(A/N: This story is AU; it's set before the BAU was formed, and puts all of our favorite team members together at the same college. Rated M for self-harm, alcohol use, and possibly some slash. I don't endorse self-harm. It's truly horrible, hard to recover from, and has long-term consequences. If you know someone who does, be there for them, don't give up on them, and encourage them to get help.)

Prentiss woke up to the dispiriting clang of her alarm clock and the sound of rain drumming on her window. It was another Monday. She always did well in her classes; the college, though rigorous, was public and not an Ivy League school. Oh well. She would never have been able to afford Harvard, and anyway, a loud, nagging voice constantly in the back of her head told her she was too stupid to have gotten in there anyway.

"Shut that thing off, you stupid dyke," her roommate muttered sleepily from across the tiny dorm room. Prentiss had come out about a month ago, and as soon as her roommate saw the Facebook post, it only exacerbated the tension between them. Her roommate, of course, had told the whole dorm of 200 students right away, and now all the girls, and even some guys, avoided her. If she was in the communal bathroom, people would act afraid, as if she would attack them. Just because I'm bi, doesn't mean I want to sleep with everything that moves, she thought bitterly. She was 20; most of the students living here were younger than she was, so she was ashamed to say that she was allowing them, a bunch of immature high-school-ish girls with no direction in life, to bully her.

Prentiss, carefully covering her body with a towel as she changed out of her pajamas slipped into the towel and headed to the bathroom down the hall. This was the worst part of her day. The whispers and avoidance of the "freak," and the fear that her towel or a curtain would slip and reveal her scars. She stepped into a stall, pulled the curtains, and turned up the water as hot as it would go.

Her right leg stung so badly from the heat that she just managed not to scream. Last night, after a phone argument with her mom during which she'd said that Prentiss would never be good enough, and several of her dorm mates pushing her into the November mud, ruining her clothes, she felt so awful, her internal voice screaming insults, feeling like she'd never be good, have any value, that she'd carved "failure" into her thigh. Gritting her teeth, she forced herself to run her leg under the hot stream, then carefully wipe at the wound, large and still an angry red, with a clean washcloth. She needed to keep the cuts, the scars clean, prevent infection, complications, so that no one would find out that she wasn't the strong, perfect person she tried to project. A 3.92 GPA and a smile hid so much. She hurriedly finished getting ready for the day, grabbed her shoulder bag out of her room, left the building, and, ignoring the pain as her jeans chafed at the word she'd carved, got on her bike and went to class.

It was a literature course; the assigned book was Kafka's The Metamorphosis at the moment. She of course, remembered the book and everything she needed to bring. Including her tools. She never knew when she would feel like hurting herself, and the need was so overwhelming that she often couldn't even wait to get back to the dorm to do it. And anyway, there were other places on campus that offered more privacy for her to do what she needed.

Her classmate and, well, she guessed, her friend, Spencer Reid, smiled at her as she walked in the classroom and motioned to the seat next to him. She wished he would stop being friendly; she was just a failure, nothing, not worth his time, his friendship. But she had to hide. So she forced a smile in return and sat next to him. "You weren't paying any attention last class. Do you need to borrow my notes?" the skinny 17-year-old asked in an undertone. He was a prodigy, in college at a young age, and thus was an outcast like her. She nodded, and began copying as much as she could before the professor walked in and began another lecture. How could you be so stupid? You need to pay attention, it's what normal people do! If anyone found out about things, especially the college, you can kiss graduate school goodbye! she thought viciously. She didn't need the notes to tell her about the book, though. She remembered every word of it. It was about a man who suddenly woke up one day transformed into a monstrous, disgusting insect and was shunned and alone by everyone after that.

She felt like that man; well, not exactly. She felt like she was him, but able to disguise herself successfully as being a normal person. But if people got too close, saw her for the thing she really was, they would shun her just like happened to Gregor Samsa. Prentiss absently scratched her leg, then stopped. Bad. She couldn't reopen the cut, start bleeding all over the lecture hall. She sat through the long class, then afterwards, quickly moved to leave. Reid stopped her in the hall.

"Emily, are you okay?" he asked. "You don't talk to me hardly at all. You used to when the semester started, and you seem sad."

"I'm fine, Spencer," she snapped, and took a few steps away from him.

He caught up with her and touched her shoulder, reaching up, since he was still shorter than she was. "And you're limping, too."

"Spencer…" she sighed.

"At least have lunch with me in the union. We used to do that a lot." Prentiss shrugged, and started to walk with him in that direction.

"Really, you don't look that good," Reid said. "Tired and pretty pale. You could use some food. I'll buy this time." Prentiss could see that he wasn't going to be deterred.

"What do you want?" he asked her at the counter.

"I don't care. You pick something for me, okay? I'll go find a table."

Prentiss wanted to slump down unnoticed somewhere, with just her and Reid- no, she wanted to be alone. But today wasn't her day. JJ, Morgan, Garcia, and Hotchner were crammed together at a small table and waved her over. They rounded out her small group of friends, if Prentiss could still call them that. She felt so alone lately and had basically given up talking, unless, like Reid, someone made her by asking her a direct question. She never went to the movies or coffee or a party or ate with them much any more. Trying not to show she was sighing inwardly, she sat down with them.

Morgan was talking. "So I'm already planning this party for Saturday night, and you all have to come. I got my acceptance already to Columbia for my master's degree, so I'm celebrating. I'll buy everything. Nothing better to commemorate an intellectual feat with than killing brain cells by drinking, right? It would just be us, and Reid if the little guy's allowed," he joked. "I don't like huge crowds, and my landlord would kill me for throwing a kegger."

"I don't think I want to go, thanks though, Derek," Prentiss mumbled.

JJ, sitting nearest, shook Prentiss's shoulder. She winced inside; she had scars only a few days old there. "Come on, Emily! You've been so out of it lately, you need to have some fun. I'm not letting you say no," she insisted.

Reid came by with a sandwich for himself and Prentiss's favorite wrap. As they all sat there, she pushed the food around, only taking a few bites and not saying much. She eventually got up to leave, and as she picked up her bag, the sleeve of her black sweater slipped.

Reid noticed immediately. The neat lines of scars and cuts, various stages of healing, some white, some pink, some an angry red, all in the few inches of arm exposed for a brief second. JJ saw too, and stifled a gasp, looked over at Reid. "Is she..what's going on?" she whispered after Prentiss left.

"I don't know," he whispered back. "What's there…what can we do?"

Neither of them knew.

That night, Prentiss cursed floridly under her breath in the underused bathroom in the basement of the library. She'd cut deeper than she intended, and as she put her jeans back on, a dark bloodstain formed all over the leg. At least it was dark; people wouldn't see her slinking back to the dorm looking like that. And she'd wash them in the communal laundry at 2:30 or so this morning, when it would be empty.

JJ blinked her tired eyes and decided to walk across the dorm basement to stretch her legs. Study break. There was a light on in the building's laundry room. She took her jacket off and sniffed it. Maybe she could ask the person still up doing laundry if he could throw that in their load.

She opened the door to see Prentiss elbow-deep in the large sink, looking frustrated. She moved closer. "Emily, are you doing laundry? Could I throw this in?" Then she saw what was in the sink, the bloodstains all over it. "Did you fall? How did you ruin those pants?"

She moved quickly away from her and slipped on the damp floor. Her fall dislodged something from her pocket; a metal blade that pinged on the tile. Prentiss scrambled for it, but JJ was faster, and picked it up, examining it and her friend. It took a minute to put the truth together.

"Emily," she said gently. She didn't respond. "Emily," she said more firmly. "You need to tell me what's going on here."