Chapter Text
Xie Lian began unwrapping the package, hands trembling slightly with the purposefully slow movements. Hua Cheng knew why— knew that colored clothing touched raw nerves left bared from gege’s days as a prince. A reminder of his supposed arrogance and naivety, of his weaknesses and failures. All the things that said he wasn’t worth anything but mourning.
It was different when he wore red to Song Ah-Lam’s 100 day celebration, a small festivity with few people there and even fewer people who knew of him and his reputation. Chen Weici’s wedding to Song Mani however, would take place in the Heavens, and there would be no hiding, no pre-acceptance of shame and humility in this.
(It was hard to believe it’s been over a year since their battle with Qin Changying. Hard to believe that they still, despite it all, were still together and still finding happiness around the corners they turned rather than another trap, another person trying to hurt them.
He hadn’t thought it would, not when their relationship had still been so new, the mere beginning of something they only hoped would be true, when Qin Changying interfered. Guilt and grief did no favors to anyone, only becoming yet another thing to make them begin anew if it didn’t break them completely.
Somehow it didn’t. Somehow they got better.)
Mu Qing placed a careful hand on one of Xie Lian’s.
“You don’t…” he trailed off and looked away guiltily, clearly trying to find the right words. “I can always tell her that you send your best wishes.”
“No, no. I want to go. And maybe,” Gege took a deep breath, voice slipping into a whisper. “Maybe it’s time I try to move on from the past.” He blinked, taking a deep breath. “Maybe it’s time I forgive myself.”
Then, without giving them time to placate or say anything else, Xie Lian opened the package completely.
For a moment, all Hua Cheng could see was a gorgeous blend of light oranges and yellows, splashes of white and blue. The once-prince stared, almost disbelievingly, at the robes, a twist to his expression that said he might just cry.
“Let me...let me go try this on,” Gege murmured breathlessly, touching the cloth with reverence and rubbing the material between careful fingers.
Then he disappeared into the room, leaving Hua Cheng and Mu Qing together in an odd quiet.
A moment, a single passing one, had transpired when Mu Qing broke the silence again.
“I got you robes as well!” Mu Qing blurted out, his face bright red, and he wouldn’t meet Hua Cheng’s eye even as he shoved a package into the man’s hands.
Hua Cheng stilled. In the back of his mind, there was an urge to laugh (amusedly rather than mockingly) at the general’s shy display, to tease at the lack of propriety in such graceless gift-giving. But he couldn’t. Instead he stared at the package, unsure how to react. Gege’s gifts were often immaterial— affections and gestures that Hua Cheng still had to remind himself that gege believed Hua Cheng deserved. That gege wanted Hua Cheng himself to believe he deserves.
He still wasn’t used to gifts.
While Mu Qing kept his gaze steadfastly fixed outside where there really wasn’t anything to see, Hua Cheng hesitantly undid the wrapping. What if he hated it? How was he supposed to react? He couldn’t react badly or rudely, he couldn’t even lie— Xuan Zhen would know and, irrationally, Hua Cheng thought that any of these reactions might undo all the progress they’d made in getting along, with how sensitive the general was and how horribly insensitive Hua Cheng could be. As though their bond was still the tremulous, shakeable thread foretold to snap.
It was as the wrapping fell away that he stopped worrying about it at all. Stopped doubting.
The fabric was of high-quality, silky to the touch. Soft reds, splashes of blues and purple-pinks, all meshed together beautifully with highlights of white spread throughout, like a vibrant sunset. There was a subtle, underlying pattern of flowers and butterflies pressed neatly along the robes, while a thick, bright silver-white embroidery of koi fish swimming upwards to become birds flying above, shadowed by black thread, was stitched across the top.
A shakeable bond required very little in order to be maintained. It did not care for intricacies of knowing likes and dislikes, didn't whisper of time toiled away in its threads. Didn't test one's patience and past pains-- 'such a task is a servant's duty', Mu Qing had once sneered, displeased with the insinuations and reminders-- and yet he'd still given in to this expression of care and affection.
This was no product of a shakeable bond, could never be when these efforts could only be borne from love.
And, for all it may waver, it was unbreakable.
Feeling emboldened, he stripped off his outer and inner robes, leaving his pants on until he was covered up more, and began dressing in the ones Mu Qing had given him.
“W-what are you doing? Are you taking your clothes off?!” Mu Qing made a noise not unlike a shriek when he finally turned to face the ghost king again, catching Hua Cheng in his state of undress. With another strangled sound, he jerked back around so quickly, he almost lost his footing. “Why are you undressing here?!!”
