A/N: Written for the Duct Tape competition.
Prompt: Bows.
Warning: eating disorder trigger warning.
Song lyrics from Stage: "Live Happy, Live With Anorexia."
Listen to the insects prey on the enemy
For when you hunt the loved, you hunt yourself
When the feast is over, you're lying down to feel
You're crazy and so sore, I feel like now to stop
I felt like this once before
So live happy, live with anorexia
She disguises herself in floaty layers and radish earrings, the winter hat jammed on her head, ignoring the wisps of blonde that clutter the basin every morning. Her eyes haunt her face, but that's nothing new, is it? Just a little mad girl, with jutting cheekbones and butterbeer corks jostling around her neck, who likes to whistle at the nargles that nest in the mistletoe, and wave her hands around like skeletal bird wings to clear away the wrackspurts.
"They hide in my ears, you know," she explains, solemn and wide-eyed, and those who have actually stayed behind to hear some sort of explanation only snort and shake their heads, moving on with a muttered "Loony" to sum it all up.
She's wasting away, but she doesn't see it. She nibbles on toast in the mornings and has pudding in the evenings, drawing intricate patterns in the surface with her spoon and murmuring airily that it might help her in her research with the crumple-horned snorkack. Hermione actually sounds interested for a moment until she hears 'crumple-horned,' and then she scrunches her whole face like she's bitten into something bad and won't talk to Luna anymore for the rest of the night. It's all right, though. Luna doesn't mind.
At night, she piles on three extra blankets, wrapping herself in a cocoon and spelling her curtains so her year-mates can't "accidentally" shove her out of bed and kick her down the stairs again in her pyjamas. She knows mistakes happen but wonders why they have to hurt so much. When she wears her hat to bed, she wakes up with the brim over her eyes and thinks she's gone blind for one disorienting, panic-laced moment. It makes her happy her roommates can't see.
"It's the cold," she explains with excruciating slowness when Harry asks why she's wearing her coat to class, or why her ear muffs dwarf her head. "I'm very sensitive to the cold," she says, and neglects to mention that she's incapable of maintaining her own body heat anymore. It doesn't matter anyway. The wrackspurts will take the thought away, and she welcomes it.
She faints in Charms class, brought awake by the panicked squeaking of her Head of House, and suddenly, her house of cards comes crashing down, a heap of melted snowflakes. And no matter how hard she tries, how many wrackspurts she tries to push into her ears, she can't lie to herself. Not anymore.