[Pinstripes] Reborn
Title: Reborn
Story/Character: Pinstripes / Seth, Elijah
Rating: PG-13 (violence)
word count: 3,299
Written for the brigits_flame prompt of "starting over".
It was raining in the city, a seemingly endless cold season of drizzling wet and flat gray skies behind a backdrop of square, ugly buildings that left nothing to the imagination in their angular shapes and exposed brickwork. Heavy and thick, just like the people that inhabited them, like the whole of the Gods cursed eastern countries, and he was cold again, chilled to the bone from the drizzle and the damp and the endless gray days.
It didn't matter, though. He wasn't ever not cold, not any more. If there was one thing the people of this country knew it was how to dress for their climate, layer upon layer of heavy cloth and thick wool and he had buried himself in it, every scrap, no matter how ill used or mismatched. Shirt and vest, knit sweater, wool coat - everything from every part of the animal and the damp smell of it in the wet, covering him from head to toe, made him sick, but it bought him a precious layer of anonymity on foreign streets. In the poorer districts no one looked at him twice unless he opened his mouth, and even then, betrayed by the awkward shape of the local speech on his tongue, it only netted him jeering disdain, not official inquiry. He was only another pauper on the streets, foreign or not, and who would ever look beneath the dirt and woven animal hairs that covered him now to find the man he had been? That life was dead for all that it hung about his throat like a stone, unwilling to let him go. He would die, cold, wet, nameless, and shivering, in the alley of a foreign city that would sweep him up along with the refuse and pay him no more mind than the morning trash.
So he told himself and the city seemed determined to prove him right, day after dreary day. In the end it was carelessness that shoved him from that path; his own carelessness, something done so unthinkingly that he couldn't even recall what it had been. Possibly a spark lit between his fingers for a roll of dream smoke, or a precious bit of flame licking warmth held between his hands for a minute to drive off the ever present chill that chased him even in his dreams. Perhaps it had been the lighting of wet refuse in a barrel one night, when they had offered him a place at the fireside if only he could bring it to life. Or the burns across the faces of would-be toughs, gangless pups who had learned to think better of shaking down a homeless beggar on a wet night when he was already aching from the cold and too miserably tempered to care for the price paid afterwards. Someone, somewhere, had heard; had pieced together the bits, here and there, and come up with a patchwork image of the whole. That was when he found himself hunted down, before he even knew the hunt was on, cornered in his own burrow in the back alley of a city he didn't know nearly as well as he should have, by a pack of full-grown wolves.
They were on him before he knew it, the flames coming at his call too little too late. One of them fell back with a cry, coat afire, but two more took his place. There had been a time when he feared no man, but that belonged to the dead as much as his name and his home, and sheer numbers had been his downfall even in the past. He could, he knew in his bones, take them - they weren't an army, they were only ten, maybe twelve, and he could call the fire of the Gods that would leave nothing but ash and bone and dark smeared grease on the wet pavement... But it would cost him. It would cost him dearly, he knew that in his bones as well, and when it came to it he found that he didn't want to die. Not like that. Not at their hands, not if he could help it.
They wanted him alive, not dead, that much was obvious in hands that grasped to subdue. So he fought back, one man against many, hand to hand, and threw them off where he could, cracked bone where he couldn't, and used nail and tooth if nothing else would suffice. They didn't know how to fight in the Eastern lands; all flailing fists and lumbering bodies, and even if he was stiff and cold and weak he could still give some accounting of himself against targets that all but stood still for him.
He thought he might have managed it; the Ancestors were smiling to see such play, and he slipped free from their grasp and dashed for the only exit. They would follow but once in the open the advantage was his, and he knew enough of the main streets to lead where they might hesitate to attack under brighter lights and watching eyes. For one brief moment he could all but taste it, the laughing bubble of triumph, and then the last wolf stepped out of the shadows dead in his path.
