Work Text:
花吐病
"You made flowers grow in my lungs and, although they are beautiful, I cannot breathe."
It begins a week before the Crux Fleet is due to sail.
They are a tangle of limbs in the Tianquan’s bed, two naked bodies entwined with crumpled sheets and messy hair. Ningguang wakes first, drawn to consciousness by the gentle warmth of the morning sun casting its rays across her cold bedroom. Beidou continues snoring next to her, an arm comfortably tucked around her bare waist. The Tianquan props her head up on one elbow, tracing the snoozing Captain’s jawline with a finger. Beidou’s nose twitches.
Ningguang smiles, and feels a tickle at the back of her throat.
The Captain snorts once, cracking her eye open sleepily. Her voice is a low rumble in her throat when she murmurs: “Ningguang.”
“Beidou,” she whispers back, watching a crooked smile tug the Captain’s lips upwards.
“Haven’t had enough, have you?” Beidou teases, a strong hand closing around her waist and hoisting her up to rest on her.
Ningguang laughs, laying her head on Beidou’s shoulder. The tickle in her throat grows uncomfortable. “When are you leaving?” she asks.
A pause. “End of the week.”
“How long this time?”
The silence drags on a little longer before Beidou says, “Eight months.” Then, she quickly adds, “Don’t worry. I’ll get your stuff done.”
Ningguang nods. The tickle turns into an itch she needs to scratch. She coughs once, twice — and something dislodges inside her throat. She leaps to her feet, running to the bathroom, coughing and hacking into her hand. The object is small and flat, sticking to her throat like paper, but she finally spits out the invasive piece alongside a globule of blood. Wiping a trickle of crimson from her mouth, Ningguang stares at it.
Sitting on the palm of her hand, flecked with red, is a single glaze lily petal.
She finds Beidou just outside the bathroom clad in her underwear, hopping nervously from foot to foot. Ningguang walks out numbly, the petal safely tossed and her hands washed clean.
“Ning?” Beidou asks, a tinge of concern in her gruff voice. “You okay?”
The Tianquan nods. “I’m quite alright,” she murmurs, ignoring the tickle at the back of her throat when she lifts her head to look at Beidou. It can’t be, she thinks, it can’t be. “Just… choked.”
The Captain laughs, a hearty sound that puts all her worries to rest. “Way to start the morning,” she teases, and turns away to dress herself.
Ningguang does the same. On days where the Captain sleeps with her, Baishi knows better than to enter. It is Beidou who takes her role, who cards her fingers through Ningguang’s hair and gently parts the silky tresses, pulling half of it into a bow-shaped bun. It is Beidou who slides the ginkgo hairpin through, securing her hairdo, and Beidou who clips the little tassel on her head, brushing her fringe while she puts on her eyeliner. It is Beidou who stands behind, gazing in adoration as Ningguang checks herself in the mirror, ever the perfect image of grace.
It is Beidou’s hand that Ningguang catches, just before the Captain turns to leave. “Take care,” she whispers, and the scratchy feeling in her throat seems to grow.
Beidou catches her lips in a quick kiss. “You take care of yourself, Ning.”
The Tianquan watches the Captain leave, as quiet and as stealthy as she enters the Jade Chamber when she docks. The tickle in her throat eases, just a little.
Theirs is a relationship built solely on mutual benefits, a scale that is perfectly balanced between desire and demand. For everything Ningguang takes, she returns to Beidou something of equal value. And so it is for the Captain to her.
Such is their contract. Ningguang takes, Ningguang obsesses, Ningguang claims. Beidou gives, Beidou possesses, Beidou denies.
But neither of them love.
It can’t be.
The end of the week arrives far too quickly. Just like that, the nights they spend learning each other’s bodies come to an abrupt end. Ningguang walks Beidou out of the Jade Chamber, stopping just before the plaustrite elevator. She lifts her clawed hands to adjust Beidou’s fur cloak. Her throat tickles, as though a leaf is brushing against its walls.
