Chapter Text
Sometimes the way the morning sun hits his bedroom window, it filters through the sheen of cracks and grime, resilient enough to paint golden streaks into the stagnant air that little Alistair fixated himself on. Particles of dust hovered in the spotlight, and if he blew into the air, he watched the currents spin and swirl the little particles around. It was like the time it had rained and the old rusted wheelbarrow in the backyard filled up with still water, but left a thick murky layer of dirt sentiment sitting at the bottom, so when Alistair churned his little hands inside the whole thing transmuted into a grimy brown cauldron.
He felt so small sometimes, but when he saw his tiny huffs of air make dust dance in the sunlight, he felt powerful. Like Jesus turning water into wine, he can turn rainwater into mud, he can swirl his little hands and huff into the air and become something powerful enough to move and command the elements.
Hunger made him feel so weak, but these meager power trips sustained an energy inside him that kept him going. With cupped hands he stole water from the faucet in the bathroom, and with torn pages from books he could fill his belly enough that the gnaw of stomach acid didn’t bother him too much at night. A soup he would pretend he was making, in one of the spare metal dog bowls he had stolen out from the shed, he would stir his sink water and tear faux strips of pasta from the old yellowed encyclopedias and dictionaries on his dad’s ancient oakwood bookshelf, knowing that since he left there wasn’t going to be anyone who would miss them.
He tore strips from pages of power, he thought consuming them might make him powerful too. The dictionary definitions of war, predation, king, god. Encyclopedia entries for gladiators, massacres, dictatorship, abuse.
When the dusty yellowed paper got goopy and saturated, Alistair greedily slurped down his dinner, quickly before his mother checked on him and noticed. Bad boys don’t get dinner, she always says. And Alistair had so much trouble being a good boy for her.
At first, it was a challenge, it was a goal he kept reaching out for. Her approval, her praise, her alleged reward of dinner or food when he did what was asked. But when that goal became unreliable to obtain, he found it was easier to make his own food than to jump through hoops with his mom to earn it.
Bad boys deserved sunken ribs and pale lifeless skin, then. They deserve suppers of wet paper soup to keep their stomachs from digesting themselves. They deserved to blow into the rays of sunlight in their filthy empty rooms just to feel powerful over specks of dust for a few fleeting moments.
That’s what he gets if he wants to hide under the bed when he’s frightened. If he wants to scamper around the house on his hands and knees, if he wants to growl at his mom like the dogs did. When she yelled and got scary with the dogs, they bared their teeth and growled at her, and she would bring her voice down. So Alistair growled, he growled low and deep and hard, and she'd usually stop screaming at him and tell her feral child to get out of her sights, and he gladly did each time.
Heed the warning of a growl, for a creature growls when it doesn’t want to attack, but will if it must. And little Alistair, starved and neglected to his dirty locked room for days on end, sometimes felt like his warning wasn’t being heeded very well. His side of the bedroom door was stripped of paint halfway down from his blunt outgrown nails, clawing and yelping for acknowledgement and food late into the night, but being left as ignored as the crying dogs were outside when his mother locked them out during storms. When he growled at her, she just locks him away, and tells him he can come out when he’s ready to act like a proper young man, and not a feral mongrel.
A little child growling was nothing akin to intimidation, but when he hid deep under his bed during his banishments, Alistair liked to imagine that’s what he was doing. He wanted to scare her, he wanted her to think he’d bite if she dares test him.
He’s so hungry all the time, he wants to bite her. Once their old German Shepherd snapped and bit her forearm, and she put him down because she needed seven stitches to seal the wound. The image of the jagged gash he made into the softness below her elbow seared into Alistair's mind— it must be so easy to break skin, it must feel so good to bite someone that hard if their old dog was willing to die for it.
And the taste, he could only imagine the taste.
Alistair bet it tastes better than paper soup.
And to his delight, he was right.
He was right, he was right so hard that he didn’t even feel bad enough to mourn when he ate her. He had bit her arm, her forearm right where that German Shepard once sank his canines into, but she shrieked and shoved the malnourished boy off so easily. That feeling of weakness— of hunger — swirled around deep inside him, like particles of dust swirled in sunlight, or dirt in rainwater. Something deep inside him transmuted when he grabbed the kitchen knife on the counter and pounced upon her. An emaciated little boy shouldn’t have the strength to be able to stab his own mother to death and eat her.
But then again, after his belly was filled and his hunger was sated, he didn’t feel like a little boy anymore.
It tasted of metal in his mouth, that blood— warmer and thicker than he had expected, like hot liquid iron in his mouth. Dried and smeared quicker than spilt milk or water, but there was plenty of blood in her body to spare the waste.
So much blood in the human body, he remembered thinking. More than he would’ve imagined, gushing out the strongest from the deeper of the stab wounds, and he dug his little fingers into the holes to try and grip into some kind of flesh or meat he could steal.
But his fingers were too weak and slippery, and he was still trembling with the aftershocks of adrenaline interweaving with his ever-persisting hunger. Eventually, Alistair resorted to the knife and sawed off the thickest slices of muscle his mother had, over her shoulders and thighs. Unlike his faint memories of cooked beef or chicken, this meat was way more chewy, but the festering yearn in his stomach gnawing at him from the inside out was too compelling to bother even fathoming the idea of trying to prepare the meat.
All he could do was feast, stuffing his mouth and swallowing barely-chewed chucks of serrated flesh and muscle, choking and gagging from scarfing her down as fast as possible before his meal gets cold.
When he was done, he crawled into her bed and curled up under her sheets, letting the dogs salvage whatever he couldn’t squeeze into his tiny stomach as he slept with a full belly for the first time he could recall.
Powerlessness and hunger, two of the worst feelings. But when he transmuted, when he stopped being a little boy, he discovered the thrill of the hunt, the reward in the kill.
Nothing is more powerful than hunting prey down. Nothing is more sating then the thick irony taste of blood in his mouth, and a full belly of those who he had overpowered.
He never had to eat paper soup again.