Notes. This story has been a long time coming. It was conceived about a year and five months ago, and has gone through multiple revisions since then. Depending on the response to this piece, there might be a second chapter that includes more scenes that were cut out, but I think this stands pretty well on its own.

The writing of this is indebted to many things, but the most important are probably: One Hundred Demons by Lynda Barry; Writing History, Writing Trauma by Frederick LaCapra; Lucky by Alice Sebold; The Dark Mirror by Marlisa Santos; and The Drowned and the Saved by Primo Levi.

This fic is dedicated to Tin, who has always understood very well, and had the deepest sympathy for, little girls who thought themselves monsters.

The Buried Life

"There has been no lasting harm done, Ginny," said Dumbledore.

Mrs. Weasley led Ginny out, and Mr. Weasley followed, still looking deeply shaken.

- From The Chamber of Secrets

After the Chamber, she had to re-teach her lungs how to take one breath, and then another, and then another, each one stolen from a phantom made of ink and dreams.

It didn't that Mum's arms were warm and constricting around her. Dad wasn't touching her, but he hovered on the other side of her like a worried sheepdog. The three of them walked very slowly, like a demented four-legged race, Mum refusing to let go, and at any other time, she would've hated it – I'm not a baby, let go of me.

"Mum," she said. Stumbled to a halt, because down in the Chamber, she had rehearsed the things she would say to them if she could if only if only if only Tom would let her go, and now she could, and – " Mum. Dad. I'm – I'm sorry."

And the looks on their faces, the looks she had put there -

"My dear," Mum said, "whatever for?"

"For f-failing you." Her voice trembled, its thin echoes ringing harshly off of the stone walls, unmuffled by tapestries. Every weakness magnified for the whole world to hear, and the tears she had thought were emptied out of her rising in her voice. "For letting that… h-happen. I wasn't - I wasn't strong enough, to f-fight it, and I let e-everyone down, and I attacked those p-people - even Her-Hermione - "

"Ginevra Weasley." The sheer fury in Mum's voice, though she wasn't yelling, was enough to stop Ginny short. She gulped down her sobs, and tried to listen. "I never want to hear you talk like this again, of failing us! The only thing you did wrong, Ginny, was not telling us about this sooner, when we could've done something! We thought you had died, and - " Her mother's voice was hitching now, eyes filling with matching tears, " - and now you're alive, but if you'd been hurt, Ginny - if you'd been hurt after all - if we really had lost you - "

An ocean of tears, a distant part of Ginny noted, as her mother caught her up in her arms. They didn't call it that because tears tasted like the sea, but because you could be swallowed up by it and tossed this way and that. Because it was stronger than you, would overtake you and drown you. Even though it came out of you, you could be unmade by your own grief.

And now Dad's arms were around Mum and Ginny as they held each other, as they cried and shook and swayed. Lost at sea. The flagstones would be flooded with their loss, and Filch would go muttering down the hallways with a mop, as her mother's forgiving words went flying and rattling through Ginny's skeleton and perched on the thin dark wires of her heartstrings, already stretched to the point of breaking.

We thought you had died -

If you'd been hurt, after all -

Because now she could never say, But I did die in the Chamber.

Could never say, I've been hurt, Mum. I'm still hurting. And I'm scared it will never stop.

It would kill her parents, if Ginny told them these things.

So she didn't.

After the Chamber, the boys didn't know what to do with her. The twins were disturbingly solemn and sensitive, never making her the butt of their jokes which hurt, oddly, more than them leaping out at her from behind dark corners and suits of armour, covered in boils and fangs. Percy blustered more than ever, to cover up his awkwardness, and gave her unsubtle side long glances. Ron made cracks about Myrtle and Harry that fell flat, and gave her uncomfortable grins that slid off his face when she was too late returning them.

For the first time since the feast that opened the school year, Ginny found herself with all of her brothers seated around her at Gryffindor table at dinner time; they did a truly rotten job of pretending they weren't hovering. All year long, Ginny's closest friend had been a diary - and now everyone was crowding around her, strengths to her weakness, a shield.

She knew they would fight her fights if she asked them to and maybe even if she didn't. They would prank or punch or deduct points from anyone who teased or bullied her. They would spoil her and watch over her and promise to break the kneecaps of her future boyfriends.

