DISCLAIMER:Harry Potter belongs to J.K. Rowling. I'm not claiming ownership. I'm not making money off this. It's simply for my enjoyment, as well as the enjoyment of those who choose to read it. Proceeding.


"FREAK!" Lily heard, the shrill sound of her sister's voice radiating throughout their home, echoing, as if she had screamed them a million times. Then in a quiet, cold voice, Petunia finished her thought, "You are no sister of mine."

These words stung Lily like ice. Petunia had been so cruel to her lately, ever since she had come home for the summer. She became nostalgic for a moment, her mind floating back to the days when they had been best friends. She remembered when Petunia had taught her how to swing, how to ride a bike, how to tie her shoe, how to play card games, how to wrap a Christmas present (however messily), and even how to be a good sister. All of those days were gone now, and this hit Lily like the fists of a thousand angry gods. She could no longer take the pain.

Heading to her room at a ghostly pace, she did not even flinch when her elbow accidentally came in contact with the hot flame of a burning candle. She deserved the pain. When she reached her bedroom, she sat down on her bed and opened the drawer to her nightstand. Inside sat her best friend—the only thing that understood her—a sharp, shiny silver blade. Her thin fingers grasped the dull edge, and she marveled at the simplicity of its design. Its creator never would have imagined that it would bring so much relief to people like her.

Slowly, Lily lifted up the hem of her dress until her entire lower body was exposed. She brought the sharp edge of the blade down until it came in contact with the pale skin of her inner thigh, and then began to apply pressure, dragging it down until it had made a deep, three inch long cut. Oh, how she had missed this feeling.

She watched as the warm blood trickled down her leg, mesmerized by the effect just one cut had on her. She had been clean for almost a year, but every day had been a struggle. She had finally cracked under all of the pressure. Lily continued making cuts of various length and depth on her leg until she felt she had no energy left to continue. Then, she lay down and drifted off to sleep, the fresh wounds still stinging wonderfully under the fabric of her dress.


"Lily, sweetie, open your eyes," said a familiar voice, almost impatiently. "Lily, please dear, open your eyes!" the voice continued to plead. She recognized it as her mother's.

Try as she might, she couldn't open her eyes. 'Am I dead?' she thought. She tried to move, to talk, to make any kind of indication to her mother that she was all right, until she felt the stinging and stickiness of the cuts and blood on her legs. Then she remembered she was not okay—she was anything but okay. Her heart began to ache like it never had before, so much that it was almost physically painful. Her soul cried out to her parents, to her sister, to anyone that would listen, just to help her climb out of this hole into which she had dug herself so deep. But she couldn't wake up.

She heard someone else entering the room. It was a man's voice, deep and smooth, like honey. "No change?" her father asked.

"Nothing," answered her mother, breaking down into sobs. Her cries became muffled, and Lily assumed that her father had embraced her mother to calm her down. When the crying stopped, she felt cold, wet hands interlacing their fingers with her own.

"I think she needs to stay here at Asclepius's for a while, honey. She's not going to get better on her own. We both know that," reasoned her father.

'So that's where I am? The mental hospital?' Lily thought, as she heard her mother mutter something about how she hadn't paid enough attention to her. Lily knew this wasn't true. Her mother had paid more than enough attention to her. She just had problems. She was emotionally unstable, and her family had nothing to do with that. Just then, she felt warm liquid streaming down her left cheek.

"She's crying!" her mother exclaimed. One would usually thing a mother being ecstatic about her child crying was odd, but this was an unusual situation. "Lily, are you awake? Can you hear me? Squeeze my hand if you can hear me, sweetie."

Lily concentrated as hard as she could, but she could not get her muscles to move. 'How much blood did I actually lose?'

Lily thought about how pathetic she must look to everyone, especially to Petunia. Being in a coma from blood loss didn't exactly make her any less of a freak than she was before. In fact, it just exacerbated the problem. Her sister would probably never speak to her again.

Just then, a meek, tearful voice piped up, "What if she dies?" It was Petunia! Lily realized that she absolutely had to see this, just to make sure it was true. With all of her might, concentration, and will power, she fought to open her eyes—and succeeded.

