Archive of Our Own

Moze is twenty-six years old. 

He spends much of his time carrying out orders, infiltration tasks, a variety of missions, and certain other affairs for the Xianzhou Yaoqing’s General. 

Perhaps occasionally attempting to murder her in cold blood, trying a different method every time. 

So far, he’s tried it two hundred and seventy-three times in fourteen years, failing each and every time, the Foxian throwing pieces of advice at him after his most recent attempts. 

The bits of free time he allows himself to have, once there is really and truly, nothing to do, he cleans. 

Cleans the General’s residence, Jiaoqiu’s kitchen, his clothes, and generally anything that can be tidied up even the slightest bit. 

The thing he spends the most time of all cleaning, though, is his own body. 

Scrubbing at his arms with soap, wiping his legs with water, practically pulling at his hair with the idea of cleanliness in mind. 

The first time he’d been asked about this almost obsessive habit was on the second day he’d spent with General Feixiao, fourteen years ago, just after she slaughtered his whole “family”. 

She’d noticed quickly, as she should have, for a woman as capable as her. 

…

“Hey, you.” 

The tall woman is standing next to him as he rubs at his arm with much force. Her stance and figure are intimidating, yet somehow casual at the same time.

Moze thinks that if he were any other child, maybe he would have been scared of her. 

He’s seen cast shadows and terrifying looks far worse than the likes of this woman could ever make willingly, the faces of the self-proclaimed humble and kind worshippers of the almighty and loving Sanctus Medicus glaring down at him. 

He should probably say something, but it’s not like she would care to listen to him. 

If his own family never did, why would she? 

Although words are on the cusp of escaping from his throat, he presses down on them, forcing them back down, refusing to let them see the light of day. 

He is also a sinner, and the filthy things that he says are not good. He is not good, and nobody likes to listen to what bad people say. 

Biting down on his tongue, Moze looks back up at the woman, her long white hair cascading down her back and flowing freely and passionately, just like her. 

He almost can’t believe this is the same woman who murdered every last member of his family in front of him with an indecipherable expression. 

Instead of allowing the terrible things to come out of his mouth that his family hated so much, he simply continues scrubbing roughly, tilting his head toward her. 

“....”

The woman sighs, not unkindly, and crouches over next to him, meeting his eyes, the sheer fire and determination in her glowing ocean-like eyes throwing Moze off a little. 

“Listen here, kid. I’m concerned.”

She is lying, the voices of his fellow Disciples hiss into his ear, despite nobody being next to him. 

She is lying, and she wants to find a weak spot. Do not let her find it. You are already a sinner. It is a wonder the merciful Sanctus Medicus would ever pardon your sins. 

Internally, Moze is dumbly nodding along to the voices, numb. He cannot feel anything about this, and he used to wonder if they were truly family, before the Master of Immortality fixed him. 

He no longer has a doubt in his mind that they were his true family. 

And this woman murdered all of them. 

All twenty-nine of the members that raised him, limp to the floor in seconds, the woman with white ears and a strong posture standing over them victoriously, like a heroine in the sinful fictional texts that were meant for the irredeemable ones, the ignorant people, the fate his family saved him from becoming. 

He continues to remove the filth from his arm, not looking to see that there is nothing there but the reddening skin.

The woman just continues.  

“You shouldn’t scrub your arm so hard. It’ll start to bleed, soon.”

Moze freezes, dropping the rag to the floor with a wet plop. 

The memories rush back to him as he turns five again, with purple scales and pointed ears and an affinity for the vast ocean and the Disciples are standing over him and demanding him to pluck them off one by one. 

Beautiful, shiny scales with a fresh lustre to them, slowly clanging to the floor. 

He’d originally refused vehemently, the first time they asked him to. 

They’d forced him to do it a few years later. 

After the scales were ripped off of his bare arms, blood would pour out of the wounds. 

He’d hated it at the time, but he understands now it was because they cared about him, and only wanted his cursed soul to be saved.

Picking off the scales pushed him one step closer to atonement for his sins. His sins of being born one of them, the beings that were both draconic and humane at the same time. 

Every time a scale was taken, they’d hand him something to cleanse his arm with. 

A piece of paper, a towel, perhaps sandpaper.

He’d preferred metal wool, as did his family, but that was harder to find. 

Something rougher, they’d said. 

Something sturdy enough to rub away the sin, to make him cleaner. 

The scales were troublesome. 

They grew back over time, and that meant Moze had to keep picking and plucking and ripping them off of his arms and legs and chest and it hurt and it bled and nothing ever didn’t hurt. 

