apprentice_lurk | (no subject)

*asplode*

:O!

Little!Artemis: O_O *alarmed*

*lies on back and fwibbles* Socute!

little!Artemis: *creeps over, sits on haunches and looks at you nervously* Uh...y'all ri', miss? *did I do something wrong?*

*beams at him* Uh-huh. ^_^ *opens arms - hug?*

little!Artemis: *blinks at you for a second, then his face lights up and he beams. Hugs! :D*

*Hugs! Hugs for the cute lil Artemis!* ^______^

little!Artemis: *yeeeee! Hugs! Lots of hugs! From someone who isn't his Da...* *...* *...loses just a little of his bounce and self-assurance, looking up at you sidelong*

*backs off a bit, looking at him curiously* You okay, lil'un?

Also, I am bored and have half an hour of my lunch break left. So I drabble.

It wasn't a slum. His Ma said it wasn't, so it wasn't, but the battered, grim-looking houses hunkered in the gloom and clung to the grimy streets, all cheap plate and dull, dirty metal, and the walkways were cluttered with rubbish and graffiti. Artemis, of course, didn't think anything of it - this was how the world looked; this was his world. He'd heard about places where there was a bright blue sky overhead, where the streets were as wide as his Ma's house across, and he'd seen the lone tree in the flower lady's garden the next Sector over, but he wasn't sure how far he believed them. He was only little still, and people liked trying to tell him things that all his baby sisters could have said weren't true. There was the Plate overhead, his Ma at home, and there was always another baby sister to look after.

And sometimes, sometimes if the world was working the very best it could, his Da would come home and see them. His Da was tall as the top of the Plate and he wore his SOLDIER blacks, and his eyes glowed in the dark so he could always find Artemis easily when they played hide-and-seek. His Da knew Sephiroth and the President of ShinRa and he'd been out from under the Plate, and his da was the only person Artemis would believe when he told stories about things like fields and forests. Whenever Da came home, it was a holiday.

Ma didn't seem like she liked Da much, even though whenever he came to see them he brought ma things - mostly gil, but some of the other people who came to see Ma brought gil before they disappeared to talk upstairs; not enough, Ma always said with a scowl and a glance at Artemis, but they still brought it. Artemis wished, sometimes, that Da could come and see them but not see Ma - they never seemed to be happy when they were together, even when they came back downstairs, but Da always seemed happy to see him. He caught Artemis up and hugged him, and told him stories about General Sephiroth and the new person who'd come to help him, the youngest First Class SOLDIER ever.

Artemis wanted to be a SOLDIER more than anything. Then maybe Ma would be happy and not yell at him when his sisters cried, and maybe Da could stay at home and help make Ma smile. Ma never seemed to smile very much anymore. He remembered she looked pretty when she did, but no matter what he tried, she never seemed to want to smile for very long - even when he brought things home for her, to make her happy.

He found some flowers once - the flower lady had been out of the green part of the next Sector, and he'd slipped down the little hill to tug a little bit of green stuff with fluffy flowers out of the ground by the big, sad tree to bring home to Ma and his little sisters, but she'd just picked it out of his hands with a scowl and told him not to bring weeds back home anymore. It had looked pretty to Artemis, and when Ma had turned around and gone back to her room upstairs he'd crept out of the house, picked up the fluffy things from where she'd thrown them out the tiny window, and hidden them under his pillow.

He wanted to show Da when he came home again, but by then, despite Artemis trying to be so very gentle and careful, the fluff had dried out and died. He wrapped the bits in a scrap of paper and hid it under one of the floorboards again, so his sisters couldn't find it and gum it to mush, and told himself that he could show Da the bits and maybe go find some more.

Awww. *snuggles it*

It just hopped out of my head. I like having computers nearby at lunchtimes... ^_^

little!Artemis: *...is snuggled?* :D! *cuddles back lots! Tenaciously, even!*

Oh, me too. And when there are no computers? That is what notebooks are for! :D

*eeeee!* *cuddlesnugglefuss*

...Bugger. You know that was me, right? -_-

No one else is quite that cute. ;)

It should have been raining.

Jinnie read plenty, though gods know how her Ma found and kept the few tatty books she had. Jinnie said when that kind of stuff happened in books, it rains so you know it's sad for sure when you read it.

