(no subject)
Title: Shallow, part 1/?
Characters: Albus Severus Potter/Scorpius Malfoy, mentions of a few others, mostly James Potter II.
Rating: PG/PG-13
Warnings: Slash, language, and thematic elements (eating disorder).
Word Count: ~2,202
Summary: “And now… now, he sits at the lunch table, only drinking water and hardly touching his food, and acting like this is no big deal.”
Disclaimer: They're all JKR's kids; I'm just playing with them.
A/N: Al and Scorpius as seen here are highly based on the Al and Scorpius played by myself and Sally in our private storyline; Scorpius is her boy, and many thanks to her for help with his characterization. Additional thanks to 0928soubi, whose fic search gave me this plotbunny.
Scorpius Draco Vincent Malfoy is worried. Very worried, and the worst part is that he can’t find exactly what specific thing is worrying him.
No, that’s not true. It’s Al that’s worrying him, and he’s very acutely aware of that fact. He just can’t think of what, exactly, about Al keeps grating at his nerves and keeping him up at night.
That isn’t true, either, though he very much wants it to be. This whole process would be so much easier if he didn’t have a specific worry about Al; in that case, he could just brush this whole situation off as him being paranoid for the boy he loves. But there is a specific worry, and just thinking about it makes Scorpius feel horrible, invasive, and distrusting - even worse, it makes him feel shallow, which he strives not to be. After all, Father was shallow. Father picked his friends for blood, and jumped into things without a moment’s thought, for the attraction of power, and he nearly died for it.
It’s just that Al’s weight is good cause for worry. Moreover, the rate at which he’s been losing it is particularly distressing, especially after how last year ended. Al has been skinny for most of the time they’ve known each other. When they met for the first time, outside the Hogwarts Express, on the first day of first year, he’d been a right twig, especially compared to his Auror father and his athletic older brother. Scorpius really only notices this in retrospect, though; at the time, Al’s eyes were what caught his attention the most.
Then, at the end of first year and during the beginning of second, Al had been bigger than normal, especially his own normal, but it had led right into a growth spurt, which had ended with him being skinny as ever. Not that bloody James Potter had made the whole process any easier on his poor brother. Until the growth spurt had happened, that arrogant, Gryffindor git had been full of new nicknames for his brother; his favorite had been, “chubby bunny,” some mockery of how their mum apparently called Al her, “honey bunny.” Then Al’s weight had gotten an even distribution and James, blessedly, hadn’t had anything to mock. The same rule of ending his growth spurts as a gangly, scrawny little thing had held true when he’d finally stopped growing. Once his height had stabilized, his weight followed suit, settling on, “thin, but not disturbingly so.”
And then OWLs had come and been a stressful time for everyone, especially Al, who was so sensitive. You weren’t supposed to be sensitive in Slytherin, but here he was: the lone Slytherin who wasn’t afraid to cry when other people were in the room. At least, that was one reading of it. Another reading was that he just couldn’t help his feelings, and the end result was the same: he’d needed comforting during OWLs, just to get through them without breaking down. Naturally, he’d gotten said comfort from Scorpius… and from Chocolate Frogs, and Peppermint Toads, and large slabs of Honeyduke’s finest, and, on more than one occasion, various sweets and cakes from the House Elves. By the end of term, his favorite pair of trousers didn’t fit, which hardly helped his mood.
Scorpius had needed to come back for him before the carriages to the train left; he’d been lying on his bed, taking deep breaths, and attempting to squeeze himself into the trousers, which were having none of it.
