Chapter Text
My release was not about being well. It was about being well enough, about being heavy enough, about being enough. I was not well when I was released. I knew this . Worse was the fact that I was finally ready to accept the idea of getting well when I was released into a world where nobody followed the strict rules that I was expected to adhere to simply to remain out of the hospital - let alone truly be healthy. To many people, my release was here we go, she weighs enough. No one was paying attention to the fact that I was broken, perhaps irreversibly.
I came home secluded. My mother was scared for me, my sister was scared of me, and I did not think that my father had ever really understood what was wrong with me. I spent my days alone in my room, wondering how my life had fractured apart like this. I didn't speak to anybody .
Well, no. That’s not exactly true. I spoke to Scorpius on an almost daily basis. Neither my mother nor my father were particularly pleased with this, which was part of why I continued to do it. It was not that they didn’t like Scorpius, and much more so that they didn’t like his family. They told me that he was not a good influence, until I pointed out that he was the only one who had prevented me from starving myself to death and they, reluctantly, permitted me to continue seeing him. I sat cross-legged on my bed and he across from me. We would talk for hours about everything and nothing all at once.
I would smile and laugh until the horrible time when he would ask me, “What are you eating?”
And then I’d look down.
I was eating. I was eating amounts that seemed perfectly reasonable to me. I weighed far below the spectrum of what was normal (and healthy) - yet it was a number that I thought I could possibly bring myself to be happy with. Scorpius, on the other hand, was utterly terrified with the food I told him I ate - an apple. Crackers. Half a rice cake, covered in peanut butter. Slivers of Chocolate Frogs cut off with a knife, piece by piece.
“It’s not enough,” he told me. “You’re not enough.”
If this, right now, was not enough, then I did not think I had the strength to be enough.
I did not like talking to Healer Patil about what had made me crumble into an infinite number of pieces (nor did I think Healer Patil liked talking to me. She could not fix a disease of the mind like she could mend a broken bone. It was just as hard for her to watch me fall apart as it was for me to fall apart.) but I did not mind talking to Scorpius about it.
“It’s hard to explain,” I’d say, sitting on the very edge of my bed as, day by day, he moved closer to me. “You wouldn’t understand, either.”
And then he’d smile. “Try me,” he’d say waspishly.
Scorpius had been my friend for as long as I could remember. He was two years older than me, which had been terrifying in the beginning, annoying more than anything when he was at Hogwarts and I was not, and comforting now that he was the only person that I trusted. I, barely eighteen years old, had not seen anything besides my home, Hogwarts, and the hospital. I had hardly even managed to finish my seventh year: I spent the last few months in the hospital frantically studying for my NEWTS (with Scorpius by my side, of course.). He, at not quite twenty, had seemed annoyed with me when I was younger: to be expected, of course, by someone still proud of their age. Now, he had mellowed and was simply comforting. Something I needed more than anything.
“I’m so bloody normal,” I began. “So bloody normal it terrifies me. I had to do something different, Scorpius. I had to be something different. I’m a Weasley, but hardly. All the rest of us have done something important. Not me. I wanted someone to notice me,” I said, and I was nearly crying, now, “and everyone did.”
Scorpius reached for me. I let him. It was strange that it was only now that I broke down in tears, after months in treatment, but that did not come to me until much later. For now, I simply collapsed in his arms, showing more emotion than I had in months and months (which was strange, now that I thought of it, because I’d only ever felt that I was overflowing).
*
I moved out.
This did not come about simply. My parents were still so worried for me - Lucy you’re still too thin, you have to promise you’re going to eat you have to ¬and a waterfall of a million other emotions - and were not inclined to let me do anything on my own. It was only when I pulled the age card and reminded them that I was only there because I had nowhere else to go that they relented. I swore up and down that Roxanne and Scorpius would come and check on me every day and let them stock my pantry with every sort of food they could think of (that I had no plans of eating, but I also had no plans of letting them know that). The sheer idea of eating something- everything in that pantry, really- so large and thick and fatty was beyond me.
Scorpius did come every day. He always ate lunch with me and stayed for hours afterward, so I couldn’t throw it all up in a feverish rush of pain and sheer power. Sometimes, he came for dinner, too, but not always. He told me, with a sad expression on his face, that he had to settle arguments between his family: the triangulated child of a traditionally painful arranged marriage. My mouth felt bitter when he told me that, and in some delayed realisation, it struck me that Scorpius, really, was the strongest person I had ever known.
If Scorpius was the strongest, than I was more and more positive by the day that I was the weakest. I only ever ate between one and two meals a day, and bit my lip by the fireplace while I struggled with the urge to throw it up.
“Sometimes,” Scorpius told me over lunch one day (two sandwiches. an apple. milk. six hundred calories.), “people who have every right to be perfectly happy aren’t. Sometimes you can have everything you want, and need, and still feel like you have nothing at all.” He paused, and looked at me. “But, Lucy, I’m so sorry that you have to be one of those people.”