Artemis didn't like it when it rained - it made all the oil and dirt and slime hidden in the rubbish heaps go all oozing over the pavements and into the cracks in the roads. He got why rain meant bad things, at least where he lived, but whenever he went to the flower lady's garden after it rained the plants always looked a little bit brighter, so maybe it depended on whether there were bad things happening and where it was, because the flower lady's garden was safe. Not if you sat where she could see you, since she might look nice and all but that didn't mean she really-really was, but if you hid behind the sad tree or crawled through the flowers to look at the bugs on the floor. Artemis didn't like touching the wet plants much, because the rain made them feel all wet and cold and crawly, but he liked to look.

He hated being at home when it rained.

It should have been raining when Ma told him Da wasn't coming back, only it didn't. Artemis supposed that maybe people who wrote in books didn't really have anything all that bad happen to them, so they didn't really know that was how things worked. Bad things happened, rain happened, and there wasn't always something to make them happen together, even if rain was a bad thing on its own most of the time.

His Ma said that if you cried you'd make it rain, so Artemis sat under a bush in the flower lady's garden instead. It was a good bush, thick and leafy so you could sit in the hollow in the middle without being seen. No squalling sisters, no Ma to shout at him, no pounding rain on the thin, battered roof.

The rain sounded better on leaves anyway.

*...flails* Did you have to have me start the day with crying?

*squeakflails!* 'M sorry-! *cuddles lots and gives happyplushies*

*grumbles* *curls up and hides under plushies*

It was a brothel. Helios had never known any other word for it, nor remembered not knowing what the word meant. His mother had sex with men for money, and one of those transactions had resulted in an unexpected complication: him.

She was nice enough in her way, his mother; when she remembered he existed, she'd bring him a sweet or a small toy, at the end of the month after the Honeybee Inn took its cut from her pay. And a few of the other girls were nice to him too. Ultimately, though, they were too full of the life they lived to have any room in their hearts for the redhead, and Helios learned at an early age to take care of himself.

That meant earning his keep at the Inn, running supplies and loading endless piles of laundry 'til his little muscles ached; when he was older, that meant spying on the goings-on and reporting customers who broke the rules, or girls who took more than their share. Sometimes it meant keeping his mouth shut about what he saw, like the fat man everyone called "the Don" who broke a girl's arm when she wouldn't do his lieutenants for free. Always it meant staying out of sight; Midgar's laws about kids in brothels were firm, and anyway letting the customers see him tended to be bad for business. That part was easy for Helios. He used the back hallways and crept along everywhere he went, and by the time he was ten even his mother had forgotten he existed.

He'd imagined other ways to live, of course he had - a mother who knew him, maybe even a father, lessons in math and chocobos and maybe even a little patch of grass all his own, like the flower lady in the church he wasn't supposed to go in - but dismissed them as Not For Him until the word came out that AVALANCHE was looking for members. "Helios the ecoterrorist" had a ring to it that he liked; as he left the laundry on the floor and slipped out unnoticed toward Sector Seven, Helios determined that to escape his life, he would become the best warrior for the Planet there ever was.

*WIBBLES LIKE A WIBBLING THING* Oh, Helios...

little!Artemis: *toddles over, looks at him curiously* 'Lo...

lilHelios: *peers at him out of one eye, slightly suspicious* ...h'lo.

lilArtemis: *grins cheerily out from under a mop of grubby blonde hair* 'M Artemis Who're you? *he's clearly been out and about today - meaning he's covered in smudges of dirt all over his hands, knees and elbows, which he seems to have attempted to wipe off with no great success*

lilHelios: *examines all the dirt and has an unexplicable urge to throw him in the washtub for a good scrubbing* *slowly, as if wondering why ask such a question* Helios...

lilArtemis: *Ma's not doing anything today! He doesn't have to look after his sisters, he can get into as much mess as he likes! :D ...Well, so long as he gets some of it off before he goes home...*

*holds a hand out, smiling brightly at him* Wan' go see th'flowers? My Da's coming home tomorrow! *logic!*

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And in retaliation...

Re: And in retaliation...

Re: And in retaliation...

Eee! <3

Re: Eee! <3

Re: Eee! <3