A/N: It's been quite a while since I've written much of anything so all constructive criticism is helpful, along with just a comment on if you liked it or not. I'd really appreciate any feedback that you're willing to offer.
Ginny stood in front of her mirror staring at her reflection, she knew that she needed to look away, that she had officially been looking for so long her mind was losing a grip on the fact the she was a real person. Slowly she closed her eyes and lifted a hand to cover them. Deliberately she turned away and stood like that for several long moments as she went over her mantra in her head.
Over, and over, and over.
'Today will be fine, I am the only person inside of my own head. Today will be fine, I am the only person inside of my own head.' Even her mind the words sounded shaky and unreal. A little girl trying to convince herself of a lie. She stopped herself, 'No, not a lie. It's the truth.'
It had been months since that night in the Slytherin's Chamber. It had been months since someone else had taken up residence inside of her head. Yet it felt like yesterday. It felt like only a moment ago. It felt like it could happen again at any second.
She had known that the first day of school was going to come around sooner than she could have hoped for. She had known yesterday that the train was lulling her into a false sense of security. She had known when she opened her eyes less than an hour ago that today was going to be awful. And no one else would know it.
Over the summer she had gone back and forth about how to deal with the constant struggle inside of her head but nothing had helped. She had tried to talk to her parents about what she was feeling but she didn't have the words and they didn't know what to say to comfort her. She had tried writing it down but her hands shook every time she picked up a quill, and if she managed to get ink on the page she felt like screaming from the fear that someone, something might write back. She had tried everything and in the end had kept to herself completely but that hadn't helped either. Which is why she was in the position she was now; standing in the middle of her room, hand over her eyes, willing herself to just walk down to breakfast.
"Ginny?" The soft voice belonged to Padma Patil. It was a voice you never really remembered but could never actually forget, Ginny thought. "Ginny, would you like to walk to breakfast with me?"
Ginny smiled in spite of herself; Padma had been dealing with all of her strangeness by treating her as though everything was entirely normal. Even weird mirror staring. "Sure, Padma. Just let me grab my bag."
Ginny dropped her hand and opened her eyes, she let the smile settle awkwardly into place on her face. She picked up her school bag from where it was lying on her bed.
'It's fine. It's fine. It's okay. It's going to be okay.' Ginny wasn't really sure if she was saying the words in her head or whispering them out loud but that wasn't exactly a new facet of the mental fog she'd been living in for the last year. She was standing behind a statue that was in a niche in the wall. She wasn't sure which statue it was or even which corridor she was in for that matter. She had fled from Trelawney's divination class and hadn't really been paying that much attention to where she was headed.
Ginny slowly went back through what had happened, trying to pinpoint the exact moment when everything had gone haywire. She had been sitting calmly in the class at a table with another Gryffindor second year, she thought that it might have been Marcus Ellewood but now she couldn't really remember. They were supposed to be reading each other's future in crystal balls; no one really knew what the hell they were doing and so everyone was pretending to see something that they thought Trelawney would appreciate. Ginny had planned to do the same; she had stared into the crystal ball and at first she had seen only her own reflection and that of the boy sitting across from her but then slowly his features had begun changing. She was staring at the tiny, distorted but still clear enough to make out face of Tom Riddle.
Ginny leaned back against the wall of the niche and took a deep breath. Even going back over it she still wasn't sure of the sequence of events, she just knew what had happened; she definitely screamed, at some point the crystal ball had either been thrown (by her) or knocked off the table (maybe by her, maybe by the startled boy), and she had run from the room. That was what had lead her here. And she had no idea what to do next.
Her next class was supposed to be transfiguration and Professor McGonagall would definitely notice if she didn't show up. If Trelawney was remotely lucid today she would probably say something to some other adult about what had happened, and by now the entire school would probably have heard about what had happened. It never took as long as it should for information to travel around the castle, one of the hazards of teenagers who could communicate with magic.
"What do I do now?" She whispered, hugging her bag to her chest. Ginny waited, almost hoping for an answer to come. It didn't. So she pushed herself away from the wall, and quietly exited the niche. She recognized where she was almost at once, she was close to the Gryffindor common room. Maybe she had been trying unconsciously to get back to a place that felt almost safe.
She shivered, trying to shake off the feeling of dread that had been clinging to her every moment for so long she couldn't remember what it was like to feel safe and normal. With as much confidence as she could muster she made her way down the corridor towards the transfiguration classroom. She was going to make it through this day, one way or another.
Ginny was standing in front of her mirror again. She stared herself down; memorizing what she looked like, checking her eyes to see that she was the only person looking back through them. Her hands were shaking from the effort it had taken to have a normal day. As normal as she could make it. Though she wasn't at all sure that she knew what normal was, or if she ever had known.
She shook her head, disappointed that she was still fighting the feeling of not being real. Still struggling to tell what was dream and what was reality. Uncertain if there was really a difference between the two anymore. Ginny had so many questions about her day that could only have been answered by her own mind but she couldn't trust herself anymore. Had McGonagall really held her back after class and given her a hug, had she offered for Ginny to come by if she needed anything, even a cup of tea? Or was that what she had wished for? Had she really kept catching Hagrid's dog out of the corner of her eye? As though Fang was following her around like a silent guard dog. Or was her mind playing tricks, trying to make her feel safe?
Ginny wasn't entirely sure that answers would help. But she took a deep breath and looked around the room, one thing she had found in a muggle medical magazine was an idea about how to ground yourself in a moment of what the muggles seemed to call 'dissociation'. Ginny couldn't completely remember how she had come across the magazine but she thought she had found it with her dad's collection of muggle items. The article had told her to find five things she could see that were real.
First she looked at her four post bed with its hand knit maroon throw carefully folded and placed at the bottom, the huge picture of the lead chaser for the Holyhead Harpies which had been a gift from Luna Lovegood at the end of the previous year; it was now hung on the wall next to her bed. There was the stack of books Marcie Adams, one of her roommates, had just checked out from the library; she swore she was going to read them all but the rest of them figured there was no way she'd make it through even half. Marcie wasn't really a reader but at least she was trying. There was the little book of jokes that insulted the reader every time it was opened that Fred and George had gifted her on Christmas last year, it held a place of honor as the only book on her bedside table. The last of the five items on her mental list for the moment would be her wand; the only other object resting on her bedside table. She had developed a habit of putting it down and out of reach every time she entered her room.
The next step was to walk around and touch each object, remind herself how they felt. Slowly, one by one, she did. When she got to her wand she gently picked it up and then pulled her hair up into a bun, sticking the wand through it to hold the whole thing in place. By the time she had done this she had also made up her mind about how to spend the remaining hour before dinner; she would find an answer to at least one of her questions by going down to Hagrid's hut.
The walk to Hagrid's hut seemed to take longer than it should but Ginny had been having a hard time judging distances and time lately. She stopped in front of the large, wooden house and considered what she should say once she had knocked on the door. At this point she was almost positive that Fang was following her around; she had been catching glimpses of the dog the entire way here and she felt grounded enough to believe it wasn't a figment of her imagination. But how did one ask if a person had set what would essentially be a guard dog on another person? Her mother had never prepared her for such a conversation. Though, to be fair, there were a lot of things her mother had never thought she would need to be prepared for. So Ginny reached out and knocked solidly on the door.