Chapter Text
Life was hard. After you lived your hard life, you died. This was simple fact to Razo, not a point of contention. Life was hard, and it was hard to bother with dwelling on it when you were starving in an alley and dealing with a crippled hip. She had fled a Commonwealth children’s home when she was eight years old after a seemingly kind teacher had tried to touch her where she did not want to be touched, and thrown her against a desk when she screamed, resisted. With no one to set her wrenched wounds, they healed irregularly, leaving her only able to hobble at a slow pace. Not fortuitous for a street urchin.
Hunger was her first companion. She had no mother, no father, no siblings, no family to speak of, but in the very pit of her stomach and the depths of her soul she had hunger. Some days it was a voracious roar. Others it was a small murmur. But consistently it was there, making sure she was never alone, never alone. It was friend, family, and teacher. It taught her that the world was cruel but not without its mercies. That her crumbling body was still alive and working desperately to remain so, that when she couldn’t count on anybody else she could count on herself.
She lived on small things pilfered from gardens, from unattended delivery crates. Razo had become quite skilled at her slow sort of stealth. Even with her bad hip she could slip into back rooms of stores without a sound and be back out with an unnoticeable amount of food. She didn’t really enjoy stealing, but she didn’t have too much of a moral dilemma about it. She figured a missing apple here and there was worth much less than a human life in the grand scheme of things. At least to her.
Things got easier as she got better at living with a crippled hip. She found better and better places to sleep, as well as better and better places to get food. Things got harder whenever she got sick and couldn’t move from the places she hid herself, weak and starving and shivering with cold or sweating with fever. Things got the absolute worst when something injured her bad hip. If hunger was her first companion, pain was her first master. She was enslaved, and she knew there wasn’t an escape from it.
Other difficulties took the form of other vagrants. Her disability and her small size made her look like a very easy target. After the first altercation nearly cost her all of her worldly possessions, she started leaving them in her place on her excursions, bringing only her little serrated knife. Some fights she won the day and others she won nothing but aching bones and bloody lips and black eyes.
She killed the next man that tried to touch her in the worst way.
She was 10 years old by then but she had decided already. Never again would anyone take from her what she did not want to give.
She was 10 years old and she had a little serrated knife that would never be clean of death again. It didn’t bother her too much. She preferred herself over monsters. The others started leaving her alone. She never let them know her name; it was the only thing no one could take from her. So they called her sutendoburēdo. It was from a language she did not recognize, having been raised speaking only the Common Tongue by the children’s home, but one that she came to learn in time. It was nearly a dead language on Orus, spoken only by the people in the run-down district she had made her home. Many languages were nearly dead on that wretched planet, in the wake of the Common Tongue. Years later, she would learn as many languages as she could. They were art, and as she came to realize, art was something intrinsic to humanity. To her. So was bloodshed.
Sutendoburēdo.
Stained Blade.
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Her knife hung like a warning sign on her bad hip as she made her travels to and from her little aerie. In this old, old district, some buildings still had these primitive contraptions she had heard called “fire escapes.” No matter what they were called by others, Razo had called them sanctuaries. She had found one in the very back of an alley, on an abandoned building, giving her a protected back side and a clear view of the front. These wonderful things had ladders that retracted to and from the ground, and although the climb was extremely painful, having to use all the strength in her good leg to haul the other up, it was worth it. During the blazing summer months she slept outside on the fire escape, and during the freezing winter months she slept just inside the small room the fire escape was attached to, with all of the doors nailed and wedged shut. It was almost like freedom, being up in the air, surrounded by something similar to safety.
Razo had always been very clever with electronics and other tech. Her little resources became the best teachers, and the overflowing piles of trashed tech on the streets became many clever little things under her clever little fingers. They became bombs, security devices, trackers. She could make just about anything. Eventually, she even had a tidy business going, selling or trading her odd inventions to local shop owners and gangs and the like. Soon she stopped stealing, once she had an actual steady income of C’s. And a steady income of rumors about her. Not only did her home in the air and her fierce reputation give her protection, but the traps and tricks in her alley discouraged absolutely everyone who knew better. Those who didn’t, learned very quickly.
She kept very little, though she had a seemingly safe place to store her things. Only what could fit inside her little knapsack or on her person, like her knife. Also among the precious belongings she had managed to bring from the children’s home was her school-issue classroom sewing and tool kits, a blanket that she had patched countless times, an aged infosearch tablet, and a very very important water bottle. And. And, and, and. One very small vial of a very precious substance.
