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"I-I can't go back in there," I blubbered, shaking in fear. Harry's hand held onto my shoulder as he whispered to me, "Yes you can, your daughter needs you Ginny. She is sick and the person that she needs the most is her mother, no matter how much she denies it."
"I really can't go back in there; it's just too much… she's so… petite." I covered my face and felt Harry's arms wrap completely wrap around me. "And she thinks that people are supposed to look like that? What does she think you and I are? Overweight?"
Harry tried to calm me down but it did not work for the next few hours. I sat in the waiting room sobbing, like a little baby going to get her second shot, because she remembered that the first one bloody well hurt. A healer came down and found us in two chairs in the waiting room and she asked, "Mr. and Mrs. Potter? Could I speak to you in private for a moment?" I slowly nodded my head and we both got up, unsure if we really wanted to hear the bad news or not.
The woman introduced herself as healer Cadwallader, but I knew that I would never be able to remember her name, but I felt like I had seen her face before.
"Between the physical exam and the mental stability test, we have figured out that your daughter is in critical condition…" The healer started but she stopped when I opened my mouth.
"Are you trying to tell us that our daughter is loony?" I asked.
Harry mumbled, "And you wanted to name her after Luna, we could have just named her Lillian Nymphadora Potter, like I wanted to, but no, you wanted to name her after Loony Lovegood..." I punched him hard in the stomach and he gave a small grunt.
"No, I am just trying to say that your daughter is in a very bad place right now… So bad that I'm afraid that she should not have any visitors besides you two for a few weeks if at all possible. It will be a slower moving process to get her back to a healthy weight and get her through physical and emotional therapy but we will do our best to keep her on the right track so that you can eventually take her home and she will be… almost herself." Healer Cadwallader explained but I had another two objections to this.
"So does that mean her brothers can't come to see her, do you not think that they have a right? And what do you mean she will be almost herself, we want our whole daughter back. Weight and All!" She moved her foot slowly to the left and to the right.
"Her brothers should not see her until she has improved slightly, they would be traumatized by their sister's appearance and it is also a risk for Lily because she could possibly react to other people being around her." This made my eyes pop.
"You're telling me what I can and cannot do with my own daughter?" I asked incredulously, "Are you insane?"
"I didn't say that-"
"I think I know what is best for my own family, you spent twenty minutes with my daughter and you hardly even know us. You don't know, you couldn't possibly know and you're telling me how to run my family?" My Weasley temper was flaring up and my face was as red as my hair.
"Obviously how you ran your family was not the proper way otherwise your daughter would not be in St. Mungo's," I heard her mumbled under her breath just enough that she thought I couldn't hear.
I rolled up my sleeves and pulled out my wand but I was pulled back by Harry who, unfortunately, was stronger than I was, but if my temper got high enough…
"Who the hell do you think you are?" I yelled, Healer Cadwallader looked at me with surprise and her eyes widened. "I did not do this to my daughter! I had no idea this was happening, she made sure that we were in the dark the whole time! Lily didn't send us any letters from school and she hardly ever came out of her room when she was home for break. So don't you dare blame this on us, it was all that little devil child's fault!"
"I am assuming that you will want another healer to be watching over your daughter then." She took her clipboard and wrote something down, probably along the lines of, mother is very hostile.
"You are assuming correctly," The woman turned on her high heel and left. I turned around to Harry and slapped him on his arm, "Why did you go and stop me from getting her?! Did you not hear what she said?"
"Ginny, there is no use in fighting or getting upset, she is going to get a new healer so that they can help us find a solution to help Lily." This was when I stopped paying attention to Harry. My eyes just went off into some sort of daze as I remembered this day only sixteen years past…
"Harry! Harry!" I rushed down the stairs, holding onto the railing; my socks slipping on the newly polished wood flooring. "Harry, I have great news!"
Harry had his glasses askew on his face, one side was not behind his ear, and he had applesauce covering his face as he had fallen asleep while feeding Albus. I nudged him in the side and he woke up with a jolt, having to wipe off his face. "W-What did I miss?"
"Harry, she's kicking, she's really kicking." I told him excitedly, taking his applesauce filled hand and placing it on my bare, whale sized stomach. "Ginny, I thought I told you that we weren't going to get excited about the sex of the baby…"
"But Harry, I just know these things… now shush, you won't be able to feel it if you keep on blabbing." We waited for several minutes until finally the baby kicked once again. His face lit up with joy and he looked up at me. We stayed like this until James came into the kitchen with dirt in his hair, sand in his hands, grass stains on his new nice shirt, and a new "friend" which was a giant spider… which we later put in a jar and showed to Uncle Ron.