About a year after that, they’d decided that his ears were too sharp, too pointed, too evil, unworthy of the soft, nourishing love of their Aeon. 

One of them had taken a dulled knife to them while he was held down, restrained by others, a nine-year-old Moze screaming and thrashing all the while. 

(And the pain had been all for naught, because they were still unsatisfied and later gave him something, he doesn’t know what, turning them “normal”, somehow. He’d lost a little of his hearing from that, but not enough to stop him from jumping every time he heard the slightest sound.) 

When he asked, later, why they never put him to sleep like they did the other members of the family when they needed to perform a surgery, all he received was a slap to the face, a harsh reprimanding about him being too dirty for the mercy of relief, and tears.

He cried a lot, back then, when he was younger. 

As time went on, though, he got over it. 

He’d thought that was wonderful. His family did, too. 

They said it was proof that THEY had been looking after him, even after all of his sins. 

It had to be true, since the family that took him in and raised him believed it. 

(He was tired of them yelling at him and berating him and reading him verses of the ancient tomes to correct him.

For them to tell him it was right, for once in his life, to live, and that he was being healed and fixed, that he wasn’t wrong, felt good.

He didn’t want to cry anymore, to be beaten just because he had scales and pointed ears and spoke in a language native to the Vidyadhara.)

From those times on, whenever Moze would see a new scale poking through the barrage of wounds that came from picking all of them off in the first place, he’d smile giddily to himself and quickly take it off, or cover his still somewhat-pointed ears with his hair.

It felt nice, still feels nice.

Reminds him that even though he is bad, was born a sinner, he can always atone for them, fix them, if he keeps his head high and stays a loyal follower of the Abundance’s Aeon. 

In a second, he gets snapped back to reality by the woman’s sudden grip on his left hand. 

He looks up to see her holding it back from his right arm, and when he looks over at that, he sees, on the underside, a scale about halfway to full growth, and he panics.

If it’s already so large, it must have been far too long since it began to grow, which means that he will be punished and he will be hurt again, and he will fall deeper into the pit of his sins and cannot come back out and he’s suddenly sweating. He’s not clean.

Trying harder to breathe every second, his eyes zeroed in on the light purple scale that the woman does not see because she is not in the right position to see it. 

He has no doubt in his mind that the second she sees it, she will hurt him, hit him, yell and scream at him, and he doesn’t want that because he is trying to be good, to be better, to change. If it happens again, he will cry, and he will be even worse. 

When Moze comes back to his senses after a few minutes of despair and dread that the Aeon he devotes his life to will despise him for this one transgression, he feels the arms of the woman around him. 

They are strong, firm, and warm, and she is holding him tightly and whispering comforting words into his ears that someone like him does not deserve to hear.

She does not seem to mind his ears or his rubbed-raw arms, and though he can feel her eyes on the wounds of the plucked scales that have not yet healed, she doesn’t ask. 

He feels like he’s safe, for some reason, even though his family has taught him to be wary around the Foxians. Her embrace feels like he will be okay, and that is confusing. 

Moze shakes her off, raising his arm to the corners of his eyes and to wipe the tears away, pushing the woman away, and running off into the shadows he’s accustomed to. 

He feels a little bad about it, but he doesn’t know if he can trust her. 

For now, though, without a word, he sits down, pulls his knees to his chest, and buries his face in them, trying to make heads or tails of what’s happening to him. 

He does not end up picking off the scale. 

…

Moze has never been good at talking to people. 

Perhaps he might have had a knack for it, once, when he was still just a young, young, Vidyadhara boy, before the Disciples of Sanctus Medicus.

Maybe he had a real family, or friends, or people he was close to. 

That’s wishful thinking, though.

Anything from before he was eight years old has surely been erased from the records, from his own mind as well, cementing the fact that his past from before them is gone forever. 

Initially, he had tried to talk to them, to the other Disciples. 

All they had ever done, though, was scoff at him, or make a comment about small children being seen and not heard, or simply just ignore the fact he had ever said a thing at all, and over time, that small child learnt that nobody wanted to listen to him.

Although he now knows that there are people who would listen, would take in each and every word, he still cannot bring himself to open his mouth and let the words flow so frequently anymore. 

He feels shame for essentially forcing Jiaoqiu to speak in his stead, for Feixiao having to stand up to others who hadn’t appreciated his taste for silence. 

For not being able to say anything when he wants to, anymore. 

The most he can do, now, is submit his reports, make a small noise of affirmation for interactions, and on a good day a few words for Jiaoqiu’s food. 

