Author's Notes: It's been done a million times, but I wanted to write a Knives-finds-Legato story of my own. I hope to not make mine sound like all the others, as I don't like looking like a copycat. However, I haven't seen any fics with the idea I thought up for this one, so hopefully, this be at least a little original. Please don't automatically compare this to all the other fics about this subject! I hate it when people do that, be it with movies, books, plays, or whatever. I'd much prefer if you enjoy (or not enjoy) this story based on its own merits, not how it stands up to others like it.
Trigun and all characters therein do not belong to me, but to Nightow Yasuhiro, and whatever companies also hold copyrights.
Desperate Child By Annie-chan Chapter One: Lost and FoundNight. All five moons were up, and the stars were shining brightly. One could see almost as well as during the day. It was a rare night indeed when all five moons were in the sky and waxed full. It probably happened once every hundred years or so.
Down on the surface of the planet, the desert was empty. No one was about in this region too long after sunset. This area was known to be a frequent haunt of bandit gangs, and everyone who lived in the region were locked up safe in their homes, be they in the towns or out on a homestead.
One being alone dared to walk under the bright gaze of the five moons. It was a man: tall, slender, and silent. Intense blue flashed as he turned his eyes up to the moons, estimating the time of night. He had no destination, merely letting his feet take him wherever they chose to go.
He lowered his eyes again to the sand in front of him. He had been walking for hours, but felt no sign of fatigue. Walking was, after all, a trifle exercise for one such as him.
Suddenly, he tensed visibly, coming to a halt. He sensed something in the distance, as if someone was manipulating some sort of wild, untamed force. He turned his head to the north-northeast, toward the sound of a distant explosion. The man immediately turned in that direction and sped off toward the fading sound. He ran silently, the sand muffling his already light footsteps.
He soon stopped. He was standing in front of the wreckage of a house, everything in a fifty-foot radius from the center of the house flattened almost completely. He slowly walked closer. Bodies littered the ground. He could tell by their dress that they were bandits. They apparently had been attacking the house. Perhaps this had been one in a list of homesteads they were going to "visit" tonight. Every single body was mangled in some way. Some were ripped apart, some were twisted into pretzels, some were crushed almost unrecognizably. The man had sensed correctly. Some kind of powerful, yet raw and untrained, force had been unleashed here.
He walked past the bodies and the contorted remains of a few trucks, unfeeling. He had no love at all for the corpses surrounding him.
The house was no more than a pile of rubble now. The sandstone bricks that had made it up had been reduced to gravel, and everything inside was shattered, melted, incinerated, or flattened.
A sound reached his ears. Something was moving near the center of what was once the house. He quickly stole away behind one of the ruined trucks, watching and waiting for whatever had survived to emerge. He was slightly surprised to see a child struggle up out of the wreckage. It was a young boy, maybe ten years old. The man watched silently as the boy turned slowly around in a circle, surveying the aftermath of whatever happened. The boy turned full circle, then sat down hard on the ground, crying loudly. His voice was hoarse, as if he had already been screaming or crying a lot. The man watched impassively as the little boy let loose his grief, fat tears streaming down his cheeks as he tore at his medium-length hair. It wasn't until the boy gave an especially loud and tortured wail that the man's eyes widened, and he paid full attention. The rubble around the boy had suddenly been thrown back away from his quivering little body about ten feet in a circle. It was the boy! He was the one who had done this!
The boy cried like that for several minutes, then began calming down. After a little bit, he struggled up to his feet, still sniffling, and stumbled off in the direction of the nearest town.
The man stood up once the boy was a little ways away and watched his diminishing form disappear into the night. He grinned. He would keep an eye on this one.
*~*~*~*~*~*~*
Several months later…
" 'Ey! Looka' dis!"
A group of preteen boys stood at the entrance to an alleyway, laughing about something. They walked into the dark passageway to where a high stone wall separated the two halves of the alleyway. In the corner huddled a little homeless boy, curled into a tight ball under a filthy, moth-eaten blanket. One of the boys came forward and kicked the streetrat in the ribs.
The urchin awoke suddenly, his wide bloodshot eyes staring fearfully at the newcomers. He cowered back as far as he could go, mumbling something unintelligible.
