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The streets of London were always dirty in the alleyways, a kind of dirty that one couldn’t scrub off their shoes or wash out of their clothing. Sometimes the buildings, tall and looming, were almost comforting to a regular rat residing here. East London was the worst, with the rats running at a rampant rate and the toll for disease rising day by day.
But alas, three children whom were certainly not rats sat in these alleyways, the building they had been squatting in for going on three weeks a rather sad sight as they gazed up at it. The canvas on the awnings were rotting and needed replaced, the stoop needed to be swept, and the alley where they always entered through the back door was beyond the repair of anyone.
It was three children, of no blood relation but rather the relation of poverty and filth that they called themselves siblings, whom soon began to squat in the two-room apartment. One, a green-eyed adventurous boy, never too patient and always flighty, whom kept the apartment secure and relatively safe from outsiders. His best friend was a blonde haired, blue eyed brain boy whom had secretly kept his eye on this place for three months before, watching the previous inhabitant deteriorate in the freezing mid-December temperatures. The most important but the least appreciated was a dark haired, pale-faced girl, who drug the frozen body to the trash bins in the dead of night, gagging the entire time.
“Mikasa,” the blonde-haired boy called from the wood stove, carefully stirring a pot of some simmering soup, none too appetizing but nonetheless food. “Would you get me the salt?”
The dark haired girl nods, leaving her post at the window to reach in the cupboards for the rocks. She grinds the compound in a mortar and pestle, then hands it to her pseudo-sibling. “Thanks,” he mumbles.
“I’m getting sick of being here,” the green eyed boy complains, the sudden absence of Mikasa next to him by the window made painfully obvious by the lack of warmth. He crosses his arms to clarify, “or at least, I’m sick of never going out anymore and always holing up here.”
Mikasa glares at him. “And yet we are no longer cold, and we have food, and beds to sleep in. Are you never satisfied, Eren?” Her accent is strange, and her L’s sound like R’s and maybe it has something to do with her heritage, the blonde boy thinks.
“Armin,” Eren gestures towards the cooking boy. “What do you think?”
He pauses for a second. “I’m with Mikasa on this one—I’m grateful that we’re safe now. Though, I do agree, it is getting kind of boring. I’m starting to wonder when they will notice the old lady is not here.”
The old lady hadn’t been there for almost a month, not a case of vacationing from this cold hell but rather vacationing from life completely. The light behind her eyes died one night, and when there was no light on in the wee morning hours like there always was, the three siblings moved in suddenly. There was no air conditioning or heating, leaving the old, single woman dead alone. Naturally, they got rid of her frozen body, grateful for the season and the lack of smell.
“If they haven’t yet, they will soon,” Mikasa mutters. “I suppose it’s safe to go out again. We’re almost out of food, and we have a little money again.”
“All thanks to me,” Eren boasts, proud of his pickpocketing skills. “I’ll get us milk and potatoes and tinned food if you let me go outside.”
“I want tea,” Armin announces. “Tea and maybe some sweets. If you two go out together, tell people that your grandmother has sent you. But only tomorrow.”
The finer layout of the plan to buy things like normal children on errands for their grandmother was discussed over the stew, which was more broth than anything else but was warm and filled their stomachs and they really couldn’t complain that the bones had come from the trash last night. The three children slept together, their warmth keeping them alive another day as the temperatures dropped well into freezing.
The plan was executed in the morning when the sun had just risen, with Mikasa and Eren bundled in Armin’s borrowed clothing and their faces washed clean, money in the pocket of Armin’s faded blue coat. The general store was a twenty minute walk away, where they gleefully bought as much as they could, even remembering to grab Armin’s black tea and some new sweet on the market, called caramel. The store owner saw their enthusiasm and laughed, mentioning how he had not seen the bright faces of children in quite some time for most were afraid of them catching disease.
It was on the way home, arms laden with a brown paper bag each that the plan went wrong. A couple noticed them, the male a short guy with cold eyes and an odd cut of hair, and the female with silver-framed glasses perched on her nose and a simple brown dress that went with her hair quite nicely. They nodded to each other, a silent agreement.
Mikasa and Eren had spent so much time at their new home, combined with the glee of fresh food that they had forgotten to watch for followers.