Once in a while, he wakes up with the resolve to attempt to say something, to fix himself after they broke him, but there’s no quick healing or repairing to the fact that he still glances around before he speaks to see if they’re around the corner, waiting to tell him to shut up or be quiet because nobody would want to listen to the likes of him .

When he was younger, his tongue was always sore from constantly biting on it to remind himself not to speak. 

Now, instead of trying not to say anything, he’s struggling with being able to freely speak at all. 

How ironic, he thinks. 

As he creeps over to the front entrance of Jiaoqiu’s home, he pulls up his hood and strides inside, footsteps completely silent. 

The Foxian had invited him and the General over to have dinner with him today to give Feixiao a break after a week of paperwork for the Wardance. 

Although he routinely takes attempts on the General’s life in various different scenarios in widely differing times, the one place he’s never going to do so is in the comfort and warmth of the healer’s residence. 

Moze had attempted once and then never again, because of the massive scolding Jiaoqiu had ended up giving to a certain sixteen-year-old boy with an affinity for the shadows. 

If Moze can recall, he said something along the lines of “not to hurt someone in the presence of a doctor, at the very least”, and although back then he never would have given in, he can now admit that it was poorly thought-out, because Jiaoqiu has stated on a few occasions that his purpose by the Merlin’s Claw’s side was to heal her, and he is nothing but resolute in his decisions.

Even if he really did end up fatally wounding her, somehow, by some Aeon-blessed miracle someday, if it were in Jiaoqiu’s home, he has not a doubt in his mind that the Foxian man would look between his master and his fellow retainer, sigh, smile, and then fix up her injuries in no time at all, and then fondly chew off Moze’s ear in… private , later.

Walking in behind Feixiao as she loudly opens the door to Jiaoqiu’s place, he feels the warmth of the hearth and belatedly realises he forgot to pull out the pocket knife for the split second she was a foot outside Jiaoqiu’s house, dismissing it quickly as he lowers his hood and steps in himself.

…

The first time Moze met Jiaoqiu, it was when he was sixteen. 

Just moments prior, he’d tried to take a hit on the General again. Four years, and he was still failing, somehow. 

Sullenly, he follows the woman as he forks over the strale, still chuckling heartily, into the unfamiliar house, trailing behind her quietly, only to be enveloped in an all-encompassing warmth. 

In all of two seconds, he’s sat down on a chair, and a young (Moze does not know how young “young” could possibly be for Foxians, nor the conversion rate from long-life species to short-life species years, but judging based solely on appearance, he looks to be about his early twenties), beautiful Foxian man with sharp golden eyes and long salmon-coloured hair that goes past his shoulders places his hands on Moze’s shoulders.

The first words that come out of the man’s mouth are..unexpected.

“Listen here, boy. Yes, you, there’s only one child here, and it’s certainly not myself or the General over there, is it?”

“If you want to try murdering the woman I’ve sworn my life to save in cold blood, at least think about where you’re doing it, hm? Think about it. This is, quite possibly, the worst spot for an assassination attempt you could have chosen, as I am a healer and I could have easily knocked you and your scrawny frame over to go tend to her at a moment’s notice.”

Moze’s face reddens noticeably, but he remains silent, putting an arm over his chest, doing a terrible job of covering up his ribs. 

They’ve been poking out for a long time, like this, and it’s most definitely not the General’s fault. She’s been trying to get him to a healthier body mass for a long time now, but his stupid, stupid head just can’t process that she’s not trying to drug him to experiment on him.  

Just like all the other things he’s been discovering have changed about himself, he wonders when it happened. 

When he started refusing to take more than he deemed “necessary” after they put pills into his meals. 

The man seems to notice his change in demeanour, looking him in the eye for a second before turning around, pink tail swaying, and sighs. 

“I’m sorry, boy. That was too harsh of me. Would you like something to eat? I can promise you there’s nothing in it.”

Over the last four years, Moze has begun to trust the woman, or, Feixiao, as she tells him to call her.

This man…

He has the same warmth she does. 

It feels good enough for Moze to hesitantly open his mouth, and start to mumble out a single word.

“...Promise?”

Feixiao jumps back a bit, taken aback by his sudden speech. The man smiles at him, caring and wholesome, no evil teeth or overly saccharine masks. 

“Sure. I can prove it, too. Come here.”

He beckons for Moze to get up next to him, as he walks over to the stovetop and removes the lid. 

“Here. I was about to start.”

Inside the pot lies finely-diced vegetables that Moze cannot make out, but can tell are not harmful. There’s some powder, but the man points to a glass jar of what seems to be seasoning, and dips a finger into it, offering some. 

With a bit of caution, Moze follows suit and licks it off his own index finger, long and bony as it is. 

