Control (Harry Potter Eating Disorder Story)

Chapter 1/5

It was a humid and sticky late August evening when a rough knocking to Harry Potter's bedroom door interrupted his profound, much-needed nap, his heart was racing as his owl cried out with annoyance at the rude, harsh knocking. He scolded as he realized who it must be and dug his head back deeper into his pillow.

"I don't have all damn day, boy!" His aunt's shrilly voice shouted from the other side of the door, infuriated. Her vicious hammering to the wood revealed her anger as much as her tone, "Here's your dinner, be grateful I took the time to prepare it!"

Even if all he wanted was to stay in his warm, but rather uncomfortable, bed, Harry still forced his frail body out of it and placed his glasses to his thin face as he shuffled his feet lazily towards the door.

He opened the door to see his lacking dinner, a can, in front of it, left on the floor by his impatient aunt. Harry rolled his eyes bitterly as he realized it was yet again another can of that watery soup that he had been fed all that summer.

He picked it up and closed the door behind him, placing his meager meal on the desk next to Hedwig's cage while trying to contain his fuming enmity. She hooted excitedly at the sight of food, and Harry gave her a weak smile.

She hadn't been able to be outside for the past weeks since his uncle thought he would be sneaking letters to his friends behind their backs, so Harry had had to resort to splitting his already tiny meals with her. It didn't affect him much, seeing as he hardly had an appetite that summer.

He gingerly opened the can and allowed himself to drink half of it, calculating precisely, before turning back to his frantic owl and offering it to her by placing it the closest she could reach outside of her cage. Making a decent amount of noise, she was desperately trying to drink as much as it as she could.

Harry pet her feathers tenderly as she drank, "I'm sorry it has to be like this, Hedwig. Soon, we'll be at Hogwarts again, and everything will be like it used to be," he whispered to her soothingly, but something in the back of his mind instantly reminded him that that was a lie.

And it was a lie. Things would never go back to the way they used to be, not with Sirius dead. Not with it being all Harry's fault.

Harry was all too familiar with this feeling- it felt as it if his chest was hallow, and like he had swallowed a rock along with the soup and it had gotten trapped in his throat, blocking his supply of air. His face grew hot as his eyes began to turn prickly with fresh tears.

He forced himself not to cry, he repeated that instruction in his head continually until his body finally decided to listen. He tried to focus on something less painful than Sirius, he tried to focus on the food he had just consumed, so he turned his head to watch his owl hysterically devour what was left of his insufficient soup.

Harry began to wonder when was the last time he had a real meal. He racked his brain and found that he had no clue, the Dursleys had controlled almost everything that had gone in his mouth that summer. They were determined that Harry would not waste their food and only gave him enough of their pathetic amounts of nutrition to let him live since they were scared out of their wits of wizards and their powers.

Strangely enough, Harry half-agreed with them. Privately, he concurred that he didn't deserve food, he didn't feel like any killer should be allowed the right to eat and be happy.

It was a peculiar thought, and Harry didn't know why it just seemed so accurate. It was like punishing himself, punishing himself for not listening to Hermione when she said the vision about Sirius being tortured was a trap, punishing himself for everything he had ever done, and punishing himself for killing the one person who cared and loved him, the only person he had left.