The boy dips his hands into the cold water of the river and washes the blood from beneath his nails.
This is routine, now. It's not even worth a frown. He acts on muscle memory, fingers and wrists aching from wielding weapons far too large and heavy for him. It's nothing. It's just work. No big deal. This is what he tells himself.
He sits back on the bank, clumsily landing on an old revolver and wincing at the unexpected pain. A lucky miss that he hadn't pushed at the trigger. Shooting himself in the ass in the middle of nowhere would be a stupid way to die. This thought, at least, draws a smile from his chapped lips.
It's not easy, being a child mercenary. Well, he thinks he's a mercenary. A fighter, a thief, a spy. Anything that is available to him is a job worth doing. He has bills to pay, debts to repay, and a blood alliance to uphold whether he understands it or not.
Blood is thicker than water. He watches the blood from his hands spiral into the clear river and knows this to be true. His mother needs him. That's what matters. So what if he's been facing monsters twice his size? So what if he knows the blood won't always be that of a creature? Who cares? Only children cry about stepping on bugs. This is no different.
Even as he tells himself this, he feels a twinge of guilt within his chest. He hits himself in the forehead with the palm of his hand and forces the emotion away.
Alfred is an actor. He'll play any role, no matter how tough or arrogant or compliant, anything to support his mother. He's learning to keep secrets so important that they burn his ribs from the inside out. He's learnt to fight with both hands, to navigate a world unfamiliar to him, and to help people forget that he's only a child, still growing, with boots too large for him. Everything needs to change. In fact, Alfred isn't sure he wants to be Alfred anymore, not for anyone new.
Weariness creeps into his limbs and he has to struggle to stay upright. If he can pretend to be strong often enough, it will eventually become the truth. It's a theory that seems to be working so far. He's been a different person in every city, every town, and no one he's had dealings with will remember him as a coward. He picks up the gun and aims at a fish just below the surface, making a sharp click of his tongue and laughing.
He's been getting better at making people laugh, too. It seems more important even than being tough. If he gets frightened, or feels out of his depth, a smart joke usually gets him back into shallow water. Adults all want to have a sense of humour. He thinks it's how they cope with the world being so cold and cruel. He hopes it will work for him too.
He lowers the gun and looks down at the worn handle, realising he can't remember where this one is from. He borrowed it from someone, he thinks, someone from the organisation. Or was it a man in a bar? Did he steal it? Too many places, and faces, and hard nights scrounging for anything that won't cost him too dearly. The only problem with becoming a good actor is that he's not so sure he knows who he is any more. But that doesn't matter, either. He can be anyone, and do anything, so long as he gets what he wants for her. His own life means nothing. It's simple and his young heart believes it will always be thus.
He had explained this to a man the night before, although he had kept the details vague. The old guy was trying to pay him too little for a tricky task but his eyes had been warm and pulling on his heart strings had seemed the best course of action. It had earned him a few more coins and a day's worth of doubts. A boy has to live for himself, he had been told. Or he'll never become a man at all.
"Stupid," he hisses through gritted teeth, squeezing the trigger slicing the water asunder. Spray and pebbles fountain into the air around the wound. "I'm not a boy anymore."
He aims again and pictures faces other than his own reflected in the ripples.
"I'm not a kid," he tells the adult woman from the market that morning, the one who had looked at him with pity in her cold eyes and asked him if she could help him find his parents. I'm not a kid. I don't need an adult to guide me.
"Leave me alone," he tells the children from the farming hamlet, offering him handfuls of acorns and asking him to play with them. Leave me alone. I'm not naïve enough for games.
"Don't try and trick me," he tells the mercenaries hanging outside the bar in the city, asking him if he wants to spend his hard earned money on women or drink. Don't try and trick me. I don't want you to laugh at me when I don't know how to act.
There is no end to the number of people he imagines killing, whispering curses into the night and peppering the riverbed with metal. No one understands. And why would they? If he had the body of a man, maybe they'd know well enough to leave him alone. If he could give up his responsibilities and be with the other children, maybe he'd be able to live a peaceful, pampered life.
The boy is nearly a teen and wishes time would pass faster. He needs more strength, more stamina, more money, more work. But less uncertainty, less prickling in his eyes when he thinks too much, less longing for a loving, healthy family.
One day he will be twenty-six, bearing the years of an adult and the heart of a frightened child. One day a young girl will be the one to show him what it means to be mature. One day he will wish that time would stop and allow him to catch up.
To the boy, the future is more like a misted dream than a place or a time. Days move slowly and he's not growing fast enough.
For now, he counts the seconds under his breath and wastes bullets on fish he has no appetite for until the sun rises.
A/N: I wanted to add 'One day he will grow a goatee' but it didn't seem appropriate somehow. Thanks for reading!