Work Text:
A-Qing didn’t really remember having parents. She knew she must have at some point, but most of her memory was wandering alone from town to town in the river valley where she assumed she’d been born, scavenging what she could and trying to go as unnoticed as possible. When she’d been very small, it had been easy to hide in shadowed corners and under things, but she was getting big enough that it was hard to go unnoticed.
That meant that people had begun to notice her eyes as well. The first few times she was called “little blind girl” or “that blind beggar,” she’d been confused. Soon enough though, a plan began to form. People in the towns seemed to think that she was less of a concern if they thought that she was blind. They even gave her food sometimes instead of her having to steal it.
A-Qing decided, after some contemplation, that maybe it would be best to let people keep on believing that her white eyes that she’d caught sight of reflected in water and the occasional mirror at a stall were actually a sign of blindness. She’d begun to spend more time camping out in the woods as she’d gotten a little bit older, reluctant to spend as much time where people could find her and kick her out of whatever sleeping spot she’d found.
She looked for a long, straight branch that she could use, similar to ones that she’d seen old men and women with clouded eyes use to guide them in town. Once she found one, she used a knife that she’d swiped a few years before and kept in as good of condition as she could manage to carefully trim it and shape it into the best cane she could. She practiced in the woods alone, teaching herself to pretend to use it as a guide and if she missed something with it to walk straight into it.
It was hard at first, but she knew that as she got older and started to look more like an adult, the ruse would help guarantee that people would still treat her with some sympathy. The poor child beggar would become the poor blind beggar instead of a young woman who should have been working in the fields or at a stall or in a craft. She had tried to find a family would teach her their craft a time or two, but she’d always been shooed away. It didn’t seem worth trying. She knew how to be a beggar and to slip away items that she needed when merchants’ watchfulness slipped.
When she had fully practiced and felt like she could actually portray herself as a blind young woman correctly, for the first time in her life, she took the road out of the valley. There were people there who recognized her, towns that she no longer went into because she’d been caught stealing. She could use her wits and wander, and maybe eventually, she’d find a friend or someone to stay with or a place that she could call home.
