CJ, with one of eir final pieces before ei leaves fanfiction on a prolonged, potentially permanent, hiatus.

Competitions: Psychological!AU Competition

Prompts: Depression

Main Character: Cho Chang

Pairings: Cho/Implied Luna, Cho/Cedric, Cho/Harry, Cho/Padma, Cho/Terry

Personal headcanons: Genderfluid Terry, Unwilling-to-label-sexuality Cho

Warnings: Explicit depression, self harm, suicidal ideation, injuries, drowning, unexplicit dissociation, unexplicit depersonalisation, bulimia mention, recovery.

Notes: Thanks to my friends for the grammar beta-ing, including RandomFandoms14 and quantumCellist, who are on this site.

.oOo.

The first time the shadows swallow you whole and wrap around your veins until your blood is lead and you can barely move, you're only thirteen and you're screaming underwater because I'mnotokayI'mnotokayIdon'tthinkI'lleverbeokay and WouldyoulovemeifItoldyou and Whycan'tyouseeI'mdrowningandIneedhelpthatIdon'tdeserve.

Professor Flitwick looks at you all through Charms with something strange in his eyes and he calls you over to his office once class is over. "Miss Chang, you didn't turn in your homework today, did you?"

"Well...I didn't have time, Professor, I'm sorry, there was just an important tournament in the Chess Club, and Professor Snape offered extra credit for members of the Potions Association if we entered a competition, so I was busy preparing-" The words, all lies, you're not sorry (you're not anything, you're barely existing), fall effortlessly from your mouth and you almost convince yourself that the words are effortless, that they don't scratch your throat as you cough them up like blood.

"Miss Chang, you quit all of your clubs in October."

And everything is breaking and falling, and for the first time you just can't hold back all of the words that have been fermenting in your stomach ever since you noticed how her hair was golden in the sun. I need help I need something I'm so sorry for bothering you I just don't know what to do I think that something's wrong and-

And.

"Everything is okay, Miss Chang. It doesn't seem like it right now, but everything will be okay."

You grasp onto those words and hold them right under your heart, protected by the cage of your ribs and the cushion of your lungs. It takes a while of waiting, but a few weeks later, everything is okay.

Everything is okay.

.oOo.

Her hair painted gold by the sun loses its luster by the time you're in fifth year, and Cedric Diggory looks at you like you're the brightest star in the sky at night, and for a while, you are.

You've almost forgotten the shadows, but you tell him after he saved you from drowning underwater (This time, the water wasn't in your head. This time, it was real.) about how at one time, your blood weighed you down and held you underwater no matter how loud you screamed. "Cho," he whispers, his fingers tracing a pattern that will forever be imprinted in the memory of your skin. "Cho, I didn't think it was possible to be even more in love with you, but apparently, I was wrong."

And if you're the brightest star in the sky at night, he's the sun.

.oOo.

You learned in Astronomy that one day, the sun will burn out.

You just didn't know it would happen so soon. You just didn't realise that when the sun went out, the world would implode.

The shadows are back, and this time, you're not screaming underwater; you're drowning in cement, and it takes everything you have to pretend you're fine. You look in the mirror, and you don't see yourself, you see a ghost of someone who you don't remember. You're breaking because the air is jagged glass that cuts your skin when you move and cuts your insides when you breathe.

It's getting harder to breathe. It's getting harder to do anything, really. It's getting harder to go to class, so you stop. It's getting harder to talk, so you stop. It's getting harder to say no to the daydreams in your head, so you stop.

The day you finally quench your thirst for blood, secretly, apprehensively in the bathroom; you kiss Harry Potter, five tally marks scrawling empty promises on your shoulder that he grips. The empty promises will stay, pink and angry then white and subdued, but his touch is forgettable because it never really meant anything.

You know the promises are empty, but they keep appearing on your skin, but they're poetry, really, silky soft croons and passionate pleas and songs written in stitched-together skin. You're breaking because you're held together by glamours and you're tired, always tired, of pursuing that mythical happiness that you can only find in what kills you.

"I'm here for you if you ever need anything, Cho, I love you so much and you are beautiful," Marietta says, eyes shiny (last year, Marietta stuck two fingers down her throat after every meal, and thanks to a Mind Healer this summer, she's stopped, but she wears the scars on her knuckles like badges of honour). You can't explain why that makes you feel even lonelier.

Dumbledore's Army gives you purpose for a bit, because it gives you a reason to not leave Hogwarts with a too-tight embrace from a rope. A small fire burns under your skin, and is this what everyone else feels like every day?

Fires, like the sun, burn out, inevitably, and you crash and burn and scream, and what you're really telling him is Please be there for me, I don't know if I'll make it, I don't know if I want to make it, but all he hears is your best friend is a bitch, and you should break up with me. Professor Flitwick can't look at you in class anymore, because you're never there anyway, and you're a ghost of a ghost. Invisible.

