Chapter Text
Eating is touch carried to the bitter end.
- Samuel Butler II
0.
A’Kun has lived too long and forgotten too much to trust his saviors, if that is indeed what they are. After all, the small group of experienced grave robbers had clearly been surprised to find him still alive when they unsealed the tomb. Saving him (from starvation, from zombies, from men far scarier and more brutal than both) was likely an accident, then. He is not surprised; his mind is inconstant at best, but he remembers the glint in their eyes when he was roughly tipped out of his basket in front of them: shock, but not pity; curiosity, but not outrage.
This group has already left him to die once.
Now, sitting around the fire, the men sing and joke. The man with the metal claw (Chen Laoban , the other men had referred to him, voices low with respect and hoarse with what might be fear) sits apart, just as A’Kun himself does. A’Kun can feel the heavy press of the other man’s gaze on him -- barbed-wire sharp and glass edged.
(A’Kun thinks he has felt that look before, thinks he remembers being weighed and found wanting, but the memory slips away when he tries to inspect it.)
The men on the other side of the campfire smile, and gesture, and hand him a bowl of stew. A’Kun is hungry, starving even, his growling stomach thunderous to his ears. And yet even still, something unnameable within him, deep and unknowable in his core, screams (fear / anger / insistence) when he picks up the spoon.
He does not eat.
Later, when the campfire has dwindled to embers and the sound of singing has been replaced by the rumble of snoring, the man with the metal claw leans into his tent and tosses him a sealed protein bar.
A’Kun examines the crinkly packaging, turning the wrapped item back and forth in his hands.
This, A’Kun eats.