DISCLAIMER: ALL OF THE CHARACTERS FEATURED WITHIN THIS TEXT BELONG TO THE AUTHOR J.K. ROWLING, EXCEPT FOR SIGNATURE HELMS, AS WELL AS ANY REFERENCES TO LOCATIONS USED IN THE BOOKS OR BASICALLY ANYTHING IN THE HARRY POTTER SERIES/SPINOFFS IS NOT MINE. What belongs to me, exclusively, is the writing and the idea. Judge it at your discretion (please don't be harsh).

ALSO, this is a work of fiction…the illnesses depicted are indeed real conditions that people courageously suffer with every day. However, the way that things play out with these illnesses has to relate to some aspects of the plot in Harry Potter. Therefore, the illnesses, while gruesome, will be treated to a certain extent with magic. Please respect this fictional work. IE. I understand that DIPG is solely a child's brain tumour, but for the purposes of this story, it can affect adults too. I'm not a doctor.

CHAPTER ONE: THE BOY WHO KIND OF LIVES.

I abruptly sat up in my bed, clutching my scar. Immediately a nurse rushed to my side to see what the issue was, but I just waved her away, lowering myself back onto the cushions and grasping at my forehead. It was a wonder as to why Voldemort decided to make an appearance now, as he typically came in the dead of night, unannounced, violently waking me up. But the tumour understood that there was some new treatment happening, and that caused it to somehow flee into the recesses of my mind and wait until I was weak enough to attack again. Voldemort knew when I was at my weakest, and it was only then that it was the most powerful.

I massaged my head, hoping that the pain would go away for a few hours as was sometimes the case. I have Diffuse Intrinsic Pontine Glioma, a brain tumour that had tried to kill me when I was a baby and, at the same time, took the lives of both my parents whose genes were passed on to me. I call my tumour Voldemort because translated directly from the Latin it means 'flight of death', and that's what the brain tumour keeps doing. Evading chemotherapy, radiotherapy, immunotherapy, any form of treatment…and yet it's not killing me, so in a way I'm fleeing death too. The scar is from the single brain surgery I had that attempted to remove Voldemort and, while being somewhat successful, did not succeed in removing the entire tumour.

And that, I guess, is precisely why I'm here.

"Nurse Pomfrey, could you dim the lights please?" I said, wincing at the bright lights above my head.

"Of course, Harry," she replied, waving her wand and instantly lowering the lights.

I was a patient/somewhat of a student at the Hogwarts School and Treatment Centre for Witches and Wizards. During the days where Voldemort wasn't around as much, and I was able to think and live and behave like a proper kid without having the constant prospect of doom in my head, I was a student hoping to become an Auror, a wizard who catches and deals with the criminals of the wizarding world. However, about 75% of the time I'm in the same bed, undergoing different treatments to hopefully obliterate Voldemort from my life, but nothing has worked to kill it so far, only to make it significantly less powerful. The thing about DIPG is that no one has ever survived it before for over 3 months upon diagnosis…my parents, according to what my lousy Aunt Petunia tells me, died because of Voldemort about less than a day after their diagnosis, and for some reason I was spared. I was just a baby then, and all I remember of my mom and dad is a loud, ringing beeping noise and a flashing green light as the magical doctors tried to restart their hearts with a myriad of spells, along with the unforgettable image of my mom, beautiful even in her last gruesome moments, lightly touching my hand before falling to the floor, dead. If they had known that the disease was in their genetics, I wonder if they would have had me.

The room around me is lined with hospital beds, only a few of them occupied at the moment. All of the people who attend Hogwarts are under the age of 18 and suffer from a mental or physical illness, every single one of them. They are the only thing that magic cannot cure, because these illnesses grow inside of us and neither wizards nor witches can figure out how to kill something inside of us without killing us as a whole, and so we live with them. For a vast majority of the students, only the professors/the nurses know what it is they're dealing with, but all the students here operate under the assumption that everyone else is dealing with something we don't know about, and because of that there's a certain element of respect. But it only goes so far.

On that note, none other than Draco Malfoy strides into the hospital wing, sneering at me.

"My, my, look what we have here. If it isn't Harry Cancer," he says, approaching my bed, "and how are we today?"

In response to that I take my wand and spray him with water, something I often do in the night when my temperature goes too high, and yet in this case it's more effective. He dries himself with his wand, glaring at me and walking over to the nearest nurse, who takes him into a separate room and watches him while he eats.

You see, Draco Malfoy is anorexic. Under normal circumstances I would try and be more sympathetic and potentially more kind, even though brain tumours sometimes turn people into assholes. But Draco is different. He comes from a very wealthy family that had showered him with such privilege and opulence that he began to grow bored, instead closely monitoring how much food he ate under the non-watchful eyes of his parents, who were too busy to constantly watch his every move. When his weight dropped to a whopping 70 pounds at 5'5 and a half three years ago, when he and I were both around 12, he was sent here to recover, and hasn't since. Although I would never admit it to him, he is making progress, with a face that once paralleled a human skeleton now looking slightly more healthy. We've been cautioned against saying things like that to statients (the word for student/patients here) who have Eating Disorders, as those types of comments often send them spiralling back to frighteningly low weights.

