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Sometimes, when Jing Beiyuan looks at him, Wu Xi feels very small. He is not used to being made to feel small. He knows he has grown up tall and well, that his shoulders are broad and his arms are strong. He is the Shamanet of his generation, chosen from thousands. The people of the Great Qing know their place and treat him as such. Yet, when Jing Beiyuan peers at him through the dim candlelight in his study, his eyes feel impossibly deep, like peering into an abandoned well in the dead of the night. When he gets this sort of way, Wu Xi understands what it is to be an ant at the foot of a mountain, to be Hou Yi gazing at the moon.
In his life, there are very little things that frighten him. He has held hands with death and will greet it like an old friend when it comes to his doorstep, he has grown up amongst monsters of men and beast alike. Madmen are easily dealt with; there’s no need to waste thought on rabid dogs.
But Jing Beiyuan is different. If this man had not proven himself to be good and honest to him, he would be afraid of him the way one instinctually mistrusts the dark. A smile that is paper-thin, and peach-blossom eyes that are uncomprehendingly old. Wu Xi trusts his instincts beyond anything else in this world, and he knows that he is dallying with a leopard, playing fetch with a tiger. Jing Beiyuan could smile serenely at you, looking the very picture of a Bodhisattva, and in less than a shichen you could only watch helplessly as you lose everything you’d spent your entire life building.
On this particular night, Jing Beiyuan has that look in his eyes again, the one that seems to age him hundreds of years. As though the burden of time had finally settled in on his shoulders, his back curves ever so slightly.
“You do not seem surprised.” Wu Xi says. He does not need to point this out, Jing Beiyuan is rarely ever surprised. It makes Wu Xi wonder, sometimes, how he did it. Surely it cannot all be a mask of emotions, surprise concealed in blank, vacant stares, or twisted into falsely knowledgeable smile. Yet if he had anticipated it, and thus wasn’t surprised, surely the man in front of him was a Heaven-sent strategist and schemer, not possibly human.
“Of course not,” Jing Beiyuan says, tidying up his scrolls. “It was obvious that this would happen. When you have your nose to the dirt as long as this one has,” a stray piece of hair falls from his careful knot. “Even footprints so carefully disguised are visible to the eye.”
Wu Xi isn’t exactly sure how Jing Beiyuan was keeping his nose to the dirt when his white robes were immaculate and he rarely stepped foot out of his Estate but keeps quiet all the same. The matters of the Palace were for him to consider and to shoulder, Wu Xi could only watch mildly from the outside and attempt to make head or tail of its ongoings.
He wonders idly now, as Jing Beiyuan finishes writing something in neat, even calligraphy, if it was possible at all to surprise the man. If he thought three, four times ahead of both those who he kept dear and those he considered enemies, where was the joy to be found from chance happenings or coincidences?
Jing Beiyuan was soft on him and let him see sides of him he wouldn’t show anyone else, Wu Xi knew this, understood it, and was immensely grateful for it. He wondered if he considered him someone he needed to anticipate and plan for, or if he was allowed to be a potential external factor in the meticulous itinerary of his life, the un-oiled cog that temporarily stalls the machine.
With this in mind, Wu Xi reaches out a finger and tucks that stray piece of hair behind Jing Beiyuan’s ear, his touch slow, lingering. Jing Beiyuan does not twitch away, nor does he bat his finger. He just gives Wu Xi an unreadable smile, surveying him carefully.
“Did you know I’d do that?” Wu Xi asks, impulsive as he always is.
“What do you mean?”
“You always seem to know everything before it happens. Nothing surprises you. Do you consider me somebody you must plan for? When you look at me in this room, are you thinking of what I’m going to do next?” Wu Xi has always been blunt, and he’s never regretted it. What he wants to know he will know, and a refusal to answer is an answer in itself.
Jing Beiyuan is quiet for a moment, then says, “Wu Xi, you always manage to surprise me.”
Uncertain what to do with this kind of reply, he sinks back into his seat and tries to spur his mind into thinking. “Then, you don’t plan for what I do?”
“If I had an unlimited amount of energy and time,” Jing Beiyuan says, with a bit of mirth, “then perhaps I’d allocate some to think about what you could do in this room. I do think about you,” he says, and his voice gets quite tender. “I planned for your future, and for the people around you to not dislike you. I curried favour, bribed, and lied so that you would be safe when you walked out of your doors. But if you ask me if I spend my nights mapping out potential conversations or actions you would take when you come in for a lecture, then I do not. You are not somebody who I need to plan for in that regard.”
Wu Xi feels like an unspeakable amount of trust has been placed upon his shoulders. He thinks about all the other people in Jing Beiyuan’s life and comes to the correct conclusion that there is nobody else he could let himself go with like this. As he reflects upon this epiphany, Jing Beiyuan continues, “don’t start using this as an excuse to do what you like with me. While I may not plan ahead for you, I can still very well guess. You are quite an open book.”
Oddly, he feels like a challenge has just been issued. “So what am I going to do now, then?” Leaning forward over the table, he eyes Jing Beiyuan up and down rather sceptically.
A bright smile crosses the other’s face, and he too leans forward, pressing into his space. “See, I guessed correctly you’d take the bait,” then he laughs heartily. “Now you think I’m too close. What will you do? This humble one has been told he’s easy on the eyes but dares not make too much of a fuss about it. He will leave it up to your discretion.”
