Work Text:
Beiyuan’s nap is interrupted by a strange apparition.
It’s a young face, carved by bold hands. Beiyuan has never seen that look in his eye in a mirror, but he remembers the shiver it used to give men decades older than he. Three glistening strands of grey thread his hair.
“You’ve come to haunt me, have you, you little imp?” Beiyuan says to his sixteen-year-old self—the first one.
He sees the slap coming and slips out of the way, grabbing the child by the scruff of his horrible neck and shoving him down onto the couch. He might have trained under General Feng, but he hasn’t actually been in a war, and Beiyuan has the advantage of height and weight. “How dare you touch the Prince Nan’ning!” the imp spits.
“I’m you, you fool.”
It takes some minutes of struggling. Junior resents the wound to his dignity, but Beiyuan isn’t above sitting on him until he quiets down. “Get off,” he finally says indistinctly, and Beiyuan lets him roll over. “This isn’t the Prince Estate.”
Beiyuan smiles serenely. “This is Nanjiang.” At Junior’s look of horror and confusion, he adds, “I found myself a better destiny than your taizi-gege.”
Junior makes a derisive noise. “That’s impossible. He’s going to be the Son of Heaven.”
Beiyuan pats his head. Junior looks as if he’s going to bite; that doesn’t stop him—he’s petted meaner creatures with sharper teeth. He feels a great upwelling of affection and melancholy. This poor child. “You’ll understand when you’re older,” he says. “If you listen to me, you might even understand before it’s too late; but I suppose this is all some kind of dream, anyway.”
He kneels, reaching out for the boy’s hands. He tries to twitch them out of the way, but Beiyuan holds on firmly. “No, you’ll listen to me, for you’ve no older guide anymore.” He rubs his thumbs over the boy’s knuckles to gentle him and feels him tense. “Don’t be so ready to throw everything you have into that person. Leave yourself some escape route; find yourself something to hold on to that’s only yours.”
Beiyuan shakes his head. This is not the most important advice. “Someday,” he says, trying to drag the words up from somewhere deep in his chest, “someday you will realize that you are just too small for him to love. It’s not his fault, but an emperor can’t love you the way a person could.”
“I don’t care,” Junior whispers fiercely, his eyes full of the dreams only young fools can have.
He remembers this, dimly: living on the cusp of everything, sure he could reach out and master the world. From the outside, he can see it more clearly. This boy is not much older than Lu Ta, and he has spent much of his life far more alone than he realizes. He is starving. He sighs, capturing the boy’s shoulders and looking into his eyes. “You should,” he says. “Someday, you will.”