Beidou smiles, rubbing the crease between her white brows. “You’re awfully pensive today. Gonna miss me?”
Yes, she thinks. She will miss Beidou with all her heart and all her soul; she will feel like a moon without the stars, like a sea without a shore. “No,” she says.
Beidou laughs knowingly. And, if Ningguang dares to let herself imagine, her laughter sounds just a little hollow. “Of course not.”
It’s far too easy. Ningguang watches Beidou step onto the plaustrite, watches her turn and give her a jovial wave. It’s a wave as big as her heart, as wide as her ambitions, as free as her wild spirit.
Ningguang could not possibly ask her to stay. Instead, she stands like an immovable rock on the shore. “I’ll be waiting,” she reminds Beidou, gentle and quiet. She will be watching the waves as she often does alone, waiting for the seas to bring the Captain home.
“I’ll come back,” Beidou says, as she always does. But this time, she gives her a cheeky grin and adds, “What could keep me from you?”
Ningguang thinks of the glaze lilies strangling her from within, and smiles.
When Ningguang lifts her calligraphy brush, she sometimes thinks of Beidou, of what they cannot be. She dips her brush in ink, letting it dance skillfully across the blank parchment. In her mind’s eye, Beidou sits opposite. Always a little too near, and yet just a little too far. In the end, they are meant to be separated. A desk, an ideal, a duty.
Oh, but if she was a painter, she would know exactly how she wants to capture Beidou. She’d catch Beidou in the middle of their endless quibbles, just when she tries not to smile. That self-deprecating tilt of her head. The laughter in her eye.
Ningguang gazes at Beidou’s name on the paper and sighs.
The week after Lantern Rite passes in a blur. Between administrative decorum and new appeals, NIngguang has stayed busy. The tickle in her throat comes and goes, but she finds that there’s a pervasive scent in the air: the sickening tang of iron mingling with the scent of fresh flowers.
“Do you smell that?” Ningguang asks her secretaries once, when they stick page after page of information on her wall of intelligence.
“Lady Ningguang?” Baiwen asks.
“Flowers.” She closes her eyes and inhales. “Fresh flowers.”
The puzzled looks they give each other tell her they do not.
Two weeks. Three. And then — a month.
The tickle at the back of her throat turns into a persistent itch she can’t scratch. Her tea, her bath, her pipe — everything smells of fresh flowers. Sickeningly sweet fresh flowers tinged with iron.
Ningguang carries herself with the same grace, the same power, the same wit. She addresses her nation and mediates the Qixing’s squabbles with a flick of her pipe and her sharp words, all while wearing a confident smile that doesn’t reach her eyes.
When she closes the door to her room, she is greeted with an empty bed and far too many echoes. The bed is tidily made. Her heels are the only pair of shoes by the doorway. Her tea is brewed for one. When she flings open her window and casts her gaze over Liyue Harbour, she finds herself searching for the silhouette of a ship on the dark horizon.
When the cough comes, it comes suddenly. It’s like powder kegs igniting in her lungs; she scrambles for the bathroom as she coughs into her hand, her ribs rattling with the force of her hacking. She spits out one glob, another, and finally a third. She sinks to her knees, tears pricking her eyes as she stares at the three bloody petals in her hand.
There is a cure, of course. All Ningguang needs to do is go to Bubu Pharmacy and tell Doctor Baizhu she is coughing up flowers. He can take it away the way the Raiden Shogun takes Visions away. She will stop coughing; she will heal.
But she will never love again.
She will forget how to love Beidou’s booming laughter, or their awkward fumbling as they memorise the curves and lilts of their bodies. She will forget how to love Beidou’s brashness, her bullheadedness, her kind and protective heart. She will forget the warmth that Beidou gave her during those lonely nights after the first Jade Chamber fell, when she dreamed of a world where she lost everything to Osial.