The first thing she noticed was that her sister was not in the room. She looked at her father as he answered the question her mother—not Petunia—had just asked. The next thing she noticed was that she was unable to talk because there was a breathing tube down her throat. She tried to pick up one of her arms to gesture to one of her parents, to let them know that she was alive and awake, but she was simply too weak. She coughed. Immediately, both sets of eyes shot in her direction.

"Lily! Honey! Oh we were so worried!" her mother said, squeezing her hand as a fresh tear slid down her cheek. She raised her hand to Lily's forehead, brushing the auburn locks out of her face. "Honey, why didn't you tell us you were feeling like that again? We could have done something to help!"

Lily shook her head, using her eyes to gesture toward her breathing tube. It was preventing her from answering her mother.

"Lily, dear, this isn't the time to make silly faces. Your father and I are seriously worried about you!" her mother continued.

"Ivy, I think she's trying to tell us that she can't talk. She's got a breathing tube in," her father pointed out. Lily sighed with relief. "Do you think they'll take it out now that she's awake?"

"I don't know, why don't you go ask the doctor?" her mother suggested, and her father left the room. Lily closed her eyes, trying to imagine what she would say to her parents once she could finally talk. What was making her feel like this again? Was it only Petunia, or was it deeper than that? Was it because she had been chosen to be the Head Girl at school this year? Could it have anything to do with not expressing her true feelings about James Potter? It could be a combination of anything going wrong in her life. Lily reasoned that it was because of all the pressure she had been under lately, and that she was stupid for resulting to something that had pained her so much over a year ago. A year without harming herself…and it was hard as hell.

Lily's father returned with a nurse who checked her vitals and removed her breathing tube. They allowed her to sip on a glass of water, and then began to question her on what exactly had happened. She wanted to avoid talking about it for as long as possible, so she began asking questions herself.

"How long was I out?" she asked informally.

"Two days," her mother responded.

"Okay, so when can I go home?" Lily asked hopefully. Her parents exchanged glances.

"Well, your mother and I have decided that it would be in your best interest to spend the remainder of the summer holiday here. They'll be able to help you get to the root of your problems, sweetie."

"I don't have any problems," Lily spat. "I want to go home!" She tried to sit up, but she still didn't have enough energy to make large movements.

"Honey, look at your legs!" her mother said, lifting removing the blankets and lifting up her hospital gown. The scars were there, still stinging, covered in blood-soaked bandages. "Do you know how many stitches they had to give you? Over two hundred! Lily, you're staying here for the rest of the summer. There's only a month left. You'll go back to school on September 1st, and everything will be back to normal. No one will even know what happened to you this summer! This is a muggle hospital!"

"That has absolutely NOTHING to do with it!" Lily began, but her father wouldn't hear of it.

"Lily, you're staying here to get the help you need, and that's final. We'll visit you whenever we can, of course, dear, but you have to stay here," he reasoned.

"Fine," Lily answered submissively. "But could you cover me up again? I'm cold."

"But dear, it's got to be ninety degrees in this room!" her mother exclaimed, covering her up anyway.

"I know… I'm just… cold."


Swoosh. A brown leather football soared through the hot summer air, brushing the leaves of a baby oak before coming to an abrupt halt in the hands of 17 year-old James Potter.

"Nice catch, mate," said his handsome counterpart Sirius Black, steel-grey eyes sparkling in the smoldering sun.

"Thanks, Padfoot. You know, I'm really starting to get hungry. Why don't we go in for a snack in a few minutes?" James gestured toward the large brick house, standing three stories tall.

"Yeah, me too. Two more throws?" Sirius suggested.

James nodded, and hurled the ball toward his friend, only to have it land over 20 feet behind him. "Oh, you think you can throw farther than me, do you?" Sirius said with a small, narcissistic grin. "Watch this!"

He threw the ball as hard as he could, and the two friends stood with their mouths hanging open as they watched it spiral through the air and land on the other side of the fence.

"Control your throws, mate," James laughed.

"Shut up and go get the ball," Sirius said, obviously angry that he had made a mistake in judging trajectory.

