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Taym would tolerate many bodily grievances without feeling the need to risk the dubious assistance of the Life techs, but when the itching on his scalp started not an hour after he'd left Rep's room (disgusted and alarmed by what he'd seen there and feeling like Kostya needed a solid kick in the a** besides) he rapidly decided that lice were an indignity beyond what he could afford at the moment. He had retrieved treatment from a barking, angry lab tech ranting about the outbreaks and wearing rubber gloves with, he felt, too pointed an expression, and he had stopped in the hallway to uncap the bottle and sniff it.

No. He would not use that in the public showers. Taym loathed the communal showers on a good day, and slathering his head in something that smelled exactly like what it was--like medicine and pesticide--was not a thing he was willing to do for an audience.

So he'd gone back to his room and he'd spread trash bags over the bed and he'd silently hated Rep for suggesting that Taym had fleas, and now he sat with the accoutrements of his head shaving spread before him. He had not intended to repeat this performance, but the situation seemed to dictate it. He lifted one of the many cheap razors he'd set aside to ruin on the job, and parted his hair out of the way feeling disgusted to touch his own scalp.

At the first slide of the blade, a tiny, sharp pain like the prod of a blunted needle--a familiar sensation--erupted. He paused, and he tried again, and this time the sensation spread a couple of inches, persistent and stinging. With his hand motionless he considered the several possibilities that might be causing that feeling, and decided that none of them were situations he was willing to endure.

Calmly, he put down the razor. He lifted the fly-specked hand mirror, determined that his hair was enough of a curly mess to hide the spot he'd just created, not that he'd have much cared either way, and he reached for the shampoo instead.

He was, he reflected as he tried to ignore the stink of the stuff, incredibly hungry. Being hungry was a baseline state of being for Taym. Fiona had long since given up troubled-sounding, gentle suggestions that perhaps waking up sated was not a sin, and only made sharp comments when the hunger pangs threatened to slide into a weakness in his hands and arms and knees that made him unable to work, or when the odd giddiness of craving threatened to morph into actual delirium. And then he heeded her. He had, in fact, come to rely on her more than himself to determine when he needed to succumb to the demands of his body. She was his safeguard, his final alarm. And she was rustling around in his head, restless, nervous about something she wasn't articulating, but she wasn't telling him to eat, not yet.

Despite this, he thought that perhaps when he'd accomplished the unsavory task at hand, he would go and choke down an MRE, or maybe canned soup or whatever else the cafeteria had managed to provide in the thin times at hand. He wordlessly extended the suggestion to Fiona, feeling out her reaction, and got only an uneasy silence and not the surprised approval he'd been expecting.

This was the first sign that something was wrong.

The second came later, after he had eaten, and he had reason to look back on the meal unsatisfied. He was unsated, he was still hungry, and, he realized, he was unsatisfied in another sense as well: the hunger pains had been unaccompanied by their usual pleasure.

Being hungry felt good; it felt fulfilling in a way that food wasn't. It made him keen and aware, as though the act of self-deprivation had activated some sort of reptilian hindbrain hunter instinct. It was the sort of sharp focus that was probably meant to be channeled to chasing down rabbits and snatching fish out of running water, but he turned it instead to his own purposes.

And it was, above all else, the tangible benefit of his rigorous self-control. He had spent years giving in to every banal, stupid urge, chasing chemical influxes and sacrificing himself on the altar of his body's irrational demands. If he could deprive himself of something so fundamental as eating, was the unspoken reasoning, that was proof of his mastery.

The fact that the pleasure he derived from the act of self-deprivation felt like a dim echo of other pleasures long since relinquished did not occur to him. This was the opposite, he would have claimed, of an addiction. The idea that it might have been the flip side of the same coin never entered his mind.

He sat in the cafeteria in front of an empty bowl and the packaging of an MRE and, distracted by his pondering on what this lack of satisfaction implied, he licked the salt out of the inside of the cellophane from the crackers and their disgusting orange-colored processed cheese-flavored filling.

It was delicious. It was foul. He found himself craving more.

When he lay awake later in the small hours of the morning, restless, sleepless, he did not even notice that his scalp had stopped itching. There was no relief in his apparent cure. All he could think of, the only thought he could hold, too big to cohabitate with smaller concerns, was a single primal need. It normally formed the background to his racing thoughts; it was an ever-present whetstone for his mind. Typically its presence weeded out the trivial; it occupied a space that helped protect against the invasion of small anxieties.

Tonight, instead, the thought was all-consuming. Rather than a comforting bulwark against the intrusion of idle thoughts, it was enormous, and terrifying, and ancient. Fionnghal was unsettled by its presence, and told him so. It was this:

I am hungry.