She can’t lose this, Ningguang thinks, she can’t. She can lose everything but this.
“Beidou,” she sobs, letting the bloody petals fall to the floor. What am I to do?
Ningguang remembers a night where they sat at the Jade Chamber’s courtyard, watching the full moon with a glass of wine and a chessboard.
“You ever regret your life choices?” Beidou had asked as they lay on the cool stone, gazing at Teyvat’s sea of stars.
“Why would I?” Ningguang replied.
“Huh.” Beidou chuckled. “I suppose the calculative Tianquan wouldn’t have regrets.”
Ningguang had rolled onto her belly, propping herself up on her elbows. “You mean to say the well-traveled and knowledgeable Captain Beidou has regrets?”
A hearty laugh. “I’m human, you know?” Beidou sat up with a grin. “I love my crew, but there are days when I wish I was just a simple fisherman. Simple worries. Catch fish, sell ‘em, raise a family.”
Ningguang gazed at her, marveling at how the argent moon bathed Beidou in silver and softened her broad shoulders. Swathed in moonlight, she looked nothing like a fearsome pirate lord of the seas. She was human, just as much as Ningguang was.
Even so, Ningguang had never thought about such matters. She’d dismissed them all as merely fragments of the heavy price she had to pay for her ambition. But looking at Beidou now, at how human she was, with that gentle smile on her lips and a sea of calm in her eye — perhaps, Ningguang admitted, Beidou had a point.
“I believe I understand,” the Tianquan replied, lifting her head to the sky. “In another life, my sunsettia business might have been successful.” And perhaps we could be— “An exclusive trade route from Mondstadt to Liyue, selling the sweetest fruits.” Her lips curved upwards in a small smile. “But I’d be bored after some time, I’m sure.”
Beidou rolled her eye, turning to meet Ningguang’s gaze. Her eye was beautiful, Ningguang remembered thinking; it shone like a brilliant gemstone that put all the treasures of Teyvat to shame. “In another life,” the Captain murmured, “I would have loved to sell fruit and get bored with you, Ning.”
Ningguang blinked, her questioning stare now boring into Beidou’s skull. Her next words were breathed, quiet and sober: “But not in this life, Captain?”
Beidou turned away, till all Ningguang could see was her red eyepatch. “Not in this life, my Tianquan.”
It’s easy not to think about her while the sun shines high over Liyue Harbour. The hubbub of activity and business is all Ningguang needs to stay distracted. Between the Qixing’s affairs and the upcoming policy changes, the Tianquan has, quite literally, no time to think.
But when the demands of the nation fades away into the stillness of night, Ningguang becomes painfully aware of the constant itch at the back of her throat, of the faint rustle of leaves within when she takes a drag. The dewy notes of glaze lilies weave into the thick, musky base of tobacco the same way Beidou cards strong fingers through her silvery hair. If she draws a deep breath, she can feel the air tickling the tips of leaves growing in her lungs. It’s uncomfortable. Her lungs feel full.
The disease has progressed faster than she thought, despite the distance and her work. Perhaps it’s because everything in the Jade Chamber reminds her of Beidou — from the porcelain vase on her shelf to her favourite blue dress, almost everything was touched by the Captain. Ningguang can remember exactly where Beidou’s calloused fingers would press against the mahogany when she peeks at her bed from around the screen. If she places her hand right there, she can almost imagine a cord drawn tight between them, as intimate as skin.
Regardless, Ningguang takes great care to maintain her image. She continues sipping tea though it tastes like bloody flowers; she eats breakfast though it’s nothing more than chewing glaze lilies. She adds just a little more tobacco to her pipe; she lights sandbearer incense in every room to keep the scent of flowers at bay. She closes both eyes to the echoes of Beidou resonating in her Jade Chamber, focusing only on work and on business. And yet, the mere thought of her name causes a coughing fit to bubble up from deep within.