Wu Xi fights back a sneer. “Men of Nanjiang never back down from a confrontation.”
“Is this a confrontation?” Jing Beiyuan’s voice has gone low, husky, the same timbre as the flicker of the candlelight. “I hadn’t intended on making it one.”
Wu Xi thinks that hadn’t intended isn’t a phrase that should exist in Jing Beiyuan’s vocabulary. Any reaction he incites is one that he has carefully plotted his way toward. Feeling that the best thing to do now would be to do nothing, he falls back into his seat with an indifferent sound. The smile on Jing Beiyuan’s face is ear-to-ear, making the moment even more aggravating. He holds that expression for more than a heartbeat, then finally he rises, dusts off his robes and says, “while it is always lovely to have you here, the day’s ongoings have left this one quite exhausted.”
If Jing Beiyuan can predict what he plans to do without needing to think about it, then Wu Xi will simply stop thinking about his actions. In the presence of the beautiful man that he has decided to make his own, he’s found that he often does think too much. Wanting to be presentable and desirable but not lecherous, wanting to be handsome and strong but not domineering, he has worried and fretted excessively. He’s done with of all that, he thinks faintly. He will be enough the way he is, and if he isn’t, then perhaps he’d try again in another life.
Jing Beiyuan personally escorts him out the Estate and stands just before the gate, his back shrouded in shadow, his front drenched in the moonlight. Like this, he looks so pale he’s almost ghostly, his skin a silvery colour that makes him look more spirit than human. There’s a painful flash through Wu Xi’s mind like a sudden headache. The mercury sheen on his dark hair brings to mind images he has tried quite desperately to suppress, and he thinks of the man with snow-white hair and whose eyes had curved when he’d seen him, shameless and loving.
This split second is all it takes. As he brushes past the Prince, he turns his head and leans forward, pressing a feather-light kiss to the soft skin of his lips, so fleeting they might not have touched at all. Yet Jing Beiyuan goes so still he could topple over, and the moonlight highlights the tense muscles of his shoulders and neck, carving him out of the darkness like a statue.
“I will see you tomorrow,” Wu Xi inclines his head formally like he hadn’t done anything out of the ordinary.
“You…” he says, a dry smile crosses his face, then it curves his eyes and breaks his face in half, genuine. He’s absolutely breath-taking, Wu Xi’s heart grows two sizes just watching him. “Alright,” he says, voice light. “I will readjust my predictions. It seems I did not anticipate this sudden streak of brazenness of yours. Perhaps I should avoid pouring oil onto the fire.”
Wu Xi gives him a small smile, the kind that only his beloved gets to see. Then gently, the way you’d prod a child to get to the deeper meaning, he asks, “how great a fire do you think it is, Beiyuan?”
This sudden question again throws him off, yet it is only Wu Xi’s practised eye that sees him stop to ponder for a moment, because his response is almost instantaneous. “It has been several years, yet you are still like the moon keeping to my heels, unshakeable indeed. I’m afraid however large I say the fire is, it would not be big enough. Would the Shamanet agree with this one’s assumption?”
This reply has tugged an even bigger smile from Wu Xi.
“I understand you cannot put out a fire with one small cup of water,” Jing Beiyuan continues. “I wonder what it would take to quench you completely.”
“How many cloths would it take to soak up the ocean?” Wu Xi counters. “How may hands to block out the sky?”
Jing Beiyuan seems delighted with this turn of conversation; his smile mirrors Wu Xi’s and does not stop growing. “What poetic words,” as he speaks, the moon disappears behind a dense cloud, and the entire front yard is immediately shrouded in shadow.
“I owe it all to lao shi,” Wu Xi says, the picture of politeness. Two eyes shine in the darkness like bright lamps, mischievous like a cat, then Jing Beiyuan leans forward and kisses him, kisses him thoroughly, kisses him ragged. His hands are in Wu Xi’s hair, pulling him down and into him and Wu Xi feels drunk when his hand curls onto his waist and he finds it as small as he imagined it to be. Jing Beiyuan leans into his body, melding against him--
Then it ends as quickly as it started, abrupt and sudden. Jing Beiyuan slips out of his grasp like wily snake and withdraws to an appropriate distance. The unfathomable smile on his face is once again illuminated as the moon breaks free from its covers. “The fire is a pressing matter, and I am the one who holds the water in my hand.” His voice is entirely unaffected by what just happened, while Wu Xi still feels like a fish pulled rudely from water. “Haven’t you afforded me too much power?”
“No,” he says, breathless and so in love. “You can have much more.”
That smile melts off Jing Beiyuan’s face like he’d been splashed with cold water, yet his next sentence is laced with an undercurrent of warmth. “You should be off now, Shamanet. The later the night, the more dangerous the road.”
With difficulty, Wu Xi excuses himself and steps over the threshold of the Prince Estate. He only turns back once to look at the Prince, but the image is burned into his mind forever. Tall, slim like a willow branch, carved from stone, in the moonlight he is a sharp blade. But in Wu Xi’s hands, and only his, he is pliant and soft. The contrast makes him breathless once more, and he hastens his steps, because if he knows if he doesn't, he would stay there forever.