The dustbins outside the tower on Ashworth Row belonged to the kind of building that didn't call itself rich so much as simply assumed the word wherever it went, glass and pale stone rising a dozen storeys over a street too clean to have ever known a proper winter's grime, and the bins themselves reflected it — lids that latched, liners that hadn't split, the kind of waste that came from people who threw food away not because it had gone bad but because they'd simply decided against finishing it. He'd learned the schedule of a dozen buildings like it over the years, which ones emptied their bins on which mornings, which doormen looked away and which didn't, and Ashworth Row emptied its bins early, which was why he was crouched at the mouth of the alley behind it when the door swung open and a young man stepped out into air he clearly hadn't expected to share with anyone.
He was perhaps twenty, dressed in a coat cut close enough to the body to have cost more thought than most people spent on entire outfits, hair combed with the particular precision of someone who checked a mirror more than once before leaving a room. He'd come out for a cigarette, by the look of the case already open in his hand, and what he found instead, crouched over his building's rubbish with a hand still half inside a torn bag, made his face do several things in quick succession — surprise first, then distaste, then something that settled, finally, into a kind of delighted contempt, the expression of a man who has just discovered something beneath him and is pleased to have the opportunity to say so.
"Well." He let the word sit there a moment, savouring it. "Isn't this a sight for the morning." He didn't step back the way most people stepped back from him. If anything he came a pace closer, close enough to look down properly, the way you'd lean over a railing to get a better view of something in a pit. "Do you know whose bins those are? Do you have any idea what that food probably cost, before it ended up somewhere a thing like you could get its hands on it?"
The boy didn't answer. He kept his hand where it was, closed now around a half-eaten roll still warm from whatever kitchen had thrown it out that morning, and looked back at the young man with the same flat grey attention he gave everything, which seemed, if anything, to annoy the young man further, the silence reading to him as insolence rather than the simple absence it actually was.
"You could at least have the decency to look ashamed." The young man exhaled smoke through his nose, unhurried now, warming to the performance of it, an audience of one being more than enough for a man who clearly practiced speeches like this in mirrors. "That's the trouble with your sort, isn't it. No shame left in you at all. You people crawl around in what the rest of us don't even want anymore and you don't even have the grace to look sorry about it. My father says it's a mercy, buildings like this one feeding half the district by accident. I've always thought it was an insult, if I'm honest. An insult to the people who worked for what ends up in that bin, that something like you gets to benefit from it without lifting a finger."
He took another step, close enough now that the boy could smell the cologne over the cigarette smoke, something sharp and citrus and expensive, and the young man's lip curled as he looked the boy over properly for the first time — the scar, the height, the flat grey nothing behind the eyes — and something in what he saw seemed to catch him slightly off guard, a flicker of uncertainty passing through the contempt before he covered it with more of the same.
"What are you looking at me like that for." His voice pitched up half a register, some of the earlier relish thinning into something closer to irritation, the kind a man feels when the person he's decided to look down on doesn't perform the correct amount of smallness in return. "You should be grateful I haven't called the doorman. He'd have you thrown off this street so fast you wouldn't have time to finish chewing whatever that is in your hand." He gestured at the roll with two fingers, distaste doing most of the work his words were meant to. "Go on. Finish your little meal and get gone before I change my mind about being generous this morning."
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The boy finished the roll. He didn't rush it and he didn't slow it, ate it exactly the way he'd have eaten it if the young man hadn't been standing there at all, and something about that — the sheer refusal to be hurried by the threat, the complete absence of the fear the young man had clearly been expecting to enjoy — seemed to reach past whatever patience the young man had been running on. His face went from irritated to something tighter, something that had stopped being about the bins entirely and started being about the silence itself, about a face that wouldn't do him the courtesy of flinching.
He lunged.
It wasn't skilled. It was the swing of a man who had never needed to learn how to throw a proper punch because nobody had ever made him defend himself for anything, all shoulder and no technique, and it caught the boy across the jaw with enough force to snap his head to one side.
The boy let it land.
He didn't raise a hand. Didn't step back, didn't turn the blow aside the way years of learning worse than this had taught his body to do without thinking, some old reflex simply choosing, this once, not to answer. The young man's fist connected a second time, then a third, catching the boy's cheek, his brow, each strike landing with the loose satisfaction of a man discovering that resistance wasn't coming and taking that discovery as permission rather than mercy. Something in his face shifted with every hit that connected — a flush rising, his breath coming quicker, a bright ugly pleasure surfacing in his eyes that had nothing to do with anger anymore and everything to do with the simple, intoxicating fact of hitting something that wouldn't hit back.
He kept going.
"Enough."
The word cut through the alley clean and sharp, a woman's voice, quiet in volume but carrying the particular authority of someone who had never once had to raise her voice to be obeyed. The young man's fist stopped mid-swing, his whole body arresting itself before his mind had caught up to why, and he turned toward the mouth of the alley already flushing a different colour entirely.
She stood there in a flowing white summer dress, ash-grey hair loose around her shoulders and catching what little morning light made it down into the alley. It wasn't the boy on the ground that had brought her voice out that sharp. It was Elden himself — the sight of him, of all people, reduced to something this graceless, fists swinging at a stranger in an alley like some common brawler, and something in her recoiled from it before she'd properly examined why, a private, unexamined embarrassment on his behalf that she would not have called by its true name even if asked to.
"Do you make a habit of this, Elden," she said, "or is today simply a special occasion."
The young man — Elden, apparently, though he looked like he'd have preferred she hadn't said it in front of a witness — dropped his fist to his side and straightened his coat with the jerky overcorrection of someone caught doing something he didn't have a defence for. "He was going through the bins," he said, and even to his own ears it must have sounded thin, because he didn't try to finish the sentence.