Every time Ningguang feels her breath hitch, when she feels a thorny vine poke her throat, she scrambles for something, anything, to take her mind off Beidou. She voraciously devours scholarly studies of Rex Lapis to records of the adepti’s feats. She dabbles further with the Guizhong Ballista and meets with craftsmen to discuss a new expansion to the Jade Chamber.
Sometimes, when she’s doubled over in the bathroom coughing up glaze lily petals, it occurs to Ningguang how ridiculous this sickness is. Is the exquisite heartache of unrequited love simply not enough? Must it be so unnecessarily cruel?
She steps out of the bathroom after composing herself on one of these endless days, and Baiwen meets her along the corridor to her office.
“Lady Ningguang,” she greets.
“Yes, dear Baiwen?” Ningguang turns, pipe in hand.
“Yelan from the Ministry of Civil Affairs is here.”
Her eyes narrow. Yelan’s arrival does not bode well. The spy enjoys her independence greatly; for her to visit suggests there is likely a matter of grave concern. Ningguang settles in her chair, taking a drag and smelling nothing but flowers. “Very well.”
Her special intelligence officer saunters in with a polite nod, placing a thick folder on the desk. “Fontaine’s economic policies,” she says, “Natlan’s will be arriving within the week.”
Ningguang leafs through the folder, rapidly absorbing the information like a sponge. Fontaine’s innovations are responsible for market unpredictability. Last year, they’d developed a unique kamera that required thin sheets of low-quality noctilucous jade, and all of a sudden, prices soared sky-high, almost driving Liyue Harbour’s economy into a downturn. The Tianquan learned her lesson from there. When drafting policies for the year ahead, one should always look at their irritatingly unpredictable neighbours.
If Beidou were here, Beidou would laugh and make a scathing re—
Something round lodges in her throat. Ningguang puts the folder aside, her eyes suddenly watering.
“Ningguang?” Yelan asks.
“Ex… excuse… me,” she mutters, hurriedly rising to her feet as the coughing starts. Ningguang stumbles into the nearest bathroom, shutting the door and locking it. She falls to her knees, doubling over. Her vision blurs as she coughs into her hand again and again, her lungs desperately trying to expel the object choking her. Her body heaves; with a great shudder, Ningguang manages to spit out the item together with remnants of her breakfast — a single glaze lily bud, coated in blood.
She half-laughs, half-sobs. Mechanically, Ningguang throws the bud into the bin and covers it. She cleans the floor and washes her hands, cleaning her eyeliner as best as she can. She pauses to check herself in the mirror. A gaunt woman stares back, her wine-red eyes empty and dull.
Ningguang allows herself an undignified snort. Who would look alive when all they can hear is the rustling of leaves in their chest?
She walks out to see Yelan staring.
“Choked on saliva,” Ningguang lies.
“That did not sound like saliva,” Yelan replies, “You were laughing to yourself.”
She hates the spy right about now. “I have Doctor Baizhu looking into it.” Ningguang turns on her heel, striding back to her office and giving Yelan no chance to push the matter. She hears the spy catch up with her a few seconds later. “Where were we?” the Tianquan asks brusquely.
Yelan says nothing until Ningguang settles back in her chair, opening up the folder again. “Who is it?” the spy asks. Her emerald eyes are dark.
Ningguang raises a perfectly-sculpted brow.
Yelan sighs. “You can’t fool me, Ningguang.” She opens her hand to reveal the bloody glaze lily bud, deftly snatched from her bin when she had walked away.
Oh.
The Tianquan sighs, closing her eyes. “It’s none of your business.”
“I prefer my employers alive and well, thank you.”
A hollow chuckle. “I’m mortal, Yelan. I will die anyway.”
“You won’t take the cure?”
“No.”
Yelan stares at her in disbelief. “Ningguang. You worked your ass off to get here, Jade Chamber and all. You’d give up everything you’ve ever dreamed of for this person?”
