Chapter Text
Burnt hair doesn’t smell just of ash. It’s a rotted scent, thick with sulfur, filling Mu Qing’s nose with familiarity, just as the burnt flesh of his hands and legs do. More than most people, he knows this scent, more than he knows the oils and incenses that he floods his space with now.
After all, this is what Xianle smelled like as their people died. It clings to him again.
Carefully, Mu Qing removes his guan and then the ribbon holding his ponytail high atop his head. His hair falls open and, even burnt far more than halfway down, it still clings together to near his knees. For all the accusations he’s faced for criminal behavior, he’s been lucky to never have had his hair cut. He’s been lucky to let it grow, the minimalist of trims since he was a child, the final length of it this partial tribute, memorial, to that youth.
But Mu Qing hasn’t been young for long in his life. He doesn’t know when he went from a child to adult, really, this gradual shift into it imperceptible in a way others don’t feel with their celebrated birthdays and holidays, each milestone punctuating each year like a ticking of a clock. Mu Qing, rather, only remembers this fugue of being both a child and adult, always. There isn’t a place to hide the sufferings of adults when they’ve children, no way to hide the lack of money or food when their small, cracked bowls look big around the food inside of it. There was a difference in childhood though, in others seeing him and seeing a child, and not a quiet, unsmiling youth or an embittered adult. There was safety.
He’s covered in armor most often these days, his saber always, always within reach, but there’s no sense of safety in it at all. Mu Qing doesn’t feel safe at all. He never has.
Tired, his hand slips a bit when he glides a blade through his burnt hair, and he swears underneath his breath as sets the burnt bunch aside to hastily look at his hair and check that the length of each strand can be measured by the same single neat line at the bottom.
There’s an ache behind his ribs, in that hollow holding his stomach, lungs, and heart, that has been carved out by hunger and silence. Silence held lungs in a vice, emptied and filled them with air in a way that did not feel like breathing.
Mu Qing looks at the burnt hair left on his vanity, the ash beneath and around it, staining the furniture’s surface just as much as it stained Mu Qing’s soul. His throat tightens. It’s the last of it. The last link to his parents, the last reminder, the last chance of being a filial son—even this, has been taken from him.
A knock interrupts him as he cleans his vanity numbly, and Mu Qing’s hand—blistered, burnt, maybe hurting. He can’t feel it at all—pauses.
“General,” Chen Weici says quietly from outside. “General Nan Yang is asking to see you.”
Mu Qing looks up and meets his own eyes in the mirror. He’s bruised and bloody, strands of the hair left on his head pasting to his skin. He’s eaten fine these past few days, months, centuries, though as a god he needn’t, but his face still looks hollow, gaunt.
Feng Xin‘s arm around his waist, teeth pulling his bow to shoot arrows to save him. His loyalty really knows no bounds and, even now, Feng Xin wants to see him.
Xie Lian’s influence truly was incomparable.
These things that Mu Qing knows nothing about: loyalty, the ability to see it through. Influence, the command of being important.
He’d have been a more worthy son if he did. Mu Qing throws his hair away. “Tell him to go away.”
His parents have been dead for centuries; what should this matter now?
It’s quiet for a long moment. “Yes, General.”
Mu Qing rests his head and tries to sleep. His eyes wet his pillow below his head.
His parents have been dead for too long. This shouldn’t matter now.
He doesn’t sleep at all.
🏹 - <> - 🌸 - <>- 🐈⬛ - <> - 🦋
The first time Mu Qing visits Xie Lian, he’s careful to keep his altered appearance immaculate, hair perfect, to what will surely be a quiet, awkward meeting made to make sure Xie Lian was still surviving without his ‘San Lang’. But he gives up after some dozen visits to Xie Lian. His spiritual energy is still low from the shackle, from the injuries taking too long to heal, and the immense amount of work that Mu Qing stayed sleepless and uneating through. The mirage is pointless. It’s a sunny morning the first time he visits Xie Lian like this, the air damp and ground muddied.
It feels like the day they had truly said goodbye.