She hadn’t ever used any. That amount couldn’t have changed the course of her wrongly healing bones. She thought of selling it once, but reminded herself that this valuable little thing could get her beaten or killed or, worse, sent back to a Commonwealth institution. This she kept hidden in a small niche she had made and disguised inside the abandoned house. Her handiwork was so impressive that only she could have ever found it. It felt something like hope, hidden deep in her heart where only she could see, where no one could find it and break it.
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One sweltering summer night when she was hardly more than twelve, Razo was coming home from a food run when she saw a huddled figure at the end of her alley, beneath the hanging ladder that promised her safety. She looked around, bewildered that not a single of her traps had been triggered, and drew her knife as she slowly approached the creature.
“Who are you? What are you doing here?” she hissed in the Common Tongue and the other two languages she knew.
The miserable shape lifted its head and revealed itself to be male. Young. Not much older than her. He appeared to be some sort of bird splice. Sad, sweet eyes peered at her through the trickles of blood that issued from gashes in his head. Beautiful iridescent feathers glinted in the rising moonlight, making an eerie contrast to the sheen of sweat and blood that misted over his midnight skin. He startled her by chuckling a little.
“Oh, just out for a stroll. Lovely evening, isn’t it?” he managed before a frightening, hacking cough robbed him of speech.
Her knife drifted to her side, not on the attack but not trusting either.
“Why are you in my alley?” she questioned once his coughing subsided.
“Being chased. Ducked in here. They wouldn’t follow. Kept saying sute… sutendobu… can’t think right. Saw your traps. Very clever, but I suppose not clever enough,” he answered between gasping breaths, “Seemed like a nice place to die.”
“What are you supposed to be dying of?”
He laughed again, a few drops of blood blooming from his split lip. “Oh, can’t figure it out, clever girl? Have a look, if it matters to you. Won’t much longer anyway, seeing as I’m on my way out.” With that, he tugged aside his coat to reveal a knife wound in a very, very bad place. “Alright if I sit a spell until I’m passed on? You could sit with me. I’m harmless and I don’t fancy dying alone. Do you trust me?”
Slowly she returned her knife to her hip and moved painfully to sit beside him. He turned his face up to look at her, moonlight pooling in his honest eyes.
“So tell me. What’s a pretty, clever girl like you doing living out here?”
“I’m not pretty. Beauty is irrelevant. I have nowhere to go and this is a safe spot.”
He frowned. “Hm. I wonder why you don’t think so. Beauty is an abstract creature, and it lives in many places.”
She moved slightly away from him. “Even if I was pretty, it wouldn’t matter now or ever.”
“Of course it would. In a bleak life like this, beautiful things are the most tangible source of hope. And you can find beauty if only you look for it. You’re giving me hope right now, just talking to me. Your voice is beautiful, your inventions are beautiful, your eyes are beautiful. The scars on your skin are poetry. Your crippled hip is a work of art, so, so beautiful. I still haven’t figured out how you managed such a complex security system with so little resources. You must be so clever. Beautiful.”
He was coughing again and tears pricked at her eyes. His eyes slipped shut and his breath creaked in and out of his chest, hands falling limply away from his jacket and showing the wound to the night sky. “It’s been very nice to talk to you. I never wanted die, obviously, but much more so I never wanted to die alone. Surely you don’t mind if I stay now. Couldn’t move anymore if I tried. It’s very cold, isn’t it? And the moonlight has never felt so heavy before. How lovely.”
Before she knew what she was doing, she was releasing the locks and securities on her ladder and scrambling up, up, up, and into the mostly empty room, to the little niche with its precious charge. Razo made it back down the ladder in record time, scarcely aware of the complaints of her hip as her eyes found the dying boy’s body in the fading light. Only a faint whisper of breath showed him to be still alive as she painfully knelt beside him, tilted his head back, and poured the vial down his throat. He went dangerously still as the liquid trickled down to his stomach. So still. Then, a few more violent coughs, and more stillness.
She worried that it had been too late, and she had not only failed but had wasted the vital fluid in vain. But then. His breath evened and smoothed, settling into a healthy cadence, and his eyes fluttered open, focusing immediately on her.
“What… was that Regenex? You had some, and you used it on me? Why, clever girl? Surely a dying splice couldn’t matter enough for that.”
She studied the empty vial in her hand, avoiding those lighthouse eyes that sought her secrets.
“You asked earlier if I trust you. I don’t know yet. You say nice things. I don’t hear a lot of nice things.”
“I’ll keep saying them, then, clever girl.”