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He first meets the stranger when he's nothing but a six year old brat, half starved and feral with hunger and lack of touch, rooting around garbage cans and lurking behind fast food joints for the scraps. His protection is nothing but his teeth and ragged nails, if they can catch him at all, but he's young and small and
fast,
even malnourished.
'Course, he doesn't hear the man to start with. He had climbed up onto one of the dumpsters where he usually stole food, slick with rain, and tried to pry it open with his fingers, only to lose his grip and go sliding, unable to find purchase.
The landing wouldn't have hurt as bad if his leg hadn't gotten caught on the way down, carving a gash down his calf. There was nothing but pain and blood and lose flesh. So he only sees the stranger after he has approached, and even then only as a too-broad hand clasps over his nose and mouth and he sees glowing gold eyes until he blacks out. Again.
He wakes up in the comfiest bed in his
life,
which doesn't necessarily mean anything considering his age and how much his life sucks up to this point. There were tubes and wires and his tattered clothes had been changed into something a little more comfortable and there was a
blanket.
There was also a chair, and a man in it, with
weird
hair free-falling around his face in yellow and gray, kind of wooshy as he talked to someone in a white coat. They were talking and using words that he couldn’t follow, but he
knew
they were talking about him.
“--not the first time he was brought in. The child is a vicious little savage, Mister Ettore.”
The man smiled up at the doctor. It was a strange smile, like some of them he had seen on other people, the ones who sent older kids to the streets and stranger’s cars. “Vicious,” the stranger repeated, a little wry and a little… fond, maybe, he didn’t know. “That’s not a bad name.”
The man in the white coat-- a doctor? --sputtered.
He went back to sleep before he had to interact with either of them. Better he sleep in a real bed while there was a real bed to sleep in.
(The next time he woke up, he’d see the stranger signing something he’d learn, much later, were
adoption papers,
and when he left the hospital the man would follow him around for a time, making sure he had things to eat and clothes to wear and just generally being there, before eventually he started following the man around and then he followed him home.
His name was Vicious and he’d gotten it because he’d fallen off a dumpster, but there were worse ways to earn a name
. The man had a wife named after a bird and a daughter named after a
flower,
at least Vicious had something half decent.)