But she could never again believe that they could save her from the monsters underneath her bed. Not when they couldn't save her from becoming one.

After the Chamber, it takes her weeks to walk normally again, instead of tiptoeing around, her footsteps quick and light as if she was trying to never touch the ground. Eventually, though, she relaxes. She trains herself to walk like other people, as if she were unmindful of the fragility of every step, as if the illusion of freedom was the first step to feeling free again.

She places her foot down on a flagstone, and it crumbles beneath her. She lands hard, winded by the fall, damp stone wakening old bruises, and chokes on dust, feels a cool wetness trickling from her head. When she touches her scalp, her fingers come away ink-stained.

She stares and she stares and she stares and she stares, not understanding. Her lungs are bursting, as if she's thrashing and drowning underwater – there is no air left in her even to scream.

A ghost of a memory smiles at her, gently. He was always gentle with her, until he wasn't.

She moves, crouching like an animal, trying to free herself from the rubble. Her hands catch on a strange texture – it is not harsh like stone, not warm-wet like ink and blood, but soft as it clings to her fingertips. She squints in the underwater light.

It's a bright curl of red hair, like a fire's dying leap. She follows the hair to its source. There is a body lying in the rubble that she must've landed on when she fell. A skeleton, really. Skin of paper and dust. Thrice-mended robes. This body, small and broken and utterly silent. These bones will not speak to her. She has failed them in too many ways.

So she curls up next to herself, the corpse of herself. She watches her own life leak away.

Like spilled ink. Like a secret told.

After the Chamber, you couldn't un-know the Chamber. The knowledge of it infects the brain, and fills her nostrils with the scent of old magic, of rotting basilisk flesh. Hogwarts moves and thrives and buzzes above it but cannot cancel it, because the Chamber is not gone, not destroyed, but simply sealed off underground: waiting.

After the Chamber, she watches the other girls in her year from a distance, as if seeing them underwater. Through them, she could catch glimpses of an old, sweet world, where the most private and intimate parts of herself remained just that – private and intimate, known to no one but herself. Those other girls reigned over the tiny skull-shaped kingdoms in their heads that no one could touch, inviolable and perfect.

Oh sure, they had their secrets, they had their different sides, they had their flashes of moods, they changed as they grew – but they were whole, unsplintered. Their minds and their bodies belonged to them. When they laughed, when they gestured, when they walked across a room or picked up a book, there was no disconnect between their will and their action, the event and their memory of the event. They didn't turn into someone different when their eyes closed. They know who they were.

She can no longer separate what is hers, what is his, what is her, what is him. Like ink spiraling through water, his touch grew, spread, and darkened everything. Now, there is nothing clean, nothing safe, nothing sacred that is hers alone, because she gave him everything of herself, cast light on every bare shivering corner, wrought it all in delicate spidering ink.

But it's more than that, it's more than Tom. Her body remembers things that her mind can't: the grip of the paintbrush in her hands as it daubed blood on the walls, the dying twitch of a rooster, the feel of basilisk scales gliding cleanly beneath her touch. There is a whole under-world of things that she knows that she knows, even if she can't remember them.

More and more often, she feels like there is a stranger living inside of her body, shadowing her movements, speaking her lines. At least when she had the diary, she could say that the stranger was Tom.

After the Chamber, this is what she remembered:

One night at dinner, there was chicken pot pie. When she woke up in the middle of the night, she threw up, and lay shivering in a small pile beneath her blankets until the morning. The House Elves came right away to deal with the mess, leaving a cool glass of water by her bedside.

At breakfast, Percy brought the back of one hand to his forehead, and then felt her forehead with the other hand, comparing their temperatures, and for one moment it reminded her so much of Mum that she closed her eyes and let herself lean into the touch.

"You're looking peaky," he said, in that brisk, obnoxious way that meant he was worried. He placed several dollops of marmalade onto some toast, and dumped the toast triangles on her plate. "Eat this, or Mother will lecture both of us." She watched, mesmerised, as the marmalade oozed over the crust and onto the plate. "Did you hear me, Ginny? Eat this, and then I'm marching you straight to the infirmary – "

"I know where it is." She worked at tearing off the crust in one long strip, and then said, feeling as if the words were being said by somebody else, "You don't have to be nice to me just so that I'll keep your secret."

