A Different Story - Wil

"Quick, hide him! Noone can find out."

         When these are the first words you recognise in your life, you just know better not to expect normal to happen. But who was I to see through the intentions of outsiders, when even to keep breathing required some practice?

         Practice. Yes. The school of Hard-Knocks, is where I went, not that I ever heard of any other. Whether it was me or my mom that called that shot, I never thought about it much, and it matters even less. The house needed a man, and for good or bad, that's what I was. Short and scrawny, almost like the corpses we used to find in the woods, "We need firewood", she would say. "Watch out for the thieves" would always come after, not out of her love or fear for my life, but because it got friggin cold in the old shack.

         The thieves, or any living man, they were not what I was afraid of. The bodies, littering the dark earth of the forest, they scared me. The thought that one day one would pass by, like I did every other day, and see me there, gaping, forgotten, like trash, without any mark (on myself, or the world) to go by, terrified me.

         "Think that's enough wood? Go get some more, so we can finally eat" was the closest I had for Happy Birthday that day. That decade, in fact. It had been twelve years since I had my only gift, a shabby necklace with a small G-shaped.. thing. Never knew what it meant, or if it ever did mean anything. Probably a cheap-ass trinket found on the ground. Or a corpse. Whatever. I kept it, thinking that, some time ago, someone remembered me. In good time too, because a moment like that never came around again.

         And since the firewood never sold itself nor the food rained magically on our dirty plates, I walked to the pile of logs I had cut before.

         A man was there.

         "Sir, that wood can be yours for a good price, but please put it down"

         "Mom never told you not to wander alone, kid? I'd run to her if I were you."

         I was never a man of great thought. Thinking delays your actions. But that time, thinking out the part were I charged a man I did not know, unarmed, might have saved a lot of trouble. I looked down to the man, with his back on the floor, and took a step back.

         "Sir, my mother needs that wood to make it through the winter. Stay away from it."

         Hoping he had understood, I let him get up. His strenght was nothing to worry about, that much I knew from the impact. He was searching for a something in the snow. My hopes quickly melted as fast as the snow beneath my feet. He found, he pulled, his sword.

         It didn't budge.

         "The frost, sometimes it makes the blades stick."

         He probably didn't hear me. I had no intention of giving him time to draw. I threw myself at him.

        

         A boy, threw himself at a man he did not know, twice his size, unarmed.

          They fought.

           And someone got hit.

        

         That's the last I remember from my forest, but the godawful smell had changed little.

Then what?

Original work C Pedro Nunes. Split according to OP's vision.