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Quan Yizhen has curly, curly hair, and it’s always gotten in his face, ever since he can remember, because he’s always had bangs.
There’s nothing technically... wrong, his parents tell him, with having a soul mark so obvious on the body. He sees plenty of children his age with soft, spreading ink on their wrists, their ankles; sometimes their collarbones, or creeping up their necks. But he’s never seen someone else- even an adult- with one emblazoned across their forehead, like his; with one that’s so simple and dark, intense and impossible to miss.
But it’s a little harder to see with his bangs short, as they always are. He gets out of the habit of pushing them out of the way, and lets them rest on his forehead, instead, after his parents scold him for it enough.
When Quan Yizhen is 10, he enters the sect.
Plenty of children’s soul marks are starting to change, at that age; it’s a gradual process, like the changing of height. Adults’ marks change, too, he’s noticed; it’s just so slow that it seems like it’s not happening. Quan Yizhen doesn’t give any particular thought to the idea that it might happen to him; his soul mark doesn’t affect him overly much.
But he, himself, does change.
The sect gives him purpose. The sword forms, the stances, the staff work- they all blend into an exhilarating stimulation the likes of which he’s never known. He sweats, he aches, he works, he trains: from the moment he wakes up to the moment he falls exhausted into the dormitory beds at night. He doesn’t think of anything else. He doesn’t want to think of anything else.
The other disciples chatter and play games; Quan Yizhen hurries through his chores so he can return to training. When the older disciples challenge him, he fights them until the pain is so strong that he can no longer stand, then lies in the dirt after they leave until he can walk again.
The fourth time it happens, someone comes across him.
“What happened to you?” the boy says, as if curious. Maybe not curious? Quan Yizhen wouldn’t be curious, if someone was lying in the dirt. He would assume they were resting. The other boy sounds a little bit like Quan Yizhen’s father did, though, when he found Quan Yizhen after he hurt himself falling off the cliff near their house. Does he think Quan Yizhen is hurt? He’s not- or not badly, at least; he’s always been able to stand again eventually.
“I fought,” Quan Yizhen says, simply.
The other boy hesitates, then draws nearer. He makes a small noise, when he gets close enough to see the bruises forming on Quan Yizhen’s face.
“How many did you fight?” he asks, kneeling down next to Quan Yizhen and putting a hand on his shoulder. A cool trickle of energy starts to flow through his palm; it soothes some of the ache in Quan Yizhen.
“Oh!” Quan Yizhen says, using the sudden burst of energy that the lack of pain gives him to sit up. “That feels good!”
The other boy startles back a bit, then smiles. Quan Yizhen hasn’t noticed him around before; but he doesn’t pay that much attention to other people. He’s not that much older than Quan Yizhen, but he holds himself very straight, like the teachers here do.
“Can you teach me how to do that?” Quan Yizhen asks, luxuriating in the way his muscles start to unclench. If he learns how to do it for himself, he won’t have to wait as long between fights and training.
“To circulate your spiritual energy?” the boy says, with a frown. “You don’t usually learn that until you’re a bit older.”
“I can do it,” Quan Yizhen says with determination, closing his eyes and following the path that the other boy’s energy traces inside him. “Like this?”
Clumsily, he pushes… something, slowly, after the path that the energy traces inside him. It feels like he’s knocking into things that he shouldn’t be, but he manages to keep pace with the flow of it, and nothing feels terrible about it; though it doesn’t feel as nice as when the other boy does it.
He opens his eyes, and the other boy is looking at him with a new expression on his face. He pulls his hand back, and stands up, holding a hand out to Quan Yizhen.
Quan Yizhen eyes the hand curiously, then takes it. He lets the other boy pull him to his feet.
“What’s your name?” the boy asks.
“Quan Yizhen,” Quan Yizhen replies. “And you’re… shixiong?”
“Yes,” the boy says, nodding. “I’m your shixiong.”
He smiles.
Quan Yizhen feels something shift in his chest.
---
When Quan Yizhen goes home to visit his parents for the new year, his mother brushes his hair back from his forehead with a small noise of surprise.
“Son,” she says, palm still resting on his forehead. “What happened?”
“I learned a lot,” Quan Yizhen says, excited. “From the sect!”
Making listening noises, his mother turns him so that he’s facing towards his father, who makes the same complicated expression that she did. When they usher him in front of a mirror, Quan Yizhen frowns.
His soul mark has changed. But while others’ seem to grow slowly- like frost across a window, or a vine in the summer, unfurling lightly, their new path barely visible until they fill in with deep color- his is just as vivid and stark as it was before, all the way to the edges. And yet, the edges have changed; swirling in a new, strange pattern that he hasn’t seen before, layered on top of the old mark and branching like flowers, or lightning.
Quan Yizhen looks at it for a moment, then shrugs.
“What’s there to eat?” he asks, and his parents exchange looks over his head.
They’re a little shorter than they used to be.
---
Quan Yizhen returns to the sect. He spends more of the time with his shixiong, now.
Yin Yu shixiong can do- anything. He can use spiritual energy, he can fight, he can read, he can play instruments. He can use sword, spear, hand to hand, whip, rings.
He’s the head disciple of the sect, Quan Yizhen finds out later, even though he’s so young. And though older disciples have told Quan Yizhen that he should stay quiet, not fight, not stand out, until he’s no longer so young and stupid, no one seems to say those things to Yin Yu.
Quan Yizhen asks him about it, once, when he’s 13. Yin Yu makes a strange face, and after a while, sighs and pats Quan Yizhen on the head, once.
