Author's note: Warning for self harm and suicidal themes.
"The marks humans leave are too often scars."
-John Green
It's all brushed aside, really. A few chats with adults who do nothing more than talk at her while she nods dutifully, a few hugs from her mum who always squeezes too tightly and leaves Ginny breathless. A brief therapy session with a mediwizard who talked too fast and had a nervous tic by his right eye.
She is healed, she is fine, and does it really matter anymore? Does it matter that Ginny Weasley is hollow, her insides scooped out by the too-clever hand of a discerning psychopath, her body dancing on invisible puppet strings, her mind forever echoing with Parseltongue and charming words and screams?
Of course not. She smiles obediently, she does what she's told. She imitates her former self with desultory success, hexing her older brothers and stealing their brooms for a familiar joy ride. It's not the same. There's something missing, something broken, and nothing can touch the howling, freezing chasm that empties out her bones and stabs through her heart.
When she goes back to Hogwarts, everything reminds her of him, right down to the embroidered edge on her pillowcase, the one she bit down on so hard her jaw ached for two days, trying to stifle the whimpers that flooded her throat as he hurt her, punished her for trying to avoid the Chamber. But she's fine, remember, she's just a silly little girl who wrote in a diary that talked back, and everything is fine. So she pretends and if sometimes her blankets are soggy in the morning, none but the house elves will even notice, never mind remember.
But it's not enough. She breaks her quill in half, draws her pain onto the vulnerable flesh of her forearm. If it happens to take on a look suspiciously close to the Dark Mark, who can tell? It is blood, and it is pain, and it is edged in bruises and wrought with suffering, and perhaps it will be enough this time. Perhaps it will fill in the gaping hole in her soul, if only for a single moment.
"Are you all right, Ginny?" but all she does is nod, hollow-eyed and chalk-faced, clutching the edges of her sleeves to hide the marks. Nothing's wrong, she reassures everyone with the brightest of smiles, the cheekiest of laughs.
She takes to camping out in the Astronomy Tower, huddled on a parapet, looking at the pin-pricks of stars and the darkness that enshrouds the bottom. If she just slipped...but she can't, she can't quite take that step, and it's always with a heavy heart and a dull feeling of shame pounding at her temples that Ginny takes her leave, slipping back into Gryffindor Tower like a shadow.
She's fine, and there's no one better at lying to herself than Ginny Weasley.