Chapter 1
“So, like, I guess they call it the sophomore slump
Always crying and always (drunk)
A few dead,
More gone,
The rest well on their way.”
-- Cigarette Ahegao, Penelope Scott
..XoX..
Harry Potter wants to live. Not in the “I genuinely enjoy my life” way or “I am dying and wish for that to cease, please” way. In the way that Harry believes that whatever THIS is -- the way he holds himself and the way his time is spent sourly and the things he does and more importantly the things he does not -- … it’s not living. He spends every waking moment wishing he was asleep and every moment asleep being haunted by the horrors of his life awake. He spends every minute starving wishing he was eating and every minute eating wishing he was starving. He is not content. He is never satisfied.
So, no. Harry Potter is not living and he ‘wants to live’ in the sense that he wants a fucking life.
Misery loves company but Harry doesn’t. He looks at the sullen or swollen faces of classmates suffering like he does and decides the best ‘company’ his misery can get is alone. Harry does not want to watch other people feel the pain that he is okay with but not okay with sharing and decides that, yeah. He’ll have no part in it.
Sometimes Harry lies in bed at night and can almost see the appeal. He is terribly, terribly lonely, and forever unsure of his sanity. He is a bundle of nerves shot dead; agitated beyond relief because a person in pain is not a patient one. He thinks that maybe, maybe if he had friends who are just as lonely as he is, he’d feel better. They can be lonely together and is that not better than being lonely alone?
But he knows better. He knows he is not a good friend -- not a friend at all, not to anybody -- and thinks that those people, the ones like him, would not be, either.
It is the best decision he could’ve made.
..xox..
Things are harder now. Harry has been suffering from EDNOS (eating disorder not otherwise specified, not anorexia or othorexia or bulimia or binge eating disorder, but some mangled, outcast mess of in-between) for five years. Every moment of those five years -- only five, though it feels much longer, feels like forever -- has been a strain on his body and his mind and he thinks that one day, they both might just snap. Secretly he hopes they do.
Many of those days, whether hungry or uncomfortably full, he lies in bed and thinks to himself that he is hardly more than this. He is not a writer, he tells himself when the dead of night surrounds him and puts focus on his isolation, self imposed but terrible, still ever terrible. He was never a writer and will never be and most importantly is not. He thinks in the morning he will set his quill on the paper and find no words to pair it with. He will freeze up on the starting line. But every morning he gets up and words flow out of him and sometimes they are clunky and sometimes they are beautiful but they are there, always. He thinks that he is not more than his eating disorder then proves himself wrong. For some time.
It is the start of his fifth year now. He expects it to be the exact same as the years before it. He expects he will not fail his classes but come very close. He expects he will binge and restrict until his head is fuzzy and he can no longer ignore the concerned (disgusted) glances of his classmates. He expects that while in bed he will doubt his abilities and identity as a writer and in the morning he will, despite this or maybe because of this, write. That is his cycle and there is no other and why would this year, this year, out of all of them, why would it be NOW that anything about that changes?
But it does. Change, that is. He sets his hopes high (previously, he had written short stories and poems and essays far more impressive than his peers’ but this year, this fifth year, the one that wasn’t supposed to change, he wants to do more than that. This year, he wants to write a novel) and then he spectacularly fails to meet them.
He sets his quill on the paper and he cannot put anything into words.
It is … (horrible, life shattering, a sign from the gods that he should finally, finally end it) … most disquieting. If he cannot write and is not exceptional in any of his classes and cannot ride the broom well and has no friends -- if he is not THAT, then what is he?
He’s nothing.
No. That’s not quite correct.
He is his eating disorder.
It is an ugly thought. He worries it is fact and so he pushes himself harder; he storyboards and forces himself to write, every day, which will soon dwindle down to every other day, for half an hour. The words are clunky always this time. They feel foggy and Harry ends up scraping whatever it is he writes by the end of the day more often than not.
Things are harder now.
Why now?
In this fifth year, the year that things get harder, he sits in the Great Hall one evening with his head in his hands, thinking idly of doing a tarot reading while he waits for his coffee to cool when Albus Dumbledore calls for their attention.
He smiles that warm, grandfatherly smile and Harry can see how it can fool you into thinking it's real but he also sees Albus’ nose bent differently at three points and the glimmer in his eyes whenever you ask about how he got it and it is not anything remotely warm or grandfatherly. It is a ruse. Dumbledore smiles and then, with that kind, soft voice, carefully constructed, intentional, he announces that this year they will be having the Triwizard Tournament.
