Work Text:
“I just want to sit down with an entire pizza,” said Kev, the guy who’d shared Jim’s station in the navigation sims for the last two months. He looked miserable. “This has been the worst week of my life and I just want to eat myself into a better mood.”
Jim wrinkled his nose and rose an eyebrow.
“Seriously? Why?”
Kev shrugged and absently pushed at a few buttons. “Just stressed I guess. You know how it is. Get stressed out and eat yourself into a coma.”
By the tone of Kev’s voice Jim felt like he should know how it is, but the truth is he didn’t. Gaila was nodding in understanding in the next station over, but seemed to catch Jim’s confused expression.
“You don’t comfort-eat?” She leaned forward, watching Jim with interested eyes and delicately arched eyebrows. Jim shrugged and shifted uncomfortably. It wasn’t something he really liked to talk about.
“Not really, no. I get stressed and I forget to eat.”
It’s not that he didn’t want to eat. It isn’t even that he didn’t think about eating. It was just that trying to eat when he was already stressed only made it worse. Once he’s faced with having to make the decision about when to eat or even what to eat, it’s easier to just…not.
For the most part it wasn’t an issue. Even when it’s bad he managed to force something down once a day, enough to keep him going. No one ever seemed to call attention to it. It was probably easy enough to miss when the one thing he ate all day happened to be a snack between classes where other people could see.
Apples were safe. He knew he could eat them wherever or whenever. He could press one button and it would fall into his hand ready to eat—no preparation needed. No decisions to be made.
The subject was dropped after that, so Jim wasn’t at all prepared for Gaila to drop a huge bowl of mac and cheese in front of him almost a month later. It had been a hellish week of tests and instructors threatening to drop him for trying to skate by on his name. Gaila grinned at him and sat down across from him with her own bowl.
“There!” She pointed to the bowl happily. “You have had an awful week. You told me you didn’t know what to eat so I made the choice for you. Comfort food, it’s good for your soul.”
Jim looked down at the bowl of shell pasta, coated in a thick and savory smelling cheese sauce. He swallowed hard and lifted his fork with a shaking hand. Suddenly, he was sitting in front of every plate of food he’d ever had to walk away from. The dull anxiety of stress from the last week was the undying hunger that he was so desperate to relieve. And exactly like all of those times before now, as much as he wanted nothing more than to put the food in his mouth, to not be hungry anymore, to just eat, he couldn’t.
He didn’t even manage to get the fork into the bowl before tears started streaming down his face. He dropped the fork and stared into the dish helplessly. It was just food. Food he liked. He didn’t have to choose it, or spoon it into the bowl, all he had to do was pick up the fork and put the food into his mouth.
He just couldn’t.
Putting the fork to his mouth seemed like a Herculean effort that threatened to make his chest collapse.
He couldn’t eat and he couldn’t breath.
Jim shoved away from the table roughly and left the mess hall as quickly as he could.
By the time he had managed to get back to the dorm he was shaking so hard he thought he might rip apart at the seams. He felt too tight, too light, too fragile and broken, like he might just break apart in the wind and disappear. The worst part though, was how stupid he felt.
He had eaten mac and cheese a hundred times before, he had ordered it, he had even craved it, but right now the very idea of having to put anything in his mouth made his stomach turn.
Jim’s fingers shook too hard to type in the code to get into his dorm. He screamed out his frustration and carefully pressed one number at a time. Forty-five seconds to type in his code, each second less stable than the last. Finally, once inside the dark room Jim grabbed the first sweatshirt he saw, threw it on and crawled under his bed.
He pressed himself into the corner where the two walls met and locked his fingers together behind his neck.
It was better and worse. He was alone with his thoughts, the knowledge that other people didn’t look at a bowl of food and break apart. He was stuck under the bed with the monstrous thought that he would always be this fucked-up. Unable to take care of himself in the most basic of ways if even the smallest stressor found its way into his life. But at least no one was there to see him fail.
Jim shook, cried, and screamed out the panic and pain, but only whimpered when the lights flicked on, slipping into his dark space under the bed.
“Jim?”
Jim closed his eyes and held his breath, trying to fight back the tears still streaming down his face. He couldn’t even begin to try and speak. He had never been so relieved to see Bones’ hands. The man was kneeling down on his hands on knees, peering under the bed.
“Jim, can you come out?”
Jim shook his head slowly, thinking hard about making his body do what he asked. He watched as Bones reached above himself and grabbed a blanket, pulling it down to the floor as he shimmied under the bed. He carefully curled around Jim and pulled the blanket around the both of them.
“Gaila came after me in a near panic. She made it sound like she had accidentally killed you.”
Jim let out a strangled laugh and carefully unhooked his hands from behind his neck. His joints creaked painfully as they moved from the strained position Jim had been holding them in for so long. He curled his fingers into Bones’ shirt, the ache receded as Jim forced them to grip again. Bones wrapped an arm around him and kissed the top of his head.
“You did everything you could to save them, Jim. I know it’s hard to remember, but you did everything you could.”
Jim swallowed hard against the knot in his throat.
“They starved.”
“So did you.”
Jim sobbed against Bones’ chest as Bones smoothed down Jim’s hair gently.
“I got to eat again, Bones. They didn’t.” His throat was too tight again, he was breaking apart again. “They died hungry.”
He was grateful that Bones didn’t say anything. Jim knew it wasn’t his fault, it just didn’t make it hurt any less.
Having a reason for it didn’t make him feel any less stupid.
Not being able to eat didn’t make him any less hungry.