Sunrise
Part 1: So foul and fair a day
It never rained in the slums when I was a kid. ‘Course there was never any sunlight either. It was just a filthy light that filtered down from the mako lamps Shin-Ra, Inc. was so gracious as to provide us with. It gave the whole place a certain feel of rot… or maybe it was the crap that washed down from the Plate that did that. Like I said, it never rained… we just got the occasional flood of runoff spewing out of the pipes from up above. That how we knew when it was raining. It was raining the day mom died.
I remember the streets in Sector 2 smelled worse than usual that day. Must’ve been a real downpour, ’cause the gutters looked more like rivers running between the houses and businesses. I was having the time of my life, of course.
I think I was five. Yeah, I’m pretty sure I was five… almost six. Mom sent me out to play. She had one of her… guests. I know most people’d look down on someone like my mom. I can think of a few dozen names that would’ve suited her profession. Heard a lot of ’em from her “guests” as they were leaving. Now me, I gotta say I respect her. Hell, she did the best she could, and she did it for me. Gotta be grateful for that. But in the end I guess it was just too much. Too hard.
I don’t really know how we ended up down there in Shin-Ra’s garbage pit. Mom used to tell me how she used to live up top and watch the sunrise from her window. I don’t think she realized I didn’t even know what a sunrise was until I was ten. And by then she was gone.
I was out in the street, jumping over the streams of runoff that flowed out of the pipes. There were other kids… all ages really, but mostly older than me. It was our own personal waterpark. We didn’t pay any attention to the muck and the slime and the drowned rats and all the other crap that was flowing along with it. It was our river. I came home soaked and filthy. I was probably cleaner than usual, to be honest.
Sector 2 was the worst of the slums. It was where the perverts and monsters and other undesirables went when they were run out of the other sectors. If a kid wasn’t careful, they just disappeared one day. Most of us learned to be careful real quick. The ones who didn’t… well, most people perfered not to talk about them.
Mom was out when I got home. So I did what I always did. Sat alone in the living room – or what we called the living room… There were only two rooms in the place. I watched the piece of shit TV we dug out of a trash heap until the reception got so bad that I finally gave up. The TV signals down in the slums are lousy at best. Can’t pick up a damn thing when they’ve got all the reactors going at once.
Mom came home a little while later. I think I knew right then that she was dead. Just a body walking around. Her eyes looked dead, like the eyes on the rats that floated down the gutters. She went into the bedroom, and when she didn’t come back out for supper, I went to check on her.
Mom was really beautiful. You just had to look past what life in the slums had done to her. Bright red hair, like mine… Green eyes, like mine… She could have looked like a princess if it weren’t for the cheap make-up she coated her face with and the tired expression she always wore. But she was never more beautiful than when I saw her then. Yeah, I guess that sounds pretty sick… A little kid sees his mom cut her own wrists and lay there bleeding to death, and he thinks she’s never looked more beautiful. Well, you’re right. That is pretty damn fucked up. But that’s how I felt. She looked… I dunno, free I guess. She told me she was sorry, and that she loved me. Funny kind of love, leaving a five year old to fend for himself in the slums. Can’t say I blame her though. She’d just had enough.
That’s probably when I started crying.
A few days went by, and eventually the old bitch next door came over to check on us. She never could mind her own business. They took mom away, and dragged me off to a youth sanctuary. I didn’t stay there long. Just long enough to store up some food, grab some relatively new clothes, and pick a few pockets. Yeah, even at five I was pretty good when it came to lifting wallets.
After that, I was on my own for the most part. For awhile at least. They looked for me for maybe a day after I ran off, but I was just one kid and they had fifty or so to deal with. One less kid was one less kid they had to keep an eye on. One less mouth to feed. I spent my sixth birthday in an alley, hiding from Shin-Ra’s soldiers. They came down every once in awhile to rough up the worst of the trash that lived in the slums… keep ’em in line. Ya ask me, it pissed ’em off more than it kept ’em in line, and of course they took it out on us street rats. But those assholes were the least of my worries. I’d swiped one of those soldiers’ guns, and lucky me he turned around at the worst possible moment.
I may have been small, but I was quick… and I knew those streets a hell of a lot better than Shin-Ra’s token police force… so I got to keep my prize. Impressed the hell out of my friends, too. Yeah, I had friends… You gotta have friends. They come in handy when you need someone to cover your ass.
So there I was… sweet little six year old me out in the middle of the worst of the slums, flashing a gun that only had three bullets in it, and thinking I was invincible.
… Alright, so I was an idiot.
-end part 1-
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