Ronan was six when he learned about his father.
He'd never cared to ask. It had always been him and Wendy, and he didn't mind.
But lately, it had been him, Wendy, and the booze.
He had only just learned the word, tossed around amidst giggles and grumbles by the Older Boys as they chased down the street, whipping each other with a dirty rag. They didn't let him play just yet - he wasn't big enough, wasn't fast enough - but he sat at the curb with a couple of kids his age and watched them with awe, scuttling out of the way every time they ran carelessly too close.
They chatted breathlessly about how they stole their parents' booze, how they hated the taste but loved the feeling, as they played. They talked about it like it was something to desire, until one kid stopped in the middle of the street and lifted his shirt and said, "My pops gave me these the last time he had booze," and all of a sudden none of them cared much for talking anymore.
Ronan wasn't the one to knock the bonnet clean off a passing lady's head during street footsie, but he was the closest, so he was the one she turned to with her pruny lips set in irritation and expectancy. "Your pa raise you with no manners, or are ya just stupid?" she sneered when he didn't apologize.
"Don't got one of those, ma'am."
The woman got all sad in the eyes, and Ronan wondered if he was supposed to care. He never had before, but, well - the way things were going at home, between him and Wendy and the booze, he wondered for the first time if he could use a father.
One of the Older Boys explained, "She thinks your pops is dead. That, or your ma's a floozie."
That evening, he burst into their narrow row house and stormed upstairs to the bedroom they shared. He half-expected to find it empty - almost hoped he would, because that would mean Wendy had gone to work today - but there was a telltale lump on top of the sheets that didn't budge at the sound of his footsteps.
"Momma, where's my pops?"
Wendy just about jumped out of her half-doze to stare at him. Her chestnut hair was in disarray, her eyes framed with dark circles, and after moving so quickly, she had to bring her fingers to her temples.
It took her a long time, and a lot of evading, to finally answer.
"He passed away before you were born." She broke the news gently, beckoning Ronan closer. "Factory accident."
Her face was kind as she opened her arms. She hugged him, and he sank into it, if only for the familiar warmth he adored. It was hard to miss someone he'd never met.
When Wendy climbed into bed that night, thinking Ronan was long asleep, he noticed a smell clinging to her, the smell he'd come to associate with bad nights. Ronan liked that he finally had a word for it, for this poison.
He tried not to breathe it in and found that it wasn't so hard to miss someone he'd never met, after all.
Ronan was nine when he learned about his father - the second time.
Millie was over. Ronan never went to bed on time when Millie was over, lest he miss prime eavesdropping hour.
He lay awake, waiting for something interesting to float up the stairs. Millie had a tendency to talk on and on without leaving much room for response, but Wendy had always been the quieter of the two, anyway. Ronan liked to listen to Millie's stories during the daytime, when she wasn't slurring her words so much.
"Kids causing trouble . . . Sam's fixin' to quit! . . . goddamn leeches . . . told Ronan yet?"
Ronan was perched on the edge of the bed in an instant. He leaned as far off as he could, not daring to try his luck crossing the creaky floorboards.
He had to strain for bits and pieces of Wendy's hissed response. "-doesn't need to know . . . better off."
Millie's next words were soft but edged, gently scolding. "He deserves to know, Wendy."
"It's for his own good."
"His, or yours? You worried how he'll react 'f he sees the Dumases are-"
"Are what?" Wendy rarely ever raised her voice. "Heartless, good for nothin''goddamn leeches?' You're not gonna tell me how to care for my own son, swear to god."
"He'll resent you," Millie said. "When he finds out."
"'When?'" Wendy echoed. "Is that a threat?"
"Wha-fuck's sake, don't be so dramatic."
"It ain't dramatic that I wanna protect my boy!" Wendy seethed. She seemed to notice her own volume, because there was a beat of silence, then one last string of words Ronan could barely make out. "His pa didn't want him- didn't want either of us. What's the use in disappointin' him? God knows I've done well enough at that myself."
The truth settled like an anvil in Ronan's throat, and he struggled to catch his breath.
Millie changed the subject after that. Ronan didn't catch a single word.
