Chapter Text
Shěn Jiǔ’s first memory was like a kaleidoscope; a confusing cacophony of light, sound, and sensation. The concept of self formed sluggishly. Movement disobeyed him. Reality was right there, he knew it, but it was just out of reach, too big to decipher. Icy fear gripped his heart at his defenselessness.
As it goes, people are born and people die. It’s always too soon. The entire universe is simply one long catalog of leaving behind and being left behind, like a snake eating its own tail. We are always the bereaved, until suddenly we are not. We don’t get to choose. And after that, no one knows. Humans are wretched animals in that way, to understand just enough to comprehend all that they don’t understand at all.
Here’s what we can say for certain: just a moment prior, or perhaps happening at the same time, or rather in the distant future, Shěn Yuán was laying still as stone in his hospital bed.
The only way to tell he was alive was the slow, steady heart monitor beeping outside his periphery. The sun was shining through the windows, not in any particularly beautiful way. The walls looked like walls, off-white paint done over to hide old stains that peeked through despite the effort. The mattress was thin and lumpy, the blanket coarse. The smell of sickness and disinfectant was thick in the air, all too familiar.
His stomach felt like it was shredding itself apart. It was complete agony, the worst pain he’d ever been in, and he could only endure it. His limbs were so far away. A slight breeze outside ruffled the branches of a close tree, and the skittering leaves refracted the light and cast mottled shadows across the sill, and Shěn Yuán was dying. Some mortal, animal instinct was whimpering pitifully within him, and that was how he knew without a shadow of a doubt that he was going to die, any moment now.
His heart was so heavy in his chest. He hadn’t gotten to live, not truly. He hadn’t ever gotten to love, not in any of the ways that mattered. What could he make of that? His body would decompose and fold over into new earth, and then what? What would remain after that? What was the point of this short, painful life, where he did not know how to touch other living things and there was nobody who would mourn him? Why couldn’t he have had the chance to do something that mattered?
His body held still. Wet tears tracked his temples, and the light that fell through the windows brushed where Shěn Yuán’s limp hand rested. The warmth was incidental, but tender still, and he didn’t know what to do with that feeling either, so he laid and laid and laid with it.
For a long moment, his thoughts turned over like stones. And then they faded into the sound of his heart monitor beeping; into indistinguishable static; into silence; into -
The rendering of an identity on top of an identity was like grinding stones together. Friction. Unparalleled agony. A mixture of physics and what physics meant to the human soul.
Shěn Yuán was no more. It wasn’t that he’d died, although he had. He’d just become something more than that, too. Shěn Yuán was the name that most fit who he once was, like a loose snake skin. Sure, it was his - but it didn’t quite fit anymore. Not really.
The boy who was no longer named Shěn Yuán was born to a poor peasant couple’s doorstep. It was a tale like any other. They were not able to have children of their own and so they took him in with wonder despite their poverty. He called them ā-niáng and ā-diē, and at some point it even became true. His father had streaks of grey at his temples and deep lines around his eyes, from smiling as much as stress. He liked to laugh. They were hungry more often than not, but you would never know it from his father’s face. His eyes were soft and twinkling, like he had everything he had ever wanted and found nothing lacking.
His mother was older than his father. She was more worn in some ways, rough and hardened from decades of harsh, hands-on work. But even then, she was kind in a way that was rare. She liked to hold him by the fireside at night when he was small and hum soft lullabies into his hair, like he was her child and not a boy disguised as a boy, misplaced in a home that was his but fundamentally someone else’s.
They were agricultural workers who traveled with the seasons. Their dwellings were rudimentary and not meant to last. The boy who was no longer named Shěn Yuán sat at their table and warmed his hands by their fire wherever they wandered. From this he learned that there is a list of a few simple things that make a life good. They include warmth and sustenance and rest. A full night’s sleep. They include a kind woman’s hand in your hair, the warmth of real fire licking at your feet. The dirt scrubbed from the day’s harvest, easy laughter, the smile of a poor man when there isn’t enough for him to eat after a day’s work. They include real people and how they live, the grit and mess of it, their immense hardship and even greater tenderness.
The couple only ever called him Ér-Tóng, and so that was all that he was. Even as an infant, they always told him, he’d been unusually quiet, his face scrunched up in big thoughts, unable to do anything about them. Ér-Tóng grew, rickety and frail with hunger, and dreamed of hefting the rice sheaths over his shoulders, muddy and shining with the effort, smelling of salt and labor. He thought of the sturdy strength in his father’s back, and his imagination was colored with a persistent impatience to grow old enough that they could rely upon him. His greatest fear was of his own burden.