"Me?" James asked, exasperated. "You threw it!"

"What, are you scared?" Sirius teased.

"Scared? Of course not! It's just an extremely tall fence with barbed wire on the top. Psh, I can scale that in a heartbeat," James insisted.

"Do it, then—without your invisibility cloak."

"Okay, I will." And with that, James pulled out his wand and conjured a staircase to lead him over the fence and back down safely. As he climbed, he looked around to make sure no one was watching. This would require serious memory charms if he was caught. Once he reached the bottom step, he hopped off and made the stairs disappear. Then, he began searching around for the ball. At last, he found it, and he ran over to it, clutching the brown leather in his fingers and turning around to leave.

"Hey! Hold it, mister!" a booming voiced called out. James dropped the ball and turned around. A tall man in a blue uniform was headed toward him, advancing quickly. His instincts told him to run, but he stood still, unable to move his feet.

At last, the man stopped and grabbed his shoulder. "Did you escape, son?" he asked.

"Escape? What?" James sputtered. This had to be a joke. "My friend Sirius and I were playing catch, and he threw the ball over the fence! He dared me to go get it. I didn't escape from anywhere!"

The man sighed. "Son, do you know where you are?" he asked.

"Umm… In a fenced off area with a large building?" James answered, as he had just noticed the large, pathetically dirty building standing about fifty feet away from him.

"This is Asclepius's Mental Hospital. You're trespassing. There are severely mentally ill people here. Do you realize that this is a crime?"

"No, sir! I had no idea that this was a hospital! Please don't send me to jail!"

"That's not my choice, son. I'm taking you inside to call your parents," said the man, and with that, they walked toward the building.


"James Harold Potter!" his mother's shrill voice yelled, full of anger and disappointment. "What possessed you to climb over that fence? How many times do we have to tell you to avoid that place?"

"I guess I never really paid attention! I'm sorry!" James pleaded with his mother. He was rarely punished, though he deserved it most of the time. Something told him this would be one of the rare times his mother did something, but he would have never expected what kind of punishment she had in mind.

"You'd better be sorry! And as a punishment and an apology for trespassing on those poor sick people's hospital, you're going to volunteer there for the rest of the summer!" she screamed.

"VOLUTEER AT THE LOONEY BIN?" James said a little more loudly than intended, exasperated with the thought of spending the next month with people who talked to themselves or were convinced they were a chicken or something like that.

"Yes, young man, and don't call it 'the looney bin'. You're going to spend AT LEAST five hours a day there until the summer holiday is over. You start tomorrow at eight in the morning. This conversation is over. Go up to your room now."

James knew never to question his mother when she sounded so serious, so he did what he was told, mentally kicking himself for accepting Sirius's dare. Five hours a day wasn't that bad, he guessed. He'd be out by one o'clock each afternoon. That was plenty of time to hang out with his friends or do whatever else he felt like doing. Since it wasn't late enough to go to sleep yet, James worked on a bit of homework before changing into his pajamas and drifting off to sleep.


The first thing James thought when he arrived at Asclepius's the next morning was that the inside of the building was just as depressing as the outside. How could someone be treated for depression in a place that looked like it would cause it? He had no idea. The volunteer office assigned him to the second floor activity unit, assuring him that he was their first volunteer in years and that the residents would be "so happy to see him". 'No big surprise there,' he thought. 'At least I only have to deal with the most sane of the insane.'

A woman wearing navy blue scrubs led him to the activity manager on the second floor, who then introduced him to all of the patients. James, only half listening, became extremely interested on a painting on the wall by some abstract artist called Picasso.

"This is Neil, and this is Andrea, this is Eva, this is Jenna, this is Michael, and this is our newest patient, Lily."

James's eyes widened as his mind tore away from the painting at the mention of Lily's name. He turned his head so that his eyes met hers, and he whispered her name, "Lily."

"James?" Lily asked breathlessly, and she promptly fainted, falling out of her chair and onto the floor.

A/N: Yeah, I know. Angstfest 2007. Let me know what you think. Review? Chocolate chip brownies for anyone who does. :)