Work Text:
in the form of devotion and prayers, silently passion shall be portrayed. do so quietly and peacefully.
on an early evening at heyu tea house, a young lady — more or less at the age where her parents would have started looking for a husband — hollers a greeting with a voice loud enough it makes even the nearly deaf man's head turn in surprise.
until now, her antics are at the very least still confined to her table.
(though the dangerous rocking back and forth on her stool does not seem promising.)
as always, her friend is clearly unfazed by her behavior, though he does politely scoot away upon sitting down and asks for her to calm a bit all in his usual tone.
his usual tone .
"hey, xingqiu, do me a favor!" she does, in fact, not calm down, and continues before xingqiu can inquire any further, “describe your tone for me.”
a puzzled look — a single raised eyebrow, scrunched to meet at his glabella, what a fancy word! a slight head tilt and there he goes, playing with his puffy sleeves. how fancy, and how improper of him — his father would definitely scold him, yes, but this is worth noting.
this is fun, hu tao realizes, but judging by her friend’s expression, he does not quite understand. a pity!
of course, he asks her to elaborate. “whatever do you mean by that, my liege?”
another fancy term, though it does start sounding a bit weird after a while — “the tone you usually speak in, when you’re not particularly attempting to portray a certain emotion,” — unlike this, a slightly higher pitch to indicate a genuine question, damn, she’s pretty good at this.
“ah.”
she lets him do his thing, this time, and leans so far back she knows her chair is more likely to fall over than it is to stand still. at least the sky looks pretty; a mental snapshot of the view that she will hopefully not forget by the time she’s back in her office later, as hu tao doubts she’ll have a lot of time for a walk.
xingqiu clears his throat, and somehow hu tao’s chair does not fall over. "i believe i was taught to speak well-mannered, usually with little unnecessary variation in pitch. perhaps i do tend to sound a little less serious, though, amongst certain company."
in agreement she hums and nods. neither of them do anything for a moment as hu tao wanders off somewhere far away and xingqiu, quite accustomed to this, simply waits.
unsurprisingly, the topic she comes back to is not the same one they left unfinished. “you didn’t bring anything with you today…” hu tao curiously eyes her friend and watches him tense ever so slightly — he is an aristocrat, not a royal, they don’t raise their kids to be that unintelligible to read — “or is there something up your sleeve?”
what a nice word-play. out of a little bag, she grabs a notebook and pen and jots it down with a quick annotation while xingqiu is very much busy coming up with excuses she won’t believe anyways.
they’ll have a quick laugh afterwards, since all of this is in good faith, but she does believe a proper explanation is warranted after three weeks of absence and an empty return.
“you see,” he begins, and hu tao slowly packs away her notebook to fully stare at him. classic intimidation technique, she knows her stuff.
except that it would work on anyone who was not as confident as the unwilling second heir to the biggest industry in liyue. how unfortunate for her, xingqiu is quite the experienced forger of truths that sound just silly enough to be true.
“i was uninspired;”
a blink; a few more. “well that was straightforward. since when are you that open with your feelings?”
characteristically, a look of deep hurt. he leans back, hand on his heart, eyes and mouth wide open in shock, the entire spiel: “how could you accuse me of being anything but painfully honest,” ;and hu tao zones out because she can’t help but notice how, very typically, xingqiu to deflects using humor and teasing.
not that it’s serious, she knows xingqiu is fine , she just finds it strange the very same way others find her bluntness unsettling. why is it unsettling, anyways? she works at a funeral parlor and she has news to deliver. there’s always blood on her hands, in one way or another.
“perhaps i was wrong to assume only the best of you, my liege and dearest friend”, because xingqiu is of course not done and does not notice that hu tao stopped listening a while ago.
not that he would mind. this is a thing of back and forth, a game of dominos that can stop and play in reverse at any point in time.
when hu tao grabs her notebook, she notices a splash of blood on the page she’d written in and wonders if she could get sued for carrying a safety hazard. a similar spot of discoloration on her coat, all of which she decides is a lot more interesting that hearing xingqiu put up an act of excuses.
“i just dissected a body, by the way,”
naturally, xingqiu comes to an abrupt halt. “oh.” mild concern displays itself in his features quite evidently before he remembers who he is talking with and his tone delves into a much more relieved “oh, okay. who was it?”
it had been a busy week, so it takes a moment for her to remember — was it the old lady that suffered from a stroke or the man that sold fruit down the street? a pity he died, really, the lavender melon he imported from inazuma were always delicious. perhaps the little girl, though she realizes that one was a while ago, and that she already sent the little one off with her favorite stuffed toy despite never finding out why she died.
finally, it clicks. “ah, yeah, the old man that lived a block away from me. i had to determine whether his maiden poisoned him for his wealth or if he passed of old age, a dire thing, really. it’s always a battle trying to find traces of the possible causes of death in time…”
“but,” a pointed look in xingqiu’s direction, and she takes joy in the way he knowingly cowers in his seat, “i still made it perfectly on time with my own batch of works written.”
xingqiu knocks on the table and she, per tradition, calls him a nerd for following rules of courtesy from the akademya before they laugh it off. and still, his lack of everything , excitement and motivation alike, it does not leave her mind. “where are you, xingqu?”
how nonchalant! she asks it so casually, though it would deserve its own paragraph in writing, given all that hu tao intends it to imply.
he responds with a look that she would describe as taken aback. slightly widened eyes, he stares for a moment and chews at his bottom lip. and if her observation is correct, then good . he deserves to be taken off guard every once in a while. perhaps a certain spark is to be reignited with change.
“give it some thought, maybe,” she says, hands him her notebook and a pen.
the first few pages are filled with sketches of various parts of the human anatomy, all based on an elderly lady that died a few months ago. her ribs are forever embedded into the paper, the way her skin folded when she was turned over on her deathbed and her heart that clearly does not beat even now.
her name is annotated at the corner of the first page, date of birth and death included.
“she consented to this?” xingqiu can’t help but ask. hu tao watches him put his fist over his heart to imagine the sheer size of it. alive, well.
“granny was an artist,” she explains. xingqiu merely nods, then opens to a random page in the middle of the notebook;
an assortment of lines reads the title, all of which dated,
whatever desire may be; it is sin. unholy and drenched in sweat, a muddled thing. do not speak of it, do not mention its name, wash your hands, rub clean your skin until it bleeds. do not think of her. do not think of how she makes you ache. do not look at your hands and think of how you would bleed for her. do not think at all.
unintelligible, scribbled nonsense. one glance at hu tao, she grins and it seems just as sly as usual.
you would cut off your tongue in search of the right thing to say.
a few pages later and the lines are blank. at the very corner, so small that xingqiu almost misses it, reads the very same question he was asked just a few minutes ago.
“i just wrote that before i gave the notebook to you, i am no psychic,” hu tao reassures him at his expression of concern. “now go ham. i have clouds to be staring at.”
evidently, i am seated in the pavilion of heyu tea house, eagerly awaiting the announcement of yun jin’s next show. however, in the meantime, there is a feather in my hand, or perhaps a simple pen. either way i find myself quite exhausted and incapable of conjuring up verses or rhymes, or a proper metric to sow this all together.
my mind drifts elsewhere these days. i might be drifting in the very clouds my friend is staring at. currently, i find myself on my bed thinking of the man whose hair i was caressing minutes before i left. his hands were sticky from the syrup and oh, how i wish i was back.
maybe i’ll leave early today. my handwriting is much too messy to fill this book of artistry anyways.