belle

harry who watched ginny run with the train during his first year until his vision could no longer see her

harry who at twelve said ginny blushed like the setting sun

harry who was the first to notice how sickly ginny's been looking in her first year

harry who who got angry and irritated with percy for shooing ginny away when she was about to tell them something important

harry who said ginny being taken down in the chamber was the worst day of his life

harry who always looks for ginny's eyes when something funny happens because he knows she'll get it

harry who got himself injured because he was staring at ginny fly so he got distracted

harry who said that his resolve will always break easily if he was near ginny

harry who thought of ginny before he died

harry who chose to come back to life because he wanted a life with ginny

'hey we've been spying on you and tracking your every move. it's a culmination of state of the art technology and an unprecedented invasion of consumer privacy. a room full of men with made up jobs bent their will toward decades of constructing this system, defending it in court, and tirelessly innovating new ways to aggregate more data about you'

and the end result is

'yeah so uh we saw that you recently bought a car. so here's an ad for that car'

I simply cannot imagine Tom ever being honest with Ginny in these circumstances, so do you think he would have lied? It'so infinitely interesting to imagine that he wouldn't though

he tells us!

"So Ginny poured out her soul to me, and her soul happened to be exactly what I wanted... I grew stronger and stronger on a diet of her deepest fears, her darkest secrets. I grew powerful, far more powerful than little Miss Weasley. Powerful enough to start feeding Miss Weasley a few of my secrets, to start pouring a little of my soul back into her..." "What d'you mean?" said Harry, whose mouth had gone very dry.  "Haven't you guessed yet, Harry Potter?" said Riddle softly. "Ginny Weasley opened the Chamber of Secrets. She strangled the school roosters and daubed threatening messages on the walls. She set the Serpent of Slytherin on four Mudbloods, and the Squib's cat." [CoS 17]

what he means by "secrets" are the facts about himself he wasn't able to reveal widely when he was at school - that he's the heir of slytherin; that he's a parselmouth and controls the basilisk; that he was responsible for opening the chamber in the forties and killing myrtle, not hagrid; that he's back to finish what he started, and so on. it's possible that he also tells her that he's voldemort - ginny certainly doesn't seem too shocked at the end of the book when dumbledore brings up that riddle and voldemort are the same person.

that is, he possesses ginny with his secrets, after her vulnerability to possession has already occurred. her soul isn't weakened by a mutual exchange of secrets - the fracture which he's able to exploit depends entirely on the secrets ginny offers him.

the question is more "what did he say to her to win her trust"? what led ginny to become so emotionally enmeshed with the diary that there was a crack in her soul for the horcrux to possess in the first place?

in chamber of secrets, riddle claims that he achieved this mostly by being generically nice, and that it wasn't hard for him because he's so great and ginny's so naive and stupid:

"It's very boring, having to listen to the silly little troubles of an eleven-year-old girl," he went on. "But I was patient. I wrote back. I was sympathetic, I was kind. Ginny simply loved me. No one's ever understood me like you, Tom... I'm so glad I've got this diary to confide in... It's like having a friend I can carry around in my pocket... [...] If I say it myself, Harry, I've always been able to charm the people I needed." [CoS 17]

but, since i am extremely well-attuned to the fact that he's canonically a pathetic teenage edgelord with all the chill of the sahara... i think this is where he's lying.

throughout canon, one of lord voldemort's defining traits is that he fucking loves a yap. and during the course of his yap sessions, he has a tendency to give quite a lot about himself away.

there are so many potential options for things ginny might have said which could set him off: she mentions her secondhand robes and books, he starts ranting about experiencing the same; she mentions lucius malfoy punching her dad the day she acquired the diary, he goes off on one about abraxas; she tells him about her teachers, he spends a hour listing all the reasons why dumbledore should never have become headmaster; she talks about her crush not realising how brilliant she is, he goes off on one about abraxas for a second time; she tells him that harry is special and brilliant, an orphan just like he is, and deeply connected to him, he asks her hundreds of questions, helps her write that cunty valentine's poem, and still isn't satisfied... so he becomes determined to lure harry to the chamber.

partially, i think this because the idea that he and ginny were sincerely bffs is funny, and it's a headcanon i'm wedded to.

but it also suits the fact that harry spends the entire series - and, especially, spends the latter three books, in which ginny is a main character - continually failing to care about her experience with the diary, excluding her from his mission to defeat voldemort, and being absolutely convinced that he's the person who knows and understands the dark lord best.

i really like the idea that - while harry, ron, and hermione are accomplishing nothing in a tent - ginny could have gone "well, one of the horcruxes will definitely be in gringotts, because he wouldn't shut up about how unfair it was that he didn't have a vault... and i reckon the other one will be ravenclaw's diadem, because he was always banging on about how bitchy he thought the grey lady was... and he probably hid that in the room of requirement, because he kept showing off about how he'd discovered it..."