Hair by his shoulders, even shorter than how he wore it as Fu Yao, Mu Qing is almost tempted to return to that alter disguise. This, coming here with his own face and name, almost feels like being a child once more and playing dress-up, like he’s come incognito but the only person he’s hiding from is himself. The thought leaves a sour taste in his mouth, one he can’t swallow past the tightness in his throat. He’s become a stranger to himself.
When the door swings open, Xie Lian looks at him for a moment, his expression eager…then it falls, confused. He stares at Mu Qing as if he doesn’t know who he is, as if the person at his doorstep is nothing more than a stranger.
(Again, Mu Qing’s brain taunts. Again, Xie Lian doesn’t recognize Mu Qing. Or maybe Dianxia never knew me at all.)
He doesn’t need any assistance for things to be awkward between him and Xie Lian, but this does the trick.
Sneering, Mu Qing says, “Should we stand out here all day, Xie Lian?”
“Ah haha,” Xie Lian laughs awkwardly. “Of course not, come in.”
Mu Qing scowls, but he steps in and takes the offered seat at the single table that could do with repairs. Feng Xin’s already there; the awkwardness between he and Xie Lian had been easily dispersed. Childhood friends, being cast away rather than escaping, there’s nothing but a sad circumstance between them rather than an ungrateful betrayal. They—Feng Xin and Mu Qing to Xie Lian—are not the same.
Mu Qing doesn’t bother to greet him. The fights between them are mostly gone and now Mu Qing doesn’t have anything else to hold onto. There’s nothing but their awkward connection through Xie Lian, because that is all their relationship has always been centered around, made of: Xie Lian.
“Ha ha, I’ve to fix that still. I hope you don’t mind,” Xie Lian’s laugh is awkward, tired, his eyes rimmed with the red of fatigue. They’re swollen, too, as if he’d been crying.
Mu Qing is careful not to look.
I’ve always wanted to be your friend.
He lets Xie Lian offer him tea and sips it while it is still too hot. The words still taste like ash on his tongue, burning: disposable. A clean slate beneath waiting for the mess on top of it to be wiped away.
This place, this space, everything between them is awkward and unsure and Mu Qing feels too unlike himself to feel anything but on edge. After all, hadn’t Dianxia said they were friends before?
A criminal’s son, Mu Qing has long lost his friends.
(A criminal’s son, and now he looked like one.)
“I brought snacks,” Feng Xin says roughly, gesturing abortedly towards a filled plate in the middle of the table as if the silent agreement between them didn’t already prescribe that it was Feng Xin’s turn this time to bring something edible. Xie Lian sits down finally, easily helping himself to the snack and slipping it between his teeth. He nibbles stagnantly though, as if caught in a thought and lost again between the quiet moments.
Mu Qing nods and reaches for one, eyeing it critically. A snack in one hand and a teacup in the other, Mu Qing’s not sure of his place here. When Dianxia last called Mu Qing his friend, Mu Qing would’ve been the one to fix the table and make the tea. He wouldn’t be eating these clearly expensive snacks with Xie Lian; he’d be waiting until Xie Lian’s full enough to leave and eat what’s been left behind, if Xie Lian noticed enough to allow him.
But that was eight hundred years ago. They aren’t the same, things aren’t the same, as then. They talk about missions, about strange worshippers. They listen as Xie Lian tells them about the weird trinkets he’s found and the awkward bargains he found worthwhile. It’s going fine, it’s going fine until Feng Xin opens his stupid mouth.
“Your hair…it really had burnt off,” Feng Xin says. He almost sounds pained for Mu Qing.
The change in topic is jarring. Mu Qing nearly startles but he forces himself to not, rolling his eyes and biting back a scoff instead.
“Oh? I didn’t notice,” he drawls dryly, crossing his arms to resist the urge to touch his hair. Feng Xin had mentioned it at Tonglu…Mu Qing hadn’t expected him to care enough to mention it again. The change must be too drastic—it’s difficult to not feel even more self-conscious even as he tries to make himself take it lightly. “Did something give that away?”
