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morituro —of someone who is next or destined to die
Su Nan was never one for teaching.
It just wasn't how she functioned. The Wang Family were very conscientious of using people's strengths and placing their weaknesses in line with someone who could alleviate them, which was how they were so efficient. And deadly. There weren't many chances to work on combatting your weaknesses because there wasn't a need for it; you just passed off the problem to someone who could handle it. So Su Nan had never really gotten good at teaching, because she knew she wouldn't have to. That skill was to be left in the hands of someone else, someone who was excellent at molding the minds of the next generation, of inspiring duty and honing precise, deadly aim. Su Nan, for her part, was the action, and she was good at it, too.
At least until she dislocated her shoulder, badly, and was forced into remaining at the compound while she healed. And since there wasn't much to do at the compound besides medical work (which she was not trained in) or training (which she had at least completed, once upon a time), she was sentenced to overseeing combat training for the next generation of Wangs.
"I hate this," she muttered. "Why are they all looking at me?"
"Shut it," Wang Cen whispers from the corner of his mouth, "You're a mentor now."
"Fuck off."
"Recruits!" Wang Cen says in lieu of a reply, voice booming loudly against the shadows. "You are all here because you show promise. Potential. We in the Wang Clan know how best to use that potential, and we will show you how you can use yours. We are a family, here, and once you have proven yourselves, you will be able to join that family. So!" He claps his hands. "Split yourselves into pairs, and go through the original ten forms. Wang Nan and I will be observing."
The room breaks into reluctant chatter as the students get up and find sparring partners. Wang Cen tosses his head toward one half and then heads in the direction of the other, which means that Su Nan's on her own for this one.
She stalks over to her half of the cadets, who are all beginning to throw punches at each other tentatively. She barks a few commands, straightening some legs and directing arms to throw stronger punches. They aren't bad students. They just aren't experienced.
And then she finds the bad student.
He's leaning up against the wall, face blank, expressionless. His arms are crossed over his chest and he has one foot planted on the wall, giving him an air of nonchalance, but he's too tense for that; Su Nan can tell. He's ready to attack, if and when the need arises.
But he's also got this smirk attached to his lips, which is making Su Nan want to punch him.
"Cadet!" she yells, expecting him to start, and he does, but only a little, just a flinch before he's turning lazy eyes toward her, smirk refusing to falter. A defense mechanism, then. Su Nan recognizes it because it's one of her own. "Why aren't you going through the forms?"
"I don't have a partner," he says, waving a hand at the rest of the room. Some of them have stopped their own training to look at the confrontation, but they quickly get back to it when Su Nan glares at them. "You can't spar without a partner."
"I'll be your partner, then," Su Nan says flatly. She widens her stance, beckoning him forward with the set of her jaw. "Come here."
He looks at her, dubiously. "You're injured."
Su Nan rolls her eyes at him. "If you think that having an arm in a sling is enough to stop a Wang, then you have a lot to learn, still." She nods at him. "Come here."
Slowly, the young man slides himself forward, off of the wall. He takes a few careful steps towards her, and then he lunges, going for her ankles, a move that problem would have succeeded if Su Nan hadn't been waiting for it. Like she said; he's tense.
Instead, she sidesteps him, using his momentum to guide him off-balance, and then brings her leg up, driving her heel into the small of his back and sending him straight to the floor.
"Too slow," she tells him, watching as his shoulders bunch as he scrambles back to his feet. The smirk is gone now, replaced by a flattening of his lips. His eyes shine like cave beetles, wet and glittering. The corners of his mouth turn down and he flicks his eyes to her injured shoulder, and so he's going to play dirty, okay, Su Nan can work with that.
She prepares to defend her vulnerable side, and is almost surprised when he feints, leaning back into a high kick that aims for the ribs she just exposed. She manages to block his strike in time, hooking her arm underneath his shin and twisting, and he falls onto his hands in a safety position. She lets his leg drop, and he turns his hips, springboarding back up to his feet.
Su Nan is impressed. Reluctantly, but impressed.
"What's your name?" she asks.
"It will be Wang Can," he replies, and his upper lip twitches with something more genuine than a smirk.
"Wang Can," Su Nan mutters, and then attacks, a series of flying kicks that are meant to barrage, to overwhelm, ending with a punch to the sternum that sends Wang Can flying onto his back, winded, mouth open as he gasps for air like a fish, but his eyes are still steady, still black, still laser-driven and focused even as he lies defeated.
“Get up,” she says.
Wang Can does.
“Get up,” Su Nan whispers, trying not to startle him.
Wang Can is one of them, now, so it doesn’t take much for him to wake, sitting up in the dark, keeping silent. Su Nan can’t see him very well, but she knows he’s looking at her, waiting for orders.
