Chapter Text
The first time Wylan feels truly hungry, he is eight and holding back acidic tears.
His eyes burn with unshed grief, and he scraps at the locked door for hours before giving up. His father is not coming back. He left, just like his mom. Left the house, left everything behind, left him.
His stomach growls and his throat clenches like his father's fist. Then, he hears them. The footsteps he learned to recognize when he was six and still unable to read, still so incapable, so stupid.
He stands up from his spot, his back no longer resting on the door. His father did not leave. His father is home. He would be relieved if it did not mean that maybe his father will come to his room.
At that thought his stomach growls again before a dull pain hits him right between his ribs. Maybe he does not want his father to come. Maybe he does not want life to go on. He does not want to sit at the big, scary table in the dining-room, does not want to turn his head and feel his mother's ghost haunts the mansion, haunts him; he does not want to see his father's eyes, deprived of emotion, only shining with disappointment when Wylan is stupid enough to make his presence known.
Wylan is hungry but he swallows his nausea and sits at his tiny desk, hands flat on his thighs, eyes drowning. He should not cry. He cannot cry. It is his fault his mother died. That's what his father told him, and his father was usually right. He should have been a better son. So he dries up his tears, let them fall back into him, let them splash into a dark, unknown part of his mind, let them fill a fragile bottle his father could later smash into pieces with every one of his hits and rightful insults.
His father does not come that night. Wylan goes to bed and spends hours lying there, both hands on his empty stomach, letting the suffering ground him. At least hunger is something tangible, something he can understand. Nothing like the numbness that invaded his senses when his father told him the news, nothing like the weight in his chest when he learned he was not allowed to go to the funeral. Hunger is real and explainable; a need that should be fulfilled, a lack that makes him human, not something that leaves him speechless, sad and lonely. He cannot sleep, but for once it is not because of a ghost; not because of the unexplainable increasing rhythm of his heartbeat, not because of the knot that ties itself in his stomach when he hears a voice call him to the office.
Even in the morning he lies there, frozen on the bedsheets, because hunger is better than grief, better than anger, better than tears, and better than facing his father.