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“How many today?”
They sit around a pit fire, a crude thing that was dug out from the dirt with their hands, insulated with rocks to keep the heat, and filled with dry sticks and leaves and paper and hair and whatever else will burn. As the question is posed, someone adds today’s newspaper to the flame to keep it from dying.
One kid, the tallest, with wild hair and missing teeth, is the first to reply. They call him Jagshark. He’s always ready to boast his count, make it a competition, raise the stakes. He puffs his chest out, and says, “Three.”
Another, smaller, but the most physically threatening, with homemade street tattoos and muscles that don’t belong on a young teenager. He rips off a piece of jerky with this teeth, chewing loudly. He’s called Bones, because he always talks about how his favorite sound is that of bones snapping. He grins ugly, food still in his mouth, and says, “Four.”
The last is silent. The youngest, he’s cloaked in shadow, long, dark hair draping his face like curtains. His knees are pulled up to his chest, making him appear smaller than he already is. He doesn’t meet the eyes of the other two boys, but they’re used to that by now. He’s the weird one. Some the other street kids gave up on trying to poke fun at him ages ago when he didn’t bother to give any of them the satisfaction of having hurt his feelings. The rest stopped when some of the more persistent bullies were found dead, heads nearly severed completely from their bodies, in their makeshift tents.
They call him Talon.
The one called Talon raises his hands, palms outward, splaying his fingers wide as if he’s pressing them against a wall. It’s his way of saying: Ten.
“Ten?” Jagshark scoffs. “There’s no fucking way, dude.”
Talon’s eyes brighten; he seems to have anticipated the disbelief. From his worn leather pouch he produces ten noses, placing them all neatly in a line before the fire. Bones and Jagshark look on in grotesque fascination.
“Gods above.” Bones rips off another bit of jerky, but doesn’t avert his eyes. “We need to get you to a shrink or something.” It’s a joke– implying any of them could afford something like that. Implying psychiatrists exist in Noxus, and aren’t something exclusive to the Piltovan elite.
Talon ignores the comment. “It’s not how many you kill,” he says in his small voice, yet somehow it’s just as threatening as a commander’s barking orders. “It’s how much you steal.” He follows up his wisdom with pulling several riches from his pouch; a golden pocketwatch, precious jewels, a nobleman’s wallet, a few golden teeth. “But you insisted on making it a competition. How much did you two get?”
Bones and Jagshark exchange a look. “Uhhh…,”
Talon gives them a hard look, from under his lashes, before deftly putting all of his treasure back in his pouch. He leaves the noses– perhaps as a warning they should have taken.
They try to kill Talon in the night as he sleeps, try to do to him what he did to all those Noxian upperclassmen. It doesn’t work, because Talon learned to never really sleep, and he’s left with the two bloody bodies of people he almost considered friends at his feet. He sighs through his nose, sheathes the knife, and picks up his pouch to head to one of the lower markets. He’ll eat well today.