“Get your gun,” she says, “We’re going out.”
Wang Can obeys, not saying anything else until they’re out of the barracks, heading back into the forest. “Where are we going?”
“We’re going to practice night skills,” Su Nan replies, and Wang Can groans.
“Aw, no,” he says petulantly. “Do we have to?”
“Do you want to die in a tomb in the future?”
“No.”
“Then we have to.”
There’s no more argument out of him after that, at least until she’s lead them to one of the more remote areas, far away from prying eyes and ears.
“Do you have the night vision equipment?” Wang Can asks.
Su Nan shakes her head, then remembers that he probably can’t see her all that well. “We don’t need night vision. Equipment can break. You won’t. So you’re going to learn how to get buy without any of that.” She holds out the clay pigeon gun to him, letting him feel exactly what she’s holding. “Just drill shots. Like you do every day.”
“We don’t do drill shots in the dark,” Wang Can mutters, but she can hear him putting his gun together anyway. That’s not something he has to practice; he’s already an expert at assembling weapons without looking at them. He gets his gun put together, crouches on the forest floor. “Ready.”
Su Nan fires a clay pigeon, and Wang Can shoots.
He misses, because of course he does. No one can get things perfectly on their first try. In the dark, she can almost see him considering, adjusting, learning as quickly as the information comes.
“Again,” he says, and she fires.
His second shot misses, but his third strikes. It’s not the sound of a perfect shot—it must glance of the pigeon and send it hurtling into a tree instead of just smashing it midair with the bullet—but he hit it.
“Good,” Su Nan says.
“Again,” Wang Can responds.
She fires for him again, and this shot is closer to perfect. They go again, and then again, and by the time the sun is rising, Wang Can can hit five in a row, straight through.
He looks tired, a little rumpled from being in the forest all night, but there’s a triumphant sheen in his eyes, and his smile is just on this side of exhilarated.
“Good?” he asks.
“Good,” Su Nan responds. “Let’s go get breakfast.”
They walk back through the forest together.
“You’re leaving soon, right?” Wang Can asks her. His tone is casual, but she can hear the anxiety under the question.
She’s left before, but she always comes back. This mission, though, is a little different. This is part of their ultimate mission, the one the Wang family has been working toward for decades. This is the important one. She has no idea how long she’ll be.
“Yes,” she says, “You’ll have to keep training hard. We’ll spar when I get back. Maybe you’ll be able to beat me, then.”
Wang Can scoffs out a laugh. “I could beat you now. You just refuse to fight me.”
“Because I would kick your ass,” Su Nan says confidently. “Who knows? Maybe you’ll be going on field missions of your own by the time I come back.”
Wang Can shrugs, his eyes tracing the forest. “I like it here. I don’t know if I’d want to go somewhere else.”
“I’m sure you’ll find somewhere,” Su Nan says. “When you leave, there’ll be a place that you’ll always want to go back to.”
“What’s yours?” Wang Can asks.
Su Nan shrugs. “A hole-in-the-wall noodle house in Malaysia.”
Wang Can makes a face at her. She laughs and pats him on the back, stopping herself from messing up his carefully pulled-back hair. She’s not suicidal, nor is she affectionate.
Later, she wishes she had done it, because it’s two entire years before she sees Wang Can again, and by that time, she’s already too late.
Li Cu’s a brat, but he’s Wu Xie’s brat, and despite herself, Su Nan likes Wu Xie, just a little bit. So when she finds Li Cu in the Wang compound, there’s really nothing else that she can do other than help him. She’s already on the way out; the Wang illusion has been dispersed. She’s seen them for who they are, now, and she wants out.
They’ve still got him, though, and in the two years that she’s been gone, they’ve turned him into a soldier, just like her.
Su Nan was never very good at teaching, but the Wangs, as a whole, are, and they’ve taught Wang Can very, very well.
He chases them through the compound. He chases them through the forest. He’s got rank, a commanding presence, and Su Nan would be so proud of him if she didn’t hate the people that he was commanding for. The Wangs are not doing this for the interests of others, like they said. They’re doing it purely for their own gain, and all of these disciples following hers… they’re all just kids, really.
She looks at Li Cu. At Wang Xiaoyuan. At Wang Can.
They’re fucking kids.
They don’t deserve this. They don’t deserve the adults that put them here, that stripped them of their childhoods, of their innocence, and armed them with guns too big for their unscarred hands and sent them into battle.
Wang Can barks orders into a handheld communicator, and Su Nan feels her heart break, just a little bit more, because he’s so young. He shouldn’t be here. None of them should be here.