The agricultural seasons called and so they moved, trudging along dark, dusty roads. It was a familiar song and dance after five years of repetition. The woman who called herself his mother wrapped him in a blanket, rough and worn but made with her own two hands, and held him against her shoulder as she carried him.
She must have thought him asleep, because she was weeping.
“We cannot do this,” she said to her husband, voice hushed and choked, “please, we cannot do this.”
“We must,” he told her, but even then his voice was cracked open and full of sorrow. Like a clay pot with holes, water constantly running through.
“He’s our child,” she only cried harder, “he’s our Ér-Tóng. He was given to us.”
“We have to,” was all he said, grim and resolute, “you know what will happen if we don’t.”
“Not my boy,” she wept, still, inconsolable. No one could know the magnitude of a mother’s heart, in the midst of breaking. “Not my boy, please.”
His heart weighed him down in his mother’s arms as they trudged along. Ér-Tóng wondered what would happen to him. It was not a quiet wonder. It was choked and heaving in his chest, like an animal, cornered and thrashing.
Morning found Ér-Tóng in the closest thing to a city that he’d seen in years. He was left, alone, while his parents asked around for work. Morning led to afternoon. Soon afternoon turned over into night. He stayed put because his parents would need to know where to find him once they had found work. Nearby, a kind auntie closing up her bāo shop for the day called out to him and gifted him some leftovers. He knew nowhere else to go and so he stayed in a nearby alleyway while he waited.
This was how it continued for days that folded over into weeks. All he would remember, after, was the cold. The panting hunger. His clothes were threadbare and the bitter chill found him easily. It had been easy to ignore with the warmth of another person at his back, toes outstretched toward the hearth. When there had been laughter and hummed songs, twinkling eyes and gentle fingers running through his hair.
His animal hindbrain was more present than he himself was, like a vulture, and it showed in how he internalized the memories. Scavenger. Scrawny mass of insatiety. Grim. Grimy. Street youth, whittled too sharp to fit neatly anywhere else.
The first thing he ever learned on the street was not to linger. Don’t be seen for too long in one place. That made people take notice. Even worse, it made them curious. They didn’t need to be curious about Ér-Tóng. He was just waiting for his parents. Nobody needed to worry.
Except that he should have worried. He shouldn’t have lingered. He should have left after the very first day. Maybe if he had, it wouldn’t have ended up like this.
Ér-Tóng was awoken in the dead of night from a fitful sleep by a tight, bruising hold on his upper arm. He snapped to awareness in an instant. The ground swayed below him, his air-born feet kicking fruitlessly. He was suspended. He looked up right into the broad, twisted sneer of a burly man. He knew, without a shadow of a doubt, that this man could kill him with a single blow. He held very still.
“How fruitful,” the man rumbled, like thunder overhead. Large. No, even larger than that. “Just like those farmers said. My ninth catch and it only cost me four silver pieces. I’ll call you Xiǎo-Jiǔ.”
Xiǎo-Jiǔ didn’t name himself. He was awarded his name the way a dog was awarded a collar. He hung limp, so scared he imagined that he could feel his cells vibrating underneath his skin. He might die again, so soon. What would happen, after that?
By the arm, Xiǎo-Jiǔ was dragged through the empty, shadowed alleyways back to a dingy shed, the makeshift headquarters of a child trafficking ring. He met other children, named similarly to him. The one named Qī offered him a thin mat. Xiǎo-Jiǔ saw that he had no other, and so they shared it through the night.
In complete silence, Xiǎo-Jiǔ clutched at the other boy’s robes with white-knuckled fists. His breaths were short and fast, but he never cried. He didn’t make a single sound. The other boy hugged him close, for warmth as much as comfort. Between them, two slave boys not yet properly in adolescence, was shared an understanding so profound and full of grief it could never be put into words.
The next day, he was sent out to beg for the first time. He and the slave boy who he called Qī-gē were young enough that they could be passed for brothers under the disguise of grime and malnutrition. That was how they survived, from street corner to street corner. Xiǎo-Jiǔ would cry on demand, because at every moment he felt he could weep from the injustice of it all, and Qī-gē would grip his hand tight as he collected coins into a pouch roughly fastened together with scrap cloth to meet the slavers quota.
Where Xiǎo-Jiǔ cried on demand to gather sympathy and, most importantly, money from passerbys, Qī-gē was too honest. They would blow dust in his eyes when necessary, but he couldn’t force it on his own. Even when the other kids got angry or jealous of their catch and started picking fights, Qī-gē always tried to find ways to resolve things rather than bristling and dishing it back.
