Chapter Text
“This soil is bad for certain kinds of flowers. Certain seeds it will not nurture, certain fruit it will not bear, and when the land kills of its own volition, we acquiesce and say the victim had no right to live” - Toni Morrison
“We have not touched the stars, nor are we forgiven, which brings us back to the hero's shoulders and the gentleness that comes, not from the absence of violence, but despite the abundance of it” - Richard Siken
It was a taking. A subtraction the same way sales subtracted opium stores, only this time, the thing being subtracted was inside of Rin: it was an essence, an idea of a self and a body that, though she wished would empty already and leave her entirely numb, never did–instead perpetually existing in some residual, spectral state. She didn’t remember how old she was when Uncle Fang started on her, only that he was always high, only that she was always small. She didn’t remember when Auntie Fang’s slaps and pinches started carrying an additional resentment to them, a resentment borne out of blame, a resentment that could only be transferred from one helpless woman clawing for power to another, younger and more helpless woman (girl? Rin reasoned she’d never truly been a girl).
I suffered, and you shall too, you ugly bitch, Auntie Fang seemed to convey. And when she finally grew too tired of Rin, as she put it, “seducing” her husband, she as good as kicked Rin’s future in the garbage.
On what the Tikany magistracy had arbitrarily estimated to be her fourteenth birthday, the Fangs summoned her into their chambers. She’d known, deep down, that it was going to be bad. After all, the Fangs liked to ignore Rin until they had a task for her (except for the times Uncle Fang found her, of course), and then they spoke to her the way they would command a dog. Lock up the store. Hang up the laundry. Take the packet of opium and don’t leave until you’ve scalped them for twice what we paid for it.
But now, in front of her, a strange woman sized her up as if she were an object, as her eyes slid across Rin’s body in ways that made her want to crawl back into the earth from which she was sure she’d gotten her skin color. The skin color that the woman commented on almost instantly. And then the woman mentioned an inspector and Rin’s “price”--whatever the fuck that was supposed to mean. Actually, Rin knew exactly what the fuck that was supposed to mean, and she hated it.
All pretense of calm lost, Rin found herself yelling: “I won’t go to a brothel!”
“She’s not from the brothel, you idiot,” Auntie Fang snapped. “Sit down. Show some respect to Matchmaker Liew.”
It turned out that, apparently, Matchmaker Liew had found a man in Tikany willing to marry Rin, ugly mud skin and all, and most importantly, the man just so happened to be the village import inspector. Rin was, to the Fangs, a pawn to trade–a single war orphan in exchange for a near monopoly over Tikany’s black market in opium. But Rin had known that already. That they didn’t give a flying fuck about her. They didn’t give a fuck about Kesegi either, considering that Rin cooked for him and did almost all the other caretaking in addition to her duties as a shopgirl and opium runner.
Rin knew how it was, and she’d long since accepted it. Still: a familiar ache in the spaces between her ribs, expanding, making it hard for her to breathe. She couldn’t do this. She couldn’t sit by and watch as the Fangs fucked her over again, no matter how fucked up she herself was, no matter how ugly or corrupted or repulsive or whatever else anyone else thought to call her she was.
As per Rin’s calculations, there was exactly one way out, and she was going to take it–no, she was going to scrape and bleed and crawl for it, knife it, incise and suture it until it was so completely conquered by her, until she finally owned her future entirely.
And so, in the dark, Rin worked in the shop, filing inventory. And if the numbers became a little ambiguous, what could she do? Not her fault, really. The pale moonlight cast the etchings of dancing shadows through the tiny window, and for the first time that day, Rin felt like she could breathe. She was alone, and she was doing something. She was saving herself. Long after the sun set, Rin shoved a pack of stolen opium under her shirt and ran.
***
Rin was going to Sinegard. She’d bribed Tutor Feyrik, she’d stolen from the Fangs, she’d burned herself with hot wax, relishing at the pain, at the alertness, the physicality that was inflicted on her by, for once, herself and just herself; she’d embraced sleeplessness, obsession, desperation, the frenzy that only a man with the barest hope of success could adopt. She’d pushed herself to the brink and back, and now, she was going to Sinegard.