"Whassat?" the boy who had kicked him said, leaning down and grabbing the urchin's hair. He yanked hard, dragging the urchin out from under the blanket, earning a pained cry. "Whatsa matta? Can'tcha tawk?"
"Ah sed, go 'way!" the urchin sobbed, trying to wriggle free. The pain in his scalp was dreadful.
"Too baid!" the one who had his hair said, dropping him suddenly. "Ah won' letcha go so ees'lee t'dai!" He kicked the urchin hard in the stomach. He reached down again and grabbed at the urchin's shoulders, jerking him into an upright position and shaking the much smaller boy mercilessly. The others laughed and jeered at the urchin's wailing entreaties to be let alone.
"Boys!"
The boys stopped laughing and turned toward the alley entrance. The one shaking the urchin boy dropped his plaything abruptly onto the hard pavement. A woman stood framed in the sunlight at the end of the alley.
"Leeve dat filthay li'l thang an' c'mon!" the woman said, obviously indifferent to the plight of the little homeless boy. "Wi'll be lait if ya don' hurry uhp!" They boys filed out of the alley, having already forgotten the waif.
The street urchin curled back into a tight ball under the blanket, crying bitterly. This happened all the time. The town was small enough that, no matter where he went, they always found him. He still had bruises from their last encounter, and now he felt like every bone in his body had been disconnected.
The homeless boy was about ten or eleven years old. His skin, one would notice, was originally pretty pale, but was now so coated with dirt, bruises, and who knows what else that it was difficult to tell if this child had ever washed in his life. His hair, a dirty, greasy dark blue, was grown wild and matted to his head. No amount of brushing would get this out. The snarls could only be cut out. The child's face was thin, with sunken cheeks and eyes. The eyes were a sickly, watery yellow that stared out from the sockets, frightening away anyone that looked into them. His body was, almost literally, skin and bones. Every day, he felt it getting harder and harder to even move. His body had been cannibalizing itself for a long time. He was very little more than a skeleton, clothed in the dirty, torn rags of what used to be clothing.
This child used to be healthy. He used to have a home, family, decent clothing, regular meals. His hair used to be not so long, and one of the most beautiful shades of blue you could find outside of an artist's supply closet. His eyes used to be bright, shining orbs of gold, not the watered-out rings of yellow now present. He used to keep himself at least partially clean, as clean as you could be living out in the middle of the desert like he had been. He used to have a life worth living.
That was before they had come. They had almost broken the door down, demanding to be let in. His father had refused, at least for a minute to stall a bit, while his mother had grabbed his baby sister, seven years old, and gone into the back of the house. The boy himself had hidden in the broom closet. It was there that he huddled, curled in on himself, as he heard the horrific events on the other side of the door. He heard the house ransacked, his father beaten to death, his mother and sister raped…there was nothing he could do to help. All he could do was pray to whatever god may be listening that they wouldn't find him, trying to keep his sobs of fear from alerting them to his presence. It wasn't long before they found him.
They had dragged him out of the closet by his hair, and thrown him facedown on the ground. He heard through his tears something about a new catamite for the boss, and felt them touching him in places no one was supposed to touch. One had grabbed his chin and forced his head up, laughing about how they couldn't let the boss keep such a pretty face all to himself. It was then that he felt his clothing being torn off and, one by one, the men forcing themselves into his small body.
Hours later, the bandits finally done with him, he had lain naked, shivering, and pain wracked on the floor, the memories of their hands all over him…all he could do was cry. One of the bandits had gone into his room and gotten a set of clothes for him, ordering him to get dressed again. After all, his previous outfit had been torn to shreds with the force it had been removed with. He had shakily complied, not being able to stop his tears, getting slapped and punched more than once for his crying. They had dragged him toward the front door, going through the living room. There, all hell broke loose.
The first thing he saw was his mother, nearly naked, her eyes wide and staring. She was dead. She had died in agony. The second thing he saw was his father, beaten beyond recognition, his blood spattering all four walls of the room. The third thing he saw was his little sister, her pretty dress in shreds on the floor, her little body covered in bruises. She had been bleeding from between her legs, from several bite marks on her skin, and from massive blows to the head. She was dead, as well.
The boy couldn't tear his eyes away from the horrible scene. His family, his loved ones, violated and beaten so brazenly. The worst was his sister, the one he held the most affection for, the one who was the sweetest and most likeable of the bunch. They had shared secrets, thoughts, toys, candy, everything. She was his whole world, almost.