He truly didn't see it coming; the move was decently executed for a student's effort, but so unexpected that it caught him fully. He had enough time, in the instant a hand caught his wrist and his feet were swept out from under him, to try to curl and roll with it but the pavement came up faster than he expected and knocked the breath clean from his lungs, flinging bright bursts of pain filled stars into his eyes. The pack was there in the next instant and he couldn't fight them and gravity and the aching emptiness of his lungs all at once. They had him, and without momentum the heavy grasp of their hands could as well have been iron for all he could break it.
They dredged him up out of the stream of muddy rainwater that washed the length of the alley, shaking him until he bones rattled like a wolf with a rabbit caught between its teeth. One of them, thin and wiry with a predatory grin that half shaded into rabid, would have kicked his feet out from him to send him to his knees on the stones, but a voice - sharp toned, a master reprimanding a hound - called him off. He was left with what dignity he could piece together, wet and aching and gasping for breath, dangled between their hands like a particularly pathetic prize catch.
It wasn't quite surprise to discover that the last of his attackers, the one who had thrown his own people's moves back at him, was their pack leader. It made sense, then, in some way, and he could hang limply in the knowledge that it was a fight well won.
The man was his own height, dark haired, and if all of the Eastern shaped faces looked alike in their alienness to him then he could at least recognize the look of assured power in the other man's too-wide eyes. He was cleaner, neater and more richly dressed than his pack, as befitted a Dashi, and one of his Lieutenants stood behind him to hold an umbrella that shielded his master from the worst of the rain. There was no fear in him; he walked up within arm's reach to where his prey dangled and there were many things a strong man could have done, captive or no. A blustering man might have claimed to know his prey's strength, a fool might have risked it anyways, but in the wolf that faced him he could only see an assurance that ran deeper than the endless waters of the bay and a calm lack of fear.
The man tipped his head slightly, regarding his captive, then nodded. "Seems we have the right man," he remarked lightly, "wouldn't you say, Thom?" The last was addressed to the man he had set on fire, who was muddy and wet from rolling in the water to put it out, and who bared his teeth in some sort of grimaced assent.
The leader had never taken his eyes off of him; didn't, even as he moved, the motions casually easy to the untrained eye, and which bespoke both respect for a wild thing's teeth and the calming motions of a man soothing a beast to his prey. "I'd heard," he said, as he took a thin metal case from an inner pocket of his coat, "of a foreigner in town. A mojo man, they said. Elementalist, a firestarter."
The rabid touched one gave a snort. "Really think he can understand you, boss?"
"Oh," their leader said, eyes locked to his captive's, "he can understand me. Can't you?" He cracked the case open, took a thin roll of the dry everyday weed they smoked on the streets out, and snapped it closed again. Holding the roll up, he arched one brow, questioning. "Light it."
It was child's play, nothing but a trick, and he could have burned the thing to so much ash in the man's hand. He didn't. They had him, and it was a younger and stronger man's prideful folly to provoke them for nothing. He waited until the man placed the roll between his lips, then called the spark to light it as the other inhaled. The tip caught, cherry red in the dim light, and the other man smiled as he exhaled the sharp smelling smoke. "Good." He still hadn't looked away and as long as he didn't neither of them would.
Still smiling, he flicked the roll into the water that ran at their feet. The coal sputtered and died, smoke dwindling away, the water soaking eagerly into the dry leaf. He ground it beneath the toe of one shoe, splashing more water on it, then nudged it into the depths of a puddle. His smile had more of the wolf in it then, edged in sharp teeth. "Light it again."
He hesitated for one bare moment, then. He had given himself away, somewhere, and the other man's smile said that he knew. Said that what happened next, whether he was let go, or killed, or became part of this man's pack, rested entirely on what the next action was. He could feel them all around him, still tight and tense from the fight, and it would take nothing at all to goad them into blood. He would never see another morning, he would die as he had predicted, nameless on a foreign street, and this life would be well and truly over.
Or, the other man's smile seemed to say, he could live. On another man's terms, by another man's graces. And as much as he didn't want to die, he wasn't sure he wanted that either.