“Gege is in the room,” Hua Cheng answered, as though he couldn’t possibly enter the room while gege was in there.
“Right. Because you can’t enter your husband’s room?” Mu Qing sputtered. “Get dressed already, you shameless-shameless f-fool!”
Hua Cheng snorted, slipping the reddish-white inner and outer robes on. He followed that with the skirt, tying the sash, and shrugging on the outer coat.
“San Lang, Mu Qing…”
Hua Cheng turned around, his breath catching at his husband’s appearance. The layers of color fell around him like a gentle sunrise. It had a decent amount of white, more than Hua Cheng would’ve guessed, but it melted into that pale yellow and gentle orange starting lightly at somewhere thigh-level of the skirt and growing bolder until the end. It had the same butterfly and flower patterning, but with blue— the exact shade of gege’s eyes— along with the white-silver embroidered the length of the fabric in the same design of that on Hua Cheng’s robes, shining like silver linings around clouds.
In them, Gege was the sun himself.
“Gege—“
“Are you both dressed now?!” Mu Qing demanded. At Xie Lian’s confirmation, he finally turned around, gaze accessing. “Good. They fit you well,” he lightly praised.
“Your compliments need work,” Hua Cheng drawled. He met his husband’s eyes adoringly, voice softening. “Gege, even the heavens with their everlasting, insurmountable splendor and grandeur couldn’t bear witness to your beauty without falling in shame.”
Xie Lian blushed, but he didn’t look away, meeting Hua Cheng’s adoration with his own boundless love. “My San Lang would think the same of himself if he’d only looked in a mirror and saw what my eyes always see.”
Hua Cheng felt his face flush, knew the pinking of his cheeks matched the light reds in his robes. He cleared his throat. “I wonder what the general will wear,” he mused, mock-idly for all that it was a pointed statement.
Mu Qing blinked, flustering slightly under the joined attention of his partners. “I-I’m not actually sure.”
“You’re not sure?” Xie Lian and Hua Cheng blinked at him, distracted just long enough to not have anything to say.
He cocked his head, a shift in the air alerting him to an array opening, a new imbalance of power and spiritual energy before it righted itself again. He knew far too well who it was.
The general winced, but a pleased little smile crossed his lips. “I’m acting father for Chen Weici, remember? She insisted on choosing what I would wear.”
“Which is why she sent me, General,” a voice drawled from the doorway. He Xuan stood there, donned in shades of dusk blue and orangey peach, the patterning and cloud-white embroidery on the robes the exact same as that of Hua Cheng’s and Xie Lian’s.
Hua Cheng drew the other Supreme closer, so they all stood together– sunrise, sunset, nightfall– and Mu Qing looked between the three of them, from Xie Lian to Hua Cheng to He Xuan, openly pleased. His three loves set before him like passages of time, routine. Promised.
“General Xuan Zhen has become quite bold in his affections, hasn’t he, Gege? He Xuan?” Hua Cheng teased, grinning. “No one will mistake who we belong to now.”
Mu Qing flushed, waving his hands and sputtering. “N-no, no that’s not– it’s just– I didn’t–” he squeaked. “S-stop being ridiculous! You don’t belong to me–”
An elbow dug into his side and, when Hua Cheng turned towards his offender, He Xuan cast him an exasperated look, holding up a package. “Chen Weici asked I bring this to you.”
Hastily, the god sidled closer to take the package from He Xuan’s hands. “Thanks,” he hurried to say while moving towards the bedroom. “I should uh, I should get dressed. The wedding will start soon.”
“What about with you?” Hua Cheng called before Mu Qing could disappear behind the door. The god paused, turning to look at Hua Cheng in confusion. The ghost smiled. “Do we belong with you, General?”
The idea made his heart ache pleasantly. Belonging with…it held an unquestionable security to it, less proprietorial and yet just as sure. Did they fit in, had they burrowed their way into the spaces of Mu Qing’s heart the way he’d buried himself in theirs?
Mu Qing looked up at him, a black diamond gaze, lips curving up helplessly. Breathlessly. “If you’re not opposed, I’d say so,” he murmured.
And then he slid into the room, his teeth sunk into his lip to bite back his smile.
(Hua Cheng remembers with startling clarity then, when his eyes had left gege’s for just a moment in the conversation after the cart dragging incident, the same curve of a smile, the same relief, playing on the lips of a servant no one else seemed to see, before it vanished into stoicism.
Mu Qing would never have to hide it away again.)
