Liberosis: n. The desire to care less about things.
Allegretto has spent his whole life caring too deeply, too madly, too frantically, defending people who were not his responsibility to defend. He has risked, yes, his safety, and his dark, damp junk yard home, but he has risked something else too, when he knelt down and put his coat around a shivering, wide-eyed, dark-eyed Beat.
He had risked his freedom.
Allegretto has always known that he would leave someday, would pack up everything he could carry on his back and walk out of this tiny little town that did not love him, that would not miss him when he was gone. He would spare what bread he could for the orphans while he was here, but he wasn't going to stay—not for them, not for anyone. He was going to carve out a place where he would fit in the world, he was going to find somewhere that opened its arms for him instead of turning its back. He would belong somewhere, for gods' sakes. He would find a place that he could really, truly call home.
All that changed when he met Beat, when he invited Beat into his little dugout under the city's restless feet. Beat looked at him, crying and shaking and cold, and scared, and alone, and Allegretto had recognized it, had remembered being that thin-lipped little boy once upon a time. So he bent down and he put his coat over Beat's haggard shoulders and took him by the hand, and as they walked together he looked up at the blue sea sky to watch those great big plans fly away without him.
He doesn't regret it, not really—but there are times, in the unspeakable darkness of his own private mind, that he resents it. He'll lie awake and look at Beat fast asleep, curled into a ball on Allegretto's bedroll and think, I could be gone. I could be somewhere better by now if it weren't for you.
Sometimes it makes him angry. Most of the time, it just makes him sad, and he gets up and wanders out to look at the stars and wonder, silently, if there was a word for this, this too much loving of a world that doesn't know how to love you back.