A moment was all he had to think about it and in the end the will to live was rooted too deep in weak flesh. He drew a breath and called the flames, fed them from his own bones until they burnt away air and water and mud alike to burrow into soaked leaf and take root there. At their feet the water-logged roll of smoke burst into fire - not sullen, smoke choked flames but bright and clean and hot. One of the men who was holding him swore, taking a step back even as he gripped his captive tighter.
Their leader smiled broader, chuckling softly in pure pleasure. "Oh yes, we have the right man." He gestured his pack back with a wave of his hand; his Lieutenant's protest hushed with another half wave. They were left, the two of them, in a ring of bodies, but there were no hands on him now and without their support he nearly stumbled, too aware of the ice eating into his own bones where the fire had gnawed him hollow, and of the need to not show more weakness in front of this man before him.
"You're wasted out here," the leader told him gently. "Whatever you were, you're running from it... But running to where? This?" He took in the length of the alley with a flick of his fingers and an eloquent shrug. "I treat my men better than that."
The last evoked a laugh from some of the men but he couldn't see the joke. The Eastern words were thick and clumsy on his tongue, but he spoke them all the same. "I am no man's slave."
The leader smiled, and for all his words might deny it the pleased curve of his lips already spoke ownership. "Of course not. I think you'd find I'm a reasonable employer. Room and board, weekly pay - off the books, no visa needed." He shrugged, taking one more step forward so that they were eye to eye. "Or name a price. We can come to a... reasonable agreement."
It was on the tip of his tongue to tell the man no and his own safety be damned; to spit at the man's feet and tell him a kept slave was still a slave and he would bow his head to no foreign wolf... But the man only watched him, waiting, and he truly didn't want to die. Not even for what little pride he had left.
Out from beneath his Lieutenant's care the man stood easily in the still falling rain, as though he might stand there all night without a care for how it soaked into the shoulders of his expensive coat. No tanned animal skins on that one, and it was the way the water soaked into the weave of the jacket that caught his eye, a familiar pattern of silkworm woven threads that made something inside of him even more hollow than his fire eaten bones ache. The man was - or would be - Dashi, whatever they might call it in the Eastern lands, and if he was a thick blooded barbarian then still it might be enough.
The words found their way into his mouth almost unwilling, thick and bitter all at once. "...Your coat."
It startled the other man but he didn't draw back, only blinked, the tilt of his head conveying his confusion. Easterners, he reminded himself, were uncivilized - to buy a man with promises of money alone and somehow think it conveyed loyalty. To bind men together into packs based solely on profit, lone wolves always chasing after the next bone, and mistakenly think it somehow made them stronger. A true Dashi formed blood out of water, family out of strangers, sworn life to life and into death; he knew, knew better than any, because he had once been Dashi himself.
Startled the other man might be, but only for a moment, the barest hesitation to be sure he had heard correctly. He laughed, then, not mocking but clear and full of life as he shrugged free of his coat. He held it out, not dangled, but with the inside turned towards his former captive, spread between his hands to be easily slipped on. It meant turning his back on the man, something that shot chills down his spine, but he found to his own surprise that it was easier than he had thought it would be. The coat was silk, still warm with the heat of the man's own body, smelling of the spice scents men used in the East, but beneath that was the scent of raw, wet silk, drowning out the thick, cloying scents of wet wool and leather that had dogged his every step.
The other man clasped his shoulders briefly as he settled the coat across them, and when he turned back around the man was smiling despite the rain that was soaking through the thin fabric of his shirt. The vest the man wore beneath the coat was a shade of blood crimson that sparked another wave of the empty homesick ache through his core, something familiar and alien all at once. He swallowed it down and stood his ground, though he couldn't keep his hands from grasping at the too-familiar texture of the coat. "Your name?"
The man's smile was proprietary and warm all at once. "Elijah Benson."
Elijah, he thought, feeling the taste of the name, and then had to correct himself because no, the Easterners gave their names back to front from what he was familiar with. Benson. It was a warm name, either way, and he couldn't find it in himself to protest it. Heavily, weighted by the ache inside, he went to his knees in the rain and bowed his head. "Dashi Benson."
A hand came to rest on his hair, cupped across the crown of his head, and he could feel the other man's warmth like fire in the touch. "And you? What should we call you?"
