InsaneJournal

Title: Shallow, part 3/?
Characters: Albus Severus Potter/Scorpius Malfoy, Madeline Boot-Goldstein, Rose Weasley, Hugo Weasley, Lily Potter II, Tommy Davies
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: Slash, language, and thematic elements (eating disorder).
Word Count: 4,745
Summary: "...everything he does is just an adorable facet of what makes him Al Potter. His most recent quirks, though, are difficult to get enthused about, and his enthusiasm for them is more than a little off-putting."
Disclaimer: They're all JKR's kids or the kids of 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 (aurieal) 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.
Links to Previous Parts: Chapter 1, Chapter 2


Madeline Boot-Goldstein is no stranger to odd behavior, but, then again, when one of your dads is an actor, the other is a severely neurotic arithmancer, your mum is a mind healer, and your best mates are a budding social activist, a lovable klutz, and Al Potter (and, by extension, Scorpius Malfoy), well. You have to get used to strange behavior.

This doesn’t mean, though, that you have to like it, and, in this case, Maddie most certainly doesn’t. Normally, Al’s little quirks are really quite endearing. The way he blushes when someone compliments him, the way he can’t do anything if he doesn’t know where his sixteenth birthday present from Scorpius is (which Maddie honestly can’t blame him for, since, apparently, the necklace and scorpion charm claim him as Scorpius’s forever), the way he can fall asleep absolutely anywhere, the way he gets personally offended when anyone maligns penguins – everything he does is just an adorable facet of what makes him Al Potter. His most recent quirks, though, are difficult to get enthused about, and his enthusiasm for them is more than a little off-putting.

He has, it would seem, developed a new love of wearing trousers and shirts that are visibly too big for him. Aside from the fact that he appears to be concealing something, these are all clothes that fit or were too small for him just a few months ago. Feels like ages ago, really, when his other new behaviors are taken into account. Everyone knows that he loves sweets – they were, after all, what originally made him get chubby – but, since term started, he’s almost always turned them down. Fair enough, he was “on a diet” until two weeks ago, but, since then, Maddie’s only seen Al near sweets twice. Once was after class last weekend, when he stomached half a Honeyduke’s bar because Tommy practically begged to eat it. He disappeared into the loo not five minutes afterward.

That’s another thing! Scorpius says (vociferously and ad nauseam) that Al hardly eats anything at most meals, that the only meat he’ll touch is chicken, and that he’s outright eliminated dairy from his diet. Maddie’s even managed to notice this; the Ravenclaw table’s proximity to the Slytherin table lets her watch without Al getting too suspicious. About the only meal after which he doesn’t run to the loo is breakfast, which usually amounts to an apple, at most.

Granted, there are some meals where this doesn’t quite hold true. At the Three Broomsticks last weekend, he ate more than anybody and nabbed most of Tommy’s bag of peppermint mice – but he ate everything slowly, and no one could find him after they got back. After hearing from one of her second years that there’d been a sick boy in Moaning Myrtle’s loo, Maddie got Rose and they tried their damndest to make the ghost talk. Unfortunately, even the joint powers of two prefects couldn’t technically command Myrtle to do anything, and all she said was that Al had come by for a chat. She was lying out her ears, but Maddie and Rose had to admit a temporary defeat.

Now in the library, Maddie sighs and agitatedly taps her quill on her parchment. She, Rose, Scorpius, and Tommy have been trying to pinpoint all of Al’s new mannerisms for an hour, with Maddie taking her usual extensive notes, and she still feels like they’re missing something. She’s written everything down, she’s made people repeat offhand thoughts just to get them down, but she still must be missing something. There has to be something they’re missing – anything. All the symptoms are shaping up into something, but nothing that any of them know.

The only distinct shape they can really find is Al’s: his wrists are visibly bony, and his elbows hurt when jammed into vital organs, something Tommy learned the hard way when harassing him to eat the damn Honeyduke’s. Everything about him seems so transient, like there’s no way that it can last, but, at the same time, the acuteness of his angles makes everything so much more visible. The hints of his body that his clothes afford show a much-diminished waist, and Scorpius has needlessly affirmed for everyone that Al’s lighter.