It tastes pleasant, at first. 

Then, the nice taste develops into a warm tingling across his tongue, ultimately turning into a flame across his cheeks and the roof of his mouth.

Choking, he spits out, “It’s….spicy…”

It’s not hurting him or putting him to sleep, though. 

Feixiao just shakes her head, sighs a long, hard, sigh, and turns to the man. 

“Jiaoqiu, go easy on him, will you?”

The man - Jiaoqiu - just cheekily grins with the immaturity of a teenager. 

“Heh.” 

In the end, he does apologise to Moze, and makes him some soup, and although the boy’s throat is irrevocably scarred for life, the food does do a wonderful job of soothing it. 

He doesn’t realise it until they walk out the door again a few hours of bustling chatter between the Foxians later, not until Feixiao looks at him, and asks, “Hey, Moze, are you okay?”

Moze brings a skinny hand to his cheek, feeling the watery droplets run down his face, and opens his mouth in surprise. 

He’s…crying. 

Somehow, he doesn’t feel bad about it, though. 

He thinks about Jiaoqiu and the soup and the unidentified spice and the smiles and warmth. 

Ah. 

Fatter tears roll off as he comes to the conclusion that in all of two hours, he’s been shown more care than he’s been given in the twelve years he had a family, ever. 

The boy covers his face with his hands, and decides to let himself cry. He’ll deal with the consequences later.

(There were no ‘consequences’ in the end. All Feixiao did was give him a long hug, some soothing words, and later in the bathroom, he resolved to try to stop using the worn-out rags on his arms.)

…

Once upon a time, a long, long time ago, within the unbearable conditions of the “havens” of a certain rampant organisation, there was a boy who was deathly terrified of medicine. 

They’d called his fear unfounded and shameful. 

Said it was unbecoming for one of the Merciful Medicus’ lowly worshippers to hate THEIR cure so much.

Once upon a time, he’d believed them. 

They were his family, after all. They took care of him. They had his best interests in mind.

They raised him. He was one of them. He’d never turn his blade against them.

He’d definitely thought about it once or twice, when he was still young and disobedient. 

Once upon a time, they called him a sinner, unworthy of the…’love’ they gave him, the imperfections ruining his soul. 

He was not good, but they’d told him they would fix him, and he would be good once they did. 

That boy was young. 

So young that even years after the brief, yet seemingly long moments that had stretched on forever to the child where they’d done unspeakable things to him he would wake up in a cold sweat. 

What he did after he woke up varied. 

Usually, after the General took him in, he would walk to the bathroom, put his shaking hands on the counter-tops, the beads of sweat dripping down his face, and stare at himself. 

Sometimes, though…

Moze opens his eyes like there’s a knife being pressed to his throat. 

He is seventeen, yet their ghosts still haunt him the way they did when he was twelve, right after they died.

He slowly turns his eyes over to the clock on the side table next to the bed. 

It’s three-thirty-eight in the morning, and suddenly he wants to rip his teeth out, or something like that. 

He sits up, looking down at the bed, and he finds himself looking for the brown, battered cardboard of the boxlike excuse of a bed he’d had back then. 

Why was he even up right now? He should…go back to bed, probably.

Did…he have anything to do tomorrow?

He pulls his legs back onto the bed, backing into the wall, pulling them to his arms, burying his head into them as he starts to think. 

Just moments earlier, he’d been ten years old again, getting his jaw forced open by rough movements and cold gazes, paralysed as he watched them open the bottles. 

They’d pick out different colours of pills each time, always differently-shaped, and Moze would always be nauseous the next morning.

His mouth would be clamped shut once the pills had been hazardously tossed in, and he’d swallow out of fear for his own life, although doing the reverse, in hindsight, would have been far more reasonable. 

Not a day later, he’d wake up to a blunt needle being stabbed into his arm, or leg, or occasionally his shoulder. 

He could never say anything, but he was scared. 

He’d always been scared. 

But they were his family. They cared for him. 

Even if they told him he was dirty, or if they told him to shut up, or they made him ashamed of simply having been born a natural long-life species child, or if they made him afraid of the idea of the people that were supposed to be the closest to him. 

It was okay. 

They raised him, and he was family. 

In truth, Moze’s been growing uneasy for a while now. 

It’s been five years. 

Five years of a different life does a lot to shift one’s point of view, and his reasons for trying to kill the Foxian woman have been dissipating, one by one. 

This is the last line he has, and although deep down, he knows gripping it tighter will only hurt him more than letting go, he has never known anything else, and he cannot find it in himself to let the strings go. 

