Chapter Text
Ten years felt like an eon in Yiling.
Springs and summers were always fleeting, gone too soon like a genuine smile or hot fresh bread. The icy fingers of a winter wind would caress the leathery necks of the populace as early as mid-September.
Every long winter was a war pitting man against hunger. In the frozen streets of Yiling, where the air smelled of fresh snow and lost hope, where the ash-gray of slush along uneven sidewalks always seemed to match the sky, hunger was victorious over even the strongest people.
The strongest man, however, was another story indeed.
He had no memory of his life before he awakened and there was only gloom and filthy snow. The vague suggestions he had were slippery, oily things that constantly slid in and around each other, sometimes twisting and merging into something almost recognisable before they’d dance away again into the black clouds of his mind, mocking him.
For years, A-Cheng had tried hard to forget the fact that he was trying to remember. It was easier to accept that hunger and cold and debilitating want was all there was. But that was over today.
“Jasmine! Jasmine, where are you?”
A-Cheng hurriedly chased after the small pup that escaped between the broken door which had been boarded up. He stood for a few heartbeats, squinting into the darkness between the rotting wooden planks barring the doorway into a palace the size of a small town. The pristine courtyard stretching wide and white at his back seemed to be as large as the centre of Yiling itself. The world around him was silent as the grave as it held its breath, watching. Waiting.
His fingers were numb now, but it didn’t have much to do with cold at all. A-Cheng couldn’t name the catalyst that had sent him down this path. He didn’t know what had happened to him. He has no idea what history had been snatched away from him. Up until this day, until this very moment, uncertainty had been in him every heartbeat, pumping in acidic cycles through his veins for as long as he could remember. A-Cheng was a smart boy. He had learned how to survive on his own, and quickly. He also knew with crippling clarity that what he was about to do was the single stupidest act he’d ever committed in his life.
But it didn’t matter. In the murkiness of that uncertainty, a chance meeting with a withered old woman at the train depot had made several things painfully clear:
One, the dreams that had haunted him for so long could never tell A-Cheng who he was.
Two, his necklace, which he guarded with his life - was the only link to his “before”. It had whispered “Together in Meishan” in solid gold during the lonely nights of the orphanage, and that meant that was the key - to who he was, to everything.
Three, a man named Wei Wuxian could get him there.
So here he was, damp and shivering, perched upon the precipice of the miserable existence he knew and ready to leap headfirst into an abyss of dangerous unknowns. He could be in the fishing village near the orphanage now, maybe huddled in front of the cozy fire of a local pub and gnawing on some bony fish bought with his day’s wages. But this decision was more important than the hunger clawing at his stomach. The not knowing was eating him alive from the inside, slowly hollowing out his bones. If he stayed in Yiling, there would be nothing left. He’d be an empty shell, a gray ghost of a man with no hopes or dreams, one of the millions in the city who drift to work every morning in the cold. He would cast no shadow on life at all.
A-Cheng bit at his wind-chapped lips, drawing a bit of blood in determination. He would die before he let that ever happen. If there was any chance of learning something - anything - about where he came from, it was here, contained within these dilapidated walls.
That was it, then. In the likelihood Wei Wuxian wasn’t here — and he had to admit, it was a long shot, anyway — it was still as safe a place as any. There was bound to be something like old sheets or coats unfit for wear that he and his misfit pup could bundle up in to keep an arctic death at bay until morning. And if Wei Wuxian was here and couldn’t help him, he would just have to help himself.
It was now or never.
*****
“Just so you know, this is all your fault.”
Liu Song paused, a heavy chopstick-ful of a meat dumpling halfway to his open mouth. He raised one busy eyebrow at the young man glaring at him from across the room.
“How is this my fault?” He said with a laugh. “I did my job. I got us the theatre and the boys showed up. It is not my fault that some of them were nearly as old as the Empress herself.” A long-suffering smile tugged at the corner of his lips.
Wei Wuxian punched his hands deep into the pockets of his black trousers and started to pace the room, making a little track from the low table littered with empty liquor bottles, to the ice frosted windows that stretched from ceiling to floor, to the gargantuan fireplace shimmering with heat. It had been a long time since he’d paced. It had been a long time since he felt this trapped and helpless, and it made him angry.
“Yes it is. What did you do, post the audition flyers at the local asylum? Every single one of them was a certified nutjob.”
Liu Song laughed again, polishing what was left on his plate with more enthusiasm than the greasy food deserved. After taking a long sip of the cheap alcohol in his glass, he said, “That is what we need, Wei Wuxian. He has to be just smart enough to teach, but dumb enough to not ask too many questions. How he looks is most important.”
Wei Wuxian snorted and let his long legs carry him back to the table. He plopped down in the velvet high-backed chair across from his business partner and friend, crossing his arms over his chest. “It took you two months to nail down that stupid theatre for the boys to gather. And not a single one of them even remotely looked like the Crown Prince. That’s two months we could have been doing jobs. With things how they are, I knew you would need help, and that’s why I offered to round up the boys to audition — oh yes, I did,” Wei Wuxian interrupted himself when Liu Song rolled his eyes. “Anyway,” he continued, simmering with irritation, “the boys you got were useless, and now that two months of work have been in vain, we’re deep in the hole and don’t have enough to pay off the patrol this month. So what the hell are we going to do?”
