3,000 Years

Eat For Me: (Smile For Me pt 2)

A/N: Another warning for self-harm, intrusive thoughts and other such themes! Like before, it's just to give you guys a heads up in case you're sensitive with that kind of stuff. 

.....

She hated herself too.

Meliodas scoffed, examining his hand in the low light of his bedroom lamp. The injury was still there, long and deep like the many scars that Elizabeth wore. Dried blood caked his palm, the drops long evaporated and dehydrated over the day. The cut itself stretched from the base of his palm to his mid-forefinger. But it hadn't hurt. It couldn't hurt. How could it when he knew that Elizabeth, the bright beam of sunshine Elizabeth, had done much worse to herself?

He smiled at the thought of her. She was too wonderful for this world. The bullies, those who watched her suffer, didn't deserve to know her. They didn't deserve her tears, her words, her smile. Meliodas knew and believed that. He knew that Elizabeth was above the scum that populated the earth.

But to Elizabeth they were above her. She was not a shining pillar: she was a monster. She was someone who deserved her hatred, someone who deserved to feel shitty and someone who deserved the self-harm. So she cut herself, she burned herself and she chopped that beautiful hair of hers. She even went as far as to let people beat her up, never once fighting back when a gang of condescending pricks decided to jump her.

So naturally the cut was nothing to Meliodas. It was a simple scrape in comparison to everything else Elizabeth went through. But who was he really kidding comparing it to her: Meliodas had done much worse to himself. Much worse than Elizabeth had ever done to herself.

That's why he had known she was broken: he knew the signs. He could see through her mask of smiles and hopeful words; he could sense the building dread and self-hatred hidden beneath her timid and meek demeanour. But sadly, she didn't - couldn't - recognise it in him. Meliodas was too broken to be fixed now, so no-one knew that he truly was broken. No-one saw his unusually lean figure, or the blonde hair that sometimes fell out when tugged too harshly; no-one heard the looping thoughts that came into his head, or saw how he was bent over backwards trying to obey his father's wishes; no-one knew of the noose he had prepped in his closet, the day of his death only driven away because of her: Elizabeth.

But soon she would tire of him too. One day her bright smile will not be reserved for him, it will not want to be aimed at him, and that day is the day he will die. It is the day his clock will finally stop ticking.

Meliodas releases a sigh, running a hand through his thinning hair. Golden strands rain down with the motion, thin and wispy due to his own self-starvation. They match the heavy bags and skinny frame that was hidden only by his tan complexion and muscled form. Those were the only things he was thankful for these days: his skin tone and muscles. But that was only because they hid what he did to himself.

What he did to himself...

Meliodas shivered, frowning as he glanced at the plate of food before him. The family were eating out, celebrating a big boom in his father's business, and so they had gone out to eat. Naturally, Zeldris and Estarossa had been ecstatic with the news - they were tired of eating crap home cooking - but Meliodas himself was a little hesitant. Very hesitant. It showed well as he sat there, staring at the plate and fiddling with the silverware.

Numbers were running through his head, adding and multiplying and dividing, as his gut was knotting at the thought of eating even a single grain of rice. One, ten, fifty, a hundred, two hundred...the odds weren't looking good in his mind.

"Go on, eat," Meliodas' father eyes him, nudging the blonde. "Don't let it go to waste."

So Meliodas ate. He forced every last piece of that food down into his stomach, even though his throat protested to such an action. It wasn't long before his intestines began to swim and his mind began to race, numbers already crunching to calculate the calories within that one meal. It was too much; too much for him and way too much for someone who kept continually screwing up.