Yes, Ningguang thinks, anything. And she’d give much, much more to ensure Beidou didn’t return until this is over. “There’s nothing you can do, Yelan,” the Tianquan says with a wistful smile. “By the time she’s back…”
I will be gone.
How long has it been? Two months? Three? Somewhere along the way, Ningguang has lost count. But one thing is for certain: she can no longer keep up pretenses.
Her lungs ache with the fullness of flowers blooming in her chest. Their roots crawl between her ribs, hungry for nourishment; their stems reach upwards into her throat, demanding air. She hears the rustle of leaves with every breath and it drives her insane. Everything tastes like bitter greenery and blood and she can’t eat. Leaves and flowers crowd at the back of her throat, jostling for space. Water wets them, calms them, but also clumps them together in a disgusting lump that shifts awkwardly every time she swallows.
Ningguang can’t remember how it feels like to breathe normally again, or the scent of the Jade Chamber’s fresh air. She swallows thickly, and the leaves in her throat respond with a rustle, like the canopy of a forest kissing the sea wind.
It’s feeding on her, absorbing her strength. She watches herself wither further every morning, her cheeks sunken and her skin paler than snow. She imagines how the glaze lilies will burst from her chest when she dies, like some macabre work of art. Glaze lilies are beautiful and so very rare, after all. Perhaps they will bloom most beautifully on her corpse.
It won’t be long now. Rumours fly across Liyue Harbour when the Jade Chamber closes its doors. Whispers of Tianquan Ningguang’s declining health reach her ears, along with tales that her ghostly pallor and sunken eyes are the result of a sudden, wasting illness. They’re not wrong, Ningguang thinks, but she pays them no mind. She has little time left.
She spends her waking moments gazing out at sea, hoping to glimpse her star of death before she passes.
Better Beidou does not know. Better she return after the funeral; better she never visit Ningguang’s grave. Just as Lady Ningguang belongs to Liyue first and foremost, so does Captain Beidou to the sea. Beidou doesn’t need to blame herself for this. No one is to blame. But she can blame Ningguang, if she must. That is the plan.
Beidou, Beidou, Beidou. Each thought drains her of strength, and she smells only the metallic tang of blood and fresh flowers. She sits in her office, in a chair far too big for her now, and meticulously amends Liyue’s book of laws late at night.
She can’t go to bed. The memories are too much this time. She might never breathe again.
She focuses on the laws, making notes on a separate parchment. At some point, Ningguang thinks she hears the sound of familiar heavy footsteps, but she dismisses it as just imagination. It’s her poor mind wanting to be freed from the agony of breathing through flowers and leaves. She doesn’t look up from her work, not until a shadow falls over her desk. Ningguang scowls, lifting her head.
A brilliant ruby eye widens in shock.
Beidou.
Shock gives way to horror when Beidou gets a better look at her. “Ning?” she whispers, “What happened to you?”
Ningguang stares, frozen. This isn’t right. It’s only been three months. She was supposed to be gone for eight.
“What’s going on, Ning?” Beidou asks, softer this time. She reaches out—
Ningguang quickly jerks her hands back away from the table. “Shouldn’t I… be the one asking that?” she asks, her tone brusque and harsh, rasping around the edges. “You’re not supposed to be here.”
She regrets it a split second later when she sees the shock and hurt cross Beidou’s eye. “I received an urgent message,” the Captain says tersely, “I cut my voyage short.”
Ningguang’s eyes narrow. “Who?”
“Doesn’t matter, Ning.” Beidou reaches out again, but the Tianquan leaps to her feet and backs away. The other woman stares, confused and upset.
Tears prick her eyes. Beidou approaches, but Ningguang keeps backing away. No, no — this wasn’t part of the plan, Beidou shouldn’t be here, Beidou should have—
“Please, Ning,” she begs, “Talk to me.”
Ningguang keeps stepping back until she hits the wall. Beidou draws close. Too close. She shudders, eyes widening when Beidou reaches for her hand. Vines crawl up her throat. Flower buds lift their heads within her chest, blooming with deadly force.