“I never wanted to be,” I said. My being on the brink of tears was becoming more and more common when I talked to people. I was not sure if that was because I was becoming more open (like all the Healers told me to be!) or because I was continuing to self destruct, crumbling away until, like I desired, there was nothing at all left of me. “Oh, God, Scorpius, why does it have to be so hard for me to be happy?”
He closed his eyes, and his hands shook. “None of us are happy, anymore.”
“No,” I said. “Neither of us.”
*
I was drunk.
I hadn’t expected to get this drunk. With only a few glasses of what I hoped was whisky, I didn’t know what I had expected. I’d hoped, almost, that everything would disappear and I’d feel what could be happiness for the first time in forever. Instead, I didn’t know what I was feeling, but it couldn’t be happiness. I felt dizzy, almost overly so, and I needed Scorpius.
Soon enough, he rang at my door. That was good. Meant it wasn’t a bad night with his family - something that occurred far too often. I opened the door with a flick of my wand, and he entered.
“Magic is great,” I told him as he walked towards me. “I didn’t even have to get up to open the door for you.”
He took one look at me and started laughing. “Lucy! How drunk are you?”
“Enough,” I said. His hair was very blonde, and I was more and more intrigued by this. I wanted to run my hands through it and see what would happen.
“How much did you drink?” He began to take food out of the cupboards. I shrunk away from him immediately, but was finding it harder and harder to remember why that was.
“Not enough,” I answered, laughing at nothing particularly funny and waiting for him to come over to me and tell me, in a smooth, caring voice, that I was being ridiculous, which I knew I was. I wanted him to sew a tapestry of words to make me feel better.
I wanted him to kiss me.
“Scorpius, do you like me?” I asked him all of a sudden, not sure of the sort of response I wanted. He turned around, distracted from setting something terrifyingly edible on the island counter.
“Of course,” he said, paying no attention to it (while the words carried a brunt of truth that made me shiver even more than I already was.) It was extraordinarily difficult for me to think. I could not picture what Scorpius was thinking, but then again, I was not sure I wanted to. I liked being drunk. For the first time in what felt like forever, I felt like I was enough.
“No,” I said, frustrated at my apparent inability to communicate. “Do you love me?” I laid extra emphasis on the word. “I think I do too, I think.”
Scorpius looked at me, and there was some glimpse of tortorous pain in his eyes before he, in a haunted, treacherous tone, said, “Of course.”
The entire world seemed to stop, or perhaps it was just my head spinning that made it seem like everything else was going so much slower. I rubbed my collarbone and pinched my wrist, all the way around, to feel the bone. I stood up and almost fell over from lightheadedness, unsure if this had to do with how thin I was or how very drunk I seemed to be. Probably both.
It only took a few seconds before I, wobbly on the balls of my feet, collapsed into what I thought might have been Scorpius’s arms.
*
I woke up with a dreaded sort of nausea I had not been allowed to feel for months upon end. Vaguely, with a bit of blurriness around the edges, I saw Scorpius moving around a bed I did not remember getting in. “What the hell happened?” I asked. My mouth felt like cotton balls and tasted like pennies .
He looked up to me and propped my pillows up so I was sitting upright. It gave my head a painful jolt that, after months of bulimia, I had almost gotten used to. “You happened. You thought it would be a good idea to drink yourself to hell, Lucy. Remember?”
“Almost,” I said, although very little memory of the night was coming back to me save the achingly full feeling. “I passed out, didn’t I?”
“That you did,” Scorpius said. “You fucked up again, Lucy, and I’d be lying if I said I didn’t love you for it.” He paused to hand me a glass of water. “Do you remember what you told me?”
“No. I hope it wasn’t too terrible,” I said, morbidly (but genuinely) curious. He looked down and away from me while I took a very small sip of the water and felt awfully nauseous all over again.
“Lucy,” Scorpius said in an extraordinarily awkward tone of voice, “you told me you might be in love with me.”
“Oh,” I said, sounding very small. A small voice for a small word. Scorpius looked at me, almost expectantly. “What if I meant it?” I asked.
“Then we have a lot to talk about,” he said, but the corner of his eyes and a hint of a smile gave something away.
I ate breakfast that day. It was the first time since I’d moved out of my parents’ house that I had.
*
Scorpius told me that I was still sick, to the point that it scared him to love me. Little though I cared to admit it, though, I was starting to wonder whether I might be getting well. I had learned, through Scorpius more than anyone, that my sickness had very little to do with my weight, yet my weight was what was causing all of my issues that remained.
I told Scorpius this. He looked at me, his eyes softened, and, like all I had ever wanted, I felt like a bird, loose above the ground, flying. I felt like I was more than a shadow. I felt, I thought, like I was more than anything.