TRIGGER WARNING: Please do not read if you have issues with self-harm and anorexia/bulimia
(3rd story in the 'Perception Filter' verse)
Some Nights
Lucy Weasley was not a happy person.
Constantly overshadowed by her family, she didn't know what she stood for. She was only sixteen and that wasn't unusual, but everyone knew what they wanted in the future as a career or at least a hobby. She doesn't have a clue.
Some expect her to be a magnificent Quidditch player, like James, Fred, Dominique or Roxanne. Others expect her to be a healer; a smart know-it-all, just like Rose and Victoire. Lucy wants to own a book shop in Diagon Alley seeing as books have been her only friends for years. All she seems to have achieved in her life is the fact that she became prefect for Hufflepuff, alongside Lysander. It hadn't been too hard, Hufflepuff's weren't as ambitious and competitive as the other houses. Lucy liked that.
She feels as if she doesn't stand for anything. She's the spare person, the Hufflepuff. She thinks that she's just there to fill the space. She thinks that they don't notice her when she talks, so she just listens. She knows so much just from listening. She knows that Roxanne has a major crush on Lysander, whom she is in love with too. She's too scared to act on her feelings because she knows what will happen with Roxanne if she does; she's incredibly possessive.
Some Nights it's too much for her to take. She sneaks out of the Hufflepuff common room near the kitchens and creeps silently up the many staircases to the fourth floor where the prefect's bathroom is situated. It's almost always empty at that time of night. She has the place to herself. Sometimes she fills up the huge bubble bath and slips in, holding herself under the water as long as it is humanely possible before she has to take a breath. Sometimes she wonders what it would be like to be a mermaid and live underneath the water permanently. She likes the water, it soothes her.
Some Nights the bath doesn't appeal to her and she sits on the cold tiles of the ground pondering the events of the day. Her mind wonders from her marks to her cousins, to Lysander.
She thinks he's perfect and is completely head-over-heels in love with him. She doesn't know if he likes her back though, nobody ever pays attention to her, though sometimes he glances her way and smiles, every time this happens her stomach goes crazy with butterflies. But he doesn't love her, she can see it in his eyes; he's just being friendly.
She desperately wants to be noticed, she wants her existence to be acknowledged by her cousins and people around her. Why should the rest of her family be noticed and she be shunned to one side just because she's quieter than the others? Just because she's a Hufflepuff and the rest of them are in Gryffindor and Ravenclaw. It's not fair.
"There's nothing wrong with Hufflepuffs," she hears Roxanne say at Lunch on Monday as she passes by the Gryffindor table where Lysander is chatting to her, "Hufflepuffs are cool."
Lucy feels her heart warm at these words. It's comforting to know that she's not invisible because she's in Hufflepuff. These raise even more queries in Lucy's mind. Is it because she doesn't try to be noticed? Is it because the blokes in her year have dated her entire family and don't want to date another Weasley… because that's all she is, another Weasley. She's not Lucy, she's just another Weasley. But the thought that occupies her mind the most, however, is her wondering if she's not as pretty as the rest?
Lucy thinks that this must be the case. She's far from perfect; she's never kissed a boy, never gone on a date, she's not the prettiest person in the world and she could do with losing some weight to wear a bikini in summer when she tagged along with her cousins to the beach. Maybe if she wore a bikini she would stand out, just like Roxanne, Victoire and Dominique. Everyone admires them and aspires to be like them. Lucy wants to be her own person, but if that means being sealed inside a ball for the rest of her life, void from social interaction because she's so socially awkward then she would rather be like her older cousins than her own person.
Some nights when she creeps out of the Hufflepuff common room and up to the prefects' bathroom, it's with the knowing feeling in the pit of her stomach that she could be better. She could be prettier, she could be skinnier. The thoughts bounce off the walls of her over-active brain and almost drive her to insanity. Every bad word that anyone has ever said about her comes back to haunt her.
Fat, ugly, pig, ginger, loser, loner;
They all echo in her mind, swirling around like a vortex, constantly giving her hell.
She tears at her hair, trying to make the pain from the words go away. It doesn't work, they stay there with her; the only things that keep her company in the seemingly vast expanse of loneliness.
It makes her sick.
She sits by the toilet, resting her cheek on the cool ceramic bowl, feeling the burn of the acidic vomit in her mouth as she reaches up and flushes the toilet, listening to the regurgitated version of that night's dinner being flushed away.
The mental pain that it causes her is unbelievable. She can't stop throwing up. It becomes like an addiction, a nightly ritual that she doesn't feel quite right for days until she's thrown up. It becomes her way of letting everything go.
She hates it. She hates the acrid taste in her mouth that lasts for hours after she has thrown up her dinner, she wants to stop but she can't. Eventually she stops eating in an attempt to stop herself from throwing up.
It doesn't work. She throws up anyway.
For the first few times all that comes up is bile and after that she just sits over the toilet gagging for hours on end, wishing that something would come out of the hatch. But there's nothing to come out of the hatch. Lucy gags until her chest hurts and her throat rasps and she can't take it any longer.
It doesn't help with the pain that the words have caused; it doesn't help her fit in. Why would it? Nobody knows and Lucy would like to keep it that way, her own little secret. Her weight starts to drop dramatically. Lucy wishes that someone would say something, but the fact that they don't feels like someone has punched her in the heart. It shows that she really was wearing a perception filter, a sort of invisibility cloak that just shifted peoples gaze to the object next to them instead of actually making the person invisible. Maybe they don't care about her at all.
She's bordering on the edge of insanity. Nothing seems to help, not even being immersed in a bubble bath like it used to. All she wants to do is die, to leave the world for good. She's mutilated her body enough already and can't seem to find a way to stop. The only solution in her mind for it to stop is death.
All she wants is to be beautiful
She just wants to be noticed.
Her cousins can't see that, they don't notice that Lucy's health is deteriorating; they don't notice her hollow cheekbones and the scratches up her arms that Lucy inflicts on herself with her nails when the voices in her head get too much for her to deal with.
In fact, her cousins don't notice a thing; they're all too caught up in their dramatic, meaningless consumer driven lives. The only time they do notice that something is wrong is when Lucy doesn't show up for her lessons. They don't notice until it's too late.
Some nights they think about Lucy. They get together at the burrow and stay up late in the room that Lucy, Victoire and Dominique used to share and sit in silence and remember. They don't discuss Lucy at all, it's more of a knowing glance here and there and when they all join hands they know that Lucy is looking down on them and all that they can do is hope that before she had passed on that she had forgiven them for not noticing anything.
AN: For;
The Issues Competition – Anorexia, Self-Harm and Bulimia
Fanfiction Tournaments Competition – Round 1 (Write anything you want)
Favourite Character Boot Camp – Prompt #4: Secret
I'm really not educated in the ways of anorexia, self-harm or bulimia. All I know is that it gets addictive and people can't stop. If anyone thinks that I've portrayed this incorrectly, please PM me (and only if you feel comfortable doing so) and tell me what the right way to portray these issues is.
I would really like it if you could leave me a review :)
Potter On
~The Original Horcrux~