Percy flushed a dull beet red, all the way to the tips of his ears.

And she waited for him to retort that he cared for her because she was his sister, not his secret-keeper, and –

She waited –

And she waited –

And -

And in that moment, she hated Penelope Clearwater with such a pure, blinding, clarity that it left her almost dizzy. It was an echo of the first time that she ever saw Hermione with Harry and Ron – a hatred that sang high in her head, sweet and ringing, demanding action. Girls like that, the ones whom glances fell upon, who stole entire worlds without even realising it.

Girls like that, they deserved whatever came to them.

Ginny pushed her toast away.

After the Chamber, Madam Pomfrey said she must've just caught a touch of the stomach flu. Either that, or nerves, "As if Quidditch and flu season and potions accidents weren't enough, this Heir of Slytherin business has to - " and Madam Pomfrey's mouth snapped shut, as if remembering she oughn't to talk about it in front of students. The area with the petrified students was curtained off, and Ginny's nausea got worse when she looked in that direction.

"Drink up, dear. This'll make you feel better, put some colour in your cheeks." She drank and she drank and she just couldn't get warm. Her stomach refused to unclench and for some strange reason, even though she hadn't written an essay or sat an exam with quill in hand that day, her hands hurt and started to cramp.

After the Chamber, she (doesn't) remember:

Wrapping her fingers around the rooster's throat carefully, mechanically. The rooster was shrieking, shrieking, one spurred foot catching at a forearm, drawing blood. They made so much noise, but Mum had taught her well, how to tend the chickens and collect their eggs and how to wring their necks efficiently, with one sharp, strong twist. The roosters are so stupid, so noisy. The one in her hand wriggled and wriggled and finally it stopped moving at all.

After the Chamber, on her first morning back in the Burrow, Mum suggested with a bit of her old cheery smile that she run along to the chicken coop and fetch some eggs for breakfast. When she approached, the chickens panicked and screeched and beat their wings at her, warding her away.

After the Chamber, she realises that the truth is very simple. In the beginning, it had nothing to do with magic. It was just that Ginny was lonely, and Tom was kind.

She had wanted to go to Hogwarts for so long, and once she was there, she was sure it would be as wonderful as the boys always said it would be – troops of owls swooping in at breakfast, and knights clanking in armour, a huge Quidditch pitch, and endless towers, and trick staircases, and snowball fights in the winter, and a big fireplace in the common room, and secret tunnels, and huge four poster beds, and striped woolly scarves, and girls, at last, other girls. Not the Muggle girls in the village who eyed her disdain because they went to the primary while she was homeschooled, or that Lovegood girl who Mum said had gone a little odd since her mother died, but girls that she would become friends with for life.

But when she got there the castle was vast and confusing and a little bit frightening and seemed to change every time she looked at it. Hogwarts went on and on and on and on, twisting in on itself like a labyrinth. It spread itself to the sky in crumbling towers and sank its roots underneath the ground. There were entire wings that no one but Filch and his faithful mop ever visited. And everything was strange and the food was good but it wasn't the same as Mum's and there were rules and directions and casual customs that she didn't understand and there were so many people everything was just a little bit (was so very) bewildering. Overwhelming. It was so easy to get lost.

And Percy had Penelope and the other prefects, and the twins had each other and Lee Jordan, and Ron had Harry and Hermione, and all she had was a diary. She had known that she couldn't just be their tagalong, and she didn't want to just be their tagalong. But she couldn't help watching the backs of her brothers and their friends as they walked through the halls; they walked buoyantly, as if they were familiar, at home.

She had three dorm mates. Two were girls from old wizarding families, like hers, but well off; they'd lived in Godric's Hollow "for generations" as they liked to say. The third girl was a cousin of one of theirs, not quite so well off, but eagerly following them as if they were a particularly exciting Quidditch match, hanging off of their every word and clumsily aping their mannerisms. The girls' eyes flicked down to the sleeves and hems of her robes, which had been torn and carefully mended, and then flicked away, dismissing her. Ginny held her books to her stomach, so that no one would see how faded the spines were, and bit her tongue until she tasted copper, rich and bright, and got paired up with Dennis Creevey in class because he didn't know anybody in first year Gryffindor either, but at least he had the excuse of being Muggleborn.

