Weiss Kreuz Fan Fiction ❯ Chains ❯ Decode Me ( Chapter 15 )

Notes: Thanks to an errant pass of a weed eater, my internet is down , so please forgive the slow posting of fics for a few days!


Chapter Fifteen: Decode Me

The food was good, warm and fresh and just a little spicy. At some point in his life, Aya had liked spicy food. Now, he struggled to remain polite, reminding himself to chew between bites and for god’s sake not drink too much of the water Omi set before him. That was good, too, though. Schuldig forgot the water most of the time, maybe leaving some on one of the bowls, but just as often not.

But no matter how badly his body wanted it, Aya found himself full with barely a fourth of his serving consumed. He could have whined over the fact, because he knew in some ways he was still starving, but his capacity to eat it was severely diminished. Already the food was sitting heavily on his stomach and a few more bites might counter his desperation to get it in.

~*~

Yohji tried not to watch Aya eat, but he couldn’t help it. It was an almost painful experience, seeing him take polite, little bites like he was attending some aristocratic banquet where slurping soup constituted a serious crime and strict social prohibitions prevented him actually laying it away proper guy style, chewing optional. Ken would have been an expert example, but Yohji could serve. Given a choice, the blonde would rather have Aya (and had honestly expected him to) pick up the plate and shovel the food into his mouth, not carry out this farce of graceful dining while they knew he was hungry.

When Aya stopped eating with more than half his plate still full, Yohji immediately suspected it as some extension of this theatric reserve. However, the sudden, wide-eyed question leveled at him refused all pretense in its urgency.

“Master,” and having garnered Yohji full and immediate attention with this quiet plea, “May I use the facilities?”

It took a second for the request to register.

“You don’t have to ask for that!” he barely avoided snapping. “Remember where it is?”

A nod. He had one hand clasped tightly over his mouth now.

“Go on.”

Yohji was afforded another terse nod before the boy bolted from the chair, causing it to screech against the tile floor in his wake. He hurried to the stairs and disappeared, forcing Yohji to formulate an unpleasant theory that needed little confirmation beyond the quick dash of footsteps above their heads.

“Is he okay?” Omi asked, looking distraught despite his earlier coldness.

“Yeah.”

Yohji hated it, but he couldn’t scold the boy over his body’s refusal of what was good for it. The older man had an uncomfortable familiarity with the feeling. A few months earlier, he had been a victim of what Kritiker called an “inadvertent consequence” and Yohji called a serious fuck up. He had spent several miserable days hunkered under the remains of the safe house, the first two of which (he later learned) the rest of Weiss hadn’t even been notified of his “inconvenience.” Three and a half days after the explosion, he had returned home exhausted, dehydrated, and starving.

After twelve hours of much-needed sleep, he had prepared a veritable feast of microwaveable delights and proceeded to gaze lovingly upon his spread before shoving the first of it in his mouth. After two trays, his stomach rebelled suddenly and dramatically. The worst of it was that even as he threw up, he was still hungry. And, stupid fuck that he was, Yohji had repeated this process twice before Omi limited him to warm liquids and sent him back to bed.

For almost a week he had alternated between ravenous, stuffed and sick, only slowly working his way back to regular consumption and, a rare occurrence for him, actually gaining three pounds over the next month.

Aya could stand to put on ten or twenty of his own, obviously. The boy looked more than half starved. Yohji could appreciate the slight impression of ribs his own frame offered, but the way Aya’s stood out in visible ridges made him think of hospitals and feeding tubes; and the boy’s thin wrists and ankles combined with the sharp relief of his hip and cheek bones reminded Yohji of third world hunger campaigns, and the emaciated form combined with Aya’s Japanese features was an especially disturbing monument of abuse.

It was going to take time, all of it. Shoving his own plate away, Yohji prepared to stand, but Omi beat him to it.

~tbc~

Notes: Yohji is busy taking advantage of Aya’s, ahem, position, but if you’d like to be entered in the random drawing for the soap, please click the review button below.