Cheap Breaths

Lee gave a sigh of relief when the child on the bed drank the entirety of the makeshift medicine that he made, but slumped down immediately after, seeing that his mother had neglected to drink her own.

Looking closer at her face, he noticed the dark rings under her eyes, accumulating into heavy bags that looked to be weighing down her entire body.

He wondered whether she had given herself any rest throughout the day, and knew that it was unlikely, considering the severity of the impact of the plague on the boy on the bed.

"Hey... er, I can look after your child while you get some rest. I can stay up for the rest of the night. You can sleep for a bit," Lee tried to advise, flinching and then stumbling over his words when the mother's fiercely glaring eyes turned on him.

She, while keeping eye contact the entire time, picked up her bowl of medicine, without looking directly at it, and downed the whole bowl in one go, not surfacing for air the entire time, slurping loudly for effect and intimidation.

Still not letting Lee's eyes go free, she put the bowl down again, and turned back to watch her child, monitoring his temperature and looking over him.

"Why should I trust you? Why are you helping us?" she asked, her voice low and threatening, the edge of a growl creeping into her tone and cadence.

Lee gulped at her questioning and felt the distinct need to turn heel and run out of the building as quickly as possible.

He lifted his head to look over to the child though, observing his laboured and harsh breathing which lifted up and displayed his prominent ribcage to be observed and examined, the noise of each breath virtually deafening in the tense silence of the room.

"Your son is ill. I had to help," Lee tried to explain, trying to make his tone as approachable and non hostile as possible, hoping to not have any kind of retributive violence brought against him.

The particular brand of love in front of him on show, the bond between mother and child, was something easy for him to view and analyse.

He had never experienced such a thing, and he could never imagine his own mother being so tender before him.

Her... love, if it could be described as such, was all harsh promises and reprimands in the best of days.

And even on good days, she was a nightmare to deal with, no matter all the times when she had been ill or had been coming down with a headache, or was just angry for no apparent reason.

On those days, it was best to avoid the house as much as humanly possible.

Seeing the mother now defending her child to the potential last minutes of his poor, short life, was something strange and somewhat of an anomaly.

Lee had never seen a mother so invested and eager to interact with her child.

Even Shen's mother was slightly distant: A figure high up and someone who looked so magical and regal, always decked out in immaculately clean clothing that gleamed in the sunlight, Shen was lucky that he was even praised by her, and he had always looked the happiest that Lee had ever seen him when she deigned him worthy enough for her to come down to and ruffle his hair affectionately.

Shen's sister had done in more in shaping her little, baby brother than his mother had ever done, despite being the one to birth him.

Shen may have inherited the slump of his mother's noise and the curve of her ears, but had always exuberated the same caring and eager aura of his sister. He spoke in the same fast pace that she did, whenever he was excited, and he had obviously copied the same gesticulating hand movements that she made whenever they were both frustrated, resulting in several comedic arguments between them that made the eldest brother comment that they looked like wild, flapping birds, several times in passing.

The mother in front of Lee, fretting about and worrying about, was something new that Lee had never seen before.

It sparked something warm in his chest, and it took him several moments to realise that the emotion that he was experiencing was happiness and hope.

Hope.

This was a foreign emotion.

This was something that Lee hadn't experienced in a very long while.

It was a warm, slightly twisting thing, creating motions within him more akin to dancing than the motions of a whip, or the patterns of the old tree that stood behind Lee's home within the clearing that he stored the scroll that had put him on this path, and stored firewood in.

The feeling made him feel as if he could fly, and finally do something, achieve something, even with the hostile glare of the mother in front of him trying to weigh him down.

Suddenly, as if all the good feelings within him had decided to lapse, deciding that he wasn't worthy of them at all and that he deserved a little more self awareness of the situation that he was currently sitting in the middle of, Lee was left with the awkward realisation that he hadn't even introduced himself yet, and that for all intents and purposes, he really oughtn't be not feeling this way at this particular point in time.

"I'm sorry. I didn't introduce myself," Lee apologised, moving to stand up properly and perform his bow of greeting to the woman who still sat on the floor in front of him.

"My name is Shen Lan. I'm a traveller who came across this village with my companion after he invited me here, because he had business to do," he explained to the lady as soon as he rose up from the obligatory ceremonial motion.

The lady, still sat on the floor, didn't look particularly impressed with Lee's delayed actions and the twitching of her eyebrow made it obvious.

"I'm Li Chang. I fucked the lord of the manor."