I've never really done something like this, but I think I'll give it a shot. Each chapter is a new age in Ginny's life. There are five chapters total.

Warnings will be posted at the top of the chapters. Also, I know I change tenses a lot, sorry about that. It's probably OOC for Ginny, as well. Each song excerpt at the top of the chapters is from Breathe Into Me by RED (hence the title of this fic).

...and this is who I am when I don't know myself anymore...

She could feel the change coming. Whenever she thought about it, it was explicitly the change, not a change. It'd been a while since she'd felt this way, like she was standing on the edge of a rocky cliff, and the ocean was sparkling below, sapphire blue and crested with white waves, begging for her, waiting for her, to plummet into it.

She was fifteen now, on the right side of womanhood, beautiful and young, intelligent, sometimes catty, but an all-around decent person. She didn't have many grudges, didn't have any enemies that she, herself, had made. But now she realized how sheltered her life was, how hidden her parents, with good intentions, had kept her from the world, and likewise the world from her. And now she isn't that girl.

"Sirius is dead," she remarks, looking at the back of Harry's head. She gets a vindictive pleasure out of reminding him, out of rubbing course salt in his fresh wounds. Ginny had never thought of herself as truly mean, but a smirk spreads across her face as she sees a tear fall down Harry's cheek and splatter onto his arm.

He was sitting at one of the long work tables of the common room, huddled over a beaten picture of Sirius, James and Lily. He doesn't respond to her, at least not right away, and this irritates her. She will not be ignored, especially by him, any longer. She isn't the quiet, shy little girl groveling after him any more.

"I said," she scathes, raising her voice, "Sirius. Is. Dead."

He looks up then, emerald green eyes wide and surprised and full of hurt. She smirks again; she's hit her mark.

"What's happened to you?" He asks. This is not the Ginny who had, of late, become so much more than his best friend's little sister. She was tall and strong and could whip a wand faster than most grown wizards and witches, she was beautiful and mature, but now Harry saw no semblance of that girl in Ginny's face.

"What do you mean, what's happened to me?" Ginny asks, truly taken aback. Was Harry really that self-involved? "Do you think you're the only one who misses him? That you're the only person who's affected by the fact that Sirius sodding Black will never breathe, never laugh, again?"

Sirius had died and taken her with him, and she knew it. He was the closest thing to a best friend Ginny had ever had, and though it'd been over a year since he'd fallen, since he was struck down by his own flesh and blood, the aching in Harry's eyes was nothing, she felt, compared with what was raging inside of her.

"You're not yourself, Ginny." Harry decides, standing up from the table.

"What, is it getting to real for you now Potter? Don't make the mistake of thinking you are the only one who can feel pain, the only one who doesn't know what to fucking do." And Ginny shoves past him and is out in the darkened corridor. It's after hours, but she doesn't care. She needs to get away, to breathe freely for a moment, and that can't happen when all she wants to do is curse Harry into oblivion.

She doesn't really hate him, she knows, but he has disregarded her since she was ten, and a person can only take so much.

But she quietly wishes she could be the person Harry thought she was.