There was a part of Xiǎo-Jiǔ that was intensely envious of this inherent goodness. He did not see any such virtue in himself. He was manipulative if need be and, given the slightest provocation, aggressive and belligerent. He had to be. Living the life they did, you were either fiercely protective over what was yours or you ended up losing it. Any weakness was exploitable, and Xiǎo-Jiǔ was under no delusion that he wasn't the weakest of them all. Stick thin and an inch shorter than even the youngest, he was an easy target from the get go. And after a certain point, you just got fucking tired of always losing, and you learned to square up, to front toughness even if you didn’t feel it, and eventually you got tough for real and the same kids who used to push you down and rip the coins from your hands thought twice before putting their hands on you.
A larger part of Xiǎo-Jiǔ, shockingly enough, wanted to protect this part of his Qī-gē. It was a silly thought - even as children, Qī-gē had been head and shoulders taller than him. What protection could Xiǎo-Jiǔ ever offer him? And yet, the human heart foolishly dreamed.
He held only one true conviction: they would be free. Xiǎo-Jiǔ always kept just a single coin from their daily catch, which he sequestered under his tongue until he could hide it away. Only he and Qī-gē knew where he buried them. Even if he had nothing else, Xiǎo-Jiǔ wanted his freedom fiercely. He never knew, before, what a luxury it was to have ownership over his own self. He would never take it for granted again.
Most of the other kids didn’t really know about their lives before the streets. Xiǎo-Jiǔ feigned the same, claiming to not know who his parents were or how he’d been left on his own. In some ways, it was even true.
He and the others, in their more amicable moments in their many years together, would come up with stories for why they must have been abandoned. Valiant fathers killed by bandits, beautiful mothers kidnapped in their travels and torn from their babies, cruel slavers holding pious parents at sword point until they didn’t have any choice but to hand everything over, even their own flesh and blood.
But Xiǎo-Jiǔ did remember the man and woman who named him Ér-Tóng, if only faintly, if only in their parting. And really, that was the part that mattered the most. Because they hadn’t been killed or kidnapped or extorted. They had, fair and square, simple and clean-cut, sold Xiǎo-Jiǔ off to slavers for spare coin.
Xiǎo-Jiǔ was the type of person who would lie about being sold to slavers if only to pretend to someone else that there wasn’t something fundamentally unlovable about him. He was the type of person to cry on demand to weasel coins out of sympathetic pouches. He was also the type of person who would, if given the chance, do the right thing.
There was a boy a few years younger than he and Qī-gē were. He was called Shíwǔ- the fifteenth. The traffickers who possessed them had grown with the funds they reaped from their slaves. They’d sold a few off when the price was right and even killed some too when they became too much trouble.
Shíwǔ was in the street, begging. The thing about learning lessons the hard way is that, sometimes, you didn’t survive it. Sometimes the hard way killed you. Shíwǔ didn’t know not to approach the nobles, especially not the ones on horseback or with armed guard. He didn’t know that they did not believe street children or slaves to be human beings. He did not know that they would kill him for daring to speak to them out of turn.
“Don’t,” Xiǎo-Jiǔ said, sharp and quiet. But no matter how hard he gripped at Qī-gē’s sleeve, good, honest, righteous Qī-gē, who did the right thing even if he wasn’t given the chance, ran in front of the nobleman’s horse to save that street boy. He was always so reckless with his own life. As if Xiǎo-Jiǔ, who had no one else in the whole wide world, wasn’t waiting for him to come back to him alive and well and whole.
Xiǎo-Jiǔ felt that same vibrating under his skin that he’d thought he’d imagined when he’d first been snatched off the street, except a thousand times worse. This wasn’t his own life on the line - it was Qī-gē’s. Have you ever lost something that you loved? It’s kind of like that. He could cope with a lot of things - indeed, he had survived that which could have just as easily broken him - but he knew without a shadow of a doubt that he wouldn’t be able to endure such a thing.
He wasn’t really in control of it. The only intention behind it was the fierce gnashing of teeth, animal and desperate. He threw the only thing in his hands - a spare coin, the one he was going to add to their stash, the one that was going toward their freedom - and it felt pitiful, it felt insurmountable. Any moment the coin would ping to the dirt and Qī-gē would be trampled along with Shíwǔ, and Xiǎo-Jiǔ would be useless, on the sidelines, too much a coward to do the right thing, too weak to hold even his own personhood.
