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The first time Nangong Jingnu sees Qi Yan in her new home, she wonders if she’s misremembered her wife all along.
The Qi Yan that lives in her memories, the one she scrubbed from the history books as a final act of grief, was always a quiet scholar. But she had the gentlest smile, and warmth would seep into her voice like honey in hot tea when she would greet Nangong Jingnu. At their best, if Nangong Jingnu was supposed to hold up the sky, then Qi Yan was the foundation under her feet. She could never be steady without her presence.
At their worst— bloodied, battered, bruised. Half-dead and heartbroken at each other’s hands.
The Qi Yan before her now isn’t any of those things. She is quiet and cold the way corpses are. She had looked at Nangong Jingnu, and then back to the painting she sat in front of.
“Am I dreaming?” she had asked.
“No! No, you’re not,” Nangong Jingnu had said, wishing death and dismemberment upon Ding You for never telling Qi Yan about her.
“Really… are you real?”
Nangong Jingnu remembered her tears, how they burned going down her cheeks. She had stained so many clothes from crying— just fat droplets of blood, slow and sluggish across her skin.
“How could I not be?” she had asked, and Qi Yan had fainted.
It’s been two days since then, and Qi Yan has been put under strict bedrest. Nangong Jingnu currently sits in Ding You’s tiny shack while her guards and servants are hard at work building her new estate.
This place is tiny and dirty. Nangong Jingnu surveys it and thinks of all the ways she could improve it for Qi Yan, if she didn’t want to move in with Nangong Jingnu. Paint the walls something more cheerful. Add in a rug. Qiuju knows a good textile merchant this far south. Bring in candles and incense, a better, sturdier bed.
She doesn’t give a fuck about Ding You’s shack. Let him live in a hole for all she cares.
A younger version of herself would give into the tempest raging in her heart. She’d demand to know why Ding You was so much like Qi Yan — always insisting on secrets, on lying to people they care about under the guise of protection. Maybe she’d barge into Qi Yan’s room, kneel at her bedside, and will her memories to return through sheer force.
She is not that girl. Nangong Jingnu may have put Nangong Zhenzhen on a shelf when she passed on the throne, but the weight of that mantle still bears down on her shoulders. She can’t easily escape it.
“Yuanjun really doesn’t remember anything?” she asks, just to hear his confirmation.
“Nothing,” Ding You says. “Not the grass plains, not the masked person, not her time in the court… All these years, and that painting is the only thing she’s recognized.”
They tilt their heads to better look at it, one of the few times they move in unison. It’s a good likeness of a freer version of Nangong Jingnu.
Her hair’s started to gray. Crow’s feet line the corners of her eyes. Emperor Father did not age gracefully, and that’s just one of the many ways she takes after him.
She’s not the girl this painting shows. She’s grateful she wasn’t. That Nangong Jingnu thought she didn’t need to understand the world. The parts beyond her would always be revealed to her in time.
That isn’t the case. Nothing but her own footsteps led her here. Ding You broke her theory; the empty coffin was not a plea for Nangong Jingnu to find Qi Yan.
It was just an empty coffin.
“What am I supposed to do?” Nangong Jingnu asks.
“This one has no right to tell Your Majesty anything,” Ding You says. Nangong Jingnu worries her lip. Again and again, she’s greeted by the same response. She stepped down from the throne. She doesn’t hold the sky up anymore.
There is only one person left alive who can face her as a partner, and she’s asleep in a bed that Nangong Jingnu doesn’t know if she has any right to.
“I want to wait here until Yuanjun awakes,” she decides. She looks to Ding You, wondering if he’ll speak out against it.
He just dips his head. “This doctor will return to his own shack in that case.”
He bids farewell, and leaves Nangong Jingnu in silence.
Qi Yan, Qiyan Agula, Qi Yuanjun — all of them and yet none of them sit in that bed now. Nangong Jingnu enters to the sight of Gu Rolan’s hand wrapped around her wrist, diligently taking her pulse.
“Did that trash doctor do his job?” Nangong Jingnu asks.
Gu Rolan glances at Qi Yan’s face. There is no spark of recognition in those eyes. She views Gu Rolan as nothing but a strange doctor.
She twists to face Nangong Jingnu. “Da-ge’s health is better than ever, Your Majesty,” she replies. “Far better than this commoner could ever accomplish.”
“Nonsense. You’re an amazing doctor,” Nangong Jingnu says, but her mind lingers on all that Ding You told her. Qi Yan left her heartbroken and mourning for the better part of a decade. Somehow, that was better than letting Nangong Jingnu know about her fraying mind. So what if her mind was hazy? So what if her body was weak? Nangong Jingnu held up the sky. Why was it so impossible to hold up her wife?
