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This darkness sucked the control straight from one’s bones like a parasite, feasting on the terror and regret of all it consumed. It took all it could stomach and then some, leaving its victims dry and hollow and on the edge of madness. It isolated them, dulled any sense of direction or spatial awareness, because the sun was not allowed here. Time was but a memory, days, nights. There was but one variant, one thing ever-changing to remind whoever was trapped within that the world outside hadn’t ceased to exist: the sounds of the water.
The blood in Shi Qingxuan’s veins tried to flow in tune to it. He could nearly hear the hum of his blood vessels as they tried to match its speed and rhythm, even direction, and it dizzied him, left him swaying where he hung shackled to the prison wall. He rolled with the tides, dropped with the trenches. Bucked with the surge, crashed with the waves. Even his sweat, plastering his hair and robes to his skin, tickled like sea foam, enveloped him, caged him. He was changing, even more so than he already had. He was being consumed.
He wanted his brother.
He blinked, and his brother was now before him, his wish immediately granted but regretted even sooner.
Shi Wudu, the Water Master, the very epitome of strength and protection, was strewn across the ground with Ming-xiong—Black Water—He Xuan looming over the both of them and looking the absolute picture of unadulterated power.
Those weren’t the eyes Shi Qingxuan knew. Those angles, those robes, that dominating posture. This man was a stranger, this violence nauseating in its effortlessness.
Except, he wasn’t. The violence, neither.
Shi Qingxuan watched, chest emptying, stomach tossing, as Shi Wudu’s head was separated from his body in a gruesome picture of tearing skin, snapping tendons, and uprooted spinal column, and even while his scream threatened to split his throat clean down the middle, the realization came crashing:
He did this.
Shi Qingxuan jolted out of his slumber with a choked cry, slick with sweat and chest heaving as his mortal lungs fought to compensate for his racing pulse. He tried to sit up before remembering the iron grasp around his waist, and he didn’t dare try to break it. Uneasy, uncomfortable, he dropped back into the sheets and the embrace, fighting to steady his breathing before anything else.
The room around him was dark but for the moonlight streaming through the faded curtains. They’d found this house the day before, and He Xuan had deemed it appropriate for a night’s rest once he saw the mattress thick with dust in the back room. A single touch of spiritual energy, and anything living in it was evaporated.
Still, it was lumpy. Shi Qingxuan tried to roll his hip off a particularly large lump, resulting in him pressing closer to the chest at his back. It had gone cold sometime during the night, meaning He Xuan had actually fallen asleep. If that was the case, Shi Qingxuan wanted to disturb him even less. It was perhaps a month before He Xuan had so much as let him out of his sight. He had to be exhausted, Demon King or not.
But the arms around his middle were like ice through his thin robe, the nose against his neck not much better, and he shivered as his sweat cooled and solidified. Sleeping would be impossible like this. He Xuan would not be pleased with his fatigued state when morning came.
Sighing, he settled his attention on the rivulets of black hair that painted over his shoulders and down his chest, mixing with the lighter strands of his own hair. They beat his out in both vibrancy and volume. They didn’t get dry or oily, break or split. They were perfect.
Absently, he reached for one of the swaths of black.
Then, against his ear: “Another nightmare?”
Shi Qingxuan went rigid. He retracted his hand, tucked it under his side. He nodded, the lips against his ear grazing along the shell with the movement.
He Xuan’s chest shifted as he readjusted himself, but it didn’t pull away. A chill hand raised from Shi Qingxuan’s waist to tuck brown bangs behind his ear.
“Of when I killed your brother?”
Shi Qingxuan’s chest tightened. He forced his eyes to remain open even as they blurred, blinked back the coming tears. He stared resolutely at the wall beside the bed, counted nine tassels on the hanging tapestry before replying, “I should have foreseen it.”
He could feel the contemplative tilt of He Xuan’s mouth as it moved to his nape above the collar of his robe. “Perhaps,” he said into his skin. “But it was I who ripped off his head. Do not take credit for my kill.”
Shi Qingxuan closed his eyes. He tried to resist a sniff, but his nose ran regardless. His shoulders quaked with the effort to conceal his distress.
A cool palm pressed to his brow, accompanied by an order: “No tears.” He Xuan finally released his hold and pulled away, rolling Shi Qingxuan onto his back. He scrutinized his face with eyes Shi Qingxuan could not read. “They can do nothing for him now,” he said.
But Shi Qingxuan couldn’t stop the onslaught by sheer will alone. He hiccuped, laid a tentative hand over the one He Xuan had yet to remove from his forehead. “Warmth,” he whispered. “Please?”
He Xuan tilted his head. Ultimately, however, he acquiesced. Heat poured first from his fingertips, then his palm, before it spread down his forearm and into the rest of his body. Color flushed his skin as well, and Shi Qingxuan had the sudden, frightening urge to follow it with his fingers, trace along the shadows of veins willed to flow.
He settled instead for letting himself enjoy the heat that He Xuan was using to ground him. He relaxed, slowly, as He Xuan slid over him and weighed him down.
“Would it perhaps help,” he asked, tone as unreadable as his face, “to be soothed with a memory?”
He pulled his hand away as he spoke, and Shi Qingxuan’s brow furrowed. “Which memory?” he asked carefully.
He Xuan didn’t reply. He merely leaned down, connected their foreheads in a firm press of skin to skin. Shi Qingxuan almost startled, trying to avoid eye contact at this proximity, but it was too late. He was anchored, tide rolling above, abyss beckoning below.
And then: a field of wheat, a cool breeze, a starlit sky. And his own voice; a song on the wind.
Shi Qingxuan trembled under He Xuan’s weight. “You recorded this?” he asked, voice nearly inaudible.
Those eyes didn’t blink. They didn’t need to. “I recorded everything.”
In the space between their brows, the song continued. Ming Yi watched Shi Qingxuan from where he sat, wheat stocks bent and broken under him. Shi Qingxuan, in female form, singing a tale of old, cheeks rosy with too much wine. A tumble, a reluctant embrace. Ming Yi’s grumbled complaints. An attempted but rejected kiss.
In the bedroom: “My hands.” Shi Qingxuan couldn’t recognize his own voice. “Where do I put my hands?”
“Wherever you wish,” He Xuan said.
He Xuan’s bare shoulders were firm under the pads of Shi Qingxuan’s fingers. He pressed them hesitantly, uncertain of how much he was allowed.
The memory looped and restarted. He Xuan pressed closer. Shi Qingxuan’s hands slid along to his back of their own accord.
In the field, Shi Qingxuan leaned toward Ming Yi with puckered lips. Ming Yi dodged with a disgusted twist of his mouth.
In the bedroom, Shi Qingxuan pulled He Xuan down, and He Xuan took his mouth like it belonged to him. And Shi Qingxuan…
Shi Qingxuan let him.