Chapter Text
Yanqing wonders if, in this ten-step state plan to betray the General in both life and death, Jing Yuan knows he’s loved.
They’re leaving a meeting with the Marshal— Yanqing attends these meetings now, there to support the General silently. The Godslayer Protocol is in full effect. The Ruin Author’s golden blood is in possession of the Xianzhou, they have a fragment of Tazzyronth prepared for metamorphosis, and Jing Yuan is prepared to sacrifice himself to take on the role of the Propagation.
Perhaps “prepared” is generous.
“It’s strange,” Jing Yuan rambles, freed of the silent selflessness demanded of him by the officials in the meeting hall. He strides quickly through the streets of the Luofu, boots flying across the cobblestone past the various gardens and restaurants in the Court of Tranquility. “I—I am not ready,” he admits. “It has been eight hundred years. For so long, I have told myself I have little care for daily life, that I am bored regardless, and that I would dedicate myself to the Xianzhou wholly. Why do I hesitate? Is it the nature of my death?”
Fu Xuan’s heels click against the stone alongside him, keeping up with his pace in a way Yanqing struggles to. “It’s natural too. Nobody can blame you. Your death is predestined, in perfect sight. For most, one never knows when it is coming. Anybody would be disconcerted to know the exact day and method they would die.”
“Maybe you’re going to hell,” Yanqing says cheerily, but nobody replies.
He is going to enter a chrysalis in two weeks. It’s a pulsing, writhing bulge of violet amniotic fluid, unfurling and aching with liquid need as it spills upon the laboratory floor. Meaty humidity twists with every throb of blood, if it can be called blood. It’s strange—sometimes Yanqing can smell the hunger on Jing Yuan’s breath during bad expeditions, so Yanqing knows to give the General his rations. It’s a little sour, fruity, and full of bile, like alcohol gone acidic. The reek of hunger pouring from the mouth of the chrysalis is all-encompassing; it sticks to hair, pores, and taste buds. It winks at them, the opening, like it wants a little taste. They got to see it, wrapped up in laboratory coats and safety goggles, like they aren’t tossing Jing Yuan in the heart of it to be swallowed down and digested.
It’ll harden, Ruan Mei had explained, when the worm enters metamorphosis. It’s still a little wet right now, but the silk will tighten right up. Then the exterior will go translucent, like violet glass, and they’ll be able to see every stage of metamorphosis. It should feel soft, she’d reassured him, like being enclosed in a womb. A warm and spongy embrace from all sides.
Jing Yuan hadn’t been able to sleep for three days, so Yanqing shared his bed, reaching over to pull blankets over his body and hold him like a child. They were told to ensure Jing Yuan got plenty of nutrients to push up his caloric intake. Yanqing isn’t in charge of that anymore.
“What does dying feel like?" Jing Yuan asks nervously, gaze firmly set on what’s ahead of him. “I’ve thought about it a couple of times—if there’s reincarnation, or heaven, or some kind of endless black. I’ve planned for it. I can’t imagine how many times I’ve warned dear Yanqing to stab me in the back if it came to it. But now that it’s so… plainly in sight, I don’t know what to think.”
Yanqing just purses his lips, not saying anything in concern his tongue would slip. Did Jing Yuan ever think, he ponders resentfully, that being told you would have to tear your father figure’s organs out at the age of ten—did he assume that was kindness? There’s a very specific way to kill a Xianzhou native, the meridians that must be severed, and Yanqing knows all of them by heart. All of them are hard for a ten-year-old to sleep on.
Yanqing has this terrible issue now: an issue that every time he looks upon Jing Yuan, he kind of wants to kill him. It’s the worst time to have an epiphany that he hates what Jing Yuan has done to him in the last year they are together.
“None of us know what dying feels like, General,” Fu Xuan sighs, clutching her scrolls to her chest. She forgot her bag in her haste to reach the meeting in time and, in fear of disrespecting the Marshal, abandoned it entirely. It says something of the Marshal’s power if sentencing the most beloved Luofu political figure in a millennium to death was not enough. “It’s where divinations end. I believe the Xianzhou understands the least of death in the universe. We have the least experience in it.”
