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"I should dress and leave soon so we can both still get a good night's sleep," Xie Yun says, running gentle fingers through her hair, following the line of their fall, from her forehead to the strands curving at her neck down to the ends that are draped over her bare waist. His hand stills there, squeezing her hip once, mild yet possessive, before moving up to begin the caress anew.
"Or you could just fall asleep here, with me," A'Fei says, pushing her head into his soft touch, grumbling the argument she has voiced every other night they've done this.
She burrows closer, warm naked bodies touching everywhere, every indrawn breath full of the scent of him. If she opens her eyes, all she'd see is miles of pale skin lit golden in the candlelight of her rooms at the Forty-Eight Strongholds.
This is all familiar, by now.
They've lain together a handful of times now, starting with that pivotal night in Jiankang where she made clear her wanting of him and swallowed his half-hearted protests for her sake right off his tongue. A handful of times - and every time has been an exploration, every touch and moan and breathless gasp a discovery.
It has somewhat sated the hunger that started all of it, the desperation to touch and feel and taste and have.
Though perhaps sated is not the correct term, not quite. She will never not hunger for her Xie Meimei, he is so fundamentally necessary to her by now. But the experiences over the past weeks has made the hot flashes of desire, at his glances and smiles and teasing words, a bit more bearable. The want is now something less a starving man's ravenous gorging and more an aesthete's pleasurable indulgence, rich and ever-evolving and joyous. She revels in it, in his presence and touches and kisses, giving and taking, an endless dance.
But somehow still, with Xie Yun, filling one want merely seems to open up five others. A'Fei has never thought of herself as greedy, but when it comes to the man who has her in his arms, her cravings seem endless. Because she wants more of him now than ever, more than little snippets of him she gets to grasp before he wisps away and raises the walls of decorum between them.
She already has him in her bed, has had the sounds of his pants and muffled groans filling the room as they brought each other pleasure in the quiet twilit hours. But now she wants also what comes after, wants to fall asleep pressed together just like this, and awaken to his skin painted by the light pinks and oranges of dawn, the lightening skies reflected in his sleep-soft eyes. She wants the first thing in the morning that she sees to be his affectionate smile, the last thing she feels before falling asleep the gentle rise and fall of his sternum beneath her cheek.
It seems unfair that they've lain together a handful of times, and yet every single one of those times he has stolen away from her bed in the middle of the night, furtive as a thief, all for the sake of propriety and protecting her honor.
"After all we did in the past hour, you think there's much honor left to protect?" she'd griped last time, still lying amidst rumpled sheets without a stitch of clothing while he got dressed to leave her for the night.
He'd paused halfway through pulling on his shirt, turning to her with a mischievous smirk.
"Well then, my waterweed sprite, all the more reason I should endeavor to protect what little's left of it," he'd said, then laughed and jumped away from the pillow she'd thrown at him.
"If you're that worried about my honor, why not just marry me so there won't be a reason to worry about propriety?" she'd muttered, gathering the blankets up to burrow into, the chill of the night raising goosebumps on her bare skin.
When she looked up, his amused smile had been just a little too fixed,
"Ahh, A'Fei, where is your sense of romanticism? For clandestine meetings and desperate star-crossed lovers treasuring every minute they spend together, fearing every second that brings them closer to the end?" his teasing grin was bright, and the parting wink he shot her before vanishing through her open window had revealed nothing amiss.
But A'Fei knows him now, perhaps not all of him, not yet, but better than most others in this world.
And the look in his eyes as he left had been indecipherable.
Tonight, she thinks about that clouded look again. Because it is there in his eyes once more when he deflects her invitation to stay and disappears into the dark blanket of the night.
She stares at her empty window and the gently billowing curtains adorning it for a few seconds, then flops back down on the bed with a huff.
"What on earth is going on in that ridiculous man's head?" she mumbles, turning on her side to snuggle into the sheets.
The pillows still smell like him.
It'd be so much nicer if he were right here too, under the sheets with her, his long limbs intertwined with her own much shorter ones. Right here, for her to bury her nose into the crook of his neck and match her slumbering breaths to the rhythm of his pulse.
But he insisted on leaving.
And she's too pleasantly worn out and sleepy right now to ponder the convoluted workings of Xie Yun's mind.
She will think upon it more tomorrow.