He made himself swallow again and kept his eyes on the water that was pooling around his knees and streaming past the other man's feet. "My parents named me Xian Seon Man," he said, and his own name was so strange in his mouth that it felt no different than the alien Eastern words. "You may call me as you like." Which was proper, a Dashi's right, and one of the many things that cut the ties of the old and created the new.
The hand on his head stilled, then stroked blunt fingers through his hair. The rain was seeping beneath the collar of the coat, his every breath filled with the scent of the man and he could hear the labor of his own lungs too loud in his ears. The fingers carded through his hair again, brushing the nape of his neck through the ragged cut ends. "...Seth," the other man said, thoughtful but firm, and it was a word he didn't know but the man's next statement cleared the confusion. "We'll call you Seth." A touch of laughter, echoed in the warmth of the fingers pressed to the back of his neck. "It's easier for our foreign tongues to say."
And then the hand was gone, and the warmth with it, the man stepping back, and that was his cue to struggle back to his feet, shivering with more than just the cold. Beginnings, he thought wildly, beginnings were never as easy as endings, or else why would newborn babes wail while old men laid down with nothing but a sigh? It hurt, in some visceral way deep inside, but it was the kind of hurt that told him he was alive. Alive, and not the nameless beggar he had been only moments before.
Elijah snapped his fingers, gesturing, and the others fell in around him easily. He joined them hesitantly but it was easier with each step, each passing moment that severed the life from before with the new one opening up before his feet. Seth, he repeated to himself. He was Seth, bound to Elijah, Dashi Benson, and anything else was only details. He would not die that night, nor the next day, nor the one after that. He would be safe. And in return... he had only to follow. It surprised him how easy it was.
"Coming?" Elijah asked, and it was an order, not a query. Seth trailed after the other man's steps, letting the too-fast babble of the words around him fall into meaningless noise, and when the other man's eyes settled on him he dipped his head in a deep bow. Yes. He would follow. Xian Seon Man had followed no man... but Seth was something new, and for that alone, he could.
Story/Character: Pinstripes / Seth, Elijah
Rating: PG-13 (violence)
word count: 3,299
Written for the brigits_flame prompt of "starting over".
It was raining in the city, a seemingly endless cold season of drizzling wet and flat gray skies behind a backdrop of square, ugly buildings that left nothing to the imagination in their angular shapes and exposed brickwork. Heavy and thick, just like the people that inhabited them, like the whole of the Gods cursed eastern countries, and he was cold again, chilled to the bone from the drizzle and the damp and the endless gray days.
It didn't matter, though. He wasn't ever not cold, not any more. If there was one thing the people of this country knew it was how to dress for their climate, layer upon layer of heavy cloth and thick wool and he had buried himself in it, every scrap, no matter how ill used or mismatched. Shirt and vest, knit sweater, wool coat - everything from every part of the animal and the damp smell of it in the wet, covering him from head to toe, made him sick, but it bought him a precious layer of anonymity on foreign streets. In the poorer districts no one looked at him twice unless he opened his mouth, and even then, betrayed by the awkward shape of the local speech on his tongue, it only netted him jeering disdain, not official inquiry. He was only another pauper on the streets, foreign or not, and who would ever look beneath the dirt and woven animal hairs that covered him now to find the man he had been? That life was dead for all that it hung about his throat like a stone, unwilling to let him go. He would die, cold, wet, nameless, and shivering, in the alley of a foreign city that would sweep him up along with the refuse and pay him no more mind than the morning trash.
So he told himself and the city seemed determined to prove him right, day after dreary day. In the end it was carelessness that shoved him from that path; his own carelessness, something done so unthinkingly that he couldn't even recall what it had been. Possibly a spark lit between his fingers for a roll of dream smoke, or a precious bit of flame licking warmth held between his hands for a minute to drive off the ever present chill that chased him even in his dreams. Perhaps it had been the lighting of wet refuse in a barrel one night, when they had offered him a place at the fireside if only he could bring it to life. Or the burns across the faces of would-be toughs, gangless pups who had learned to think better of shaking down a homeless beggar on a wet night when he was already aching from the cold and too miserably tempered to care for the price paid afterwards. Someone, somewhere, had heard; had pieced together the bits, here and there, and come up with a patchwork image of the whole. That was when he found himself hunted down, before he even knew the hunt was on, cornered in his own burrow in the back alley of a city he didn't know nearly as well as he should have, by a pack of full-grown wolves.