The boy didn't know how what happened next came to be. First, he felt something welling up inside of him, filling his body and soul, pounding at his outer walls in a wild attempt to get free. The next he knew, he was screaming as it burst forth, not out of pain, but out of grief, anger, and vengeance. His scream was soon joined by the screams of all around him, and soon by the explosion of the house itself.
He had fallen unconscious for he didn't know how long. The first thing he remembered was crawling up out of the rubble. It hadn't been too long, judging by the positions of the moons. That didn't matter. All he saw was the wreckage of the house and the bodies. He was surrounded by the bodies of dozens of bandits. Most of them didn't seem killed by the physical blast that destroyed the house, but by some other force. They were twisted and mangled beyond comprehension.
His only option was to run to the nearest town and try to survive on the streets. What life he managed to salvage was miserable. He could never find enough to eat, he was always getting more and more disheveled and filthy, and the neighborhood kids delighted in picking on him cruelly.
Now, as he cried in the alleyway he had chosen to be his sleeping place the night before, all he could think about was the life he used to live. It had been a simple life, but he had been happy. He longed more than anything to have it back, but that was impossible after what had happened.
He was scared of people. Everyone he met either shunned him or hurt him. He was terrified they would do to him what those bandits had done to him, or worse.
He stayed curled in that alleyway all day, afraid to come out. He didn't eat at all that day, making his body deteriorate even faster than it normally did. It wasn't until late that night that he uncurled his stiff joints and ventured out, even weaker than normal. There were some garbage cans nearby, and he went toward them to try to find something to eat. When he got there and pulled the lid off one, he heard a low, threatening growl. His head whipped around to the left and beheld a big, mean-looking, stray dog. It was slowly walking over to him, drooling, as if it saw him as a tasty, if a little bony, snack. The dog probably didn't eat much more than he did. Its overly large, hunger-crazed eyes froze him in place, letting the dog pounce forward and sink its teeth into his forearm.
He screamed. As loud as his weakened lungs would allow, he screamed. The pain was unbearable as the dog began to chew on his arm even as he lived. All who heard his screams paid no attention. They all knew that it was just the little homeless wretch, and nobody wanted to risk getting hurt themselves by the dog.
The dog suddenly let go of the bloodied limb with a loud yelp. It's head twisted around, the neck snapping audibly, and its body fell lifeless to the street. The boy looked up and saw, in the moonlight, the outline of someone he hadn't noticed before.
It was a man, standing perfectly still and silent not twenty feet away from him. The man was tall, perhaps almost seven feet, and slender. They boy could tell that the body under the odd, tight clothing was very well-toned, and could be lethal in a fight. Short, platinum blond hair looked almost white in the moonlight, and the stars glittered in two deeply blue eyes.
The man started walking toward the boy, and the boy tried to scramble backwards, but his weakness made him stumble and fall back to the ground. He screamed again when he felt the man's hand on his bone-thin arm.
"Don't move," the man said, his voice smooth and soothing. "I'm not going to hurt you."
"No, no, no!" the boy shrieked, trying to twist away. "Lemme go! Leeme 'lone!"
"I said, don't move," the man repeated, sounding as if he wanted to comfort. He put his other hand on the boy's shoulder, as if to steady him. The boy, crazed with terror of this man, turned toward the hand on his shoulder and bit into the wrist hard. "Ow!" the man yelled, jerking his hand away. "You little brat!"
The next thing the boy felt was a hard slap across his face, and he fell into darkness.
To be continued…Author's Notes: Ouch. I was meaner to the little boy (I hope to God you all know who he is) than I originally meant to be. Ah, well. I hope I didn't get too harsh. Anyway, I won't be so mean to him later on. Oh, and as for all the informal speech: read it like a Southerner would speak. I spelled it to fit that kind of accent, as well as just uneducated pronunciation. Not to say that Southerners are uneducated. I just mixed some informal pronunciation into the accent. I hope I succeeded. The man (I hope to God you all know who he is, too) doesn't speak that way, because he obviously isn't from the region. So, how did you like this first chapter? I don't know if this story will get too long. Probably not. Anyway, let me know either in a review or at mangareader@hotmail.com, onegai shimasu!