“Bloody, buggering Merlin!” Al groaned, before a session of labored panting. “Fucking hell, and these were from Aunt Fleur. She got them in Paris, and I told her I’d wear them tonight…”
“Al, she’ll understand if you wear something else. Not everything fits all the time-”
“But I promised…” There it had been again. Al’s sweet, nigh on pathological, and almost Hufflepuff-esque need to keep promised. “’sides, it’s all my fault I can’t wear them. Carrying on like I did, putting on bloody four-and-a-half kilos… don’t deserve these bloody trousers…”
With that, Al inhaled deeply, held his stomach in, and began another frantic round of trying to squeeze the trousers shut. Scorpius sighed and sat down next to his manically writhing boyfriend. The cause was a lost one without intervention: those damn trousers only fit Al right if he was on the thin end of his normal; he’d come back to school from Christmas hols this year with the button barely staying put, and he hadn’t even eaten that much. Without wasting a second, Scorpius pointed his wand at the straining waistband and murmured the incantation for an Extending Spell. It wasn’t particularly potent, but it worked quite spectacularly: Al not only got his trousers fashioned, but they fit just as they had before his OWLs and they rather effectively disguised the fact that he’d developed softer sides and a noticeable curve in his midsection. He sighed in relief.
“Knew there was a reason I loved you,” he teased, kissing Scorpius on the cheek.
That hadn’t been the end of it, though. He’d eaten a good deal of sweets on the train, and he’d mentioned how his Gran was making a huge meal for everyone who was coming home. The trousers had been straining to hold their newly expanded size when Al had given Scorpius his goodbye hug, and, even now, Scorpius doesn’t want to think of what happened to them over Al’s supper.
He knows what happened to Al afterward, though: he didn’t stop. One owl he’d sent had had Chocolate Frog prints on it, another had the remnants of some of his Gran’s cooking, and, when they met in London to have lunch about two weeks after school had let out for summer, it looked as though Al had had more than his ‘bloody four-and-a-half kilos’ to complain about. His face had filled out into a more cherubic look, and his jeans, obviously transfigured, were visibly strained against his swollen stomach and expanding arse; he kept pulling on his t-shirt to no avail. At lunch, he had soup, a salad, an entrée, dessert, and a third of Scorpius’s food - then he’d demanded that they go up Diagon Alley to get something else at Fortescue’s. And, through it all, he’d denied that anything was wrong.
Something was wrong, though. And Scorpius had had to find it out from a Witch Weekly article written by none other than the fire-breathing harpy from Hell, Rita Skeeter, herself. “Trouble In Paradise Takes Toll on Harry Potter’s Second Son: Is Albus Potter’s overeating a cry for help during his parents’ strife?” Moreover, Al hadn’t even sent him the article; Maddie Boot-Goldstein, one of Al’s Ravenclaw friends, had sent it, with an attached owl that read, “Rosie and I have tried. Lily’s tried. He won’t talk to any of us about any of it, has he talked to you?”
For point of fact, Al hadn’t talked to Scorpius, which had been the most upsetting thing in all this. Scorpius didn’t care if Al was skinny, or fat, or any of that. He just wanted Al to talk to him, which the sneaky little bastard seemed oddly loath to do. He’d sent owls, of course, but they’d been vague about what Scorpius considered important and had focused intently on talking about trivial things. Then Al had met him at King’s Cross looking like his old self, which had been notably thinner than their last meeting. And he hadn’t been any taller, which debunked the, “It’s just leading up to a growth spurt” theory. (Scorpius almost protested before thinking better of it; having more Al to hug after a summer apart wouldn’t have upset him any.)
Then he’d actively turned down a present of Honeyduke’s chocolate. He’d fought Scorpius for a full ten minutes to avoid taking the damn slab of candy, and his only offered explanation had been, “I can’t. I’m on a diet.”
“Just take it, you prat,” Scorpius joked, giving him a kiss on the cheek. “You’ll always be beautiful to me, so what’s the harm in it?”
“I’m on a diet,” Al insisted, “which means that I can’t eat it. And if it’s anywhere near me, I’ll eat it.”
“And there’s no problem with that-”
“Yeah, that’s what I thought. Then I turned into a sodding balloon-”
“You did not-”
“I most certainly did, and you know it. Made a bloody pig of myself at lunch with you that day, and during OWLs, and after OWLs - I’ve only been able to wear Aunt Fleur’s trousers again for a week, maybe ten days. I’ll just have you know that.”
