Hermione last year – with Draco, that is, and the Blood-Cooling Charm – and I've been thinking that Luna could easily have been framed. It's not difficult, with magic."

"I've been thinking about that case, too," said the Headmistress. "And I agree. Miss Lovegood was certainly under a Confundus Charm that caused her to make a scene; that has already been confirmed and the Charm has already been removed. Memories of guilt remain, and she was immediately quite repentant upon removal of the Confundus Charm, but expert opinion is that the memories were likely falsified, and they are being investigated. It is likely that she will return to school within the week. I am certain that justice will be served with respect to Miss Lovegood; it wouldn't do to repeat the mistake that was made five decades prior at the cost of Rubeus Hagrid's education – and the case against him was actually much stronger."

"I'm very glad to hear that," said Ginny, and McGonagall softly smiled.

"Is there a reason you cared to inform me of your suspicions that something was amiss?" said the Headmistress.

"No, of course not!" said Ginny, and she had been sent into full panic-mode.

"I merely meant that I was unaware that you and Miss Lovegood were such close friends," said the Headmistress. "No one else came in to testify on her behalf."

"Well, uh, we are," said Ginny. "She was the first friend I made this year, actually. I wish I spent more time with her."

"Oh," said the Headmistress. "Alright." She smiled, looked down, and made eye contact with Ginny.

Wait, what's going on? thought Ginny.

The Headmistress's mouth fell open, and then she buried her head in her hands.

Tossing and turning in a bed below which was a Tim-less box. Nothing ever seemed to get better around here. First, students had started getting petrified. Then, Ginny had found out it was her doing it, while possessed by her diary friend, who was probably actually Voldemort. Then, Voldemort had escaped from his cloth pile prison under her bed, God-knows-how, and had petrified another student while possessing God-knows-who - maybe her, again. Then, Luna had been framed, and when Ginny tried to set things straight, she'd gotten her mind read by the Headmistress, who proceeded to yell at her for "withholding critical information". "You're lucky not to be expelled," she'd said. Then there'd been a bunch of painful diagnostic spells to make sure she wasn't still possessed, and someone had been sent to do the same to Draco, and the year had just generally been a mess.

Well, now at least Ginny could sleep. Or, rather, she couldn't. She could lie in bed and shut her eyes, but her mind refused to follow. Where was Tim - Voldemort, that is? Was Harry safe at this very second? What about Draco? What about her? According to the stories Ginny's mother sometimes told her about the war, no one was safe when the Dark Lord was on the prowl, and so Ginny kept her wand by her bedside, though it was doubtful it would be of any use. Who was he possessing? Clearly he needed to possess someone to physically act, and he needed consent for that; otherwise his behavior would have been very different indeed. The only other person Ginny knew had consented to possession was Draco, but he had been tested, and the unaccounted-for memories meant any number of other people might have interacted with "Tim". No one could be trusted.

And what would become of Luna? Nurmengard didn't have Dementors, but it was still no place for a young girl. If she returned to Hogwarts soon, then good, but odds were that she would still be under suspicion, at least from her fellow students. There had been whispers about her ever since she witnessed the Petrification of Marietta Edgecombe, and her eccentric personality had long been considered threatening by the sorts that Percy hung around. Come to think of it, who had benefited from her framing? It had fallen apart so quickly; was having her take the fall the entirety of the plot's purpose? If so, it had been a failure. Already, those in power knew they had been duped, and Luna was projected to return to school soon. Hadn't Luna given Ginny a paper describing what the diary was and how to destroy it? Ugh, Ginny had been such an idiot, and now she knew that Hermione, Luna, and countless future others were paying for it.

Where was Harry in all of this? Ginny considered Harry's intellect far superior to her own, even if they occasionally disagreed. He was supposed to be involved in important secret things. So why hadn't he fixed the year's problem? Ginny supposed that proved what a difficult problem it was. That, or that he was in on it - which would just make it an even more difficult problem, and was honestly too awful to think about, on top of producing complexity penalties all across the sky. Just a brief consideration of Harry's possible involvement with the evil plot, and it was as though a very heavy monster was sitting on Ginny's chest.

But wait, no - there actually was something weighing down on her; the chest monster was literal. Ginny's eyes opened to see an enormous, self-propelling sheet baring down on her, crushing the air out of her lungs like a python, smothering her like Desdemona. It was a Lethifold! Ginny heard thoughts being whispered from somewhere unknown, telling her that everything was tumbling down, that she wanted to end it all, that she wanted to become Death. She did her best to ignore these voices, and struggled for her wand.

"Expecto Patronum!" Ginny could barely get it out, being so close to suffocation, but she succeeded. Her wand immediately began to light up like a sparkler, and the Lethifold leapt backwards, disentangling itself from Ginny at shocking speed. It soon became clear that the little particles flying from Ginny's wand were a strange, tiny sort of fish.

"Go back to sleep, Weasley," muttered Pansy (the real Pansy, that is), who then rolled over in her bed, missing the many variable bright-white fish that were appearing in mid-air, frightening the Lethifold into a corner. Some of them appeared to have legs, and then there was a salamander the size of a dog, which snapped at the slithering sheet. Ginny sat up in bed, and put her legs over the side onto the ground and watched the scene unfold; little white lizards scurried past her feet at the assassin hoping for a bite.

"OMM, is every Patronus in the world in our dorm tonight?" said Sheila. "Did I miss some - Lethifold!" Indeed, the glow of a couple of the largest forms - one some sort of sail-backed reptile, the other a sort of streamlined wolf with dinosaur features - had broken the Lethifold's natural concealment, and soon everyone was waking up and shrieking.

Ginny was already trying to process what had happened - had the point been to make her show her Patronus, or had it been a regular assassination attempt? She easily could have died, which made the latter a simpler, likelier outcome. And, oh, come to think of it, her death would have been magical asphyxiation, and the diary had spoken to Luna about her Divination work. Perhaps the disbelief had been feigned. Meanwhile, the Lethifold attempted to creep up the wall to escape from the roaring superpredators, to the frustration of a collecting group of mice and other, less familiar small rodents. But monkeys followed, climaxing with a vicious chimpanzee that grabbed the Lethifold and screeched as it dropped to the floor with it, attempting to rip it in two. The Lethifold fell unconscious.

"Um, listen," said Ginny, to the stunned crowd; she was slipping gloves on. "I have something I need to do in a hurry before help arrives. If it wakes up, use your own Patronuses to scare it." Indeed, several - mostly snakes - were already out. "Bye!"

Cries of "what the hell was that?" and "you put it to sleep?" were heard behind Ginny as she ran, but she didn't care. Nor did she notice that the chimpanzee had been replaced by a human, who beat its enemy first with a club, then with a sword, then with a rifle, and then with a wand, before turning into a tiny floating point that orbited around the Lethifold, keeping it down.

Ginny was soon standing at Draco Malfoy's private door. She did the quickest and quietest possible variation of his secret knock, and creaked the door open. Perhaps this course of action was incorrect - Draco had, after all, been tested for precisely this - but, if correct, it needed to be done as soon as possible.

"Petrificus Totalus," Ginny said, in as few milliseconds as she could manage, pointed directly at Draco, who was neither awake nor asleep. She knew this was the spell to use, but she could not fully remember why. It just seemed right. Ginny was soon upon Draco's temporarily frozen body, and soon she had found, sure enough, a familiar diary beneath his shirt. She tore it off of him - saved herself only by gloves - and stashed it away, and then reversed the curse. Draco promptly began to breathe heavily, and Ginny flashed the diary at him, and his pupils grew even more dilated.

"We're going to kill this bloody book," whispered Ginny.