Strolling In The Alleyways

The girl wasn't entirely lost yet, it seemed. She knew she would be, some time, but for now she could wait. Her steps stopped, pausing in the alley as she waited for the other boy to catch up. Psi. That boy. He looked older than her, but he didn't act any older. She wasn't sure what that meant - maybe he seemed young for her age, or maybe she was just too old for hers. Somewhere beyond the pale features, a boundless wisdom lurked. It wasn't hers, but it was still lurking there. It aged people, she thought, to know about such things.

Or maybe she didn't, and it all just seemed very deep because she was fourteen.

"It's okay," she assured him, as he apologized, "I'll get... lost... again when I... need to. I ...always do." Her shoulders shrugged, thin beneath not quite enough layers of clothing. "I'm not really... going anywhere. Don't... really have... anywhere to go. Sometimes... it's more important... to be going away."

She wasn't really going away from anywhere either, at least, not at the moment. Maybe away from the first alley, from the hero there. That could be it. There was something else she'd been getting away from, once, but she didn't always remember what it was. The mouse on her shoulder squeaked, conversationally. He was right. It really was better that way.

Not that she would have remembered otherwise.

"I know... many places." The girl shrugged again. She was always waking up in places like that. None of them were any better than the place he was thinking of, though, and she didn't really know if she could find her way back to any of the ones she had been in. Returning to places was establishing a pattern. Somewhere you went back to was somewhere you could be found, and the girl... well, she couldn't be that.

"I'll come with... you. I... don't mind. I'll... disappear sometime." Another shrug, another half expression twisted by scarring. "I... do that. Not... on purpose." A squeak, from the creature on her shoulder, maybe a reminder, maybe a remonstrance. She reached up without looking, twining the mouse's tail between her fingers. Whether this was intended to comfort the mouse or herself, it was impossible to tell.

What she had said was the truth, though. She didn't really control her ability to become lost, it was simply a part of who she was - or, at least, a part of who she had become. Sometimes, the girl thought those were the same people. Other times, she wasn't so sure. But at some point she would sleep, and when she woke up she would be somewhere else. Or sometimes people turned around and she just... wasn't there. It had to be that way, though. It kept her safer, that way. People knowing who she was, where she was - those were people who could lead others back to her. People like heroes.

She couldn't let that happen. Not again.

"I'm used to walking."

The girl gave Psi a little smile at the assurance that he wasn't about to have heroes over for dinner, but she didn't make any promises about taking him up on the offer he'd made, either. She had learned that promises were something you had to be careful about, otherwise you ended up promising more than you could offer, and then things got... complicated.

She knew a lot about complicated.

He'd pried up part of the street and opened up the route into the subway tunnels. The girl knelt down beside the opening. She wasn't oblivious to the grime and whatever else she might be kneeling in so much as that she had just passed beyond the point where that was something she could care about any more. 'A little dirt never hurt anyone,' as the saying went, and since she knew a number of things that would hurt someone, dirt was fairly low on her list of things to be concerned with. A flicker of movement in the shadows caught her eye - there were rats down there, in the sewers. Live ones. Well, dead ones too, but not all of the rats down there were dead.

She liked the dead ones better. A vision flashed through her mind of a future where she might be so callous as to say the same thing about people, and she shrank away from it, unwilling. Maybe things would go that way whether or not she wanted them to, though. She certainly hadn't been given much choice about... all this. Psi jumped into the hole, and she followed him more carefully, using the ladder. Could she have used her shield to stop herself from getting hurt? Probably, in a pinch, but that didn't mean she wanted to use the energy for it, especially when there was a ladder anyway. That, and she didn't just want to be throwing around magic all the time. It was best to save that for times when she really needed it.

She rejoined her... no, he wasn't her companion. She couldn't have companions. She rejoined the person she was currently walking with, glancing over at him for a moment. She'd had the whole way down the ladder to consider her answer to his question.

"With all my... other issues... how could I tell?" There was another quirk of an almost-smile, the statement simultaneously not-quite-serious and also entirely so. She might have known the statement was a bit absurd, but that didn't necessarily make it wrong.

"Are you... okay? You've... been through things." She knew. He didn't have to say much about them, and she wasn't going to pry into anything he didn't want to talk about. She could certainly understand not wanting to talk about some things. But still, she couldn't help but know. There was a look people got, when they'd been through things.

She knew about that one.

Psi sounded like some of what he had said, he'd kept bottled up inside for a while. The girl kept up with him, walking quietly with the light footfalls of someone of her build: small and slight, easy to overlook. She didn't say anything for a while, but she didn't think she needed to. She listened, and the mouse on her shoulder listened. Its ear flicked notably for a moment when the boy spoke of not letting people hurt his friends, the motion a swift twitch, caught by something in his tone.

