The Best, Cont.

(I liked yesterday's idea so much that I kept whittling away at it today. The vast majority of what I wrote actually had more to do with world-building and longer story-arc plotting, but here is a bit of a continuation of yesterday's specific narrative.)



I sometimes wonder if I would have bothered, if it had just been me. If it weren’t for my little sister, would I have just allowed myself to… waste away? I think I might have. This, in turn, leads me to think that as awful as it was for my sister to be afflicted along with me, it was probably for the best. After all, I have since seen what happens to our kind if we don’t find the proper sustenance, and it would have been exceptionally unpleasant for all the other denizens of the orphanage. Whereas since I was driven to save her, no matter the cost, I kept both of us in check, and the living children were always quite safe from us.

That first time was necessarily the hardest. Even though we had eaten the stew before, we still had many years’ worth of conditioning that to do so was an abomination. But then I remembered that our Lord had asked- no, He had commanded- that we eat of His flesh, and I comforted myself that it must not be so bad, if it was in the Bible. But I still thought it would be best not to bring it up with anyone else, and when the opportunity arose I took care of all the preparations myself. My sister (and I, for that matter) began to recover immediately, and the nuns were amazed. The stew I made for her was so nourishing that it soon became my regular duty to help in the kitchens, which made things ever so much easier for us to stay well-fed. I know now, of course, that we don’t actually have to cook our food, but at the time the thought never would have occurred to me. And to tell the truth, in the long years we’ve had our special diet, we’ve only resorted to such barbarism in the most extreme of emergencies. So even putting convenience aside, it was really for the best that I ended up helping in the kitchens, since it meant I got to learn many methods of food preparation I otherwise never would have. As it turned out I had a bit of a gift for it, which was to be useful later on in our lives- but you may rest assured that I have never prepared our personal stew for anyone but ourselves.

Well, and for others of our kind, naturally.