(Change. This is change. Harry does not take well to change.)
“Students from Beauxbatons Academy of Magic -- lovely fellows,” Dumbledore adds, sounding fondly nostalgic but Harry thinks it is a different kind of nostalgic, the kind that veterans exhibit when telling war stories. Harry doesn’t believe Dumbledore thinks those at Beauxbatons Academy of Magic are lovely fellows in the least.
Harry, personally, knows that their fashion sense is grand and their bulimia rates matches the gandor of the country, toe to toe. It is kind of sad that the most he knows about Hogwarts’ competitors are eating disorder statistics but he shakes that thought from his head. He is so tired of being sad.
“-- and students from Durmstrang Institute will be taking residency of Hogwrats for the duration of the…” and he rambles on for quite some time, mentioning the 100 Galleon prize and some “mystery prize” that the winner will get along with it, the entry is a raffle that everyone is entered in unless you ask to be taken out of, and this and that and THIS and THAT -- Harry does not care. He can barely hear him, that liar with a dark past and crooked nose and cups of tea offered that should always be refused.
Durmstrang.
Durmstrang!
He cannot believe it. He has spent so long running from his predicament and there it is, catching up to him.
Harry lets his head fall on the table. Oh, boy.
..xox..
Harry had stood before his parents, arms folded over his chest, back when he was not insecure and could eat food like a normal person and did not know the real meaning of the word “unhappy.” “You’re joking,” he accuses, even though he knows they are not. It is in reality an offer. Take it back. You have the chance now. Take it.
They don’t. They don’t even consider it. Lily laughs -- laughs! The audacity. “It is a delightful opportunity, Harry, and Luna Lovegood is a very sweet girl, exceptionally excited to meet you, she’s already agreed to the arrangements--”
“I haven’t.”
James blinks at him and Lily gives a nervous chuckle. “You haven’t what, son?” asks James.
“Agreed to the arrangements,” says Harry, voice tight. He is trying not to cry or yell or release whatever it is that is building up in his throat. He needs this conversation to be calm, needs himself to be calm, because he needs to get his point across. He needs them to understand. “I don’t want to marry Luna Lovegood.”
“Oh,” says Lily, face turning red. “Oh. Well, if you’re -- it is fine if you’re--”
“Gay, yes,” smooths over James, wrapping one arm around her shoulders. “We love you anyway, of course. We can work with that. There’s this swell boy, Neville Longbottom, perhaps you’ve heard of him--”
“What?” Harry furrows his eyebrows, hands dropping to his side. He shakes his head. Stay calm. Get them to understand. “No. I don’t want to get married to anybody.”
When as a child he had heard that his mother and father, who are madly and deeply in love with each other so much that when talking with other children whose parents are not, it feels so alien -- are in an arranged marriage. Their parents had shoved them together and they fought it at first but then they appreciated it and still do, to this day. Harry, then five or so, it is hard to say, told them that was great for them, but he didn’t want to be in a marriage, arranged or not.
They had dismissed him and said, in tight and serious voices, no room for debate, “You will change your mind when you’re older.”
When you’re older. Yeah. Sure. He got older. And nothing changed. His parents pressured him into dating girls and let him know that dating guys, if he wanted, was okay, too. But the idea of a relationship, of having a dynamic like his mother and father have, made his nose wrinkle. He rejected ever offer made as politely as he could.
Harry assumed his parents were okay with that. Their attempts at shoving him into a relationship soon dwindled and Harry assumed they were okay with that because they acted like they were okay with that.
But here he stands, ten years old, being told he is one day to be married to Luna Lovegood.
They didn’t get it. They still won’t. James says, smile tight, like he wants to say something more but can’t, “You might be upset now, but I promise, this is a good thing--”
“I’m not you!” Harry says and he is surprised by how choked up he sounds. He clears his throat and tries, “It was a good thing for you. But I’m not like you guys.”
Lily doesn’t even falter and Harry is on the verge of sobbing and thinks that her composed demeanor is unfair, terribly unfair. She runs a hand through his hair, bending down to his level. “It is a good thing for you, too. I promise if you genuinely do not want to get married, you don’t have to. But you have to give this thing a shot, okay?” When Harry says nothing she asks again, “Okay?”
“Okay,” Harry chokes out. (Neither of them will keep this promise.)
She kisses his forehead and tells him he is a beautiful boy, never forget it, and they both love him more than life itself.