“Nothing? Nothing at all?” For the first time, Jing Yuan almost seems nervous. He chews his lip furiously, hands tightly clasped behind his back to hide the sweat that most certainly beads there. “Aha, I suppose it is to be expected. Pay this old man’s worries no mind.” He pauses. “The expedition in the Sunyata Star Belt—I will never see it to its completion. The reeducation, the reformation of their practices, seeing their aim straightened to the vision of the Reignbow… I will miss it all. What will become of my legacy?”
“Violence, probably,” Yanqing says loudly, “and orphans.” Jing Yuan ignores him like he isn’t even there, caught up in his head.
Jing Yuan is not somebody to feel sorry for. This is what he keeps trying to remind himself of. To most of the universe, Jing Yuan exists in their history as a living nightmare. But to Yanqing, he’ll always be that shuddering figure curled up in bed, crying silently for comfort. Yanqing is not a perfect weapon, only because Jing Yuan is his soft spot. Swords aren’t really supposed to be soft, but swords aren’t supposed to be human. The Xianzhou has conflated the two.
Distracted by terror, Jing Yuan strides right into the street, not bothering to look both ways, and a starskiff comes careening towards him, the engines screaming like death. For a moment, Yanqing thinks it might be gentler, like this—to have Jing Yuan die in an accident and his body go to waste, instead of being built into the war machine. For a moment, he doesn’t like the idea of moving.
Then, Yanqing lunges forward, sweeps in front of Jing Yuan to embrace him, teenage arms curling around his chest. From his spine, where his heart should be, brilliant white erupts like windswept clouds or fresh snow in flight. Unfurling, billowing, and mistakable for pale camellias or a wintry dawn, they are wings that spill out to protect Jing Yuan. His back takes the brunt of the impact, steely feathers defending the both of them, and the star skiff groans, careening before crashing to the side. Metal and glass are fragmented and sent flying, but they clatter around Yanqing harmlessly.
“General!” Fu Xuan screams, races to his side, and drops to her knees. Her silk is dirtied by the road, but that is the least of her concerns. “GENERAL!“
“I—“ Jing Yuan slips out of his embrace, clutching his head. Not that any injury is present. Yanqing had made sure of that. “At rest, Lady Fu. I am unharmed.” He jokes, “I should be calling you General, really. It’ll be yours soon.”
“How did that not kill—or even seriously injure you!” Adrenaline has hit Fu Xuan in a monstrous rush, fingers twitching madly and sweat running down her face. Short, tight breaths wheeze in her diaphragm. “You— thank the Aeons, but how—“ Fu Xuan has a terrible tendency to preemptively grieve. She mourns people before they’re in the ground, a natural consequence of her master’s passing. She grieved for Yanqing when he first held a sword—perhaps because she knew it wasn’t right. Fu Xuan has always known that the Xianzhou would eat a child’s dreams alive.
Jing Yuan attempts to stand but finds he cannot—they tremble like a newborn fawn, collapsing against the roadside again from the shock. “Aha—haha, ha! Perhaps the heavens have—have blessed me!” He almost shouts this, shaken by the near-death. “They truly want to see me live! It must be the heavens, protecting me, or—or an, or an—“
An angel, Yanqing thinks wryly, standing easily upright.
If Jing Yuan doesn’t know what death is like, Yanqing can say that it was kind to him. It’s soft and a little airy, like falling into a sea of clouds. But he doesn’t know if Jing Yuan is going where he went. If Yanqing is unforgivable, then what of Jing Yuan…
If Jing Yuan doesn’t know anything, at least let him know that he is loved.
—
Yanqing did not want to live very badly.
He explains this to his superior, swishing wine in a small dish overlooking the cityscape of heaven. Heaven is so strange—he'd always imagined a kingdom of silk and clouds, with scholars studying the movement of stars, the cultivation of souls, and the libraries to be built below. But it has changed with the times and has become something more along the lines of a cultural celebration in futuristic neon, with temple rooftops reaching for the skies and dragons curling about their windows. It’s always night in heaven, with the colossal moon sitting atop half the horizon. Midnight lasts eternal.
