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“Then good fucking luck.” Rin will never be pretty but Nezha thinks she manages striking quite well— her eyes cut like broken glass, her skin catches the firelight like bronze does. She’d be almost as good at being a statue as she is at being a murderer. But Nezha can’t let go. They’re sitting on the sampan for the hundredth time and Nezha can’t let go.
“This doesn’t have to happen,” he says.
Silence. Static.
“I’m serious. Rin.”
Nothing. Her face is cold and hideous and lovely and frozen in time.
His voice shakes. “I don’t want this— come on. Just take it back. Take it all back. It’s— it’s not that bad. They did it to me too.”
She turns towards him at that and just smiles. Nezha wants to throw up.
“Don’t go,” He begs. He doesn’t know what he’s saying. “That’s all I ever asked for— I wanted you to stay. Here, with me.”
That draws an ice-cold bark of laughter from Rin. Finally she’s animated again, moving and talking and living. “Don’t give me that shit. Stay where? You should know better than anyone that there’s no place for me somewhere run by the Hesperians.”
And Nezha—
Nezha doesn’t have an answer to that. “I love you,” he says, instead.
Rin blinks. “That’s not a good reason. It wasn’t a good enough reason for you not to stab me.”
Nezha recoils.
The clouds roll by them like smoke. Nezha is breathing in gulps of nothing. Static flickers in his ears.
An unspecified amount of time later Rin sighs. “Look. It was always going to happen. That knife went into my back the second Vaisra went for Hesperian aid.”
“And it was just a coincidence that my hand was on it?”
Rin’s eyes harden. “No. You’ll never love me more than you love your duty.”
“Don’t say that.” Nezha’s breath grows ragged. Don’t cry don’t cry don’t cry don’t cry.
She’s completely right, is the horrible thing. Nezha loves her so much he could die for it but it’s really not all that important because his first and most important love is his country. This he knows above all else.
Rin sees his the look on his face and snarls. “Oh, so you can’t even hear the truth about yourself—“
The words burst out of him unprompted. “You want truth? I’ll give you truth. It doesn’t matter whether I love you or not because the only thing you’ll ever love is pain. I don’t know who addicted you to it— Altan? I bet it was Altan.” He spits Altan’s name with a special sort of bitterness. “But it’s a part of you now. You love pain and you don’t understand why anyone would hate to suffer because you think torturing yourself has made you stronger but it hasn’t, it’s driven you insane, it’s broken you over its knee, and you think it’s made you a better soldier but that’s only because you’re too numb and broken to feel anything. So I guess you win. You’re a good soldier, Rin, but you’ll never be a functional human being.”
Rin’s expression goes terrifyingly flat. “Fuck you,” she says, pleasantly. “Fuck you, you don’t know anything about—”
“No. I know you. I don’t understand you but I know you and you can’t pretend that I don’t.”
“That’s not true,” she insists.
“You’ve never once given me reason to believe it isn’t, Rin.” Nezha’s voice breaks. “I poured my heart out to you. I let you see the worst thing that ever happened to me and you told me that—” he chokes on his own breath. “You told me I was weak because I didn’t love my baby brother’s murderer. How could you?” His voice is wretched and anguished, blood dripping from every word. He can see it there on her skin. On his hands.
On the knife.
Rin’s eyes are dead-empty. “Power is power, Nezha. Power could’ve saved lives. Jinzha. Your father—”
“—don’t talk to me about my fucking family—”
“—and you don’t get to say anything, either. I showed you where my wounds were, too. And you stuck a knife in them.” She pauses, letting out a giggle. It’s too high-pitched, too shrill. It sounds so utterly wrong. “Nezha, I really thought you were going to kiss me on that— on this sampan. I wanted our last memory together to be happy.” Her voice grows hoarse, like the beginning of a sob. But Rin’s eyes are always dry.
“That would’ve been nice,” He agrees.
The clouds roll by them like smoke. Nezha is breathing in gulps of nothing. Static flickers in his ears.
“We found the Trifecta’s corpses,” He says, suddenly. “Tarcquet wanted to dig them up. Make sure they were dead for real. I thought it was a horrible idea, but, well.” His shoulders shake. He feels like he’s supposed to be laughing. “Good job, by the way. They were all curled up together when we found their bodies.” It’s the kind of death I would’ve wanted for us is what he doesn’t say. “Jiang’s skull was smashed in. Daji was at the bottom— I think she suffocated, but the autopsies are ongoing. No survivors.” Nezha closes his eyes. “They’re cutting them up. They’re living legends. Nikan’s heroes. And they’re— dissecting them.” His breath comes out a wheeze with the effort it's taking him just not to cry.
“And they’re doing the same to you.” She hums. “Would’ve done the same to me. That’s why it had to happen, Nezha.”
He rests his head in his hands. “Did it? Couldn’t we have been better? Smarter, somehow? Was there ever a happy ending in the cards?” He needs to know whose fault it was, where it all went wrong.
“I’d like to remind you that I am a figment of your imagination,” Rin says, swinging her legs.
Nezha slumps. “No. I’d never be this cruel to myself.”
“Yes, you would. See, I can prove it.”
“What—”
Rin kisses him.
He’s burning alive— figuratively, because he’s in love, he must be in love. This is what they should’ve had. He doesn’t know what it would feel like to kiss her, is the thing. He can’t tell if her lips are soft or chapped or anything, and then he realizes that he’s burning alive literally because she’s breathing fire into his mouth. This is what it should’ve been. Just him and Rin and the fire, and then he’d be clean, then it wouldn’t matter whether he was strong or weak.
The fire sinks into his lungs. They’re surrounded by water but the Dragon isn’t here. He’s free. He’s free. He’s fucking free, finally—
Yin Nezha wakes up to a cold bed. There are handcuffs around his wrists and a country on top of his shoulders. And everyone he’s ever loved is dead.