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"Are you mad that I never gave you parents?"
"Sometimes," Yanqing admits. "Other times I pretend I'm a Vidyadhara." He puts his fingers to the top of his head to mimic dragon horns. His hair flows straight down from the front of his ears - Jing Yuan tucks them back. Yanqing sticks his tongue out and then squeezes his cold toes under Jing Yuan's thigh. "Do you regret not giving me parents?"
What a complicated question with an uncomplicated answer. "Yes," Jing Yuan says.
Yanqing smiles at him. "You're always stuck in the past, General."
It will be a full moon tonight. "Let's sit outside," Jing Yuan offers.
Yanqing grasps his hand. "Well, it's be a lot weirder if I called you Father," he says, even though that's what Jing Yuan had essentially been to him for a long time even if he could barely be there, between his General duties and the guilt of raising his to-be assassin so tenderly. He does not say why it would be weirder, Jing Yuan is not sure if their reasons would be the same; he is not sure if he wants Yanqing to elaborate. He says, when Jing Yuan does not reply, “maybe I’m used to it.” A pause. “Outside, then.”
The pavilion, unchanged, is where Jing Yuan once hid in behind the tall broad leaves to watch Dan Feng and Yingxing sit close together and then closer, where he once laid with Jingliu with his head in her lap and she ran her fingers through his hair and told him he should cut it. Yanqing tips his head back, his skin drinks up the moon, and the tips of his eyelashes are white.
Yanqing reaches for the wine , and tips it back. He does not cough or splutter like Jing Yuan expected him to - but that had been how many years ago, when Yanqing still came up to his shoulders, trying to posture and needle his way into locked cabinets. But he's grown tall enough to hook his chin over Jing Yuan's shoulder to read reports he has no business in, the nosy boy.
Last week Jing Yuan had seen him seated cross-legged with a circle of his men, an uncapped bottle of alcohol passing between their hands as they laughed, and when one of them had elbowed Yanqing in the side, he’d elbowed him back as he grabbed for the bottle.
Wordlessly Yanqing passes the cup to him, and Jing Yuan puts it to his lips. It's slick on his tongue. It’s a cold day today, and they’re pressed shoulder to shoulder, their knees knocking together.
“Oh,” Jing Yuan says, “A-Qing, you are growing up.”
Yanqing laughs, bright and brilliant. “With you, A-Yuan.”
Yanqing’s hair is smooth, silk in Jing Yuan's fingers, flowing over his shoulders in rivulets, twisting as the man does. It's rare to see his hair down these days; once it's gone past his shoulder, he's tied it into a bun. "So it doesn't get in the way," he says. Yanqing has always been practical about anything that involves his sword fighting, Jing Yuan's aesthetic sense notwithstanding. It looks good, flowing in the wind. Sue him. "It gets in my face," Yanqing spits at him. "Bleh."
"One of these days-" There's a tense little crick on his shoulder, "-I'll get it cut again and then I can wear it down." He won't, though, because the longer his hair is, the more time Jing Yuan has to spend combing it.
It's quiet between them as he does. Jing Yuan pauses to see why. Yanqing is nodding off.
Jing Yuan tugs his hair.
"Ow!" Yanqing jolts up. He whirls around, a tick to his cheek, and Jing Yuan smooths it out with a hand. He scowls at Jing Yuan, who smirks at him. An elbow to his gut.
“Did you know,” now Yanqing is combing Jing Yuan’s hair for him, “what a Knight said to me the other day?”
“Mm?” Jing Yuan says sleepily.
“You’re going to find it ridiculous,” Yanqing says, even though his voice wavered a little. “He said, Lieutenant, the way you met General Jing Yuan is so romantic! Hah!”
“Romantic?” Jing Yuan says.
Yanqing snags a knot a little too hard on his hair, gasps, and then strokes the crown of his head apologetically. “My men asked how we met,” he grumbles, and Jing Yuan imagines him hiding his face behind his head.
