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Rogues: Asthma

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...The young boy was short and slight of figure, a stature just borderlining feminine. His hair was a raven-black, shoulder-length mop that hung, unkempt, in front of his eyes; blue-grey eyes that were frozen in a permanent sober, self-conscious gaze. The boy's elfin face was leaden with a brooding look, emotive beyond his years and yet inherently childish, at all times of the day. Even in a lighter mood, the boy's lips would part in a wan, almost nervous smile, and his brow would furrow as if he were concerned; one was left with the impression that he simply had no skill in feigning contentment.

One's suspicions would be correct: the boy, who was rarely in a mood lighter than the deep gloom of the dusk, was convinced that he had little reason for smiling in the first place. Your stereotypical introvert, he had been shunned by his peers since his elementary years when his stunted growth became apparent. His less-than-masculine appearance was noted cruelly by the boys and the girls in middle school and they treated him accordingly. Now a sophomore in high school, or at least as long as the high school was still around, it was obvious that he would never be accepted. He was too small, too petite, too shy. So he turned inward. His only pleasures were limited to crafting petite animal figurines out of clay, painting every detail of their tiny bodies, and inevitably destroying them for their imperfections. Nothing could satisfy him. Neither human interaction nor creative opportunity could keep the boy content for very long. He was a stranger to everyone: his peers, his parents, his younger sister, and the few clay animals whose flaws had not condemned them to desecration. At school the boy excelled only because he sought something to pass the time with. He was not challenged, yet he persisted, as with his animals, despite his loss of faith in absolutely everything. There was nothing better to do, after all.

Spending time with friends was not an option because he had none. Those who knew him, knew him because he was the butt of their jokes: a queer (which he was not), an overachiever (although he never felt like he achieved anything worth boasting), an outcast (because they didn't allow him to be anything else). He could do nothing to help himself. He knew that to speak out in his own defense, would bring speedy and brutal repercussions. So he let his dark hair hang in front of his eyes while the jeering words shot about him from all angles, miraculously failing to strike their target. The boy was not impervious; rather, he was simply intangible, as if composed of nothing but a thin vapor. There was no substance for the words to pierce, for they had made a ghost of him.

Not that any of that mattered anymore. All that mattered was keeping himself out of real harm's way. The cruel words had gone away, but a new danger stalked him now: starvation.

The baggy black T-shirt that hung off his arms like a robe and reached almost to his knees, that once concealed his petite figure, now hid a skeleton beneath its folds. His size-0 skinny blue jeans were loose on him. His face, once pale and elfin, was sallow and gaunt; faeries of the forest who ate nothing but flowers didn't look this emaciated. His blue-grey eyes were now more grey than blue and peered out from their sunken positions in his small skull. Only his hair, that unkempt black rag on his head, seemed the same as before.

The fifteen-year-old hadn't eaten more that a few pieces of stale bread in two weeks. Clean water was plentiful in his area, but did nothing to satisfy his hunger. His only possession was a lump of clay, and that could not be eaten. He had tried; it didn't go over well.

Each day was a fruitless search for sustenance. The neighborhood he had lived in at first was devoid of nutrients; the refugees had taken all their food with them when they fled. Why such an exodus had taken place, the boy was unaware. He could not sense the danger, only the emptiness that spread like a plague, or a famine, that always trailed him along in its crippling wake. He was always the last to know. Perhaps, just maybe, it was him they were evading. So he stopped following their tracks and found himself alone in the midst of the vast city of Long Beach. For several blocks, human presence was limited to himself. Outside that radius, it was sparse. And further beyond that, unknown. Perhaps the world had left him to starve and die? he wouldn't put it past them; he was a runt, after all, only living to waste their precious resources, he thought bitterly. They saved themselves by leaving him to starve.

Such thoughts circulated tiredly in his raven-coloured head as he picked cautiously through heaps of rubble and abandoned homes for food. At the end of the day when he found none, his meager form could be seen crouching by a large puddle of muddy rainwater, where he ruminated sour thoughts and shaped little creatures out of the mud with his nimble little fingers, slowly starving to death. His place was once an alleyway between two buildings, one of which was now collapsed. The two buildings were just two of many shops on Atlantic Avenue. It was the same sight all over the city: empty streets, rows of shops, apartment buildings, offices, some still intact, while beside or directly across the street somebody else's business had been reduced to a heap of smoking rubble. Such things were common. The boy found it all rather prosaic—this post-apocalyptic scenario—and he spent his time pretending it wasn't so. But he could only pretend for so long before...

Vespyr handed Eddie the binoculars and pointed at the boy, who was crouched in his usual spot in the alleyway about a mile down the street from where they sat, on top of a rather high office building. Without the binoculars he was but a black speck in a muddle of shadowy, dawn-dyed greys and browns. It was about time for the sun to rise; several minutes from now, his shady alley would be touched by the warmth of the morning sunlight, and he would get up to begin digging for food. For now, though, he crouched by the muddy water, his baggy T-shirt hanging so low as to drape completely over his legs, the mop of long black hair hanging in front of his face.

"You're going to stalk him. Stay within thirty feet but never let him know you're there. When you hear my signal, you will reveal yourself. You must then bring him to us; a new recruit."

She was silent for a moment, staring across the mile of distance at the tiny target. In the dim light of dawn, her face was ghostly white and her violet eyes, unnaturally cold, with the piercing glint of a hawk glaring at its prey. On the smoggy horizon, the first warm glimmer of the day's light appeared; Vespyr put on her sunglasses and her gaze was suddenly lost behind the dark lenses.

"Go."
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Alleby's avatar
I think he's cute :(