If they touch, she will—
She bursts into tears, shoving Beidou aside when the coughing starts, far more violent than before. She runs into the nearest bathroom and falls to her knees as flowers crowd her throat. Ningguang claws at the wall in frustration, choking and sobbing; tears mingle with blood and saliva as she hacks up torn petals with each cough.
But the flowers — the flowers are stuck. They bloom at the back of her mouth and she can’t breathe. In desperation, Ningguang reaches into her mouth, tugging at the glaze lily all while coughing and sobbing. With a groan and a choked scream, she pulls the bloody flower out by its petals, feeling its thorny stalk drag along her throat. She cries and cries, tugging harder until the stem snaps and the flower falls out of her mouth.
More flowers bloom, an explosion of petals and vines rippling up from her chest into her mouth. Flowers blooming and blooming like how love did, filling her lungs over and over until she’s full to bursting—
“Ningguang!”
Warm hands touch her shoulders. And just for a moment, the flowers close. She sucks in enough air to rasp out a “Beidou,” before the lilies open, choking her again. Ningguang turns to bury her face in the pirate’s chest, sobbing helplessly. The thorny vines scratch her throat as she coughs and hacks until her body spasms violently and a glaze lily fills her mouth. She reaches in again, pulling the blooming flower out; she blubbers incoherently when the stem snaps once again, lacerating her throat.
Love hurts.
“Please,” Ningguang begs. She had thought it’d be a tranquil death like the stories she’d read. Quietly choking on love and flowers and all things beautiful. Not like this, not with her spasming body screaming to live while she pulls out glaze lily after glaze lily and drop after drop of blood splatters onto the floor.
Please just let me die.
“Who is it?” Beidou almost shouts at her, gripping her shoulders so tightly she thinks she might burst. “Just tell me, Ning! I’ll get them here, and you’ll be fine. I promise!”
She only sniffles and shakes her head. She can’t. She can’t be the rock that grounds Beidou, be the shackle that binds her to the land. Beidou doesn’t want to be bound; Beidou is free. She has always been free. And Ningguang only wants her to be—
“Ning.” Her gruff voice, usually so strong and firm, now breaks. “Please, stay with me,” Beidou sobs. Ningguang is vaguely aware of how tightly the pirate holds her, of the hot tears kissing her face.
It hurts, Ningguang wants to say, it hurts that the words suffocate her every time she wants to speak. It hurts to know every moment with Beidou is as fleeting as the glaze lilies she coughs out with each dying breath; how their time together blooms so beautifully and withers so quickly into dust.
“Tell me who it is,” Beidou begs, “Let me—”
“You,” Ningguang rasps, desperate for the agony to stop. “You…” Beidou.
The pirate freezes. “Me?” she repeats, “I… I put you through this?”
Ningguang wants to laugh. She’d expected this; she’d known from the start that hope was futile. But what she didn’t expect is that Beidou would have to watch her wither away and die, knowing full well that she can’t save her.
Because we never loved each other, we were only ever—
“I’m sorry,” Ningguang chokes, hating how a glaze lily dangles from her lips, its stalk stretching deep into her chest. “You don’t… you don’t have to…” More flowers bloom in her throat, cutting her words off. Her eyes widen at the agonizing pain of glaze lilies crawling up from her lungs, bursting into her mouth.
It’s exquisite, some morbid part of her thinks. Love — her love, blooming so beautifully for Beidou to see. Words she could have never spoken, whispered from every glaze lily that awakens in her chest.
But Beidou — Ningguang doesn’t think she’s ever seen such a terrified expression on the pirate before. Despair is written all over Beidou’s face, and her skin is whiter than snow. “Ningguang!” Beidou almost screams, “What do I do… what can I do?!”
