Title: Life
Author: Killaurey
Fandom: Harry Potter
Rating: T
Word Count: 1,515
Summary: Picking up the pieces starts with just a single step. Ginny-centric. Set just after Chamber of Secrets.
Author Notes: Originally written for Day 25: Backpack on Lastfanstanding on Dreamwidth, this is the expanded version of the fill. Alsofills 'Trapped in a Dream' on my Trope Bingo Card, 'Cages' on my Hurt/Comfort Bingo Card, and 'Change' on my Cotton Candy Bingo Card.
After Riddle is destroyedand she is rescued by Harry, Ginny wanders through life in a half-haze, both numb and relieved, but mostly tired in heart and soul and mind. Sick at heart, she relives the past year in her dreams and waking thoughts alikeand it is funny (but really, really not) how she remembers the terrible things in detail but remembers very little of the last few days at Hogwarts, the first days of freedom and the tattered remnants of her first year away from home that, upon reflection, she doesn't really want to remember. So it doesn't really matter.
(It's all tears and pain and things she has no words to explain to anyone—not that she can, since she's not supposed to talk about it anyway, even if she could find the words; it's not fair, but nothing this year has been fair.)
Ginny's one concession to freedom (it doesn't feel like freedom) is to try to think of him as He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Namedbut she finds that she can't, not even in thought, not yet when she's only barely free of him and his diary; some days it's a struggle to not call him 'Tom', like she used to. It makes her sad, in ways she wouldn't, even if she could, dare to try and explain to people that she can no longer call him Tom.
(Yes, he'd turned out to be evil, to be the Dark Lord, but he'd also been her best friend for most of a year. Ginny missed her friend Tom, who'd been different from Voldemort, even if it had all been a lie.)
Calling him Riddle is her compromise.
The first few weeks at home are just as bad, though the memories burn less sharply away from the stark reminders of the nightmares where she wandered the halls out of her own control, nothing but a passenger in her own mind.
(Except that those hadn't been nightmaresand that's the problem.)
Mum cries, when she thinks Ginny can't hear her, about how her baby girl has changed. Dad tries to get her to talk about it, except that he's so awkward and concerned that Ginny winds up, inexplicably, even to herself, just staring at him vacantly until he goes away, leaving looking more worried than before.
(She knows it's bad of her and can't help it. Riddle's gone and she's still trapped in the nightmare he left her in, and trying to figure out how to breathe again is all she can manage.)
Ron and Fred and George and even Percy try their best. They hover until she wants to scream except that she's all screamed out and so, even when they irritate her, she just lets them do what they want.
It's easier than facing the girl in the mirror that she doesn't recognize. It feels like she's behind the bars of a cage and, worse, part of her feels like she should be. What if he comes back? She should be kept away from everyone for their own protection, just in case.
When she wakes up crying incoherently and terror-ridden in the middle of the night, there's always someone there to wrap their arms around her. (Professor Dumbledore was wrong: hot chocolate hasn't helped anything in her case.)
When they win the draw and Mum and Dad, after hushed conversations behind closed doors, decide to go to Egypt, to visit Bill, Ginny knows that it's partly because of her.
They want to see Bill, of course, and going away on vacation for a trip with all of them is something they can never afford to do, and have always dreamed of doing, so that factors in as well.
But it's still (also) partly because of her.
Ginny likes Egypt, with its oppressive heat and unfamiliar buildings, and the strange, huge pyramids that Bill shows them. She likes seeing Bill, too, though he's not much more successful at breaking her out of her (familiar-unfamiliar) shell than the rest of her family.
(Though she likes his hands the best. He has the gentlest hands, out of all her brothers, for stroking her hair when she seeks comfort in the middle of the night.)
When they leave, he draws her aside and sets a pendant in her hand. It's attached to a green leather cord. "An ankh," Bill says. "For life, all right? You're going to be just fine, Ginny."
She stares at the silvery pendant for a long moment then asks, without looking at him and her voice little more than a whisper, "Promise?" It's the most she's said about it, about anything that happened, in the daylight since that first awful outburst when Mum had told her she ought to know better than she had.
He kisses her forehead, a benediction that she can feel even when she feels hardly anything at all. "Promise."
Bill is a curse-breaker. He knows how terrible it can be to break a promise. Ginny doesn't think he would make one that would be broken.
She thinks about that all through the next (exhausting) thirty-six hours of Portkeys and customs and waiting rooms. She thinks about it as she collapses onto her bed at noon when they finally get home, the ankh clutched in her fist.
Ginny wakes up in darkness, and is horrifically disoriented for a few seconds before realizing that it's not that late, just past eleven at night, and she's home and she's safe. She's safe. As she wipes sleep from her eyes, the tattered illusion of being back in the Chamber fades away.
Listening hard, Ginny realizes that no one is coming to see her, and that no one is there, and knows it must be because they are all exhausted and, likely, still sleeping.
Her body aches and hereyelids are heavy and she could use more sleep herself. The ankh, still clasped in her hand, makes her think of something else to do instead.
Life, Bill had said.
She hasn't really been living it. Ginny stares up at her ceiling and thinks about how easy it would be to go on this way, not really caring.
(But that's the problem, she does still care—if she didn't, she wouldn't be like this now, becauseit hurts to careand the numbness helps her get through each day.)
Life, she thinks. She needs a new start on it. But how?
It dawns on her, sometime around two in the morning that maybe a person (and life) can be a bit like one of Mum's quilts or Dad's Muggle projects. Sometimes it has to get taken apart and re-done from the beginning with a few changes made.
Ginny can't go back in time. (And going back in time wouldn't change that she remembers, which is what she wishes would happen.)
But, symbolically, she thinks she can manage something anyhow.
Quietly, so quietly, in an effort to keep the rest of her family from waking up, Ginny ties the pendant around her wrist, then sorts through her belongings, taking everything that she associates with Ridd-Tom, and sticks the things in her backpack, the one she used all last year. All told, the bag is maybe half full when she creeps down the stairs with it. The bag mostly holds quills and ink and bookmark she'd used to mark her place. It feels much heavier than it ought to as she avoids the creaky stair and sidles into the living room.
She's not supposed to light the fireplace with magic in the summer, but a murmured charm sets it blazing anyway. If she gets in trouble for it… well, she's survived worse trouble, hasn't she?
(Somehow, that's encouraging.)
Ginny stares into the flickering light for a time, thinking all the while of new hurts and changes, and phoenixes (she wishes she could be half as amazing as Dumbledore's phoenix), and a pair of green eyes, before convulsively throwing her backpack on the fire.
As it burns, she thinks of Tom.
She mourns him too. Maybe he'd turned out to be something totally different but, for a year, she'd loved the him he'd shown her. Maybe it's wrong to feel loss, since he'd been evil, but Ginny does. While the fire eats her bag, bursts the inkpots open and makes the quills blacken and shrivel, Ginny gives herself permission, for the first time she'd he'd left, to really miss him.
(It helps.)
When Mum comes down the stairs a few hours later, Ginny is still standing in front of the now empty fireplace in her pyjamas, her backpack with its memory-laden cargo long burned to ash. The only difference visible is that, now she's wearing the ankh Bill gave her, on its green leather string. Ginny wears it as a promise to herself.
When she hears Mum's intake of breath-with a question in that breath that dies even before a word makes it past her lips-Ginny greets her with a tiny smile, the first she's given anyone since she woke up after Tom.
(It's a start. Life.)