"You know it makes it worse, don't you?" Lysander asks her as he watches her touch the marble to her lips. It unsettles him a little to watch her, though this is one of her easier-to-manage ones. He thinks he could probably live with the marble, if it didn't remind him of all her other little rules.
"I know," replies Lily. "But I can't help it."
"Yes, you can," Lysander says, but there's no heat in his voice. Not anymore. His fight left him a long time ago.
"Would you say you could stop breathing?"
"Touching a marble to your lips isn't breathing though, is it?"
"It is to me."
He finds her at the foot of the stairs. The blank look in her eyes tells him all he needs to know – it's the look she gets when she's fighting the panic rising up inside her.
"Lily?" He approaches her like one would put a hand out to a startled animal. He's afraid that, if he's not careful, she'll lash out and hurt someone. Probably herself.
"They took it away," she whispers, almost to herself. She looks up at his face, but her eyes see straight through him.
"Took what away?" he asks. He wants to put his hand on her shoulder, or hug her, or touch her wrist comfortingly, but he's afraid he'll break her. She's too fragile. "How long have you been here? It's almost curfew."
"The suit of armour," says Lily. "It was here. By the stairs. I have to touch it. I can't go up, otherwise."
"Okay," Lysander says, his mind whirring violently. He repeats his question. "How long have you been here?"
"A couple of hours."
"Right. And everyone just walked past you?" He's hit by a bolt of anger that people could just abandon her here.
"I pretended I was waiting for someone."
"Why? You should have come and got me."
"I couldn't. I just… couldn't."
"Okay." He chews his lip. "You don't have to touch it to go up another way, right?"
She shakes her head. "But I can't go up the staircase with the vanishing step," says Lily. They both know that those are the only two staircases that will take them up to Gryffindor tower.
He wants to ask why not, but he holds his tongue instead. He doesn't trust himself. "It's okay," he says. "Have you, you know, tried? To go up the stairs without touching the armour."
She shakes her head. "I can't do it."
He has to suppress the frustrated feeling he gets whenever she's like this. On one hand, he understands that this is hard for her. He can see how much pain this causes her, and how much she doesn't want to be like this. He feels the utmost sympathy for her because of what she has to go through, just to get through the day without having a panic attack.
Sympathy he can feel very easily, but not empathy.
Try as he might, he can't comprehend why she can't just put one foot in front of the other and climb the staircase. He doesn't understand why she needs to touch three different wooden things before entering a room she's never been in before. He doesn't understand why, when she eats, no food of different colours can be touching. He doesn't understand any of her hundreds of rituals she has to perform.
This lack of empathy frustrates him even more than she does. If he could just understand… if he could just help….
He gets a brainwave, and touches her hand lightly. "I know a way we can get to the dorms without taking these stairs or the other ones," he says, the careful tone of his voice masking his feelings that he knows will only scare her away. "Will that work?"
Lily hesitates and then nods, and he takes her hand. The small fingers tighten around his own, feeling unusually rough. He glances down to see that she's scrubbed them raw. 'Germs,' he thinks.
They go back down to the second floor, and Lysander mentally begs the Room of Requirement to come up with a solution. He's pretty sure it can; he rarely uses it, but his mother's told him all about it, and how much help it gave her during the war. Sure enough, when a door appears and they step through it, they are in a passage with a ramp, rather than stairs, that takes them all the way up to the common room.
The next day he goes to Professor Longbottom. He's the sort of teacher you go to about delicate matters like Lily, and it helps that he's known both the Scamanders and the whole Potter family since they were children.
"I can get the suit of armour put back," he says, stroking his beard thoughtfully, "but you know that won't help her in the long-term, don't you?"
"I know, sir," Lysander says. He can't quite bring himself to call him 'Professor' – not when he was "Neville" for the first eleven years of Lysander's life.
"Is Lily getting help?" he asks.
"I don't think so, sir," Lysander replies. "I don't think many people know how hard it is for her." Or that anything's wrong with her at all, he tacks on silently. She's too good at hiding it, and they're too good at seeing right past her.
He saw her, though.
"I see," the professor says thoughtfully. "I see."
When she sees the suit of armour that afternoon, a huge, relieved smile lights up her face. Usually she just brushes it lightly before making her way up the staircase; that day, however, she stands there for almost a full minute before joining Lysander on the trek back to the common room.
"I do want to stop," she says, touching the marble to her lips.
"Then go to Madam Pomfrey."
"I can't."
And Lysander is so used to hearing those two words that he doesn't even argue any more.