But he’s… Wang Can is a Wang. That’s all he ever tried to be. He followed in her footsteps, and then he outpaced her, and now, here he is, coming up with the steps on a different trail.
He attacks, and she’s thrown back to the boy without a partner, leaning against the wall, unconcerned. His eyes are the same, his lips curled in a smile. He pushes a bookcase over, trapping her beneath, and going for Li Cu, who is so much softer than Wang Can ever was.
Li Cu’s clever, though, and he’s fought Wang Can before. He knows how he moves, how he reacts, and he’s able to keep him at bay as Su Nan struggles out from under the bookcase.
She goes to the microphone.
“Wu Xie,” she gasps, “It’s Su Nan.” She hears Wang Can yell in frustration, but she keeps going. “You have to leave immediately. This building will soon be filled with poisonous gas. Can you hear me, Wu Xie?”
Behind her, Wang Can throws Li Cu through a wooden slat piece, breaking it into sharp, jagged edges. He towers over him, picking up one of the shards to use as a weapon.
“You saw the password every day,” he says. “Too bad you won’t have time to think about it.”
Su Nan doesn’t think about it either. She grabs the scissors from the desk drawer and sinks them into Wang Can’s shoulder.
He yells, drops Li Cu, and turns on her. The wooden stake in his hand is splintering with green paint. She holds her pair of scissors, painted with fresh blood, and presses down. He holds her back; they are locked into each other, a pair of cogs in a crumbling machine.
“Try Wang Xiaoyuan,” Su Nan yells to Li Cu, who scrambles up and over to the computer.
Wang Can glowers in frustration, because she’s guessed it, she knows that. He finds some trickle of strength, deep inside, and thrusts the wood at her, but she saw that coming. She’s always been able to read him.
He’s a Wang, now, and she doesn’t want them to have him anymore.
She stabs. The scissors puncture his neck, and then, when he falls, his shoulders, his upper back. He coughs, blood spilling over his lips, and she kicks him down, makes sure that he stays before looking toward Li Cu, who is smiling.
“I guessed it,” he says.
Su Nan almost smiles, almost finds some glimmer of joy in their victory, when the miserable croak of a voice stops her.
“I want you,” Wang Can says, pulling the pin on the grenade he’s had hidden away, because he’s a Wang, because she taught him well, “To die with me.”
He throws the grenade.
Time ticks down in Su Nan’s head.
She has seconds.
There are two people she can save; two at most. There’s a window that leads to fresh air and clean grass, away from the gas and explosions that are about to rend the compound apart. If she’s quick, if she’s fast, maybe she can save two of them.
Wang Can is on the floor. Li Cu is behind the computer, his eyes only just widening as he realizes what’s happening, and she chooses.
Li Cu is Wu Xie’s kid, just like Wang Can is hers.
She grabs Li Cu, and with strength that can only be attributed to adrenaline, lifts him bodily and slams him through the window in an explosion of glass.
Li Cu doesn’t make a sound when he goes. Su Nan looks just long enough to make sure that he’s free of the building, tumbling toward the earth, and then turns to look for the other person with her—
She doesn’t make it in time.
The grenade explodes, blowing up the wall and throwing her away from the window. It hurts. Her legs feel ripped and raw, and there’s shrapnel worming its way under her skin, and her ribs are shattering. Her once-dislocated shoulder aches. Her head pounds.
She lands on her side, blood forcing its way past her lips from where she’s bitten into her tongue. She coughs, hearing the telltale hiss of gas. She’s a Wang. They are Wangs. Wangs never do anything in halves.
Slowly, painfully, she manages to roll over, to drag herself across the few scant inches between them. She needs to get to him. She needs him to know.
Wang Can’s eyes are half-lidded. His hand is pressed to the stab wound in his neck, blood pouring from in between his fingers. He’s almost gone, and a part of Su Nan is grateful that he won’t have the mental capacity to experience what’s coming next, because she’s seen the gas tested, and she knows that it’s a slow, painful death.
That’s what’s coming for her, and maybe she deserves it, but not Wang Can, however bad he’s turned. He never deserved this.
He blinks at her, mouth fluttering, and for the first time, he looks scared.
“Get up,” Su Nan whispers, forcing the words past the blood in her throat. “Wang Can, get up.”
He doesn’t. He can’t. He just looks at her, hair falling around his face, blood on his cheeks and neck and hands. His fingers slip off of his neck and he doesn’t have the strength to replace them. His hand folds into his chest and his breath gurgles. Blood flows.
She reaches out, stretches her fingers as much as she can, but she can’t reach him. He’s too far away, now.
She wonders if he ever found his Somewhere.
She hopes his Somewhere is better than this.
“Jiejie’s sorry,” she murmurs to the shell of a boy next to her, and then the gas takes them both.