On Mount Alyppia

The Rooftop

Sooooo... guess who forgot that I update on Fridays! *awkward finger guns*
Yeah, sorry bout that. School has been very very, bad.
But on the bright side, this is a longer chapter than usual, and probably my favorite ever.
So, enjoy!

The girl moved swiftly though the dirty streets, weaving nimbly through the crowd. Leonid panted as he tried to keep up, afraid he would lose sight of her, until she veered off the road and tucked into an alley. Leonid followed her.
    The alley was dark and narrow, seeming a different world from the one he had left behind. The air was thick and stale, reeking of rotting food and stinging woodsmoke and the shit-and-sweat scent of dirty bodies. The buildings cramped tightly together, the roofs sloped so the only bit of the blazing sunlight overhead were thin shafts of light. Stairs and open window-shutters and balconies crammed  the walls as if the people were scratching and clawing for every breath of air they could get.
    There were puddles and trickles of filthy water on the ground, stray mutts and stray kids splashing around in it. The children shouted and laughed and called, finding some bit of fun in anything they could. Plenty of people crowded the alley, hard eyed and weary shouldered, but dressed in sweaty work clothes as he was no one paid any heed to Leonid as he walked after the girl, a few paces behind so she wouldn't notice him.
    The girl had stopped running, and now walked slowly, wearily, her feet dragging and a hand pressed against her side. She seemed more comfortable here, sinking into a wretched sort of ease.
    Until a boy came slinking to her side from under a rickety staircase, and she stiffened again.
    "Hey, Lippie," the boy said with a grin, his stride long and relaxed. He towered over the girl by nearly a foot. Though Leonid had used the word Lippie before himself, the way the boy said it made him want to punch him.
    The girl let out a sigh. "Go away, Feather," she said in a voice that was weak enough that Leonid barely heard her.
    The boy she called Feather grinned even wider. "Last night was fun, eh?"
    The girl scoffed, wrapping her other arm around herself. "For you, maybe. They didn't catch you."
    The boy laughed. "C'mon, was it that bad?"
    The girl turned and shot him a glare. "That guard cracked to a'my ribs," she hissed.
    Leonid sucked in a breath. No wonder she had been stiff. And a guard? City guards were supposed to protect people, not break their ribs. Though perhaps the rules were different if you were a Lippian living on the streets.
    The boy laughed, like he thought broken ribs were funny. "It was fine," he drawled. "We should do it again, sometime."
    "Rob your own stores," she muttered. "You keep most the gold, anyway."
    "I already told you, there was barely anything there this time. We try the docks next and split the coin, eh?"
    The girl kept walking, a bit faster than before. "I don't go by the docks."
    "Scared of the guards? I'll protect you," he said.
    "Like you protected me last night?" Arista muttered. "There's worse things than guards. I'm not going to the docks."
    The boy gave a sigh. "Really, Lippie? I thought we were friendly?"
    "You don't hit me too much. That's not mean we're friendly. Break in yourself."
    He sighed. "But you're tiny! You got your nymph talents!"
    She laughed bitterly. "Nymphs've got me nothing but my hair, and all that gets me is beatings. You ran last night when the guards showed. Let my ribs mend up before you try and woo me again."
    The boy smirked at her and went on his way, singing under his breath and off-key. The girl kept walking.
    She stopped at the edge of a building that looked abandoned, one of the walls half gone. She clutched at her side once more with a grimace and a sigh, then latched onto the wall and began to climb.
    Foot tucked into a wall here, elbow braced on a window-pane there, both hands grabbing a rusted pole extended from the wall. She pulled herself up, swinging up her feet, and then she was up on the roof and out of sight.
    Leonid waited a moment, sighing and cursing his still-sore muscles, then followed her.
    The wall was difficult to climb, and he wondered how a tiny, skinny girl could have done it. He made it to the top eventually, revealing bird droppings, garbage, and loose tiles, but no girl. He spotted an adjoining roof, a taller one, and walked up to it, glancing over the edge so that the girl wouldn't see him before he wanted her to. How the tables had turned.
    The sun, halfway through its descent down the sky, was blinding as it stabbed straight into Leonid's eyes, so it took a moment to see the girl. She sat in a hollowed out section of wall, her hair loose and falling in a grubby, stark-white curtain down her back. She was drinking from a bottle, taking quite a few sips of what did not look like water before putting it down and hiding it behind a brick. She seemed to deflate then, slouching down with a sigh and running a slender-fingered hand through her hair.
    Then, to Leonid's embarrassment, she began to lift up the side of her tunic, baring smooth skin that had not been tanned like her face and arms. Any thoughts that should not have been there flew out of his head when he saw her ribs.
    Just a bruise, indeed. A huge, ugly splotch stretched across her side, mottled red and gray and purple. She was horribly thin, bones jutting from under her skin. Leonid could count every rib, and he could see the breaks, the spots where the cracks in her bones strained against her skin every time she took a too-shallow breath.
    She turned her head, and Leonid ducked down quickly, nearly losing his grip on the wall. He squeezed his eyes shut. Maybe she would not see him. She probably wouldn't see him. Please, please, don't let her see him...
    "You."
    Leonid swallowed and looked up. The girl was standing above him on wobbly legs, again clutching her side, a hand on her hip. Her hair was loose. Leonid tried not to stare at it.
    "What're you doing here?" Her speech was slightly slurred. What had she been drinking?
    Leonid averted his eyes and climbed fully onto the roof, since she had seen him now. "I followed you," he muttered bashfully.
    "Stalker."
