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Nezha finds that it’s easier to categorize people by sensations and what he feels in their spirits.
Besides the obvious ones—he himself is fire, of course; Ao Bing is clearly ice and snowflakes, as gentle and unfairly kind as he is sharp-edged and bladed, and he tends to think of his father as an unshakeable boulder, standing tall even as he’s chipped at—when he thinks about his mother, it’s harder to categorize.
She has the same fire as him, a tongue sharper than his, a sword that never falls out of trajectory. She’s gentle and picks him up with hands roughened and calloused from battle but gentler and kinder than a spring flower. She’s the kindest person in the whole wide world and loves Nezha more than he deserves.
He doesn’t know how to categorize his mother, so he never tries. He doesn’t think he would ever regret not giving it enough thought, until he does. Ao Bing sits beside him, cool and constant to the unsteady crackle of his fire, and never presses, and for that, Nezha is grateful—something of kindness and care left behind in the cracks his mother tried her hardest to fill.
He knows his birth was not auspicious.
Even before he had known about the curse that was supposed to take his life—would have, if he hadn’t had Ao Bing by his side—he’d known before he could speak (just a scant few months old, he was) that his existence weighed on his parents. Of course, he knew they loved him; of course they did. How else is he meant to take kind, worried hands lifting him up and amused laughs when he learned to walk around and promptly fell over on his face?
(But resentment grows and festers and he’d been trapped inside his whole life and there was no one in the world who understood what it meant to be Nezha. Growing up too-quick-too-fast, with no evident maturity, no friends, no good nature, nothing worth noting except a strength wired to break and kill. He’d known that. He’d hated it and embraced it awkwardly in a sideways hug, leaning in only when it suited him, cringing away where it didn’t serve him.)
His parents love him, his mother loved him, this is true, but what is also true is that his mother was often weighed down by what it meant to be a parent to a child who would, at most, live for three years, and give everyone on earth hell’s worth of trouble the entire way. Nezha believes, now, that he should’ve commended his mother’s love sooner—who the hell gives their life to loving a child who doesn’t even understand the weight of its existence?
Except Nezha did, and not entirely soon enough, or just—not enough.
At half a year old, Nezha had once fallen off a table, and a rather high one at that.
His mother had left him up there, keeping an eye on him while she baked—he would come to understand later the ridiculousness of the timing; who bakes for their half-a-year-old son right after returning from a skirmish at the border?—and had simply left to get something from the adjoining room. Nezha was an active kid, true, but it’d been hardly a minute.
Nezha doesn’t exactly remember how and why he ended up on the floor, either, but he remembers it hurt, and he’d screamed, and his mother had come running, horrified and spooked by a sound she’d yet to hear from her son. She’d scooped him into her arms and knelt on the floor, checking him over for injuries, rubbing her hands all over his arms and legs and his back, and, once certain he was safe and sound, buried him in an embrace so tight it might’ve suffocated a normal baby.
Except Nezha had simply squirmed and tried to bite his mother, and then gradually relaxed and calmed, tucking his head against her chest and drowsing off rather quick. She’d go on to recount the event a year or so later and say, Zha-er, you always use up so much energy, no wonder you went right to sleep! Which is not. Wrong, but:
Nezha didn’t really fall asleep that day. He’d stayed in her arms until she put him down in his bed and he shot right back up, giggling and immediately breaking something else. It’d been safe, and he had outgrown it way, way too soon.
He thinks he most regrets never telling his mother about Ao Bing.
True, he hadn’t known Ao Bing for a very long time, but immediately after he had met him he’d been locked up, and then the whole thing with the curse happened, and then he’d gone and died, and his mother had cried so much, and then he’d rejected her hugs as he’d left, Ao Bing’s soul nestled next to his own.
Stupid, stupid. He’s so stupid, it really is unbelievable.
He wishes he’d had time to tell his mother about the only friend he’d ever made. He wants to tell her about how Ao Bing is so mild-mannered and polite, but he’s so ridiculously easy to rile up, and likes to poke fun at Nezha just to see him sputter in disbelief. He wants to tell his mother about how Ao Bing hadn’t said a word about his appearance when they met (even though Nezha poked fun at Ao Bing’s horns, which—okay, idiot move, he can accept that) but had kicked jianzi with him and smiled instead of laughed when Nezha cried about it.
His mother had wanted Nezha to have friends so badly. He didn’t really believe it back then, when both his parents insisted he stay locked up in the compound, looking at him with exasperation whenever he broke out; it had felt like a splinter through his heart every time. No matter where he went, he was always alone, doing something wrong; it didn’t matter that his mother often slipped up and said, Zha-er, you should make friends, before remembering he didn’t really have means to.
Truthfully, he hadn’t thought of himself as the kind of guy anyone would want to be friends with. Until Ao Bing, of course, and—
He doesn’t want to share Ao Bing with anyone else, but he wants his mother to know how happy and joyous every moment he spends with Ao Bing is. How his heart had dropped when Ao Bing had turned to the sea and left with his father, fluttering weakly with the hope that he’d come back, and then soaring to the heavens with delight when he did. If there’s anything else like ascension in the world, it’s that: I’m enough, I’m worth it, and he came back. I’m worth staying for.
He’d wanted to tell his mother about how special Ao Bing is. Maybe he’d have stumbled over it: Niang, this is Ao Bing. You’ve met him before, but—he’s my friend. I…yeah. He’s not good with words. He imagines that, if there had been time, Ao Bing would’ve bowed to his mother and greeted her so very formally like the perfect little good boy he is. God, Nezha would’ve loved to never let him forget such a thing.
(The bow and formal greeting to his father doesn’t count, not in the wake of his dead mother and his own family’s betrayals. Even Nezha knows that much.)
He wants to tell his mother, and watch her smile light up, watch her smile at him so softly before joy overtakes it; wants to see the way she’ll take Ao Bing’s hands and greet him so happily, manners thrown to the wind because Nezha has a friend, and a good one at that. Well—that is barring the whole deal about him being, well, a dragon, but he supposes that if it had been any time after they’d chased off Wuliang, if his mother had survived it—
He wants her to see that she’s not alone in her desperate fight to make sure her son is loved, and she never has been. Nezha had simply learned it too late.
I wanted, so badly, to make you proud, this is all my fault, I’m so sorry.
But his mother would never let him take that kind of blame by himself, so, as often as he repeats in his head, in his dreams, in his waking thoughts, she’s there to pierce herself through a hundred spikes and tell him I never cared whether you were an immortal or a demon. All I know is you’re my son. Niang will always love—
It’s a bit like a betrayal, to still fail at finding true meaning in her words. To accept that there is no real difference, to pretend like he had not been a burden to his parents his whole life.
(She keeps telling him. Again, and again, and again, even when he doesn’t believe it.)