“I still say that Myrtle was putting us on,” Rosie huffs, sinking into her chair.
“Really, Rosie?” Scorpius sighs. “Honestly. Your mother was the most brilliant witch in her year?”
“Shut it, Scorpius.” She narrows her eyes at him, dangerously, or what she probably wants to think is dangerously. “I don’t notice you giving any suggestions as to what’s wrong with him.”
“Because I’m in the dark as much as you are!”
“You love him so much, you care about him so much, you spend so much more time with him than the rest of us – how can you not have some kind of extra ideas?”
“Do you really think that he wants to talk about this? Have you even tried talking to him about this? Do you want to see the mess firsthand, or should I just tell you about it-”
“Rosie, Scorp,” Lily interjects softly. “This really isn’t the time, okay?”
“No, Lily,” Rosie snaps, not even bothering to think about the volume of her voice. “It’s not okay. It’s not okay that the ever-intelligent Scorpius Malfoy, who spends so much time with our relative somehow manages to not have any more ideas-”
“Rosie. No one has ideas. Al’s my brother and I have no bloody clue what’s wrong with him. Why? Because he’s not talking to anybody about it. So don’t go at Scorp for not having ideas.”
“Please don’t get us thrown out,” Hugo practically whimpers.
“It could be a parasite?” Tommy offers hopefully.
“Can’t be,” Maddie retorts knowledgably. “There’d be other symptoms.”
“Like what?”
“Well, that’d depend on the kind of parasite, but he’d be exhausted-”
“He is exhausted! Last Wednesday – last Wednesday, at dinner, when he sat at Ravenclaw’s table by mistake, and he was practically falling asleep on you before Scorpius came and-”
“That was after Quidditch practice, Davies,” Scorpius huffs. “The way he pushes himself at that stupid sport, it’s no wonder he did that.”
“At least he’s trying,” Rosie snorts.
“That notwithstanding,” Maddie continues. “He’d have a fever, he’d have – there’d be other things going on, and-”
“And if we’re not at the pitch in time for his game,” Lily points out in a last-ditch effort to calm them all down, “he’s going to murder all of us.”

Of course, everybody knows she’s right. Al has to have an apparent fervor about Quidditch, otherwise he looks suspicious, to say the least. You don’t just go from skipping every match to read Muggle science fiction, or snog your boyfriend, or debate silly things with your female best mate to being the star Seeker of Slytherin without saying something. The fact that Gavin Nott is the Captain this year doesn’t help, either. He and Al may not be best friends, but they’re friendly enough, and it’ll look like a case of friends putting friends on the team if Al doesn’t live up to the position. It’ll look even worse if he doesn’t live up to all the hype that Gavin, Damien Pucey, and Hugo have been building up – and the worst part will be if anyone points out that Hugo got magically suspended by his ankle by a group of boys in his year, for daring to say that Al was as good a Seeker as James. Even if Al is Hugo’s cousin just as much as James, it’s against some unwritten rule for a Gryffindor to say anything positive about a Slytherin when Gryffindor victory is on the line.

If she had to pick the one new mannerism that she likes the least in Al, Maddie would have to pick this ruddy Quidditch thing. One of the things they bonded over early on was how much they hated that stupid sport, for their different reasons. Maddie hated it because it was a pointless spectacle that only served to make some people look better than other people, even though luck was a huge factor in everything; Al hated it because his family had given him a Quidditch hangover by the time he was seven. Maybe it’s escaped the notice of most of Hogwarts, but the fact that he went from only reading what happened to his mum’s team (and, at that, only when Lily said that something big had happened) to knowledgably ranting for fifteen bloody minutes about who was a better Seeker, Viktor Krum or “Dangerous” Dai Llewellyn, is inhumanly worrisome, in Maddie’s book.

