Chapter Text
It was a boy.
The magistrate looked back down at the file. Trespassing, breaking and entering, attempted theft and assault, all at the Public Security Maintenance Bureau and on the first conviction. He had been expecting someone older, the file way the file was written implied someone older. He had been expecting a large muscled man, or just a man in general, with ‘criminal’ written across his expression. What he got was a scrawny teenager, a boy who was fourteen at oldest, with big blue eyes and a fresh criminal mark burned onto his right cheek. With wild hair, sweeping blond bangs and dressed in obnoxious shades of blue and yellow, the boy barely looked able to sneak past his mother let alone into the main Security building.
The boy had to be a minor, so where were his parents? A legal guardian? The boy had to be an orphan or his parents were oblivious to his arrest. Either way, no one would be finding out until morning when the boy would already be on a junk ferry to Satellite.
The magistrate reread the file. Yugo. Male. No age, surname or date of birth given. Arrested in the Security building after being found trying to hack into the archives. Had defeated three officers in a duel and had physically assaulted the vice-director of Security. No prior convictions.
He had been so annoyed at being dragged out of bed in the middle of the night to sentence one person that he just stamped a deportation Satellite with a minimum of three years and the harshest parole conditions he could think of. Now he regretted it. Had he been more lucid, the magistrate would have spotted the holes in the report, details that had been skimmed, vague or just simply improbable. How would a boy, or anyone for that matter, found on the third floor and surrounded by officers simply ‘appear’ in the reception? There was nothing about him breaking through the officers, the duel had happened on the ground floor, and there was no way the boy could have fazed through the floors. It was simply impossible. The reports had to be fabricated.
The magistrate had felt rather smug as he walked out of the court house. He had decided to drop by the holding cells and see for himself the poor lowlife who dragged him out of bed at three in the morning. Then he saw the boy, alone in an empty cell, hands cuffed behind a chair and screaming for release. Now all he felt was guilt.
He heard the thumps of heavy footfall and turned to see a man racing towards him. The man looked about his mid-twenties with black hair with blond streaks, dressed in a blue polo and white lab coat.
He came to a sudden stop, bending down trying to catch his breath.
“Is Yugo in there?” the man demanded.
The magistrate dumbly nodded. The man straightened and entered the cell, disabling the lock with a quick tap on the keypad. The effect was instantaneous. The boy stopped his futile squirming and stared blankly at his visitor. He said something, the man’s name most likely, and the man had caught him in an embrace.
The magistrate felt his heart drop to his stomach. The man was from the Tops, he had to be. How else would he have gotten clearing so quickly? The boy had to be his brother or cousin or nephew or something and it was likely the man wouldn't take kindly to the boy being sent to Satellite.
The higher ups, the ones who probably framed the boy, would be untouchable. The magistrate, the cruel cruel magistrate who had sentenced a little boy to the island of misfits and criminals, would be the one taking the fall.
But even if the man pressed charges the moment he walked out of the cell, nothing could stop the boy from being sent to Satellite.
{~~~}
As gruesome as it was, finding bodies on the street wasn't that uncommon in Satellite. Calling it a hazardous place to live in was a severe understatement.
Every building, whether it had been built before or after the earthquake that split the island from the mainland, was at risk of collapsing. It was spontaneous and instantaneous. One moment, an old structure was a home the next it was a pile of rubble and a new grave.
There was barely any sanitation, and running water was a distant memory to some and a fantasy to the rest. A contaminated water pump would have an entire neighbourhood dropping like flies, or making people wish they were flies. They were one of the few creatures that thrived in this environment and would spoil food beyond human consumption with their eggs and maggots. Unless the source could be trusted, ‘fresh’ food was used as fire tinder. It was better if the food was canned, the high sodium contents would kill in thirty years rather than thirty days. If tin poisoning didn’t get to you first.
And that was all without the ‘politics’. The mainland simply didn't care about Satellite. They were sub-human creatures on an island of trash from the City's perspective. Junk and refuse were constantly dumped by ship or by pipeline, even the human kind. It was simply too much effort for them to realise that Satellite was filled with normal people too.
Then there were the duel gangs and Security. The average resident saw them all as the same, oppressors trying to grab power. The only difference was that one lot was funded by the City. Conflict between them was near constant. Security against gang. Gang against gang. Security against Security. It was all the same in the end. Just now there were more bodies on the streets.
Rin had known nothing else other than Satellite. The dirt and grime. The duels and diseases. This was all that life was. She had learned long ago not to let her eyes wonder, to be cold to the world as the winds the blew through the night. Train your sights forwards and look to the future, she taught herself, those that fall are losers. The losers of the losers. To lose is to die. To win is to live.
But what made him so special?
Rin couldn’t remember what else she had been doing that day but her eyes should have never wondered. She didn't know why her eyes drifted from their straight path to land on him. He was nothing special. Another body in the dirt, another loser among losers. But…
“Hey, are you ok?” that was her who said that, kneeling down to him, a not quite dead body of another ten dozen.
And he looked up. Pale skin and misty blue eyes...and an ugly yellow mark cutting across his cheek. His clothes, though torn and dirty, were a vibrant yellow sweater and blue jeans of better quality than anything that could be found on the island. He was trash from the mainland. He had lost and couldn't survive with the scum. That much was obvious. No one born and bred in Satellite would be found like this. She should had left him where he laid.
But a pair of arms flew around her and a face was buried in her neck.
“ enwindenwindenwindenindenwind....” was mumbled into her ear, over and over like a hypnotic chant.
Rin pushed him off of her, stumbling to her feet. En Wind. It sounded so familiar but what did it mean? A word, a name maybe, was at the tip of her tongue and barely-formed memories pressed at the edges of her mind. She was grasping at her wrist, feeling for something that wasn’t there. She was looking at his eyes again. Clear crystal blue like the sky on the rare smog-free day, like clean water that was as rare as gold, like...like…
Like wings.
“ Rin?”
“Yuugou?”
“Oi! It’s Yugo, not Yuugou!” he immediately snapped, breaking them both out of their dazed states. He stared at her blankly, fully conscious and completely confused. “Who are you?” asking as if he didn't say her name a moment before.
Rin should have walked away at that point. Whatever trance she had been in was broken and she had no time to loiter with some mainland reject. But…
“The name’s Rin.” she said, extending her hand to him. “Need a place to stay?”
Martha wouldn't mind one more mouth to feed.