wanderer

Well, if she wasn’t gonna be able to move for a while, she couldn’t much think of a safer place to do it. Yeah, the guy was nice enough, offering a blind, crippled thieving rat like her food and a couch to hang out on, but more than anything, she appreciated the respect.

Most people would see someone like her and immediately assail her with charity. Turn her into a pity case, a platitude receptacle, without actually bothering to ask her if she was okay with it, or whether she even wanted or needed free food or blankets or soaps. Those things were useless to her, because she didn’t stay in one spot to keep them around in the first place. She dropped them at the nearest shelter where others could use them and moved on like always. Worse yet, there were the ones that offered her scripture and meaningless ‘salvation’. Or, heavens forbid, that one bitch who tried to pin her down and force her into a hospital.

This guy though? Not so. As soon as she was caught, she was asked whether every action was fine with her. He asked before he took her to that doctor’s office, and stuck with her instead of leaving her at the mercy of a medical facility she was truthfully scared of. He established where he was around her when she asked for it without raising a fuss or asking any questions. And more than anything, he left her alone until she approached. One of the things she hated about people who thought she needed ‘help’ was that they were unbearably pushy about it, forcing their way into her business. But that wasn’t the case here.

On top of that, it was quiet here. It was easy to tell where things were around her, because the silence meant she didn’t have to pick through myriads of other sounds to interpret what she needed to. The calm made it easier to settle and let her leg heal, because there were no strange noises to keep her on alert and prickly. No, this house, big as it was, had an aura of tranquility she found compelling.

Of course, as soon as he saw the scars, it’d be all over, wouldn’t it? If it wasn’t everything else, it was always the scars that set people off. And if not that, it would be the pills in her back pocket, or the moment she inevitably ventured out to find a dealer. But when that happened, she would just move on again. Like she always did.

Even if maybe she didn’t really want to.