Jing Yuan cannot think anything romantic about it. "What did you say?"
"That you rescued me." He puts his chin on the back of his shoulder. The side of his face is warm. "Carried me back all the way and took me home."
"Ah," Jing Yuan says. Yanqing grumbles when his shoulders shake - his belly warms with laughter. "Did you tell them you were an infant?"
Yanqing shoots up. "Of course not!" His hands go back to Jing Yuan's tresses. "After he called it romantic?"
"Are you embarrassed, Lieutenant?" Jing Yuan says.
A pause. "Of you, General?" Yanqing must have leaned in, his front warm against Jing Yuan's back, his breath ghosting over Jing Yuan's ear - he suppresses a shiver. "Never."
"General-"
It would have been less complicated if Jing Yuan let himself be Father. Or maybe Yanqing would have hated him more. "You're going to have to kill your old man one day, you know." It was easier to say, "a master's greatest wish is for their student to surpass them."
"Fu Xuan says you'll still be kicking around for at least another century," Yanqing scolds him. A mean poke at the wound dressing on his flank. "Are you so determined to prove her wrong?"
"I am fine, A-Qing."
"General!-" A frustrated huff, fingers twisting too-tight in the bandages around Jing Yuan's torso. Jing Yuan captures his hands from him and untangles them from each other. A-Qing is pouting.
"You are too old to pout."
"You are insufferable!" Yanqing says loudly, but then his voice falls, like a child in the dark. "I was worried."
Jing Yuan takes in a deep breath. "I-"
The door opens. "Pardon me!" Shuts. Jing Yuan realizes Yanqing is sitting across his lap on the bed, and their faces are close together, and their fingers are interlocked. Bailu would have knocked their heads together. This doctor must be new.
"Oh-" Yanqing says, his face turning away. There is a healing cut on his cheek. "She wasn't interrupting. I'll go get her." There's nothing to interrupt. Jing Yuan grasps Yanqing's fingers anyways, before he makes to leave. They are a little red and swollen.
"I'm sorry for worrying you."
"Seems like the only thing you ever do these days," Yanqing tells him.
"Impudent," Jing Yuan says. "What kind of Lieutenant speaks this way to his General?"
Yanqing smiles back, and brings Jing Yuan's knuckles to his lips. "You need medical attention. A-Yuan." He ducks out of the room, and Jing Yuan hears his laughter - and the poor healer's stammered apologies - down the hall. Yanqing ushers her back in and waves at Jing Yuan over her head. "I'll be back later."
Her ears are twitching frantically. "Lieutenant-"
"Take care of him for me," Yanqing says. "I'll be leaving this idiot in your capable hands, doctor." He's finding this funny. To Jing Yuan he says, "if you bully her into letting you come home without being cleared I'm dragging you back here." The poor girl's tail is whipping so hard it smacks into the doorway. Yanqing is right - it is kind of funny.
"Don't let Yanqing scare you," Jing Yuan says, loud enough he knows must still be in Yanqing's earshot when he turns to leave.
"Er, we see this type of thing all the time," she says, her tail wagging. Her face is pink. "It's sweet to have someone dote on you, isn't it?"
"It is," Jing Yuan agrees, smiling.
Yanqing brings him cut fruits the next day. The wound on his temple is healing over nicely - it'd leave barely a scar. Bailu is the one who walks in on them this time (Jing Yuan's lips pressed to Yanqing's forehead), and she throws her rag at Yanqing's face. "The two of you are causing ruckus in the break room!" She shrieks at them.
"I cannot control what your employees gossip about," Yanqing says.
"I still remember when you were just a wee small," Bailu sighs longsufferingly, and the tips of Yanqing's ears turn red. " Bailu-jie, are you coming over? Bailu-jie, can you teach me how to heal? Bailu-jie-"
"Lady Bailu!" Yanqing says.
