Do Words Make a Bit of Difference?

Right now I'm wickedly inspired by Pure Reason Revolution. I borrowed the chapter title (which translates to 'The Unfortunates') from one of their songs, although this isn't a song fic. (I do not own them or the song or the lyrics, natch, no money made either for those who are wondering.) Give them a listen. Now, on to the story.

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I come from the district of the dirt poor, in the 78th district of Rukongai. It’s called “Inuzuri", the South Alley of Flowing Spirits, a name far prettier than what it really is- a hellhole. As so many of the children of that area I’m an orphan and my parents, well, truth is I don’t really know what happened to them. I assume they abandoned me, maybe they died or I died before them in the World of the Living and truth is I’m not sure I care either way.

That knowledge wouldn’t have changed anything, wouldn’t have made my existence easier or in any way better. I don’t even know who gave me my name, Renji Abarai. I used to wonder if there were other redheaded Abarai’s running around, now I sometimes wonder if there ever will be other redheaded Abarai’s wreaking havoc.

My first clear memory is not of soft, warm hands or smiling faces beaming down at me because of some accomplishment; it is of crying, of begging for spare change or food from faceless strangers in a dank alley, snatching what I could from anybody stupid enough to let me. My story is so common in that area of the Rukongai that people there didn’t and still don’t even take notice of the kids like me; the unwanted, the strays. Dogs were treated with more kindness than we were. Apparently they had a purpose.

There were and still are, so many others like me; scared, cold, hungry, dirty, runty little gutter rats and we found each other. Some formed gangs, had territories and specialties, paid tithe to other bigger, better equipped gangs. There is a certain safety in numbers. Even as a snot-nosed li’l fucker, I knew literally dozens of messengers, fences, thieves, grifters, knee breakers, outright psychos and a few delightful, purported killers. Some were allies, some were enemies, but the ones I really trusted, became my friends, my family. We stole food; we ran from shop keepers and kept each other as safe as we could.

It was a hard existence with little beauty and tenderness. More often than not we sported cuts and a variety of multicolored bruises. These were worn like badges of honor showcasing our survival against the harshness of a world not fit for children. This one from a passerby who kicked instead of asking us to move, that one from the grasping hands of a pedophile one of us had barely escaped from, a burn from a pipe carelessly ashed, a fight with a rival gang over a spit of road. Those marks were shown off to mark our toughness and general badassery and compared to others. Countless repetitions of ‘Wow that musta hurt’ and ‘Nah, what am I? A pussy?’ were thrown around.

At first I was one of the younger ones, but more kids joined our little gang and as time went by, the older ones left. Some got jobs, some went to jail, some moved up in the underworld, more than a few died, but what they had in common was that they were suddenly out of our lives. It wasn’t long till I was the eldest. I was probably not even eight or nine, but it’s hard to be sure. Time passes differently for kids in my situation, none of the usual milestones to mark the passage of time are celebrated. Seasons pass, festivals come and go and it all feels the same. The best way to describe it is that it’s an odd sort of time-displacement. Sometimes I would see someone in the morning and by afternoon it seemed they’d be wearing something different. Only it was afternoon a week later.

I had only been my little gang’s big cheese for a couple of months and the winter had been especially harsh. I was close to giving up, of breaking under the pressure of responsibility of feeding the litter of kids that were somehow mine, rather than bending and enduring as I had done ever since I could remember. I had it all planned out, an unspectacular end for a common little thief.

A simple fall from a roof and I would be gone, freed from the burden of life. I knew they’d have a rough time of it without me, but I was so tired of it all, I could hardly bring myself to care. I herded the kids through the familiar streets and stole a few dented pieces of fruit, (“the last apples of the season!”) out of habit as I looked for the tallest building I could find. As a matter of pride, I said our code word and watched as the group scattered, I didn’t want them to see me go splat. I was inattentive and very late caught on to the fact that the guy at the fruit stand was after my ass. I tried to dodge the screaming vendor, but he’d gotten close and I had a very bad feeling as I fled.

I could tell I would get caught, could practically feel the mans hot breath on my neck. I ran flat out as I fast as I could, into a crowd of people. It wouldn’t be enough to lose him and I felt panic trickle in my veins. Not jail, not another beating, please no, I’m just trying to die. A tiny hand whipped out from the space between the raised walkway and the street and grabbed my ankle. I face-planted on the frozen ground and the wind was knocked out of me. I was yanked, hard, my cheek scraping the frozen ground, till I lay gasping under the wooden planks of the walkway above me. I felt blood trickle down my face, but it was better than being stomped into oblivion.

I closed my eyes and listened to heavy footfalls pound first one way fast, then slowly back the way they came. When I opened my eyes and looked over at my erstwhile savior, I was sure that the dim light was playing tricks on my eyes. I drew a shaky breath and crawled until I reached the other side of the building. I turned and saw the tiny creature following me. When I finally made it out from under there, I put my hands on my knees and just panted for a while. Then I lifted my head and took a good look at the kid who had saved me.

