'If I could I would treat you myself, sink through your skin to your blood cells, remove whatever makes you hurt; but I am too weak to be your cure.'

There's something strangely inviting about self- destruction.

It calls out, in a voice made of velvet, to the kids who have nobody else to listen to. The scared, the angry, the lonely, the misunderstood. The ones who talk too fast, laugh too loud, fall further than anybody else because they're usually higher than everybody else.

It's not just self- destruction that they have in common, though. They orbit towards one another, as if there's some kind of gravitational force based on madness that pushes them together. There's an unspoken understanding between the ones with the Crazy in their heads- don't talk about it, don't push me on it, don't mention it, don't ask why there's blood on my shirt/vomit in my hair/tears in my eyes/razors in my bag because I will flip out- and it makes it easier to be with other people when they pretend not to notice.

It's rare to find somebody with a scary-high degree of the Crazy. That's why it's so strange that there was, at one point, four of them in attendance at Hogwarts. It might have been fate, or unseen magic, or just dumb luck that they ended up in the same dormitory, as well as the same classes. Whatever the reason, there they were: four boys who listened to the velvet voice and were, by the age of sixteen, bringing new meanings to the over-used phrase 'fucked up'.

This is the story of The Marauders- the funny one, the handsome one, the smart one, the happy one.

And this is the story of The Marauders- the alcoholic one, the eating-disordered one, the bipolar one, the depressed one.

This is the story of how the velvet voice called, the silken hand beckoned, the rabbit hole opened, and they all fell down, one by one.