To let himself acknowledge that they weren’t really his family, after all.

They’re the last remaining strings of his clarity. 

If he lets it all go, what else will he have? 

They were gone five years ago, but they were never really dead to him. 

He wants to throw up, all of a sudden. 

He…should go take his medications. 

Yes, that’s a good idea. 

That way, he won’t have to bother Jiaoqiu in the morning. 

It works out for everyone. 

He will be good if he takes them, and he feels right now he needs to have that the most.

(It’s not good for a seventeen-year-old-boy with so many issues to be near a medicine cabinet unsupervised, but no one has ever told that to Moze, so like any other child, he wouldn’t know that.)

Blending in with the shadows of the dark and the night, Moze creeps downstairs, quiet as a speck of dust in the corner of an old closet, to Jiaoqiu’s medicine stockpile. 

Opening the door, there are mostly spices and herbs, but on a different shelf, a bit higher, he can distinguish some bottles. 

Without much difficulty, he reaches up and swiftly grabs a few, staring at them. 

What is he doing? 

It’s three in the morning, and here he is, raiding Jiaoqiu’s medicine cabinet like a child and a cookie jar.

Moze opens his own bottle, picking out the circular tablets and swallowing them whole. 

There’s another one that says “pain relief”, and Moze decides that he can do something spontaneous for once and regret his decisions in the morning. 

Something about these makes him feel like he’s good, worthy. Like he’s not worthless.

About ten minutes later, he’s downed half the pills in the pantry stock, and he’s coming to the realisation he’s just done something very, very wrong. 

Instantly, there are figures towering over him, and he lowers to the ground, the bottles quietly watching from their temporary place on the kitchen table. 

They are telling him he’s trying to kill himself. 

Telling him he’s trying to go against the Sanctus Medicus, the holy saint that was supposed to save him and now he will instead rot in hell.

No, he tries to scream.

No, he thinks to himself. No, I just wanted to be good. 

Jiaoqiu will be furious at him in the morning. 

He will be angry that Moze has so clearly tried to be evil, to embrace the darkness in his spirit that they abhor. 

If Jiaoqiu has to be angry, Moze does not want to be yelled at. He does not want to be hurt for trying to be good. 

It’s not obedient of him, not very good of him, but he makes his way out the sliding doors onto the roof, his face in his hands, not knowing what to do with himself. 

Apparently, Jiaoqiu either has overly refined hearing, or Moze has forgotten to be quiet, or maybe both, because after a few minutes of not knowing what he should do, he hears a gentle sigh. 

“Moze, get down from there, please.”

He freezes. 

He is trying to lure him. To capture him, so he can yell and scream and reprimand and hurt him. 

Then, Moze remembers that Jiaoqiu, unlike himself, is a good person. 

That he’s a gentle person. 

Moze does not come off of the roof. 

What he does do, though, is respond quietly, perhaps quieter than usual. It’s okay, he knows Jiaoqiu can hear him.

“...I’m sorry.”

“Moze, it’s alright. I promise you’ll be fine. Please come over here. Sitting on the roof is risky.”

Moze contemplates for a second, and decides to get off the roof. 

As soon as Jiaoqiu sees him appear next to him, he sighs again, caressing his temple, and Moze shrinks. 

“Just come inside with me, boy. We can talk about this when it’s not in the cold at an ungodly hour of the morning, alright?”

Moze stiffly nods, both heading back inside the house to go upstairs, Jiaoqiu carefully watching Moze as they pass the cabinet. 

As he returns to his bed, he cannot sleep. 

All he can do is stare at the ceiling until five hours later, when Jiaoqiu comes into his room, leans against the doorframe, and hits him with the, “We need to talk.”

So, Moze finds himself sitting on the tiled floor of the room with Jiaoqiu as the doctor picks up the emptied-out bottles from those few hours ago and arranges them neatly between them. 

“Moze, you already know what I’m going to say, don’t you?”

He does know. He’s going to say he’s sinned.

“...I’m sorry. I’ll…be better.”

Jiaoqiu’s face turns confused. 

“What do you mean? I was simply about to ask why it happened so we can get rid of the root problem.”

Ah. Right. Jiaoqiu doesn’t want to hurt him.

“...”

Moze turns away, averting his gaze from the golden eyes and the bottles. 

“No, none of that. You need to tell me, boy, or I can’t help you.”

Moze looks back at him. 

“...I…”

Jiaoqiu looks at him patiently. 

“...had a dream. I just…wanted to be good.”

He can see the wheels turning in the Foxian’s head.

“Ah, so that’s what this is about.” 

“...Mm.”