"Ginny? Harry?" Asked a tentative healer at the other end of the hallway; his voice seemed familiar, but I could not place where I knew him from until I saw him up close. He was shorter and had mousy brown hair just like his older brother had. "Dennis?"
"Most people just call me Healer Creevey now, but Dennis is still good." He shook both of our hands and looked at a chart. "It seems that I will now be Lily's primary healer, so if I could ask you a few questions, that would help me out a lot to get to know you a little bit better and to see really why Lily had done this to herself."
I swallowed hard on the air that I had just sucked in and I said with slight hesitance, "Sure."
Dennis sat with us for thirty minutes asking us questions that, I did not know the answers to. When Lily started acting strange, when we noticed, how we first tried to get her to stop, how were her friends at school, when did she start to become shy, how would she hide her food from us, and when she started to stop eating all together.
He took his final note and showed us into the room that Lily would be staying for a while. For once, I saw her sleeping peacefully. But I remembered how much that jumpsuit showed of her bones and my smile did not come back to my face. "Lily already denied food under the circumstances of 'distress' so when she wakes up, we will try again… and if she denies, we will have to put in a feeding tube."
"Um, wait, what is a feeding tube?" I asked, looking from Harry to Dennis, Harry's face had scrunched up quite considerably from hearing this news.
"Well, it is a muggle way of doing things… If she refuses to eat then we will be forced to put a tube down her throat which will feed her since she is unwilling to eat herself." Dennis explained as calmly as he could and I shut my mouth. I looked at my poor baby lying in that hospital bed and I slumped down into a chair next to the bed. "Oh." Was all my brain would allow me to say.
"It will be our last resort though, because it could cause vocal damage," Dennis told us hastily, moving his hands to gesture this. "I should warn you that with cases so rare as Lily's that she will need to stay here for a couple of months. No matter how long she thinks she doesn't need to stay. The first couple of months will be the hardest so I would strongly suggest to not having a whole lot of outside visitors; meaning non family members and cousins of cousins of cousins. For her recovery I was thinking mostly the grandparents, parents, and her brothers should be coming for the first few weeks and then if we think that she is strong enough, we will have friends come, and once she is stable enough, we will have her talk to someone for a hearing." But Dennis was quick to shoot down Harry, "he will have to stay in custody of the ministry until she is stable enough to give out full information, otherwise the Wizengamot will deem her as unable to verify her own information and he will win the case if they are cunning enough." Harry looked angrier than ever as he stood next to me, I took his hand gently and he looked down to my eyes.
I pleaded for him to calm down and his face slowly drained its anger and it spilled out of his feet into the floor. I gave him a smile and he took the seat next to me. "I know that this wasn't the ideal way that you would spend your summer vacation, but this is going to need to be the way that things will go… As for her schooling, we provide a few classes here so that she does not need to miss so much school and she can recover as quickly as she can in a comfortable environment." Dennis gave us some alone time with our daughter and closed the door quietly.
"Well… at least they have her in a single room." Harry commented, looking around at the one dead plant in the room that was in the corner of the room. He looked closer and found a window and got up to go look out and said, "it has a nice enough view."
"Just as good of a view that the media has of Lily, please close those blinds, the sun will be coming up soon." I told him and he shut the moonlight from coming in. Now the only light that gleamed in the room was the light that was in the opposite corner of the plant. "I just know that awful woman will take any chance she has at Lily and I don't want anyone seeing her like this… this shouldn't be the way that people see her. Only the boys and mum and dad can come, I don't want anyone else in here." Harry opened his mouth to speak but it took him a while to protest to my statement.
"What about Lily's school friends?" Harry asked after a minute or so.
"They can come in a few months but they are still in school right now, a month and they will be out and so will Lily hopefully…" Harry's hand came gently onto my shoulder and he spoke as softly as he could. "Ginny… you know that it will take more than a month. By a month maybe she will be a few pounds heavier, but she will push us every single step of the way, you know that she got her stubbornness from you and your mum. I know that she won't want a feeding tube, but unless she is willing to eat, she will need it… for her own good."
"She's going to get better though now… that's all that matters." I told him, not looking directly at Harry but towards Lily, her eyes were closed and I wondered what she was dreaming about… why she was not smiling, nor frowning… What was her head filled with at this very moment; a dream or a nightmare?
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"No! I won't deal with you anymore, go beat on something else!" I screamed, the room was filled with my blood. He kept it as a constant reminder of what he could do to me and to others. "I won't take your anger problems anymore!"
He threw me up against the back wall and grabbed a hold of my hair, kicking my stomach to weaken my knees and he continued to kick until I fell down to my knees. "Say it again!"
