⠀❝⠀If im the first person you've seen in a while, what have you been eating .ᐣ⠀Or drinking .ᐣ⠀❞ / hubby for wifey
Slay the Princess! || Accepting!! || @hellbloom
Gabriella did not answer right away. At first, it looked as though she had not heard him at all. She sat on the floor beside the bed, knees pulled close to her chest, one of the blankets dragged down around her shoulders like a shed skin. The apartment was almost completely dark, curtains drawn tight, every lamp off except for the weak blue glow of her phone facedown on the carpet. Even the little nightlights she usually kept on for comfort had gone dim, their batteries drained, their magic sputtered out. The air smelled wrong. Stale tea. Cold coffee. Dust. Something sweet rotting in a mug on the dresser. There were plates near the bed, some untouched, some picked at. Toast gone hard. A bowl of soup with a skin formed over the top. Crackers crushed into the sheets where she must have fallen asleep with them in her hand. Lemon had tucked himself into the corner of the room, wings pressed close to his fuzzy body, antennae lowered. He gave a tiny, worried squeak when the witch finally stirred.
Her eyes lifted toward Loux slowly. They were not quite right. Hazel, yes, but threaded too brightly with green, like something beneath the surface had woken up and forgotten how to pretend. Her pupils were wide despite the dark. Too wide. Her freckles stood out sharply across her face, but her skin looked drained beneath them, lips dry, hair tangled around her shoulders in a mess of gold. “I ate,” she said, but the words came out uncertain. She swallowed, throat bobbing as she tried to think back through the fog. Morning and night had blurred together. Time had become something soft and useless, folding over itself until she could no longer tell whether she had slept for hours or simply stared at the wall until the sun went down.
“I think I ate.” Her brows pinched together, shame flickering across her face before fear could swallow it. She looked toward the plates, as if the answer might be there, as if the evidence of human food should have been enough to prove she was fine. “There was soup,” she murmured. “And toast. Lemon kept yelling at me, so I made tea. I tried to eat the crackers, but they tasted like paper.” She pressed a trembling hand against her stomach, fingers curling into the blanket. “Everything tastes like paper.” The confession seemed to frighten her once it left her mouth. Gabriella looked down quickly, golden hair slipping forward to hide her face. Her body shook, not violently, but with the awful, quiet tremor of someone whose strength had been leaking away for days without her noticing.
“I thought maybe I was sick,” The witch whispered. “Or tired. Or maybe it was the thing... inside me acting up again.” Her hand moved higher, pressing over the center of her chest. Beneath her palm, something pulsed. Not her heartbeat, not exactly. Something deeper. Hungrier. Restless in a way she did not have words for. “The voices got loud,” she said, barely audible. “Not like before. Not one voice. A lot of them. Like they were in the walls. Like they were under my skin.” She gave a small, broken laugh that held no humor. “They kept saying I was starving.” Her gaze flicked to him again, and for one terrible second, her eyes did not land on his face. They went to his throat. To the pulse there. The living warmth of him. Gabriella noticed herself noticing and recoiled as if burned. Her hand flew to her mouth, and horror washed over her features, immediate and sharp enough to cut through the haze.
“No,” she breathed. “No, I didn’t mean to do that.” She shifted backward, blanket dragging with her, until her shoulder hit the side of the bed. “Don’t look at me like that. Please.” Her voice cracked. “I don’t know what’s wrong with me.” There it was. The fear beneath everything. Not hunger, not weakness, not embarrassment over the state of the apartment. Fear of herself. Fear of the thing inside her that knew more than she did, the ancient instinct she kept mistaking for illness because the alternative was too awful to hold. She pressed both hands over her mouth now, as if she could keep whatever waited behind her teeth from waking. “I’m hungry,” she whispered through her fingers. “But not for anything I have.” The words left the room colder.
The witch squeezed her eyes shut, lashes trembling. “I tried. I swear I tried. I made food. I drank water. I made tea. I even ate that awful protein bar you hate because I thought maybe I just needed something heavy, but it didn’t help.” Her breath hitched, panic slipping in around the edges. “It just made me feel more empty.” Lemon squeaked again from the corner, soft and distressed. The sound made her face crumple. “I scared him,” she whispered. “I didn’t hurt him. I would never hurt him, but I scared him.” She looked toward her familiar, grief-stricken. “I woke up standing by the window, and he was hiding. I don’t remember getting up.”
Her hands dropped slowly from her mouth. Her fingers were shaking badly now. “I heard people outside,” she said. “On the sidewalk. Laughing. Talking. Just normal people, and I could hear their hearts.” Her voice thinned. “I could hear all of them.” She looked up at Loux again, eyes shining with unshed tears and that unnatural green. “And it smelled good.” The shame of saying it nearly folded her in half. She hunched over, gripping the blanket so tightly her knuckles paled. “I don’t want that,” she said quickly, desperately. “I don’t. Loux, I don’t. I don’t know why my body wants something I don’t want. I don’t know why everything in me keeps saying food is not food.” A tremor passed through the room, faint but real. The shadows along the walls seemed to deepen for a moment, stretching toward her like they had been listening the entire time. Gabriella felt it and stiffened, breath caught behind her teeth. Then, slowly, carefully, she forced herself to breathe.
Her voice came smaller when she spoke next. “I didn’t call you because I thought I could fix it before you saw me like this.” That truth hurt worse than the hunger. She could hear it in her own voice, the old habit of hiding until she was presentable, until the mess had been cleaned up, until no one had to know how bad it got. “I thought if I slept, it would pass. And then I woke up and it was dark again. And then it was dark again after that.” She swallowed. “I don’t know how long it’s been.” She looked at him properly this time. Not his pulse. Not his warmth. Him. Her Loux. The fear did not leave her face, but something softer joined it. Trust, fragile and desperate. “I’m sorry,” she whispered. “I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean to disappear inside myself.” Gabriella reached one hand out, then stopped halfway, fingers curling in the empty space between them. She wanted to touch him. Wanted to be held. Wanted to bury her face against his chest and let his scent drown out the terrible sweetness of everything living outside the walls.
But she was afraid of what might answer. “I don’t know what I need,” she admitted, voice trembling. “But I know it’s not soup. Or tea. Or toast.” Her lips parted around a shaky breath. “And that scares me.” For a moment she sat there, small beneath the blanket, golden hair tangled, eyes too bright in the dark. Then she lowered her hand to the floor between them, palm up. An offering, but not a demand. A choice, made with what little steadiness she had left.
“If you know something,” she said softly, “if you can feel something I can’t, please tell me.” Her throat tightened. “Because I’m so tired, Loux.” Her fingers trembled where they rested against the carpet. “And I’m still so hungry.”
