“W-what do I do? It’s all over you! I-”
“Shut it, Maria! It just looks worse than it is."
What is she supposed to say, when he levels such a look at her?
Congratulate him for putting on his big boy pants and toughing out the pain?
This boy. He’s all of twelve years old, yet he fancies himself to be a fighter.
Sì, Jacopo, you certainly showed those older boys who’s the boss. What the hell is up with men and this reckless, bullheaded urge to fight losing battles?
There’s blood beginning to crust under her fingernails, and it’s all she could do to keep herself from gnawing them into short little stubs. That’s one thing to wash off once they reach the hideout; Jacopo’s face needs looking after, before she can even think of herself. She forces her trembling hands to still as the idiot sways on his feet. Someone needs to keep him upright, and that someone turns out to be her. Figures.
“You didn’t have to do this.”
Her arms come up to hold him as he nearly topples over. Jacopo’s head slumps against her chest; the crimson dripping from his hair and face stains the lace of her dress. Her long gloves are both goners, removed and used to wipe some of the blood off. Ah, well. Today’s outfit is the awful peach dress that her mother chose for her, it wouldn’t be such a big loss. Hah, she just has to sit through a scorching rebuke. Perhaps Mamma would even box her ears.
Not as big of a hit as what this fool took for her.
“Need? I wanted to.”
The usual bite is missing from his voice. Unable to bite her fingernails, the unladylike habit not yet browbeat out of her, Maria instead finds herself worrying her lip.
“Let’s get to our place first.”
“Before what?”
He keeps talking. She fights the urge to pinch him in the arm, hard enough to make him squeal. Maybe this is a good thing, a mouthy Jacopino means he’s gonna be fine.
Right?
“Before you tear me a new one?”
“Oh, I would, Jacopino, but you already took enough losses today.”
“What - they ran off!”
One slightly bungled attempt at slinging his arm over her shoulder later, Maria makes her way towards their little home. She has to stoop a little to accommodate for the shortie, not missing the way he huffs when he notices.
Because of course, he does.
It’s a weak little breath, barely the scoffs he’s capable of, that leaves his slightly slackened mouth.
“One day, I’ll be taller than you.”
‘One day, I’ll protect you.’
Maria wants to cry at hearing this.
This makes her relax. Some tension leaves, softening her clenched jaw. If he could still be offended, as is his talent, then he’s fine.
Because if he’s not -
Then she’d find some way to make those boys’ lives hell. It’s not the sneering, arrogant words that make her blood boil. It’s not ‘Your father’s just a whimpering little lapdog’, because, for one, her father can defend himself just fine. It’d only take a week at most, for word to get back to him and those curs would lose their tongues. Not even ‘And you’re just the little bitch birthed from that unambitious dog Campanella’ gets to her.
Jacopo, in all his foolhardiness, jumps the loudmouthed youths they come across earlier.
A Bearzatti, coming to the defense of a Campanella? That is already preposterous on its own. But he’s always been different. The other children of the land that her grandfather owns are soft-bellied and weak; they do not understand her, and the legacy that runs in her blood.
The blood that spills on Sicilian soil today isn’t hers, but it may as well be. He is her other half in all the ways that count.
Maria is a girl. And girls can’t always fight with their fists, not in a world dominated by men. Men who take what they want with their fists, with their guns, and with their money. But there are other ways to fight. Words have been hammered into the malleable metal that is the young Maria, forging her into something not quite as hard as steel — for she is only ten — but the beginnings of something like her beloved guns, wrapped in a layer of silk.
Revenge is best served as a knife in the dark; an unexpected, slow and insidious poison works better than immediate savagery.
These are the words she learned from her Mamma.
Awareness comes back piece by piece, like the broken pieces of a sunken ship floating back to the surface.
Jacopo stirs on the makeshift bed, the salty taste of iron still in his mouth. There’s something soft pressed against his skin, wrapped around his forehead. When he lifts a hand to tug it off, a sharp ache lances up his side and makes him stop.
His other hand is wrapped around small, slender fingers. They are more calloused than one would expect.
“Ma… ria?”
A head of golden hair is tucked against his other side. His friend is sprawled on her front, sitting against the side of the hay bale. Why would she not sleep on the other bed…? The bonnet she dislikes wearing is haphazardly clutched in her free hand, nearly falling out of fingers lax with sleep.
He starts at the sight, sitting up and jostling himself.
“Ouch-!”
The noise rouses Maria, who lifts her head and blinks back at him, the haze receding from her green eyes. When her gaze locks on Jacopo, she furrows her brow and tightens her lips into a straight line.
They stare at each other, and he fights the urge to fidget like a misbehaving child.
For once, Maria Campanella’s bright and mischievous eyes are unreadable. This alone makes him feel like his mamma caught him sneaking an extra cannoli at dinner. He feels himself begin to sweat.
He’s known her since they were eight, scrappy young kids left alone by others their age. Their first meeting is memorable, what with the fisticuffs that ensued. He refuses to acknowledge that this blonde girl in a ruffled dress nearly won against him, even years later. Maria would claim it’s a tie, but the smirk on her face tells another story.
“You’re stupid, you know that?”
Maria breaks the silence, squeezing his hand. Is that a good sign?
“Who’s stupid?! Me, or the one who got shoved by those bastards and smiled?”
He rises to the bait anyway, feeling his cheeks darken. He squeezes back even as he raises his voice, and the sound of his strident proclamation — the impudence in it — makes a little life return to Maria’s eyes. Jacopo feels like he passed some unspoken evaluation.
“Why wouldn’t I smile?” His friend fires back. “Papa would hear what happened, and those boys would regret it.”
“They called you a bitch!”
“Am I not?”
This brings all of the gears in his mind screeching to a halt. He gapes at her, and she has the nerve to roll her eyes at him.
Maria takes his silence as her cue and speaks the most perplexing words Jacopo Bearzatti, twelve years old, has ever heard.
“Mamma says that it’s good for a woman of the cosca to be a bitch. It means we’re not falling over for the stupidity of man.”
“Uh? That’s-” He flusters for a response, feeling quite out of his element. “That’s still not a nice thing to call you…”
“I don’t need to be called nice things. Those people are nobodies anyway.”
“When I grow up and work for your father — or you,” Jacopo blurts out with his foolish mouth, “I won’t let them say things about you.”
Maria finally cracks at this, the strange, almost frightening look she’s worn since she laid eyes on him melting away. Her laughter bounces off their hideout’s walls, and that’s when Jacopo notices the morning sunlight peeking in.
“Ahaha! Does Jacopino want to be my bodyguard? You’re a skinny shortie!”
The sun casts a halo about Maria’s golden hair, but an angel, she is not. The ruddy flush on her peachy skin as she doubles over laughing mirrors the red quickly spreading on his tanned face.
“You never cut me any slack! I’ll work out and be like those big men in the cosca, just you wait!”
The sun also brings out the bruises on her knuckles in stark relief. This reminds him of the glove currently wrapped as a makeshift bandage around his head.
As her laughter eventually lulls, Jacopo sighs and lifts her hand, inspecting the damage.
“You still throw one hell of a punch.”
After the kick in Jacopo’s side that sends the young boy rolling on the ground, the thug also finds himself going down as pain erupts between his legs. Jacopo still cringes at the memory. What finally chases those brutes off, in the end, is the murder in Maria Campanella’s face as she peels off her fancy gloves and throws her entire weight into her fist, driving it into one ugly mug.
‘Every bruise on my knuckles is one less finger for you later, by the way.’
‘Now scram. The more I look at you, the more I want to be a bitch.’