When he had first come to heaven and told them his story, he’d expected to be received with glory—admiration for being the youngest lieutenant, a soon-to-be champion, slayer of Hoolay, fourteen years of age, and the strongest martial artist on the Luofu. Instead, all he had received was pity.
“You… they sent you to war?” General Yueyu’s sleeve whipped up to her mouth, hiding her horrified expression as her ears dropped to her head. “We—it never got that bad! After I died?” She pleads, turning to her friends for reassurance. “We trained children, but I thought that was as far as it went! Even on the field, sometimes, for experience, but—a lieutenant? They let you lead?”
Yanqing hates to call her naive.
Only a few of them ascend, the officials had explained, only their most virtuous. Heaven had been established in the Primeval Era, the true immortality that had been sought after for centuries, but the Xianzhou natives were unable to reach it themselves. Whether it’s a creation of an Aeon, another plane, or a second death, or perhaps something as abstract as the afterlife is something beyond all of them.
“Yes,” Yanqing gritted out, "and I was good at it.” Too late now! He isn’t in need of pity anymore and isn’t in need of protection—and if he was, that would make him even angrier. The Xianzhou just feels like a bad dream he’d been thrown in. A nightmare.
"Exploitation" is such a nasty word, and it’s one Yanqing refuses to use in this context. He has been many things—a sword, an idol, an example. He wouldn’t be surprised if casualty had joined them. No single person had caused all his suffering; no, not when everybody had the same expression on their face—it has always been the Xianzhou in its entirety, a tradition of war, history itself that spun its spindly violence around his hand and sword.
There’s a terrible, aching silence that stinks of apology. “Congratulations,” somebody whispered, but it was laced with horror instead of admiration. “You are truly worthy of heaven.”
Yanqing thought crankily, After all that shit, I better be worthy.
By nature, Yanqing is ungrateful. He was angry as he lived, angry as he died. No matter how much he was given, he wanted more—prestige, justice, and, at his most vicious, power. He isn’t grateful for this either.
When he was alive, or at least a year before his death, Yanqing could say he loved what he did. He was the kind of person who shone, who could become a champion, a sword of Taixuan—now, it’s much easier to ignore the stars. He’s surrounded by dream chasers in heaven. They all have passions that move their hearts, their hands—all Yanqing has is envy for those things.
Looking back, he enjoyed none of it and doesn’t have happy memories of these competitions and battles. He’d wanted to be good at something, something that he didn’t have to be ashamed of. The sword had bought him forgiveness.
People wanted him to be happy, but he had to be the best. Looking back, all it bought him was loneliness.
“I don’t really mind war,” Yanqing admits today, swishing the clear alcohol in his cup. “It’s something I’m good at. I’d keep doing it.”
General Yueyu’s face contorts in sorrow, in the way it always does with him. Yanqing hates it, but he understands. “Yaoshi will die soon. Where would you go?” She glances over the balcony, watching the people mingle in the streets below. Even in death, people haggle over street food and wait for convenience stores to go on late-night sales.
“I don’t know. Anywhere,” Yanqing says sardonically, butchering a novel he had once read, “There’s always war. That’s the only thing immortal about the Xianzhou.”
It’s easy to say war is profitable if you live in the ships, but it’s a total slog outside of it. Endless losses, humiliation, battering, treaties, disease, death, violation, getting pushed into a corner over and over as you’re forced to give up more dignity—but if you win…
Yanqing enjoys war. He doesn’t know what kind of person that makes him. Complicit, at best. But he knows he is much, much worse.
General Yueyu doesn’t try to correct him. “But are you Xianzhou, Lieutenant Yanqing?”
He laughs shortly. “Was it the hair?” She nods, and Yanqing thinks it’s fair game to ask.
“General Yueyu… do you know anything about a nameless country?”
She raises an eyebrow, piqued. “You speak of Jing Yuan’s expedition towards the end of the Third Abundance War.” For some reason, "expedition" makes it sound like a fun adventure. Yanqing smiles wryly at the thought. “You know, he brought you home right around then. But a lot of their history and records were wiped right off the map.”
