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It’s screaming again. Shen Qingqiu lies unmoving in his bed, just listening to it for a long time. What wretched, heartbroken wails. It only stops for air, brief pauses as it fills up its lungs to screech it all out again, high and piercing. He put it in the sideroom to get it out of his sight, to try and muffle it, but it still feels as if it’s screaming directly into his ear. Not a soul on Qing Jing Peak must be able to rest with such a clamor.
Eventually, he does get up out of bed. It feels like dragging a corpse, his body aching and unwilling, still half torn apart from what he had gone through weeks ago. A pain so awful that it had felt like violation, torture. Almost nostalgic, really.
He opens the door to the sideroom, and it does somehow get louder. And there, in the little crib gifted (forced, snuck into his home while he was in labor) to him by Yue Qingyuan, is the infant. Shrieking, its voice ragged with unanswered despair, its little face screwed up hideously. It no longer looks red and shrunken all the time, but crying brings back that appearance.
It is almost always crying.
He walks up to the crib and looks down at it for a moment. It’s crying doesn’t abate or change in the slightest. Shen Qingqiu might as well be a ghost to it, for all the comfort he brings. Of course, it is only an infant. It barely has sight at this age. A blind, helpless little lump of flesh that can’t understand language or speak to ask for what it needs, completely and entirely dependent on others for care. It is a miracle that any human ever survives this stage, he thinks. The sheer amount of attention an infant needs - who did that for him? It must have been his mother. Who else would bother? But why would she?
“Shut up,” he says flatly. The crying continues, as if he hadn’t spoken at all. “Be quiet. What is it now? More milk? Have you soiled yourself? Did you have a bad dream?”
It can’t answer him, obviously. He might as well be talking to himself. He considers walking back out of the room, leaving it to cry itself out until it goes quiet. That works sometimes. Even if it takes hours, it works.
Instead, he picks the infant up. He has to be delicate with it even doing this much, supporting its head so the weight of its own skull won’t snap its neck. So horribly, pathetically weak. Such a fragile existence. Grudgingly, he smells it. There’s no scent of piss or shit, something that he’s too tired to even feel relieved about. It smells clean and warm.
He blinks his eyes open. They had closed. He’s been standing here for too long, doing nothing but holding the infant.
… Its crying is quieting down. There are exhausted hiccups between the wails now, a familiar sign of it winding itself down. He looks down at it, inspecting its snotty, tear streaked face. Ning Yingying had insisted it looks like him. He sees no resemblance - not of him, or of Yue Qingyuan. It just looks like an infant, pudgy and ugly and unformed. Babies do not look like anything but babies.
When will it start to look like a person? Which one of them will it take after?
He doesn’t know which one he’d hate more.
Open your arms, he thinks. You won’t even need to use force. Just let it fall.
He carefully puts the infant back in the crib, supporting its head. Its slowly waning cry starts to gain force again. He wants to cave its soft little skull in like squishing a fruit, make it be silent.
He leaves quickly, before he does anything. Collapsing back into his bed, he lies there without moving or sleeping for the rest of the night, listening to the knife-sharp wails of the creature he made of his own flesh and blood the whole time.
Yue Qingyuan comes to visit the infant. He does this often; Shen Qingqiu is too tired to try and bar his way. If he wants to come and see something that won’t even notice or remember his presence, then he is welcome to waste his time.
“He is looking much healthier now,” Yue Qingyuan says warmly, holding the infant comfortably in his arms. It isn’t screaming at the moment. He’s good at making it stop. Then, gently and encouragingly, “Has Qingqiu-shidi thought of a name for him yet?”
“It’s still young,” Shen Qingqiu says. “It’s bad luck to name infants. It might still die.”
He thinks about this often. He had been almost certain that he would miscarry it, checking his sheets for blood every morning. Then, he had been sure that it would die during the birth, a quiet stillborn corpse sliding out of him. Then every day and week after that, waiting for its crying to cease that would then never again resume. But it keeps not happening. It feels like watching any hope of rescue slowly drain away. Naming it would be giving up.
Yue Qingyuan doesn’t like this answer, although he does his best to hide his reaction.
“It is spring,” he says, “and he will receive all the support that a child of a cultivation sect could possibly have. There is no reason to fear for your son’s life.”
Your son. He is always very careful to phrase it that way, never ours. Claiming no ownership, no association. There is nothing in the world that could possibly induce Yue Qingyuan to tie himself so inextricably to Shen Qingqiu, apparently.
“If you want it to have a name so badly, then name it yourself,” Shen Qingqiu snaps. His head throbs. He’s so tired it hurts like a physical wound. “What should I care what it’s called?”
Yue Qingyuan immediately apologizes. For what, he likely doesn’t know.
“I didn’t mean to rush or pressure you, Shidi. Please, take all the time you need. You’ll pick an excellent name.”
Shen Qingqiu scoffs a humorless laugh, then smiles as a mean idea occurs to him. “What about Shi, then? Ten after nine.”
Yue Qingyuan doesn’t immediately respond to this. He fusses over the infant for a moment as a distraction, then says, “I’m sorry for taking up so much of your time. This shixiong will stop bothering Qingqiu-shidi and his family and leave now. And please remember that if you need any help at all, there are plenty of people who would be happy to assist you.”
He holds the infant out to Shen Qingqiu. He doesn’t want to take it. He wants to refuse, to tell him (beg him) to take it with him. Take it far away from Shen Qingqiu, where he can’t see or hear or touch it. Yue Qingyuan looks like a natural father holding it, smiling at it easily and soothing it effortlessly. It had grabbed his finger earlier, holding on as if fascinated. It hasn’t done that with Shen Qingqiu. It only screams when he holds it, as if knowing that something is terribly wrong.
“Put it in the crib,” he says, his arms like lead weights by his sides. “It should be sleeping.”
Yue Qingyuan assents, and goes and puts the infant in the crib. He makes his farewells again, then leaves Shen Qingqiu alone with the thing he made. He sits there in the silence for as long as it may last, the only emotion strong enough to overpower his fatigue, a slow, creeping fear that has been putting its tendrils in him ever since the first time someone forced the infant into his arms, weak and vulnerable as an exposed heart. A dread, an inevitability. How long, how long until he kills--?
From the sideroom, a wailing starts up. Shen Qingqiu retreats into his bedroom, as far away as he can get from the noise, hiding and only hoping that it will stop on its own. The less he interacts with it, the better.