He learned which alleys offered shadows deep enough to hide in. Which back doors led to kitchens and trash bins. Which routes let him move across whole blocks without crossing in front of main windows. He picked up the small, quiet rules of vanishing.
He learned to steal, not out of thrill or greed, but because the body demands food and the world rarely gives it for free.
Survival did not feel noble.
It did not feel like the stories where brave children fought against impossible odds and were rewarded with kindness. It was slow, grinding work. Cold fingers. Empty nights. Counting how many days he could stretch a crust of bread, how long he could go before risking another theft.
The city—whatever city this was now, blurred between real memory and the Gate's distortions—was full of others like him.
He saw thin, sharp-eyed children darting between alleys, clutching bags close to their chests, ready to run at the first sign of danger. Some traveled in small groups. Others moved alone, like ghosts.
Shopkeepers watched the streets with narrowed eyes. When Noctis approached, doors shut. Locks clicked. Faces hardened. They looked at him the way people look at stray dogs near their trash—something that might bite if cornered.
There were also adults whose smiles never reached their eyes.
They promised help in soft voices, but their hands hovered too close, their questions dug too deep, their offers came with invisible hooks. Noctis learned to avoid them the way he avoided open flames.
He slept anywhere he could find even a scrap of shelter.
Some nights he found his way into an attic above an old building, where dust floated in the dim light and echoes of old laughter clung to the beams. Other nights he curled up in a boiler room, where warm pipes occasionally sputtered to life and filled the darkness with thin, comforting heat.
Once, he hid behind the cracked altar of a ruined church.
The stone was chipped, and whatever god had been worshipped there had been forgotten by the people outside. But old prayers seemed to linger in the air like faint smoke. He breathed them in—words of hope and help long since spent.
They did not change his situation.
But they felt like something.
He dreamed of food often—of full plates, of soup that reached his ribs with warmth, of bread that did not have to be shared with rats or stolen from bins. He also dreamed of hands reaching out to him and not turning into fists or grips.
Those dreams never lasted long.
Piece by piece, he shed parts of himself that he could not afford to keep.
He stopped being the boy who waited for someone to notice he was in trouble. He stopped calling out for parents who would not answer. He stopped crying alone in the dark, because tears did not bring bread, and sobbing wasted breath he needed to keep moving.
Despair did not come in a single, dramatic night.
It settled in slowly, like dust.
Endurance became his only currency. Each day survived was a coin he earned and spent at the same time. Emotions blurred at the edges. The bright, sharp feelings of anger, longing, fear—they faded into a dull gray hum.
There was no room for hope. No space for joy.
Days bled into weeks. Weeks into months.
He was not alone in the absolute sense—people existed all around him—but he was always apart. The city worked like a vast machine. It took in those who could serve it and chewed up those it could not use. Some were crushed quickly. Others took longer.
One evening, the rain softened the city's sharp edges.
It fell in tired sheets, muting footsteps, turning distant shouts into muffled shapes. The streets glistened with muddy reflections of broken lights. Noctis walked with his shoulders hunched, hands tucked close to his chest, eyes searching for somewhere dry enough to rest.
Then he heard it.
A small sound. Not the usual clatter of trash or the hiss of leaking pipes. A muffled cry, half-swallowed by the rain and the stink of alley rot. It was faint enough that he could have pretended not to hear it.
He paused.
Instinct screamed the same rules it always did: keep walking. Stay unseen. Do not get involved. Every time he had stepped toward others before, it had cost him.
But something tugged sideways inside him.
Maybe it was hunger making his mind wander. Maybe it was the echo of his mother's shaking hands as she packed her things. Maybe it was a tiny scrap of warmth he had not yet managed to stamp out.
He turned.
The sound came from a narrow alley, crowded with bins and broken crates. He slipped into the shadows, moving quietly.
Two small shapes huddled beneath a torn, filthy sheet.
The first was a girl—Magi. Her hair was wild and tangled. Her eyes were bright and sharp despite the bruise blooming across her cheek. She looked like someone who had learned to bite long before she learned to ask.
The second was a boy—Rob.
He was quieter, his dark eyes watching everything. One arm was wrapped around his side, where blood had soaked through a strip of cloth. He held himself very still, the way people do when moving even a little might hurt too much.
They looked up at Noctis as he approached.
Not with open trust—nothing in their lives had taught them that—but with a mix of fear and suspicion, and a tiny glimmer of hope they were trying very hard to hide.
For a heartbeat, Noctis almost turned away.