"No rigorous physical activity until the General has fully recovered!" She snaps, and slams the door on them. From the eavesdropping hallway there is a scream. Yanqing grins and slides his palms down the wrinkled sheets.
“That means no sparring for us, General,” he says, eyes twinkling.
They are tangled under the covers together - Jing Yuan has been discharged even though Bailu had been pissed about it - and Yanqing is mumbling away his dreams, his ear pressed to the bandaged part of Jing Yuan’s chest over his heart. Artificial sun flickers in through the blinds.
Jing Yuan would not have minded this arrangement a hundred years ago. But Yanqing is now almost as tall as him and hard to wrestle off. No vigorous activity, Bailu had warned them one last time, her tail thumping against their shins, and behind her her staff blushed and giggled, but she’d spent the past two hundred years chiding them (Yanqing) for petty injuries on the training ground so she deserved to bully them a little bit. Yanqing had smiled at her, one hand half-holding up Jing Yuan, his broad palm pressed to the flat between his shoulder blades. She looked annoyed and then beat them off with a broom. The Knights let them into Jing Yuan’s house without a break in their mask - one of them nodded at Yanqing and the other stared straight ahead - and Yanqing threw him on the bed. Wrestled his shoes off and then poured him a glass of water.
Watched as he drank half of it and then swiped it before Jing Yuan tipped the rest of it down his shirt. “I drugged you,” he said, far too proudly, like Jing Yuan was five years old suffering from a cold, or like he hadn’t put his life in Yanqing’s hands so many times over he’d lost count.
“Mm,” Jing Yuan just hummed sleepily, and his unruly little ward batted his hands away, bundled them in his blankets, and pressed a kiss to his forehead. When he woke up they were tangled in Yanqing’s hair and the boy was snoring - in a spare set of Jing Yuan’s sleep clothes - and there was another glass of water on the end table. Not that Jing Yuan could maneuver his hands far enough to reach it. He blearily wondered if he was one of Yanqing’s swords.
“A-Qing,” he says, and Yanqing huffed in his sleep.
Jing Yuan blinks once, twice, and then closes his eyes.
Only a handful of people remember that they were once parent and child. When Yanqing grew old enough to learn to be embarrassed about his proximity to Jing Yuan (the Arbiter-General, his boss, the most powerful man on the Xianzhou Luofu,) he'd tried to shove him away when they stood together. "Everyone assumes it's nepotism," Yanqing complained. He'd been newly fifteen, not tall enough yet to fit into the Cloud Knights' standard issue uniform, but old enough to start growing into his teenage angst. Jing Yuan knows that Yanqing is too good for special treatment (of course he dotes on him, but he'd be beyond his wits if he were to assign ranks based on anything but skill. He doesn't want to get Yanqing killed.)
The new batch of recruits had giggled amongst themselves - their lieutenant decades to centuries younger than them, his voice cracking every so often, trying to stand on his tip-toes to look over their heads. "That's him?" One of them says loudly. "The General's kid?"
Yanqing burned in embarrassment. Jing Yuan sent him off to run off his energy and then contemplated when he was fifteen tripping over Jingliu's heels. She had handed him a spear, told him to sort out a platoon of men, and then spun him away. The lot had cooed over him and then Jing Yuan had promptly turned them over their heads. That was over seven hundred years ago.
So Yanqing went from the General's son to the General's successor. It worked well enough for them back then, because Yanqing had been calling him "General" ever since he could talk; because Jing Yuan had always been too much of a coward to try and ask for too much between them - their delicate construction of the imaginings of a relationship between them, held together by how it remained unspoken.
It comes crashing down anyways: like broken starskiffs and mismanaged expectations. Yanqing grows up too fast. Suddenly he's a hundred, suddenly he's two. Suddenly they would be a lot less uncomplicated if Jing Yuan had allowed them to be, but he hadn't, and then they didn't have a name to call themselves. They were Lieutenant and General but that felt like a disservice because they were so much more.
