Author's Note: I do not and never will own HP.
Warning for smoking, alcohol, and drug use/addiction. AU (naturally).
She just wanted to feel warm again.
It was a cliche, but weren't they all? Her ribs had never managed to feel anything but hollow after Tom Riddle had been yanked out of them. His poison had curled around each lung, had settled in the weight of her heart. The basilisk fang could destroy him, but it couldn't fill in her own destruction. She was no longer a blank page, and it hurt.
Her family treated her like china and it made her feel all the more breakable. There were cracks in her glaze, and she tried to fill them with the firewhiskey she found hidden in the back of Fred and George's room. It burnt all the way down and made her feel sick, but the important thing was that it made her feel. She'd thought she never would again. Her wand felt like a cemetery bloomed at the tip and she hid it in the bottom of her school trunk. She penned a thousand apologies to Hagrid and Argus Filch and ripped them all up. Her words never sounded sincere enough.
Magic had betrayed her, so was it any wonder she turned to Muggle ways to destroy herself? She wandered down to the nearby village after fourth year, a pack of cigarettes in her pocket, broken and bleeding inside. Voldemort was back, and he owned her, body and soul. She was being maudlin. She was being dramatic. She was being immature.
She was all of those things, but she was terrified first and foremost, and couldn't bring herself to care. When a neighbour called her Ginevra, she wept.
She didn't know how it started. She found a pub, and she found some boys who didn't mind sharing a bottle. It was vodka, they told her, and it burnt almost as badly as firewhiskey sliding down her throat. She laughed when she realised and drank some more.
It ended with her sitting in a bathroom, belt cinched around her arm and the buckle held in her teeth, as a newfound friend positioned the needle just right, pointed toward her heart. When he'd flicked the lighter under the spoon, she'd felt like she could fly. Minutes later, she nodded instead.
"Be careful," he told her, but Ginny had no intentions of obeying. She fell asleep in the backyard, the moon a sliver of yellow bone in the sky, the grass damp beneath her, and she wondered if you felt like this when you died. Ron woke her up in the morning, recoiling at the stench on her breath, to tell her that Mum and Dad were furious at her for running off. Making them worry. Ginny wondered when exactly she'd lost the ability to care.
Bruises bloomed purple black on the insides of her elbows and she found herself grateful for robes. Her mother sent her to a Healer. She hexed open the window and hefted herself out through it when the woman went out to get a drink, sprawling onto gritty flagstone five feet down and driving the breath from her lungs. She ran and didn't know where she was running, only that it was away.
Molly didn't try again. She didn't know whether to be relieved or disappointed.
Going back to Hogwarts was a nightmare. Umbridge was gone, but it didn't make her feel better. She scratched her arms when nobody was looking, woke up in cold sweats at night, her teeth clamped shut over a scream that she would never let herself voice. Withdrawal was painful, but Ginny didn't care, because pain meant she was still there, pain meant she wasn't buried in an old diary with a hole stabbed through the middle and ink spurted across the pages like heart's blood.
If she was alive, then perhaps she could rebuild herself into something that did not belong to Tom Marvolo Riddle.
She begged cigarettes off seventh years and lit up in quiet, abandoned corners of the grounds. Smoke wreathed her face, and her lungs throbbed. She'd never felt so cold. Harry's scar was emblazoned on his forehead, but hers were all inside. She still couldn't find her hope.
Quidditch was her escape and her broom took her flying. She discovered the steepest ascent into the clouds she could and stayed there, straining, head spinning. It wasn't the same, but it could be enough. Her robes were damp with condensation when she came back down, and Ron scolded her when she dismounted, holding the broom like a lifeline.
"You could have gotten killed," Ron said, and Ginny had to bite the insides of her cheeks to stop herself from saying she wanted to.
She knocked back hidden bottles and shot glasses in the dim light of the Room of Requirement. Luna Lovegood found her there. When Ginny walked out, Luna was sitting cross-legged by the door, her wand tucked behind her ear, her fingers rolling a cigarette around them. Ginny gaped at her and Luna smiled.
"I thought you might be here," Luna said, and rose to her feet.
She didn't talk. She didn't know what to say. Luna walked with her, sleeves pushed up to her elbows and untied shoelaces flapping against the ground. There were shadows in those grey blue eyes that Ginny couldn't confront.
"He's not you, you know?" Luna said, just before Ginny clambered through the portrait hole. She stopped, confused, and a little afraid.
"He had a part of you. But he's not you. You're yourself," she told Ginny, before skipping off, nearly tripping over the hem of her robes.
Her self destruction slowed. She tried to start picking up the pieces, tried to forget poisonous green ink dripping down yellowed pages. Tried to forget a needle in the crook of her arm, the way it felt to fly without a broom.
She still woke up with a scream locked behind her teeth. She still dreamed of the Chamber, of the sound of dripping water and the chill of wet, clammy robes.
"I am not him," she told the mirror in the mornings, muttering it as she brushed her teeth or ran a comb through her hair. When she raised her hand to her hair and her sleeve fell, the inside of her elbow held only scars. "I am myself."
It felt as good a mantra as any.