He had wondered about his father, occasionally and wistfully, on the days Wendy worked too long to make him dinner, or the days she drank so much she missed work and dinner. He wondered when he heard her vomiting in the street and when he had to help her up the stairs, when there was so little coin on the counter that only one of them got to eat, and he fell asleep to the sound of her stomach growling.
He had thought, even through all of that, that he was alright without a father, because as unsteady as she was, Wendy had never failed at loving him.
But she had never lied to him, either.
Millie's voice disappeared behind the front door long before Wendy finally came upstairs. Ronan feigned sleep as she pushed the hair from his face, and though he'd long-since grown accustomed to the smell of liquor, tonight he had to resist the urge to flinch as she pressed a kiss to his forehead.
She sat awake for some time, playing gently with Ronan's hair. She had always paid a bit more love to his white patch, always told him it was so pretty. Ronan had keened every time, at the attention and at the way the word pretty sounded directed at him.
Now, he squirmed, just enough that she pulled her hand back for fear of stirring him. She fell asleep eventually, but Ronan didn't.
He was out of the house before dawn the next morning. He didn't bother picking around carefully; after a night like the last, Wendy wouldn't wake until the sun forced her.
Mr. Hughes was already hard at work when Ronan reached the locksmith's, and he didn't do more than raise an eyebrow at Ronan's early arrival.
He did pause when, an hour later, Ronan blurted from beside him, "D'yknow the Dumases?"
Mr. Hughes lowered the magnifying glass he held over the mechanism of a tumbler lock. "That's what's on your mind? This is your favorite part and you're not even watching."
"Do you?" Ronan asked again, rudely, but Mr. Hughes either noticed his agitation or wasn't fazed either way. He straightened from his deep bend over his work table, though not by much - Ronan doubted he'd been alive the last time the man had stood fully upright.
"Personally? Not in this life," he snorted. "Know the name, though. Want me to ask around for you?"
Ronan chippered up immediately. "Will you?"
It took three days -taking what he could from Mr. Hughes and asking around for the rest, trailing the city streets and badgering whichever passersby were willing to stop for his questions. He hardly saw Wendy in that time, and he was grateful for it.
It took a fourth day to gather the courage.
Ronan stared up at a wrought-iron gate, peeking through the gaps in the fence at a lawn that stretched as long as a city block. Dumas was not a common name; he had been directed with little confusion toward a single house.
Though, standing before it, house was hardly the right word. Ronan had never been to the countryside before, hadn't even known land so lush and homes so big could exist on the same island that housed his crummy city street.
It felt impossible. But the pearl in Ronan's pocket weighed heavy, his only clue that this might not be so far-fetched after all.
He was greeted at the door by a plump older woman in a black dress and a long white apron, with graying hair peeking from a white cap. She stared down her nose at him, blocking his view of the house, and he was suddenly aware of his muddied, crumbling shoes.
Anxious and nervous and woefully unprepared, Ronan was rambling before she'd even gotten a word out. He admitted unnecessarily to tearing his pants climbing the tall fence, then steamrolled on to recount his two-almost-three-hour walk to the estate. Her face morphed from scorn to scornful disbelief when he switched gears suddenly and gracelessly, begging to see his father. She tried to dismiss him, but he jammed his foot in the doorway.
Ronan thought he heard something like a snort from further in the room. He fumbled around in his pocket to present a single pearl earring.
"I think he gave this to my momma, see? Do you see? It's from my pops, ain't it?"
The woman excused herself abruptly, suddenly pale, and rushed away without inviting him inside. Ronan waited with- well, it was hope, wasn't it? He crushed the pearl tight in his palm and hoped.
But when the woman returned minutes later with her shoulders hiked up to her ears, it was to tell him to leave. She said it with force and finality and was quick to shut the door before he could argue, cutting off his last-ditch plea. The thump thump thump of his small fist against wood went ignored until the fatigue from the last five days, from the walk there, caught up to Ronan all at once. He sagged against the door, defeated.
Maybe he only had to look harder - surely there was at least one other man on Diverra by the Dumas name - but he couldn't find it in him to do much more hoping. For all he knew, the man he was looking for was already dead.
He was on the other side of the fence when he heard a girl's voice cry,
"Wait!"
With slumped shoulders, Ronan turned around to face her.
And froze.
She mirrored his surprise, stock-still but a few meters away. "Is what you said true?" she asked.
