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There's a note in his book, its pages worn so thin and soft they whisper against his fingertips. It says, don't be afraid . It says, you know him.
Gu Mang doesn't remember much anymore, but his book helps him pick up the pieces. He leans sleepily against Mo Xi and feels him shift to accommodate his weight, the warmth of him settling around his body. You know him, the book had said. He tastes the fact on his tongue, slow and precious, something to be savoured. Gu Mang does.
-
Lin’an is louder than he’d expected, filled with bustling stall-keepers and the people of the river. His fingertips are curled loosely in Mo Xi’s hand, as if he’s scared Gu Mang will wander off without him. Gu Mang’s other hand holds his bag of dried fish.
“Dinner first, then the inn? Does that sound good?” Mo Xi is fussing again. He’s been fretting about every detail of their trip. Gu Mang wants to tell him it’s fine, that he doesn’t mind anything, but every time he nods or smiles or even shakes his head Mo Xi seems to relax, tiny furrows of expression smoothing out. That is good, then. Mo Xi will ask and Gu Mang will answer.
There’s the scent of lamb skewers in the air, spiced and pungent against the lush green of the river where the lotus buds are beginning to bloom. Gu Mang nods at his suggestions and watches him smile, a crinkling in the corners of his eyes. It smells like home.
He follows, listening only idly to what Mo Xi’s saying about the inn, the big windows overlooking the river, this and that. A quiet stream of murmurs seeking to replace a silence he’d left, voice halting with disuse. His little shidi was never good at small-talk, was he? Gu Mang makes sure to hide his smile, looking away into the greens of the water.
“—window, he said, with a view of the riverside—“
Dage, I used to sleep in a shed. He’s not snickering, cognizant of the little princess’s feelings. Who the hell are you trying to impress? But the thought only flashes for a moment then disappears, a flickering gleam of silver. Sunshine in the shallows.
Mo Xi glances at him, eyes soft. “What’s so funny?”
Gu Mang blinks, caught off guard. He doesn’t know. Abruptly the walk seems too much, too noisy—water sloshing in a basin too small, hands grasping to come away empty.
He offers him a fish instead of an answer, a smile instead of apology.
Mo Xi looks away first, but his hand tightens around his own.
-
They leave the markets laden with paper bags and Mo Xi’s qiankun pouch stuffed full with trinkets and rattles with every other step. Gu Mang’s heart is so warm.
He shouldn't want more, he already has so much, but Mo Xi catches him looking at the pastries and is handing over the shells before Gu Mang can even form words, hands too full to tug his sleeve and tell him no. He can only trail after him, shaking his head in unease and exasperation.
They find a quieter corner to sit in. Mo Xi offers him a pastry, golden on the top and so flaky it's already crumbling at the edges. Gu Mang swallows, for once hesitant to take it.
"Too much," he says, voice very small. "I don't have any money." The words echo in his head, an old refrain. That, at least, never seems to change.
Mo Xi looks at him, all the weight of his dark-eyed attention brought to bear. Gu Mang lowers his gaze, fidgeting, but Mo Xi's voice is whisper-soft and gentle. "Do you want it?"
It stumps him. Wanting is hard; it's never mattered too much, what Gu Mang wants. He stares at the edge of the table, then the crumbs. He doesn’t know.
Mo Xi seems to know what he's thinking, because he tries again without making him answer. He breaks the pastry in two, delicate layers cracking apart at the slightest pressure, holding out the bigger half. "Would you like to share with me?" Something in the tone of his voice makes Gu Mang sigh to himself, very quietly. He’s getting better at subtlety, the silly boy.
The thought melts away when he looks up, gaze caught in the shadows of Mo Xi’s eyes. In this light the purple beneath the thin skin is clearer and he wants to wipe them away but he can’t so he only sits, heart a lump in his throat. It’s only for a moment—he shakes his head to clear it, then reaches out to hold Mo Xi’s wrist. They sit like that for a moment, Gu Mang’s fingers looped around his wrist, Mo Xi’s hand still cupping half a pastry.
Gu Mang watches his face, and dips his head to nip the crumbling half from Mo Xi’s outstretched hand.
Mo Xi lets him, endlessly patient. “What's mine is yours, Shixiong. Anything at all, okay?"
Anything, Gu Mang thinks.
He takes a bite of pastry and carefully shapes a smile in return.
-
Night falls like a worn cotton blanket over the skies of Lin’an, pinprick holes where the stars shine through. He waits until Mo Xi's settled before springing it upon him, some whisper in the back of his mind joking it's so Mo Xi can't try to run away, again . Gu Mang yawns the voice away and shivers because he's drowsy, nestling up against the warmth of Mo Xi's side and peering over his shoulder at the book he's reading.