As he leaves the room without thanking the nurse, I get a glimpse of his features under bright lighting. He has incredibly pale, almost white hair, noticeably thicker than a few months ago, when the Anorexia was causing his hair to fall out. He has a gaunt-looking face, with sharp yet hollow cheekbones, and grey eyes that, when looking at me are always reduced to slits, yet regularly are big and slightly protruding with an almost cartoonish effect for the rest of his face, as the disorder has made all his existing features look out of proportion. He's taller than he was all those years ago, but still just as much of a pain-in-the-ass as always.

"I'd tell you to feel better but I know you won't," he says as he walks past my bed while leaving the wing, pushing up his sleeves to reveal a small row of freshly healed scars. Decency holds me back from responding with a snide retort, and I once again slump back into the cushions. As Draco leaves the wing, he doesn't bother to hold the door open for the next patient.

This patient was a sight to wonder about. The procedure he had probably done on his right leg left him with a seemingly permanent limp that was virtually unnoticeable once you took in the rest of him. He has dirty blonde, incredibly messy hair that he, despite the disease within him, keeps neat and gelled to one side, with alarmingly green eyes and a single dimple whenever he smiled in his right cheek. He looked like some kind of war hero, visibly looking annoyingly perfect and probably admired by all, yet in a way, it seems like he's so out of reach that he may as well be merely a photograph.

Once he saw me, his face went from deadpan to astounded, shattering the illusion. I stared at the ground, knowing what was next.

"You're Harry Potter, aren't you?" he asked, stumbling over his words like an excited little kid. Just looking at him gave me a fresh pain on my forehead, causing me to grasp at the scar once more.

"Yes, and you are?" I responded, trying not to sound exasperated.

"Man. I didn't know you were here! The only survivor of the world's most evil and dark tumour is sitting next to me in a hospital wing!" he replied, not answering the question.

I just looked at him. "I wouldn't really say survivor," I said, gesturing to the tubes and pills beside me. "Unless you call this surviving."

"Of course! You're THE BOY WHO LIVED!" he exclaimed, smiling at me. "I'm Signature Helms, by the way. Osteosarcoma, but it's relatively stable. Nothing compared to yours, I don't think."

"One could say, The Boy Who Lived. I mean I guess. Signature, if you don't mind me asking, if your cancer is relatively stable, why are you here?" I ask, trying and failing to not sound annoyed.

He completely dismissed my tone. "I mean, I don't want to take any risks, living at home and doing nothing. I don't want any surprises with this nasty thing, even if I think it's gone for good. So I've come to study here…I'm just coming to meet the nurses, but if all goes well I'm mostly going to be here as a student. I know I'm starting later than most, but my parents wanted to make sure I was okay to leave home first."

I swallowed at the mention of his parents. I wondered, for a brief moment, what it would be like to have a set of parents/guardians who cared about me. "Well it was nice to meet you, Signature," I said, feigning exhaustion.

"It was an absolute honour meeting you, Harry! I'll definitely be seeing you around!" he replied, waving and walking towards to the nurses. As they led him into another room to check his vitals, he routinely glanced over at where I was sitting, shaking his head in awe each time. I wanted to puke for a reason that, just this once, wasn't related to my cancer.

I tried to focus on keeping my eyes closed and sleeping while the medicine tried its best to torment Voldemort but it was to no avail. I remained there, lying with my eyes closed as morning turned into late afternoon, as the nurses brought my next round of drugs to me, the unwilling patient.

I had only arrived here about a week ago, when an autistic quasi-wizard (his wand was confiscated for some reason I didn't know of yet) by the name of Rubeus Hagrid had come to see why I wasn't answering the letters that Hogwarts had been sending me for several months. The problem was that none of these letters ever found their way to me, always being intercepted by either my aunt Petunia or my morbidly obese uncle Vernon or cousin Dudley. While paying the absolute bare minimum to keep me alive, choosing the cheapest treatment possible, they did not want me going to Hogwarts where they feared I would discover my wizarding abilities and proceed to kill them all. Obviously I wouldn't kill them (cancer has you thinking of what comes after death, and I certainly didn't want the chief impediment to whatever lies in the next life to be the fact that I killed the Dursleys. Also, murder is wrong), but I was absolutely infuriated that they had kept my magical abilities from me for so long. Three years, to be exact.

So far, however, I had no friends. I hadn't really left the hospital wing since I arrived here, as Voldemort particularly didn't like Hogwarts and the pain he gave me was too much to eat with or go to class with, let alone socialize. So I sat in the cancer wing, occasionally reading but mostly sleeping, and always being woken up by some new student yelling in my face that I was Harry Potter. It was new, sure, I mean no one had cared about me before, but it was growing old really quickly.

As I finally fell asleep, despite the protests of Voldemort, I thought about how amazing it was to now be at Hogwarts, and it all went dark.

The next morning, I awoke to a pair of half-moon glasses peering at me from above. I jumped up from the cushions in surprise, reaching for my glasses to better see the figure above me. He looked incredibly old, with pale white hair and a very long, very white beard. Dressed in elegant robes, he waved his wand to produce a comfortable chair upon which he sat while continuing to stare at me. I felt disturbed. Strangely enough, though, in this unfamiliar man's presence, Voldemort seemed to be absent. Something about this man terrified the tumour inside of my head.

