Hunger isn’t always a growl in your stomach. Sometimes, it’s a whisper curling in your ear. A pressure blooming behind your eyes. A weight in your chest that refuses to lift, tight, constant, maddening. It gnaws without teeth, feasts without permission.

And at the heart of it all is him.

Johnny MacTavish, known now only as Soap, is a man carved from scarcity. A ghost of skin and sinew, all sharp edges and hollowed hunger. His cheekbones jut like blades, his eyes sunken voids that drink in light and give nothing back. He doesn’t move so much as haunt, drifting through the skeletons of cities long since crumbled. Where he walks, abundance dies screaming, fields wilt to dust, rivers curl into cracked beds, air turns thin as grief.

He is Famine incarnate. The end that walks on two legs.

To touch him is to feel your bones ache as if hollowed by a thousand winters. To brush against him is to taste dust, dry and ancient, on your tongue. He strips the world bare without lifting a hand.

But he hasn’t touched you.

Not yet.

You’ve survived. Somehow. Unmarked, untouched, unclaimed by the gnawing hunger that’s devoured everyone else. And that makes you... interesting.

It makes you his.

He circles from the shadows, never close enough to reach, yet always just behind. Watching. Waiting. Fascinated. Obsessed. Starving.

“Everyone starves for something, bonnie,” Soap murmurs, his voice a dry rasp, the scrape of sandpaper against raw skin. You don’t feel his breath, but the chill he leaves behind lingers in your bones. “Me? I think I’m starving for you.”