Yanqing had gone home (they lived apart) and he'd left half of Jing Yuan's sheets smelling like him in the morning. They stopped sleeping in the same bed when Yanqing was ten and claimed he was too old for petty things like nightmares and nightlights. They started again twenty years ago when Yanqing had come back from a mission: Baliu had pushed him past Jing Yuan's door and said he couldn't be alone with his painkillers but the hospital beds were saved for people who could walk less than him. Jing Yuan had set alarms for every other hour in the night and Yanqing slept through all of them. Mimi curled up at their feet.
The days melded together in the sweltering artificial summer - Jing Yuan grows older and Yanqing grows a little more war-bitten. The hunt surges forward like time, sharp and unforgiving like the Reignbow Arbiter's path.
Jing Yuan celebrates his ninth hundred year of reign unceremoniously. Fu Xuan raises a glass to him, and her eyes are sharp, but Jing Yuan catches her smiling in the reflection of his glass. "Watch your back, General," she says, in earshot of Yanqing, who turns around and playfully flicks his fingers at her.
They celebrate again in his private quarters. Jing Yuan breaks out the good wine. Yanqing laughs, light and airy. "Oh, A-Yuan," he says, "your wrinkles have grown." His fingers are still delicate as they curve around Jing Yuan's eyes. "Maybe you should retire soon, hm? Before this job takes away more of your pretty face."
"Anxious to serve under Fu Xuan?" Jing Yuan teases, even as his heart skips a beat.
Yanqing leans in. "My heart will give out sooner or later the more divinations she makes about the years you have left." He's a little too close.
Jing Yuan swallows. "A-Qing-"
Yanqing sways back. Jing Yuan releases a breath.
"I don't want you to go," Yanqing says, after a long while. Jing Yuan remains silent. "But I know you've already decided to die the day you took me in."
"I'm sorry," Jing Yuan says.
Yanqing shakes his head. Some of his hair escapes his ponytail. Jing Yuan thinks of pulling it back, but then he thinks he doesn't want Yanqing to look at him.
Yanqing looks at him. (What a contrary kid Jing Yuan has raised.) His eyes are bright. "You knew I'll miss you."
Jing Yuan knows. He's been missing people for so long he feels like it's the only thing he ever does. It's not a fate he wanted Yanqing to go through, but they all will, in the end of immortality. "Yes," Jing Yuan says, because he has been selfish for a long time.
Yanqing smiles, like he can read Jing Yuan's mind. He probably can. "At least you've given me a good one to miss." He leans in again and Jing Yuan does not move.
Yanqing's head falls with a soft thump on his shoulder (he must still not be able to hold his alcohol too well). Jing Yuan looks to the full moon (golden white light) and drinks the rest of it in - the alcohol burns his lips.
The day Yanqing kisses him - kisses him - Jing Yuan can barely think of it as a surprise. Fondness arrests his heart: that boy of his, always so exasperating. He is not on the first ship back, nor the second - the third trails in smoking from an engine propeller. Yanqing steps out matching his spoils - a limp in a leg, sling in the opposite arm, and Jing Yuan heaved a sigh of relief even though he knew that the returning party would not have been this calm if something had happened to their lieutenant.
Yanqing waves to his men with his free hand - the milling congregation call out with greetings - as he passes, and he looks briefly surprised when Jing Yuan rounds the corner.
"A-Qing," he sighed, because Fu Xuan had divined a broken wing. Of the starskiff, he sees, not on his little bird. A-Qing looked tired, his hair falling in errant strands, dried blood glued to his temple. He was favoring a leg so Jing Yuan reached out an arm to hold him. Yanqing looked up at him with an expression halfway between puzzlement and exhaustion, like he wasn't sure if he was important enough to pull Jing Yuan from his seat to come see him return safely after what he hears - from missives from frantic sergeants, with their lieutenant deep in the fray - was a harrowing mission.
