I Almost Died
I almost died.
Sheep without a shepherd.
Cattle without a barn.
Pigs without a fence.
Children without parents.
In other words—orphans.
The way they scrape by is usually much the same. Either some highborn with peculiar tastes raises them as slaves or servants, or they get by the ordinary way: pickpocketing and begging, day after day.
In my case, it was the latter.
Well. Truth is, every orphan on these streets ends up that way. Get old enough and sharp enough and you might climb to officer in a crew—but most of them die before that ever happens.
Crew. Family. Clan. Call the outfit whatever you like; the structure is simple. The oldest, strongest orphan sits at the top. Officers are cut from the same cloth. Everyone underneath is younger and weaker still. Pretty pathetic, sure—but it's an organization all the same.
Of course you can't survive the back alleys looking like that, so there's always a backer. Who? Just more thugs, really—the kind who refuse to be lumped in with a bunch of orphan brats. Never mind that they were orphans themselves once, clan kids the lot of them.
Anyway. Gather orphans together and you'll find the quick-handed and the fleet-footed, the ones with razor minds, and the ones missing pieces. Fast body? You pickpocket. Sharp head? You run cons or work as a guide. Bad at both? You beg.
If you can't run, you're better off without legs. If your brain won't turn over, you're better off crippled. Begging rewards that kind of talent.
Me, though—I had a decent head and a quick body both. A one-man variety show in the orphan world. So I made some noise. No, seriously: faster than the pickpockets, smarter than the con artists. I could scrap, too. How could the backer outfits not keep an eye on a tier-one orphan like me?
Which is why I never saw it coming.
People feel inferior about what they don't have, and jealous when someone else has it. And jealousy is an ugly, filthy thing—ugly enough to drive an eleven-year-old washout of a freeloading orphan to shove an eight-year-old three years his junior toward death.
"…Cough."
Yeah. That's my story.
The back alley's fleet-footed swindler. Stabbed to death by an eleven-year-old explosion of jealous, talentless, freeloading orphan rage.
One hell of a shitty epitaph.
No—wait. The corpse would just rot wherever they dumped it, and nobody was going to raise a headstone anyway, so it wouldn't even be an epitaph.
Ah, fuck.
The scraps of thought I'd been clinging to were starting to blur. Was I actually dying? Me? Undisputed sales champion of the Alto Clan, this month's most-decorated orphan, no contest?
Aaaah.
This is bullshit.
Lived a bullshit life doing bullshit things, and now I die a bullshit death for a bullshit reason?
Fucking figures. Hah.
Fine then. Next life, I'll only do good things. Die clean, for a good reason.
"…That's as far as I remember, Elder."
"Bwahaha! Even on the brink of death, that's what you were thinking! You're properly insane! Bwahahaha!!"