"I don't love you, no one loves you, you don't even love yourself because you know that on the inside you are just as empty as you are on the outside!" He kicked me so hard that I started to cough up blood; it slowly dripped out of my mouth giving me the most unsatisfying taste left in my mouth.
"Tell me you love me!" He screamed; his face redder than I had ever seen it before.
"I won't lie." I spat, he kicked me again, and the only thing that kept me up was his pull on my hair which felt like it was all going to rip out soon.
"You think anyone loves you? You think that Matthew Perks loves you? Huh? Well, you're wrong, he's snogging other girls and a few of them even told me that they went farther with him… much farther." He taunted, but I knew this wasn't true… it couldn't have been true.
"You liar!" He threw me down to the ground so hard that I thought for sure one of my teeth had chipped.
"Can't you just imagine, Matthew Perks holding onto some other girl… Mary Flint for example. They're kissing, and then… his hand somehow wanders around. She just is so excited and she starts kissing him more and more, and they spend the night together. Naked in each other's arms, you find them in bed and there is nothing that you can do about it." I covered my ears to try and block him out but he just kept on saying it louder and louder…
"His hand slowly caressing her body as you sit and watch this happen because you know that he doesn't love you, he loves her…"
"Shut up!" I screamed so loudly that I scared myself and him, I had been hyperventilating and it felt so real.
"Matthew Perks never loved you, the only person that Matthew Perks loves, is himself."
"No! No! No! No!" I started kicking the floor as hard as I could while holding my ears tightly. Then, a voice came to me, "Lily?!" I ignored it and kept on kicking… but then…
I woke up, in a cold sweat; it felt like it had rained on my body while I slept… Only I felt warmer than I should normally be. My feet felt weak as I looked up at who had said my name.
James. He had taken some time off from spring training to come here, but this was obviously a mistake. I wouldn't be here that long so there was no point in visiting me. I was still glad that I got to see him. Christmas had just gone by so fast.
"Lily, what were you dreaming about?" He asked quietly, looking at me with a seriousness to him that I rarely ever saw.
"N-Nothing," I stammered out, trying to find mum, but she was nowhere in sight by now, dad had gone too. Light was trying to leak into my room from the blinds but they had been closed tightly.
"Stop lying, I'm sick of you lying to me all of the time, you lie to everyone now as if it is like breathing." James hardly ever got mad at me anymore… but this time… I had really done it.
"I just remembered something, okay?" He looked at me as though he didn't like my tone but he kept his tongue. "Where are mum and dad?" I asked, wanting to see them because they had been nicer to me… even if they were a bit delusional for bringing me here.
"They went home to get some rest but they'll be back, mum said before lunch, so she said that I needed to make sure you ate breakfast." James had never looked so angry with me, I didn't know why I had caused him to get so angry but he seemed angrier than ever before.
"I'm not really hungry…" but he was quick to shoot this down.
"I heard your stomach growl at least eight times in the past two hours, and I know that you haven't had a decent meal in days because we asked Matthew Perks if he saw you eating at all and he said no, you hadn't been eating. But Addie wasn't found so we couldn't get a second opinion." Damn it Matt, why did he have to go and tell them that?
James looked at a tray in front of me and gestured to it, he pulled it closer to me and said, "Eat. The healer said that you didn't need to eat much, just a little, since you've obviously been starving yourself that too much might over do you."
So many calories on one little plate… it disgusted me. They were trying to get me fat again, no way. When I refused James took the toast in his hand and said, "Do not make me do the broomstick noises."
When I shook my head again, James opened my mouth for me and put all of the fatty calories into my mouth and he made me chew it… and finally I had to swallow it. He had put it down so forcefully that it hurt… or it might have been that my throat was not use to it.
He made me drink very cold orange juice and he made me eat several pieces of bacon which he said I liked but all of that fat made me want to purge myself again.
"Feel better?" He asked, satisfied that half of my plate was partially cleaned off; the other half he would eat. To be honest, I felt worse; I could almost feel my face turning green. I wouldn't let myself throw it up… I wouldn't. Because then they would make me eat more. I wouldn't throw up… I wouldn't.
"Uh… yeah." I lied, but this time, he believed me. He smiled and took a bite of toast, "I'm just worried about you sis, you know that. When they told me your weight I nearly flipped out on that Creeper- Creech- Whatever the hell his name is."
He had finally started talking about something I was interested in, "What did he say was my weight?" I asked intently.
James looked at my all too eager face and frowned, "An unhealthy weight, especially for your height and age group."