Ronan felt a bit breathless as he said, "I thought so."
She stepped close enough to reach through the fence and touch, if he dared. "That would make you my brother."
Ronan might have struggled to believe it. Compared to him, the girl had a wider nose and softer features, a round frame covered in sunny brown skin. But they had the same dark, monolid eyes, gone large with shock. And, parted down the middle at the center of her hairline, worked into long pigtail braids, was a lock of white.
Ronan's face lifted. "Yeah?"
Her name was Elena, and she met Ronan at the fence every week. Ronan wasn't used to keeping secrets, but Wendy wasn't in any state to pay close attention, and the lying came easy - maybe he'd gotten that from her. It was trickier on Elena's side. Her mother was apparently overbearing; the handmaid, Ms. Macy, was not easy to distract; and it took some bickering to decide which spot along the fence would best hide them from view. Still, they made it work, and Ronan made a friend.
He was only two years older, but talking to her made him feel as though he'd lived a thousand lives. He would be embarrassed for rambling, but she soaked up his stories with curious eyes, eyes just like his. He didn't much understand what sort of life she lived, but he figured it couldn't be too thrilling, if talk of meaningless scuffles with the kids on the street had her so affronted.
Her laugh was the sweetest thing Ronan had ever heard. She seemed like an angel next to him, clean and groomed and polite, but she treated him like someone to admire.
It never occurred to Ronan that they might someday be caught. But he was ten years old, and there was a towering man storming across the lawn. Ronan didn't notice until he was already bearing down on them.
They had no backup plan for being followed, no defense against the displeasure that colored the man's eyes - eyes just like Ronan's - when he cornered Elena against the fence. She tried for a pleasant introduction, but she shrank back as his countenance morphed from confusion to disbelief to fury like Ronan had never seen- only to fall open when he got a better look, when he saw his nose and his eyebrows reflected on a thin young face. The both of them, Ronan and him, had turned white as sheets.
He had the same birthmark, too. Ronan could see it, though it was faint against the man's graying hair.
Ronan shifted on the balls of his feet, poised to run.
And then the gate was flying open, and their father was introducing himself as Vernon Dumas, and Ronan was crying tears that could've been happy or angry, slumping regardless into a sturdy chest when offered an embrace.
He was not was not invited any further, but he didn't notice that week, or the next, or any week after that. Vernon told him stories and gave him gifts: books and candies, silky handkerchiefs, a watch, a pair of shoes as shiny as his own. Ronan stored the items beneath the bed, out of sight of his mother. Except the shoes; he claimed he walked straighter in them.
Ronan chanced asking to enter the mansion, maybe even stay some weekends. Vernon looked down at him with a somber smile and a regretful not yet. It was Ronan's mother; she would be severely displeased to hear of it. It was his wife; she didn't want Ronan around, didn't want rumors to stir. He was trying to convince her, he promised. He even had a bedroom on the second floor waiting for Ronan; pointed it out and everything. Ronan's chest swelled so wide, he thought he might burst.
Wendy did notice the shoes, eventually. She asked, then asked some more when Ronan went tight-lipped. The truth spilled out in a sneer.
It was their first real argument. Wendy was shattered to learn Ronan was seeing Vernon. Ronan swore she had no right to be, and refused her pleas for him to stop. She was angry that he'd lied; he was angrier, for the same reason. That, finally, seemed to quiet her.
Ronan went to bed frustrated and crying and frustrated that he was crying. Wendy went to bed drunk; he could smell it all over her.
But that night, after laying for hours side-by-side, pretending to sleep, she pulled him close and told him that she was sorry, that she loved him so. Despite himself, he curled toward her. Her hold was bonier than Vernon's, but it was safer, too. Her fingers trembled as she fiddled with his hair, for once avoiding the birthmark she had always given so much attention before.
"I'm sorry," Wendy whispered as Ronan sank into a doze, "that I couldn't be more than this. 'M sorry that he can't, either. You deserve at least one good parent. 'Stead you got one that don't know how to live and one that don't know how to love."
Ronan dreamt, that night and many others, of a bedroom on the second floor of a mansion, where his sister would only be a shout away and a handmaid would bring him all the food he could eat and his father would give him etiquette lessons until he fell asleep.