Live, Ningguang wants to say, her vision blurring as more glaze lilies crawl up her throat. Live your life for me. She tries to keep her mouth closed till the bitter end, until the flowers burst out with all the fiery passion of love, blooming on her lips.
This is it, then. The glaze lilies fill her from mouth to chest, and she can no longer breathe. She hopes, at least, that in another life — if ever there is one — we can be bored together—
Fingers brush the flowers aside. Something warm and soft and sweet touches her lips; she feels her heart melt into the heat. In a field of endless glaze lilies, Ningguang breathes.
There is one other night that Ningguang often reflects on. It is a particularly cold night, she recalls, and the sea is restless as Beidou prepares to leave. It will be another long season of waiting.
“Thank you,” Ningguang had breathed on this icy night, fingers clutching a fur cloak that Beidou had draped over her shoulders.
The Captain looked at her, all tender and warm and soft. “What for?”
Her breath hitched in her throat, just a little, before she answered: “This.” Ningguang gestured to the furs, to the wine glasses at a corner, to the stone chairs they sat on as they spoke of everything under the sky. “For the good times. For always coming back.”
Beidou opened her mouth, but Ningguang simply stepped forward and pressed a finger to her lips. “I love you,” she whispered for the first and, she knew, the last time.
The pirate was stiffer than a gangplank. “Ning—”
“You don’t have to say it back,” Ningguang interrupted, taking a drag. “I only wish to remind you that your life is not yours alone. So, you must take care.”
Beidou’s normally-bright eye was clouded by a murky swirl of emotion. “Ningguang,” she whispered. She was trembling.
“Don’t pity me, nor blame yourself,” the Tianquan murmured, exhaling her love together with smoke and watching both dissipate into the night. “Live your life, Beidou. Just the way you want to.”
“And you? You’ll just… wait for me?”
Ningguang lifted her head, a wistful smile on her lips. Beidou was a child of the sea, the untamed and uncrowned Dragon King. She could never stay on land for long. She craved adventure and freedom; she loved as wildly as she lived. Ningguang’s love, however, was an engraving upon a rock, a shackle on Beidou’s ankle, a cord that would keep her tethered to a life that would slowly kill her.
Perhaps Beidou was right. Not in this life. But in another life, perhaps, Ningguang would have loved to sell fruit and be bored with her.
“Always,” she said.
When Ningguang opens her eyes, she finds herself staring up at the familiar mahogany ceiling of her bedroom. She’s stared at it countless times, her eyes idly tracing every grain of wood as she lost herself in thoughts. Shakily, Ningguang sucks in a breath, half-expecting to smell disgustingly-fresh flowers and hear the sickening rustle of leaves — nothing.
Fresh air runs down her raw and stinging throat, filling her lungs.
What…?
“Ning.” A calloused hand gently cradles hers. She turns, her gaze resting on Beidou. The pirate’s eye is swollen and puffy; her shoulders are hunched. She looks like she’s trying to make herself seem as small as she can despite her bulky frame; she looks like she’s gone through a war while Ningguang was asleep. “Thank Morax,” Beidou whispers, “You’re finally awake.”
Finally?
The confusion must have shown in her eyes, because Beidou reaches out to stroke her hair gently when she adds, “You’ve been out for three days.”
Ningguang blinks, struggling to open her mouth. Her jaw is as sore as her throat. “Beidou,” she rasps, wincing at the stinging sensation rippling through her throat when she speaks.
“Shhh.” Beidou turns away, taking a cup. She slides an arm under Ningguang’s head, propping her up and holding the cup to her lips. “Drink this, it’ll help with the cuts in your throat.”
Ningguang silently obeys. The warm liquid smells of mint and sweet flowers — two scents she has not inhaled in what feels like forever. It soothes her stinging throat when she swallows.
“You’re okay,” Beidou coos softly, setting the cup aside.
“I’m…” Okay…? That means— her eyes widen. “But…”
Quietly, Beidou moves to sit on the side of the bed, guiding Ningguang to rest on her chest. Her gruff voice is quiet when she asks, “Why didn’t you tell me, Ning?”