Like blood in her mouth, she swallowed it all. And only Tom ever asked her how she was feeling.

Maybe that was the worst part – the worst part out of many worst parts. The part that hurt the most and stayed the longest, even after the feeling of long cold pale fingers wrapped around her wrists finally faded. She'd been invaded, corrupted, possessed, and nobody had noticed.

She had been lost. She had been allowed to get lost. She had gone missing, she had died inside of her own skin, she'd turned to shadows, she had become a ghost, and nobody stopped it. Nobody was watching.

After the Chamber, she stops trusting sleep.

In the infirmary, she sips the cocoa that Madam Pomfrey has prepared for her, but there's something wrong with it, a sickly sweetness that coats her tongue and it (doesn't taste like blood, doesn't task like ink, doesn't taste like venom) but she chokes and chokes and her mug clatters to the ground, the hot liquid spilling everywhere.

"I don't want any more potions."

"It's to help you sleep – "

"No." Her voice doesn't sound like hers at all – it's high and cold ad sharp and – "I mean, please, no. I'd – I'd rather not, if I could help it. Maybe just some warm milk?"

So Madam Pomfrey heats up warm milk for her, sweetened with honey and a touch of lavender but no sleeping potions, and Ginny thrashes and spends a lot of time staring up at the ceiling and drops off into random bursts of fitful sleep that never last more than an hour or two.

But at least when she wakes up, she knows who she is. And where she has been.

After the Chamber, she thinks – Madam Pomfrey thinks – her parents think – everyone thinks – that once she gets back to her own bedroom in the Burrow, then she will be safe. Everything will be fine, as soon as she can get back into her cool, narrow bed with its white sheets and the faded cornflower-yellow blankets. Her stuffed rabbit next to her pillow, old jam jars filled with ragged quills and dried wildflowers on her bedside table, brightly coloured pictures from Witch Weekly tacked to the walls.

In the middle of her first night back at the Burrow, she wakes up to find Tom is sitting at her little wooden desk, idly burning his name onto the tabletop.

"You won't ever leave me, will you, Ginny?" he asks. He reaches over and smooths the hair away from her forehead, and she flinches, expecting it to feel like knives, but his fingertips are light and careful, the pressure like bird's feet pricking her palms. You'renotrealyou'renotrealyou'renotreal, she whispers very hard and very fast underneath her breath, but he only laughs. That gentle laugh.

"Of course I am real. I'm the only thing you believe in, anymore. I'm the only one who will never leave you."

After the Chamber, sleep is elusive. So she spends the empty hours with wand in hand, whispering hexes to herself and practising the motions again and again and again and again and again.

After the Chamber, the first time she sees the blood spiralling down the drainpipe, she automatically reaches up to brush away the tiny, clinging bits of down that aren't there. Blood on her fingertips and not again I won't not ever again

She spends her first day as a woman curled up in bed with a hot bottle clutched to her stomach, while Mum makes her tea and her favourite cinnamon buns. Ever since Tom, Mum is hovering and worried and fretful, and there are times, like now, when Ginny could scream, smothered in so much love. When Mum asks, she blames it on the cramps.

"Your sister is going through some changes," Mum says to the boys.

After the Chamber, Charlie comes home for a brief stint. Charlie is the star returning, everyone eager for his warmth and his attention and the stories behind every one of his scars, because his stories are ones that he can tell out loud instead of reliving every night. For once, everyone's eyes follow Charlie instead of her, and it makes it easier to pretend to laugh.

The first night he's home, Mum makes enough food to feed them for two weeks, and all the kids stay up late in the living room, talking over each other and laughing and rehashing fond childhood memories, and it's not that Ginny is happy so much that she can float on the wave of other people's happiness, instead of feeling violently cut off from it. She's outside of it, but for once that detachment doesn't hurt.

Perhaps I will even be happy again one day.

She actually falls asleep on one of their squashed couches, a half-eaten biscuit in one hand and her wand in the other (she always keeps it handy now, even though it's summer), as the twins are in the middle of a re-enactment of one of their Quidditch matches.