That was the promise Vernon made, again and again, whenever Ronan grew restless enough to ask. A bedroom waiting just for him.
Ronan never wanted to leave Wendy, but he thought- it might be nice to have both.
Ronan was twelve when Wendy got sick.
They couldn't afford a doctor. Millie came around, but she couldn't stay; she had her own family. The homemade remedies offered by neighbors scarcely helped.
When Ronan told Vernon, Vernon held him steady and promised to write a doctor he knew, promised to cover the costs.
So Ronan cared for Wendy as best as he could - he was used to tending her, but it had never been like this before - and waited for the doctor, watching her deteriorate until she was too sick to be left alone. The entire house smelled of sweat and sick and years of liquor, soaked deep into the floorboards. Ronan spent little time sleeping and every waking minute trembling, except when he needed to feed Wendy or hold a washcloth over her forehead - in those moments, he was forcibly steady.
The illness took her in three weeks.
He resented her. For getting sick, for buying liquor instead of saving for emergencies. For leaving.
The orphanage took him in three days.
Ronan appeared at the Dumases' doorstep on a brutally hot day, flanked by two men who were vastly irritated with the walk and with him. He processed the events that followed in snippets.
Ms. Macy answered the door with poorly-veiled panic and disappeared to summon Vernon.
The men asked if Ronan was his son. Ronan's eyes were puffy, red, and hopeful.
Hollow-voiced, Vernon proclaimed, "I do not know this child."
Ronan's eyes shot wide, but the men seemed unsurprised. They apologized and moved to lead him away, but he struggled, pleading, crying out to his father. Vernon did not look at him.
Just as Ms. Macy was tugging the door shut, Ronan caught sight of his sister surging forward, calling out. When Elena met Ronan's eye, he pulled the hottest glare he could muster through a face stained with tears, right before the door clamored shut between them.
The walk back to the orphanage afforded Ronan plenty of time to think. He had wanted both - Wendy and Vernon - and he'd ended up with neither. Ronan was twelve years old when he realized there had never been a doctor coming to save Wendy, and there had never been a room on the second floor waiting for him, and the only person who'd ever loved him was dead.
He had never even gotten a chance to say goodbye to Mr. Hughes.
Thinking became too much, too jumbled, and Ronan spent the rest of the walk quietly crying.
Ronan did not speak for six days after being moved into the orphanage.
He nodded obediently as the matron listed off rules in stern monotone, and he didn't complain when he was handed a single folded uniform with rubbed-out knees. A narrow bed with a harsh wire frame and a lumpy mattress was made for him, and that was where he stayed as long as he could get away with.
He was served a bowl of bland porridge in the mornings, broth and bread and maybe potato parings in the evenings. Mealtimes were rigid and uniform, as were lessons. The house was large, but it was crammed full of so many children, it felt stuffy. Ronan watched with a roiling stomach as boys and girls were berated and struck for minor misdoings by the handful of adults manning the establishment, then turned around and watched bullies take out their grief by tormenting their peers.
So Ronan didn't make a sound. He became invisible to stay out of trouble. When he made eye-contact from across the lunch hall with a boy bigger than some of the adults, tall and chubby and thick as a trunk, he turned his chin pointedly downward and shrank out of sight. And when the quiet of night became too much and his chest ached with repressed sobs, he cried in silence.
In a very short time, Ronan gained the awareness to realize that he had probably been lonely his whole life. He had never actually been alone, though.
He racked his brain, endlessly and unfairly, for something he could have done to deserve all of this.
When he arrived teary-eyed to breakfast on his sixth day, he was accosted by the matron not six feet into the lunch hall. Repetitions of why are you late? morphed into demands of why aren't you answering me? that grew angrier with every variation. Ronan was hopeless to respond - his mind was foggy with pain he hadn't yet learned to bear, and his voice was so long out of use, he'd forgotten how to summon it. And what would he have said, anyway? My momma's fucking dead and my pops never gave a damn about me, and I'm so lonely I could scream but instead I'm quiet for your convenience, and-
His hand was swept up by the matron's. A ruler cracked down on his wrist, once, twice, four times.
The lunch hall erupted in laughter that was just as quickly cut off by the matron's sweeping glare. The humiliation burned nearly as bad as the pain in his wrist. With a searing warning, the matron turned and left Ronan to make the shameful walk to the food line.