The weather today, though – that isn’t even the least bit concerning. For being November, it’s surprisingly sunny and, while not warm per se, it isn’t freezing. Al is, by his own admission, just glad that it’s not raining like it has been for the past two weeks. Mothering isn’t normally Maddie’s style, but she can’t help but think that, if it were raining, she’d do anything in her power to keep Al from playing. With how skinny is and how ill he’d get in the cold and rain – she’d stun the little prat if she had to, just to keep him safe. But he got his good playing weather, so there isn’t any need to fear about that. There’s need to worry about something, though, or so Maddie thinks as she follows Lily, Rosie, Scorpius, Tommy, and Hugo into the stands to wherever they had Logan stake out seats. Once they’ve settled in, she leans forward, teetering dangerously on the edge of her seat, expectantly waiting for the players to file in like tiny insects coming out of a nest.

When they do, she picks out Al immediately, and it’s hard not to see him, since everyone else on the Slytherin team is a few inches taller and a good deal more physically substantial than he is. Even the Beaters, Higgs and Urquhart, are bigger than he is and they’re third years. Maddie keeps focused on the action while Gavin and James Potter come to centerfield and shake hands. She hears the whistle blow and watches intently as players mount their brooms and kick off. She makes sure that she’s paying attention while Al bobs and weaves through the other players and dodges Bludgers, looking for that ruddy Snitch. But it isn’t long until Maddie remembers when this started instead.

An easy estimate would place the root of these problems in September, when Al came back to school, thin again but refusing to eat anything, especially not anything he liked. Maddie has no time to suffer easy estimates. By her reckoning, Al’s problems truly started back around last Christmas: OWLs were coming, classes were stressful, his parents were fighting, his uncles weren’t helping, Lily had gotten involved (as involved as third years could get) with that vile Robert Hargreaves, the Muggleborn fifth-year who wanted to use her as an in to her dad – and, more importantly to Maddie’s concerns, Al’s weight gain started. The thing is, they should’ve seen it coming. They all should’ve seen the initial gain, and these present problems, coming: Al was ill just before the Christmas hols, so he’d lost weight from not eating, and, given how his Gran is, they should’ve expected pampering and overeating, which was exactly what he got. Even Al admitted freely that Gran Weasley had barely left him alone, and that she hadn’t let him leave Christmas supper until he’d had thirds of everything.

Not that this was weird. The Christmas hols have always been troublesome for everybody, at least in Maddie’s experience – the sheer number of times she’s heard her actor dad complain about high-calorie food and how he won’t be able to fit in his costumes is ludicrous on its own. And, to be fair, Al certainly falls into the subset of “everyone.” Nevertheless, his weight gain hadn’t been a problem then. All his clothes still fit, and even his trousers from his Aunt Fleur had forgiven the fact that he was a bit softer around the middle – but then he apparently didn’t stop overeating. It wasn’t like he ate that much more in public, or anywhere that Maddie saw – no one even noticed that he was gaining weight for a while. Maddie didn’t notice anything at all, until Valentine’s Day came and a massive House Elf mishap made life complicated.

For no apparent reason, around that time, clothes wound up with the wrong people all across the castle. For example, Maddie wound up with Scorpius’s clothes, while he wound up with Logan Wood’s; her clothes turned up with Tommy (who took to wearing her skirt a bit too enthusiastically), and some third-year Hufflepuff girl wound up with Logan’s. Al wound up switched with Rosie, which was rather problematic, as she was four inches taller and a bit more streamlined than her cousin. Since it had been a Saturday when Maddie noticed, there hadn’t been a need for the dress code, and Al was forced into Rosie’s jeans and a t-shirt of hers, both of which were far too small and were impossibly unforgiving towards his softened sides and bigger middle. He had to roll up the bottoms of the jeans because the legs were far too long, while smallish love handles and a pouching tummy stuck out over the waistband and out from under the shirt, since both it and the jeans were too small. Maddie noticed all of this immediately when he joined her in the library to work on their project for Ancient Runes.

