Falcon's Flight

Six

Fen was not successful in ignoring those thoughts. The thoughts of her family, her home, plagued her and reminded her of other things. If she had gotten a successful match with the matchmaker then she would have probably died in the village. Or she would be a dutiful wife somewhere while her husband went off fighting the Huns for China. But that lifestyle didn’t appeal to her anymore, not like it used to. At one time she had wanted to be a good wife, to cook nice food for her husband and to raise their children in a nice little house. And while she wouldn’t mind being able to cook proper food again and she wouldn’t mind having children, the idea of it being in a nice little house and being nice and honourable for her husband seemed wrong.

As the night fell, Fen only grew more and more tired. She was glad when Shan Yu declared that they would stop for the night. He said he would stay awake longer, to keep watch, and that he would wake her if he needed to.

No matter how hard she tried and how heavy her eyes got, Fen couldn’t sleep. She rolled onto her other side for what felt like the third time.
“You’re not asleep, are you?” Fen stayed silent and as still as possible for a moment, wondering if she should say something.
“No.”

“Why not?” he asked. He shifted to look at her.
“I was thinking earlier,” she said with a sigh as she sat up. “So much has happened in… I don’t know how long. I don’t even know what day it is any more, not that I really need to. But that’s my point, you know? So much has changed.” Fen pulled her knees to her chest.
“You can carry on talking, if you’d like.”

“I never got the chance to mourn my parents, I never had the time and now I think about it, my ancestors must be so angry with me for this,” she said quietly but Shan Yu listened to every word. “You burnt my home, my village. I could have chosen to die with them and I would have died in my home. Now I’m not even in the same country I was born in. The people there would hate me.”

“Surely not all of them would hate you.”
“How would you know that?” she asked, furrowing her brow at him.
“Because not everyone in China would know that you are a wanted criminal now,” he said. Fen sighed, that was really helpful to her. “And from personal experience, you’re hard to hate.”

She looked over at him and smiled. “Really?”
He stared at her for a moment, it looked like he was trying to hide a smile. “Yes. Despite your mildly irritating habit of pestering me with questions, yes.”
“I can try to stop pestering you with questions,” said Fen. She wasn’t sure why she said it, or why she should stop asking him questions. She supposed she would have done that at home. The Matchmaker never liked her for her questions either.

“Don’t bother.” His voice quickly snapped her out of her thoughts. She was doing a lot of thinking lately, a lot of overthinking too, probably.
“Don’t bother?” she asked.
“No,” said Shan Yu, furrowing his brow. “Don’t change yourself simply because I’m not fond of it. If you want to change yourself, do it because you want to better yourself. Do you like asking questions?”
Fen thought about it. She did enjoy finding out things, she always had. Questions were just a way to find out things. “Yes, I like asking questions.”
“Then why change?”

Fen hummed as she thought about what he had said. That was a lot to think on and she did want to think about it. Offering to take the first watch, Fen watched out and listened for anything dangerous as she thought about things.