Title: Words to Build
Fandom: Harry Potter
Rating: PG
Length: 790 words
Content notes: set at the start of Prisoner of Azkaban. Also fits the "monsters" and "fight" challenges.
Author notes: It's not clear in Chamber of Secrets how much if any of the truth about Ginny and Riddle's diary the school at large was told; this story assumes no-one beyond those directly involved knew about it.
Summary: Tom Riddle tore Ginny apart with his diary. She put herself back together again with her own.

When Ginny learnt they were going to Egypt, she knew she wanted a record of her trip. But cameras were too expensive, even with their winnings, and her drawings had never progressed beyond stick figures. So, forcing hands that wanted to tremble to be steady, she wrote to Hermione, and asked her to buy her a muggle diary - cheap, she insisted, so she could pay it back later. A plain notebook would do. She just wanted something that couldn't possibly be magical.

Hermione picked three, all with bright covers and bold patterns, and sent them with an equally firm insistence that they were presents. (Ginny didn't know until years later that Hermione had felt horribly guilty she hadn't realised sooner what was happening, hadn’t solved the mystery faster, hadn't noticed Ginny fading into herself. The fact that the older, wiser people who should have been responsible hadn’t either didn’t matter to the girl who wanted to save the world.)

Ginny asked her father to show her how to check them for hidden spells, just in case. Arthur had never thought one of his children asking about his work would break his heart. Her hands still shook so badly the writing on the first page was almost illegible, so she traced her name over and over again until they steadied. This diary belongs to Ginevra Molly Weasley. Ginny Weasley. Ginny. Ginny. Ginny. No-one else.

The hot sun of Egypt burnt her skin, added more freckles to her face, warmed her through and through. She walked in tombs that were ancient before the Chamber of Secrets was ever built, and was not afraid. There were no monsters here. Her eldest brother was there, his arm warm and friendly around her shoulders, assuring her their deadly secrets had been found and disarmed. When the boys came out of the one Ginny wasn’t allowed to enter, laughing a little too loud and shrill about skeletons, she thought, That was almost me. And then, But it wasn’t. She was alive, and the sun kissed her to confirm it, to prove the last words Tom made her write as much a lie as every one of his words was.

She wrote it all down, describing it to the best of her ability, her quill moving so fast with the need to write everything she almost didn't have time to be afraid. She wrote about hot sand and dry stone and shared laughs. She wrote down Fred and George's mad pranks, Bill's arguments with their mother about his hair, her father's fascination with the Muggle radios the cursebreakers carried as back-up. She filled the first diary, but put it in her Hogwarts trunk anyway, a reminder of that month in the warmth.

When the dementors boarded the train, bringing cold and fear with them, Ginny was dragged back to another freezing cold, the cold that had seeped into her bones as she lay dying on a stone floor. But she didn’t faint; she held onto consciousness with every last thread of her self, with all her innate stubbornness. She fought to ignore the echoes of Tom’s insidious whispers, the shadow of his command that she lay down, give up, let him steal her life. She didn’t faint. And she didn't ask Lupin how to fight dementors, because they were not her monsters.

Her monster was a boy who came out of a diary. It was rooster feathers on her clothes, gaps in her memory. She fought these with her bright notebooks, writing everything she did, checking that nothing was vanishing, that there were no words but her own.

Her monster was the knowledge that Tom - that Voldemort - had poured part of his soul into her. Her monster was the dread that seized her whenever she thought of something particularly sharp and smooth and cruel to say.

There was a craze among the girls for diaries that year - wand-keyed locks, special quills, covers with magically changing pictures. When her roommates offered to teach her the little charms they used, for decoration, for secrecy, Ginny refused at first, and wondered if the harsh scorn she had done so with was her own.

Later, though, staring at the gold and red spirals Hermione had picked (had scoured five stationers' for, looking for something with their House colours), she changed her mind. She was a Weasley. She was a Gryffindor. She refused to let her monsters rule her, bind her, shackle her; she would be stronger than her fears.

That night, with hands that trembled despite her will, Ginny followed Romilda Vane's instructions and made black ink turn every colour of the rainbow. It looked like happiness. It felt like clawing herself an inch closer to freedom.