to rule the world | a ninjago au

[22] gutter girl

evan

Alissa Gorski was a nice girl, as far as girls could be considered nice. He still wasn't sure if she had 'cooties'.

Dr Julien and Evan had been living in an abandoned Masters supermarket for several months now. There was a lot of canned soup (they were switching out the flavours everyday for some change. Today was mushroom soup.) and food, random resources that they'd scavenged. His father was taking it strangely well, but he was glued to the rackety old television half the time.

Everytime a broadcast came on that mentioned the Hunted Seven, rarely Zane specifically, Dr Julien would jot it down in a My Little Puppy notebook and then disappear for an hour or two. Evan had been out and about looking for more metal scraps for his father, when he'd stumbled across a blonde girl in a gutter.

"Who are you?" she'd said, still sitting there.

Evan had remained quiet, then lifted up the blob of melted metal he'd found.

"Do you have food?"

He nodded.

"Can I have some?"

"I don't have it with me."

"Oh. Can we trade, then? I have a toolbox I found in a garage, and Mama and I need food."

His father would really like a toolbox. The one they had was a put-together set of flimsy screwdrivers and a faulty solder. They had enough food to spare anyways, and Evan was getting sick of soup and beans.

"Alright. Do you want mushroom or chicken soup?"

"Chicken, please. I'll be back in an hour."

"Is it far for you?" he suddenly blurted out. This was the first person his age he'd talked to in months.

"About twenty minutes both ways by foot. How about you?"

"Fifteen," his lips quirked up when she clambered out of the gutter and brushed down her skirt grandly.

"Race you back?" she offered with a smile.

"But I'll be back faster than you will," he frowned. The race would be unfair then.

"You can try." she grinned again, leaving him to respond to dust when she ran off into the winding streets of Ninjago.

Evan walked back home and packed his bag with soup, so much that he sounded like a walking clanger machine. With every step it was like he was yelling for the vultures (aka every gang roaming the streets) to come down and swoop up your carcass. Or in his case, a carcass bearing soup. He ran as much as the soup allowed him to and still arrived within the time limit, but when he turned the corner, gutter-girl was there. With a bike.

"You said it was twenty minutes by foot!" Evan exclaimed, digging out soup frantically.

"Yeah. And I have a bike. Well anyways, one toolbox for you—oh, what's your name?"

"Evan."

"My name's Alissa," she stuck her hand out, and he shook it slowly. "Alissa Gorski."

There was an awkward pause when neither of them spoke and he realised she wanted to know his last name. If she's been watching the news, and she's as smart as I think she is, she'd figure it out. Do I trust her enough? What if she hands me in to Emperor Wu?

"Julien," he said finally. "My name is Evan Julien."

Alissa's blonde head snapped up from toying with her bike at that. "You're Zane's brother."