Work Text:
It’s you who paints the bulk of Mo Xuanyu’s talismans, although he was the one to show the characters required for the ritual. His hands are stiff from too little warmth and shaking from too little food, so you bring him what comforts you can and he sits by your shoulder and assesses your work.
Painting talismans is like wielding a saber. When you first picked up a brush for this purpose, your white-knuckled grip broke it; a bone-crack of a sound to match the black blood-spatter of the spilled ink. The knowledge of your talisman’s effect was the knowledge of your saber’s edge, as though a fight was about to start and you would be as helpless as always, your grip unpractised in the movements required for victory.
Routine alone has worn the shock away into something bearable, just as it has worn away the sting of playing the fool with your brother’s killer.
“You have steady hands,” Mo Xuanyu says, one quiet evening. His voice is low and measured, blatantly accusatory in its pointed calm. How many talismans have you painted before, Nie-zongzhu? There’s often an accusation buried beneath his words, and who can blame him? He knows why you keep him company, what you’re winning from him with gifts of poisoned of honey—fine food, kind words, the knowledge that someone believes what spills from his painted lips. A-Yu has never known love without conditions, and conditions… Well, they so often change.
“Oh, Xuanyu, it’s nothing so salacious as you imagine,” you reply. “I like to paint, that’s all.”
Once, you liked to paint. It’s rather fallen by the wayside in recent years. It isn’t of use in keeping up the facade of useless, frivolous Nie Huaisang, so what’s the point of indulging in it? You keep birds because their acquisition bleeds money from the sect, and you can blink, wide-eyed and uncomprehending, when Jin Guangyao explains this to you; you collect pornography so he can scold you about your indiscretions. Painting is altogether too respectable for the Headshaker to engage in.
Mo Xuanyu gives you a long look, as though reading the truth from your face. Perhaps he can—nothing makes men kin to each other like vengeance.
“Of course you do,” he scoffs.
In this stale and dusty room, your boyhood seems like a lifetime ago, but you can summon the spirit of youthful mischief with far less sacrifice than the spirit of your long-dead friend.
“Do you have any hobbies, a-Yu?” you tease, knowing full well that the answer is no. Even if his life left him any room for simple pleasures, Mo Xuanyu is as focused on his revenge as you are on yours. Both of you have carved away the parts of yourselves which are unnecessary.
His answering smile is a mean little thing that makes him look nothing like either of his brothers, and all the better for it.
“I don’t know, Nie-zongzhu. I’m very busy with my studies.” He waves a talisman at you, mimicking your airy tone. When you bat it away, careful not to smudge the still-drying ink, he laughs—then hesitates. His expression turns far away, wistful, the nostalgia for a life that could never have been his. It makes you want to snatch the mask from his lap and force it against his face until his expression is no longer one you can recognise in the mirror. You continue to paint. “Jin-zongzhu never let me learn to ride. Neither of them did. But I watched the lessons sometimes.”
You listen half-heartedly as he speaks—unable to force yourself to inattention, but unable to act as though his words mean anything for your shared future. You were taught to ride, just like every son of the gentry, but it never came as easily to you as it did to your brother. He treated his horses with the same respect as his saber. For all their beauty and strength, you preferred to keep company with your birds.
Mo Xuanyu continues for a while, filling the silence with the rise and fall of his voice, until he doesn’t. Your hand goes still above the ink-pot, a wordless acknowledgement of the change.
“You paint,” he says, then stops.
Mo Xuanyu is an adult by now—as old as you were when you first heard his name, or thereabouts—but it’s easy to feel older than your years in his company. His life has left him with few opportunities to learn the rhythms of social interaction between compatriots. His emotions change with the wind—like yours did, as a boy—and it’s a good thing that no one takes him seriously, because he shows every nuance of how he feels.
You look at him, at the strain on his face as he struggles with whatever he wants to say. Any reply you could give would be the wrong one. Blithely agree, and he’ll think that you’re mocking him for stating the obvious—which wouldn’t strictly be untrue. Misdirect, and he’ll never have the chance to get his words out. You simply wait for him to gather himself.
“Would you paint me?”
“Yes. Why?”
The immediacy of your answer isn’t a surprise to you. Mo Xuanyu’s suffering at the hands of his family is something that you’ve made no effort to spare him from, but there are some kindnesses you can afford to grant in the dwindling time before he gives up his life.
You place your half-completed talisman aside as Mo Xuanyu frowns, considering his words further. The parchment that you use in this matter is hardly suitable for portraiture, but it isn’t as though you’ll have an opportunity to retrieve some of the fine canvases that gather dust in Qinghe. With a wrinkled nose, you select the most untarnished of the pieces available to you.
When he speaks again, his voice is very quiet.
“There were paintings of Rusong and Rulan.” Ah. No one has ever painted Mo Xuanyu, because no one ever thought he was worth the acknowledgement.
You reach out, catch his chin between your fingers, and he goes still—prey caught in a trap.