“Al… it doesn’t matter to me. I just want you to be happy-”
“Then keep the bloody chocolate!”
He was the same way about the food at the welcoming feast that evening.
He went out for Quidditch shortly thereafter, even though he famously dislikes playing it. He even made Seeker, though his enthusiasm for it was clearly, to Scorpius at least, feigned.
And now… now, he sits at the lunch table, only drinking water and hardly touching his food, and acting like this is no big deal. When Scorpius tries to impress some vegetables on him, he just says that he isn’t hungry. He’s thinner now, too. It’s happened slowly, all while Scorpius has been around him, and, so, it’s been harder to see, but it’s there. His jaw is harder, his collarbone more defined; the bones in his wrists are quite evident, especially when he writes so agitatedly, as he’s doing right this instant. Scorpius hasn’t seen him this thin since around Christmas, third year, and he’d been ill then, so he’d had an excuse.
“Al, at least have an apple before Transfiguration,” Scorpius attempts to press. “It’s rigorous, and you’ll need your strength.”
“I’ll get it at supper,” Al sighs, folding up the Ancient Runes textbook he’d been working out of. “’m not hungry right now.”
“But you’ve hardly eaten anything-”
Al cuts Scorpius off with a chaste kiss to the lips, followed by a smile. “Honestly, Scorp. I’ll be fine.”
Still smiling, he gets up and leaves, as though nothing happened whatsoever. At least the Halloween Feast is in a few days. If Al doesn’t eat then, then Scorpius will know that something’s truly wrong.
***
Al makes a point of overeating at the Halloween Feast. After McGonagall’s speech, he calls for a pumpkin juice toast, between Scorpius and the other boys in their year - Gavin Nott, Brody Harper, and Damien Pucey. He calls for a toast to travesty, horror, debauchery, and the ending of his diet, which he made sure that all of them knew he’d embarked on. After that formality is handled, he helps himself to everything. As much as he doesn’t want to eat it, he has to: Scorpius and Gavin are both getting suspicious of him, and that goes without mentioning that Lily, Rosie, Maddie, Tommy, Logan, and everyone else he’s related to sees some problem with his plan to lose weight.
The only exceptions had been Dad and James. Even Aunt Fleur had seen him at his worst, watch him burst the button off her trousers at Gran’s welcome home dinner, and she’d still told him that everything was fine. Dad had gotten so enraged over Rita Skeeter’s article, but he calmed down once Al had had initial success. James, though, didn’t stop. By the end of July, Al had lost nearly eight kilos from his highest point, and James still saw fit to pinch his extra flab (especially around his waistline) and sneer at him. He’d even done it at King’s Cross, after Al had lost another eight-and-a-half kilos. Al had tried out for the Slytherin team, and made it, and all it had earned him from James was a pinch of the stomach (which had lost another three-and-a-half kilos since school had started) and a smirking remark about how Seekers were meant to be skinny.
Merlin, it was hard enough knowing that, as Harry Potter’s gay, Slytherin second son who had no interest in either Quidditch or being an Auror, he’d never be good enough for anyone. Why did James have to rub in the fact that he was fat, too? Granted, at just barely under sixty kilos, Al actually weighed less than had been his normal weight last year - hell, he weighed less than James, even though James was half-a-foot taller and Al had weighed five-and-a-half kilos more than he did over the summer - but that didn’t stop James. None of it stopped him, and with good reason. Whatever the comparative weights said, he could still grab fat at various places on Al’s person, and that had meant that Al was still fat.
But everyone else takes issue with what Al’s done to improve himself, and so he makes a point of overeating. It’s the same principle he applies when eating at Gran’s: help yourself to everything, don’t hold back, and let yourself have everything you normally wouldn’t eat… but don’t make plans for after supper. There’s only one place he can go after a meal like this.