“No opposition at all, Mu Qing,” Hua Cheng breathed out, and he let his eye drift to look at both of his lovers, let his mind create that image of Mu Qing while he couldn’t see him. “None at all.”
————————
He Xuan had presumed he’d never step foot in the Heavens after he’d gotten his revenge, had thought he’d only see that splendor as a reminder of all that he lost so someone else could relish in the riches, but now…
“She looks beautiful,” Xie Lian smiled as they watched Chen Weici move to settle down by the altar, her robes of red and gold surprisingly opulent given her reservations. Her soon-to-be wife sat beside her, equally decorated in rich fabrics. And yet, it was like He Xuan couldn’t see them at all.
His eyes, rather unwillingly, were drawn again to Mu Qing in his robes that complemented his three loves, only colored instead in daybreak blues and soft peaches, the same cloud-white embroidering thread as the one on He Xuan’s. It was perhaps a little rude to be at someone’s wedding and have no time or care to pay attention to them at all, especially someone who’d gone out of her way to make it obvious who her general loved and was loved by, and yet…
He Xuan was never good at losing focus of the things that caught his eye.
He sighed and nodded. Though he and Xie Lian had much to work through, bonded only by their shared love of Hua Cheng and Mu Qing, it really wouldn’t do to ignore the man. Even if their last conversation alone had been nothing short of a disaster.
(He still winces internally when he thinks of how they shared mild traumas as though passing silly notes, much to Mu Qing’s and Hua Cheng’s enraged horror. He’s since been made to promise not to joke about getting beaten in prison which really wasn’t that big of a deal in the grand scheme of his life. Much like being trampled hadn’t been in Xie Lian’s.
But he hadn’t forgotten the lectures or the glares– or aggrieved sighing and eye rolling in Mu Qing’s case– so trifling conversation topics it was.)
“Mu Qing said he’d been crafting her robes since she said she loved Song Mani.”
Xie Lian laughed, shaking his head fondly. “Of course he had. I’m more surprised that he let Pei Ming officiate the wedding, especially with how Pei Ming has been almost certain now that they share some familial relation.”
The other ghost king snorted, though his eye (finally no longer dancing between Xie Lian, Mu Qing, and He Xuan) kept searching elsewhere. “He’s been tracing back all of his trysts from over 800 hundred years ago.”
General Nan Yang’s voice rang out behind him and, when He Xuan turned to greet the god– again, reluctantly– he couldn’t help the mild surprise at seeing Shi Qingxuan and Cuocuo in tow with him. “I’m not sure where he thinks the proof will be– it’s not as though it’s been written anywhere.”
“I wouldn’t be surprised if he wrote it down somewhere,” Shi Qingxuan scrunched up their nose, even as they avoided eye contact with He Xuan. “Pei-ge can be distasteful like that.”
It was still tense between them, a barrier built of conflicting emotions glued together by all the pain each other’s existence had wrought.
Hua Cheng seemed to pick up on it, of course he would, and he pouted slightly, interrupting to complain, “You know who I haven’t seen yet–”
“San Bobo!” A voice shrieked in delight, and then suddenly a tiny body launched itself at Hua Cheng’s legs. The other man had just barely managed to twist himself so his knee wouldn’t collide with the baby’s head.
He Xuan watched as Song Ah-Lam grinned up at the younger Supreme, her tiny arms wrapped around his legs. “Up, San Bobo! Up!”
And Hua Cheng– Hua Cheng with all his angst and misery and supposed carelessness for anyone that wasn’t his beloveds– laughed, hoisting the toddler up and into his arms. “Ah, there she is! And how is Song Ah-Lam doing?”
Immediately the baby started babbling, a flurry of nonsensical words and hand movements that made less sense the more they tried to figure them out. She paused after a bit, waiting for a reaction, and Hua Cheng gasped, widening his eye comically.
“Really?” He asked. “That’s what happened?”
The little girl nodded insistently, her face all scrunched up as though to say “Right?! I can’t believe it either!”, her enthusiasm renewed as she began babbling again. Then her eyes caught He Xuan and she flung herself into his arms with a “Da Bobo!”
He Xuan had just barely caught her, nearly fumbling when she smacked a kiss onto his cheek. He stared down at the little girl with her wild hair and watermelon-seed eyes, her too-bright smile, and dropped a spontaneous kiss on her forehead.
“There you are!” Song Youyi popped up, dragging a chair with him and urging He Xuan to sit down. Behind him, his wife and another junior official also brought a chair with them, coaxing Xie Lian and Hua Cheng to also sit, while yet a third official was tugging Mu Qing by hand to them with one hand and hoisting a chair in the other, settling it down beside He Xuan.