But she knows, too. If she were any younger and any less brittle, she wouldn’t understand. The Nangong Jingnu Qi Yan abandoned wouldn’t have let her leave. She would have kept her tucked away from all danger, while her soldiers scoured the world for a cure she wasn’t even certain existed.
It wouldn’t have done either of them any good. Nangong Jingnu is broken and Qi Yan is not the woman she was, but the gods have been kind enough to allow them another meeting in this life.
Gu Rolan murmurs her thanks. It isn’t anything dignifying a response. Instead, she turns her attention to her amnesiac wife. “How are you feeling, Yuanjun?”
“I feel okay, Your Majesty,” Qi Yan says. Nangong Jingnu’s splintered heart breaks further in her chest. She’s heard those words so many times before. Qi Yan always coated them in honey, so why do they feel so stale now?
“That’s what Ding You called you, right? Should I call you something else?” Qi Yan asks.
“You can call me whatever you like,” Nangong Jingnu says, trying to keep Nangong Zhenzhen out of her voice. For all she helped, that emperor is fallen now. Nangong Jingnu does not need to wear her any longer.
“We’re wives, but I don’t know anything about you,” Qi Yan says. There’s so little emotion in her voice. Not that there was a lot before, but it feels… different. That Qi Yan was scholarly; for every word she didn’t say, there were thousands lurking in the muddy depths of her mind. This Qi Yan is blank. Wiped clean of so much.
“You can learn,” Nangong Jingnu says, though her heart screams as the words escape her. She doesn’t want Qi Yan to learn her again. She wants her Yuanjun back, pain and heartache and betrayal all together. She wants their scars to make sense to one another. For all the stories Nangong Jingnu can tell her of their past — and she’ll tell Qi Yan every one, until her throat is scraped raw and her tongue bleeds — it isn’t the same as living through them together. A story is just that. A story.
Nangong Jingnu presses closer. Daringly, she grabs Qi Yan’s other hand. Her palms are cool. Surely this can’t be healthy, but she trusts Gu Rolan not to lie to her. The girl is still too scared of her to dare.
“Please excuse this commoner,” Gu Rolan says. She speaks a little like Qiuju; the thought makes Nangong Jingnu snort. Gu Rolan picks up older sisters the way shaggy dogs pick up dirt in their fur. It’s charming.
“What do you want to know?” Nangong Jingnu asks. “Ask anything at all. I’ll tell you whatever.”
Qi Yan considers her. She doesn’t pick Nangong Jingnu apart. She doesn’t see into her heart. She just sees her, whatever goofy expression she might be wearing.
“Were we happy?”
Nangong Jingnu does not cry in front of others. Not since she was a little girl. She lets herself have this, red tears streaking her face. Qi Yan’s eyes widen at the sight. The amber seems to shine in the afternoon light.
Nangong Jingnu smiles and nods. “Not always. But often enough, we were the happiest two in the world.”
The ocean is a strange place.
Nangong Jingnu had heard about it, of course. Had read about it in books and poems. People seemed to have a lot of feelings on it. It made them feel awed, tiny, powerless.
She tries to picture the depths below the glittering waves. Surely it is too deep to ever breach. She’d drown long before she touched the bottom. Her domain was the skies, not the seas.
She sits, barefoot on the wet sand, her robes hiked up to her knees. The waves lap at her toes, making her yelp from the cold every time it happens. Qiuju always looks up from her station when she does, her mouth quirked in a tiny smile. It makes Nangong Jingnu feel like a child whenever she does. It’s strange. She finds she doesn’t hate it.
Footsteps crunch against the sand. Qiuju greets someone in a low voice, but Nangong Jingnu is too far away to hear the words. Still, she is not stopping whoever is coming. There’s only two people left in this world who have that level of authority, and one of them lives on the other side of the country.
Qi Yan comes to her side. “Your Highness,” she says softly. “May this subject join you?”
She doesn’t speak that way because she remembers. She speaks that way because Gu Rolan told her that’s what she used to say. Every reference feels like she’s trying it on for herself, to see if the relationship still fits.
“You’ll get wet if you do,” Nangong Jingnu says.
“I don’t mind.”
“Very well,” Nangong Jingnu says, pulling her robes in to make room for her to sit. Qi Yan does with a kind of effortless grace it took Nangong Jingnu years to perfect. “You should sit higher up, though. The water is cold. It won’t be good for you.”
“Following that logic, the water shouldn’t be good for you, either.”
“I wasn’t the one who nearly died of a water condition!” Nangong Jingnu says, then snaps her mouth shut. She feels a flush come over her face. All these years apart, and Qi Yan still unravels her careful control with just a few simple words.
