Sunrise
Part 2: All night, all day
Yep, I was an idiot alright. A complete and total idiot. I mean, I was dumb even for a slum kid. I never did know when to keep my mouth shut back then… Still have a bad habit of mouthing off when I shouldn’t, but that’s not the point.
The point is, I did something incredibly stupid.
Let’s see, I was probably seven or eight at the time. I still had my gun… the bullets were long gone, though, and a kid can’t exactly walk into a shop in the slums and buy ammo… That’s just begging to be jumped on the street. And forget about stealing it. Stuff like that’s hard to come by down there, and the people who do have it don’t let it out of their sight.
But the nice thing about a gun is that you can never be sure if it’s loaded or not. And I got damn good at bluffing my way out of trouble. What I didn’t figure on was that it was only a matter of time before someone called my bluff. And then… well, I’ll get to that in a minute.
I usually ran around with three other kids about my age. First off, there was Jazep… That guy was the definition of the word fat. Never did figure out how he managed to gain so much weight while the rest of us looked like a pack of starved dogs. But we didn’t complain, ’cause it was his size that kept certain people from bothering us. He was strong too, but slow as hell. Then there was Kume. He was my best pal… ’til he ditched me and left me bleeding in an alley, the little bastard. Fuck… There I go, gettin’ ahead of myself again…
Kume could kick ass like nobody’s business. He was a couple of years older than me, or at least he looked like he was. Problem was he usually only looked out for number one. The other kid in our little group was Angel. She never told me her real name. Hell, for all I know, her parents might have really named her that out of some last ditch effort to find some hope in the slums. Personally, I think she just made it up. Her mom was dead, but her dad was still around. I’m not even gonna go into what went on in her house… Still makes me sick to think about it, and I’ve seen a lot. But she never really ran away. She’d go off with us for awhile, but she always went back.
Me? Well, I guess if we’re assigning titles, I was the show-off of the group. I was the one who’d always take a bet if the prize was good enough, and I usually came out the winner. Which meant I was also the rich kid. Hey, I told you before I was an idiot… At the time fourteen gil seemed like a fortune.
But anyway… I did something stupid. I trusted my friends to back me up.
The part of Sector 2 I lived in was unofficially the territory of a man named Yolin… mostly because he had the means to back up his threats. And me being the smart little kid I was – note the heavy sarcasm in there – I got into it with him and tried to bluff my way out of a very bad situation. Let’s just say my luck finally ran out, and leave it at that. The result is what’s important here.
By the time Yolin’s brute squad was done with me, I don’t think I had an inch of skin that wasn’t black, blue, or purple. And I had a nice little stab wound or five to go with the bruises. Oh, and the scars… Can’t forget about those. They gave me those just so that on the off-chance I actually survived, I’d have something to remember them by.
And where were Jazep, Kume, and Angel, you ask? Well, Kume high-tailed it out of there the second the knives came out. Jazep stuck around long enough to take a couple hits himself… though I don’t think that was his choice. He just couldn’t run fast enough to keep up with Kume. Angel hid – something she was very good at – until Yolin’s guys left.
She was the only one who stuck around to see if I was still alive. I’ll give her that much credit. Didn’t do much to help though, unless going through my pockets is considered helping. It didn’t really surprise me, though. I probably looked like I’d bite it any second.
The only one of them I ever saw after that was Angel. But that came much later.
Needless to say, I lived through that attack, and that I owe entirely to the guy everyone knew as the preacher-man.
-end part 2-
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