@fellqueen
Ike didn’t know how long he had been running now, or how far he had gotten. Nothing looked like home anymore, but after what he had seen, the boy wasn’t going to go back there. He felt...ashamed to have left his little sister behind, but his fear had overcame him.
The bodies, the blood...Who was responsible for the gruesome deaths.
Ike had been frozen for the duration of the carnage, until his mother had intercepted his father; calming his deadly rage, but sacrificing herself in the process. That’s when those two men appeared -- a man in holy garb, and another in heavy armor. They spoke in hushed tones, over the bodies of his parents -- one dead, one still alive.
As soon as the holy man spoke...
“You saw everything, didn’t you? Poor child...”
Ike had bolted. He ran, and he did not stop. He had long since lost any familiarity with his surroundings, and sneaking aboard a random ship certainly didn’t help with that. And while being stuck out on the open water had been horrifying for the boy, the wasteland he now found himself in was almost as bad. He hadn’t eaten in days, the constant gnaw of hunger in his stomach the only thing that really kept him from simply giving up; sitting down to die of hunger wasn’t something he wanted to go through.
“...Ah, ‘scuse me, miss...Can you...spare somethin’? Food, water...anything, really. I-I can work for it,” Ike mumbled, barely even looking up at the woman he had approached. Begging was shameful, but he was desperate at this point for something to put into his stomach.