maybe if I fall asleep I won't breathe right

It's the same every night. You lie in your bed staring blankly up at the ceiling, barely blinking, never stirring.

You move out of fear of what it might do to you – what it might do to your friends and her family. You can't mention this to anyone; they have enough problems as it was and you don't want to become another problem in the pile that they already had to deal with.

Breathe in, breathe out.

You know that your parents are going to break up even before they do. There's a certain rift in your family that hasn't been healed ever since Molly died of a drug overdose and you tried to commit suicide in January. You wish you'd never put your parents through that panic of not knowing whether you were alive or not. You should've seen how distraught they were when the muggle police officer arrived at your door and informed your parents that your one and only sister had been found dead in a gutter.

You felt nothing.

You cried and screamed yourself to sleep that night – oh yes, but that wasn't because you were grieving for your sister, it was because you were angry that you couldn't feel remorse, hurt or guilt. You screamed because she was gone and you weren't even sad. You screamed because you hoped it would bring some feeling back into your body. You were wrong.

That was when you dug the first razor blade into your arm and watched the blood flow freely down the pale flesh and drip onto the glistening bathroom tiles. You did it because you were tired of feeling numb, tired of feeling like you were a scrap of paper being ripped over and over again but not being able to feel a single bit of it. But you can't feel a single thing, it twinges when the blade slices the skin but there is no more pain after that. As you stare quizzically down at the blood that's dripping down your arms, you realise that there will be nothing that you can do in hell or on earth that will make you feel pain. The pain inside you is too strong, you've trained yourself not to feel it and by default the pain around you is no longer felt.

It's the end of May when you try to cast the cruciatus curse on yourself.

You creep into the bathroom late at night and cast silencing spells so you don't wake your roommates. You point your wand directly at your head and whisper "Crucio" you feel yourself hit the ground and a throbbing in your head immediately starts, though you can't feel any pain. You've heard from your uncle Ron that it feels like having a thousand rusty blades slice open your skin very slowly.

You can't articulate how wrong he was.

You cast the curse again and again and again, hoping that the more you cast it, the more pain you will feel but it doesn't work.

You collapse onto the tiles, wishing that they would just swallow you up and suffocate you, because suffocation would be the most painful. You lie in the bathroom, just a lifeless blob on the floor, until the sun starts to peek over the horizon. You slip out of the bathroom and back into bed.

There's no need for anyone to know what happened last night.

You've taken all of your NEWTs and failed. You know you have because you sat there through every exam with your head in your hands, staring blankly at the first question like it was in a foreign language.

But to you, everything is in a foreign language. You don't understand anything or anyone anymore.

Your family seems to look right through you, even though you used to be best friends as children. Your friends all leave when they realise that you're a freak. Your parents stop caring about you when you attempted suicide and now they're breaking up and neither of them wants you.

The pain you have been trying to keep at bay for months on end surfaces and there is no way that you can handle it anymore. You've kept it locked away for way too long.

You scream.

Screaming isn't the big deal, you've screamed plenty of times in the past few months. It's the fact that the scream shows that you are in pain and it shows that you are afraid of what might happen. It shows that you're vulnerable and that you need help.

But of course, there's nobody around to hear.

There never is.

Your birthday comes and goes without so much as a card. Your parents have separated and the divorce papers are pending. You don't blame them for not wanting to acknowledge you. If you were them, you wouldn't want a daughter that was like you.

In a way, your parents had lost both of their children. One daughter died at the hands of muggle drugs and the other is as good as dead, being killed slowly from the inside. Like a spy inside his enemies camp.

You're glad that you've left Hogwarts. It's almost a relief for you and you're glad that you don't have to see everyone who walked all over you during the time that you were there.

You've got your own place – a flat in London, although you don't know why you needed an entire flat. A window would've sufficed, seeing as that's how you spend your days, curled up at the window, just wishing that you were able to feel something.

There's no point anymore though. Your family have abandoned you with nothing but this house. You can't work because you never have the motivation, and closing your eyes to go to sleep terrifies you more than ever.

It terrifies you because you can't feel any fear in your dreams and you often wake up in a sweat, breathing heavily.

You're scared that if you fall asleep that you won't breathe right and then won't wake up.

Not that it would necessarily be a bad thing, but the thought of dying and burning for a thousand years both terrifies and entices you.

The muggles in the neighbouring units must think that you're crazy because you need to feel something other than the numbness inside you. You scream and beat your fists against the wall until they are bloody and the knuckles are bruised and broken.

And yet, you still can't feel a goddamn thing.

None of the muggles ever come by to see if you're okay though. They know you're not well. They don't care about the mental teenage girl in the flat down the hall. You don't blame them. You wouldn't want to help someone in your situation either.

Nobody could hear your screams. They couldn't hear your thoughts bouncing off the walls of your head and making you hurt more and more inside. They couldn't see that there were times when you couldn't breathe. They just looked right through you and dismissed you as some attention-seeking teenager.

As your shaking hands light the match, you see your life flash before your eyes. You see yourself playing exploding snap with your cousins in the autumn before you first started at Hogwarts. You see yourself running through the field near the burrow with Molly, you and Lily pranking James in the Christmas of 2013, Roxanne, Rose and You studying furiously for different exams.

That's when the memories stop.

You drop the lit match onto the oil at your feet.

That's when you finally feel it. You finally feel the pain that you should've been feeling all these years. All of it comes back in one go as the flames lick your flesh and it burns.

You yell and scream both in pain and in relief as they engulf you. The last thing you see before you hit the ground and black out is a panicked muggle who had just rushed in the door.

He was just one day too late.

"Come with me,"

You look up to see Molly standing over you, her hand outstretched. She looks different to how she did the last time you saw her. She's not stoned for one thing, but her face looks fuller, she looks healthier and happier.

"M-Molly?" you question, "Where am I?"

Molly laughs, a sound you haven't heard emanate from her lips in years, "Where do you think?"

You shrug. Molly smiles, "It's a better place than earth, I can tell you that Luce."

"Really?" you ask.

"Really," Molly confirms, "Take my hand."

And you do, without hesitation. Your last feeling before everything goes white is complete and utter happiness.

AN: Wow It's been way too long since I wrote something. It's probably a good thing that I speed wrote this because otherwise I would've gotten distracted.

For:

Camp Potter: Tech Discovery – Write about Lucy Weasley

Fanfiction School: Mathematics Assessment one – birthday card, seeping, well, Ron Weasley, Exploding Snap, Autumn.

I'd love to hear what you thought of it! Drop me a review in the box below!

DFTBA

Nayla xx