a/n: since this is set before gummy becomes an operator at rhodes island, i'm choosing to refer to her with her real name - lada - here.
this was sitting around in my docs for a while but i finished it not long ago and i like it enough to post, so... here it is.
if you haven't gotten a look at the stories from the children of ursus event, you can access it in the archives for arknights' story segments - i'd recommend you take a look at that before checking this fic out if you haven't gotten a look at it for yourself.
[CN/TW]: self-loathing, fear of autophagy/self-cannibalism, starvation, generally potentially upsetting themes
After moments spent frantically rummaging through her bag, shoving fingers past textbooks and ballpoint pens poking out of the pencil cases they've been stuffed into, Lada finds that she has only one candy bar left in her bag. When she feels at it she can tell that the chocolate has broken underneath its colorful wrapper — unevenly, too, to her light dismay. She can smell it, perhaps a bit melted, even with the covering: Milk chocolate, sweet and lacking the distinct fruitiness of dark chocolate, with the milder, mellow smell of almonds.
It's something her parents, her mother especially, used to poke fun at her about. When she was still in primary school her mother would chide her by saying that once upon a time there was a little Ursus girl who ate so much candy that the sugar in it made all of her teeth melt. That, however, did not deter Lada — if anything she was just more curious about it. But she knows it's never something her parents meant any harm by; if anything, she found that their incessant joking about her sweet tooth, while a bit chafing at times, secretly amused her. As she grew up, though, she knew better than to gorge herself on sweets (much to the relief of her parents as well as her dentist, who had been amazed that she hadn't gotten a porcelain filling for more than one cavity) but her love of all things flavored with honey or sugar would crop up every now and again whenever her dad brought back pastries for breakfast.
Hunger gnaws at her stomach and she forces herself to push the thought aside. She doesn't have much left to eat, she needs to conserve all she can. Still, though, Lada can't help herself from peeling the wrapper and breaking off a piece of candy. Her teeth crunch through chocolate and nuts, grinding them at her gums till what's leftover is stuck in her molars before she swallows down.
Before Reunion dug their claws into Peterheim, before the glass of the classroom windows broke, her class had been studying science.
Lada found out about a process known as autophagy. It was just a footnote in their biology textbooks, so when she'd gotten home she had booted up her father's run-down computer that whirred strangely every now and then to look it up. Autophagy, the Internet told her, is a process that happens when the human body is starved for too long. It becomes so desperate for sustenance that the brain and cells within self-cannibalize. Though, these source pages told her, it's normal for other parts of the body, it's the brain that saves itself for last when there is nothing else.
These days, every time Lada feels a pang of painful hunger she wonders if it's autophagy. Lada wonders if that gnawing feeling in her stomach is it trying to consume itself, swallowing down acid and slippery flesh shrinking and shrinking. When will her brain — her mind? — be gone with the rest of her, too?
And Lada can't help but hate her own body for its weaknesses. She's so scared of one day going to sleep with an empty belly full of nothing but dreams of someday escaping (and dreams are no feast) and never waking up again, hates herself for the fact that every nerve in her body is screaming and demanding proper food when all the other students here are starving. She does not bring any of this up to Natalya or Anna or anyone, because she might scare them about it. She sleeps in the darkened classrooms of these schools with ill ease, wondering if one day she'll wake up and simply exist, a starved body without anything to move it forward and yet still painfully, unfortunately alive.