They were on him before he knew it, the flames coming at his call too little too late. One of them fell back with a cry, coat afire, but two more took his place. There had been a time when he feared no man, but that belonged to the dead as much as his name and his home, and sheer numbers had been his downfall even in the past. He could, he knew in his bones, take them - they weren't an army, they were only ten, maybe twelve, and he could call the fire of the Gods that would leave nothing but ash and bone and dark smeared grease on the wet pavement... But it would cost him. It would cost him dearly, he knew that in his bones as well, and when it came to it he found that he didn't want to die. Not like that. Not at their hands, not if he could help it.
They wanted him alive, not dead, that much was obvious in hands that grasped to subdue. So he fought back, one man against many, hand to hand, and threw them off where he could, cracked bone where he couldn't, and used nail and tooth if nothing else would suffice. They didn't know how to fight in the Eastern lands; all flailing fists and lumbering bodies, and even if he was stiff and cold and weak he could still give some accounting of himself against targets that all but stood still for him.
He thought he might have managed it; the Ancestors were smiling to see such play, and he slipped free from their grasp and dashed for the only exit. They would follow but once in the open the advantage was his, and he knew enough of the main streets to lead where they might hesitate to attack under brighter lights and watching eyes. For one brief moment he could all but taste it, the laughing bubble of triumph, and then the last wolf stepped out of the shadows dead in his path.
He truly didn't see it coming; the move was decently executed for a student's effort, but so unexpected that it caught him fully. He had enough time, in the instant a hand caught his wrist and his feet were swept out from under him, to try to curl and roll with it but the pavement came up faster than he expected and knocked the breath clean from his lungs, flinging bright bursts of pain filled stars into his eyes. The pack was there in the next instant and he couldn't fight them and gravity and the aching emptiness of his lungs all at once. They had him, and without momentum the heavy grasp of their hands could as well have been iron for all he could break it.
They dredged him up out of the stream of muddy rainwater that washed the length of the alley, shaking him until he bones rattled like a wolf with a rabbit caught between its teeth. One of them, thin and wiry with a predatory grin that half shaded into rabid, would have kicked his feet out from him to send him to his knees on the stones, but a voice - sharp toned, a master reprimanding a hound - called him off. He was left with what dignity he could piece together, wet and aching and gasping for breath, dangled between their hands like a particularly pathetic prize catch.
It wasn't quite surprise to discover that the last of his attackers, the one who had thrown his own people's moves back at him, was their pack leader. It made sense, then, in some way, and he could hang limply in the knowledge that it was a fight well won.
The man was his own height, dark haired, and if all of the Eastern shaped faces looked alike in their alienness to him then he could at least recognize the look of assured power in the other man's too-wide eyes. He was cleaner, neater and more richly dressed than his pack, as befitted a Dashi, and one of his Lieutenants stood behind him to hold an umbrella that shielded his master from the worst of the rain. There was no fear in him; he walked up within arm's reach to where his prey dangled and there were many things a strong man could have done, captive or no. A blustering man might have claimed to know his prey's strength, a fool might have risked it anyways, but in the wolf that faced him he could only see an assurance that ran deeper than the endless waters of the bay and a calm lack of fear.
The man tipped his head slightly, regarding his captive, then nodded. "Seems we have the right man," he remarked lightly, "wouldn't you say, Thom?" The last was addressed to the man he had set on fire, who was muddy and wet from rolling in the water to put it out, and who bared his teeth in some sort of grimaced assent.