Ningguang finds she cannot answer.
“Would you really have just…” Left me?
Yes, Ningguang realises, yes, she would have. She would have left Beidou just like how the Captain leaves her for the world every time. All the love she had for Beidou that she’d had to swallow each and every time they met — some tiny part of it had festered into vindication over the years.
She’d thought she could accept this… fine balance they tread, between loving and yet not quite loving. She’d thought she could handle it, these seasons of waiting, always waiting, as Beidou comes and Beidou goes like the waves kissing the shore. And when the flowers bloomed… she’d thought it only poetic that this time, she would get to be the one who goes.
“No,” Ningguang says.
“Liar.”
Ningguang does not meet Beidou’s gaze. Eyes are the gateway to secrets, and these are selfish thoughts that do not fit someone of her stature. Ningguang takes. Beidou gives. Ningguang claims. Beidou denies.
Where are they now?
“I should have known,” the pirate sighs.
Ningguang lifts her head, staring at the melancholy written on Beidou’s face.
“I was a coward,” she continues, “You gave me your heart, and I let it shatter.”
“The heart doesn’t choose who it loves,” the Tianquan replies, “I don’t blame you.”
Beidou shifts awkwardly. “That’s not what I—”
“It’s over now,” she interrupts, “I’m fine.”
Ningguang sits up, away from Beidou’s chest. Hot tears sting her eyes once again. Funny how she would have rather died there and then on the bathroom floor, would rather have had Beidou discover her blooming corpse. Funny how she’d rather break Beidou’s heart so exquisitely the pirate could never love again, than continue living with the knowledge that Beidou can’t give her the love she dreams of. Just a few more weeks, and it would have been over.
Instead, she’s left to cradle her broken heart again. “We can go back to—”
The rest of her words drown in warmth when Beidou catches her lips in a deep kiss. This isn’t like the kisses they always share, their touches driven by only lust and desire. This is imperfect and magnetic and goes by a million names. This is the land rushing up to meet them and the sea crashing into the sky and the stars falling into the moon and it is everything Ningguang has ever dreamed it could be. Her heart melts into the heat of Beidou’s lips, sealed under a new covenant.
When they finally part, it is for the sweet cool air to rush freely into Ningguang’s empty lungs.
“No,” Beidou breathes, gazing at her with swollen lips. “We’re not going back.” Her hands weave into Ningguang’s silky tresses, fingers grazing her scalp. “You didn’t let me finish, Ningguang. You never let me finish. You jump to assumptions before I even start talking.”
“And you don’t?” she asks, breathless and giddy with anticipation.
Beidou smiles a crooked smile. “Not this time.” She takes a deep breath. “I waited too long, Ning. I feared too much. I thought this would protect us both.” She looks down. “I should have said this long ago. It’s been on my mind all this time, every time, ever since we met.”
Ningguang’s chest tightens, but the flowers do not bloom.
Beidou leans close, her cheeks suddenly tinged red. “I think I love you,” she whispers almost shyly, “I think I always did.”
Ningguang’s own cheeks burn. “You think?” she repeats, a smile tugging at the corners of her lips.
“Morax’s wrinkled ass,” Beidou scowls, “I swear, Lady Ningguang, I will—”
Ningguang steals her threat with another kiss, the kind where the world implodes before their eyes in a heady haze of fire. Beidou’s lips and tongue against hers, her fingers on her face, in her hair. Just the way she dreamed, warm and tender and intimate, as though they are falling through the ocean to the sky.
And when they pause to catch their breaths, she sees the love blooming in Beidou’s eye, far more beautiful than all the flowers she’d coughed up for her.
“I love you,” Beidou says again, firmly this time, holding her close.
Ningguang closes her eyes, thinking of the flowers blooming all around them. A field of love to be tenderly watered for the rest of their lives. “I love you too.”
—FIN.