But that’s not what happened at all, because the coin flew from his hands. It obeyed his will. The copper piece magicked before his eyes into a sharp projectile and embedded itself in the flank of the rearing horse with just enough force to send the nobleman off target.
Qī-gē grabbed Shíwǔ and they fled. Xiǎo-Jiǔ, shocked into stillness, forgot his own cardinal rule, the first one he ever learned on the streets, and he lingered for just a moment in disbelief. The nobleman, who sat atop his horse proud and cruel, whipped his head around. He looked down at Xiǎo-Jiǔ with the same gaze that was leveled at barn animals on the side of the road and roaches underfoot.
“You there!” He barked, turning to a guard on foot behind him. “Grab that boy!”
Xiǎo-Jiǔ turned tail and darted down the alleyways. But it was too late.
It took less than a week, in total, for Shíwǔ to sell him out. The slavers welcomed the nobleman who was oh-so-interested in Xiǎo-Jiǔ warmly. They demanded triple the price they would’ve asked anyone else for, sensing his wealth, and Qiū Jiǎnluó paid it without fanfare. Swiftly, the life Xiǎo-Jiǔ had more or less always known, the streets he had learned to navigate and survive on, was snatched away. Even in its share of pains, Xiǎo-Jiǔ had found comfort in its familiarity. But now. Now.
Xiǎo-Jiǔ looked down at his hands, small in their boyhood and yet scraped raw with labor. Qī-gē was at his back calling, Xiǎo-Jiǔ! Xiǎo-Jiǔ! but he sounded so far away.
For the first time since coming to slavers, Xiǎo-Jiǔ had cuff-like shackles placed around his fair wrists and bony ankles. They weren’t fastened together, symbolical more than anything he guessed, but still they invoked terrible sorrow within him. Like ice, dread froze his stomach and foreboding swelled within him like rain.
There were deeply carved symbols impressed upon the metal. He didn’t know how to read them, but at once his vision went the faintest bit blurry at the edges, his short term memory foggy and confused. The buzzing that once accompanied him underneath his skin was sluggish now, and it was only in it’s absence that he could acknowledge how intense it was, before. He’d grown so used to it that it was as if it wasn’t there at all. Now, he missed the electric static of energy beneath his skin fiercely, with the same ache in his chest that the word freedom inspired.
This was another lesson he learned: the magic qì inside of him was a resource that could be exploited like any other. Street children should know better than to expose their valuables. Remember? Sometimes, learning the hard way killed you.
Xiǎo-Jiǔ thought he knew hunger, before. He thought he understood loneliness. He thought he’d seen violence. It was so simple as words, but the reality of it was anything but.
“What is it they called you?” Qiū Jiǎnluó sneered, as if he had never bothered to pay much attention at all to what others were named. His voice echoed in the halls of the Qiū estate like howling wind. “Xiǎo-Jiǔ? I think Xiǎo-Shòu fits you much better, don’t you think? Filthy animal, you belong to me!”
Xiǎo-Shòu got his hands under his shoulders, somehow, and lifted himself up from where he lay sprawled across the floor. It made him think of crime scene documentaries, from a lifetime ago, with chalk outlines of where the bodies had once been. Everywhere he blinked was the imprint of another version of himself, stuck in suffering like a butterfly pinned by it’s wings behind mounted glass.
Qiū Jiǎnluó drew his foot back.
Qiū Hǎitáng called for Xiǎo-Shòu often and shepherded him into her quarters like a kept thing. She would sit him down like a doll and talk to him sugar-sweet, and he would sit very still. She called him Chǒngwù. It wasn’t the same as Qiū Jiǎnluó’s heavy hands but the objectification of it was the same. He didn’t want it to happen but he didn’t have any way to make it stop and so he sat, silent as stone, and tried to pretend he was somewhere else.
Maybe back with the slave trading group, begging on random street corners with Qī-gē. Maybe sitting with the slave girl he once called dà-jiě, back before she was sold off to an old widower. Maybe with his parents, who he couldn’t properly recall the faces of anymore, back before.
Before.
Shortly after being taught to read and write - a gift given only to demonstrate to outsiders the wealth and dignity of the Qiū clan, who educated even their slaves - Xiǎo-Shòu’s fingers were broken under Qiū Jiǎnluó’s heel in punishment for some slight or another.
You are nothing more than vermin, he had sneered at the time, only by my grace can you come anywhere near human.
If I was an animal, Xiǎo-Shòu would think, I would tear out your throat. The thought was strangely far away.