The leader had never taken his eyes off of him; didn't, even as he moved, the motions casually easy to the untrained eye, and which bespoke both respect for a wild thing's teeth and the calming motions of a man soothing a beast to his prey. "I'd heard," he said, as he took a thin metal case from an inner pocket of his coat, "of a foreigner in town. A mojo man, they said. Elementalist, a firestarter."
The rabid touched one gave a snort. "Really think he can understand you, boss?"
"Oh," their leader said, eyes locked to his captive's, "he can understand me. Can't you?" He cracked the case open, took a thin roll of the dry everyday weed they smoked on the streets out, and snapped it closed again. Holding the roll up, he arched one brow, questioning. "Light it."
It was child's play, nothing but a trick, and he could have burned the thing to so much ash in the man's hand. He didn't. They had him, and it was a younger and stronger man's prideful folly to provoke them for nothing. He waited until the man placed the roll between his lips, then called the spark to light it as the other inhaled. The tip caught, cherry red in the dim light, and the other man smiled as he exhaled the sharp smelling smoke. "Good." He still hadn't looked away and as long as he didn't neither of them would.
Still smiling, he flicked the roll into the water that ran at their feet. The coal sputtered and died, smoke dwindling away, the water soaking eagerly into the dry leaf. He ground it beneath the toe of one shoe, splashing more water on it, then nudged it into the depths of a puddle. His smile had more of the wolf in it then, edged in sharp teeth. "Light it again."
He hesitated for one bare moment, then. He had given himself away, somewhere, and the other man's smile said that he knew. Said that what happened next, whether he was let go, or killed, or became part of this man's pack, rested entirely on what the next action was. He could feel them all around him, still tight and tense from the fight, and it would take nothing at all to goad them into blood. He would never see another morning, he would die as he had predicted, nameless on a foreign street, and this life would be well and truly over.
Or, the other man's smile seemed to say, he could live. On another man's terms, by another man's graces. And as much as he didn't want to die, he wasn't sure he wanted that either.
A moment was all he had to think about it and in the end the will to live was rooted too deep in weak flesh. He drew a breath and called the flames, fed them from his own bones until they burnt away air and water and mud alike to burrow into soaked leaf and take root there. At their feet the water-logged roll of smoke burst into fire - not sullen, smoke choked flames but bright and clean and hot. One of the men who was holding him swore, taking a step back even as he gripped his captive tighter.
Their leader smiled broader, chuckling softly in pure pleasure. "Oh yes, we have the right man." He gestured his pack back with a wave of his hand; his Lieutenant's protest hushed with another half wave. They were left, the two of them, in a ring of bodies, but there were no hands on him now and without their support he nearly stumbled, too aware of the ice eating into his own bones where the fire had gnawed him hollow, and of the need to not show more weakness in front of this man before him.
"You're wasted out here," the leader told him gently. "Whatever you were, you're running from it... But running to where? This?" He took in the length of the alley with a flick of his fingers and an eloquent shrug. "I treat my men better than that."
The last evoked a laugh from some of the men but he couldn't see the joke. The Eastern words were thick and clumsy on his tongue, but he spoke them all the same. "I am no man's slave."
The leader smiled, and for all his words might deny it the pleased curve of his lips already spoke ownership. "Of course not. I think you'd find I'm a reasonable employer. Room and board, weekly pay - off the books, no visa needed." He shrugged, taking one more step forward so that they were eye to eye. "Or name a price. We can come to a... reasonable agreement."
It was on the tip of his tongue to tell the man no and his own safety be damned; to spit at the man's feet and tell him a kept slave was still a slave and he would bow his head to no foreign wolf... But the man only watched him, waiting, and he truly didn't want to die. Not even for what little pride he had left.
Out from beneath his Lieutenant's care the man stood easily in the still falling rain, as though he might stand there all night without a care for how it soaked into the shoulders of his expensive coat. No tanned animal skins on that one, and it was the way the water soaked into the weave of the jacket that caught his eye, a familiar pattern of silkworm woven threads that made something inside of him even more hollow than his fire eaten bones ache. The man was - or would be - Dashi, whatever they might call it in the Eastern lands, and if he was a thick blooded barbarian then still it might be enough.