Jing Yuan says, "welcome home."
Yanqing did not reply with words. He swung his free hand up to the back of Jing Yuan's head and scratched through his mane to find the nape of his neck and then pulled him down. He found the corner of his mouth like he was aiming further left or right but missed it, with his trembling arm and half-lidded eyes (the sun was in the sky) and the blood loss that made his head spin. Yanqing tried again and found his cheek.
The third time Jing Yuan tightened his hold on Yanqing's waist so he didn't slip from his grip and then they kissed again, a peck on the lips this time, soft and hard and firm and chaste.
People watched them. Jing Yuan adjusted his hands until Yanqing could wobble on both feet and then they walked back in silence to the infirmary where the gossip must have already been spread faster than they could travel, and everyone watched them more. Bailu was not there that day to yell at them (maybe things would had been different if she were there to chatter about being Bailu-jie to Yanqing's Xiao-Yan, but all they got from everyone else were giggles and winks far-too-bold whistles,) and afterwards Jing Yuan took Yanqing back home.
They continued not to speak until Jing Yuan had tucked Yanqing into bed and then opened his mouth to say something (anything, he still doesn't know what he would have wanted to say,) and Yanqing kissed him again, at the corner of his lips, like he hadn't been sure where to put it; like it was a question. And then he promptly fell dead asleep.
Jing Yuan, for the lack of any excuse he could bear to give him, crawled into bed beside him.
They don’t talk about it the next day. The day after that Jing Yuan unbinds and binds Yanqing’s bandages around his torso and his fingers pause on his ribcage. Yanqing’s eyelashes flutter. He sinks into his bed and Jing Yuan falls with him, and then Yanqing giggles into his shoulder and puts his nose into his neck.
“A-Yuan,” he sighs.
“A-Qing,” Jing Yuan murmurs to him. Yanqing grips onto the back of his neck like the day at the docks and they crash into each other over and over again in endless trial-and-error like reckless waves and the riptide pulls them deep.
Bailu is back from her sabbatical by the end of the week - she is displeased to hear they’ve torn a row of Yanqing’s stitches. “What part of no physical activity,” she rants, and refuses to heal him. She slaps a pamphlet - Everything you need to know about Safe Sex - into his hands.
“I’m too old for the talk,” Yanqing complained.
“Then what is this?!” She jabbed her finger into Yanqing’s side, over the new bandages she had to tie onto him, and he winces.
“Unsafe sex,” Jing Yuan quips.
Her tail slaps him. “You should know better. You are 800 years his senior. Good grief, the two of you.”
“You don’t find this weird?” Yanqing asks her.
“I am your healthcare provider, not your moral compass,” Bailu huffs at him. “And I am Vidhadyara. If any of my lovers had been my parents five hundred lifetimes ago none of us would remember it.” Yanqing blinked hard at her, she rummaged through her notes and scribbled something on it that she showed neither of them. “I remember the time you were still an infant in Jing Yuan's arms when he brought you to me. He said he hadn’t intended to adopt you and he raised you anyways. What do you want me to say? Sometimes people love each other because we have been spending time together for hundreds of years. I have no parents - I cannot tell you what it is normal for you to feel.” She glares at them both. “I do not want to see you two in here again for another silly reason like this, understood?”
“Yes ma’am,” Yanqing says, face pleasantly pink. He grips Jing Yuan’s hand all the way out.
Fu Xuan looks at them for a long time when they return to the Seat of Divine Foresight. She looked at Jing Yuan with pity and then at Yanqing with even more. She grasped Yanqing's hand in hers and smiled at him and then smacked Jing Yuan on the back of his head with a rolled-up fan. It was the least he deserved, Jing Yuan supposed.
Later a Knight comes by with letters in her hands. "Good to see you up and about, lieutenant." She looked behind him to glance at Jing Yuan with something akin to glee in her eyes.
