Straggling, shoes scraping, legs undulating weakly--the legs of a dying insect in a hostile environment. One leg moved more sluggishly than the other, and when it struck the concrete, its sound was akin to a hammer striking a brick wall.
The bigger thing attached to the peculiar leg gave an agonized cry, and then lay still, shoulders heaving, clutching at the odd appendage.
There existed a slice of sky above the alley walls, and he rolled feverish, golden eyes up at it, hot cheek to concrete, nostrils flaring. For quite some time, the stray-cat eyes remained on the estranged slice, and then, brows crowding toward the center of his face, he wetted his lips and brought himself upon his left forearm. He remained this way, body trembling precariously, and then spat, swinging his right forearm beneath him also, bracing it against the cement, trying to coax it into holding him.
Whatever the arm's reaction was, it, apparently, did not suit the smallish man. He gave another cry, and the arm collapsed--hammer against brick--and him along with it.
Outside the alleyway, people passed.
They were wondering if "Sally will be on dinner by the time I get home". They were thinking "jeez, my boss is a real jerk" and "that my briefcase is heavy, so I really ought to clean it out sometime this evening."
Nobody thought about--or heard--the pitiful creature in the alley.
Except one.
He'd been wondering, like some fellow pedestrians, if he'd be eating from another tin can later on when he heard a pained, yet clearly outraged cry. He froze in his tracks, said "excuse me" to the elderly woman who bumped into him, and listened hard for a repetition.
When none came, he adjusted the schematics--for a rocket, and boy, was he excited to begin construction--and was about to go on his merry way. But he heard it again, and, if his hearing wasn't shot from engine testing, it was coming from an alley.
His ears, as it turned out, had served him correctly.
He'd gone to investigate, expecting a hurt animal--but the cry had sounded "human", hadn't it?--and found a person. He was slight and scrawny, but his raggedy attire--which, somehow, appeared damp--made him look smaller. He had abnormally long hair--for a man, anyway--and he imagined that, had he not been on the ground like that, it would be a medium instead of a dark blond.
When his eyes turned on him, they were a startling yellow. Like a cat's.
Whatever stupor this stranger's appearance had held over him, it was broken the moment their eyes met.
"Ah...hallo," He greeted the stranger and winced. German wasn't exactly a universal language; perhaps English was better.
When the stranger responded, he decided a language barrier was inevitable. The stranger began spewing a garbled gibberish, frantically and heatedly. The hostily and the alien-like quality of the language--he was certain he had never heard a person speak it--made his stomach do a slow, uncomfortable roll.
"Er...were you the one screaming?" An immediate sense of disdain for the question settled in. Chances were the stranger didn't even understand him--and of course he was the one to make the noise. Other than the two of them, the alleyway was deserted.
As though rebuking such a senseles question, another angry string of gibberish--and what he assumed were curses--hit him.
He found his feet wishing to backtrack. It was clear he didn't need--or appreciate--help. He was probably just some foreigner who had underestimated the intensity of German liquor and was screaming his lungs out in an alleyway to attain soberness.
Yes, happened all the time.
He turned to leave--and then paused, noting the way he was favoring his left leg.
"...You're hurt," He said plainly, and his heart sank. Helping this peculiar little man had just become unavoidable.
What he got back sounded challenging. If the speaker had at least spoken English, he would have imagined he said, in that same sneering tone, "So what if I am? You gonna save poor, helpless little me?" But he just prattled his nonsense-talk, and it even sounded a bit like he had called him a "darling faucet" somewhere in there.
He considered this for a moment, then began to approach the injured stranger. The stranger drew back and puffed himself up--he found this disturbingly similar to the behavior of some trapped animal. So he did what one was supposed to do when confronting hurt animals; he sank very slowly to his knees and reached out a tentative hand, half-expecting to draw it back with everything from the wrist up missing.
"You're hurt," He repeated and reached for him a little more, "let me see."
A boisterous protest rolled from the foreigner's mouth, and he cringed away, hand following suit. The stranger said a few more things, then began to drag himself off.
"Wait!" It was now his turn to object. "You'll make it worse! Please, can't I take a look?"
He had, a little impulsively, grabbed his shoulder, and the stranger whirled on him and gave another explosive warning. But he did not chomp his fingers off.
'That's encouraging...' He thought, and then reached for the pantsleg, ignoring the owner's strangled objections. He drew it up sharply, like a curtain, and prepared his stomach for an appendage covered in putrid, festering sores or gaping wounds, scabbed and frothy with pus.
Instead, there was metal. It contrasted sharply with his expectations--so much so that he gave a little gasp and dropped back onto his rear.
Mr. Stranger drew his leg back and beheld him in a mixture of smugness and defiance, then said, "Irgnaff."
He stared at the metallic leg in shock. It was a false limb--no more than some inanimate, lifeless thing jutting out of a person's knee--and not at all like the prosthetics that war veterans often sported. It wasn't normal; it was strange.
He looked to the stranger's face, demanding an explanation with his eyes, and paused. On the stranger's face, he saw the first non-aggressive expression since stumbling upon him.
He saw fear.
Subtle fear, if anything, but it was there, nonetheless, as the stranger peered upon the place where the metal part met flesh. The flesh looked raw and scarlet; he imagined that, if he were to hold his palm over it, it would be rather like holding his hand over a stove.
Still, the look was more urgent. How many times had he worn that same look himself?
"That looks bad," He remarked, and the stranger's eyes came to him with guarded suspicion. "I can take you home, and we'll get you fixed-up, okay?"
The stranger frowned and unhinged his jaw, then paused. For the first time, the stranger was interested in him. He studied his face, odd-colored eyes growing fascinated; he couldn't help but notice that, after doing so, his shoulders slumped somewhat, and his scowl dissipated.
He uttered a single, monosyllabic word, and then took the hand offered to him.
Together, the two managed to get the less healthy, who winced visibly and leaned upon him for support, to his feet. He then lead the limping stranger down the sidewalk--among pedestrians he had belonged to about twenty minutes ago--and was readjusting the diagrams under his free arm when the stranger spoke again.
He had asked something--his grubby face, with its wide, curious eyes, suggested that much.
He thought it over, decided what the question meant, and smiled, "I'm Alfons."
The stranger's eyes grew rounder, and, for an instant, he saw a flicker of that strange fascination in his eyes. Then, he adverted them and stared at the street ahead. They walked--hobbled--on in silence, until the stranger spoke again.
"Edward,"
"...Oh?" He asked, and he smiled down to him again.
"It's good to meet you, Edward,"