“We don’t need to talk about it if you don’t want to, Moze. I just need to know if you’re feeling alright, because that was a lot of medicine.”

“I’m okay.”

“You sure? You look like you need to throw up.”

That sounds really nice, right now. 

Jiaoqiu’s stern doctor persona switches on. 

“Don’t keep looking at me. If you need to, go. I’ll make some soup.”

…Moze runs off. 

It’s been so long since then.

Predictably, that day, he’d gotten just about deathly sick from the overdoses of medicine, but he hadn’t intended to kill himself. 

He and Jiaoqiu had a long talk about that afterwards, one that he wishes not to remember not for the sake of shame but because of how long it really was. 

Looking back on it now, Moze really wishes he could say he might laugh about it, but it only serves as a reminder of what he’s turned into. 

Something he wasn’t meant to be.

Something of the Abundance’s terrifying creations, although Jiaoqiu and Feixiao have made sure on several occasions to reassure him otherwise. 

Maybe that’s why he decided to continue following behind the Yaoqing’s Arbiter-General. 

After all, Lan’s arrows will continue to rain upon Yaoshi’s overgrown lands till the end of time. 

For better or for worse, though? Once the destructive power of the Hunt lands on the grass, the barren spot is doomed to never grow again. 

It seems that…Moze still has much to learn, even after everything. 

… 

He doesn’t have any outward weaknesses, which fits nicely with the fact that he’s a Shadow Guard. 

On the inside, though, he’s full of them. Moze hates this. 

He can’t stand anything less than spotlessly clean, gets the flashbacks when he closes his eyes, wouldn’t talk, or rather, couldn’t talk, for the sake of someone’s life, and a few other things. 

It’s not like he was born with all of those weaknesses. Most of them come from his childhood. They come back to bite him at the worst moments, occasionally. 

…

Moze has so many things he could be doing right now. 

So why is he inside a closet, crouching and quieting his breath, holding a dagger in his hands when he knows she’s probably not coming? 

This is stupid, he thinks. 

I don’t even want to kill her anymore, a voice inside him says. She is my friend. I don't want to hurt her.

He shakes his head fervently. 

No, he tells himself. No. 

But she’s good to you. 

She killed them. 

They didn’t love you. 

It doesn’t matter. She has to die. 

They’re not going to stop haunting you even if she’s gone. She saved you, it taunts. 

No. No, she has to die, she has to, she needs to, or you will hear them forever, ringing in your ears as you walk at night, shadowing behind you when you run, thundering in your mind and refusing to leave when all you want is to be freed. 

Your shackles will only become heavier, if she dies. She can help you. 

He breathes, long and hard, sucking in the air and pushing it out forcefully.

To any normal person, he might seem like he is fine. 

This, though, is the best he can express his despair to himself before he crumbles. 

He opens his eyes, frightened violet meeting closed doors. 

Closed. 

Immediately, he thinks about the times he was locked up in a small place, a little cellar, somewhere so small it couldn’t possibly be his fault for developing intense claustrophobia over time. 

Claustrophobia. He forgot. 

He tries to push open the heavy doors, his breathing becoming more ragged and hoarse by the second, but all he ends up doing is locking it, and he starts to claw.

Nevermind that his nails are bitten to death, that they start to bleed, that he starts to breathe harsher and harder as he kicks at the doors, punches them, even tries to rip it open with the knife. 

Moze can’t focus on anything. He tries, but he can’t. 

He feels the tears rolling down his face, down his neck. 

Worst of all, he can feel a sound crawling its way out of his throat. It climbs up, higher and higher, and he finds he cannot suppress it when it finally reaches the top. 

He lets out the most guttural, loudest scream he’s ever had. 

It’s not really that loud, being that his voice is scratchy and rough from disuse, but it disrupts the quiet of the residence. 

Moze’s hands find their way, bleeding and chapped as they are, to the scales on his arms. 

He’s been hiding them under his sleeves, watching them grow, not letting himself pick at them. 

Maybe…

No. 

He closes his eyes, shakes his head, and moves them to his hair, instead. At least tugging on that won’t make it come out.

Faintly, he can hear the sound of a person running towards his general direction, light on their feet, as he breathes. 

The knife clatters to the floor of the closet, and he rocks back and forth. 

He really wants to close his eyes and drift off right now. 

It feels like he’s sinking to rock bottom, maybe further than that.

As he closes his eyes shut, he can feel light on his face as the heavy doors open up. 

Cracking one of his eyes open a sliver, he can see her lips moving faster than he can read them. 

In a swift moment, the Foxian woman picks him up out of the closet and starts shaking him by the shoulders aggressively, clearly in a state of panic. 