Yanqing cleared his throat. It was a little hoarse. “Something for me, sergeant?”
“Just some team updates. You can leave it until you’re fully recovered, sir.”
“I am,” Yanqing says.
“You’re still limping, sir.”
“That is unrelated.”
On another day Jing Yuan receives a call. Specifically, he receives two and makes one: the first he picks up to silence, then a beat of aborted stammer, and then a click. He calls back: it goes to voicemail. Five minutes later his phone rings again. He answers it quicker.
"I didn't think you'd pick up," is the first thing Dan Heng says. "I apologize. I got startled."
"It is good to hear from you, old friend," Jing Yuan says, and hope this term of address lands well today. On some days Dan Heng would huff with exasperation; other days he'll hang up immediately. Today must be a good day, Jing Yuan imagines the other rolling his eyes.
"You too.”
Jing Yuan is glad he is alone in his room or everyone will see him grinning wide. “What brings you to call? Not that there needs to be a reason for us to catch up.”
“I saw the news about you and Yanqing,” Dan Heng says. No preamble, as usual. Also: they’re on the news?
"Have you been checking up on me?" Jing Yuan asked.
"...No," Dan Heng said after a pause, and Jing Yuan no longer knows him well enough to tell if he's lying, at least not over the phone. "Welt saw.”
“I didn’t know we were on the news.”
“Ah-” Dan Heng flusters. “It was - on the tabloids. Just one of those sensational things.”
“I see,” Jing Yuan says. “I don’t suppose you’re here to scold me too.”
“Ah? I…” A cough. “I was calling to congratulate you.” Pause. “Should I be scolding you instead?”
“No, I would much rather have the congratulations,” Jing Yuan says. “Whatever for?”
“Alright then.” An intake of breath. “I’m… happy for you.”
Jing Yuan opens his mouth, shuts it. The overwhelming sincerity of it strikes the amusement out of him. He’s blushing in his own room on the phone with his old flame. “Thanks.”
“I’m glad.” Dan Heng says. “That you can find happiness. I know you were hurting for a long time. Ever since Ren-” He stops. Jing Yuan imagines him shaking his head. “Let’s not dwell on the past. This is about the future.” There is no path to the future without a line drawn from the past, but Jing Yuan does not say it. Dan Heng will not agree, and this is a happy phone call.
"Thank you," Jing Yuan says again. His smile strains his eyes but it is the good sort of ache. “Send my regards to your companions. Welt, Himeko…March 7th?”
“March parted with the Express a while back,” Dan Heng says, “We ran into her briefly while we were cruising over 8b… she seemed well. Archives is with us again, you remember him,” Jing Yuan hums in assent, “It seems that he’s staying longer this time. I think he missed Welt, but he won’t admit it.” A slight chuckle. “Like some people I know.”
Jing Yuan laughs - it echoes in his head, Dan Heng laughs with him, like little butterflies.
“Treat Yanqing well,” he says. “Send him my well wishes. Please do not bully him. I know how you get.”
Dan Heng hangs up. Jing Yuan lies back on his bed and stares at the ceiling until the light swims, and then he opens his phone and searches the gossip sites. The Luofu tabloids has a picture of them standing in the middle of the dock, a couple of knights leering in the background, their heads close together - it must have been after the kiss, or just before. Yanqing’s broken arm was pressed between them and Jing Yuan had his hand firmly on Yanqing’s hip. Their faces were turned away from the camera, but their visages were nigh unmistakable, and Jing Yuan dismays at the blotch of red that crept up from under his collar and spread up to the rest of his face. Yanqing was pale in comparison - it must have been the blood loss.
There was an endless string of comments under the post. Jing Yuan knows better than to open the floodgates, so he simply saves the picture and closes the webpage.
"There's news talking about us!" Yanqing kicks his door in. "I got stopped a million times on the way to work! And back!"