It turns out that the Room of Requirement isn't just for Dumbledore's Army (which you stopped going to, because there was no reason to go, no reason to do anything, really), because one day when you're avoiding Transfiguration, the door opens and you see the smallest closet, padded walls and cushions on the floor. It's safe. You break, you scream and your bones shudder out of your skin, and you're not really there, you're just watching your body curl up and shake out and explode and tear your broken promises until they're bleeding.

There's a potion waiting for you when you're done, and you sip it tentatively. It tastes sour, but something tells you that this will help. This will help you become opaque, this will help you. There's a salve that numbs your skin and heals your poetry.

By the end of the year, you haven't completely waded out of the concrete, but the hollowness that had invaded your existence is gone, and for the most part, you've lost the need to write on your body, when you can spill ink on parchment and incendio it into oblivion instead.

You're getting better.

You'll be better.

.oOo.

The War leaves you a leader, battered, bruised and hungry, and you don't know what makes you kiss Padma under the Hufflepuff tapestry after a particularly dangerous excursion saving Michael Corner from the dungeon fifteen minutes before he was going to be tortured. And all of the edges you've cultivated, all of the ridges that have replaced your curves, melt away for a few seconds, and it's just you and Padma, and she's holding you tightly, as if you'll disappear like a ghost if she loosens her grip.

"I've never kissed anyone before," she says afterwards, not regretfully. Your foreheads are a hair's width apart, and her words are cupped in the space between your mouths.

"I love you," you whisper, and your words solidify and drop in the space between you two, curled up on the floor, in matching blue sleeping bags.

Too soon.

In the morning, Padma doesn't meet your eyes as you patrol the hallways between classes, wands at the ready.

.oOo.

The War invigorates you, it gives you that fire simmering under skin again, but you learn that not all shadows come from within you.

But these shadows can still wind their ways down your throat and pool in your lungs and leak down your ribs until they tangle in your stomach, and it leaves you wallowing in vast nothingness, and every day is blurring together, and you've lost all reason for anything, and you don't remember when you last ate, because doing the smallest thing makes you hate yourself because why do you deserve to live when so many people better than you died?

Why can't you go back to how things were? Weren't you happier then?

But all that you remember is bloody poetry (that is crawling and creeping back on to your body) and words coughing out of you like blood, and shaking and not knowing where you were because you didn't exist. But all that you remember is Cedric and Marietta, and feeling so alone that it hurt inside the marrow of your bones. But all that you remember is the Room of Requirement, and the cushions and the salve, and it takes a week of pain and doubt and numbness before you force yourself with the last bit of life you have to put some damn clothes on and Apparate to St. Mungo's.

This is good.

This is progress.

This will help.

The Mind Healer is wrinkled and her skin is gray and it's slow and hard, almost harder than what was before, because this is baring your soul, because until now, your shadows were yours, and now everyone can see these shadows that are almost your friends.

This is good.

.oOo.

It's been a year, and the shadows are still there, but so is the fire, and most days, the fire wins.

You met Terry at a DA reunion (you almost don't go, but Harry sends you a personal owl, and you think you see an apology for something you forgave a long time ago hiding in his messy scrawl, so you figure why not?), both of you uncomfortably sober (your potions don't agree with Firewhiskey) and huddled in the corner. You bump elbows and apologise a lot, but end up making fun of the few totaled people making absolute fools of themselves -Ron attempts to kiss Seamus before a disgruntled Hermione and Dean drag their respective partners away- and somehow, you have his address in your pocket and a we're-just-friends lunch next Saturday.

That we're-just-friends lunch next Saturday turns into another lunch at the park, and then another at the library, where you sneak food in because technically no food is allowed, and you have to run out of there as fast as you can when he spills a bowl of tomato soup on the cream carpets. The lunches aren't scheduled, because sometimes he's too busy feeling like someone is watching him, and sometimes you need to lie in bed for a few hours and let yourself drown.

It takes a while, but he tells you that some days he can't breathe can't think can't move because he's just so afraid of everything, that he makes lists, hundreds of them, almost twenty a day, to calm himself down, that he's taking potions so he doesn't have to make lists.

And you tell him about your shadows and your promises and poetry, and the potions you're taking so you don't have to scream underwater.

But the waiter comes with the food, and you've ordered tomato soup for him as a joke, and he scowls good naturedly and kicks you under the table, because he ordered you cow testicles, and oh my god, what kind of restaurant serves cow balls we are never coming here again, Terry.

The sun is setting, and painting the sky in bruises, but it'll be back tomorrow, and the sky will be blue, and you'll be one step closer to being opaque, one step closer to that mythical happiness.

So for now, you're content to order something that isn't bovine genitalia, not caring when your sleeve is pushed back a little when you raise your hand (okay, maybe you care a little), and sit.

And for once, the shadows are still there, but they're as good as gone.