Kyouya Ootori eats his feelings.
Whenever he's scared, or angry, or upset, he goes straight to the cupboards, or the larder, and grabs all he can before sneaking back to his room. He shovels and crams spiced cookies, salted crackers and French bread into his mouth; chewing and only breathing when he swallows. It's the only thing he doesn't control – 'can't' and 'not trying' being one in the same – and he relishes it. It's something he can lose himself in; eating and eating until he's surpassed fullness, until his stomach cramps and he has to spend the rest of the night curled up under his covers.
He feels like shit after he binges, but he also feels better.
It works like clockwork, and the cooks never mention missing food and the maids never mention crumbs of said food in his bed and in the carpet. He also has two parents with excellent metabolisms, so it makes sense that he inherited that quality; it meant that a binge every now and then wouldn't show on his waistline.
He notices, after the first time his father hit him in front of staff, that Tachibana bought a Tupperware box of his wife's chocolate brownies to his room. He doesn't even like sweets, but he eats them all in five minutes. His loyal bodyguard says nothing when he finds his young master passed out on his bed with chocolate smeared on the corners of his mouth.
This carries on for a while. Eating and eating until he feels it all go away. Unfortunately, even his metabolism can't stave off the effects of those extra calories for long, and the waistband of his school trousers begin to press harshly into the softening flesh of his stomach. It doesn't seem too bad, however. He can actually stay warm now, and the girls of the host club seem to have a thing for boys with soft tummies; that is if the ten percent increase in his request rate is anything to go by, and how they fawn over that 'cuddly figure' of his.
He's not cuddly, but the profit margins seem to sing as he works on spreadsheets, taking bites out of one girl's shy offering of gingersnaps. They aren't half bad.
Tamaki pokes his waist a lot more than usual, but doesn't say much; he probably wondered what the girls found so attractive in a few extra pounds. Hikaru, however, makes nothing but comments and unsavoury nicknames; but Hikaru is just a bag of hot air that Kyouya would rather ignore. He barely qualifies as 'chubby', after all. He's certainly not fat.
His father adds new insults to his punches. On top of 'worthless' and 'good for nothing' and 'stupid', he adds 'fat' and 'lazy' and 'disgusting'. He says that he won't gain respect with that extra weight.
Kyouya realises that, yes, it is possible to beat something into someone – if you use enough force. He thinks that he should feel upset – the kind of upset that hollows his stomach and tempts him to fill it with junk food – but he doesn't.
He doesn't feel upset.
He doesn't feel angry.
He doesn't feel scared.
He feels numb. Like the life flowed out of him with the blood staining the office floor.
He goes to bed, not to dinner, or the cupboards, or the larder, and sleeps until his alarm goes off the next day.
Instead of stuffing himself with an obscene amount of toast and scrambled eggs, he leaves for school with nothing but his supplies and a water bottle; he's still numb from the night before and can't quite bring himself to satisfy his now ravenous hunger.
'It was all the food I've been cramming down my throat,' He thinks, 'I shouldn't be so hungry.'
When lunch arrives, his stomach cramps, but he doesn't bother to buy anything.
The weight actually isn't that hard to remove with this method.
There's no problem with his mental state, he's just dieting. Everyone does it. While it only tends to be girls that he overhears talk about this new starvation – well, what did gender have to do with weight loss?
He abstains for as long as he can, sipping water in an attempt to quiet his stomach as it pleads for something, and chews ice cubes and celery when he can't stand the hunger any more. It's effective, and the pounds seem to melt off, but there's always that pinch of skin that he could improve.
The girls are a little disappointed that their huggable host isn't huggable at all now, but a different type of fan takes over; the type that loves his nipped in waist, his prominent collar and cheek bones, the gap between his thighs. Even with the loss of certain girls, his request rate still rises by twenty percent. After all, skinny never goes out of fashion.
Kyouya Ootori eats his feelings, but it's okay.
He doesn't feel much of anything anymore.