"Knock knock," he said.

"WHat," I replied, clearing my throat.

"Knock knock! You've never heard of knock knock jokes?"

"Of course I have. But who are you?" I asked.

"Answer the door."

"Fine. Who's there?"

"Lemon Meringue."

I stared at the empty bed beside me, as though to share in this man's insanity with a fellow patient. "Lemon Meringue who?"

"Lemon MeRANG the door, but no one answered!" he laughed, leaning back in his chair. I would have assumed that he'd escaped the psychiatric ward that dealt with statients who had mental disabilities, but Hogwarts only dealt with magical students under 18, which he was definitely not one of.

He paused. "Harry, I just made an attempt to lighten the mood. I think some laughter might be polite, considering you appear as though a dark cloud is permanently above your head."

I looked at him, deadpan. "Ha," I said. "Could you please tell me who you are, sir? Should I call a nurse?"

"That would be unnecessary," he replied. "My name is Albus Percival Wulfric Brian Dumbledore, or Professor Dumbledore for short. I am the Headmaster of Hogwarts School and Treatment Centre for Witches and Wizards. I hope you are well today."

I decided to refrain from telling him how it was in his presence that Voldemort seemed to cower in fear, saving it for another time when I knew this man better, so as to not scare him away. "Hello professor. I apologize for the rude greeting, I mean I didn't know you were-"

"Nonsense," he said, and I immediately stopped talking. "You're Harry Potter. Your reputation precedes you. Tell me, Harry, why were you such a poor correspondent? It seemed as though you didn't want to speak with me, nor did you wish to accept my invitation to join us here at Hogwarts. Why is that?"

"Sir, I never received a single one of your letters. Believe me, I would have jumped at the opportunity to come here, but my non-magic uncle and aunt kept taking the letters from the mail and all the other places they appeared, I mean I think some of them were inside of eggs according to my lunatic aunt, but they didn't want me to come here," I explained, "and it wasn't until the letters started flooding into the house from, like, all the openings everywhere that I knew something was up that they weren't telling me, I mean, obviously, letters were flying everywhere and there were owls surrounding my house and, being here in the magical world it all makes sense, but then when I thought magic wasn't real? I thought my pain medication was playing a trick on me, and then Hagrid showed up, and he was so nice and respectful and everything but my uncle and aunt refused to let me go, I mean, is this place free? I have no idea why they were like that, I think it's because my aunt hated my mom, now I think it was because my mom was magical and my aunt wasn't, but-"

"Harry. I understand the confusion, but I must correct you there. Your mother was one of two daughters born to the Evans family, and only one of them had magical capabilities that were in turn passed down to you. Lily was an astounding witch…one of the brightest of her age," he said, smiling and leaning back as though lost in some fond memory. "But Petunia is a Muggle, or a non-magical person, and it is my understanding from what Lily explained to me when she was here that Petunia was incredibly jealous of her, and that jealousy, unfortunately, was directed onto you once Lily tragically passed away 15 years ago. From the same tumour you have in that remarkable head of yours," he said, gesturing at my scar. "For some reason, you lived. Care to share your secrets, Harry?'

"Professor, if only I knew. I mean, I have no idea. It doesn't make any sense to me," I replied, sighing back into the cushions.

"All will be revealed in time, Harry. That is what's certain here at Hogwarts. The more you pursue something, the more likely you are to obtain it. Why, look at your parents. James pursued Lily so fervently that even we teachers gossiped about it. It's not one of my finer moments," he said, straightening his back, "Anyways, how are you feeling today, Harry? Do you believe yourself to be capable of attending the first day of classes?"

Using his wand, he produced a mirror. When I looked into it, I saw a 15 year old boy who seemed to permanently look like he was being chased by something ferocious. I tried to relax my expression, which helped. The scar at the top of my forehead while not incredibly large, in fact very small, was shaped like a lighting bolt and mostly healed. Whenever Voldemort was particularly active in my head, it shone bright red and hurt quite painfully. Now, it was a dull reddish brown. My eyes were green and I had messy, out-of-control brown hair that I kept permanently unkempt. Overall, I'd rate me like a 1/10, but speaking honestly I wasn't bad looking, and you couldn't tell I was sick thanks to the magic, but before Hogwarts I was completely bald and was just as gaunt as Draco. The reality of cancer in a non-magical world.

"Sir, I think I might be. Can I ask you one last question?"

"Of course, Harry."

"Why did you come and visit me?"

He stood up, and the chair underneath him magically disappeared. "You're a miracle, Harry. I fear that if I did not come to visit you, you would vanish once more into an area of this world where I could not find you, and I would have lost my chance."

"Why would I vanish, sir?"

"You said one question, Harry. But to say that you are not sought after by all the wizarding schools would be a nasty lie. I do not fancy myself liars," he said, ironing out his robes. "Please be changed and at the Great Hall within the next 30 minutes. And Harry?"

"Yes, professor?"

"Good luck today."