Regardless of what they all think, there’s still more work to do.
Characters: Albus Severus Potter/Scorpius Malfoy, mentions of a few others, mostly James Potter II.
Rating: PG/PG-13
Warnings: Slash, language, and thematic elements (eating disorder).
Word Count: ~2,202
Summary: “And now… now, he sits at the lunch table, only drinking water and hardly touching his food, and acting like this is no big deal.”
Disclaimer: They're all JKR's kids; I'm just playing with them.
A/N: Al and Scorpius as seen here are highly based on the Al and Scorpius played by myself and Sally in our private storyline; Scorpius is her boy, and many thanks to her for help with his characterization. Additional thanks to 0928soubi, whose fic search gave me this plotbunny.
Scorpius Draco Vincent Malfoy is worried. Very worried, and the worst part is that he can’t find exactly what specific thing is worrying him.
No, that’s not true. It’s Al that’s worrying him, and he’s very acutely aware of that fact. He just can’t think of what, exactly, about Al keeps grating at his nerves and keeping him up at night.
That isn’t true, either, though he very much wants it to be. This whole process would be so much easier if he didn’t have a specific worry about Al; in that case, he could just brush this whole situation off as him being paranoid for the boy he loves. But there is a specific worry, and just thinking about it makes Scorpius feel horrible, invasive, and distrusting - even worse, it makes him feel shallow, which he strives not to be. After all, Father was shallow. Father picked his friends for blood, and jumped into things without a moment’s thought, for the attraction of power, and he nearly died for it.
It’s just that Al’s weight is good cause for worry. Moreover, the rate at which he’s been losing it is particularly distressing, especially after how last year ended. Al has been skinny for most of the time they’ve known each other. When they met for the first time, outside the Hogwarts Express, on the first day of first year, he’d been a right twig, especially compared to his Auror father and his athletic older brother. Scorpius really only notices this in retrospect, though; at the time, Al’s eyes were what caught his attention the most.
Then, at the end of first year and during the beginning of second, Al had been bigger than normal, especially his own normal, but it had led right into a growth spurt, which had ended with him being skinny as ever. Not that bloody James Potter had made the whole process any easier on his poor brother. Until the growth spurt had happened, that arrogant, Gryffindor git had been full of new nicknames for his brother; his favorite had been, “chubby bunny,” some mockery of how their mum apparently called Al her, “honey bunny.” Then Al’s weight had gotten an even distribution and James, blessedly, hadn’t had anything to mock. The same rule of ending his growth spurts as a gangly, scrawny little thing had held true when he’d finally stopped growing. Once his height had stabilized, his weight followed suit, settling on, “thin, but not disturbingly so.”
And then OWLs had come and been a stressful time for everyone, especially Al, who was so sensitive. You weren’t supposed to be sensitive in Slytherin, but here he was: the lone Slytherin who wasn’t afraid to cry when other people were in the room. At least, that was one reading of it. Another reading was that he just couldn’t help his feelings, and the end result was the same: he’d needed comforting during OWLs, just to get through them without breaking down. Naturally, he’d gotten said comfort from Scorpius… and from Chocolate Frogs, and Peppermint Toads, and large slabs of Honeyduke’s finest, and, on more than one occasion, various sweets and cakes from the House Elves. By the end of term, his favorite pair of trousers didn’t fit, which hardly helped his mood.
Scorpius had needed to come back for him before the carriages to the train left; he’d been lying on his bed, taking deep breaths, and attempting to squeeze himself into the trousers, which were having none of it.