“Hey, breathe, breathe, okay? Just try to breathe in and out, alright? Do you need water?” 

She seems to be breathing almost as erratically as he is, though. 

He can hear her mumbling.

Something like, “Aeons, please don’t take him from me, please, not him too, not after all of them.”

He really hates being touched against his will, but maybe both of them will stop breathing so raggedly, like they’re going to choke, if he lets her. 

Moze can’t really focus, but he tries his best, the images still flashing through his mind, shakily reaching up his hands. 

Feixiao looks at him silently, as if to ask, and while he desperately feels the urge to go back to picking at his arms, he shakes his head fervently up and down. 

She holds him closer, head on his shoulders, rocking back and forth, both of them on the floor. 

The contact burns his skin, but the feeling is overshadowed by comfort. 

Moze slowly rises back up to the surface, taking a few long breaths. 

“It’ll be okay, Moze, you’ll be okay…” 

“...You’ll be o..okay too..”  

She pats his back gently and rhythmically, her own tears free-falling down his back. 

That’s one of the similarities.

They come from similar backgrounds, as she’s told him when there’s nothing to raise her axe or his dagger upon and they sit on the edge of the Yaoqing fleet.

They’d exchanged stories many times over the last few years. 

Feixiao would quietly recount her days of war, being dragged over dirt and coarse ground, every last one of her fellow prisoners dying of something or other in front of her. Fearing every day for her life, fearing she’d be struck down next.The blood on her hands, the uncertainty of ascending to the role of a General’s, if she was fit to be one at all. 

He’d let words that pushed themselves down his throat many times free, talk about the experiments and the medications and his family. The pain, the tears, the excellent emotional control developing from years of forced prayers and ideologies and beatings, an innate sense of constant self-hatred following him everywhere.  

It’s hard to imagine that this woman could have ever been weak, but everyone is a child once. It’s just that not everyone gets to have their childhood, and neither of them were lucky enough.

It was probably some kind of shock right to Feixiao’s heart, he thinks, clearer now that his breathing has calmed, to see him curled up with bleeding hands and knuckles, face pale and drained of warmth, inside that closet like he had been hit by an arrow.

She really is his friend now, isn’t she? It’s not like she could care otherwise. 

Oh.

He troubled her, didn’t he? 

Moze…should apologise. 

He rubs one of his own hands over her back, soothing it. 

“I’m sorry for scaring you.”

She suddenly pulls her face off of his shoulder and looks at him dead in the eye.

“Don’t be. It’s not your fault, Moze, okay? It’s okay. I’m alright now. Are you feeling better?” 

“...Mhm. It…was dark, though.” 

“Okay. You wanna do something else?” 

He can feel her eyes on the dagger. He grips it a little tighter. 

“We still have that mission to go on, if you’re up for it.”

Of course, he accepts.

If Moze doesn’t see that closet there the next time he walks into that room, he doesn’t say anything.

….

Moze has never been much of a smiler. That’s a fact about him that’s easy to pick up from his outward appearance. 

Even when he was still a little Vidyadhara, running freely amongst crowds of people with the baby fat in his cheeks, he’d always preferred to squint up into someone’s eyes and look there instead, looking for a spark of something interesting. 

Those sparks came in different forms. Sometimes it was there, sometimes it wasn’t. It’s more efficient to tell what somebody is thinking from their eyes, since those don’t lie. 

Then again, Moze’s own eyes, the most ridiculous combination of colours for his profession, blue, purple and pink, have never really shown much within. 

Jiaoqiu occasionally says something about how unique they look, but that’s not much coming from a man with golden orbs for eyes that can be scary in every way if something happens. 

Sometimes he wonders how Feixiao’s eyes seem so remarkably normal compared to her retainers. She’s certainly not a regular Foxian, anyways, so…

The point is, Moze doesn’t really smile. He doesn’t smile with his face, or his eyes, or anything, really. 

That’d been one of the things Feixiao had teased him about when he was still new to the General and her whole personality. 

It’d always be something like, “ Kids like you should smile more often! See how nice it looks?” 

She would give him a toothy grin of her own, and then she’d drag him to a mirror and use her fingers to stretch his mouth without his consent. 

(It was okay with her, though. He understood her touch wasn’t meant to harm him.)

Moze always thought that he looked pretty stupid with his mouth open like that. He’d push her off and argue with her a bit, as much as he could without talking too much, but it was all meant well. 

Actually, it hadn’t really been like he didn’t want to smile. It was just that back then he hadn’t anything to smile for. No smiling means essentially no laughing, either. 

