I guarentee this is and HP fic. It's set in the world after the defeat of Voldemort. Quite a few of the teachers we know and love are there, but the students we know have graduated. Just give me another chapter after this to introduce the wizarding world.


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Prologue


I woke up to the beeping of an EKG machine for what felt like the millionth time in my life. I turned my head and could only stare blankly at it. Most kids my age have never even seen one. If I were to mention it, they wouldn't know what I was talking about. They're all so lucky. But this meant that my heart had begun to fail again. Again. Even though it was merely a thought, the word rang in my ears. I was slowly brought out of my own thoughts by the sound of my mother sobbing and people talking. Five surgeries, countless months that I spent in the hospital, and I could hear them now saying there was nothing more they could do. I didn't want to hear anymore so I just focused on the lines and the gentle beep of the machine next to me. Once I was bored enough with that, I turned to the IV. I always found it interesting, for some reason. The way the liquid seemed to cling to itself, holding on as this little dome of liquid appeared, slowly turning into a bubble, then falling as if it had been freed from a strange sort of cage. I loved it when my IV was on a slow drip. Slow drips you can always watch the entire process.

The door opened and my mother rushed through it. She always rushed like that, as if I'd die in the next few seconds from the doorway to my bedside. She took my hand, the one that didn't have the IV, and laid her forehead on it. I could feel her tears on my fingertips as she cried. Somewhere through the sobs I could hear her apologizing to me, and I didn't know what for. Even if I was dying, it's not like she hadn't done what she could.

“It's not your fault, mom,” I said weakly, and it hurt my throat to do so. I must have had a breathing tube again. I sat up and smiled at her, though it took a little more effort than I'd thought. I definitely had more strength when I was laying down. I looked around the room. “Water, please?”

Someone had a glass ready and handed it to me. Meanwhile my mother was looking up at me and talking about how brave I was. I wasn't really brave, though. To be brave, you had to be afraid, too. But I just couldn't be. It was difficult to feel anything, really. Five surgeries and several hospital visits later, they'd only told me what I was sure of since I was five. I didn't know how to feel anything about it, much less what to feel. I drank a little of that ice-cold water at a time and slowly felt my throat go numb. Pulling a sliver of ice into my mouth, I enjoyed the feeling of that smooth piece become nothing.

A doctor walked up beside my mother and I wondered what they were going to say. I already knew I was going to die. Surely they didn't think that I couldn't hear them right outside my door.

“I'm afraid there's nothing more we can do,” he said. Indeed, they didn't think she'd heard. In that case, she wasn't letting them know. “We've tried everything, and there's just no improvement.” She could imagine those words written across her file: failure to thrive. “We're moving you up to the fourth floor so you can have some time to recover. If you show some improvement, we'll let you go home until your next episode.”

I nodded and looked at my mother. “I'll improve, mom. Don't worry. I wanna come home and go swimming, okay?”

She nodded, her eyes filled with tears and despair. The doctor looked on as though he wanted to say something and simply couldn't. He quietly left the room, letting them grieve for me while I still lived.

I'm Angelica Morayne, ten and a half years old, and have just been told that all the medical marvels in the world have failed. Tomorrow I will wake up on the fourth floor of the hospital. My guess is, I'll be all alone.