He is born in the shadows, the bastard son of a rich man that can afford no loose ends. But his mother loves him, keeps him safe and teaches him that the dark is nothing to be afraid; it is just a friend you haven't met yet. She cannot stay with him always, she explains as she rocks him to sleep. As a servant she has duties to do; her absence will be noted and if that happens they will come for him.
So he grows alone in the dark from the age of three onward. She visits the hut she birthed him in sporadically and when she does, she brings treats from the palace: ripe fruits with juices so succulent that they hurt when he swallows them down, bread that tastes nothing like the stuff he steals to keep alive, drinks that are so sweet he throws them up after his mother leaves. He has no taste for the foods of the rich, but his mother risks her life to bring them so he eats them for her.
When he is eleven, mother brings him one gift too many. They follow her and discover her secret. They are brought before his father for judgment, who wants them disposed of in secret. But a servant woman, one who helped to hide the truth of the boy's origins offers her life for his. A stranger steps up to the golden steps and begs for mercy, pleads for the life of a young boy that she does not know. A stranger gets him cast into the pit. There he doesn't see sunlight for years, but he had grown in the darkness so it does not bother him.
In the depths of a hell that slowly becomes home a sunbeam finds a crack. It starts as a trickle. A woman is lowered into the pit, her belly beginning to swell with child, and still the men lick their lips. He watches her hide away, reminds himself that he should care for himself only, and doesn't notice when his pacing constantly takes him past the locked cell of the pregnant woman.
The child comes on a rainy night. The men are gathered under the hole with broken jars, cupped hands, anything to catch the pure drops that they can save for their bellies later. He sits by her cell instead. Her screams are drowned out by the thunder, the doctor's instructions barely breaking through the haze as he tells her to push, to breathe, to keep going. Nobody pays the cell any mind until the first newborn cry silences everything. He glances through the bars and realizes there are other things to live for.
When the baby is two he is allowed to hold it. It has more weight than he expected, but he still treats it like the fragile thing it is. "What do I call it?" he asks, his voice struggling between the high tone of a boy and the rich rumble of a man. The mother shakes her head and takes the baby away.
They interact through the bars after that, him tossing crumbs of his food as he passes by and the child watching him with a sense of awe. At night, when the walls rumble with the snores of thieves and rapists, he sits by the bar and teaches the child a game his mother had taught him. Their palms touch each other at intervals, the child's soft hands nearly disappearing into the calloused palm of his own, its eyes sparkling with a laughter that it has already learned to keep silent. Sometimes he finds he misses the sunlight when he watches the torchlight glitter over its face, wondering if the sun will create the same effect.
The child's screams wake him before the roar of the crowd does. They are desperate and high, much like they had been years before when it first arrived in this world. Because he is slight and desperate he is able to force himself to the front of the crowd. The child shakes in his arms, still screaming as he slides back through the crowd.
"It's a girl!" the men around him shout as he brings her to the ledge. The cry is taken up and echoes all around them as hands turn from pulling towards the cell and seize upon his shoulders. He pushes her up and away, safe as she begins the climb and his mask is torn down from his face. When she glances down at him the sunlight from above glances over her face and on that image he closes his eyes for a moment. "Goodbye." Their hands tear at him, their feet kicking and harsh, but the child climbs to the top, to the sunlight where she belongs, and he gives over to the crowd.
Years pass before a rope drops into the hole, men with guns shouting orders as they sort through the men in search of him. The light lands on his face and he merely squints against it; it's a nuisance now. They ask him his name, but moving his jaw requires agony that he does not want to spare. They ask it again, the man in front reaching in to tear his mask down. He grabs the man's wrist and breaks his arm in several different places. A gun raises and the order is given, but then a cry cuts through the tension.
"This is him," a voice says and it is familiar yet foreign in his ears. His head turns as much as he can spare and a young woman steps into his vision. She crouches in front of him, her eyes as gentle as her hands when she raises them to his face. Still he recoils from the touch, raising a hand to warn her off. He can only imagine what his face might be after the doctor's handy work; she does not deserve more horrors in her life.
The men behind her flinch but she simply smiles and presses her palm to his. Her hand still seems to disappear into his palm, but it is just as soft as it always had been even though he can feel new scars and callouses that he wasn't there to witness. "Hello, old friend," she tells him.