Mo Xi's arm settles around him like a blanket, a weight so comforting he doesn’t want to think anymore. Gu Mang thinks a good deal these days, though not often does he get anywhere.
They sit in a shared couple moments of silence, a sweet lull after a long day.
Gu Mang is so cold but Mo Xi is warm. He sighs, curling closer. So warm. He won’t be pushed away; this he knows for fact, even if it feels like a guilty thing, a gentleness he shouldn’t be given.
"Mo Xi," he says, quietly. Mo Xi hums a questioning noise at him, the rumbling going through his spine. Gu Mang closes his eyes and nestles in..
-
He dreams of running, running freely through a forest where nothing could catch him. He dreams of being a monster and a wolf and maybe the two were the same, fur gleaming silver in the pitch of night. There was blood in his mouth and he hoped it was his, only his, his alone.
He can’t run fast enough.
Giant beast eyes stare out at him through the darkness, twin abysses where he’d fallen in— I am you and you are me, I am you and —and it hurt so much he convulsed on himself, bones twisting in his flesh and he was writhing because he had no choice his soul was splitting apart and the pieces were slicing through his tongue—
He wakes with a choked-off scream, to Mo Xi’s worried face a pale moon over him, to a nauseous sense of guilt and fear and so much pain, endless, lines of fire cutting into his chest and pulling taut around his throat—
“Hey,” Mo Xi says, hushed. “Just a nightmare, but it’s over now. It’s over now, shh, see?” He takes Gu Mang’s hand, gently chafing his chilled fingers, turning their interlocked fingers upward as if to prove they’re both real. His eyes are so sad in his ethereal face, and it curdles the sick lump in Gu Mang’s belly. It’s his fault Mo Xi looks like that.
Gu Mang tightens his grip on Mo Xi’s hand like he’s driftwood, drowning. Sweat cools over his back. He grounds himself to the low thrum of Mo Xi's voice until the syllables start to make sense as words. “We’re in Lin’an, and you’re here.”
Gu Mang stares wet-eyed where Mo Xi’s looking, to the window where they can see the moon hanging like a crescent slice of light, the flowers blooming across the shore. Moonlight fills their room in an unreal silver and abruptly he realizes why Mo Xi wanted the windows. His heart is still pounding and his tongue is wooden.
“Sorry.” It’s not enough. “For,” he struggles to get the words out, “waking you up. Sorry.”
“Don’t be,” says Mo Xi. He moves slowly, like he’s approaching a skittish deer. Gu Mang does want to flee, but not from him. “I wasn’t asleep.”
He sits by the edge of the bed and lets Gu Mang lean against him, holding him close but not holding him down. Safe harbour from the storm. "I'll get you some tea?"
Gu Mang snuffles wetly and burrows into his side. He’s all but climbing into Mo Xi’s lap, hands twisting tight in his robes. “Don’t go,” he says, thick and muffled. “Stay.” He's so cold it hurts, skin sticky with fevered sweat.
“Shh, okay, of course. It was just a bad dream, I’m here now.” Mo Xi cards clumsily through his hair, painstakingly gentle. “Shh, it’s okay, nothing happened. Don’t cry, Gu Mang, don’t cry. It was just a bad dream.”
He sounds like he’s had practice. He sounds like he’s trying to convince them both.
Gu Mang wants to trust in that voice.
But it didn’t feel like just a bad dream.
He’s— sorry, so sorry oh god please Mo-shidi I never wanted it to be you, I swear— he’s not sure, but he hopes it was a dream. Please, not him, I'll do it myself— He shakes his head, wordless, eyes shut tight. Nothing makes sense in his patchwork head, memories and dreams grinding him in between. Why did it have to be you? He’s still crying, he realizes, eyes hot and stinging with a grief he doesn’t remember, pain that must have come and gone and left only an afterimage in its wake.
Gu Mang shakes his head and sobs, ragged scraps of sound escaping him against his will.
Mo Xi just holds him closer, soothing strokes down his back, his side, until his breathing and heartbeat calms to match his. Gu Mang manages a thready inhale, sniffling. Don’t be , Mo Xi said. I wasn’t asleep.
“You’ve—” He tries again, a little more slowly. “You’ve done this before.” It’s not a question. Gu Mang’s hands tighten in the cloth of Mo Xi’s sleeves.
“There was a tent. And I was,” he thinks it over, only half-aware of what he was describing, “bleeding?” All over the damn blankets, and we sure as hell weren’t gonna get new ones . He swallows, tongue dry. “You tried to stay awake for me.”
Mo Xi stills. “You remember that?”
“I don’t know.” Gu Mang scrunches his brows and fights the headache. “I got mad at you?”
The smile creeps like winter dawn across Mo Xi’s face, pale and slivered. “You did. You told me if I ever tried that again you’d knock me out with my own weapon and leave me there to sleep it off.”