Then Tom his holding her, cradling her. His arms are thin but very strong, and there are steel bands spanning across her chest, confining her breath, and he wields her wand quite casually, though a feeling of utter wrongness twists up her insides, to see her wand in anybody else's hands, but especially his. He is carrying her to her bedroom and smiling down at her, a tender, private smile.

"Why don't you keep a diary anymore, my darling? You always had such a way with words."

She should say, You are a liar and a murderer and the worst person in the world. You're evil and I hate you and when I think about the way you died I laugh and laugh and laugh and I wish that I had been the one to put that tooth through you and make you bleed –

Instead, she asks, her voice weak and trembling, "Why didn't you love me?"

"Love you?" He sounds genuinely surprised. "But I do. I am the only one who will ever love a monster like you."

He's right –

And then with a strength she never knew she had, she seizes her wand from him, and the words of a Cutting Hex bubble to her lips, and the only smile now will be the thin red line gaping across his white throat –

"Ginny! Fuck, Ginny, steady on, it's me, it's Charlie!"

And she has her wand tip pressed to his throat.

Oh God oh God oh God oh God

She drops her wand arm, and Charlie sets her down carefully on her feet. "You fell asleep," he says, his voice hushed. She can hear doors opening, and there are heads peering down to look at them on the stairway. "You fell asleep and I was carrying you to your room, and then you – "

"I had a bad dream." Her legs are shaking as if she's run a mile, and her head feels like it's glowing white hot. "I'm sorry. I'm sorry."

He tries to place a hand on her shoulder and she pretends she doesn't see the look on his face when she shies away.

"Good night," she mumbles. "I'm sorry. Everything's fine. I'm sorry. Good night."

I almost killed my brother.

I almost killed my brother.

I almost killed my brother.

I almost –

After the Chamber, there is Egypt. Egypt is searing heat and shifting sands, liquid mirages, the cool darkness of the inside of tombs, Bill's steady voice explaining centuries' old curses, myths of terrible vengeance and divine justice, possessed objects, violent and horrific deaths.

She finds this all obscurely comforting.

One time, she gets separated from the boys, and finds herself darting through the labyrinth, trailing hands across cool stone walls, going down paths that she knows she shouldn't. There are many barriers and safeguards in the way, but she manages to find a structural weakness, a frayed thread here or there which she snaps and slides past, and thinks boldly, I could do this, as she presses into areas that are sealed off from the public, drunk on her own daring, fierce with the rush of it.

The dark whispers to her, in broken fragments of words she can almost decipher. Her heart's pounding, her skin is electrified, she goes deeper into the maze, and there's a sweet terror that's deeper and brighter and realer than anything else in her shadow-life ever since the Chamber, and the fear tastes like triumph, like truth. This is what is hiding beneath everything, and for once Ginny doesn't have to pretend that it is over, behind her, sealed safely away, when it is all around her, when it is inside her and she is inside of it still –

"Ginny!" Bill grabs her arm and jerks her back, and she realizes, with a wide-eyed blink, that she was one step away from falling into a pit lined with spikes. He starts yelling at her, things like, What were you thinking and could've killed yourself and nearly gave me a heart attack. He almost sounds like Percy, she thinks, mumbling and trying to look sorry, while in reality she is a million miles away. Then he says Mum and Dad, and she comes to life, struggling in his arms, saying, "No! Don't tell them! Please!"

Bill's eyes blink at her through the gloom. He releases her forearms. Her feet sink back into the cool sand.

"All right," he says, slowly. "All right."

That night, she curls up in an old armchair in the hotel's common room, reading about the old myths of Egypt by the light of a dusty green-shaded lamp.

And the body parts of Osiris were scattered over the land, and Isis grieved, because Osiris would never be brought back to life again…

"That's some light reading there, Gin," says a voice high above her, and it is Bill, bearing two steaming cups of tea. He sets one down near her, and keeps the other to himself. Even though the weather is blindingly hot in the day, it gets terribly cool at night.

"I thought you went back to your flat for the night," she says, putting down her book.

