[ CONFLICT ]
“Please cease this infighting immediately!” Gepard’s voice rang across the uproarious crowd, which easily got overshadowed and lost in all the noise. Beginning on his way to push his way through to the center that housed the two individuals that the masses had flocked to once the altercation had begun. Regretfully, he wasn't paying close attention, and didn’t see how it all began. The only reason he knew now was due to one of his men coming to him in a fit of panic asking for assistance.
“Hey! Watch where you're going!” A crowd-goer screamed at him as he accidentally bumped into them in his rush. Feeling awful that he wasn’t able to state his sorry to the individual, but he doesn’t stop, as he was determined to put a stop to this violent display.
The crowd let out a loud cheer once he made it through to the front, likely due to fight in the middle, and he was right. One of the individual's just completed a wide swing that completely missed their opponent. The reckless move making them lose their footing, tripping over their own feet and moving with the momentum to stay standing. Surprisingly, they managed and righted their stance.
Right in front of where Gepard was standing.
From what he saw, the person's face was completely red, facial expressions full of anger, rapidly they turned to get ready to charge back into the fight. Raising their hand in a tight fist, but Gepard had seen enough. Before the individual could move, the Captain grabs onto their wrist to stop them. "Hang-" He tried to say, but was cut off rather abruptly when the aggressor wanks their arm out of his grip. Whirling around to punch Gepard square in the face.
All this over a fucking heel of bread.
It was stale, and not even the whole loaf, let alone a bread bowl to fill the belly of whatever lean, wolfish dredge pulled out from the city's underbelly - but then that was the thing, wasn't it? It wasn't the shitty stale ass end of yesterday's loaf, it was the absence of everything else, in comparison to the steaming bowl and salted baguette that some of those posh citygoers received.
Kalpas did not hunger, he had no need for the soup or the bread or the heat that they provided cupped between desperate palms, nor even for the comfort of community that the action of taking and receiving provided. He hunkered with the rest of them, ushered and prodded into the city square, that pretty plaza as everyone turned their eyes to the sky in despair at the roiling white.
It had started small, a few bitter comments here, a shoulder check there, but ramped quickly in a way that only deep-seated bitterness could, and the fight that seemed to have started from a spark erupted into a blaze before his very eyes.
"You think I didn't notice? That you took twice the portion?"
"Oh, fuck off! I took the same that everyone else did - "
"Yeah, this time around! Change your hair a little bit, put on a scarf - I see you, asshole! You've been through the line twice now!"
The guards would come, as they always would in situations like these, an attempt at order in spite of the burgeoning hatred that remained underneath the surface. Kalpas watched as those armored men tromped into the crowd, pushed everyone back with those massive shields, and even as Blondie got his clock cleaned, whirling in the fray.
His fellow guards could have formed up, then, if they'd the reflexes, could have moved to file around him in the way training with those shields surely could have, and maybe that would have stopped the riot that was simmering just beneath the surface, or maybe it wouldn't, or maybe it didn't matter as bodies began to shove against one another with impatience, with carelessness, bootsoles grinding the stale heels of bread into the dirt -
Kalpas surged forward, a fist curling into the shirtfront of the largest man, whose own fist was raised and ready to strike, and whose anger had shoved a girl in red to the stones, the steam of her soup misting the air as celery and carrots embedded in the mortar.
"Give her yours," he snarled, and the heat rolled from him in waves, the baring of teeth in warning, a tiger snapping its teeth in the face of a pup whose ego was as big as the feet he tripped over.
Apologies muttered underbreath, more servings of soup doled out, and those stale fucking heels of bread - the same as everyone got - and Kalpas turned to slink back into the crowd.
But not before he cocked a head at that blonde man, certainly the leader of this coterie of guards, and assessed him silently for a moment, and finding him wanting.
"Need to keep a better eye, don't you? Lot of people. Lot of tempers."