the one in which I may or may not be trying to communicate my own thoughts and feelings by pushing it onto Pon. ANYWAYS @pawsomelybuggy consider your request painfully fulfilled. Also!! Including a headcanon by @my-blood-is-maple-syrup that after landing on Earth, Pon develops an unhealthy relationship with food as a way to cope with his trauma :D
After landing on Earth after everything that happened, Pon quickly found that Earth had so many new, and different foods. And he wanted to try them all.
At first, that was all it was, just a desire to try all the wonderful new things. Later, he would be able to define it as an unhealthy eating disorder. He would go through periods during where he would vaguely realize that he had been eating uncontrollably. It always made him feel sick, and soon, he found that he had put on a bit of extra weight.
And sometimes, people said things that the didn’t mean, or that they didn’t realize would hurt. That, unfortunately, was just the way it was sometimes, and Pon had to work to remember that. So, when Pon heard Kai say something that maybe he shouldn’t have, he had to try his hardest to put it past him.
But it was so hard to do that. The words would float through his head at random points throughout the day, and he knew it could be solved easily, if he just sat down with Kai and told him that his words had affected him in a way that Kai might not have meant. It was easier said than done.
And so he said nothing, and opted to take more than a couple long looks at himself in the mirror, wondering just when he had let himself be cooped up by the trauma of his past. His mind was becoming an unbearable place, plagued with exaggerated images of himself, and whispering thoughts as delicate as a spider’s web that caused destruction like a hammer on a vase.
He felt alone, surrounded in a cloud of suffocating dark that poked its way into every crevice of his mind. There was no end to its effect, nowhere he could hide, nothing he could do.
If it wasn’t bad enough being trapped in his own damaging thoughts, it didn’t seem that Kai or Ezra had noticed. Both boys being perceptive, it might have hurt that neither seemed to have noticed the stark change in Pon’s whole being.
So some days, while he couldn’t stop himself from mindlessly eating, other days, he couldn’t find the strength to drag himself out of bed. On those types of days, he would watch movie after movie, listening closely to the music selection so he could think about the part they played in the story on the screen.
And then, one day Pon was in the kitchen, blankly staring into the fridge, his mind a million miles away, headphones in his ears and a large, dark blue hoodie swallowing him up. He had been so lost in his thoughts he didn’t notice Ezra was trying to talk to him until the boy tugged an earbud out of Pon’s ear. When Pon jumped, startled, Ezra backed up a step. “Sorry, I didn’t think that that might have scared you.” Pon shrugged.
“It’s fine, did you need anything?” He asked, closing the door to the fridge, embarrassed that he couldn’t recall how long he had been standing like that.
“Well Kai said he was worried about you— to be honest, he can’t stop talking about you— said you weren’t physically responding to him, and not responding through your phone.” He shrugged, sticking his hands in his pockets, and Pon’s brows furrowed.
“Oh, I think my phone’s been dead for a couple days.” Pon didn’t realize how that sounded weird until he saw the worried look on Ezra’s face, so he lied, adding “I can’t seem to find the charger, that’s all.”
Ezra nodded once, something in his eyes saying he didn’t fully believe the lie, but Pon plastered a fake smile and hurried out of the kitchen and to his room, locking it behind him. He shut the blind that had been opened earlier in the hopes of lifting his mood, drenching the room in a grey tone. After, he flopped onto his bed, flipping the hood of his sweater over his head, a feeble attempt at comforting himself.
A knock sounded on the door, and Pon made some noise of acknowledgement. “Pon?” It was Kai, and Pon couldn’t help but pick up his head to look at the door. Despite the mood he was in, there was something about Kai that made it impossible to ignore him.
“What?” It sounded snappish, and Pon winced at the harshness, felt the nonexistent tears sting his eyes.
It took a few moments to hear a response, but eventually, Pon heard Kai ask if they could speak alone, and Pon found that he was dragging himself off the bed and unlocking the door. When he laid on the bed again, he could feel Kai sit beside him, and could feel the hand on his back rubbing comforting circles. “What’s happening between us?” The circles paused as Kai asked the question, lying himself on Pon’s back.
Pon breathed in and held it for a couple moments before sighing it out. “I don’t know. Something in me, in my mind, feels so weird.” His heart pounded, because was he really going to do this? “Nothing… nothing feels worth it anymore, and I hate the way I look.” The contemplative silence drove itself into Pon’s skin, irritating him enough to get him to add “And I heard what you said to Ezra the other day.” With everything out there, Pon finally released a breath he hadn’t thought he was holding, and with it leaving, a huge weight fell off his shoulders. Maybe now he would stop feeling this way.
The silence in the room was filled with tension, uncomfortable and overwhelming. “Pon, I—” Kai’s words trailed off into a hesitant static. Taking a deep breath, Kai continued, sitting up. “I didn’t realize that what I said at the time had the capacity to hurt you. I should never have said it at all, and I know it doesn’t begin to show it, but I am so sorry.” Towards the end of the sentence, Pon could hear a wobble in Kai’s voice.
His best friend sniffed “I hate that you feel this way, and that I caused this. I wish you knew how much you mean to me, because I don’t think I could ever have gotten to this point if it weren’t for you being by my side through it all.” Pon turned his head slightly, and could make out Kai, tears sliding down his face.
“If you could give me another chance, I promise you I will be better.” Kai turned glazed eyes to Pon, who already knew his answer.
It was a mistake, and he knew it the whole time, but hearing Kai acknowledge that it was wrong without making any excuses was so… good. And things don’t go back to normal because of an acknowledged accident, but maybe Pon would have to accept that things don’t get fixed overnight. But he turned to Kai “Of course I forgive you, dummy. I knew it wasn’t what I was thinking it was, but there’s something wrong, I think. And so it kinda became something that just haunted me.” He opened his arms, and Kai immediately leaned into the proposed embrace.
“I know maybe it’ll take a while for you to believe it, but I love you no matter what you look like, or what’s going through your head.” Kai declared, and Pon had to admit, being told he was loved was so different, and so much nicer than just knowing without acknowledging.
Mental health— a term he would soon learn from Ezra— isn’t something that heals overnight, and Pon knew it would likely take years for him to get to a point where things didn’t make his brain throw him into any sort of crisis, but at least now he knew that Kai— and Ezra— would be there to help him on his journey to being okay again.
And who knew, maybe he would learn to love himself along the way.