“Been hitting the Honeyduke’s lately, Albie?” she teased, giving him an affectionate smile.
Wrinkling his brow, he eyed her with an odd mix of hurt, irritation, and suspicion. “So you’re the one who got Scorp’s clothes,” he huffed, rummaging through his bag and purposefully avoiding her eyes.
“Bet I did – let him know later that he has amazing taste in trousers, and amusing taste in pants. Though I suppose you already knew that.”
“Maybe I do.” He still wasn’t looking at her.
“So, whose clothes did you get? Some second year’s?”
“Rosie’s. And don’t remind me. I know I look ridiculous, but so does she, so it’s not completely horrible.” He paused and stared intently at the table before returning to his bag and adding on, “She looks better in mine, though. Which is completely sodding unfair, if you ask me.”
“Well, the tightness of hers is rather unflattering on you, which returns us to my original question: have you been hitting the Honeyduke’s recently?”
“I gained a kilo or two-”
“Looks like a bit more than that, Al.”
“At most three, around Christmas.” He huffed matter-of-factly, “Which is fine, because Gran says that I was too skinny then anyway.”
“Your Gran would say that Lizzie Goyle is too skinny,” Maddie pointed out simply.
“Yeah, well, I actually was too skinny, so it’s fine. It isn’t a huge deal.”
“Those jeans disagree.” Smirking, she poked him in the stomach; he made a whining noise of disapproval and lightly smacked her hand away.
“Yeah, well, that’s because they’re Rosie’s.” Shaking his unruly dark hair out of his face, he sat down opposite her and opened his textbook. “It’s not my fault she’s so bloody tall and so fucking skinny, or that she plays Quidditch, so it doesn’t hurt her when Gran makes her take seconds. Probably won’t even matter when she quits the team next year because she takes after Uncle Ron. So she’s always going to have tiny jeans, and that isn’t my fault.”
“You can only blame so much on the jeans, Al.”
“I can blame bloody everything on the jeans because it’s all their fault!” Noticing that he’d raised his voice, and gotten himself rather worked up, he paused, took a few deep breaths, and then sighed, “It’s really nothing, Maddie. I mean it. Now can we please just do this project?”

His tone of voice said that he didn’t believe himself, and Maddie didn’t buy a word of what he said either. She’d poke him in the stomach more than a few more times throughout the rest of that day, and she lost count of how many times he said, “It’s just a couple of kilos” or, “It’s honestly nothing.” She wishes now that she hadn’t ribbed him so much about how he’d put on weight – but how was she supposed to know? She’s like that with everyone who matters to her, and it’s just a way to say, “I love you.” She points out all the so-called flaws and all the apparent eccentricities of all the people she loves because she loves said “flaws” and “eccentricities” the best of everything about them. And now she’s gone and messed up Al – her best mate ever, the first person she told about her crushes on Rosie and Allison MacMillan, the only person she trusted with the knowledge that all three of her parents (even the mind healer) had started going to therapy after Rita Skeeter gave the arithmancer dad a panic attack followed by a depressive episode that lasted three weeks – and she went and messed him up to the point of mindless self-destruction…

“Maddie! Look!”

Without being aware of it, she’s apparently phased out, and now Rosie shakes her shoulder, bringing her back down to Earth. Whatever the score is doesn’t matter to Maddie, or to anyone: everyone’s too busy staring at Al and James by now. One of them must have seen the Snitch because they’re both rocketing towards the ground – any minute now, they’ll have it – they’re neck and neck, but Al has a slight advantage – they’re closing in – they’ll have to get it soon, any second now-

Al pulls out of the dive first, his hand clenched tightly around something gold.

“He’s got it!” Amelia Jordan shouts into the magical megaphone. “Albus Potter, Slytherin’s new Seeker, has beaten his brother to the Snitch! Slytherin wins!”