He knew how this story usually went. You reach out. You share. Then someone takes more. Someone betrays you. Someone dies.
His instincts, sharpened by the city's cruelty, told him to keep his distance. Alone was safer. Alone was simpler.
Then a memory flashed.
His mother's hands, trembling as she picked up her belongings.
The sight hit him harder than he expected. His fingers tightened on the crust of food he had managed to save. It was barely enough for one person, certainly not enough for three.
He held it out anyway.
He did not say anything grand or comforting. He just offered what he had. His hand shook, whether from cold or hunger or nerves, he couldn't tell.
Magi's eyes widened.
Suspicion warred with desperation in her gaze. For a second, he thought she might snatch the food and bolt. Instead, she glanced at Rob, then back at Noctis, then scooted sideways, lifting the edge of the torn sheet.
An invitation.
Rob flinched when Noctis stepped under the thin shelter, shoulders tensing, eyes darting as if expecting a blow. But he did not pull away. He let Noctis lie down beside them, their bodies forming a small, fragile cluster against the cold.
They split the food.
It was not enough. It did not fill them. But it was something. It was shared.
That night, three small bodies pressed together under a ragged sheet. The rain still fell. The city was still cruel. Hunger still circled them like a starving dog.
Yet the cold felt a little less sharp.
The silence felt a little less heavy.
With Magi and Rob, survival changed shape.
They did not become safe. The city did not become kinder. But "alone" turned into "together," in a rough, clumsy way.
Magi knew paths Noctis had never seen—narrow ledges hugging the sides of buildings, routes over rooftops, hidden spots behind ventilation grates where they could hide when danger swept by. She moved like someone who expected the world to chase her and was determined to make it work for the chase.
Rob was quiet but observant.
He noticed patterns in patrols, which shopkeepers were quick with their hands, which doors were never fully locked. He was the one who pulled Noctis back when he stepped too close to an open street, the one who pointed out the shadow that meant "someone is watching."
They shared what they knew.
He found new ways to scavenge while they found safer ways to travel. They warned each other about angry drunks, about older kids who liked to corner the younger ones, about sudden storms that could flood underground tunnels.
Once, Rob fell ill.
His wound grew hot. His skin burned. His eyes turned glassy. His breaths came slow and shallow. Noctis watched panic creep into Magi's eyes—panic she refused to show anyone else.
They needed medicine.
Magi stole it.
She darted into a small pharmacy, hands quick and steady, slipping bottles into hidden pockets while Noctis made a commotion outside—knocking over a crate, shouting at a phantom insult, drawing the shopkeeper's attention.
He took a blow for that distraction.
A rough hand grabbed his shirt. A fist caught his cheek. A boot caught his side. The pain was sharp, but he had learned long ago how to take hits without folding. Magi slipped past while the shopkeeper focused on him, then dragged Rob away to safety.
When they regrouped later in a dry corner of an abandoned building, Magi's hands shook with tired triumph as she poured a bitter liquid between Rob's lips. Noctis watched the boy's breathing slow, then even out over the next few days.
It was not a miracle.
It was work. It was risk. It was the choice to care, even when caring could get you killed.
In the quiet moments between danger and hunger, Noctis noticed small changes.
He began to listen to their breathing at night—not because he was afraid they would attack him, but because the steady rhythm calmed something restless inside him. On nights when the city felt hostile and heavy, he counted their heartbeats to remind himself that he was not the only one still here.
Once, when a shout in the distance made him flinch, he felt rough fingers slip into his hand.
Rob's grip was hesitant but firm, the fingers small and warm despite everything. No promises. No explanations. Just a quiet, solid anchor.
Somewhere in the middle of these days, a sound escaped Noctis.
It shocked him as much as it seemed to surprise the others. It was not a sob, not a scream. It was a broken, rusty laugh, like a hinge that hadn't been used in a long time suddenly swinging open.
Magi stared at him for a second, then grinned.
"Oh, he can laugh," she said, half-teasing. "Thought you were made of stone."
Rob smirked and broke his bread in half, pressing the bigger piece into Noctis' hand without making a fuss.
That small exchange—one laugh, one teasing remark, one shared crust—felt more important than most things the world had offered him before.
Between the three of them, something fragile and real took shape.
It was not safe. It was not permanent. It could be broken easily by sickness, violence, or simple bad luck.
But for the first time since his parents had walked out into the storm, Noctis was not just surviving next to other people.
He was surviving with them.
It was a family of sorts—found instead of given, fragile instead of secure, but a family all the same.