It was but a few weeks after the pretrans fell and died in the river that V went through his change. He had been aware of the differences in his body for quite some time before it hit: He was plagued by headaches. Constantly hungry yet nauseous if he took food. Unable to sleep though exhausted. The only thing that remained alike was his aggression. The camp's demands meant you always had to prepared to fight, so the sharpening in his temper was not marked by any overt shift in his behavior.

It was in the depths of a cruel early snowstorm that he was born into his male self.

As a result of the plunge in temperature the cave's stone walls were frigid, the floor sufficed to freeze your feet in fur-lined boots, the air so cold the breath from your mouth was a cloud without a sky. As the onslaught prevailed, the soldiers and the kitchen's females slept in great heaps of bodies, not for sex, but for shared warmth.

V knew the change was upon him, for he awoke hot. At first the ease of the heat was a boon, but then his body raged with fever as an agonizing hunger swept through him. He writhed on the ground, hoping for relief, finding none.

After forever, the Bloodletter's voice pierced through the pain. "The females will not feed you."

From amidst his stupor, V opened his eyes.

The Bloodletter knelt down. "Surely you know why."

V swallowed through the fist that was his throat. "I do not."

"They say the cave paintings have possessed you. That your hand has been oe'rtaken by the spirits trapped upon the walls. That your eye is no longer your own."

When V did not answer, the Bloodletter said, "You do not deny?"

Through the morass in his head, Vishous tried to calculate the effect of his two conceivable responses. He went with the truth, not for veracity's sake, but for self-preservation. "I… deny."

"Do you deny what they say elsewise?"

"What… say… they?"

"That you killed your comrade at the river with your palm."

'Twas a lie, and the other boys who had been there knew it to be so, as they had seen the pretrans fall of his own fault. The females must be making the assumption on the fact that the death had occurred and V had been in the vicinity. Because why would the other males be desirous of passing along evidence of V's strength?

Or mayhap it was to their benefit? If V had no female who would feed him, he would die. Which was not a bad outcome for the other pretrans.

"What say you?" his father demanded.

As V needed the appearance of strength, he mumbled, "I killed him."

The Bloodletter smiled broadly through his beard. "I suspected. And for your effort I shall bring you a female."

Indeed, one was brought to him and he did feed. The transition was brutal, long and draining, and when it was through, he overflowed his pallet, his arms and legs cooling on the cold cave floor like meat from a fresh kill.

Although his sex had stirred in the aftermath, the female who had been forced to feed him wanted nothing to do with him. She gave him just enough blood to see him into the change; then she left him to his bones snapping and his muscles stretching until they ripped. No one attended to him, and while he suffered he called out in his mind to the mother who had birthed him. He imagined her coming unto him aglow with love and stroking his hair and telling him that all was well. In his pathetic vision, she called him her beloved lewlhen.

Gift.

He would have liked to have been someone's gift. Gifts were valued and cared for and protected. The diary of the warrior Darius had been a gift to V, the giver perhaps not knowing that in leaving it behind he had done a kindness, but still.

Gift.

When V's body had finished with its change, he had slept, then awoken to hunger for meat. His clothes had been torn from him by the transition, so he wrapped himself up in a hide and walked barefoot to the kitchen area. There was little to be had: He gnawed on a thighbone, found some breadcrusts, ate a handful of flour.

He was licking the white residue off his palm when his father said from behind him: "Time to fight."

"What are you thinking about?" Jane asked, "You're all tense."

V jerked back to the present. And for some reason didn't lie. "I'm thinking about my tattoos."

"When did you get them?"

"Almost three centuries ago."

She whistled. "God, you live that long?"

"Longer. Assuming I don't get cracked dead in a fight and you fool humans don't blow up the planet, I'll be breathing for another seven hundred years."

"Wow. Gives a whole new context for AARP, huh." She sat forward. "Turn your head. I want to see the ink on your face."

Rattled from his memories, he did as she asked because he wasn't coherent enough to think why he shouldn't. Still, as her hand came up, he flinched.

She dropped her arm without touching him. "These were done to you, weren't they. Probably at the same time as the castration, right?"

V recoiled on the inside, but didn't move away from her. He was wholly uncomfortable with the female-sympathy routine, but the thing was, Jane's voice was factual. Direct, So he could respond factually and directly.

"Yeah. At the same time."

"I'm going to guess they're warnings, as you have them on your hand, your temple, your thighs and your groin. I'm guessing they're about the energy in your palm, the second sight, and the procreation issue."

Like he should be surprised at her hyperdeduction? "True."

Her voice grew low. "That's why you panicked when I told you I'd restrain you. Back at the hospital in the SICU. They tied you down, didn't they."

He cleared his throat.

"Didn't they, V?"

He picked up the clicker for the TV. "You want to watch something else?"

As he started flipping through movie channels, there was a whole lot of silence.

"I threw up at my sister's funeral."

V's thumb paused on the remote, stopping on The Silence of the Lambs. He looked over at her. "You did?"

"Most embarrassing, shameful moment of my life. And not just because of when it happened. I did it all over my father."

As Clarice Starling sat on a hard chair in front of Lechter's cell, V craved information on Jane. He wanted to know the whole course of her life from birth to present, and he wanted to know it all now.

"Tell me what happened."

Jane cleared her throat as if bracing herself, and he couldn't ignore the parallel to the movie, with himself as the caged monster and Jane as the source of good, giving away bits and pieces of herself for the beast's consumption.

But he needed to know like he needed blood to survive. "What happened, Jane?"

"Well, see… my father was a big believer in oatmeal."

"Oatmeal?" When she didn't go on, he said, "Tell me."

Jane crossed her arms over her chest and stared at her feet. Then her eyes met his. "Just so we're clear, the reason I'm bringing this up is so you'll talk about what happened to you. Tit for tat. It's like sharing scars. You know, like the ones from summer camp when you fell off the bunk bed. Or, like when you cut yourself on the metal edge of a Reynolds Wrap box or when you hit yourself on the head with a-" She frowned. "Okay… maybe none of that is a good analogy, considering the way you heal, but work with me."

V had to smile. "I get the point."

"I figure fair is fair, though. So if I spill, you do. We agree?"

"Shit…" Except he had to know about her. "Guess we do."

"Okay, so my father and the oatmeal. He-"

"Jane?"

"What?"

"I like you. A lot. Had to get that in."