“Bloody, buggering Merlin!” Al groaned, before a session of labored panting. “Fucking hell, and these were from Aunt Fleur. She got them in Paris, and I told her I’d wear them tonight…”
“Al, she’ll understand if you wear something else. Not everything fits all the time-”
“But I promised…” There it had been again. Al’s sweet, nigh on pathological, and almost Hufflepuff-esque need to keep promised. “’sides, it’s all my fault I can’t wear them. Carrying on like I did, putting on bloody four-and-a-half kilos… don’t deserve these bloody trousers…”
With that, Al inhaled deeply, held his stomach in, and began another frantic round of trying to squeeze the trousers shut. Scorpius sighed and sat down next to his manically writhing boyfriend. The cause was a lost one without intervention: those damn trousers only fit Al right if he was on the thin end of his normal; he’d come back to school from Christmas hols this year with the button barely staying put, and he hadn’t even eaten that much. Without wasting a second, Scorpius pointed his wand at the straining waistband and murmured the incantation for an Extending Spell. It wasn’t particularly potent, but it worked quite spectacularly: Al not only got his trousers fashioned, but they fit just as they had before his OWLs and they rather effectively disguised the fact that he’d developed softer sides and a noticeable curve in his midsection. He sighed in relief.
“Knew there was a reason I loved you,” he teased, kissing Scorpius on the cheek.
That hadn’t been the end of it, though. He’d eaten a good deal of sweets on the train, and he’d mentioned how his Gran was making a huge meal for everyone who was coming home. The trousers had been straining to hold their newly expanded size when Al had given Scorpius his goodbye hug, and, even now, Scorpius doesn’t want to think of what happened to them over Al’s supper.
He knows what happened to Al afterward, though: he didn’t stop. One owl he’d sent had had Chocolate Frog prints on it, another had the remnants of some of his Gran’s cooking, and, when they met in London to have lunch about two weeks after school had let out for summer, it looked as though Al had had more than his ‘bloody four-and-a-half kilos’ to complain about. His face had filled out into a more cherubic look, and his jeans, obviously transfigured, were visibly strained against his swollen stomach and expanding arse; he kept pulling on his t-shirt to no avail. At lunch, he had soup, a salad, an entrée, dessert, and a third of Scorpius’s food - then he’d demanded that they go up Diagon Alley to get something else at Fortescue’s. And, through it all, he’d denied that anything was wrong.
Something was wrong, though. And Scorpius had had to find it out from a Witch Weekly article written by none other than the fire-breathing harpy from Hell, Rita Skeeter, herself. “Trouble In Paradise Takes Toll on Harry Potter’s Second Son: Is Albus Potter’s overeating a cry for help during his parents’ strife?” Moreover, Al hadn’t even sent him the article; Maddie Boot-Goldstein, one of Al’s Ravenclaw friends, had sent it, with an attached owl that read, “Rosie and I have tried. Lily’s tried. He won’t talk to any of us about any of it, has he talked to you?”
For point of fact, Al hadn’t talked to Scorpius, which had been the most upsetting thing in all this. Scorpius didn’t care if Al was skinny, or fat, or any of that. He just wanted Al to talk to him, which the sneaky little bastard seemed oddly loath to do. He’d sent owls, of course, but they’d been vague about what Scorpius considered important and had focused intently on talking about trivial things. Then Al had met him at King’s Cross looking like his old self, which had been notably thinner than their last meeting. And he hadn’t been any taller, which debunked the, “It’s just leading up to a growth spurt” theory. (Scorpius almost protested before thinking better of it; having more Al to hug after a summer apart wouldn’t have upset him any.)
Then he’d actively turned down a present of Honeyduke’s chocolate. He’d fought Scorpius for a full ten minutes to avoid taking the damn slab of candy, and his only offered explanation had been, “I can’t. I’m on a diet.”
“Just take it, you prat,” Scorpius joked, giving him a kiss on the cheek. “You’ll always be beautiful to me, so what’s the harm in it?”
“I’m on a diet,” Al insisted, “which means that I can’t eat it. And if it’s anywhere near me, I’ll eat it.”
“And there’s no problem with that-”
“Yeah, that’s what I thought. Then I turned into a sodding balloon-”
“You did not-”
“I most certainly did, and you know it. Made a bloody pig of myself at lunch with you that day, and during OWLs, and after OWLs - I’ve only been able to wear Aunt Fleur’s trousers again for a week, maybe ten days. I’ll just have you know that.”
