Chapter Text
You are born screaming like all babes do, a red-faced bundle of confusion and fear and anger at having left the comfortably warm cradle of your mother’s body.
Unlike other babes, however, you are born wrong. A strange sense of self, of awareness, of an already existing sense of boundaries and morals and bottom lines… Progressive - outlandish, radical thoughts for the time you’ve been born in. You wonder if the gods have misplaced you, or if they’re watching you struggle against the world, the society and pre-existing norms around you with popcorn or whatever the hell the period-appropriate equivalent to it is. You hope that if it’s popcorn, that the butter is clumpy, the toffee too thick and sticking in their teeth, sugar not sweet enough.
Overall - the gods don’t deserve nice things after slapping your 21st century, British-born Chinese feminist soul in goddamn god knows what century of ancient China with severe caste/social/class systems and a systematic in-built hate of women.
At the start, when you are still hungry when the woman pulls her nipples away, you scream and cry until she presses some sort of dough soaked with water to your mouth, letting your tiny gums work at it until you can swallow it down.
You hate growing aware because you start to understand shit - that the milk runs out too soon because the woman, your mother, is too starved to feed you even if she did have her full serving of steamed buns, because two plain steamed buns twice a day could maybe fill you up but not a grown woman feeding a whole ass other human - you.
You want to throw a fit when the hunger pangs hit but you can tell she’s young and struggling and you don’t want to make her life harder, so you stop crying as much. More soft little whines for attention rather than full on bawling. You never find out if your mother appreciates the change, because the fire comes soon after your third birthday, not that you do anything to celebrate it.
You remember that your mother is desperate when she tries to run out of the courtyard, to safety, you clutched to her bosom. Something strikes her down - a falling beam, perhaps, from a house mismanaged enough that the structural integrity has been long compromised even without a fire. You are slammed into the ground, your mother’s hands and arms mercifully cushioning the majority of the impact from you. She’s shifting, a single hand to support you as the other drags her limp body forward.
You hate understanding things, hate that you know it’s very unlikely that she - and consequently, you, will make it, judging by the sheer intensity of the blaze and the injury that’s preventing your mother from getting up and running again. You can barely afford food - medicine and medical assistance is a pipe dream at best. And as the skies are covered in clouds of dark ash, your mother’s efforts slowed but never stopping as she army-crawls onwards, a gleam of white appears in the skies.
It lands to the ground with a thud, revealing itself as a man with a pretty sword and strange papers. Talisman, you will later learn - talisman that he uses to choke the fire in some places, or to gush with water and douse the flames in other places.
Your first impression of the man who one day becomes your master is - light, clean, untouched by mortal problems.
Something about him seems both cold and kind when he reaches down to your mother. But she’s past saving - the smoke inhalation and blood loss is too great. She holds on long enough to say your name, and beg him to care for you, before those paradoxically strong and weak hands falter, grip on you falling slack.
He picks you up stoically, cradles your small form into an arm. He smells of the countryside, of forests and wilderness and something more bitter (ink, you will later learn). In the moment, however, you wonder if the empath in you has been catapulted to new heights and that the bitterness is because he has been suddenly burdened with a child, a life, you.
He says something about safe and rest, and many other things you don’t particularly pick up on because the adrenaline has crashed and suddenly you’re just tired and cold, so you burrow into his robes and fall asleep. A distant thought of if this is safe floats across your mind but your sole caregiver is dead, leaving you at the mercy of anyone - hopefully, this man in white and green has enough mercy for you.