He is ready for it. When an unfamiliar, gnawing sensation strikes, he has a list prepared.
First: put the meat in the fridge to thaw. He did that when he woke up.
Second: at first sign of possible hunger, take directly to patch. Leave note on fridge.
There's a patch of soil out in the woods that's soft enough to dig down into. He's practiced the route there and back, and left markers on trees to point the way. None of that should be necessary if he's in his right mind, but that isn't something he can guarantee.
The note is also pre-prepared. It will tell Ingo and Emmet (though he shouldn't be out in the sunlight anymore, even if he does recover swiftly) where he is, why he's there, and what he won't resent them for doing if things go wrong.
With what was once most of a person's body in his backpack, Gladion slips out onto the balcony, drops to the ground, and crosses the tree line dividing yard from forest.
And then, something changes. [cw WHAT DO I CW THIS EXACTLY? not gory just kinda existential and dissociative] [These woods are becoming familiar to him, slowly. As a place, and as a presence - a neighbor, perhaps a friend in the making, with habits to learn and to learn from. A community, with beginnings and ends tangled up in itself. A battlefield, where some fall and the victors feed.
That's how natural places work - it takes an enormous inflow of resources to pretend at saving everyone, plus some deception on the side. Without an arbiter to pick favorites and unfavorites and to declare the cost worthy and forgiven, the scales fall even and the carnage spreads itself across everything and everyone. A place like this leaves you free to take on exactly as much as you can carry: one life in the arms of another.
He leads himself to the patch of soft earth, and unwraps his lunch.
His cost is red and wet.
Time slows. Time stops.
He can't eat this.
But he's hungry.
But he can't eat this.
But time won't move again until he does.
When finally he falls through forever, he lands somewhere under the topsoil, staring up from a world inverted. Bones and fur and other slow-rotting things dot the humus like stars; death is life, black and teeming, and beyond the leaf litter lies the deathless lifeless wasteland of nitrogen gas and its mix-ins and the fluid-gold flow of sunlight.
His human part, projecting strange and lonely into that abyss, pries holes into the living world and fills them with red and wet salvage.
The greatest surprise and comfort is that when he grows to reach for it, to pull it under molecule by molecule, he's not at all alone. His scraps feed the teeming world. It's almost disappointing to have to deny his tablemates some of the meat and feed his human part up there in the emptiness, but he feels his hunger in two places, so it seems important to try to sate it in both. It's the only way to avoid a frenzy, after all.
2/5/23 first feeding
He is ready for it. When an unfamiliar, gnawing sensation strikes, he has a list prepared.
First: put the meat in the fridge to thaw. He did that when he woke up.
Second: at first sign of possible hunger, take directly to patch. Leave note on fridge.
There's a patch of soil out in the woods that's soft enough to dig down into. He's practiced the route there and back, and left markers on trees to point the way. None of that should be necessary if he's in his right mind, but that isn't something he can guarantee.
The note is also pre-prepared. It will tell Ingo and Emmet (though he shouldn't be out in the sunlight anymore, even if he does recover swiftly) where he is, why he's there, and what he won't resent them for doing if things go wrong.
With what was once most of a person's body in his backpack, Gladion slips out onto the balcony, drops to the ground, and crosses the tree line dividing yard from forest.
And then, something changes. [cw WHAT DO I CW THIS EXACTLY? not gory just kinda existential and dissociative]
[These woods are becoming familiar to him, slowly. As a place, and as a presence - a neighbor, perhaps a friend in the making, with habits to learn and to learn from. A community, with beginnings and ends tangled up in itself. A battlefield, where some fall and the victors feed.
That's how natural places work - it takes an enormous inflow of resources to pretend at saving everyone, plus some deception on the side. Without an arbiter to pick favorites and unfavorites and to declare the cost worthy and forgiven, the scales fall even and the carnage spreads itself across everything and everyone. A place like this leaves you free to take on exactly as much as you can carry: one life in the arms of another.
He leads himself to the patch of soft earth, and unwraps his lunch.
His cost is red and wet.
Time slows. Time stops.
He can't eat this.
But he's hungry.
But he can't eat this.
But time won't move again until he does.
When finally he falls through forever, he lands somewhere under the topsoil, staring up from a world inverted. Bones and fur and other slow-rotting things dot the humus like stars; death is life, black and teeming, and beyond the leaf litter lies the deathless lifeless wasteland of nitrogen gas and its mix-ins and the fluid-gold flow of sunlight.
His human part, projecting strange and lonely into that abyss, pries holes into the living world and fills them with red and wet salvage.
The greatest surprise and comfort is that when he grows to reach for it, to pull it under molecule by molecule, he's not at all alone. His scraps feed the teeming world. It's almost disappointing to have to deny his tablemates some of the meat and feed his human part up there in the emptiness, but he feels his hunger in two places, so it seems important to try to sate it in both. It's the only way to avoid a frenzy, after all.
Time stretches. Time crawls.
He and the soil chew it all down to nothing.]
[And then,]
Oh.
[Oh.
Oh...
What the fuck?]