[Mahiru frowns because at this moment she bascially remembers that fact, yeah. A little self-starvation never hurt anyone; she's had a couple bad busy weekends herself before, and her dad was the same way. (Well. A lot worse.) But this impulse goes beyond Mahiru's mechanical gravitation towards food as comfort, comfort as distraction, distraction as self-treatment. Involuntarily, she thinks of Kuzuryu's injunction against the rides, even though Ibuki's found that self-treatment so effective. Or has she? All four of them ended up more sad about this than they "should" have been.

Mahiru continues looking at Peko's curled form, thinks she sees blueness and shaking in the failing light. All she can imagine is the even weaker moonlight where Peko is fighting those people, not running away, and gets exhausted all the sooner, so Tanak resolves to retrieve her from the afterlife too--]

I ate before. [The small-voiced sentence isn't really a complete thought. Before the trial?] There were some other meals to make, too, you know. I wanted to take care of everything before I found Peko-chan.

[Even herself. Mahiru knows she won't be fine all by herself, of course, not any more than she thinks Peko will be.]