Quan Yizhen hasn’t been patted on the hair since he came to the sect. He thinks that he… loves it. He decides he loves it. But he can’t say that he loves it, because Yin Yu is already talking.
“Don’t listen to them,” he says. “Just keep training, and eventually you’ll be good enough that it won’t matter what people say.”
“Really?” Quan Yizhen asks, surprised enough that he forgets about the heat patting. He hasn’t been listening to his other shixiong for a while now, but he keeps being told that that’s wrong.
Maybe, since Yin Yu is the head disciple, he can just listen to this shixiong? And then all the rest of it will be right.
Yin Yu pats his head again, and Quan Yizhen feels like warm sunshine melts all through his body.
“Shixiong!” he says, excitedly. “I like that! Do it again?”
Yin Yu blinks, and draws his hand back, as if he hasn’t noticed what he was doing. Quan Yizhen frowns, and scoots closer, so that his head is under Yin Yu’s hand.
After a short pause, Yin Yu sighs a little, and his hand pats, hesitantly, against Quan Yizhen’s fluffy hair.
The same warmth- as of the first wave of sunlight in the spring- rushes through Quan Yizhen’s body. He smiles at Yin Yu, and his shixiong… smiles back.
Quan Yizhen hasn’t seen someone smile at him in a long time.
---
Yin Yu ascends at 21. Everyone talks about how incredible it is, how talented he is to have ascended at such a young age.
Quan Yizhen… just misses his shixiong.
He’s still excited to train, he still fights the other disciples; but there’s no one to spend time with afterwards. No one to really test himself against; he can now easily defeat all the other disciples, no matter how many come against him at once.
It only takes Quan Yizhen a year to ascend, after that.
He arrives in the heavens in a shock of lightning; the gods that gather around him remark on his youth, at how impressive it is for someone to ascend as a martial god at 18. The last god to do that, they say, was-
Quan Yizhen doesn’t hear them as their voices trail off into murmurs; he’s looking for Yin Yu.
Eventually, he finds him.
Here, his shixiong is more… distant. Quan Yizhen still follows him around, but Yin Yu doesn’t respond as easily; snaps a little more often. He still takes care of Quan Yizhen after he fights with the other gods, though, so Quan Yizhen doesn’t pay it much mind.
He doesn’t pay it much mind at all, until his birthday; and then he’s fighting gods that he doesn’t mean to fight, and trying to…
When the dust has settled, he goes to find his shixiong.
But he’s gone. Banished to earth.
Quan Yizhen doesn’t stop looking.
He doesn’t find him.
---
Years, and years, and years later- after the capital burned, after everything- Quan Yizhen goes to the ghost city.
Yin Yu didn’t take Quan Yizhen’s powers when Jun Wu offered them.
Yin Yu didn’t find a new place to hide.
Quan Yizhen guesses that means he’s welcome.
He lets himself into the palace, following the familiar trails of Yin Yu’s power. He tracks it to the ornate doorway to a room. It’s not the sort of door he’s ever seen before; decorated and heavy and inlaid with strange wood.
The door opens.
It’s Yin Yu who steps out of it. He exits slowly, closing the door behind him, and leans against it a little stiffly.
“Shixiong,” Quan Yizhen says. The same feeling of warmth, like sunlight, runs through him, as it did when he was a child.
“Yizhen,” Yin Yu says, corners of his mouth turning down. He doesn’t move as Quan Yizhen steps closer; then closer still.
He’s stiff like a tree when Quan Yizhen wraps his arms around him. Quan Yizhen buries his face in his neck, and squeezes him tighter. His whole body feels lit up with happiness; he can feel the muscles of his biceps trembling a little with how tight he holds.
“Don’t- squeeze like that,” Yin Yu wheezes out; but Quan Yizhen can’t make his arms stop. He noses deeper into Yin Yu’s neck, pushing aside the fabric as he goes, so that he can rest his forehead against the warmth of his skin.
“Your hair-” Yin Yu complains, shifting a little in his arms. But he doesn’t push Quan Yizhen away; doesn’t object when he settles his face comfortably against the bare skin exposed by the now-loose dip of his robes, even though his hair must be tickling Yin Yu the same way it usually tickles Quan Yizhen.
And then- at the very edge of the bared area- a slight, curling mark.
Quan Yizhen has never seen Yin Yu’s soul mark.
He’s suddenly consumed with curiosity.
His arms still don’t want to let go, so he takes the edge of Yin Yu’s robes in his teeth, dragging to the side in small jerks to expose the twisting pattern of his soul mark. Yin Yu makes a confused noise, and wriggles a little in his arms, but Quan Yizhen doesn’t let go.
After a few moments of mostly ineffective tugging, most of the mark is finally exposed. Quan Yizhen looks at it for a long moment.
“Shixiong,” he says, finally. His brain is working very hard; his heart is beating louder than it usually does. “Your mark looks like mine.”
Yin Yu shifts a little, then sighs. “We ascended through the same sect,” he says. “It’s normal for them to look similar.”
Quan Yizhen looks at it for a while longer, then lets his forehead fall to rest in the crook of Yin Yu’s neck, nose brushing the soul mark. It feels like any other skin against him; it’s warm on the tip of his nose.
“I like that they’re the same,” he says, voice muffled by Yin Yu’s chest.
Yin Yu doesn’t say anything in response.
But after a moment, his arms come up to lightly rest around Quan Yizhen’s back.
The sunshine flares bright inside of Quan Yizhen.