“What–”
“I’ve to greet my family. That includes the people who my father loves,” Chen Weici began, kneeling on a pillow in front of Mu Qing, looking up at him as though in worship.
The god huffed out an embarrassed laugh and hastily wiped his tears, very much the image of a father giving up his daughter, for all that tradition was outdated and not at all what he was doing.
“Brat,” he muttered, and he gently tugged at a lock of her hair. “Have I raised you with no shame?”
“Not enough, General…A-ba,” She tried for a smile, but spoke around a sob. “For while they have yet to become my A-ba’s companions in marriage, I know they are the companions of his heart and therefore have become fathers to me as well.”
Beside her, her bride kneeled on another pillow, and smiled. The tea set with all eight of the necessary cups had been placed before them by the junior officials acting attendants, each already filled.
And soon the first cup was in his hand and Chen Weici, blotchy-faced much like Mu Qing, was asking him to drink the tea.
Once upon a time, He Xuan was supposed to get married, supposed to have a family of his own. Long ago, he had parents and a sister, but he'd spent even longer without them. He was an orphan, a widower, an only child.
He looks at the two men he loved, the third he knew, if albeit reluctantly, he would grow to care for. To them, he may become a husband. To Chen Weici, who greeted him in ceremony, he’d been accepted as a father. And Song Youyi whose daughter called He Xuan her uncle, he’d become a brother. Among the junior officials and all of the other gods around him, he thinks…
Somehow he’d found himself a new family.
He swallowed the tea.
—------------------------
“What-what are you doing?” Mu Qing stared at him, wide-eyed and burning red, shock and a need for sleep warring through him weirdly.
Hua Cheng and Xie Lian had such an odd sense of timing, he couldn’t help but mentally lament.
The wedding and following party had just ended, they had just gotten home and were getting ready for bed when Hua Cheng knelt in front of Mu Qing (who was still half-undressed, mind you), guiding Mu Qing to sit on the bed and clasping his hand in his.
“I’ve already given gege my soul. But for you, I have nothing to give you, nothing of nearly enough worth,” Hua Cheng murmured slowly. “But I can—”
Mu Qing blinked. What–? He scowled, interrupting Hua Cheng with a sharp, “Are you actually insane, Hua Cheng? ‘Nothing of worth?’”
He cupped Hua Cheng’s face in his hands, brushing his thumbs along the other man’s cheek as he determinedly met Hua Cheng’s eye. “You’re enough, idiot. I don’t need the grand gestures or extravagance to know how you feel for me or to feel loved by you. I don’t need your actual fucking life in my hands! That’s- that’s so…”
The god couldn’t help but look away suddenly, his eyes watering traitorously, and cleared his throat. He opened his mouth, then closed it. Under Hua Cheng’s relentless regard, the words would not come, would not be found.
So he moved his hand, carefully brushing it over Hua Cheng’s eye in a silent plea to close it. Hua Cheng did, leaning down to rest his forehead against the ghost king’s when he no longer bore the weight of his gaze.
“Y-you’ve shown me that you do.” Mu Qing whispered, curling his hands over the ghost king’s shoulders. “I’ve only known love as fleeting. S-something to have only so you could lose. Something to hurt from. For the first time in my life, I…I don’t feel that way. I don’t feel scared to love and that-that’s because of you.”
He pulled back, made himself meet Hua Cheng’s eye. “Because of you…Xie Lian…He Xuan, I think of love and it feels…steadfast. P-promised. Like for once I have something that doesn’t have a price or a t-trick clause, I– how can you possibly think I’d ever need anything else to know you feel for me?”
His throat had gone tight, and a tear slipped down his face. Hua Cheng quickly brushed it away before taking Mu Qing’s hands back in his.
“You’ve this really bad habit of interrupting me every time I try to confess my feelings, Qing’er,” he muttered, huffing a laugh.
The door inched open then, Xie Lian and He Xuan peeking in.
“Oh! A-Qing!” Xie Lian threw the door open, hurrying in to sit beside Hua Cheng on the floor and cradling Mu Qing’s face. “Don’t cry! Really, we’ve thought this through and there’s no pressure at all–”
“Thought about what?” Mu Qing sniffled lightly. Reflexively, he cleared his throat again, not wanting to sound like a maiden in mourning of all things. “What are you talking about, Lian-ge?”
The other god looked to his husband, blinking, that look of wanting to laugh or cry crossing his face. “San Lang…”
Hua Cheng laughed again, just as softly. “He interrupted me, gege. Again.”