She was small, thin, pathetic looking with the biggest eyes I’ve seen before or since. Nothing uncommon or spectacular at all about her, but those eyes... Something in their dull purple depths, as stupid as it may sound, spoke to me. I knew her suffering; I knew the hunger crawling around in her belly, just as I knew the desperation to find a warm, somewhat safe place to sleep.

I flipped an apple up in the air, not particularly hungry, not even sure why I had bothered stealing anything in the first place, when her voice startled me from my reverie, “Hey, hey you… Aren’t ya gonna eat that?”

I dropped the apple in my distraction and watched her eyes follow the fruit rolling around on the ground. I squatted down and picked up the apple, which was scratched from the rough ground. After shining it against my too-short hakama, I handed to her without a word. I didn’t need another responsibility, hell, I didn’t want another one, but I was too soft to just leave her. As I watched her inhale that apple, I knew I wasn’t going to look for death that day.

I asked her name, pleased when she answered, even if it was full of the hesitation so characteristic of the wounded, “Rukia”.

She looked at most six and not half as sturdy as my sort-of sister Yori was at, my best guesstimate, four. This mite looked as if a strong breeze could pick her up and carry her away. She was skittish and quick to startle, a shell of a girl too scared to risk looking me in the eye for longer than a few seconds.

I stuck my grubby hand in a fold of my kosode and pulled out a dried plum. Her eyes grew impossibly larger as I held it out for her. I tried not to look as she tore into the salty dried fruit, her face scrunching up at the sour taste. I knew a mess of kids who’d cut you if you watched them eat and another passel that outright refused to eat around anybody at all. She didn’t look like she carried a blade, but that meant less than nothing and she obviously needed the food. I wasn’t taking chances either way.

After she was done she looked at me with such mistrust, it made my heart clench in my chest. I could see the age old question as clearly as if it was written across her face: Fight or flight? The answer for her would almost certainly be flight, as whatever fight she’d been born with had long since been crushed under the weight of her existence. No, there was definitely not a knife of any sort hidden up her sleeve.

If I hadn’t already decided before, I knew then I couldn’t leave this little waif. It took some fast talking, but I convinced her to come back with me. I was more aware of her then than I was of my surroundings as I led her deeper into one of the worst neighborhoods in the 70’s.

We wiggled under buildings, a common theme, apparently, in our relationship. We squeezed through tight alleys till we finally reached the hidey hole the other kids and I had inherited. Rukia looked skeptical, ready to dash away at a moment’s notice, when we finally reached our destination.

It was an empty square of dirt between buildings, completely inaccessible except by crawling. It was partially protected by the sagging overhang of a roof, prone to flooding in the wet season, but there was a dry spot we could huddle in under the east building. It was home.

There was food was laid out, not a feast by any means, but probably more than she’d seen in one place outside the market place. The food was most likely the deciding factor for her.

Yori, the littlest one, had lost the ribbon she wore in her hair during some sort of scuffle during the day and she was disconsolate at its loss. Unlike me, Yori actually thought she remembered, albeit vaguely, the people who had given her her name before she’d died. That was rare, but it happened occasionally. I’d sat through many recitations of the time her mother had tied the white ribbon around her thin black curls and I knew how much that stupid ribbon meant to her. She’d been wearing the damned thing since I picked her up a few summers ago.

I knew in my bones that the tantrum would last for days, that there would be nothing we could do to help poor Yori in her predicament. Rukia, on the other hand, this shell of a girl, took the whole issue in stride, as of she had been dealing with this sort of problem her whole life. Yori was swept into her lap like they were sisters from the start and she unceremoniously ripped three strips from the bottom of her purple, flowered yukata.

I wasn’t sure how shredding her clothing was going to help, but I was glad Yori was distracted. When she braided the strips together, it started to make sense. Yori’s sniffles faded by the time she was finished and I was more grateful to Rukia than I’d ever been to anyone else, for saving me twice. Yori knew that the braided strips weren’t the same as what she lost, but it soothed her nonetheless. When Rukia carefully gathered Yori’s hair back and carefully tied the makeshift ribbon into a perfect bow, a contented smile swept across Rukia’s face, but was gone so fast I could have sworn I’d seen wrong.

When Yori clambered out of Rukia’s lap, I could practically see the shutters slamming closed across those big eyes of hers. It was not uncommon, that instinctive retreat back into the safety of a shell, but it was still astounding, and sort of sad to see her defenses at the ready so soon.

When the sun finally went down, the rest of us bunked down as was the custom, like puppies in a basket, close and curled against one another, sharing warmth and comfort. Rukia accepted a blanket but instead of joining us, sat with her back to the one wall that extended all the way to the ground. The last thing I saw before sleep claimed me was wide her eyes shining in the light of our dying little fire.