“Chǒngwù,” Qiū Hǎitáng called, painted lips curling at the corners uncannily. Her blood red mouth knew violence, too. “You know, my brother promised me that we could marry. Then you’ll be mine forever, won’t that be just perfect?”
“Yes, Hǎitáng-xiǎojie,” Chǒngwù whispered, inflectionless, monotone. When had the world lost all it’s colors? They were sitting outside, spring in the midst of bloom, and yet all the flowers looked washed out and gray.
“I’m glad you agree!” She tittered, pulling him like a rag doll to lean against her shoulder so she could pet at his hair, not unlike the way she would to a lap dog. Chǒngwù breathed in and out, one even breath after another.
She and him were of a similar age, and yet he had never felt farther away from another person in every possible way.
I wish you didn't exist, he thought to himself, and even though it was a horrible thing he couldn’t stop himself from thinking it, I wish you and your brother would just drop dead.
“Xiǎo-Shòu,” Qiū Jiǎnluó spit, his cold, dark eyes riveted on Xiǎo-Shòu as he fought to get to his feet. “Who do you think you are? It seems I have been remiss in teaching you your place.”
He turned a contemplative eye to the wall. His eyes sparked maliciously when his gaze lighted on something that Xiǎo-Shòu could not see.
“Ah, this will do,” he hummed smugly, and then unhooked the metal fire stoker from it’s hook adjacent to the fireplace. It was the summer months, the hearth cleaned out and unlit. Why was he grabbing the stoker? What was Qiū Jiǎnluó going to do?
Then Qiū Jiǎnluó whipped his arm back, and the harsh metal line crashed into Xiǎo-Shòu’s knees.
He couldn’t even hear Qiū Jiǎnluó’s scathing, raving shouts over how loud he was screaming. The pain was unlike anything he’d ever endured before in his life. Not broken, but shattered. He threw up and lost consciousness, and when the confusing cacophony finally settled into one large, pulsating pain that he could swim to the surface of, he registered Qiū Jiǎnluó above him, boot pressing his head into the floor below.
“Beast, you will always stay at my feet!”
Qiū Jiǎnluó, in a foul mood, locked Xiǎo-Shòu away in what the servant’s dubbed “the Pit” until his knees healed. It was one of few prison cells hidden beneath the main estate, with thick iron grates covering the wooden door and sole, skinny window, worn cloth bedding piled in one corner, and not much else at all to be seen. It wasn’t his first time here. It certainly wouldn’t be his last.
He hadn’t spoken to anyone since the last time Qiū Jiǎnluó permitted food to be sent. That's why it came as a shock when the door began to rattle, as if someone on the other side was banging with all their might.
“What…” Xiǎo-Shòu made to go over to the door, but upon standing black rushed his vision. He blinked and found himself sprawled, too weak to get his feet back under him, his still healing knees fiery points of pain along the map of his body.
Still, the rattling continued. He slowly got his palms under himself and, rather pitifully, dragged himself toward the door. When he was close enough, he closed his hand around the metal bars that acted as a second door, catching his breath before asking, voice hoarse, “who’s there?”
The rattling ceased at once. Tentatively, someone called back, “Xiǎo-Jiǔ?”
It had been so long.
He would recognize that voice anywhere.
“Qī-gē?” He asked, part incredulous and part wild, unbelievable, bone-melting relief. “What are you doing here?”
“I-I came to get you out,” he hurried to explain, the rattling resuming. “I must’ve grabbed the wrong key, it won’t open-”
Distantly, the sound of footsteps echoed. Xiǎo-Jiǔ’s stomach sank. Just as quickly as hope bloomed to life within him, it was snuffed into smoke and dust.
“Qī-gē,” he said, voice strong and firm despite how unsteady he felt, body and soul. Weakness and hunger and sorrow had turned him desolate. The footsteps were growing louder, Qiū Jiǎnluó’s harsh voice seeping through the walls.
“Qī-gē,” he repeated. The iron bars were cold against his forehead. He couldn’t remember when he’d slumped to rest against them, his grip failing him. He made himself continue regardless, because he was the type of person who would, if given the chance, do the right thing. “My legs are broken. You must leave me.”
Qī-ge hit the door, so hard it shook on it’s hinges. “I’ll come back, I promise Xiǎo-Jiǔ, I promise-”
Xiǎo-Jiǔ felt, right in the heart of him, a despair so large and heavy not even Atlas could have shouldered its burden.
Street boys only needed to learn a lesson once for it to stick.
No one would be coming back for him.