Ronan had a lot to be angry about, so much that it was overwhelming, but it felt easy in that moment to channel it all toward this one focal point, this terrible woman, this matron.
He was up long after the last lamps flickered out and the children were ordered into silence. He waited into the deepest hours of the night before he snuck away from the room and up the main stairs to the off-limits third floor where the matron slept.
With a stolen hairpin and years of experience, he rendered the lock on her bedroom door useless. The candle in his hand offered just enough light to see his feet, but it was more than he needed. He was out in minutes, serenaded by her snoring the whole way, and he felt light with vindication as he secured the door behind himself.
Five sleepless hours later, he was halfway out of the lunch hall, walking with his stare trained on the floor, when he was jostled by a force against his shoulder from a kid passing in the other direction. Ronan hardly stumbled, yet the kid's hand came to his wrist to catch him anyway, and suddenly Ronan was facing a wiry boy with a jarring red birthmark and a lopsided apologetic smile.
"Didn't mean to jostle ya," the boy said, shoving his hands into his pockets. Ronan was ready to dismiss the interaction with a nod and an about-face, but the boy thrust his hand between them for a shake. His knuckles were knobby and red. Ronan stared at them until the boy dropped his hand with an awkward laugh. "Fair enough. Say, you're pretty new, huh? Got a name?"
He was flanked on each side. To his left, a kid with light brown skin and dark freckles. Ronan recognized the massive boy he had intended to avoid - some good that had done. Up close, though, Ronan thought the kid made himself as small as possible, with his shoulders hunched and his hands linked at his front and his head bowed low enough for his hair to shadow his eyes.
"Still mute, huh?" said the boy who had bumped Ronan. Ronan winced, but he didn't get much time to feel embarrassed. "I'll start then, yeah? Name's Vito, and this here's Sidney and Tony."
He nodded to his other side, to a girl who must've been Ronan's age. She was obviously Vito's sister; they had the same angular face and the same dark eyes, the same olivey complexion dotted with moles. Though she was nearly the taller of the two, Ronan thought she had to be younger. Her face was impassive, almost bored, as she looked at Ronan, but she failed at discretion where she clung with one hand to the back of Vito's shirt. There was a tense set to her shoulders that only left once he stepped just barely in front of her.
Ronan watched it happen, a gesture so small, and could tell he had never known how it felt to be cared for the way this boy must care for his sister. To be not only loved, but protected.
He didn't notice he'd been staring until she was narrowing her eyes, glaring at him while simultaneously edging further behind Vito.
"Let me strike up a deal with you," said Vito. "I'll let you in on some of this-" he pulled from one pocket a thick square of bread. There was pocket-lint on it, and it was a little smushed, but it looked soft to the touch, and Ronan could smell its sweetness. "If you let me in on how you managed this."
From his other pocket, he brandished a black-glass bracelet. It was the very one the matron had worn as she slapped Ronan's wrist the day before, and the very one Ronan had stolen from her room late that night.
Ronan tugged down his sleeve, slack-jawed. Sure enough, the bracelet was gone. "How did you get that?"
The words came hoarse from his scratchy throat. He noticed Vito staring and quickly shook his sleeve back into place to hide the purpling bruises on his forearm.
"He speaks!" Vito played it off easily. "There's this bakery a couple blocks down, and they're always leavin' windows open for the heat, so-"
"Not that!" Ronan fumed.
Vito shrugged. "I've had a lotta practice."
"Give it back!"
They were interrupted by a piercing clap. The crowded lunch hall went suddenly silent as the matron stormed through the doors, her face shining red-purple.
They were assembled into a line and searched, one-by-one, as the matron ranted shrilly about theft and consequences. Ronan hardly heard her, too caught up thinking about Vito. They had gotten separated in the sorting, but Ronan could see him a few bodies down with his group, seconds away from being searched.
Ronan watched, barely breathing, as he emptied his pockets, rolled up his sleeves, took off his shoes. Ronan could hear his own heart racing as he waited for the finger that would inevitably come pointing his way and the pain that would follow.
But the bracelet did not appear, and Vito did not say a word about Ronan.
With a thorough search of their belongings impending, the group was dismissed, and Ronan lost sight of the trio in the scramble.
