Author's Notes: Warning for eating disorders and self-harm.
She's not delicate like the other Pureblood girls. She doesn't have perfect gilt-blonde hair or a thin, willowy figure. She doesn't even have the tightly coiled muscle beneath the delicacy and lace that Pansy Parkinson does.
She's thick. Broad-nosed, square-chinned. Stringy-haired. Above all, not perfect.
Her mother disdains her. Her father ignores her. They are proud when she is Sorted into Slytherin, but it is the sort of pride you might bestow on a pet, and not a particularly bright one at that. They send her a letter each month, desultorily inquiring into her grades, and when she answers them, it's always the second or third attempt that flies into the night, clasped on her owl's leg-the first parchment's too splotched with tears.
The other students scorn her. Outside the green-and-silver walls, they present a united front, but it's a lie patched together with plastic smiles and hidden hexes. Pansy Parkinson simpers at her, and calls her a troll in the next breath. Draco Malfoy trips her on his way to the lavatory and claims it was an accident with wide-eyed innocence, as she pulls herself to her feet and pretends her knee's not throbbing, and her fingernails aren't broken from their contact with the rough stones.
The other Houses are worse. Oh, most of them aren't brave enough to attack her physically. She looks too hefty, and they're too cowardly. Even the Gryffindors, with their scarlet and gold lions stitched across their chests. But the whispers-those never fade. Too fat, too stupid, too ugly, she knows synonyms for everything before the end of the first week, and they leak like poison into her ears.
She's not perfect.
Is it any wonder she takes to pushing her food around her plate, to tipping bits of it discreetly onto the floor, where a helpful house elf will vanish it? Is it any marvel she rushes to the restroom at the end of every meal, sticking her fingers down her throat in desperate, burning effort? Her stomach echoes, hollow. Pure. Her smile is as empty as the rest of her as she sits in class, as she scribbles down notes that she won't remember taking, for classes she can't bother herself to care about.
She discovers the sweet, stinging relief of her table knife, slipped across one arm and the other, and it becomes part of her ritual, too, kneeling before the toilet bowl and purging, the red slash across her fingers matching the one in the back of her throat. Again and again, because it's never enough.
Her uniform starts to hang on her, but the taunts never let up. She doesn't expect them too. The lines on her arms accumulate, like a child's collection of scrawls scribbled on a blackboard. Criss-crosses of red, always hidden by her robes and the scowl etched across her face. The bones of her fingers are starkly lined against her skin, and at night, her hip bones jut painfully against the sheets.
She wants to be perfect-and she'll go to any lengths to get it.