Wei Wuxian’s eyes narrowed as he watched Liu Song shrug and practically rumble with a satisfied sigh, monumentally unconcerned as usual. Liu Song stroked his thick graying whiskers, his expression thoughtful. “What we always do,” was his noncommittal reply.
Yes, Wei Wuxian thought as he looked away, into the bowels of the fireplace. What we always do. Lie, cheat, steal. Dabble in all seven of the deadly sins. At least he’d graduated from petty thievery, despite having been quite good at it. It would likely still be his occupation of choice if Liu Song hadn’t thrust himself into Wei Wuxian’s path all those years ago.
With a groan, he settled his crossed arms on the edge of the table and rested his forehead in the crook of his elbow. Wei Wuxian could hear Liu Song shift his ample weight in his chair to poke at the embers behind him with a rusted poker. The heat in the room bloomed in a rush of warmth. Wei Wuxian reminded himself again that he would gladly take the sweat trickling down his back over the aching cold of the city outside these walls.
His two front teeth had barely grown since the last time he’d called this place home, when the palace was alive and seething with light and sound, everywhere the glint of gold and the sweet smell of lotus flowers. Wei Wuxian worked in serving meals to the young crown prince at the time and often snuck into the kitchens where the fat cook would smack his hand with a wooden spoon if he ever talked back. Every night, he slept in a tiny spartan room in the servants quarters he shared with his mother, before she—
Wei Wuxian’s head jerked up as he snapped to attention. This is why he avoided stress like the plague. Visions of the city patrol pounding his skull into a bloody pulp with their heavy boots had already begun to snowball, picking up the debris of memories he had been trying desperately to forget for years. He never spoke to anyone about what had happened to his mother. He didn’t intend to start thinking about it now.
It took years of drowning his demons in stolen alcohol and lies to bury them deeply enough to lie undisturbed during his waking hours. But they were not generous. Wei Wuxian learned he could function during the day, but in exchange, the ghostly bones of the skeletons he kept so carefully hidden reigned over the kingdom of his nightmares, ruling him from dusk till dawn. He accepted this. It was his punishment for always wanting more than he had.
Wei Wuxian shouldn’t have saved the Crown Prince that night. He should have never even dared to look him in the eye before that day. But the youngest child of the Jiang family, with his single winking dimple in his right cheek and his large curious eyes, had Wei Wuxian by the heart the moment he glanced in his direction for the first time. They had barely spoken, but he was everything good in Wei Wuxian’s life, even if he was a royal angel and he was the servant trash. Wei Wuxian had thought that if he saved Jiang Wanyin, somehow he’d come back to him. But that was then.
Wei Wuxian awoke from that endless, flaming night with a throbbing head that felt the size of a melon and a small jewelled box still grasped in his fingers. Sunlight streamed through the windows across his cheeks, its purity and warmth a sickening contrast to the horrors of blood and screams a few hours before. The crystalline light gray eyes of the crown prince had been seared into his mind. Wei Wuxian ran from those eyes, swearing he’d never come back to this palace of death.
Yet, here he was. Lounging in its remains.
Liu Song turned back to the sulking Wei Wuxian. He reached over to pat his arm with a meaty hand, “There was one boy who would’ve been passable…”
Annoyed by the interruption of his self-piteous train of thought, Wei Wuxian scowled up at him before he graded the alcohol and took a long drink straight from the bottle, “What?”
“The boy at the theatre, the one with the small face and black hair. What was his name?”
Wei Wuxian grimaced more from the memory than the bitterness of the alcohol. “Him? God, Liu Song, he had the face of the turtle. No amount of makeup would make the Empress believe her son grew up to be that ugly.”
Chuckling low in his throat, Liu Song retrieved the bottle before easing back. The chair creaked dangerously beneath him, “He was not too ugly for my bed.”
Wei Wuxian almost choked on his mouthful of alcohol, “Please, consider my virgin ears. Aren’t you a little too old for that?”
Liu Song merely shook his head and grinned, lacing his ham-like finger over his burgeoning belly before replying, “I'm older, yes, but not dead. You’re still young, Wei Wuxian. As the years go by, you will learn.”
Wei Wuxian laughed in spite of himself, “I hope I never have to learn to get past a face like that.”
And just like that, the tension between them had been eased. Liu Song had always known what to say to put things into perspective. When the moment passed into an easy silence once more, the older man’s voice came quietly, “We will find him, my boy. We will find the lost Prince.”
Wei Wuxian’s jaw tightened as his eyes assessed a set much like his own. They were not related, but Liu Song was basically family. The unlikely pair had taken care of each other in worse times than these. “I have to get out of this city.”
Liu Song smiled, understanding more than his young friend could ever realise, “I know.”
Then there was a sudden voice, a distant thump, like something large had been knocked over in the opposite wing of the abandoned palace.
Wei Wuxian frowned, “Did you hear something?”
“No?”
With a sigh, Wei Wuxian stood and headed for the door, but not before pausing to assure himself that he had remembered to slip his hunting knife back into his boot. Vagrants could be trouble.