Ultimately, it was Vito who found him next. He cornered Ronan in the hall and Ronan braced for impact, only to be led by the wrist to the boys' room instead. Ronan trailed him to the very edge, where a blanket and pillow were heaped, out of place, on the floor.
Vito sat, and after a few seconds of watching him rummage through a sack stuffed beneath the pillow, Ronan followed. Vito procured another square of bread, this one less linty and squished.
"Eat," Vito said, when Ronan hesitated.
That sweet smell hit Ronan's nose again, a temptation he couldn't fight. He held his hand out, but what dropped into his waiting palm was the bracelet, retrieved like magic from somewhere inside Vito's shirt. Then came the bread.
It was the best thing he'd eaten in weeks. Ronan finished every crumb, then heard Vito's faint laugh as he licked his fingers clean. "Good?" said Vito. Ronan nodded vigorously. "I'll try bring you some more, then."
And he did. A couple of afternoons later - after finding Ronan at every meal and egging him to sit with him and Tony and Sidney - Vito snuck to Ronan's bedside and sneakily proffered another square of bread.
He didn't stop there, though. He reached back into his bag and pulled out a ratty old journal with a few of the front pages ripped out. When Ronan squinted at him quizzically, Vito said, "I got to thinkin' that maybe the reason you don't talk a whole lot is 'cause there's too much going on, y'know," he gestured vaguely around his head, "Up here. Thought it might help if you could write some of it down. Stole this off some vendor, hope you don't mind. Maybe make a list, or somethin.' You know how to write?"
Ronan nodded, a bit stunned, and took the journal.
Vito didn't call him over at dinner that evening, but he smiled like the sun when Ronan sought him out.
Ronan opened the journal later that night. He could hardly see the page in the dark, and he didn't know exactly what he would make a list about. But he pictured his father's face, then his sister's, and all he knew was the anger that curled hot around his ribs. With terrible handwriting and all the animosity in the world, he scribbled,
Reason #1: They lie.
𓃥𓃥𓃥
Ronan didn't know much of anything anymore, but he was sure of this one fact: Vito was selfless.
He explained, some days into their tentative (on Ronan's end, at least) friendship, that he was sleeping on the floor and stealing bread because he was not supposed to be there. The orphanage threw kids back onto the street to work once they turned fifteen, and Vito had hit that milestone some months ago. But his sister was only eleven, so he had pleaded and bargained until the matron agreed to extend his time in exchange for work around the house. He'd been forced to sacrifice his bed to the next child that arrived, he was only fed if there were leftover scraps, and he was sworn to good behavior.
He'd be dumped at the first wrong move, and yet he hadn't sold Ronan out on that first day.
Vito was tiny for a fifteen-year-old, but that didn't stop him from jumping resolutely to his friends' defense at any provocation. Sidney was picked on often for his size and clumsiness, called the most creative names fourteen-year-old boys could come up with, but the insults never had time to land before Vito came chiming in:
"You better watch it. He could beat you senseless in a second flat, you know that?"
"Sidney's the strongest guy I've ever met! Jealous, are we?"
"You're lucky he's so damn nice, or you'd be done for!"
"Try and lift that desk and then talk to us, eh? Sidney can lift two."
In those moments, Sidney seemed to hold himself a bit straighter, raise his chin a bit higher.
And when they took to jeering at Ronan - the dunce, the mute - Vito was somehow always there, defending him just as loudly as the friend he'd had for years.
It was that, not the bread or the journal or the companionship, that made Ronan see that Vito was his friend.
And then, as time went on - as Tony taught him to braid so he could help her with her hair, as Sidney pulled him aside one evening and requested, embarrassed, that Ronan call him by his surname, because it made him feel stronger - Ronan realized that Vito wasn't the only one.
So he didn't have to think, not really, when the choice arose to run away with them or stay without them. Vito shook him awake in the middle of the night and led him into the hall to meet the others, where they explained that Mitch was turning fifteen, and the matron refused to grant grace to another child. Mitch was leaving, and Vito wouldn't let him leave alone.
"Can I come?" Ronan asked without consideration, not that he needed any.
Vito started to smile, warm in the candlelight, but it fell away to concern. "You sure? We'll be homeless. You know that, right?"
