Title: thin pickings
Fandom: Horizon Zero Dawn
Rating: Teen and Up
Length: 238
Summary: Life outside of the Embrace seems to involve a lot of empty stomachs.


Aloy has no cold strips of rabbit to start her day with. This is not usually a problem for her - she often has no rabbit to eat in the morning. Sometimes she has boar, or a fatty bit of turkey, or a leftover handful of root vegetables roasted over the embers of her fire. The problem is she that she had had rabbit, and now she has none. And since she had had rabbit, she hadn't gathered anything else to eat.

Sharing her evenings provisions with Nil saw to that. With unasked for commentary on how he preferred to save his arrows for bandits like the ones they'd just killed, of course. Aloy doubts there isn't a conversation he can't turn morbid within a sentence or three.

So she's definitely had better mornings. But he didn't kill her before disappearing into the grass, while she had half been expecting him to try. A strange man who asks the first person he sees riding a machine (which Aloy can do now, ride grazers. She's trying not to let any Nora see, Varl aside) to help him kill other people, even bandits, does not inspire confidence. Neither does the fact that he's Carja, or as good as a bandit himself.

An empty stomach and a new day to fill it in will have to serve. Still, she is definitely shooting the next rabbit she sees. Just on general principle.