“Yes, that’s the one. I believe, in the Xianzhou language, it was once called…”
Yueyu hears him out, surprisingly, and unshackled by belief, she explains.
Yanqing thinks about her words when he’s walking through the streets of the Luofu. He isn’t always by Jing Yuan’s side in a poor imitation of life—clocking into work, guarding him as he naps, turning in his papers when he’s too lazy to bother. His feet don’t meet the pavement the same way they used to, a little softer on the landing. His wings float behind him, and they don’t weigh anything at all. When he’d first died, Yanqing had spent a lot of it posing in a mirror and admiring them from various angles. Then he remembered that he died and began to cry on the floor.
Sometimes, he watches his own grave in the cultivated gardens, gets mad when nobody shows up, and remembers most people have lives, and that most people aren’t grieving at ten in the morning on a weekday. Then he’ll go back to Jing Yuan’s office, watch him sob into his paperwork until the ink stains splotchy while clutching some stupid gift Yanqing bought him, and remember that some people are grieving at ten in the morning on weekdays.
The most annoying part about death is that Yanqing is still irritated by little things like this. He’d assume death would dull it out, make him some kind of forgiving Buddha that would have worldly wisdom distanced from his past life. If that’s true, Yanqing must be the most childish Buddha in heaven.
Sometimes, Yanqing visits the Zhuming to check on Yunli and curses her out for not grieving him every hour of the day. He walks with her, staring furiously at her laughing with her friends, and comes up with fantasy scenarios where he faked his death and sweeps up Yunli as her only friend. Then he feels bad and remembers that he’s happy that Yunli has such a great friend group, and he’s just jealous and lonely.
He watches her yell at his old fans, screaming herself hoarse, “YOU THINK YOU’RE GRIEVING? YOU THINK YOU CARE! YOU DIDN’T EVEN KNOW HIM. FUCK YOU. FUCK YOU. FUCK YOUUUUUUUUU!”
Then she kicks over his memorial with his photocards and grocery store flowers, and Yanqing can’t help but laugh. He crushes a daffodil with his foot and grinds the watery juice into the pavement.
There are flyers made by his fanbase, discarded merchandise, and abandoned event dates. Yanqing hated them too, he thinks. All of the events made him feel worse than a streetside performance; it felt more like being a cheap idol, heaping on fake praise and relatability for a chance at tips. He regrets a lot of that now, letting Hongling and others grab him and demand him to give them well wishes instead of just skewering them on the spot. He tried to get the fans to shut down, but he was told it was good for his career by other Knights.
He wonders if they’re grieving too, in their own parasocial, disrespectful way. Most of them have moved on, but there are always some diehards that he hates the most. The banner with his face on it is now yellowed and tattered. He likes it better this way.
Sometimes, he watches Yunli go to the ocean with her friends and tries to act normal instead of becoming so envious his fingernails cut into his skin.
“You know, Yanqing always liked watching me dress up,” Yunli admits suddenly, and the Octet goes into a somber concern before giggles rise, remembering this is how Yunli is healing. “He didn’t like the seaside at all, but he’d come anyway.” It’s true, he doesn’t like the sea. The salty air tickles his nose, and the sand gets stuck between his toes. The beach is always too crowded, and if it is empty, he starts smelling blood mixed with the saltwater again. He thinks he liked it before the crisis, but he can’t remember.
“Aw, it’s probably because he liked you!” One of the younger girls chirps, taking out a strawberry soda and passing it to Yunli. Yanqing doesn’t have the heart or means to tell her that Yunli hates strawberry. “The way he acted around you, he was just lovestruck! He’d lose on purpose, sometimes, you know?“
“I never understood that.” Yunli sits down on the towel, staring at the waves like if she glared long enough at the water, she could lift her head and Yanqing would be alive again. She picks out the sand from under her fingernails, and Yanqing wishes he could compliment her sundress. “Sometimes I wonder if I ever really knew him at all,” she says. “He really cared about his reputation, about looking perfect—how was I supposed to know he liked me when he always insisted he never liked anything?”