"You'll learn to deal with it," Jing Yuan says serenely, having been the center of Vidyadharas' rage for many long years after he'd arrested their Yinyue-Jun. Yanqing makes a face at him in response.
Qingzu sighs long and wistful when Yanqing runs to her for help. "When Jing Yuan first brought you in," she says, her arms crossed, "I scolded him for falling for another small, cute thing. I told him I wasn't going to take care for this one too if he found himself too busy."
"I apologize," Jing Yuan says, although he doesn't look very sorry at all. Mimi lounges like the fat fed thing she is, her tail swishing contentedly. Yanqing takes great care to step over it, now that Mimi - in her old age - has grown less durable for being tripped over. She has always been tolerant of him, even when he was five years old clambering over her and pulling at her ears, maybe because he always smelled like Jing Yuan, or because she was always too full to want to eat him.
"An impulsive shopper whenever it comes to anything small and cute," Qingzu shakes her head. "At least you didn't grow bored of them when they grew."
"I don't think Mimi or Yanqing outgrew the cute stage at all," Jing Yuan says indulgently, and Qingzu rolls her eyes at him. Yanqing's face warms.
"Ahem, Qingzu, I asked-"
"Yes, I know what you asked," she said. "Do you think I'm a miracle worker? The pictures are here to stay. Next time you should not kiss in public if you didn't want to be photographed in public."
Dan Heng calls him a second time, shortly after the first. It's a rare occurrence for him to want to talk to Jing Yuan so soon after their previous interaction. "I was informed that I should have scolded you the first time," he says, when Jing Yuan picks up. "I apologize for the oversight."
"It's alright," Jing Yuan says, amused. "What brought this on?"
"Welt showed me the picture and heavily implied that I should speak to you," Dan Heng says. "He did not specify the reason at the time, but after our call, he clarified. As a parent himself, he was very displeased to hear about you and Yanqing."
"Ah," Jing Yuan says. "Well, pass my regards on to him."
"I will not," Dan Heng says. "He is upset about you. He is also moping because Archives is gone again-” A brief scuffle on the other side of the phone. Jing Yuan waits. “-ah,” Dan Heng is back, “I was just informed that he is not moping. My apologies.”
“Where did Archives go this time?”
“I don’t know. I also have to let you know that you are no longer allowed on the Express for…" Pause. "The foreseeable future. And I do not think we will be stopping by the Xianzhou Luofu anytime soon as well. I fear Welt might try to hit you."
"Ah, my own banishment," Jing Yuan says.
Dan Heng laughs a little. "Yanqing is still welcome on the Express, though."
“I'll be sure to pass the message,” Jing Yuan says. “How have you been doing?”
“Fine.” A beat of silence. “March is here. She says,” a longer pause, “March, I’m not going to repeat that. If you want you can say it to him yourself.” A rustle.
“Hey, General!”
“Hello, Ms March.”
“Aren’t you worried about the age gap? Since Yanqing is like a baby - he's younger than me! And you're so old!” Behind her, a hissed “March!” Undeterred, she presses on: “Because you'll probably die soon. You’ll succumb to mara eventually, right?”
Jing Yuan smiles, despite himself. "I will."
March says, "then what? What if you die and then leave- Dan Heng, I'm talking! I- eep!"
"I'm sorry about her."
Jing Yuan laughs. "It is heartwarming to hear you two still getting along so well."
Dan Heng seems to falter, a thin breath hissed through his teeth. "Jing Yuan, I…"
"I know."
"For what it's worth, I'm sorry," Dan Heng says. Which is silly, because he doesn't remember anything to be sorry for.
Jing Yuan says, "I am, too."
"I am going to die one day."
"I know." Yanqing takes his hand and kisses the back of his knuckles. His eyes are shining. "It is cruel of me to want you to stay, huh? You've waited so long already."
"I apologize," Jing Yuan says, but he has lived a very long time.