Qi Yan grows quiet, thoughtful. “That’s right. Still, I think I’ll be okay. It was in my lungs, wasn’t it?”
Nangong Jingnu nods. “Don’t swim.”
“I don’t know how to.”
Another thing her amnesia stole. Nangong Jingnu would be perfectly happy if that particular memory never returned, even if the skill is most likely still buried somewhere in her body.
“This village is so quiet,” Nangong Jingnu says. “I find myself with so much free time I don’t know what to do with it.”
“Ding You told me something similar. That’s why I teach,” Qi Yan says.
Nangong Jingnu’s heart cracks. “You don’t like it?”
“I don’t know.”
Her chest almost bleeds. She digs her nails into her palms, holding back the urge to throw herself into Qi Yan’s arms and weep. Qi Yan is such a good teacher. After so much suffering, she deserves to do something she loves.
“Could you, in time?” Nangong Jingnu asks. She thinks of that school. It’s small. Poorly managed. The current principal doesn’t seem to really care about how it’s run. Maybe she could convince him to cede control to her. She could encourage the village girls to enroll. Set up a curriculum to ensure they learn the six arts alongside the boys. She could even find a music teacher for them.
Qi Yan would be a good one, but she already has something to teach. Even with her memories gone, her hands stay steady. She’ll simply have to expand the staff.
“I don’t know,” Qi Yan repeats.
“I hope you find out one day,” Nangong Jingnu says.
“As do I.”
The people of this village adore Ding You. They tolerate Qi Yan by association — the reclusive cousin of their beloved doctor with a gift for calligraphy is respected, but never loved.
It’s fascinating to see just how different they feel from Nangong Jingnu. Ding You’s only value comes in what he can do — and does do, did do — for Qi Yan.
“Why does she trust you so much?” Nangong Jingnu asks. “What did you do to earn it?” What must I do to keep it? She wants to ask.
If she were any younger, she might not even be able to look him in the eye. Her jealousy burns strong. She wants to matter to Qi Yan as much as Qi Yan matters to her.
“She had no other choice,” Ding You answers. “I’m a doctor. She needs to trust me to care for her health, or else she’d die. Even then, she’s difficult to keep alive.” Nangong Jingnu almost laughs at that. He’s right.
“If I were a younger man, and if I could pick between having her love or her trust, I would pick her love,” he adds.
She isn’t surprised. It still hurts to hear. “What if I want both?”
“Then you’d truly be blessed by the heavens,” he says.
Nangong Jingnu tries to spend time with Qi Yan. Even when it hurts, when she quotes part of a poem they once read together in their youth and all she receives for the effort is that same blank stare, she tries.
The season shifts. Nangong Jingnu’s new estate is nearing completion. Qiuju has started to speak of their provisions not in months, but in years. Nangong Jingnu receives and answers letters written in code she taught Shangguan Fu before leaving. She eyes the school with more consideration. Her hands itch for something to do; something to influence and mold under her judgement. She was Emperor for far too long to convince herself that she is anything other than competent. With a school, she can have near-total control over it.
She would be close to Qi Yan, too. They once worked so well together. She’s certain that even Qi Yan’s missing memories wouldn’t change that.
Oddly enough, it’s Qi Yan that comes to find her. They’ve spent the better part of three months distanced from one another. They meet occasionally, but to this Qi Yan, Nangong Jingnu is just a face captured in paint.
She thinks that she overwhelmed Qi Yan at first. It takes baby steps. For all Qi Yan’s strength, she has always been deceptively fragile.
“Hello,” Qi Yan says. Nangong Jingnu sits outside her half-completed estate, a book of poetry in hand. She looks up from the words there at the sound of Qi Yan’s voice. Her heart flutters in tentative hope.
“Yuanjun,” Nangong Jingnu says, the name slipping past her lips before she can think better of it. A reflexive response to that friendly tone, she thinks. She stopped using it at her after the first few days, when Qi Yan couldn’t quite realize she was supposed to respond to it.
She does now. “That’s a nice name,” she says. “May I sit with you?”
Nangong Jingnu makes room for her. “I chose it for you,” Nangong Jingnu explains. “Emperor Father tasked me with choosing your courtesy name. I’ll show you the poem I selected it from sometime. You used to like it.”
“I hope I’ll like it again,” Qi Yan says.
“Do you like it now?”
“I do.”
Nangong Jingnu smiles. She glances over and, feeling a little daring, sits a little closer to Qi Yan. She doesn’t lean into her, but she doesn’t pull away, either.
It’s progress. One stumbling step at a time. And considering the broken path that laid behind them, it fills Nangong Jingnu with a strange kind of hope.
Even if Qi Yan doesn’t get her memories back, even if they never end up exactly the same as they once were, they can still be together.
Happiness feels so close.