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Eiji might be innocent about many things, but he wasn't foolish enough to notice that something was wrong with Ash.
When they moved into the apartment, he was excited to meet the real Ash Lynx, the domestic one hidden behind those green eyes. However, what he found was completely different from what he imagined. He knew he wouldn't be overly affectionate or homely, since everything he'd been through must have hurt him quite a bit, but he wasn't ready to see some things either. He didn't eat. Or at least not when Eiji was there.
At first, he thought it was normal, since the change of environment and the workload may have influenced his appetite, but as time went by, he began to notice other details. When he ate with him, he always chose something with lettuce or some other vegetable. When he finished his plate, he would obsessively clean his nails. Sometimes, when he thought no one was looking, he would measure his wrists, clasping them with his fingers. But the worst revelation for him was when he saw him shirtless.
One day, he arrived injured, who knows why, but the Japanese boy decided to treat him. Ash refused at first, but after much insistence, he let him. He slowly unbuttoned his blood-soaked shirt and rolled it into a ball; after all, it was too ruined to wear again.
Eiji knew more or less what to expect from the sight of his torso. He expected to see smooth muscles marred by old cuts and scars. But the sight surprised him.
He knew Ash was thin. After all, he was easily mistaken for a model, but he was too thin. He couldn't even make out any real muscles on his body. He only saw his abs, defined by the alarming lack of fat around his waist. His collarbone was painfully prominent in his neck, and he could almost see his throat moving every time he breathed. What about his ribs? They stood out, as if showing the world how much they had been deprived of everything.
He almost burst into tears. Ash saw it, but didn't associate her sudden change of mood with how deteriorated her body looked. He thought she was simply like this because he saw her hurt. So, mustering all the courage he had, Eiji set about cleaning her body without saying a word. At some point, he was going to confront him about this, but not now. First, he had to come up with a plan of action and prepare for whatever might happen. But yes. He knew something was wrong with Ash, and he was scared it was exactly what he thought.
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Ash wasn't an idiot. He knew Eiji was suspicious of everything. He noticed it when the invitations to go out to eat increased. Or when he asked for junk food instead of groceries to cook with. He was running out of excuses to get away from everything, and he was starting to panic.
He hadn't meant for things to get so bad. At first, he ate whenever his body asked for something. Then, when work began to increase, his body stopped asking for food. And since it no longer asked for food, he didn't eat.
He tried to convince himself that the problem was that he was forgetting to take a break to eat, but as time went by, he realized it wasn't that simple. Every time he remembered to eat something, his body rejected it, showing its discontent. And because of this, he began to dread his next meal. He didn't want to feel bad; all that would do was render him useless.
The fear of eating slowly transformed into disgust, toward food and himself. It angered him how his body couldn't do something as basic as eating and digesting food. Good Lord, it was essential for survival. But no, his mind didn't grasp it, and he continued with his self-destructive habits.
There came a point where he thought he was going to die.
One day his gang invited him to eat some hot dogs at the corner, and to avoid disappointing them, he decided to go with them. He ordered one, just with mustard, because the other condiments were too much for his body, and he ate it, for the first time in a long time, with gusto.
However, the pleasure was short-lived, because when he got home, his stomach rebelled against the strange weight inside him. He quickly went to the bathroom, lifting the lid and painfully removing his food along with all the water he had drunk that day.
When his stomach finally settled, he flushed the toilet and stood up. But as he tried to stand up, bright spots filled his vision. It wasn't the first time he'd felt dizzy upon standing, but this time the spots didn't come alone.
A dull ache began in his right temple, but that was the least of his worries. His chest felt strange, as if something was violently pressing down on him with a belt. It was forcing the air out of him, suffocating him, further upsetting his unstable stomach. The pressure increased, and he almost felt like his ribs were going to break. His heart beat faster and faster from the fear that they were going to kill him in such a pathetic way. The attacker persisted, squeezing him harder and harder, increasing his headache until he couldn't bear it anymore. He prayed to any deity that the man would spare his life.
But there was no one there; it was just him within the four walls of that bathroom.
He heard the apartment door close, and he knew Eiji had come home. To the apartment. To his apartment. Before Eiji came in, he was alone. There was no one next to him torturing him, it was just his own mind playing tricks on him. He had to calm down, breathe, so Eiji wouldn't see him in that state.
So that's what he did, just as Blanca had taught him a few years ago. Inhale for five seconds, hold for three, and exhale for another five. He repeated the process about three times until he felt a little less suffocated. It was time to take action, before his absence was noticed in the apartment. With his legs still shaky, he tried to stand up, this time succeeding, and went to the sink to splash water on his face. His reflection didn't do justice to how he really felt.