“I didn’t mean it,” assures Gu Mang, clumsily patting his hand. “I wouldn’t have.” He nods his head very seriously, to make sure Mo Xi gets it. “But you shouldn’t have stayed awake.”
“I wanted to,” says Mo Xi. “But I’ll sleep if you do.”
“Not fair.” He squints at him, wary. “How will I know you’re asleep if I am?”
“I’ll dream of you, and you’ll know.”
Gu Mang squints. Still a fuckin’ bad liar , someone chuckles. Isn’t it a blessing you're pretty?
“I always dream of you,” Gu Mang dismisses. “That doesn’t count. Lie down properly."
Mo Xi pauses and then obliges, staring up at him from within the covers. Saying so much exhausts Gu Mang, and the shock of his nightmare has faded, taking the energy with it. "Go to bed," he mumbles, patting his hair. “I’ll. Keep watch.”
He watches Mo Xi look back at him for a moment longer, and then those lashes flutter down in one last sweep. Gu Mang bends, clumsy with instinct, and presses a kiss to that familiar brow.
-
Day comes, and his nightmares recede. Darkness falls, and they return like the kiss of blackened water around a sinking ship.
It makes sense, of course. Ghosts walk at night, and Gu Mang has so many.
-
Dawn breaks over the skies of Lin’an like the pale fish-belly white of an egg in the frying pan. Gu Mang is careful to stay very still, because Mo Xi is still sleeping.
He looks at him carefully, breath stirring Mo Xi’s lashes. His hair is a spill of ink across the bedding, having escaped its ties sometime during the night. Gu Mang’s palms itch—he can almost feel the heavy drape of it, smell the scent of jasmine rising around them like steam, hear the whisper of the comb as it glides against Mo Xi’s scalp.
Gu Mang closes his eyes, trying to follow the silken thread. What was that today? his dream-self chides. You can’t be risking yourself anymore, princess, the left flank was doing just fine .
Mo Xi had said something, syllables soft with sleep.
Are you even listening? Tsk, no respect at all—
The thread breaks like smoke in air. Dawn gilds Mo Xi’s face, casting new shadow in a play of light. Gu Mang watches for a very long time, until those lashes flutter open and shock washes the sleepiness from Mo Xi’s face.
“I—“ His voice is crackly and his ears are red. “Good morning.”
Gu Mang grins.
-
Maybe it’s like the puzzle-toy he has. Little pieces of a soldier, arms and legs and torso and head. He takes them apart just to put them back together and wishes he could be made whole just as easily. Wooden slats and wooden joints, numb and creaking. Hollowed bamboo.
Maybe you weren’t a person until you had all your parts.
-
Every night is the same, even if Gu Mang doesn’t remember them all.
There’s a nightmare that comes, often, of a room in the dark.
He’s so cold, his bones are shattering into flakes of glass and ice and it hurts so bad but he can’t scream, he can’t, or else the masked man will know he’s hurting and he’s not supposed to be unless he was lying, he wasn’t, he wasn’t .
Sometimes the man isn’t wearing a mask at all; sometimes he’s wielding a falcon dagger, sometimes an imperial crown. It doesn’t matter, because they all want the same thing.
He remembers being stronger. He remembers trying but they shattered him anyway, no matter what he did, so why bother trying again?
Ah, it hurt.
-
Mo Xi told him a story once, when he asked for them just to hear his voice as he drowsed, as if it would ward off the dreams. There was a man who dreamed of a butterfly, a butterfly who woke as a man, and the dreamer stopped knowing the border between the real and the not-real.
Gu Mang stares at himself in the bronze mirror and wonders if that blue-eyed monster fell asleep one day and he was what woke up after, a puppet with a dead man’s voice in his head.
Mo Xi wouldn’t care. Mo Xi wouldn’t care if he’s missing parts or a monster dreaming of being a person but Gu Mang does. He knows the taste of blood in his mouth and it’s bitter like the worst medicine, chokingly heavy. Gu Mang is so tired of swallowing it back down.
-
“They can’t come home,” he weeps, hearing their howling in his head. “They can’t–”
Someone tells him no, you did it, there’s seventy-thousand named gravestones on the peak of Chonghua’s mountain, they’re home, they’re safe, they’re sleeping. He doesn’t know who to believe. The voice sounds familiar, but so do the dead. Gu Mang, Gu-shixiong, they’ve come home.
He clutches his head. Wide eyes, empty eyes. “But he’s gone. He’s lost.”
Someone takes his hands, iron grip ringed around his wrists, pushing at his fingers to get them out from the flesh of his palm. Gu Mang hadn’t known he was digging his nails in. “Who?” The voice asks. Gu Mang turns to them and sees Yanluo’s face, come to judge him at last.
There’s a name on his tongue, but he can’t answer.