The stadium erupts in cheering, and Amelia rattles off the score from there, but Maddie isn’t listening; something’s on her radar now that needs her attention now. As Al flies around the pitch, holding up that idiotic, flying ball, the sleeve of his Quidditch robes comes down, and Maddie can see his whole arm. Even with the distance and the speed at which he’s flying factored in, it’s disturbingly thin. And she’s done this to her best mate…

Time seems to fly by after the match; all Maddie is really aware of until dinner is that she doesn’t see Al at lunch. He comes to dinner, which is good for all the Slytherins, because they feel the need to celebrate their new Seeker’s triumph with a raucous party, and it’s better for him because, as Maddie can see, he actually eats. He eats a lot. More than Maddie can remember seeing him eat – and he makes a huge show of eating it, too, shoveling everything in rapidly – and what he eats is, literally, everything. Not a plate on the Slytherin table goes untouched by Albus Severus Potter, especially not the enormous chocolate cake that Urquhart and Higgs stole from the kitchens, of which Al has three large slices.

Then, as abruptly as this fit of overeating started, Al leaves the Great Hall with an odd sense of purpose about him. Apparently, this escapes everyone, save Maddie and Scorpius, and across the distance between their tables, they exchange a Significant Look. Whatever Al is doing, and despite the fact that they don’t know what it is, they know for certain that it’s bad. She feels the worst for Scorpius at this moment; from the look on his face, she can tell that he actually thought that Al was done being so ludicrous about his food.

They wait fifteen minutes before looking at each other again; Al still isn’t back yet.

They wait another fifteen and watch as everyone else begins to file out; Al is still missing. When they meet outside the Hall, Scorpius says that he’ll go check the dormitory. Maddie heads for Moaning Myrtle’s loo, moving like the whips of Hell are behind her. If that ghost was trying to pull a fast one on her and Rosie, there’s no way she’ll be able to do it when Maddie comes in and sees the truth.

Maddie’s careful with the door, sneaking in quietly and looking for anything. Listening for anything. She just needs one lead, one tiny little hint that Al’s here-

“Would you stop looking at me like that?!”

And there it is. The voice is unmistakably Al’s, and knowing how often people use this loo, he’s no doubt talking to Myrtle. Although her first instinct is to run into his stall and announce her presence, Maddie hangs back and leans against the wall to listen. Maybe this will finally explain what’s wrong.

“Look, Myrtle, do you want to see me?” There’s a pause, and what sounds like a gasp from Myrtle. “Look at that. There – you can see me, are you satisfied?”
Myrtle whimpers, “Put it away.”
“Yeah, I know, disgusting, isn’t it?”
“I can see your-”
“Look where my hands are, Myrtle! Look at it! Do you believe I’m not skinny enough yet?”
“Well, you’re hardly what I’d call fat.”
“How can you look at me and say that?!”
“I can see your ribs, Al!”
“That isn’t where my hands are, Myrtle. Look where my hands are.”
“Are you ever going to tell me why?” Myrtle sounds so oddly hurt. Not that she doesn’t usually sound hurt, but this is infinitely more personal than being picked on or having things thrown at her. “You’re in here twice a day, making yourself sick for at least an hour at a time-”
“Is there a bloody point in here, or are you just going to lecture me?”
“Well, I think I have a right to know why you’re doing this. I’m always here, anyway.”
“You’re just being curious. And nosy, too.”
“Am I not allowed to be concerned for one of the only people in this school who’s kind to me?”
“I was just screaming and cursing at you. That’s hardly kind.”
“Well, when you aren’t making yourself sick, you’ve always been very… sweet to me. And I like you, and I keep secrets for you, and I think that I should be able to know why you’re doing this. If you want me to keep my mouth shut, anyway.”

There’s a pause between the two of them, and Maddie can swear that she could cut the silence with any knife or charm. She needs to be in that stall with them. This is her best mate, and it’s her fault that he’s here, making himself sick on purpose and (hopefully) confessing why to Moaning Myrtle of all people. But she’s a Ravenclaw through and through, and, moreover, she’s concerned for her best mate, and she can’t go in until she knows why this is happening.

