loomlings:

• Ginny Weasley not using black ink after her first year. Navy and brown and purple are the colour of her thoughts, not his masquerading as hers as they flow from her quill. 
• Sleep isn’t the problem. Sleep is dark and deep and soothing; there is nothing there, waiting for her. She hasn’t dreamt since that first Halloween at Hogwarts and she doesn’t dream now. It’s when she’s awake and someone moves too fast, or there’s a shine off of something, an out-of-place sound that she thinks she sees him.
• Ginny Weasley touching that locket and the back of her brain recognising that heartbeat that strives to match her own, that curls under her veins, that tugs at the edge of her mind and makes her want to get rid of it as soon as possible. She throws it into the sack and feels just as unclean as the House of Black is. Years later, when she knows about Horcruxes, she thinks she should have recognised it, that she should have known it by the sheer abjection she felt toward it.
• Ginny Weasley listens. You can learn an awful lot by listening, especially if whoever’s talking doesn’t think much of you. By her sixth year, she’s no longer quiet, but she still listens, only now it’s the whispers of first and second year students. She knows what it’s like to be utterly terrified by Voldemort when you’re eleven. She teaches them that you can lock away different parts of your brain, smother them into silence, and that’s another form of bravery, standing there, smooth-faced and lying to the Carrows that there’s nothing wrong. Defiance is not always big things like stealing the sword from Dumbledore’s old office. 
• The Carrows don’t scare her, and it’s not just Gryffindor bravery talking there. The Carrows are loud, mean, and crude. They’re unrefined bullies. They couldn’t get someone to trust them just through words if they tried. She tells Alecto that they should’ve sent a better class of Death Eaters to Hogwarts and gets a Cruciatus for her efforts. She spits out blood where she bit her tongue and smiles with red teeth because the Carrows are easy. 
• She tries on different personas like outfits in her fourth year. It bemuses Michael, who never hits her with a spell during the DA meetings, who never sits with her during Gryffindor v. Ravenclaw Quidditch matches, who is far too sweet even though he’s a bad loser, and she realises that she’s just trying this on after that last game.
• At the beginning of her fifth year, she marches straight into the trophy room and defaces Tom Riddle’s award for special services to the school and feels vindicated when the award is removed and never seen again. 
• After everything’s over and Myrtle’s bathroom has taken enough damage in the fight that the entrance to the Chamber of Secrets is no longer secret, Ginny Weasley goes down there and stares right into the ruined eyes of that basilisk corpse for a solid ten minutes, then nodding as all of the shakes and shivers she’s had since she was eleven and this was her own personal hell fade away, leaving her with clenched fists and bright eyes. “You lose,” she says to the empty Chamber, and leaves, smiling.