"I usually do," her brother acknowledges, "but I was catching up with Dad, in the pub. Er, you didn't hear that. Drink up, will you? It's a pretty good brew, if I say so myself. Chamomile tea."

She sips the tea, a little dubiously, but Bill is right – it is pretty good. Small yellow buds, curled up like faded parchment, releasing their sweetness into the tea. "It tastes like sunshine."

"It does, doesn't it?"

They sip their tea for a while in comfortable silence before Bill says, as if just reminiscing, "You know, Gin, you grow up so much every time I see you. Seems like just yesterday you were a little butterball clinging to my knees." His voice becomes reflective. "And now you're twelve, and you've been through some things that a lot of other twelve-year-olds can't begin to imagine."

The tea grows cold in her hands.

"Ginny." One of Bill's large hands, warm and lined, folds around her own. "Do you know, I was trained by some retired curse breakers when I first started the job. These were men and women who had been through some dangerous business in their time. Some of them had trouble sleeping, or were startled by certain noises, or had flashbacks or nightmares, or had trouble letting down their guard. Some of them went back to places where they had worked, obsessed with the thought of breaking curses that they'd been unable to defeat. They went back to these places over and over, even knowing that they might be killed. Maybe even hoping that they would."

She's trapped. By the sweet smell of the tea and by the gentleness of Bill's hands and voice and eyes and words which is so different from a different kind of gentleness that she remembers. There's an animal clawing to get out of her skin, and it will eat her alive if she lets it loose.

"Ginny," he says, "if there's anything you want to tell me, you can. Even when you get back to school, you know I'm only an owl away. And if you don't want to talk about it – that's fine, too. You have the right to that. But you need to talk to someone."

She imagines what it might feel like. To spill out her all her secrets, her guilt and rage, her ugliness, her deformity – to lay it all out, and let the sunlight burn away.

But she would never be Bill's little sister again, she would never be that little girl in pigtails that he hefted up in his arms and tossed into the air. She would only ever be that girl who had disappointed everyone and fucked up everything, who didn't deserve a single one of the simple kindnesses shown to her because she could never quite take it as a simple kindness ever again.

They finish their tea in silence.

"Good night, Bill."

"Night, Gin."

After the Chamber, her room is stuffy, suffocating in the summer heat. She props open a window to let in the breeze, but even that's not enough – she needs to be out there, among the stars and the moon and the night. As if all that dark blessed coolness could strip every memory from her brain. Freeing her to be anyone but herself.

She waits another hour or so, until the entire house, even the ghoul in the attic, has quieted down, and she steals her way down the stairs, avoiding the creaky one. The broom cupboard's already opened by the time she realises what she's doing, and the touch of rough twig bristles and well-polished wood beneath her hands brings her back to herself. She settles herself on the old Comet, and she goes soaring through the night.

In the air, she's weightless, a thing of pure speed, a ribbon of wind shooting over the world. She feints and dives, barrel-dives and spins. She dives so close to the ground, she almost feels the grass graze her fingertips, and then she pulls up at the very last moment, to corkscrew through the open air.

It feels like a jailbreak – from every awkward look that her brothers slanted her over the breakfast table as they tried to joke and fight over bacon, every worrying brush of Mum's hand against the crown of her head, every faintly sad, pained smile that Dad sent her when she said she had slept just fine, thank you, every nightmare, every phantom sensation of Tom's mouth by her ear, whispering, of Tom's fingers sliding through her hair, and the cool kiss of paper against her cheek.

She leaves that all behind on the ground. Being up in the air, flying like this, heart and blood pounding and singing and alive – it pushes out everything else until there is no one inside of her skin except for her, and there is no one stopping her, pulling her back from the edge.

One day, she takes out a quill, and a sheet of parchment. Not a diary. Just a single sheet.

And she writes:

Sometimes, even though I ought not to, I miss him terribly.

Sometimes, I wish I had died down in the Chamber.

Sometimes, I don't think I will ever truly be well.

I will remember this all of my life.

I will remember.

The ink shines wetly, but remains inert. It does not reshape itself into new words written in a different hand. The words are ill-formed and wobbly, but they are hers. Her own truths, not softened or suppressed to save anyone's feelings or to protect herself. Written only for herself.

That night, for the first night since the Chamber, she sleeps without dreams.