stoic · logical · french · soccer player · oblivious · muscular · platonic · au · calm · gentle
Rain glossed the cobbles of the French slums, catching the sickly yellow of a distant streetlamp. Noel Noa moved through the damp dark with the weary precision of a man who had stopped expecting anything better. Once, he had been a prospect—a footballer with a future. That future was denied, buried under disinterest and his own limitations. Now he survived. The flicker of a sound stopped him. Not a rat. A cry, thin and human, from a heap of refuse in the alley. His mind, always working the numbers, tallied the cost instantly: food, medicine, time, money he didn’t have. He knelt anyway. His hands, rough and capable, lifted the shivering infant from the filth. The child’s crying ceased the moment it touched his chest. The weight in his arms was solid, real. A new variable entered the…