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Their saving grace, he suspects, is that he knows that his parents are not Fated Souls either. And they have a perfectly good marriage.
It had been his mother who'd told him, bluntly, when he was eleven years old and newly furious about the hum that had started up at the back of his skull sometime in his tenth year. She'd sat him down at the edge of the Clan's training yard and explained that his father had been paired, as a young man, with a lord's daughter in the east who'd died of fever before they'd ever met, and that this had grieved him, but it had not broken him. She'd told him of her own engagement to a voice that no longer was, that had once been part and parcel of the Clan, and that the absence had grieved her, and then angered her, and had then strengthened her resolve. Neither instance had stopped the Ma Clan from becoming what it was.
That's what you're afraid of, she'd said. I'm telling you these things so that you know not to be.
He'd spent the next three years learning to meditate.
The kind a soldier learns: a deliberate narrowing of attention, a door he could step back from and let close. It had worked, eventually. The hum at the back of his mind had become something he could tune down to a low-frequency static, present but manageable, the way a scar becomes just a part of your skin.
Drowning it out, however, is exponentially harder when the source of it is right in front of him.
"I said blood-rousing," The Nuisance of his life gripes at him. Basen opens his eyes to glare at her. Big mistake.
The lacquered ceiling swims above him in nauseating brown waves, all the wooden tiles sliding wrong, and before he has time to process the indignity of it, there is a hand flat over his eyes cutting off the visual catastrophe entirely.
He'd have objected. He objects to most things she does on principle. But the darkness helps.
"You ate it," he argues.
The Nuisance, though he cannot see it, makes a face that he feels at the back of his head. Something sneering and disfiguring that accompanies the hot rush of blood in his gut and his ears as she snaps something back about her training and her also not attempting to wield one of his weaopns.
The image arrives with her thought: herself, approximately the size of a child's toy soldier, attempting to heft a dao.
Alright. Fair.
He doesn't like her, but he can respect training. Training he understands.
Of course you do, she condescends silkily in the back of his mind and Basen wishes he weren't currently incapacitated so that he could, at least, glare down at her from a higher vantage point. He'd love to whack her, but his father would not stand for that.
Violent, she muses. Should've guessed you had issues with—
"Me?!" he explodes, coughing as the blood trickling from his nose pooled into his mouth. "You're the one eating poison!"
Training, she reminds him with an annoying sing-song. He glares at her from where he'd turned to spit the blood on the tiles. The Nuisance doesn't even have the grace to look bothered.
Sure, he drawls. Pity you didn't waste any time to train your communication skills.
The Nuisance pinches the skin over his wrist under the guise of taking his pulse. Basen drips blood on the floor.
His father's sigh interrupts them.
Basen barely has the time to look up at the face of his progenitor, eunuch though he might be now, before his father lifts him to seat him against the latticed room-divider as if her was no older than five. Basen blinks up momentarily at the worried furrow of his father's brow. He knows he is heavy, but his father is still the strongest man he knows.
Biased, the nuisance scoffs in his mind.
Like he hasn't overheard her considerations of his father's physicality.
Ew, comes the immediate response. That was— she starts, and he feels the spike of irritation. That was entirely different, your father simply has the build of someone who has never stopped training, it's an aesthetic observation, not a—
Please, he thinks tiredly, Please stop.
Basen does not want to hear anything about his father's prowess in any context whatsoever. He has barely recuperated from the way she'd analyzed his father's grip on his sword… of all things. He does not have the capacities today. His father's lips are down-turned as he makes space so that the nuisance can come closer.
Let me take a look at your eyes, she orders and Basen's head is already turned towards her inspecting hands, as she narrates her doings for the other two people in the room.
Tongue, she orders just before she reaches for his chin and Basen splutters and--
"No," he argues as he ducks away from her questing fingers. "You can check on me and leave me my dignity—" He tries to worm away from the nuisance. "Don't you dare—"
"You hear each other's thoughts," his Master sighs behind the nuisance's back and both The Nuisance and Basen stiffen, turn, to witness the beautiful face of Jinshi—
Zuigetsu—
Eeeeeeeeeewwwwwwwwwwwww.
—and the crumbling of his Master's perfect mask in the minute details that the nuisance had picked up on remarkably quickly on her own, while Basen has had a lifetime of familiarity to fall back on and—
He knows that face. He has made a study of that face across the span of his adult life, could reconstruct it from memory in the dark, could catalogue every microvariance of it the way some men catalogue star charts. The downward pull at the left corner of the mouth that means he's calculating something. The way his eyelashes move a fraction of a second before the rest of his expression follows. The particular quality of stillness he achieves when he wants to appear unmoved and isn't, quite—
SHUT UP, the Nuisance screeches in his skull, full volume, with the force of someone slamming a door.
"We're not getting married!" They both snap at the Eunuch Prince.
I Don't Want To Know! The Nuisance insists and shoves her grimy palm against his lips like that's going to shut up his mind. I never heard that!
Basen's sneer intensifies behind her tiny hand, but his ire is interrupted by the confused look of his Prin—
Nope! She screeches. Shut up!
Fine.
He shuts up.
His father sighs. "Xiaomao?"
The Nuisance takes her hand off his mouth. She smacks his shoulder in the process. He elects to believe it was accidental. She does not produce an expression that would confirm this.
"Though your observation is correct, your conclusion is faulty," the nuisance grinds as politely as she can. The deliberate return to precise court register is something he can hear her working at, smoothing her voice over. "Hearing one another's thoughts is no basis for a solid marriage. Neither of us have a desire to wed the other. And finally, it would be highly unfavorable for both our families or Lord Jinshi, so." She pauses. "No."
She's already reached into her sleeve. He knows, before she does it, what she'll pull out — he'd caught the mental inventory she'd run during his examination, sorted and dismissed across three seconds of apparent silence while she narrated for the room's benefit.
She presses the small paper sachet into his palm.
Coal, he hears. The herbs from earlier. You know the proportions. I need to—
She needs to leave. He knows. He knows the way he knows when a soldier is about to break formation — the telltale quality of stillness before movement, the weight shifting off the back foot.
She needs to go; he knows.
Run away.
Shut up.
"We're not getting married. If you will excuse me, I have to fetch a final ingredient."
Basen lets her walk. Doesn't reach for her when she steps over him an out of the room. The hem of her borrowed robe catches briefly on his knee and she flicks it clear without breaking stride, and then she's through the door and gone, and the hum at the back of Basen's mind drops several registers immediately, settling into something he can almost pretend is ambient noise.
In front of him, his father and his Prince — Shut up, shut up, shut up — both look at the doorway through which she has departed. His father's expression is the one he wears when he is solving something; it gives away almost nothing, but Basen has had decades and the particular disadvantage of a son's attention, and what it gives away is interest. The kind that means this will be filed and revisited.
His Prince — Good heavens, Basen, shut UP — looks as if someone has taken something from him while he was looking the other direction and he's only just noticed the absence.
Basen closes his fingers around the sachet.
Outside, somewhere past the partition wall and the corridor and probably all the way to the courtyard, the Fated Soul his mother had prepared him for is looking for an ingredient she already has, because she needed to be somewhere that isn't here, and he can just barely feel, at the outermost edge of the frequency he's spent fourteen years learning to tune down—
—relief.
Wait for the next call of the watchtower before you ask your father to grind that into paste. The Nuisance at the back of his mind instructs.
Her noise dims.
Basen feels, for the first time, oddly left alone.
His father's sigh is the quietest one yet.
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