Work Text:
He's been in this place for eight years when he goes to the river to bathe and finds a child face down in the reeds, her pale yellow robes muddy and soaked through. It is not unusual to find dead things here. Poisoned animals. Children who crawled away to die someplace quiet. He has considered it himself, more than once, but he cannot die here until he's carved the shape of his hatred into the world.
He thinks, as he pulls his clothes off and drapes them over stones worn down to silkiness by raging water, that she is lucky she is dead.
Maybe he will bring her back and tell his master that he killed her. His master will be pleased and make him feast — and he will obey with the relief that she was already gone, and didn't die knowing her bones would be sucked clean by the demons who make Ghost Valley their home.
As he scrubs at his eyes and he sinks his tender, raw places into the water, he hears a thin and human cry. Startling up with a splash, he pulls his clothes on quickly, unwilling to be seen like this, bare as meat. With his hands shaking, he realizes the sound came from the child.
She is alive.
Still barefoot, his toes squishing in the muck, he crouches beside her to roll her over. He expects maggots and rot, but her face is pink from crying, pink with life. She sniffles a breath and opens swollen eyes and makes a small, piteous sound. It is a cry for her mother.
There are no mothers here.
"What is your name?" Wen Kexing asks, trying to sound as if he does not care to know.
The little girl blinks at him. She does not move. One small hand trails in the water. If he pushed her into the current, it would drag her away, out of the valley, to become food for carrion birds and not monsters.
"You're filthy," he whispers, cupping clean water in his hands and letting it run over her tearstained, dirty face. She doesn't flinch or make another sound, but she watches him.
Some things, he wishes he could forget. But it is all or nothing, so his hands recall how to search her tiny body for wounds. There's nothing but foolish trust in her gaze as he hauls her up and turns her over and determines that she is only thirsty and hungry. The blood on her sleeve is not her own.
Everyone who cared for you is dead, he wants to say. That's why you're here.
Instead, he folds her against his chest. His breath sucks in raggedly when she puts her thin arms around his neck. Her skin is clammy against his. He wants to shove her away. It hurts to hold and be held.
"You're alright," he says, hearing his voice fray.
It is a long time before his heart settles and his legs regain their feeling. She is light in his arms. He collects his things with the girl perched on his hip and listens to the laughter that never quite stops echoing in his mind. I can keep her if I want, he would argue, if anyone cared to listen.
I can keep her if I want, he tells himself as he picks his way along the narrow path back to the heart of Ghost Valley.
He has never had anything of his own.
I can keep her.
He holds her tight.
***
Aunt Luo finds him clutching a bowl of porridge and trying not to kill the child he pulled from the water.
"She won't stop crying," he snaps, gesturing at the unreasonable, small, loud, terrible thing who burned her mouth on the food he made for her and thinks she knows what pain is.
"A-Xing," Aunt Luo says, sweeping the girl into her arms and fixing him with a gaze that makes him lower his eyes and drop his shoulders. "What have you done?"
***
When his master sends for him, he looks at Aunt Luo, and she lifts her delicate brow in an unspoken question.
"Please," he says, gaze darting to the place where he's hidden the girl away with her belly full of porridge and enough wine to make her senseless with sleep.
"Please what?"
"Please don't tell. I can keep her."
"You can't keep her safe," Aunt Luo says in a voice as gentle as the wind that never escapes these deep, damp caves. "Slit her throat. She won't feel it."
His hands tighten into fists. "Do you wish you had slit mine?"
She looks at him steadily. He doesn't see her move, but in a moment her hand is on his cheek. "Yes," she murmurs.
Wen Kexing jerks away from the touch and snorts, laughing out a sob. He leaves his things on the bed where he still sleeps alongside Aunt Luo's women when he isn't needed by his master's side.
"If she wakes up," he says, "Tell her her name is Gu Xiang."