She mumbles, “I didn’t even really know if I was his friend. Or if he had friends.”
Yunli was so much more to Yanqing than he ever would be to Yunli. Yanqing thinks, even if he had the chance again, he wouldn’t convey that to her. How embarrassing is that, when somebody is your best friend, but you’re not theirs? How embarrassing is it when somebody is your only friend?
Yanqing wishes he could have said he liked her. It would have been a political nightmare, worse if they broke up, but would it have mattered? Realistically, Yanqing would have been an awful boyfriend, and she’d move on to safer things. But it’s nice to fantasize.
People forgive you a little more when you don’t have a personality. It helps cancel out the obvious traits they hate about you.
“There are rumors,” a handsome guy of the Octet murmurs, a little older than the two of them, and Yanqing bristles at the idea of him making assumptions about his life. “There are rumors that the Luofu Lieutenant was a girl when they were adopted, but it was too inconvenient to not have a male heir. And so…” he shifts awkwardly. “Maybe that’s why he liked watching you dress up. Maybe he was yearning for something of his own.”
The Octet goes silent until Yunli mumbles, turning away from the group, “I don’t want to talk about this anymore.” She busies herself with unpacking the beach bags, setting out towels and sunscreen and cold drinks, things that only matter to the living. She almost drops a water bottle, but Yanqing grabs it in the nick of time and ensures it lands in her hand.
“Stupid,” one of them scolds, “she loved him, and he’s dead! You can’t just say something insensitive like that! Now she’s going to go on questioning, and it’s just…”
He wishes it wouldn’t be that upsetting. Yanqing slips in next to Yunli, tucking his wings in so he can fit, helping rearrange the umbrella so the shade falls over her properly. She sniffles. “Yanqing would be really sad,” she hiccups, “seeing me worry about who he was and who he wasn’t. When I really think about it, I don’t know if I care. He’s just my friend.”
It’s over, and Yanqing knows it. People say it a lot—that you can’t selfishly die, because people will grieve you, and that’s the cruelest thing you could do. But everything cruel and selfish Yanqing has ever done was when he was alive.
She doesn’t say anything more, still staring off in the distance as tears slip down her cheeks. The sun sets, and everybody leaves, but Yunli sits there, brushing them off as she watches the sun drown into the sea with a brilliant flash of orange light. Yanqing stays there with her, wings shielding her to fight off the cold. Despite this, she still shivers, tugging a towel around her shoulders.
The moon finally rises, casting her in a frigid watery light.
“You’re all I ever really believed in,” she whispers to herself. "Forget the gods, the Aeons. I thought if anybody, you’d end it, Yanqing. Not with the Swarm, not with death, not with slaughter or swords or anything like that. I don’t know what I was thinking. Like you’d just tell the Marshal it’s wrong, and she’d give up on this stupid war.” She sighs. “I don’t know. I guess you just made me wistful. You still do.”
People do this, sometimes. They talk to him like he’s in the seas, the winds, the stars, and the skies, like he can hear them wherever they go. That must be comforting to them, but for Yanqing, it’s just annoying to think that they’re talking to thin air and believing he’d actually listen. He isn’t God. He doesn’t care.
What did Yanqing want to tell her? That it took every bit of strength in his body to pretend he was a normal kid, even though he was messed up beyond repair? That he did destroy that orphan girl and destroyed everything about himself until he was unrecognizable to be accepted? That he didn’t want to scare her off with his spinal implants and strange violence?
He wanted to tell her, had been waiting to show her how wounded he was—he'd wanted her to know what a shattered figure he was so he could be pitied. Now that’s selfish.
“For what it’s worth,” Yanqing apologizes, “I think you knew me better than anyone.”
Yanqing thinks it’s pretty cruel when he kisses Yunli on the cheek, unable to taste the salt under her eyes, and apologizes, not for dying and not for refusing to regret, but for leaving her alone to fill in the person he was.
The waves lap up on the shore, and Yanqing tries to ignore the sound of her sobs. It would be kind of an awful thing for him to say they were annoying.