Luna Lovegood thinks he’s beautiful, too. She loves his hair and his eyes and tells him absently during the first time they meet that they remind her of the sun hitting shamrock. She shows him her embroidery and muses over his poetry with gentle hands. The word “sharp” is used.
She really is a sweet girl.
Sweet enough to marry, though?
Not even close.
Harry tells his parents he’d like to back out of the contract. They ask him to go on just one more date, just two more, just three, you might really end up liking her. Harry humours them until he doesn’t. He starts fighting. He no longer hangs onto the pretense of “calm” because now he isn’t and he has not been for a long time. He yells and smashes things and demands -- demands -- to not be made to marry Luna Lovegood.
They punish him -- lightly, though, as if they understand why he is angry, though this only serves to make him more upset -- and keep sending him on the “dates” with Lovegood. He shuts her out. She tries to talk to him and he won’t let him. “I don’t want to be here,” he says curtly. “I don’t want to marry you.”
“We could just be friends,” she suggests, “if you’d like.”
“I’d rather not,” he says and it is not because of anything Luna did or did not do, not because she was mean or crude because she was neither. She was the perfect future spouse and would have been an even better friend if Harry let her. But he didn't. Because she represents the marriage he is tied to. The freedom and control he does not have.
So he rejects her violently and rejects what she symbolizes in his mind. He knows he cannot love her so he hates her.
Harry eventually stops outwardly fighting. He stops yelling and screaming and breaking things. His parents think in relief that it is because he has finally accepted his situation. It is not. It is because he is so tired of fighting a losing battle and realizes the more effective way to make a point is not to destroy the world around him, the books and trinkets his parents hold dear, but to destroy himself.
It is a reason of many that, at ten years old, he stops eating. He starts restricting his intake and binging if the urge overtakes him and it does, all vivid and mind numbing and comforting in a way he’d probably need a therapist to understand. He locks himself in his room and writes all day. His parents knock on his door or unlock it with magic, leaving plates of food that he will not eat, even when binging, and forehead kisses he does not recuperate, even when he wants to.
He turns eleven.
He goes to Hogwarts.
He greets Luna Lovegood with a sneer and a biting remark and ponders later that night when did he get so mean? He cannot love her so, by god, he will hate her with everything he’s got. She tries to get close to him during Hogwarts but he is vile. He insults her hair and her eyes and her heritage and more things that don’t even make sense to insult -- and she is persistent. Maybe she understands his hatred of the situation. She gives him some of her embroidery and cupcakes (red velvet, his favourite, but Harry smeared it on the ground when she handed it to him) and speaks gently about her day. She tries to be his friend, truly tries, with all her heat. But she eventually gives up because it is too much to bear, Harry’s harsh words and misdirected anger. He honestly can't blame her.
She sends a letter to her parents and a week later transfers to the Durmstrang Institute. “You seem like you need space,” she tells him. It sure is a lot of space to give.
Harry asks her the day he is to leave if she finds him beautiful, even now.
She tells him always. It is not the answer he wanted to hear nor the one he expected to and he hates it, hates her.
She sends him a letter weekly and he reads it, everytime, but never responds and always throws them in the fireplace.
As he watches the fire burn he thinks loathing that he is a horrible, horrible friend. (When did he get so mean?)
His parents send him letters frequent in occurrence and these, he can’t bring himself to burn. But he doesn’t read them, either. He stuffs them in the bottom of his trunk. During the summers, his parents try desperately to reach him but he thinks absently that there is nothing left to reach. The bridge is already burned so why are they trying to cross it?
And so the rest of his years at Hogwarts go as follows: he builds a fort of self-isolation and buries himself in it. He writes and ruins his body and does good enough but just barely in school work and…
And, yeah. That’s about it.
This year, this fifth year, the one that wasn’t supposed to change, Luna Lovegood has a chance -- and however slight it is, it is there and it is ugly -- to enter the tournament and stay in Hogwarts for the year. She might retract her name, of course. She is kind, however rude Harry is to her, and she might still recognize Harry’s need for space. If she doesn’t it’s unlikely she’ll even get chosen.
The odds are not against him.
So…
Why does it feel like they are?
..XoX..
“Above and below me
United, I fall
When the swords I’ve collected
Spasm with gall
I lie down beside them,
Think sadly, This is it
But it isn’t, not really
Because the battle is over
And the war, I have won
The treaties are signed
And when I want, it is done
But above and below this
There’s a storm, steep and strong
It is coming
For me, not for all
Reversed, I stand upright
And divided, I fall.”
-- Harry Potter, “Five of Swords.”