Chapter Text
It’s with a dull lack of curiosity that Zhao Yunlan finds himself arranged before Ye Zun. There have been smirks and evil promises—all meaningless, of course. What Shen Wei sacrificed himself for, Zhao Yunlan would carve his own heart out to protect before handing over to the murderer across the table.
Ye Zun is monologuing, threatening—it’s tiresome. It would be infuriating, but fury, too, seems to have been crushed into a flat whisper of a thing. And when Ye Zun asks him what he wants—it’s all he can do to hold on to the impossible wish, guard it too closely for that pain to be turned against him. I want him back. But drunk on grief and Dixing wine as Zhao Yunlan is, he understands that those words would give Ye Zun far too much power over him.
People like you have no imagination. People so greedy that they keep taking and taking—they don’t understand how you could ever be content with what you have. Ye Zun, who wants nothing but to devour lives and keep devouring, can’t possibly understand how a single other life was all Zhao Yunlan needed to make his own complete. You’ve already done your worst, and you don’t even know it. It is what Zhao Yunlan doesn’t as much think as feel, with every sluggish beat of his now-useless heart. It doesn’t make the words he speaks next any less true.
“I want you to die.”