| Ficbit Challenge 4
Sixteen
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| She was six the first time she saw them. Six and straw-haired and thin,
daughter of a barmaid and a day laborer, resident of the slums of Midgar,
gone with her mother to work in the dark and dirty bar where she was employed.
Elena earned a few gil by cleaning peanut shells from the floor and gathering
empty bottles to be thrown in the trash. Occasionally her mother would
let her keep one or two gil, if it had been a good night, and Elena kept
her savings in a cigar box under her bed. She had almost forty gil. She
intended to use this money to buy her mother and father a real house, in
upper Midgar where the sun shone all the time.
Some six-year-olds have dreams like these. But that night in the bar, crawling between the legs of patrons to pick peanut shells and bottlecaps off the floor, Elena got her first glimpse of how the world really works, the world in which you cannot buy a house for forty gil, no matter how painfully you had saved. The door to the bar crashed open and three men in dark blue suits came swaggering in, laughing and thumping each other companionably, and even Big Ben--bigger by half than any of them and twice as strong as any man alive, a brawler born--froze in his seat, a beer halfway to his lips. The world went silent. Elena crouched, hidden, under the table, and listened to those men in blue fill the silence. A man, they were seeking. A certain man, with a scar on his cheek and another on his throat beneath it, and red hair shot with gray. And while they were here, a beer for the Turks! If they had to wait, they might as well enjoy it, eh? Elena's mother served them in silence, and one of them laughed and patted her rear, and instead of breaking a bottle over his head as she would normally do, she just twitched away and fled. She knew who they were seeking, of course. Everyone here knew Ferren. And not one of them, not one brawler or tough man, tried to leave while the Turks sat drinking and laughing in their bar. Not one of them tried to warn Ferren. And when he came striding into the bar, unaware, no one moved a muscle to help him as the three men exploded away from the bar and bore him to the floor, beating him until he had the sense to lie still. And then they bound him. One of the Turks knelt over him, tightening the knots on his wrist, and then he looked up and saw Elena, under the table on hands and knees, all wide and frightened eyes. And he smiled at her and winked, so casual even here in the midst of slums-men who obviously despised them, and then they picked Ferren up and left, laughing amongst themselves, not bothering to pay for the beers they'd drunk. She was quiet all the way home, holding her mother's hand and listening to her mother curse the Turks under her breath, and (as some six-year-olds are more aware than they let on) noticing that her mother would fall fumingly silent whenever they got close enough to another person to be overheard. Elena did not sleep well that night, listening to her father snore on the other side of the curtain that separated their sleeping chamber from hers. The next morning she went and traded her forty gil for a cheap gun and a box of bullets. Down here in the slums of Midgar you learned early that power, electrical and otherwise, was what made the world turn. Elena had always liked blue. |
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