The Colour Of Hunger

by Vindemiatrix

Another drabble. No idea what's going on here.

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Hunger is a bruise, the colours of dirty sunsets; purple, blue, sickly yellow edged with grey. Not red, as some would think; there's nothing angry or passionate about hunger that extreme. Hunger is a sullen pain, a sharp sulky nausea, a whole-body sickness as you begin to devour yourself from the inside out. Hunger is not like any other pain. You can walk with a knife-wound, a bullet-wound; you can pick yourself up and carry on. Hunger incapacitates you.

The Underlanders had not fed me for sixteen days when my prison door finally opened. The rescuers carried me out, too spent to talk, to move; too eaten, with the stumps of my fingers still lazily dripping blood. But still conscious. Still horribly, painfully conscious.

My recuperation took months, sealed into the cool stone walls of the army hospital, as they reintroduced food to my life. Plump nurses cooed as I regained weight, as what was left of my fingers healed over, as I learned to walk again. I sat in the courtyard, sometimes, in the weak winter sunshine, ignoring the sideways glances of the other patients at my hands. I was a local legend within that impregnable fortress. The soldier who ate himself to stay alive.

There were no windows on the outside world, there. I learned news in dribbles, in fragments, from the other soldiers that came in and left. Whispered voices. The Underland army was driven back, or it was advancing. Cities were captured, liberated, destroyed. Farms were burned, supply caches looted. Another Underland system of caves, another prison opened with no survivors found.

I learned that my sixteen days of hunger was not the cruelty of the Underland. My sixteen days had been the period between the capture of the Underland prison and massacre of the guards, and the opening of the cell doors. I starved because my rescuers had killed the guards and never thought to open the cells until the order came from the Floating Fortress. Sixteen days I starved due to bureaucracy, and chewed upon my own fingers--

The day came when I was fit and ready to leave: on the outside, at least. The hospital doors creaked open, and I stepped through the portal of sunlight to find myself on top of a mighty hill. Around me I could see for miles, the Overland stretched out under a vast blue sky.

Around me, the farms burned. Smoke plumes hung in the still air like columns holding up the sky, from blackened fields, from ruined crops, from lands razed of all life.

The Overland put a gun in my hands and told me to get back out there. But the famine is imminent. Even now, our army survives on plunder and remnants, as the civilians starve to death and stories come from the homeland of entire villages turning to cannibalism. The hunger approaches. Even now, as I crouch in this trench, bullets rattling over my head, the hunger approaches me, and I feel its first, bruise-purple grip.

The Overland put this gun in my hands, and it is only right that I use it. And so fittingly.

I will never go hungry again, I think, as the barrel makes its way inescapably to my mouth.

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