Xenogears: Jessie on fatherhood?

[sincere]

"There's that boy again," said Tom.

His customer didn't turn to look, only made a disinterested sound that Tom decided to interpret as interest. He elaborated, "Poor kid is always hanging around that corner there weeknights-- He's, what, fourteen? He's scrawny, anyway."

"Beggar kids are better off finding food for themselves and not sitting on street corners," opined his customer.

Tom gave him a dirty look. He was a tobaccanist by specialty and a bleeding heart by nature: his wife often told his customers, behind his back, that if you handed the man a kitten in a box, he would spend the whole day swaddling it in blankets and feeding it milk from a bottle and coaxing a purr from the beast. The many unhappy children of Aquvy caught at his every weakness. It was an unfortunate region for him to live in, but he was so inured to the cold that he felt sick in warmer climes.

"He's not a beggar. I think... I think he gets a stipend from the Wharf." The Wharf had a name, but no one was precisely sure what it was. He was a big burly man who managed the docks and most forms of commerce in Aquvy, legal or otherwise, saw a small discreet handling fee in his pocket. "I think he must be working there. Wouldn't that be horrible? For a boy of fourteen?"

"Boys gotta grow up sometime," said his customer, still without looking at the boy.

Frustrated, Tom said, "It shouldn't be at fourteen." His own children had eaten well into their twenties before moving someplace else, less stifling. Tom was positive that if the man would only turn around, only look at the boy, he would be moved to pity despite his stony heart. "I drive myself batty thinking what that boy's been through. Probably lives on breadcrumbs, look at him..."

But the other man didn't look.

"I keep wanting to ask him to come in," Tom said, morbid, more to himself than the customer. "Poor kid-- He could probably use more of a father figure than Wharf, eh? I bet it's one of those stories, deadbeat dad, drunkard or such..."

The customer exhaled a long, disgusted breath of smoke, gray from his cigar. "I suppose," he said finally, "that we're all deadbeat dads at heart."

"I beg your pardon," said Tom, bristling.

The customer finally turned, ever so slightly, to glance at the boy. The boy was pale, white like snow in skin and hair, his eyes a wintry blue, a ghost on the streets except for the grime that coated him. His shabby trousers looked as if they hardly kept out the chill wind, and he huddled into a cloak as he sat against the wall -- waiting, if Tom guessed correctly, for Wharf to get done with whatever money-counting he did in the dark of falling evening and locked rooms.

"No matter how good your intentions," said the scarred man, and then he paid Tom for his cigars and left, ducking into the alley and away from the boy who bore him little resemblance at all.