"Oh come on James, just tell me, please?" I asked, ignoring that feeling in my throat.
He looked down at his hands and shook his head and mumbled something, "What?"
"You're eighty six pounds." He said a little more clearly, not looking at my excited face. That had been the lowest I had ever gotten! Alex would never be able to hit me again with a weight like that! "For my sake at least would you wipe off that smirk?" I frowned immediately at his tone. "It's one thing to be skinny, but Lily, that is not a good weight. I have eighty six pounds in my upper half of my body! I would worry about picking you up right now and breaking you because you're so skinny." He had gotten mad again… very mad. "Lily, look at yourself, it's sick, you can see all of your bones! There isn't any left of you if you were to get in an accident, you would have no padding and you would die on impact!"
I grabbed onto the little pink dish as fast as I could and without even trying, I threw up. All of the foods that he had forced down my throat were now in a little pale. He stopped yelling and looked at me without saying a word. When I finally stopped throwing up I looked at him crossly and asked, "Are you done yelling at me yet or do I need to throw up some more?"
James sat quietly in the seat beside me, in a sort of dazed look. "You made me so angry, you kept on yelling and screaming… and I don't like you when you're screaming at me. You remind me of Alex when you scream at me." He finally looked up at me with tears streaming down from his eyes.
"Alex?" He asked, his lips barely trembling out the words, "You mean that little twerp from fifth year? He was the one that picked on you your first day? That's whose been doing this?" I saw his knuckles turn white when I shook my head yes. "How long has he been doing this?"
"Since you left Hogwarts… since your last day at Hogwarts." I mumbled, feeling nauseous again, James hit the arm of the chair very hard. His hand went to his hair immediately, like it had always done with dad. It's what they all did, when they were frustrated and didn't know what to do; they ran their fingers through their hair.
"Why on earth did you let it get this bad?" He asked, but before I could ignore the question a trainee healer came in and took the pale bucket from me and frowned. She didn't say anything but put a new bucket at my bedside. She asked me how I was feeling and I told her the truth. She gave me a glance and pressed on my stomach… which made a mess of a situation. In the end, she left with her face red and regurgitation in her hair… she shouldn't have pressed so damn hard.
James sat in the room until he was paged out of the room, he gave me a quick kiss on the forehead and left.
He left me to sit in a bright room and stare at a dead plant. Great. Just great… My luck.
This gave me time to maybe fall asleep… but I was woken up in the middle of the night by my father who had been watching me toss and turn, "Lily, are you okay?"
I had slept through lunch and dinner, great! I didn't have to make up any excuses not to eat today, and I didn't have to throw up anything either.
"I'm fine now." I told him, wiping my eyes. Mum sat in the corner of the room by the plant, her eyes closed. James sat next to her, but he was wide awake, just staring at the ceiling.
"Your mother blames herself you know," Dad told me in his secret, quiet tone that he only ever used when he didn't want people to hear. "For all of this, she says if she would have been a better mother then she would have known sooner... maybe caught all of the signs."
"That's crazy, we both know that mum is an amazing mother…" but dad just nodded his head silently.
"We both know that, but your mother is very convinced that this is her fault and there was a way that she could have prevented it… but you know your mother, always worrying…"
He gave me a small smile but I just looked over at her. She seemed so worn from everything.
"You should take her home… she needs to sleep in a proper bed. It's not like anything will be happening here now anyways." I told him but he just looked at me. "I think you need to eat first."
Why were people so fixated on having me eat something? I didn't understand. He didn't force me to eat anything but he seemed so sad, so for dad, I tried to eat something… and I tried to keep it down as best as I could. I had half a bowl of tomato soup, and he was happy with that. For some reason he could not stop smiling at me, and I felt great for giving him that whole smile. We both knew that my stomach would not hold any more than what I had already eaten so we just played wizard's chess to wait it out and see if it came back up again.
Two in the morning and nothing had come back up. Dad gave me a kiss goodbye and woke mum up. She seemed too tired to really understand what was going on until two minutes later when she was getting up out of her chair. She came to hug me but then she refrained and just kissed my cheek. Mum gave me a sad smile and left with dad by her side.
James wouldn't let me be alone, and I was thankful that he didn't. It was scary in that hospital at night. I would have to remember to thank him later… after this was all over. But I was not excited to wake up and have it happen all over again.
Is this chapter long enough? I hope so... *sigh* I have a rant... but I will refrain. I will keep this short so you will talk freely all about the chapter and your thoughts without my interruption.
Thank you so much for reading and please review!!!
P.S. You can find out where the sequel to "Without Red Hair and Freckles" will start by checking out the old and now closed poll on my profile :)
