Sera was hungry.
She was always hungry.
That was simply the condition of her existence – a fact as reliable as gravity, as impersonal as weather, as exhausting as both. But there was hungry and there was hungry, and right now, with Simon's mouth warm against hers and his hands finding her waist with the particular desperate ease of someone who had been here before and wanted very much to stay, the distinction felt important.
She traced the roof of his mouth with her tongue and felt him respond – a soft sound against her lips, his grip tightening, leaning in. He tasted like polluted mana and pleasure and the sweetness of someone who didn't know what was being taken from him. It moved through the contact freely enough – that part had never been the problem. The problem was what happened after. She was a vast container with a false ceiling set humiliatingly low, and the moment she approached it the System would claw back everything she'd taken and leave her exactly where she started, plus a punishment for trying.
So she sipped. Carefully. The discipline of it was the worst part – not the hunger itself, she had made a kind of peace with the hunger, the way you made peace with chronic weather. It was the management. The constant minute-by-minute calculation of how much she could take before the ceiling, how close she could get to the edge without going over, how to fill the gap she consumed, how to keep the appetite from the surface of her face while Simon's hands tightened at her waist and his polluted mana moved toward her like it had somewhere to be.
Fifteen minutes of careful sipping that left her with roughly the caloric equivalent of a single cracker.
Better than nothing.
She was very good at telling herself it was better than nothing.
Just a little more, something in her thought, with the patience of something that had been waiting longer than she had. Just–
The alarm trilled.
Damn it.
Sera broke contact first – clean, practiced, no hesitation – and moved back before Simon had finished processing that the session was over. He was already leaning forward, eyes glazed, lips parting for a kiss that wasn't going to happen.
She pressed two fingers lightly against his mouth. He blinked.
"Time's up," she said. Warm. Professional. The voice she used for this.
"Oh." A beat. He straightened, smoothed his shirt, had the grace to look slightly embarrassed about the state he'd been in. "Right."
Fifteen minutes. Once per week, once per esper, no exceptions.
Sera had built the rule and she kept it – not because she wanted to, but because the alternative was not having a rule at all, and she had seen, once, what happened when she didn't have a rule. That was not an experiment she intended to repeat.
Simon shuffled toward the door with the reluctant energy of someone who had been somewhere pleasant and was having difficulty accepting that it was over. He paused with his hand on the door handle.
"Thanks again," he said, not quite meeting her eyes. The back of his neck was pink. "Work's been – uh, it's better. Since you've been here."
She knew. She could see it on him – the softened edges, the shoulders sitting lower than they used to, the way he moved through the corridors now with less of that wound-up tension that had been there two months ago.
She had done that. With careful calculation.
Not out of kindness, exactly. More the way a farmer tended a field – practical, attentive, with a clear understanding of what the field was for. Simon was better because better Simons came back. Better Simons rated her highly on the post-session survey. Better Simons kept her roster full and her metrics acceptable and her position at this guild unquestioned.
He had a crush on her.
It was legible on his face the way most things were – that earnest openness he couldn't quite control. She had watched it develop across two months of weekly sessions with the detached acknowledgment of someone noting a weather pattern.
It would probably get worse before it resolved itself. That was fine. Crushes were useful. Crushes came back every week without fail and never pushed past the fifteen minute mark and rated her a five out of five on subjective experience, which, she noted, was good for her year-end bonus.
Cute, she thought. In the way that a meal could be cute.
He was a meal. That was the whole of it. His crush was cute but Sera was never going to find a lover. Especially not here. She couldn't.
She would eat them down to their very bones.
"Of course," she said. "See you next week."
He left.
The door clicked shut.
Sera held the professional warmth for exactly one more second – long enough to be certain – and then let it go. She dropped onto the sofa, tilted her head back, and stared at the ceiling with the expression of a woman conducting a private audit of her own misery.
Her stomach growled. Loudly. Without sympathy.
"I know," she said.
She pulled up her System interface out of habit – the pale blue panel blooming across her vision, the numbers she had memorized so thoroughly she barely needed to read them anymore.
< Dimensional Transfer Debuff >
A post-Filter evolution has defied the System.
Capacity throttled.
All stats halved.
Time left: 7,296:34:23s
More or less ten months left.
She closed the interface.
Outside her window, pink blossoms drifted across the lawn in slow, indifferent arcs. The bell tower tolled noon. Somewhere in the cafeteria two floors down, the lunch service was beginning – human food that went through her and left nothing behind, consumed purely for appearances, the performance of being a person who needed things people needed.
Sera pressed the back of her hand against her forehead and looked at the ceiling and thought about being satiated.
Not full – she had never been full, not really. That was the nature of what she was. The hunger was structural, built into her the way lungs were built into a person, and no amount of feeding was ever going to close it entirely. She had accepted that a long time ago.
But satiated. That she remembered.
A different world, a different set of constraints, circumstances she preferred not to examine too closely – and underneath all of it the quality of a hunger that had been answered enough. Not silenced. Still there every day, the way a clenched fist was always there – present, felt, something you were always aware of. But not excruciating. Not this.
She thought about that sometimes. The distance between where she was now and where that had been.
It was considerable.
The annoying thing – and she used annoying deliberately, because the alternatives were words she had no interest in applying to the situation – was that there had been a time when the hunger was manageable. Not gone. Never gone. But manageable in a way that her current existence bore no resemblance to whatsoever.
The annoying thing was that the only reason it had been manageable was him.
She did not think about this often.
She thought about it now because she was lying on a sofa in a foreign world staring at a ceiling that had nothing useful to offer, running on a single cracker's worth of polluted mana, with ten months left on a debuff she had earned by stealing something that wasn't hers and running as fast as she could in the opposite direction.
She had made her choices. They had been the correct choices. She stood by them entirely.
Ten months from now the debuff would lift. She could feed properly. She would never need to think about him again.
Sip like a bird, Seraphil.
His voice landed in her memory the way it always did – dry, unhurried, faintly amused.
He had said it the same way he said most things: with the calm certainty of someone who already knew the outcome and was simply waiting for her to arrive at it too. Usually while he had her pinned against something. Usually while she was trying very hard not to give him the satisfaction of reacting. He had always known exactly how hungry she was. Had always known exactly how much to give her and exactly when to stop, his hand at her waist or her jaw or pressed flat against her sternum, feeding her in careful measured increments like he was portioning out something precious.
She had hated it.
She had also, and this was the part she particularly did not think about, never once gone to bed starving when he was managing her diet.
Sip like a bird.
She made a sound that was not quite a laugh and not quite the other thing.
She was very good at telling herself things.
Sera got up off the sofa, straightened her blouse, checked that her expression was where it needed to be. Professional. Warm. Approachable. The face of a C-rank guide who had just finished a session and was going to lunch like a normal person who needed lunch.
The hunger settled back into its usual register – present, persistent, the clenched fist she had learned to ignore. She picked up her bag.
The cafeteria wasn't going to perform itself.