Like everything that Lanling Jin has laid a claim to, Mo Xuanyu is beautiful. You, of course, once enjoyed beautiful things. The further from Qinghe’s standards of beauty—stark and lovely as they are, on the days the weight isn’t too much to bear—the better, and Lanling Jin has always stood in contrast to them, if not in outright opposition. Their opulence is as calculated as the Nie sect’s lack of it; you caught your first bird within those walls, a shining songbird which had escaped from Jin-furen’s chambers.
“Mo-gongzi,” you murmur, testing the sounds on your tongue. He flinches, an ugly shudder running through him, and colour rises to his cheeks beneath the remnants of yesterday’s powder. “Or Jin-gongzi?”
His scornful huff of air does nothing to hide how he trembles in your grasp. He’s so very fragile; if you weren’t breaking him, something else would. At least this way, someone gets some use from his suffering.
“With the powder,” you continue, “or without?”
His eyes are so much like his half-brother’s, wide and dark as a wounded doe’s. You brush your thumb over his lips, pressing inwards to feel the dryness of his mouth. At least he doesn’t have his half-brother’s silver tongue; he would be dead, not exiled, if he’d ever shown a hint of that danger.
Banishing thoughts of Jin Guangyao from your mind, you comb your other hand through Mo Xuanyu’s hair, tugging at the tangles of dirt and grease to pull him closer. He makes a noise of pain, a cold breath against your palm. When you kiss him to inspire a flush to his lips, it draws another noise from his throat, a different kind of pain. His grip on your arms is bruising.
“Well, Mo-gongzi?”
“I, ah…” He’s as dazed as any young lover. One hand comes up to touch his mouth, his fingers ghosting across his lips. “Just leave it as it is,” he replies at last, too flushed to be firm.
You smile, bow your head, a pantomime of deference. Though he clings to you still, you pull away; the fragile, careful parting of silk threads. Your hand is the last thing to leave him, lingering on the roughness of his cheek, until even that warmth, you take from him.
“As the young master wishes.”
As Mo Xuanyu collects himself, hands toying with the mask in his lap, you assemble your tools just as you once did every day. Even here, you wear a long-lost self. Easier to play the part, no matter how much of that costume you shed in Mo Xuanyu’s company.
You have two inks—black for plain writing, red for where the talismans call for blood—and one brush more suited for calligraphy than for portraiture. The light filtering in from outside is that of early dawn; time, too, is an inadequate tool. A shichen, being generous, before Sect Leader Nie can no longer risk being seen here. You’ll make what you can of it all.
Mo Xuanyu has settled into fidgeting; having never sat for a painting before, he doesn’t know how to stop the stillness from bothering him. You always enjoyed the time to think of frivolous things, but his thoughts gnaw on him in the silence.
“Keep still, Xuanyu,” you say. His answering glare glimmers with tears.
He starts crying before you even finish sketching his proportions. You force yourself to look on, unmoved, viewing him through the eyes of an artist rather than the eyes of a man. You will have to bear witness to far worse things in the months to come.
Black for the outline, for his dirtied feet and the shadows under his eyes. Red for the accents, for the unhappy curve of his lips and the borrowed robe wrapped around his shoulders.
If you were a crueller man—if you took your playacting to heart and painted him as the sect heir he never was—you would place a dot of red on his brow. But Mo Xuanyu shivers before you, his sun-starved skin showing through under smudged powder, tear-tracks, ruined and true.
“I wish it could be like this forever,” he says, miserable.
It would be kinder if you could agree with him, and kinder still if you could make it so. But your connection is that of a saber clutched in two hands; without a battlefield, nothing would bind you together. You won’t—can’t—pretend that a half-mad failure of a boy means more to you than the vengeance you will achieve with him as a weapon. He will never see Qinghe.
“Come here, a-Yu,” you murmur in reply. It’s all the tenderness you can offer him.
He curls up against you, leeching your warmth away as you wrap your free arm around him, rubbing his shoulder in absent soothing. His stifled sobs are companion to the scratching of your brush, though they ebb as he watches the essence of himself take shape on paper. Your memory suffices to fill in the fine details of his face, his posture; it is a faithful depiction, if an unpolished one.
You will keep the painting when you go, that’s certain. What would he do with it—what would happen if it were found? You have no use for it either, but… There will be a place for it, somewhere in your rooms where no one else will ever see it.
“Something to remember you by,” you say, then regret it.
“Will you?”
When the time comes, Mo Xuanyu will sacrifice every part of himself to bring back the Yiling Laozu: life, spirit, and flesh. Even if anyone alive cared enough to give him a tombstone, there will be no ghost to pacify and no corpse to bury.
His family will be dead within the week—perhaps even the day. The jianghu knows him only by rumours. Will the Yiling Laozu even think of him more than the ritual demands? In the end, you will be the only person to remember Mo Xuanyu as he truly was.
You don't answer.