Instead, it draws an immediate scowl from Feng Xin. “I was just saying—since you care about your appearance so much—”
In a fell swoop, the desperation to tread lightly is snatched from his hands, and Mu Qing’s stomach drops.
“My appearance,” he repeats hollowly. And then he does scoff, derisive and disbelieving. The sound punctures their tumultuous calm, like a sudden crack in ceramic, drawing a jagged line through precious product and threatening to make it shatter. Is that all Mu Qing still is in their eyes, vanity and pride?
(There’s a tiny part of him, buried beneath burning lava and ash, beneath all of the medicines he applied on himself that thinks, that feels that it’s not, that believes he’s more to them than that…and yet it’s all he can think. It’s too sore, his miserable heart and the miserable, wretchedness of himself left behind in the scars on his hands, dirtied and cleaned anew and completely untethered to his family.)
He continues, mouth filling in the spaces that Feng Xin’s words don’t. “Yes, that’s exactly it. My appearance, that’s what I care about.”
He remembers his mother’s hands brushing his hair, twirling the wavy-curling strands around her finger gently, playfully, braiding it before he fell asleep every night. Remembers his father teaching him to tie it in a neat bun.
This gift from his parents, it’s gone.
“You can disguise it like you were before,” Xie Lian says hastily, reaching a hand towards Mu Qing’s before hesitating and pulling it back to himself. His eyes flit from Mu Qing’s hair back to Mu Qing’s face, expression morphing to rest on something meant to be soothing. Something that almost seems like a plea for Mu Qing to be reassured by this overture of comfort. “Just until it grows back.”
Mu Qing realizes what he’s doing. Xie Lian’s eager to diffuse the tension. The intention is good, with Xie Lian it oft is. But with Mu Qing, it never came to practice the same way. Mu Qing laughs, the sound of it wet and mangled. It suits him, this ruined sound so unlike his usual laugh. He is no longer his usual self, it makes sense that even this would change.
“Disguise it? Disguise myself?” Mu Qing repeats incredulously. They look at him, and they don’t understand, it’s so obvious they don’t understand. That,
‘Oh no, here he goes again’
expression on their faces that Mu Qing detests. He leans closer, eyes alight, humiliation wrecking a wounded rage beneath his chest. “Like how we disguise whatever this is as friendship? I’ve done that before, Dianxia, are you sure you want me to do that again?”
The words leave his mouth just as so many before: bidden by offense. His appearance? His appearance? His parents are gone, the first and last gift they have given him has been irreparably damaged, and all they think is that Mu Qing is upset about his appearance? He laughs again, hands twitching, then clenching to keep from wrenching it through the remains of his hair.
“Just because you can hide something, Xie Lian, doesn’t mean it hasn’t happened. It doesn’t mean it’s been fixed. You of all people should know that well.”
He hears it after he says it—it’s a touch too cruel leaving his mouth this way, he doesn’t mean it, not like that, he doesn’t mean it but it’s too late—and Mu Qing pulls away, letting it drop within that physical space now between them, in that same distance where everything else that matters falls to be silenced. He should…he should leave. Before it gets worse. He should breathe—
Feng Xin stands up then, hands slamming onto the tabletop. “What the fuck’s your problem?! Why do you always have to be so—”
“Be so what? Myself?“ Mu Qing’s standing, too, suddenly, sneering. The table shatters beneath his hands, an explosion of wood and fire, and Mu Qing wants to scream. He didn’t start this fight, he didn’t, he didn’t—
I’ve disrespected my parents, he wants to yell, the realization, the words, damning. I’ve lost my tie to them.
His voice breaks first, before those words can escape, before he can beg Xie Lian and Feng Xin and ask if they could just understand—
And Mu Qing almost swears at himself, breath catching on it just to suffocate and choke him on the air. Staring at his friends,
(Friends. Friends? Friends?
He doesn’t know what that means. The frantic panic of not understanding claws up his throat, buried deep and sinking deeper, consuming him. He has no one. They don’t know him or anything he says, what it means, and he’s no different with them. He has no one. All that’s between them is wrongness and nothing, all that is left is remnants of something made of false perceptions that was gone centuries ago. That can’t be friendship.