*
The next day, she settles down with sword oil and whetstone to do some routine maintenance on her sword. And with her hands productively occupied, she can let her thoughts roam free.
Surely Xie Yun's hesitance is not because he has changed his mind about her?
She lets herself spend a few brief minutes contemplating this train of thought while methodically buffing her sword till it gleams.
The idea is, honestly, absurd. And no it is not arrogance on her part to think that.
Xie Yun is a flirt and can be a liar when it serves him, but at the core of him he's good. He would never have let things get this far between them if he had even a minute of doubt about his own feelings for her.
Besides, the way he drowns her with signs of his affection, in every imaginable way. Making little pretty trinkets for her to wear, cooking for her, saying ridiculous things just to make her laugh. Painting images of them together, a future where they're happy and together and in love.
And for all his theatrical talents, he is not so good an actor that he can fake the way he looks at her, so meltingly devastatingly fond, every single day.
So no, that is not it. Even when she herself was unsure and wavering, Xie Yun never made a secret of his affection for her.
Then is it some fear of commitment, perhaps?
She pauses her work with her sword, frowning.
By his own words, Xie Yun has lead the life of a complete free spirit. 'The four seas are my home,' he is fond of saying, and that is truly how he has lived thus far. So perhaps, sharing with her his mind, body and soul is easy for him, but the idea of something more definitive and binding like a betrothal or marriage feels caging.
She resumes working, vetting this idea in her mind even as she whets her blade.
This thought, it makes logical sense. It is not implausible... but it doesn't quite sit right with her.
She thinks of his deviously smirking face as he tried to call her 'niangzi'. Thinks of the little drawing he made titled 'Your Guess', which he teased her by saying it depicted his future wife, and yet was very clearly drawn in the image of her.
She remembers too the night that changed it all, his face glowing golden in the warm lantern lights on the balcony, eyelashes cast silver under the radiance of a full moon. Remembers him, self-mocking and bittersweet, saying, 'And I have the girl of my dreams before me and yet I cannot marry her'.
No. It is not reticence to commit that stays his hand from tying theirs together for this lifetime, in front of their ancestors and elders. That one final step to making their belonging to one another irrefutable...
Irrefutable.
Something about that word niggles at her, makes her think of the surprised-disbelieving-awestruck look on Xie Yun's face every time she kisses him or embraces him or otherwise gives this unnamed thing between them tangible physical form. It is as though -
She freezes mid-motion and blinks at the air before her, sword and whetstone still held poised in her hands.
It is as though Xie Yun still half-expects her to abandon him, as though he thinks of everything between them as merely an ephemeral blessing to a dying man rather than the forever she has promised to him in word and deed.
But before she can follow the trail of that thought like a hunter on a prowl, A'Yan is bursting into her rooms, screeching about some Third Prince or other, here with a bride price. To ask for A'Fei's hand in marriage.
Instinct guides her to the next step, a devious ploy that isn't the type of thing she is typically wont to do. But she listens to it.
"A'Yan," she says, with a devilish smile. "Go find Xie Yun immediately and tell him the Third Prince is here to ask for my hand in marriage. And see how he reacts."
*
Later - after watching Xie Yun's face shrink in misery and feeling some strange sort of uncharitable pleasure at it, after soundly showing the Third Prince how he is in every way undeserving of her affections, and then making it clear to Xie Yun he is deserving of it in every way - later, she drags him to her rooms.
"A'Fei," Xie Yun protests. Always protesting and poking and prodding at the boundaries of what she'll allow, this man, and yet when she open her gates wide open for him, he is the one who raises a white flag and retreats.
She huffs and shoves him to the bed, just a little bit rougher than she usually would. But she is feeling a bit at the end of her tether with him at the moment.
Xie Yun splays gracelessly on her bed, blinking up at her in mild alarm.
"A'Fei, what -?"
"Shush."
A'Fei takes a moment to gently place the flower she received from Xie Yun on her table (her betrothal gift and she wouldn't trade this lone flower for all the riches in the world) and then she bounds back to her bed and drops heavily on Xie Yun's lap.
"Oof, A'Fei, watch it," Xie Yun complains, but his large hands automatically spread out over her back, holding her steady. He scoots back so she has a firmer seat on his thighs, him a king's son and yet his body her throne.
She never knew she could feel this much affection for someone.