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We survived like that for an indeterminable amount, hand to mouth, living in that nearly inaccessible hole between buildings, sharing the stolen fruits and meats of our labors. It was a hard existence, but Rukia took to it like she was born in the lower 70’s. Sometimes, I wondered if she had seen more than we had and that was what caused her guardedness or if it was simply that she’d been sheltered and then dumped in someplace unimaginably scary.

She may not have looked it, with her porcelain doll looks, but in time she showed that she could be as ruthlessly fierce as anyone of the boys. Sometimes, I will admit, the incongruous scowl she’d assume when she was challenged in some way, made my sides hurt from trying to hold in laughter. But she proved over time, after her initial timidity faded, that she could be a tough little bitch.

Sometimes Rukia would whimper in her sleep and when I’d wake her she’d tell me she missed someone so much it was like a hole in her chest. “Who?” I’d asked once. She’d shaken her head and said she didn’t know. I would hold her close during the nights she woke crying for the unknown and looking back, maybe that’s when I fell in love with her. Her skin would burn like a furnace while she wept. Her tears would scald me and her quiet sobs would tear my heart. Somewhere along the line she had stopped sleeping propped against the wall and curled up next to me instead when the weather started getting cold. I loved to feel her next to me. It made me feel strong, like a protector.

Seasons passed and changed, we grew taller, our faces matured and even our voices started changing. Where our numbers totaled eight when Rukia first joined us, somewhere over the years, we’d lost three and gained a new boy, Takashi. Takashi had run away from his master, a man who had bought him as a baby. A man, who drank too much, beat him mercilessly, and after his wife died had taken to violating the young boy. The beatings, Takashi told me years later, he could have taken, but the things the man made him do, never.

Kenshin was the boy who’d been with us the longest and for a time, we were evenly matched in stature. Somewhere along the line he got wider, I got taller, but his face remained childlike and nearly always creased in a smile. He told bawdy jokes and was the person we relied on to call warnings. He had this amazing talent to produce a shrill whistle that could pierce your eardrums at fifty paces. He was also a good friend to have on your side in a fight and an excellent sparring partner. We often imagined ourselves as great sword masters and he, Takashi and I fought epic battles with sticks.

When Takashi first came along, I was afraid our dynamic would change, but Takashi blended right in, as if he was a piece that had been missing from our puzzle. Takashi and Kenshin were as dissimilar as night and day, Takashi being small, thin and soft spoken. They would gang up on me all the time, but I never felt slighted because of it. They complimented each other and after a while it seemed like the two were halves that made a complete whole; that one without the other was strange and somehow not right.

Ai and Yori may have looked as if they were cut from the same cloth, but their personalities were worlds apart. Though they got along well, they bickered and picked at each other constantly. Yori was the sweeter of the two, usually found with some stray animal trailing her heels looking for a handout- which she’d nearly always provide. She was forever picking up stuff around the campsite, cooking, making sure our clothes were mended to the best of her abilities. She hated dirt and took great pains to avoid a puddle or anything else that might dirty or mess her clothes. Yori loved Rukia to pieces for giving her that ribbon and she wore it everyday.

Ai, on the other hand, thought she was one of the boys, as did Rukia, but in a more extreme way. She’d follow us around, beg to be included when we wrestled, was the first to jump in mud, climb a tree. She even tried to pee standing up. She also had the nimblest fingers of all of us. She could lift a necklace off a seven foot giant and her victim would never even know it was gone till they got home and went to take it off later. There was always something a little feral about her and we loved her for it.

That meant there were six of us total in our makeshift family and tempers had a tendency to run high, hormones raging as they were. I hit a growth spurt and suddenly I was just about a full head taller then the rest of the kids.

I was already the unofficial king of our kingdom, but the height advantage was new and delightful. I’m the first to admit that the power went straight to my head. Rukia, of course, knew just how to pull me from my high horse; she’d viciously yank my hair or kick me square in the nuts and call me the Red Pineapple Headed Idiot. I’d sulk for hours after one of her callous attacks, but she’d just laugh and gather the rest of the gang around our little fire and tell stories about the Shinigami’s- Soul Reapers who ushered the souls of the departed from the World of the Living to the Soul Society.

She’d seen one stalk through a nearby alley a few years ago and after talking with a few of the people she knew, had concocted this idealized image of them in her head. The truth was probably far less glamorous than her imaginings, but I didn’t have the heart to tell her otherwise. There were so few places left for the imagination to retreat when one had seen what we saw everyday and I didn’t have it in me to disillusion that for her.

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So that's the first chapter of my first published fanfic...I hope you enjoyed it, or if you absolutely loathed it, at least tell me what made it suck. I'd like reviews, be they good or bad. E-sake for those who do!