Ding Jia turned to find a little girl with crooked pigtails grinning up at her, clutching a porcelain doll nearly as big as her own torso. She had the kind of unfiltered delight on her face that only small children seemed capable of, as if she'd just discovered the single best thing in the entire hospital, and that thing happened to be Ding Jia.
She smiled automatically, the reflex baked in after years on camera, though this time it came easier than usual. A child this adorable, she thought, deserved at least one cheek-pinch.
"Hello." She leaned forward as best she could from her wheelchair.
"Big Sister, you're so pretty!!" The girl beamed, practically vibrating with excitement, and Ding Jia laughed. There was something disarming about how transparently happy this child was.
"And you're pretty too," she said, reaching out to pat the girl's head before her eyes caught on the doll clutched in her arms. "That's a beautiful doll. Do you like to play with dolls?"
The girl held it up proudly. It was a Western-style porcelain doll, blonde curls and an elaborately stitched gown, far more detailed than anything sold locally. "Her name is Sasha!"
"That's pretty. How'd you pick the name?"
"That's what she told me."
Ding Jia blinked. "...She told you?" Back then, Barbie was the only name she ever called her dolls.
Ding Jia was terrible at naming pets and dolls ever since she was little.
"Mm-hm!" The girl nodded with complete conviction, as if this were the most ordinary fact in the world. "Sasha said that's her name."
She would have laughed with the girl right at this moment. Yes, that's the normal development for this kind of conversation, isn't it?
If it wasn't for that.
Something cold slid down Ding Jia's spine. Her hand, halfway to touching the doll's curls, stopped midair. For one disorienting second, she could have sworn those glassy blue eyes looked larger than before — bigger, somehow, like they'd grown while she wasn't watching.
Don't be ridiculous, she told herself. It's a doll. Dolls don't grow eyes. Heck, do they even have eyes? That's a toy eye.
She was still recovering from that thought when another voice rang out behind her.
"Tang Yuan! I told you not to wander off!"
Both the girl and Ding Jia turned. A woman hurried toward them, sharing enough of the girl's features that the relation was obvious before anyone said a word.
"Mom!" Tang Yuan ran straight into her mother's open arms.
"I'm so sorry, did she bother—" The woman's apology cut off mid-sentence as recognition hit her face. "Wait. Aren't you Ding Jia?"
Ding Jia offered her practiced, warm smile and exchanged a few pleasant words with the mother, who, after a brief, visible internal debate about whether a photo would be inappropriate given Ding Jia's hospital gown, asked for an autograph instead.
"Will we get to see you on screen again soon?" the mother asked while Ding Jia signed.
"Of course. I'll be seeing you all again," she said, deliberately vague, and left it at that.
She stayed at the hospital another five months after that encounter. Five months of rehabilitation, therapy, and the slow, frustrating process of teaching a year-dormant body how to function like a normal one again. Her friends visited often, and Lin Lin kept her sane by delivering crates of fan letters that had piled up at the agency. After that night with the bloody doctor, nothing else strange had happened, and Ding Jia had quietly decided that the less she wandered the hospital halls alone, the better. A building full of sick and dying people was, she suspected, exactly the wrong place to test whether ghosts were real.
On the day of her discharge, she saw Tang Yuan again. Thinner now, her hair noticeably sparser than it had been months ago. Whatever illness had brought her here clearly hadn't loosened its grip.
"Hi there. It's good to see you again," Ding Jia said, keeping the pity carefully off her face.
Tang Yuan's energy hadn't dimmed one bit. "Congratulations, Big Sister! I heard you were leaving today! Are you really okay now?"