Jiaoqiu had gotten on him once for that, and then the next day given him a songlotus cake to bite into. Lo and behold, some kind of creepy laughing sound emerged from his throat, and he got the Foxian back for that one later. 

Over the years, Feixiao would keep bringing him to look at his own reflection as he got older, still pulling his mouth sideways with her fingers, Moze furrowing his brow all the while, the expression turning into some kind of twisted grin. 

He never really thought he’d ever have reason to smile much at all, especially now, too, after everything with the borisin outbreak has gone down. 

Moze is not foolish enough to think he could curb Jiaoqiu’s stubbornness by himself, but if he’d been able to get there faster, stop hesitating, just ignore the commands the healer gave him, think on his own, he could have helped somehow. 

He might have not been able to salvage the Foxian’s sight, since Moze was never experienced in the medical field, but he could have saved him a third of a lifetime’s worth of the chilling whispers, the haunting visions at night. The urge to look behind him every now and then, expecting to see a dauntingly structured beast. 

Now, Jiaoqiu can’t even indulge in half of his favourite pastime anymore, the spicy food he loves so much. If he so much as lets a drop of sauce near the inside of his mouth, his wounds will flare up again and cause unnecessary pains that Moze hates to see him suffer. 

Even as he and Feixiao make their worries known to him, the healer still refuses to admit anything, stating that he’s fine with “going off of memory” while he attempts to cook. 

It was also incredibly awkward to stand behind Jiaoqiu, quietly, for Moze, as he stood in the shadows and watched the man fumble for his spices, not quite spilling on the floor, but pouring sugar into a pot when it needed salt. 

Dinner that night was still very good, but Moze thinks Jiaoqiu could tell something was off as they silently ate, the three of them. 

It’s been a few months since then, and Moze himself got away with only a handful of new scars. He feels incredibly guilty for that. 

Before, he’d really had no reason to smile at all, but after seeing somebody he’s so close to get put in a life-or-death situation like that, even he has to admit he’s been shaken up the way one mixes around ingredients in a bowl. 

He can’t protect everyone he cares about, and that would have been fine before because he didn’t care about anyone at all, not even himself. 

And although that last part is still mostly unchanged, he’s realised that the list of people he holds a certain fondness for is only getting longer. 

After such a grave realisation, who could bring themselves to smile? 

He knows that Jiaoqiu would probably give him a scolding for not believing that the Foxian could manage himself, but he can’t help it. He can’t help wanting to have whatever he loves close to his chest, so that they can’t be harmed. 

It’s a natural part of life , Jiaoqiu had consoled him. 

It’s okay.

It’s not your fault. 

This was my idea. It had nothing to do with you. 

What guts him the most is that he couldn’t be useful in those few moments. All he could do was watch silently, waiting for a moment to step in, as the healer waved him away with his eyes, telling him to turn away. 

Because of that, Jiaoqiu got hurt. 

He hasn’t really left his room much for the last week unless it’s for missions, now, quietly dwelling on what else he can do to make it up to Jiaoqiu. 

Surely he doesn’t truly forgive him? There must be something else he can do. 

There has to be, right? 

As he mulls it over, the door opens, and light streams in. 

“Moze, come out, please.” 

It’s Jiaoqiu. He lets himself become visible again, so that the man walks over to the spot he’s sitting on the floor. 

He kneels over. 

The words he says are nothing remotely like what Moze imagined he might. 

“Do you want to come out with us to the new hotpot place?” 

“...Huh?” 

“Yes, I said what I said.” 

Before he knows it, Moze’s getting dragged off the floor onto his feet and out the residence onto the street. Apparently, Feixiao is already there, and she’s waiting. 

They walk in silence. 

“...I’m sorry.” 

“Aeons, boy, how many times do I need to tell you that I was never angry with you in the first place? You’re forgiven a hundred times over, Moze.” 

“I…failed you.” 

Jiaoqiu scoffs as he steps over a rock. 

“Nonsense. What have you been telling yourself? It’s fine, it really is.” 

“...Can I at least…do something?”

“What, to make up for it?”

He nods.

Jiaoqiu playfully puts his finger up to his chin as if he’s thinking.

“Hm. How about you have the spicy one for me, then?” 

“Huh?” 

“Mhm.”

“Oh…okay.” 

Jiaoqiu smiles at him. It’s pure. Moze cannot see anything in his eyes anymore, but he can tell he has no grievances. 

It’s only the smile of a happy man. 

So, Moze returns the favour and smiles back at him. 

He doesn’t have to force it. It comes out by itself. 

Maybe…I can get used to this.