The words found their way into his mouth almost unwilling, thick and bitter all at once. "...Your coat."
It startled the other man but he didn't draw back, only blinked, the tilt of his head conveying his confusion. Easterners, he reminded himself, were uncivilized - to buy a man with promises of money alone and somehow think it conveyed loyalty. To bind men together into packs based solely on profit, lone wolves always chasing after the next bone, and mistakenly think it somehow made them stronger. A true Dashi formed blood out of water, family out of strangers, sworn life to life and into death; he knew, knew better than any, because he had once been Dashi himself.
Startled the other man might be, but only for a moment, the barest hesitation to be sure he had heard correctly. He laughed, then, not mocking but clear and full of life as he shrugged free of his coat. He held it out, not dangled, but with the inside turned towards his former captive, spread between his hands to be easily slipped on. It meant turning his back on the man, something that shot chills down his spine, but he found to his own surprise that it was easier than he had thought it would be. The coat was silk, still warm with the heat of the man's own body, smelling of the spice scents men used in the East, but beneath that was the scent of raw, wet silk, drowning out the thick, cloying scents of wet wool and leather that had dogged his every step.
The other man clasped his shoulders briefly as he settled the coat across them, and when he turned back around the man was smiling despite the rain that was soaking through the thin fabric of his shirt. The vest the man wore beneath the coat was a shade of blood crimson that sparked another wave of the empty homesick ache through his core, something familiar and alien all at once. He swallowed it down and stood his ground, though he couldn't keep his hands from grasping at the too-familiar texture of the coat. "Your name?"
The man's smile was proprietary and warm all at once. "Elijah Benson."
Elijah, he thought, feeling the taste of the name, and then had to correct himself because no, the Easterners gave their names back to front from what he was familiar with. Benson. It was a warm name, either way, and he couldn't find it in himself to protest it. Heavily, weighted by the ache inside, he went to his knees in the rain and bowed his head. "Dashi Benson."
A hand came to rest on his hair, cupped across the crown of his head, and he could feel the other man's warmth like fire in the touch. "And you? What should we call you?"
He made himself swallow again and kept his eyes on the water that was pooling around his knees and streaming past the other man's feet. "My parents named me Xian Seon Man," he said, and his own name was so strange in his mouth that it felt no different than the alien Eastern words. "You may call me as you like." Which was proper, a Dashi's right, and one of the many things that cut the ties of the old and created the new.
The hand on his head stilled, then stroked blunt fingers through his hair. The rain was seeping beneath the collar of the coat, his every breath filled with the scent of the man and he could hear the labor of his own lungs too loud in his ears. The fingers carded through his hair again, brushing the nape of his neck through the ragged cut ends. "...Seth," the other man said, thoughtful but firm, and it was a word he didn't know but the man's next statement cleared the confusion. "We'll call you Seth." A touch of laughter, echoed in the warmth of the fingers pressed to the back of his neck. "It's easier for our foreign tongues to say."
And then the hand was gone, and the warmth with it, the man stepping back, and that was his cue to struggle back to his feet, shivering with more than just the cold. Beginnings, he thought wildly, beginnings were never as easy as endings, or else why would newborn babes wail while old men laid down with nothing but a sigh? It hurt, in some visceral way deep inside, but it was the kind of hurt that told him he was alive. Alive, and not the nameless beggar he had been only moments before.
Elijah snapped his fingers, gesturing, and the others fell in around him easily. He joined them hesitantly but it was easier with each step, each passing moment that severed the life from before with the new one opening up before his feet. Seth, he repeated to himself. He was Seth, bound to Elijah, Dashi Benson, and anything else was only details. He would not die that night, nor the next day, nor the one after that. He would be safe. And in return... he had only to follow. It surprised him how easy it was.
"Coming?" Elijah asked, and it was an order, not a query. Seth trailed after the other man's steps, letting the too-fast babble of the words around him fall into meaningless noise, and when the other man's eyes settled on him he dipped his head in a deep bow. Yes. He would follow. Xian Seon Man had followed no man... but Seth was something new, and for that alone, he could.