    Leonid gave her a look. "You watched me working from that tree every day for years," he reminded her, hauling himself to his feet. She seemed... smaller, more delicate, now that he was standing, and he had a few inches on her.
    The girl flushed bright red and glanced away. "So you knew I'se there," she muttered.
    Leonid suddenly felt like an idiot for mentioning it. "Yes."
    "What're you doing here?" she said again, more forcefully.
    "I- well, er-"
    "D'you wanna stare? Is that it?" she asked angrily, her words flowing together. She shoved both hands into her hair, tugging it, fluffing it out into the air. "Go ahead. Stare. And then, go. Please."
    "I don't want to stare," Leonid said, taken aback.
    The girl looked down, hissing suddenly, probably at the pain in her side.
    "I wanted to apologize," he said.
    Her one good eye shot to his. It was intense, large and framed by long silvery-white lashes and a wispy eyebrow, a pale sleet grey that was another odd characteristic for a youth in Kalterra.
    "I'm... I'm sorry I pretended I didn't see you in that tree all that time," he said, rubbing awkwardly at the back of his neck. "And... I'm sorry I was so disgusted when I first saw... Your hair."
    The girl brushed that hair out of her face, twisting it up into a single strand. "You're not disgusted any more?"
    "No," he said firmly.
    "Why?"
    "Because... Well, because you're you."
    The girl blinked. She didn't seem to understand what he meant any more than he did.
    "I was disgusted for no good reason," Leonid said. "You were the girl who would watch my work. You with white hair and you with black hair and you with no hair at all is still you. Though you with no hair would look odd..."
    The girl still looked sad and solemn, but one corner of her mouth lifted, the slightest bit. Leonid stared at that phantom smile, which lit up her eyes and lent color to her cheeks.
    "Thank you," she said softly.
    Leonid smiled at her. "Why did you watch me?" he asked. "All those years... Why?"
    The girl thought for a long while, hiding the bad half of her face with the fall of her hair like a curtain. "Your yard," she said finally. "And your sculptures. They're peaceful, and pretty, and they almost alive. There's not too much I look at that's peaceful and pretty."
    Her voice was rough and raspy, her grammar poor, and her appearance wild. But she was a gentle soul, without the rough-and-tumble swagger of some beggar children.
    The girl stumbled suddenly, and Leonid tried to catch her, but she jerked away from his touch with a hiss of pain at the sudden movement. Se walked back to her hole in the bricks by herself, and sat down carefully in her mound of dirty rags. She took another swig from her bottle, one that would do her little good, then eyed Leonid with a weary, bleary eye and offered it to him as well.
    She was unselfish, Leonis thought as he bent down to take a cautious whiff of the bottle, its contents making his insides revolt. Still, he knew nothing of beggar's etiquette, and perhaps it would be rude to refuse a drink. So he wrinkled his nose and turned up the bottle, swallowing the barest bit of the burning liquid and immediately regretting it. "What is that," he gasped when he could speak again.
    "I've no clue," the girl said, taking back the bottle and taking another swig, then blinking and pressing a hand to her head. "Snatched it from a grocery basket," she explained.
    Stole, Leonid took that to mean. He could not quite blame her. "How can you drink so much of that?"
    "Helps with pain," she said, definitely slurring now, hiding her bottle again. Her face was positively red, and she looked like she might fall over, even sitting down as she was.
    Maybe because the drink was getting to him and maybe because it had definitely gotten to her, Leonid scrounged up the nerve to blurt, "What happened to your eye?"
    The girl's invisible shields snapped right back, her shoulders stiffening. "Nothing," she said, reaching for a bit of brown cloth with hands that were not very steady and wrapping it around her head to hide her hair. Clumsy, but still effective.
    "I've never seen someone lose an eye to nothing," Leonid said. He wondered what her face looked like under that eye patch.
    The girl shrugged, bringing her knees closer to her chest. "Nothing important."
    "Did someone cut it out?" he pressed, then realized he should probably stop. The girl was clearly uncomfortable. She shrugged again, but had started to tremble.
    Leonid stood up. The girl followed him with her pale blue eye.
    "I should go," he said. "Tina... Assuntina... Is waiting for me."
    The girl nodded. Leonid held out his hand, and hesitantly, she took it from where she sat. Her hand trembled like a leaf in a storm, and Leonid wished it wouldn't. He wished she wasn't frightened.
    He bent down and planted a light kiss on her scabbed, dirty knuckles, the barest brush of lips against skin. The girl's cheeks were still red. Leonid gave her hand another squeeze, wondering what had come upon him, and let it go, stepping back.
    "My name is Leonid," he said.
    "I know," the girl muttered.
    "What's your name?" He knew it, Assuntina had told him, but it wouldn't feel like her name until she said it.
    She shook her head jerkily "'s not a pretty name."
    He shrugged "If it's your name, it must be."
    She shook her head again.
    "If you don't want to say, you don't have to." He waited. She said nothing, and he turned to leave.
    "Arista."
    Leonid glanced behind him.
    "My name's Arista." Her hands were fidgeting, and she looked even smaller than she had. Morcelli was right. She really was ashamed of it.
    "I can call you by something else, if you'd like," Leonid offered.
    Arista shrugged.
    "Well, goodbye then... Rissi," Leonid said, cropping the 'not' from her name and leaving only the part that meant 'want'. Or in some contexts, 'love'.
    Arista's small, surprised smile was the last thing Leonid saw before he jumped down from the roof.
    "So? How was it?" Assuntina said eagerly when he finally slipped back into the carriage, breathless, sore and sweaty.
    "Good," he gasped.
    Assuntina huffed. "And what else?" she pressed. "What happened, exactly? Tell me everything!"
    Leonid shrugged. "I got her to smile," he admitted with awe.