Inside, he still felt very unsteady, but luckily his face didn't show it. While he was a little pale, it wasn't worrying. His eyes, on the other hand, were red, but he could pass it off as oversleeping. So that's what he told Eiji. When he left, he greeted his friend and told him he'd taken a nap as soon as he got back from the meeting with his gang. The Japanese man didn't question his lie and asked him if he wanted dinner.
He knew he should, but the idea of putting food in his mouth disgusted him, especially after that episode. If on a normal day it was already difficult for him to put food in his mouth, now, after his recent panic attack, the last thing he wanted was to trigger another one by deciding to eat more than once a day. It was almost comical how, after fighting so hard against Golzine's desire to put him on a diet, he now couldn't eat. It seemed the old man finally achieved his goal. He broke it.
"I'm not hungry," he said for the third time that day.
Because he didn't deserve it, and he didn't want it either. He needed Eiji to understand, but the Japanese man was fed up with the refusals. "I haven't seen you in the kitchen in weeks, and I could swear the last thing you ate was that hot dog from yesterday," he said. "Eat at least a little, for me."
And the boy knew that after that sentence, Ash wouldn't be able to refuse, because he didn't have the heart to waste something Eiji had made. So he gave in to the insistence and sat down with him at the table.
The meal was seemingly peaceful, with light conversation between the two and the sound of cars in the background. But inside, all Ash could think about was how selfish he was being. He had done nothing to deserve this; he had killed some guys yesterday, and the last thing he needed was to be rewarded for being a murderer.
Every bite felt like a stone in his stomach. They weighed him down, dragged him down, and made the pain in his head worse. At this point, he was giving Eiji a smile out of sheer will, because his body was trying to break.
"Just a little more," he told himself.
Until he finished half his plate and his body reached its limit. He knew that if he took another bite, history would repeat itself, so he played with the remaining food on his plate while chatting with Eiji, cutting it and spreading it on the surface to make it look like he'd eaten more. He didn't want his friend to find out, not now, because after so much time with people controlling his life, he wasn't about to lose control again, no matter how much it would hurt him in the process.
Although it wasn't as if he had complete control. After all, it was his body deciding whether they would get anything to eat, but he supposed that was better than someone else imposing things on him. He'd rather starve himself to death than have Golzine take away all the food he wanted. But Eiji wasn't Golzine, and he knew he'd never do anything to harm him, but the fear of being forced to do things he didn't want to keep him from being honest with the Japanese boy.
His mind was so muddled at this point that he didn't even know what triggered his eating problems. Was it post-traumatic stress? A way to maintain control? Self-loathing? Or some kind of macabre combination of the three?
All he hoped for at that moment was for something to pull him out of this hole he'd dug himself, because he no longer felt capable of escaping on his own.
That's why, when he fainted months later in Golzine's mansion during that visit from Blanca, he was grateful. His body had finally reached its limit, and while it hadn't been the most pleasant experience, they had finally noticed his problem.
Of course, the treatment he received there wasn't the most pleasant. Still, when his gang and Eiji rescued him, he was grateful for everything he'd suffered there.
Because weeks later, when things calmed down a bit, he was able to talk to Eiji and told him about his problem, which now had a name: Anorexia. Now that he knew what it was, he wasn't so afraid to admit it, and knowing it was an illness and not entirely his fault comforted him. The help he had refused to ask for for so long finally became welcome, because he no longer felt he deserved the suffering. The one who deserved to suffer was Golzine, the one who ruined his life, the one who almost got Eiji killed. That's why, after he died, his conscience was cleared, and he gave himself permission to heal.
The conversation was complicated, and there were many tears involved, all coming from the Japanese man, and some screams of frustration at him for being such an idiot not to tell him sooner. He accepted it all because he deserved it, just as he deserved the hug he received afterward and the promise to help him get better. Eiji also made a sort of mea culpa, because he suspected Ash's food issues and yet he didn't say anything, for fear of making the situation worse. Ash wasn't bothered by that detail because, to be honest, if he had said something at that moment, he would have gotten angry at the boy. So the two made peace, at peace with each other, and happy to finally be completely honest with each other.
That's why, when he received Eiji's letter along with that plane ticket, he couldn't help but smile, happy to feel, after so many years, a glimmer of hope. That, finally, he could eat a full plate of something and not feel undeserving. That he could go out with Max to a restaurant without looking for the option that would make him feel less guilty.
That he could finally be at peace.