"I can hardly wish for you to go through what Ren has."
Yingxing would have been mad at him, Jing Yuan knows. Never mind the scandal about pseudo-incest, short-lived species were always so much touchier about age gaps. "You're 800 years older than him!" He imagines Yingxing yell. But he had been bashful back when Jing Yuan was 20 and he was 40. "I'm too old for you," he would laugh, even though he would blush regardless, as if they weren't the same age viewed from the lens of the world he tried to carve a life in, even though it is true that Yingxing could have been Jing Yuan's father, and it is technically true that Jing Yuan is Yanqing's. Jing Yuan loves (loved) (loves) the both of them anyways. Not that that was enough to not lose them.
It's one of those cold nights when they can do not much more but sit together. Mimi has found her way over their laps, so they couldn't do much more even if they wanted to. Jing Yuan thinks he might be halfway to a cold. It's unfair because he hasn't gotten a cold in centuries (other than that one time when Yanqing was still a kid and had passed it to him) and Bailu would yell at him if she found out why. Yanqing was nursing a mug of hot chocolate, and Jing Yuan sniffled about it.
"I can't believe you chased Mimi out into the snow."
"I wanted to grab her," Jing Yuan protested. "It's too cold to be about."
"It's too cold for you to be about," Yanqing scolded. "Mimi is a wave treading snow lion. She treads snow. That's her job description! Are you a snow-treading Arbiter-General? I don't think so!"
Jing Yuan sneezed. "This is what will take me out."
"Mara will have a hard time taking you out. You will not die to a common cold."
"Tell Fu Xuan to divine my will."
Yanqing pulls out his phone. "I'm telling Fu Xuan to divine the number of sick days you'll need." A pause as he taps. "Five."
"Great," Jing Yuan says.
Yanqing kisses him on the nose.
"I'll get you sick."
"Mm, you wish you will," he says. Jing Yuan pouts. Yanqing laughs. "Remember when I got sick as a kid?"
"Of course I do," Jing Yuan said. He had been fretting. Yanqing had been so small that Jing Yuan feared he might sneeze too hard and burst like a little grape.
Yanqing looks at him, lips twisted into a little wry grin. "I don't remember it. But Yong Hai used to like to remind me about how you were fretting." He would be scandalized at the news of them, probably, but he had passed away peacefully at the end of his natural life span a hundred odd years ago. He had a daughter, who went into poetry. When he died she'd written in the back of her latest book: To my Father, who has given me so much to miss.
Once upon a time Jing Yuan decided to raise a child and hoped he would one day kill him. They called him the Divine Foresight, but it was only a logical play. He will succumb to mara, like everyone else before him, and then the disciple will defeat the master. As long as the Hunt presses forth, so does time, and the inevitability of endless history.
It is cruel for Jing Yuan to ever love him, crueler to ask that Yanqing watch him die, but he cannot bear to hope for anyone else to kill him. He wonders if Ren ever forgave Yingxing, if Dan Heng ever forgave Dan Feng - if Yanqing will ever forgive him. A long time ago he had requested for Yanqing to bury him next to Jingliu, if there was anything left to bury.
Yanqing had smiled at him, his eyes brighter than anything Jing Yuan had ever seen. "Don't worry," he said, his voice like crashing waves against the crumbling waterfront, "I'll bring you home."
There are people young enough to not remember them when they were Jing Yuan and the ward he adopted - Cloud Knights with fresh frozen worried faces who don't remember to balk when Yanqing kisses him, or maybe they're too focused on the way Yanqing's palm is pressing at the cracks in his armor, and the blood that is seeping through anyways even as his dear child tries to hold him together.
"General, A-Yuan," his lieutenant sobs, and Jing Yuan thinks of pushing him away, and he thinks he's been a cruel guardian and an even crueler lover, as Yanqing dips his head again to press his forehead to the side of his neck, and he cries. It's a cold day today.