That can’t be anything worthwhile. All Mu Qing has had for centuries is no one. Whatever they were, whoever they were and are, it should’ve been gone then, too.
All Mu Qing has now is no one.)
Mu Qing thinks of his parents and his heart stops, the words stuck in his throat.
I’ll never be able to ask for their forgiveness for it, but I beg you for a forgiveness that cannot compare.
The realization hits him all too hard, nearly sends him reeling. But he doesn’t say it. He can’t reveal it. Not this. Not to them. His supposed friends.
They’re not close enough to speak about this.
“This is how I am, Feng Xin, you’ve known me for eight centuries, has your brain not learned at least that yet?”
Feng Xin glares, his whole body going rigid in rage. “Learned what?! You don’t make sense! You expect people to know you when you don’t say anything! All you do is criticize everyone else as if you’ve no faults at all! All anyone knows about you is all the things you think you’re not and you have always been wrong!”
His chest rises and falls erratically. Each word hurts. They burn like brands against Mu Qing’s skin and Feng Xin and Xie Lian stare as if knowing, waiting for Mu Qing’s response. It hurts; Mu Qing won’t allow himself this weakness. Hardening his voice, he grits out, “It's not my fault you’ve always been too dense to understand anyone. I don’t make sense? What about Dianxia and Jian Lan?“ He lets his tone turn mocking. “They don’t make sense either?”
Feng Xin goes still, deathly still. So motionless, it’s as if in that very moment, he had stopped breathing.
Mu Qing doesn’t let that stop him, fury fueling his tongue, making a joke, a weapon, of something that isn’t funny at all. “You ever think, Feng Xin, that maybe you’re the problem?”
Feng Xin has. Mu Qing knows that better than anyone because he knows Feng Xin better than anyone except Feng Xin himself. He knows and he knows it hurts and he says it anyway because Feng Xin…more than anyone, Feng Xin should know what hurts Mu Qing, too.
It’s petty revenge. Casual cruelty.
Mu Qing can’t stop himself from breaking everything between them in it. “Everyone you thought you were close to, you were the one who never understood them at all. That’s why they didn’t even bother trying, they knew with you that it’d be no use.”
Even though it’s from his mouth the words spill from, even after he’d closed his teeth after them, Mu Qing can’t help but think how their conversation had been so benign, so fucking normal for once, until it suddenly was not. This argument, like every other, sprouted between them as predictably as any other. Mu Qing doesn’t know how it’s gotten to this, he doesn’t know, he doesn’t know. Distantly, he hears Xie Lian try ineffectually to diffuse it, displeasure of being dragged into their argument again heavy in his tone the way it wasn’t before Crimson Rain disappeared, but the words hardly register. Not that it needs to. Mu Qing knows Xie Lian in misery better than Xie Lian thinks and he can see that everything’s gone too far. Hundreds of years of Xie Lian learning patience while Mu Qing was ridding himself of his own didn’t change things as much as they’d all seemed so desperate to convince themselves.
Grief, loss—no one was impenetrable. No one with anything that bore a semblance to a heart could be unaffected. And Xie Lian? Wrought with this devastation of missing Crimson Rain, he isn’t so patient in this misery of waiting. Isn’t so patient to be dealing with them. But patience isn’t something Mu Qing’s ever been afforded, these spaces for understanding, to be understood, they were never catered for him. This frustration is what he knows, it’s all he knows…
And he’s fine with it.
He’ll tell himself that until he dies or until he believes it, whichever comes first. Mu Qing is fine with it. Scowling, he all but throws the chair behind him out of his way as he stands and heads to the door.
Behind him, Feng Xin still doesn’t move at all. All they have ever done is hurt each other and this time is no different.
Guilt simmers in his throat. Mu Qing doesn’t care. His foot hesitates just outside the closed door, ‘sorry’ trapped between his teeth where it always is, where no one else holds one for him…
This beleaguered routine…Mu Qing nearly laughs. He’s so, so tired of this practice in prostration.
For once, the ‘sorry’ between his teeth doesn’t move at all.