Skin And Bones; Harry Styles

Sometimes Harry gets tired of it. He doesn’t like waking up to the voice yelling at him to get his fat lazy bum up for a morning run every day, he doesn’t like how the voice says such nasty things to him all the time. Sometimes it gets difficult to believe the voice when it tells him that it only hurts him because it loves him, because it wants him to be perfect. Because it chose him, out of everyone else, and he should feel special about that. Sometimes Harry gets tired of listening to the voice, and he listens to himself.

That’s when he dares to eat, when he thinks the voice is asleep, to sneak into the kitchen and find the bag of crisps and the packet of biscuits and the bars of chocolate and the stashes of sandwiches and cans of tuna and slices of cheese and everything else that the voice never allowed him to touch. He sits down with trembling hands and opens the packets, and suddenly the voice wakes up, demanding to know what he’s doing. But he ignores it, begins to eat. He stuffs the food into his mouth, and it feels so good to have some sort of nutrition inside of him. He keeps eating, finishing the entire stash that he’s collected to the point of his stomach being ready to burst. All the while the voice is screaming at him, telling him that’s he’s weak, that he’s worthless and fat, that’s he’s nothing but a fucking traitor.

Once he’s done, Harry sits back and stares at what he’s done. The voice has calmed down now, but it’s still coldly furious as it demands him to go to the mirror. Harry meekly obeys, not wanting to anger the voice any further, and he follows the voice’s orders to strip naked in front of his reflection. The voice begins lecturing him, telling him where all that food he’s just eaten goes, and then the voice just tells him that he’s fat, that if he ever disobeys it again, he’s always going to be the fat cow he is today.
Harry starts to cry, god he feels so fucking guilty now. He never should’ve disobeyed the voice, what was he even thinking? The voice was always right, who was he to even try to question it?

The voice makes him go over to the toilet bowl, brings him down to his knees in prayer, and makes him beg for forgiveness as he purges the meal out. When he’s done, his eyes are bloodshot and his mouth is sore and there’s pain in every little breath he takes, but the voice tells him that he deserves it, and Harry believes it. He believes that this is what will happen if he ever disobeys it again, and he knows that this is the price he will have to pay.

Harry spends so much time investing in the voice, until he loses everyone else and the voice becomes all he has. He hates the voice, but each day he grows to need it more and more. The voice tells him that it’s the only one who wants him to be truly happy, the only one who loves him this way.

Sometimes he tries to bleed the pain away, and this is always a delightful surprise to the voice. It loves how he cuts his skin with the razor, and it tells him over and over that he deserves this, that it is proud of him. It loves how he bleeds for it, loves to see him believe that he deserves this pain, loves it when he cries.

The voice controls everything he does, from the smiles that he fakes to the meals that he skips. It makes him suck in his stomach, makes him spend hours in the gym, working till he’s ready to faint. But he can’t, he can’t be dizzy because the voice refuses to cut him some slack.

You’re stronger than this, it whispers. If you don’t work for it, you don’t deserve it. Go run another five miles, only then will you be skinny.

Harry tiredly obeys and soon he’s weak as hell, and he can’t possibly finish the rest of the five miles, he can’t, he just can’t because he’s so exhausted. He tries to reason with the voice, but it’s upset that he’s disobeyed it yet again, and that night Harry will spend the night swallowing multiple laxatives and sitting with extreme discomfort on the toilet for hours, his entire stomach hurting and cramping until the voice is appeased again.