“Al… it doesn’t matter to me. I just want you to be happy-”
“Then keep the bloody chocolate!”
He was the same way about the food at the welcoming feast that evening.
He went out for Quidditch shortly thereafter, even though he famously dislikes playing it. He even made Seeker, though his enthusiasm for it was clearly, to Scorpius at least, feigned.
And now… now, he sits at the lunch table, only drinking water and hardly touching his food, and acting like this is no big deal. When Scorpius tries to impress some vegetables on him, he just says that he isn’t hungry. He’s thinner now, too. It’s happened slowly, all while Scorpius has been around him, and, so, it’s been harder to see, but it’s there. His jaw is harder, his collarbone more defined; the bones in his wrists are quite evident, especially when he writes so agitatedly, as he’s doing right this instant. Scorpius hasn’t seen him this thin since around Christmas, third year, and he’d been ill then, so he’d had an excuse.
“Al, at least have an apple before Transfiguration,” Scorpius attempts to press. “It’s rigorous, and you’ll need your strength.”
“I’ll get it at supper,” Al sighs, folding up the Ancient Runes textbook he’d been working out of. “’m not hungry right now.”
“But you’ve hardly eaten anything-”
Al cuts Scorpius off with a chaste kiss to the lips, followed by a smile. “Honestly, Scorp. I’ll be fine.”
Still smiling, he gets up and leaves, as though nothing happened whatsoever. At least the Halloween Feast is in a few days. If Al doesn’t eat then, then Scorpius will know that something’s truly wrong.
***
Al makes a point of overeating at the Halloween Feast. After McGonagall’s speech, he calls for a pumpkin juice toast, between Scorpius and the other boys in their year - Gavin Nott, Brody Harper, and Damien Pucey. He calls for a toast to travesty, horror, debauchery, and the ending of his diet, which he made sure that all of them knew he’d embarked on. After that formality is handled, he helps himself to everything. As much as he doesn’t want to eat it, he has to: Scorpius and Gavin are both getting suspicious of him, and that goes without mentioning that Lily, Rosie, Maddie, Tommy, Logan, and everyone else he’s related to sees some problem with his plan to lose weight.
The only exceptions had been Dad and James. Even Aunt Fleur had seen him at his worst, watch him burst the button off her trousers at Gran’s welcome home dinner, and she’d still told him that everything was fine. Dad had gotten so enraged over Rita Skeeter’s article, but he calmed down once Al had had initial success. James, though, didn’t stop. By the end of July, Al had lost nearly eight kilos from his highest point, and James still saw fit to pinch his extra flab (especially around his waistline) and sneer at him. He’d even done it at King’s Cross, after Al had lost another eight-and-a-half kilos. Al had tried out for the Slytherin team, and made it, and all it had earned him from James was a pinch of the stomach (which had lost another three-and-a-half kilos since school had started) and a smirking remark about how Seekers were meant to be skinny.
Merlin, it was hard enough knowing that, as Harry Potter’s gay, Slytherin second son who had no interest in either Quidditch or being an Auror, he’d never be good enough for anyone. Why did James have to rub in the fact that he was fat, too? Granted, at just barely under sixty kilos, Al actually weighed less than had been his normal weight last year - hell, he weighed less than James, even though James was half-a-foot taller and Al had weighed five-and-a-half kilos more than he did over the summer - but that didn’t stop James. None of it stopped him, and with good reason. Whatever the comparative weights said, he could still grab fat at various places on Al’s person, and that had meant that Al was still fat.
But everyone else takes issue with what Al’s done to improve himself, and so he makes a point of overeating. It’s the same principle he applies when eating at Gran’s: help yourself to everything, don’t hold back, and let yourself have everything you normally wouldn’t eat… but don’t make plans for after supper. There’s only one place he can go after a meal like this.
Regardless of what they all think, there’s still more work to do.