Those Who Bleed

II. Remembering Hunger

He had not noticed immediately.

There were days on the ground, staring at a ceiling covered in water rot and slowly dissipating, ivy and weeds crawling their way inside through the holes in the walls. Somehow, the sun had not burned him. At first, Seren had thought himself lucky; he could have died so easily within those first few days. It took several decades for him to decide that he hadn't been lucky at all: Seren wished he had died in those first few days. It would have saved himself - and many others, though he himself did not care about them - many lifetimes worth of grief and hate. 

Those first days, then thought to be lucky. The days Seren had not noticed his hunger - or rather, the lack of. Unmoving, but not dying. Bare of a shirt, pants torn, shoeless, but not cold. Covered in blood that dried quickly, stuck to him like a second skin. Two pinprick marks just above his heart, torn, like whatever had pierced him there had dragged through his skin before being removed. It ached in that spot just above his heart, and that would the last pain, true pain, that Seren would ever feel for many hundreds of more years before an unknown girl would move past him, sparking within him that feeling he had so, so missed. 

Hunger.

Desperate, clawing, unrelenting. 

Satisfying, rewarding, lovely. 

The driving force of survival.

Those first few days, which Seren remembered to be longer than his entire lifetime. The days when he did not know he would never hunger again.

-

"Ser?"

Holding a cold glass to his forehead, Seren cracked open an eye. The man in front of him wore mahogany coloured pants, a high-necked black sweater that no doubt covered no small amount of bruises left by innumerable lips, many rings in gold and bronze. He had not removed his shoes upon entrance, most likely because had not entered through the front door (Seren would have heard it buzz as it opened. Instead, he expected, he would find an open window somewhere within the suite, despite it being located on the seventy-second floor when the fire escape ended on the fifty-first, safety violations be damned). 

"Do not call me that." Any shortened version of his name, any variety of bastardization, Seren hated. He only went by a single name - his original surname had been lost to the years, and so he did not care to stick with a single one for long, changing it as suited him when he needed to sign a cheque or lease - and so he found it unnecessary to shorten his already short name. 

Kova, seating himself without invitation on the arm of the couch Seren lounged on, laughed. He had an unlimited amount of nicknames for the man who owned the home he had let himself into: Ser, S, Sera (this one had earned him double black eyes), Sir (said only as a way of mispronouncing the prefix of Seren's name, no respect behind it), Sora, Sworn, Sane. Over the years the names had gotten worse sounding and farther off from the original that few who heard Kova's loveless nicknames would have any true guess to Seren's proper name. For nearly a decade Kova had strictly called him 'Billy', based off an old surname Seren had once used, and immediately regretted. 

"Miss me?" Kova knew that Seren had not, had never missed him, would never. Kova was the only person who always knew where to find Seren: the Italian seaside; unnamed Pacific islands; New York high-rises, rented under the name of a man who would show up dead five months later; York flats; an Icelandic yurt. Seren had not always desired to live as luxuriously as he currently did, although any home in Cence, the decaying city, no matter how expensive, how beautiful, felt somewhat off. 

The presidential suite, with rooftop access, that Seren had owned for the past eighty years, but had only stayed in for approximately a third of that time, took up over three-quarters of the top floor, save for a short expanse of hallway from the elevator to his door, and a small storage room that was tucked away, accessed from across the elevator. Its floor-to-ceiling windows expressed a breathtaking view of the large stretch of westside city, from downtown to the river valley. From so far up it was impossible to see the horrors of the streets, the garbage, the ghastly faces of those who could not afford to leave, the broken sidewalks and pipes that peaked out from beneath asphalt, the graffitied walls and sewage streams.