A'Fei takes a moment just to look at him, the way his brows are slightly crinkled in puzzlement, his mouth a little chapped and pale. She reaches forward for a quick hard kiss, and when she pulls back, his full mouth is moist and flushed pink.
Good. He looks sturdy enough now to face her wrath.
"Why would you talk yourself out of asking to marry me?" she demands, sharp and annoyed. "Did you really think I'd care that you don't have bride price to offer or about your titles and lands? Who do you take me for?" She resists the urge to pinch him, mostly because he'd probably buck and send her tumbling off her perch on his thighs, and she wants to finish having this conversation before they get into any sort of roughhousing.
"It's not that," Xie Yun says, ducking his head, looking away. She reaches up and takes his chin in her hand, turns his head so he'll meet her eyes. "A'Fei."
He trails off, shifting his eyes to focus in the distance once more. She jostles insistently at his jaw till he looks back at her.
"Why?" she asks, unyielding.
The smile that quirks Xie Yun's mouth is small and self-deprecating, and A'Fei hates it.
"I've done enough damage to your life already, don't you think?" he says, wry. His eyes are full of storm clouds. "I will die within a year, and for my selfishness, I've let it get this far with you. I will never regret a single moment I have beside you, but I regret the pain I shall cause you when I'm gone..."
"Who says you're going to die?" she asks, full of angry bravado. If her voice cracks a bit, both of them pretend to not notice it. "We're close to tracking down Hai Tian Yi Se, and we have Yang Jin and Ying Hecong and whatever knowledge is left from the Little and Big Medicine Valleys on our side. You are not going to die. We will find a way!"
He looks at her so gently, so soft and sad and resigned. An unwanted lump grows in her throat, itch building at the corner of her eyes. She steadily looks back at him, daring her tears to gather and fall.
She will not cry. Crying would look like she is ready to give up and lose hope, and she will not do that.
"We will find a way," she repeats, half-a-promise, half-a-plea.
"We will certainly do our best, my waterweed sprite," he says finally, lifting up her hand to kiss her palm, and it feels like such an unhappy impasse.
Silence descends between them, only the rustle of leaves in the wind and the distant bustle of people milling about the Forty-Eight Strongholds keeping them company. A'Fei leans closer, just to feel the steady thump of Xie Yun's heartbeat against her torso, and tries to will the tears away.
"I just -" Xie Yun says, indeterminate minutes later, mumbling under his breath, not quite meeting her eyes again. "I just couldn't stand the thought of leaving you a widow. I thought perhaps - if all I do is spend the rest of my numbered days by your side, without tying myself to you before the eyes of the world and the heavens, then perhaps... when the time comes, your life won't be indelibly marked by me. That you could love again without having to make excuses, and find joy without a specter tying you to your past, a new start on an uncharted adventure that my presence has never cast a shadow on. And I thought that would be for the best, so I could become merely a memory to think of fondly on nostalgic winter nights now-and-then..."
The burning in A'Fei's throat threatens to burst into a flood of salty tears.
"Shut up," she garbles out, tries to regain control of her voice. "Stop - stop talking as though it is all - inevitable - stop talking as though -"
Despite her best efforts, a few tears leak from the corners of her eyes anyway.
She starts to reach up to angrily swipe them away but Xie Yun gets there first.
"Ah, I hate to see you cry and yet I seem to be the reason behind so many of your tears," he says, half-joking, but his fingers are so tender where they brush away the moisture on her cheeks.
"Well stop saying stupid things that make me cry then!" she snaps, swatting away his hand to mop up her face in her own dress sleeves.
"I must obey the beautiful heroine," he agrees gravely, miming locking his mouth and throwing away the key. She giggles wetly at his ridiculousness despite herself, and hates him a little bit for the effect he has on her.
"Besides," he continues on, the mimed vow of silence forgotten just seconds after making it. Ridiculous. It just makes her giggle a little more and oh, how dim would be a lifetime that doesn't have him there nattering on by her side?
"Besides," Xie Yun says. "All of that is moot point anyway. I have already professed my undying devotion to a waterweed sprite that rose from the Ximo River. Promised my hand to her with the mountains and rivers as witness. I don't have much to give her, but the least I can do is keep my word."
"The only gift I seek," A'Fei says, firm, "is to have you beside me for the rest of my lifetime, safe and healthy and just as you are."