"Please let me come," Ronan begged. "I'll take care of myself- you won't even have to feed me, I swear-"
"Woah, woah-"
"You're an idiot," Tony interjected.
"-shit, Ronnie, I'm going to feed you."
𓃥𓃥𓃥
Three months in, Vito found a vision.
It wasn't the quietest life, squatting in abandoned buildings until someone found them, picking up spare jobs for the money to feed themselves for a day, stealing from markets and shops and pockets when they didn't make enough.
Ronan liked the noise.
He liked stealing. The guilt only lasted as long as it took to fill his stomach; then it was only satisfaction at a job well done.
And when Ronan was thirteen, Vito said to him, "I think we can be more than this."
They sat side-by-side on the curb as the daytime market whirred around them, chewing on dried meat they had bought with stolen coin.
"Hm?" Ronan hummed absentmindedly, preoccupied with the salty taste.
"What is it they say? Make hay while the sun shines."
Ronan let it show on his face how deeply unimpressed he was.
Vito laughed under his breath, draping his arms over his knees and looking out at the city. "It I just mean . . . we're good at this, aren't we?"
It wasn't like they had any choice. If they were caught, Tony and Ronan would end up right where they'd started, and Vito and Mitch would end up in jail. But Ronan couldn't deny that they had a good dynamic going on - his skill and Mitch's strength, Tony's agility and Vito's brain.
"But we're stealing from the wrong people," Vito continued. "It's what we gotta do to survive, but- I dunno, I think I'd like to take from someone who actually deserves it. Wouldn't you?"
His eyes were alight like Ronan hadn't seen before, glowing even in mid-afternoon. Ronan didn't know nor care what Vito meant- the answer was yes, a thousand times yes, if he'd say it like that.
Ronan was overcome with inspiration and gratitude and admiration for this maelstrom of a boy, this friend, who had stolen him from the worst time of his life and protected him without seeking anything in return. Of course Ronan would do this one thing for him.
It was too much to meet the flicker of a spark in Vito's gaze. Ronan stared, instead, at his reflection in a post-storm puddle.
He wasn't sure when he had last looked at himself, but he hardly recognized the boy staring back.
He had always thought he had sharp features and a bony face. He understood now that he'd just been hungry his whole life.
With fuller cheeks, he looked more like his sister.
He thought it ironic that he should be well-fed for the first time as a homeless orphan, and started to tell Vito as much, but he didn't get very far before a sudden commotion had him nearly choking on jerky.
The entire market scattered as a young boy sprinted across the street with a basket full of food clutched to his chest. He was followed by a stream of curses and shouts, and soon a bearded man appeared in his wake, chasing him down with a brandished knife.
Ronan turned, incredulous, after they disappeared around the corner, but Vito was no longer at his side.
He didn't appear again until that evening, standing in the doorway of the dilapidated house they'd been occupying with a wild grin. There was a boy tucked under his arm, holding a basket.
"Tell me you're joking," Mitch said before the door had even closed behind them. He had been leaning, half asleep, onto Tony's side, but he was wide awake now and starkly unamused. He didn't slouch so much, nowadays; Vito's words had finally gotten to him. "Pretty sure 'seven-year-old stray' wasn't on the shopping list, Romano."
A barely-there mutter, spoken mostly into the basket. "I'm ten."
"Fucking- are you serious?"
The boy raised his head. He had the saddest eyes Ronan had seen since- well, since Wendy had died, and he'd spent three nights alone in their bed, staring across the room at the mirror on the wall.
"Fuck off, Mitch," Ronan snapped. He ignored Mitch's bewildered look and faced the boy in the doorway with an unthreatening tilt to his head. He tried for encouraging, though that was really Vito's forte, as he asked, "What's your name?"
The boy scratched the back of his neck and nearly dropped his haul. Torn to the elbow, his sleeve parted around his arm for the brief second before he replaced his hand to steady the basket, revealing an array of circular burn scars trailing up from his wrist.
"Felix," he said. Then, a little louder, "I, um. Well, I have food, if you're hungry."
𓃢𓃢𓃢
Song for this chapter: Heirloom by Sleeping at Last
Wendy's song :')
deepest apologies for the utter lack of Amir in this chapter. next chapter is full of him to make up for it