Title: Finding Direction
Author: smolder
Disclaimer: I own nothing. Angel the Series belongs to Joss Whedon and David Greenwalt. Harry Potter belongs to J.K Rowling.
A/N: These drabbles won't always be in strict chronological order.
A/N 2: Reviews are Good. This has been a subtle hint from the author - Please return to your regularly scheduled reading.

Lily likes muggle college. Although she supposes adding "muggle" to the beginning is unnecessary since the Wizarding World doesn't have colleges.

But she does like it here. Her oddity was more accepted than it ever was at Hogwarts, where she was known not only as Harry Potter's child but as the weird one. Crazy. Loony.

If it wasn't for her red hair, everyone would think she was the one that had sprung illegitimately from Luna Lovegood's womb. (Something that has always been a point of a bizarre mixture of bemusement and amusement to her mother who had thought giving Lily her best friend's name to use as her middle one at birth would have only been a symbolic gesture).

Here people describe her as bohemian, quirky and eclectic. Which were perhaps just more polite ways of saying weird, but Lily still felt warmed by how easily she was initially received into this environment. It seemed less…fake, in a way, even from the onset.

When you are the child of someone in the public eye, you learn to recognize disingenuousness from a very young age. When people are trying to suck up to you because of your parents – the way their smiles seem to go on for too long and they compliment you too much. Agree to anything and everything you say. (And how quickly that turned when they didn't like what her father and mother did anymore – the life both of her parent's had chosen to live in order to stop torturing themselves and be happy. Be honest and whole.).

No one knows who they are here. There aren't constant eyes that follow them everywhere, people who yell questions on the street. No need here to be on guard for a wizard with Quick-Quill-Notes and a too wide smile trying to ambush her with questions about her family if she isn't careful.

She had mostly went along at first to follow Albus, really. He wanted this so badly. To learn science like Fred was - understand it more completely and use that understanding to apply it to their experiments. But her twin had always had a bit of a problem of being on the edge of things, seeing it so close, but not being able to quite get there without a little push.

And she didn't want to be separated from him either. Lily didn't know if magical twins were any different from their Muggle counterparts, but she knew she would miss Albus horribly if she didn't see him all the time (it was hard to imagine really, they had been such a part of each other - counterpart - for as long as she can remember). There was also the fact that she hadn't known what to do with herself either after Hogwarts. And Lily welcomed the chance to spend more time with her sister.

So this - college - seemed like a wonderful and fascinating option.

But, where Fred and Albus had a clear idea of what they wanted to study, Lily meandered for a bit. She took the all of the suggested entrance classes and somehow stumbled upon something that caught her interest.

Psychology.

Mental health problems weren't something the Wizarding World wanted to look at too closely. Especially with the amount of magical manipulation that was done on people's minds on such a regular basis. In the view of most of the Wizarding World, there were normal people and there were those that were dubbed insane – no real grey. Some peoples' minds "broke" because of curses or such, but that was "spell damage". (Was the use of such euphemisms out of fear – a desperate need to not look at this, these people, too closely? Or were they trying to be tactful in an odd way?)

It made her wonder how many people had been thrown into the 'Long Term Spell Damage Ward' in the hospital because that was the assumption whenever they encountered someone severely mentally ill. If any of the people who were damaged by spells that affected them mentally, could actually be helped through treatment instead of just being caged.

Even the term "spell damaged" bothered her the more she thought about it. It was so very vague. Covered such a wide variety of things. What were the official requirements for those that were placed in that wing?

She would sit sometimes and just stare at the picture in their apartment that Fred had taken with her before she left home of her mother and her Grandfather. An awkward tilted shaking shot, obviously taken one-handed by the man in the photo. They were both laughing and looked so carefree and full of love. The very same man that now didn't even look at his daughter because he thought she was really dead, had never once even acknowledged Fred even though she had been coming multiple times a year her whole life.

And then there was Ivy's grandparent's. Stories told of their lives third hand because Professor Neville had never had a chance to know his own parents either before they were "damaged". Tortured to the point where their minds were considered "broken" and they were simply tossed away into a room and given meals and occasionally toys for distraction.

Tossed off to the side, locked away into a section of a building where no one would look at them too closely - where people would forget them. And they would have been forgotten if it weren't for people like Professor Neville and Aunt Luna. Because Ivy and Fred had told them of all the others that were there that never got visitors.

There was also the matter of the talks she had with Seamus (he had asked her to call him by his first name, said it was "fuckin' easier than trying to figure out what we would preface it with or something else entirely"). He told her how it was more than just that obvious shit (his word) there were also all the people who were messed up from the War or just messed up by life in general. All the time, he had people coming in to his pub that would just go on and on about these problems they had (family, illness, work, relationships, abuse, guilt, memories) because they had no other forum.

It's not that Seamus didn't feel bad for them, but there wasn't anything he could do but listen. And that's all that seemed to be needed to actually help some of them. Others – others really should probably have something more than the simple ear he could provide. There just wasn't anything around in this fucked up community (again his words…mostly).

It was - it was an idea. A direction for her life that felt right to her. She had always been good at reading people and this was a way for her to help. Work that needed doing.

Lily wasn't sure if the Wizarding World would accept this sort of help from her. Even though it so desperately seemed to need it from someone. But all she can do right now is learn everything she possibly could – the rest will have to sort itself out later.