“You make ridiculous proclamations!” Mu Qing protested. He Xuan sat on the bed beside him, smirking.
“You should hear them out, Xuan Zhen, they get rather entertaining,” the older Supreme said, letting Mu Qing brace against his side. “I once heard him spout on about the taste of the finest wine and how–”
“As I was saying– ” Hua Cheng quickly intervened, glaring at the other ghost king. “I don’t have anything of worth– no, don’t interrupt, Qing’er–”
Mu Qing snapped his mouth shut.
“But gege and I have decided to revoke our marriage vows so that, when we are all ready, we can take them once more, together,” he looked between Mu Qing and He Xuan. “Because right now…they’re incomplete. I may have no symbol, no possession to promise either of you, but when you’re ready, I– we want to promise ourselves to each other. Through– mmf?”
Hua Cheng toppled backwards, landing on the ground with a muffled thud with Mu Qing caught in his arms.
Mu Qing wasn’t quite sure what made him do it: the idea of getting married– something he long thought he'd be forever denied– finally becoming something of reality making him overly emotional or just the deep-seated desire to get Hua Cheng to stop talking, but he half flung himself into the ghost king’s arms, pressing their lips together fervently.
“I guess that’s a yes,” Xie Lian snickered from somewhere above them.
“...”
Xie Lian could stop talking, too, Mu Qing decided, pushing himself up so he could pull the other god closer.
Later, when all the kisses had been shared and they were finally ready for bed, all sprawled out lazily among the sheets, Mu Qing realized he never actually gave them an answer.
He coughed lightly to get the others’ attention. “Yes,” he said. And then he froze because there was so much more he needed to say and what were words–??
They looked at him questiongly and he blushed fiercely.
“Give me a minute before you start looking at me like that!” he complained, and that– well, anger and indignation always did wonders for making his mouth work. “I’ve promised myself to be by your side, all three of you, before. And- and at the time, I hadn’t meant it to be more than as a companion, a f-friend or ally.” He took a deep breath, letting his eyes shut for a long moment, trying to gather himself. Trying not to sound too harsh for this admission. Mu Qing opened his eyes as he breathed back out.
“But, but I want you to know, I’ve already promised myself to l-love you and be with you, marriage or not. So when that day comes…my answer’s yes.”
—------------------------
Their bedroom was dim, cozy even, and, despite all the day’s activities, Xie Lian still couldn’t sleep. Unable, really, as he was to do anything but keep his eyes open as San Lang, Mu Qing, and He Xuan slept, curled into each other as they all were. He couldn’t quite remember how they fell into bed like this, with San Lang caught on his back between the two gods cuddled against his sides and He Xuan tucked behind Mu Qing, all of their limbs tangled together.
Xie Lian let his fingers trace along Mu Qing’s hair, brushing it away from his face, letting his fingers ghost along the man’s cheek and neck, mapping the bits of skin he could reach and etching it into his mind like a memory he would always keep. Mu Qing inhaled a little sharper, a tell-tale sign he was about to wake, and Xie Lian quickly pulled his hand away, waiting for Mu Qing’s breath to settle again. It took a moment, sixty seconds of bated breath that seemed far too long for an immortal who had an indefinite amount of time to spare, for Mu Qing to relax once more but, once he had, Xie Lian slipped his hand into Mu Qing’s, letting them twine together on San Lang’s sternum.
It was a pretty sight, welcome after all their turmoil. Prettier with the promise of marriage, of forever, beating itself in his chest steadier than his heart beat ever had.
He watched them both, admiring his two beloveds and their beloved in the scarce moonlight and fuzzy warmth of the few small candlelights hovering high above their head like gently twinkling stars. It cast an almost hazy glow on them that made them look softer, sweeter, than they usually let people see them as. Even He Xuan, usually so monotonously severe, appeared almost delicate in the muted light, human again.
It made Xie Lian’s breath catch, willingly trapped in the warmth that filled his chest. He’d bury it deeper and never breathe again if it meant he could have this happiness for the rest of his life.
Xie Lian would leave the sight untampered for as long as he could. Leave it to last forever, if he could.
He touched his free hand to the ring on his neck as he looked at them, San Lang’s ashes having long been back to where they belonged now they hadn’t any enemy to lose it to. Soon they would have a new painting for their wall, one with four men together, harmonious as the sun and sky and as given as daytime would always follow night, and Xie Lian smiled.
After so many centuries of traveling alone, this and here until the end of forever was where they were meant to be.