Work Text:
At court, and at other people’s courts, Zhang Yi and Ying Si are slippery, conniving, ruthless sons of bitches. So their allies and ex-allies inform them, sometimes in those exact words, and frequently enough that on occasion they forget they’re supposed to deny it. It’s quite enjoyable, being able to pretend that the world sees them as they truly are.
So instead, in the quiet hours, Ying Si takes Zhang Yi by the hand and walks him down darkened, unfamiliar corridors in the Xianyang palace. They're not secret, nothing so crass as that. They're just too full of Ying Si's ghosts to leave much room for the living.
“But imagine, what if we were still in Yueyang,” Ying Si laughs in that way of his, so he rather looks like he's snarling. Zhang Yi hears an attendant scurry away somewhere in the distance. No dust stirs under the hems of their robes.
Ying Si shows him an empty study, the shelves bare and the lamps clean of oil and soot. He shows him a courtyard, slightly overgrown. The paving under their feet has been recently swept, but the low stone table and benches are sparsely scattered with fallen leaves. They come to one last doorway. Ying Si turns away from it, unhurried but deliberate, tugging Zhang Yi after him.
In time, Zhang Yi sees the scrolls that had been absent, their thread bindings replaced and one copy made for the archives. Then there are the heavy wooden storage trunks that should have by all rights remained in those empty, maintained rooms. Ying Si lays a hand on the dark lacquer, but doesn't open them.
There is, eventually, a kerchief dipped in Shang Yang's blood. (“Anything less wouldn't have killed him dead enough,” Ying Si laugh-snarls.) Time has darkened the blood to almost black, but the red still gleams through a little, like a patient ember.
Even this, Zhang Yi understands, is not a trophy nor a relic, but Ying Si’s in its own right. A king’s history is sprawling and indiscrete. Ying Si couldn’t escape his regrets, his dead, his sin when his fathers had understood only the concept of crime. The alternative was to turn around and take pride in them.
And in these quiet hours, Zhang Yi, too, presents to Ying Si the past that he carries. It used to be compact enough to fit on his skin: the circles of dark, shiny tissue where they’d hung him by his wrists; more scarring where the beatings broke skin. But his tongue had remained intact. It’s making a name for him these days.
Ying Si’s fingertips are slightly sticky where they trace the sweep of a whip scar. But when their eyes meet, Zhang Yi thinks the understanding is mutual.