He apologized for talking, which she didn't think he'd needed to. She murmured something unintelligible in response, but the tone was right for don't worry about it. He'd asked her about herself, about whether she was doing okay, and her answer was already prepared on the tip of her tongue: I'm fine, don't worry about me. It was the answer she was supposed to give, wasn't it? When people asked how you were, they didn't want an answer, they wanted a reassurance. It was a quick interlude, meaningless words passed between one person and another.

But some words had meaning, and so she swallowed what she'd been about to say, and was silent for a moment, the ambiance of the subway punctuated by the distant noises from the city above and the occasional scuffling of rats in the shadows. Eventually she sighed, and offered another shrug. It wasn't like the other ones. Those had been noncommittal, but this was more... helpless. "Not really. It's... hard. But it's... what I asked for. I guess." It was what she had to be, if she didn't want to be found, and that had been so very important. That was important.

"I hate it, really. But... I'm learning."

The girl was quiet, a different sort of quiet. Her usual quiet was withdrawn, but this was a quiet that was almost considering questing out a little bit. It was a quiet that considered the idea of a place to go back to. That was... something dangerous, she knew. She had once had somewhere to call home, and other places where she knew she would always be welcome. Those places were still out there, somewhere, but... she couldn't go back there. She wasn't the same person she had been, when she'd been there.

Or maybe she still was the same person, but did it really matter? Either way, she couldn't go back to where she'd been.

She had never been here before, though. It was something different. Something new. Something that was... not tied in to who she had once been. Was it safe? Was anything safe?

No, of course it wasn't. She knew that as well as anyone. Heroes were supposed to be safe - they were supposed to save people, anyway, but that wasn't how it worked. Maybe they had saved someone, but it hadn't been her.

His 'thank you' made her shy, and she didn't quite know how to react to that. "I just... I thought..." She didn't know how to express what she'd thought, not really. It wasn't really that she had thought he needed help - she wasn't a hero. She didn't try to force help on people, not like that. So why had she reached out? Maybe she'd just seen someone like who she'd once been, when she'd needed someone to say something to her.

That was it, really, wasn't it? She'd needed someone to say something to her, but everyone had been saying things at her instead. Telling her what to do, what she should have done, why everything she wanted was bad, what she wasn't allowed to do or have or want. "You seemed okay. And... I... didn't know if other people would... see it that way." He'd seemed like someone who knew what it was to have to make choices, and what it was like when there wasn't a perfect choice. It was easy to say don't steal when you weren't suffering. People always said it like that. They said don't steal because it was easier to say than you deserve to be hungry, you deserve to be cold, you deserve to suffer. People didn't say things like that, even when they meant them. They said don't steal because it made you the bad guy, and it made them the hero.

She'd noticed that. She noticed a lot of things. It was easy to notice things, when you were small and quiet and didn't attract attention.

"And you're alone like I am." Not alone, but alone like she was. The mouse on her shoulder rubbed its nose against her fingertips, always with her. A constant companion, but it didn't make her any less alone, really.

She watched him look around the place and think about making it... home, she thought. She knew what that was. She couldn't have one, though, not any more. Psi seemed happy, though, which was a good thing. It was good to see someone happy.

He slipped a necklace out from under his shirt and held it out to her. It had some of those little identification tags on it like they used in movies about soldiers - not that she had really seen many of those, but she knew the general idea. She didn't really know why he had them, but that wasn't something that she was about to ask questions about. If he wanted to tell her, that was one thing, but sometimes there were things that people didn't want to talk about. She looked down at the necklace, then back up at Psi, realizing after a moment that he seemed to intend for her to take it.

The girl shook her head. "No. I... I know what you're... trying to offer. But I... can't. I... won't." It was everything she had been avoiding so far, so very carefully. She didn't want anyone to be able to find her - not even him. Not even if he wanted to help.

Because she knew where that ended.

The girl gave him another one of her little half-smiles, somehow apologetic. Maybe she would have liked to take the little necklace, but she couldn't bring herself to do it. It was forging a link between them, and sometimes those links could be traced. Even if they couldn't find her, someone might use her to find him. That was as much the reason she could never go back to what she had been, and it was the reason that she couldn't accept it now. She liked him, as much as she liked anyone, and that meant that she had to say no.

Even if she knew it was the antithesis of what he would want.

"I am sorry. I wish... things were different, sometimes. I wish... things were different... a lot of the times."

He spoke to his arm, she noticed, but she didn't really mind that either. She talked to dead rats, after all, and dead mice. Or not so dead mice. Sometimes it was hard to define things like death and life. Once she'd thought that they were pretty clear, before she'd learned about life magic. Biomancy. It was just another pretty word for something awful, though. When they did it it was life magic, when she did it it was necromancy.

She didn't mind. The rats didn't mind either. "I'll remember this. And... I won't forget you. Or forget about you."