*Author's Note*

**I'm picturing this as Draco talking about Harry. I don't really understand it. I have no idea what I'm trying to say, except that eating disoders=control issues, and Harry and Draco seem like perfect candidates for that. My head is a strange place. I apologise in advance. Personally I'm pretty proud of this fic. It's been buzzing aroun my head forever and I finally got enough motivation to write it. It's my first ever fanfic and so I'm asking you to pretty please be kind. If it's not your cup of tea and you read it anyway, please leave constructive criticism. I'm not a great writer, but I do it for the love.**

J.K Rowling the wonderful owns all. I'm just screwing with the characters.

Prologue:

It would be wrong of me to say I did not see this coming.

Someone in my…position. I've been taught to be observant since I was old enough to know what I was looking for. And I have never watched anyone closer than you.

You are dying. No; you are killing yourself. And I am watching it happen.

Your once brilliant green eyes look too big for your face and they're all sunken and bloodshot. They are hungry eyes, starving- wide and staring; deep and dark and deadly, ready to gobble up the world, if only you would let them. But you do not eat, do you?

I'm not sure if I'm the only one who has noticed how you push your food around your plate, surreptitiously making it vanish without a morsel of it ever passing your pretty pink lips-

You look so pale and fragile now, like you're made out of spun sugar and I want to eat you up. But you're all razor blade bones and you would delight in cutting me up as I swallow you down.

It's kind of a disappearing act, isn't it? You and only you have mastered the trick. The master illusionist vanishing piece by piece on the stage- and the audience doesn't know whether to applaud-

or to cry.

Your friend's conversation and good intentions are a cage and I watch you

night

after

night

as you try to escape. Pushing aside their offers of homework help and second helpings- when you're ahead of even the Mudblood in every single class and your plate is untouched. They're treating you as a pet- their tame little Golden Boy- the sort they can pet and coddle and cuddle without fear; they have forgotten you're a tiger in the gilded cage of their zoo.

And I wonder- how do you make yourself invisible, with so many eyes tracking your every move?

Now that is a trick I'd like to master.

You're shrinking, again. It seems to come in waves; you plateau for a while and then next time I look, you're another 10 pounds down.

Your callused hands are all bone now. The veins such a dark blue beneath your grey parchment skin, they're almost purple. The flesh is too taut across your too big knuckles, like the bones are trying to break through, striving for the light.

Your proportions are all fucked up now. Your eyes and head and hands all too big for the rest of your emaciated body. Your once pretty pouty pink mouth that I used to gaze at in Potions is now permanently pressed into a hard, white line. No food will get past that fortress.

Your collar bone is a coat hanger- it's sticking out more than mine.

Your wrist- your wrist…where do I begin? It's beauty and perfect perverseness is utterly breathtaking. Your wonderful wrist shows every vein and tendon and each beautiful bone. You move your arm a fraction and all is revealed; its like seeing the inside of a clock, the strings of a puppet.

It's fascinating, your self-destruction. Fascinating and terrifying.

Do you have any idea what you do to me?

I can see your shoulder blades poking through your tatty muggle shirt.

They're starting to look like wings.

You do not eat. How? How do you not eat? What are you that you have traversed the earthly need for food? You are all bone and it is beautiful. Don't stop. Please Gods do not stop, for me, for me…

Even your friends have started to notice.

I watch them, watching you. How pitiful, how pathetic they seem to me. Now, more than ever. To have only noticed once you gave up every effort to hide it. Now you have abandoned your tattered façade they see- and here I thought they were your friends. Here I thought they cared.

And still, still they stay silent! Mouths open close like imbecilic goldfish but they say nothing. They do not pressure you into eating, speaking, living. Not that it would help, regardless. But to not even try-! I must admit, I expected better of the Golden Gryffindors.

(But, a traitorous voice in my mind whispers- can you blame them? They're lost for words as is expected. You their hero, their brother, has been starving to death in front of them…and they had not noticed. You are not perfect and their world has come tumbling down.)

I don't know why I am surprised. I shouldn't be. They never fail to fall down to the level of my expectations. You are dying and they only noticed when you are about to jump into your grave. It's typical really. They were always going to be too late. I was the only one who saw.

And I've never loved you better than I do now.

Your hands shake as you pour your coffee. (Black as your once lustrous hair; bitter as bile.)

Eyes- blue and brown and anxious and fearful and all of them so, so ugly next to your once verdant orbs- track your every move. But you just look away. I think I see you smirk into your cup. I smile at the sight.

There will be tears and screams and anger, now that they know. They do not take pleasure in your pain, like we do.

Do you know the perverse pleasure I derive from your deliberate ruination?

Can you comprehend the extent of my restless, desperate nights, on sheets sticky with sweat and too, too hot and yet far too cold without your body next to mine. Do you have any idea of how beautiful you are as you self destruct? I want to break your body under mine, hear your prominent bones creak under my passionate attentions. I want to see bruises flowering on your paper thin skin. I want to put you back together piece by piece and I'll keep you safe and whole and dying and no one will touch you but me.

But for now, they are trying to feed you. Force you. Fix you. Can they not see it is far too late for that? You are too far gone. There's a fever now, in your mad, glittering eyes. (And oh Gods, that bright burn is back in them, they're emerald again and you're so beautiful). You're living off of broken dreams and borrowed time. You're counting calories in air and smoke and water and scents. You count the calories you burn in each spasm of your wasted muscles, the number of times your skeletal fingers tap tap tap on the tabletop. I can see the numbers adding and subtracting in your eyes. Those beautiful, starving, bruised and bloodshot eyes-they are like an open book to me now and Gods, I have never wanted anything so much.

You are indescribably beautiful. You are everything I have ever wanted.

They cannot reach you now.

I know, I know-you are

Too

Far

Gone.

You are beyond them now alone

And unprotected.

Mine for the plucking and I yearn.

Is this love? I wonder if this is love- maybe the story books got it wrong got it right-

If I can't have you I will die.

I smiled at you today, for the first time in all our lives. You looked so shocked. No one smiles at you any more. They look at you with trepidation and fear and anger and occasionally disgust. But no one smiles.

I promise, I- I will always smile.

I saw your ribs today. Like a ladder, matching the one you'd carved on your thigh. Such pretty little slices, like red ribbons. They match the bruises blooming on your flesh, the madness blossoming in your eyes. Oh what a beautiful, desecrated battlefield you are!

I had your skin beneath my hands, your brittle bones beneath my questing fingers.

I ran from you, and I am sorry.

But your ribs- you were just standing there! And there they were in all their protruding glory! I always knew you were the epitome of beauty but never before had I realised what gazing upon perfection was.

The sight of you filled me with shame. Such willing hard won perfection beneath my hands, in my grasp and for the first time I knew what it was to be undeserving.

Seeing you I felt

My flesh thicken

Harden

Like I was wearing a cage made of the

Flabby

Fleshy

Failings

Of the dead and damned.

Who was I to attempt to posses beauty?

I want perfection. Like you. Beauty like your shoulder blade wings.

So I will follow you, follow you, follow you down. And when I am deserving, then, then I will touch you

Mark you

Hold you

Love you.

And all I'm asking is please do not die 'til I reach you.

It would be wrong to say I did not see this coming.

*A/N* Compnaion Fic to this: "Hero Like Me" is complete...you should definitely read that before finishing this but it doesn't really matter. Please review! I'm so happy and grateful to everyone whho have read/alerted/favoutited this but reviews mean the world to me! Negative, positive, contructive. I really don't mind.^_^