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Persephone knows that food shouldn’t be wasted.
Even now, years past the war, wasting food is frowned upon. She knows this, and she does her best to stave off the nausea. She doesn’t quite succeed; the spoon doesn’t quite reach her lips before she directs a smile at Festus at a comment he’s just made. She lowers the spoon back into the uneaten lamb stew. No one seems to notice she’s not eating. She stirs it around; a mimicry of making progress in the meal that the Academy has served today. It’s easier to pretend than to explain why she can’t eat it.
No one asks, no one notices, except that’s not quite true.
Coriolanus sits across from Festus, beside Clemensia, and he keeps looking at her. She looks away, but it doesn’t help. She knows why. She’d been six-years-old, sitting at the dining table while her father ladled a meat stew into her bowl. She’d been so young and so very hungry then, and her father had told her that it was stray dog. She remembers the warmth of the bowl in her hands, the strangeness in the taste, different than what she expected.
But she ate it. She had to.
Eat or starve.
Her mind recoils from the memory even now. She knows what it was. She’s known for a long time, deep down, without ever letting the truth surface. That wasn’t a dog. It was someone—someone who hadn’t survived as far into the war as her family had. But she can’t think about it too hard. If she does, it all unravels, and the queasiness turns to something worse.
Coriolanus’s gaze has flickered back to her again, and Persephone smiles politely, always politely, because politeness is a shield, and shields are necessary. It’s easier this way, to pretend she doesn’t notice the way Coriolanus avoids her in the hallways, like brushing too close would leave something foul clinging to him. Easier to pretend she doesn’t see the flicker of revulsion in his gaze when their eyes meet, quick and instinctive, like she’s some terrible monster that should be repulsed.
Pretending is quite easy, actually, when they are both doing it.
She takes a sip from her glass of water, slow and deliberate, pretending not to notice the way Coriolanus grips his spoon too tightly, as though he’s forcing himself not to devour the stew like he hasn’t eaten in days. Maybe he hasn’t. He’s pretending, too. Pretending that she doesn’t disgust him, pretending that the hunger isn’t tearing at him, hollowing him out piece by piece. It is an irony that almost makes her laugh; that the memory that haunts her most seems to haunt him too, just by proximity.
***
Persephone would almost call Coriolanus a friend.
Almost, because they are certainly friendly, with years of shared classes and an overlap of friends. And he knows, Coriolanus knows, and he has not breathed a word about it to anyone. She’d thought it might have been a kindness, for him to keep it to himself. Looking back on it, she thinks it might have been fear. She’s grateful for it all the same.
Because fear makes sense to her. Fear is familiar. She recognizes it now, in the sharp angles of his shoulders, the hollowness in his cheeks, the tension in his grip on the spoon that he eats with. It’s the same fear she’s seen before, the sharp edge in her father’s eyes during the Dark Days, in the way he’d looked at her across the table, his voice steady but brittle.
It’s stray dog, he had said. You need to eat, Persephone.
So she had believed him. She had to.
You’ll get sick if you don’t eat.
Her father needed her to eat that stew, to swallow the lie along with every spoonful, because otherwise, the truth would’ve been too much to bear. And with each bitter bite, she had eaten what he had given her. Because the war did not leave room for questions, and starving was not an option. Coriolanus is starving still, she thinks, and she wonders what kind of sickness it is causing in him.
***
Coriolanus knows something of hers. Persephone knows something of his.
Not a word of it is spoken aloud.
***
Persephone does not confront him on it. Not quite.
It is a quiet thing. She gets a bowl of vegetable stew from the Dining Hall, and he offers her a polite nod when she takes a seat across from them. It is just them two, and there is not much to say. What is there to say when what is known between them are the same subjects that neither of them want to acknowledge? Words would make it real. Words would expose everything they both pretend don’t exist.
It is held in a careful balance, until the scales tip with a light push. It is Persephone sliding her untouched bowl across the table with a light comment: “I can’t eat meat.”
I can’t make myself eat meat, she knows he hears.
“It’s a vegetable stew,” says Coriolanus, and he is looking at her.
“Oh,” says Persephone, blinking, as if this is a revelation she hadn’t considered. She doesn’t move to take it back. Her hands stay folded neatly on the table, her expression as calm and polite, always polite. “I won’t tell anyone.”
Coriolanus stares at her for a long moment.
She is not talking about the stew, and she knows that he knows this. He stares at her for a long moment, his expression caught somewhere between wariness and something weightier. It isn’t about the stew. It never was. It’s about the hunger that is carved into his bones, the kind of hunger that’s as old as their oldest memories, sharpened by desperation and necessity. Persephone knows it well—knows what it means to carry something unspeakable and survive by pretending otherwise.
She sees the moment he recognizes this too.
He lifts the spoon slowly to his lips, slowly, deliberately. He eats.
***
She leaves, and Coriolanus hates her. He hates that she’s made any sort of discovery at all. He hates that she could understand. He hates that there is anything that could put them at the same level given the depravity she engaged in during the Dark Days. He hates the pity in her eyes as she tells him, assures him, promises him, “I won’t tell anyone.”
And, most of all, Coriolanus hates that he believes Persephone will keep her word.
(And she does.)