To Know

To live a righteous life, travelling from town to town, solving the problems of others was a good goal to have, but Lee definitely needed a new name to go by. If Wei Lee's name was ever used, he did not want it to be traceable back to himself.

But what should it be?

The evidence of a new town that Lee was nearing was beginning to pile up. It was beginning to become difficult, ignoring the plucked stems of certain medicinal herbs, the occasional chopped down trees, and stray arrows embedded within the ground, newly discovered when Lee pulled up the feathers decorating their ends or tripping over their metal tips.

The sturdiness of his boots could finally be appreciated now, being used to explore new terrains and stepping on new junk and litter.

Considering Lee had already abandoned his parents, it really wouldn't be too terrible for him, in comparison, to now pick up a new name.

He should still create it in relation of those who he cherished: Luo Shen and Wei MeiLian.

Those were the only people who he remotely cared about. Those were the only two people he had loved, with his whole heart and soul.

He could forgive Shen for marrying his sister, considering that she was the best woman to have ever graced this planet. She was kind enough to be able to comfort others, even when she was in pain, and intelligent enough to recognise, at an even earlier age than him, that something was extremely wrong, and she had the fortitude to build up a network of friends to help her, in times of need.

Lee had just stewed in his own pain and hurt, sinking deeper and deeper into his worlds of dreams and fantasy.

The ones he was living out now!

He gave a little skip over a small rock, before he continued his way down the river and towards the town ahead.

He couldn't be angry at his sister for what she did to him. If she wanted to escape unscathed, somebody had to take the fall, and he was simply there. He couldn't blame her for wanting to avoid pain.

And whenever she told on Lee for his failures, she would be rewarded with love: smiles, hugs, and kisses. Her telling on him became so frequent, mother seemed to assign that singular task as the only way that Little Mei could receive affection from her.

And if she ever slackened in that duty, the dreaded questions, violence, and guilt, would be thrown her way.

She would be the one to bear the insults of failure. She would be the one to answer questions as needles were threaded into her skin. She would have purple flowers, looking as if they had been embroidered onto her, blooming over her body.

Those needles would come so close to her eyes as well. Threats of one day waking up to find that she could not, were common staples. Her nightmares, which she sobbed out when they grew too strong for her to carry alone, falling out with her tears into Lee's shoulder, showed her visions of her own face: her ears folded with the slaps sewn together; her eyes, with stitches so tiny and fine, sealing those lids shut, looking as natural as if she were simply asleep, but a hand, running over that rough, textured threat revealing all that was present, with her eye balls bulging outwards, threatening to tear the lids of her eyes as they rolled in their sockets, with blood pooling out into the world at the points that the most pressure was applied - the eye balls themselves collapsing inwards, leaking their gelatinous, clear, vitreous fluid, tinged pink with burst blood, pouring backwards into her skull and brain, excess finding its way into the world by bubbling out of her nose and mouth, collecting up and dribbling down her face, and into her stomach, tasting horrifically delicious as if it were something sweet and desirable, as if it were a good thing that she should do and needed to be done and-

Lee normally refused to listen to anymore. The sights which she described to him too terrifying for him to keep on going. The guilt of his own cowardice was especially strong on those nights, as he feared at what she had just lived through, against her will. He just held her tight as the sharp bones of her face dug into his shoulders, brining out red marks that would not fade throughout the next day, the punishment for him being a terrible brother.

He could not blame his sister.

She, in her search for love and acceptance, in the face of his withdrawal and unwillingness to interact with her, turned to their mother, the figure that they were supposed to trust. The one person who would show them how to live their lives, how to experience kindness, and how to experience support.

The one person in the world, who no matter what, would always love them. The only person in the world who would experience the dangers of childbirth, to let them live. The only person in the world, who would risk their lives for the sake of them.

Yet none of those promises were fulfilled.

Little Mei - while still only a small, innocent child - had backed herself into a corner. She had believed that the system which everybody else in the village truly lived under and benefitted from, would be just the same with her. She thought that her mother would love her. She thought that her mother would care for her. She thought that her mother would never love her.

And she was completely, fundamentally, utterly wrong.

She was forced to suffer. She was forced into making Lee suffer.

She was forced to bear all her sins and all the guilt, haunted of what her life could be, if she were a little braver and didn't report Lee nearly as often against her mother's wishes, wearing all sorts of slashes and scars. If she were a little wiser and didn't look up to Lee nearly as much, she would be able to talk to the village elders and they would have done something.

If Lee wasn't such a failure of a brother and hadn't been so fearful of all the people around him, something could have been done. If Lee wasn't so afraid of all the villager's reactions to them, their potential hatred, their potential disbelief, their potential scorn, maybe Lee could have said something. If Lee wasn't so faithless in the village elders, their conservative attitudes that a little pain never did any harm without ever actually saying what counted as only a little pain to them, their senility and tendency to dismiss anything that didn't relate to them directly, their actions which may even act in accordance of his mother's words, then maybe could have said something.

Lee was ultimately afraid of losing his mother, as sick and backwards as the attitude was.

He did not understand himself, and his desire to escape from her, yet still keep her well kept for, as long as nobody else had to be involved in the situation.

Lee knew that he feared his mother, but he was not sure why he always refused himself when it came to turning her in. Even after his father died - a physical force that could, and probably would, hold him down and kill him with a single blow if he ever want against any unspoken rile by making slights that he wouldn't even be aware of, because the man never fucking spoke to him - Lee still did not go against his mother.

Even after the knife incident, and every other brush with death that Lee had, he still would not report his mother. Was he simply conditioned into accepting all that he had been given, eternally damning himself to be mistreated by her until the day he died, if he had not run away?

Did, despite all that she had done to him, he still care for her, in some twisted way? Was he still that child, that maniacally gathered up bunches of flowers to give to all the people he liked, since one travelling merchant told him that, in the cities, people gave flowers to the ones they loved?

He remembered his mother, laughing at the daisies and dandelions that he had brought to her, and then throwing them away, because they were weeds. He remembered immediately leaving to go out to find different flowers, seeking out magnolias and peonies for his mother, only to be disappointed as he found none, laughed at again when he returned home.

Was he still that child, who left home the next day, searching even further and wider for those beautiful flowers, begging some hyacinths of an old lady, who no longer lived in this word, only for those same flowers to be thrown away.

He would cry, back then. He would cry at his weakness, and hated it, how his mother would laugh at him. He did not want anybody to know about how he cried, how he suffered this weakness.

Lee did not want anyone to know about it all.

But most of all, Lee desperately did not want Shen to know.