“Am I going to get an answer?” Myrtle asks softly. “Or are you just going to stare at me?”
“I can’t not do it, Myrtle,” Al sighs. “You have to understand that much.”
“But why not?”
“Because I can’t! I don’t even understand it – it’s like there’s this voice in the back of my head, and all it ever says to me is, ‘Keep going, don’t eat that it’s bad for you, hex yourself one more time and then we’re done, oh, you didn’t get enough up that time, we have to do it again, look at you, you’re so weak, keep going and you’ll be stronger, don’t complain, complaining is for babies!’ And I know it’s sick, I know it’s dangerous, I know it’s completely sodding mad, I know… I know that there’s probably something wrong with me-”
“But then why do you have to do it? If you know it’s dangerous-”
“Because it’s the only way. I mean, I… I’m never good enough. I’ve never been good enough. James is tall, and athletic, and smart, and he’s good at everything, and he’s just like Dad – he’s a Gryffindor, he wants to be an Auror, he’s the fucking family pride – and Lily. Don’t even get me started on Lily. I love her, she’s not a prat to me like James is, but… but she’s the same way he is. Everything she does, she does it perfectly. She’s thin, she’s pretty, she’s popular, there isn’t anything wrong with her except her taste in blokes and even that’s gotten better since she dumped Hargreaves… Mum and Dad always tell everyone about how brilliant James and Lily are, but they never say anything about me.”
“Al…” For the first time in Maddie’s memory, Myrtle’s voice sounds protective, oddly maternal.
“And then, after last term? Over the summer hols? Myrtle, it was wretched. They were fighting all the time – I thought they’d cause a scene sending us off on the train – and then Rita Skeeter came in with that stupid, bloody article… and she wrote a second one! About a week after the first one, she had a second one, and she said all these things, and made all these accusations… she said my dad might’ve hit me, and she said that I might’ve been sexually abused – she accused Slughorn of molesting me! Said it made sense that I was fat and gay if I’d been an abuse victim. And then the pictures… do you have any idea what seeing that kind of rubbish is like?”

After another silence, Al concludes, “I can’t go back to that, Myrtle, and I can’t get that kind of publicity, and I can’t disappoint my parents… I disappoint them enough by not being James or Lily.”
“So I suppose killing yourself is a better option?”

Maddie didn’t mean to say that. She doesn’t even fully realize that she did before the door to Al’s stall slams open and a pale, panicked Albus Potter comes out, staring at her. She stares at him back, arms folded across her chest, and she blinks. More times than is really necessary – and then there’s something hot on her cheeks. Is she crying? He comes closer to her, and she’s suddenly quite sure that she’s crying.

“What are you doing here?” Al demands, in a wobbly voice.
“You were missing for half an hour,” Maddie says simply. Her voice is just as shaky. “Scorpius and I were concerned. He went to your dorm, and I came here.”
“How much did you hear?”
“Every word.”
“Are you going to tell someone?”
“Do you have any other idea for what I should do?”
“Maddie, please, you can’t tell anybody, please-”
“Al, you’re hurting yourself! I can’t just let you keep doing that, I-”
“It’s completely fine, I promise! I know what I’m doing, I have it under control, nothing could possibly go-”
“Have you looked in a mirror recently?!” Getting hysterical isn’t something she does often. She hopes Al’s aware enough to know that. “I can see the bones in your wrists, your clothes are too big, your collarbone could probably collect water… you’re unhealthy. What more evidence do you need?”

He sighs and looks away from her, and it doesn’t take long for him to draw his wand. It takes him even less time to point it at her.

“Maddie,” he says softly. “I’m so sorry.”

She hears him say, “Obliviate,” and then everything clouds over.

Maddie has no idea where she is. She blinks more times than is necessary, and then sees that it’s Moaning Myrtle’s loo. Why on Earth is she in here? And why on Earth does Al look so hopeful?

“Al…” she whispers. “What’s going on?”
“One of your first years was in here getting sick,” he explains. “You came to help, and you did, and-”
“I’m too exhausted to have that be it…”
“Rosie said you had a long day… and it’s cold season. You might just be ill?” He comes over and hugs her. “Go down to the Hospital Wing and get looked at, okay?”
She nods. “Okay…”
“And go to bed early. You’ve been working too hard on that essay for Arithmancy.”
“Okay…”

As she leaves, headed for the wing, Maddie knows that something isn’t right here.

But, for the life of her, she can’t think of what it is.

She knows that she knew it once.

But she can’t seem to finger it anymore.