Chapter Text
The man on the ground was unconscious, a sword clutched to his chest, devastatingly beautiful despite the state he was in, and Wu Xie had the sudden urge to kiss him awake.
He didn't.
Instead, he catalogued him with the force of habit: Tall and frighteningly thin. Pale white skin under all the dirt as if he had never even known sunlight, black hair in long matted strands around his face. Young. Round cheeks but a chiseled jaw and delicate features, incongruous with all the traces of past violence born on his skin - mud, blood, gore, scratches, but no scars and barely any bruises, he noted. A large, flat pectoral necklace resting on his clavicles as if molded over them, with convoluted, byzantine markings that Wu Xie's mind struggled to place. The rest of his chest looked equally statuesque, muscles as taut and distinct as if they had indeed been carved out of stone, and Wu Xie refused to let his eyes linger over them - somehow, this felt more inappropriate than the urge to kiss him had, without some noble intent to justify it. The man was only wearing a pair of loose pants, torn and dirty, and he was trembling despite the oppressive tropical heat, his shivers the only obvious sign that he lived.
He was not the first slave they'd found in the compound but something about him felt different. The straw bed he rested on was set apart from the others, and Wu Xie briefly wondered if the man was sick, if he should have gotten away from him, but he couldn’t bring himself to move until he had made sure that he would be alright. There was something terribly vulnerable in his face, under all that history. Wu Xie wondered if he too had been made to fight monsters like cannon fodder, just so those bastards could sneak into tombs more easily. It made his stomach twist with empathy and even though he knew it was useless in his unconscious state, Wu Xie rested a hand on the man's bare arm for support, feeling the shivers concentrate under his fingers.
Eyes a dark black sliver of night, the man turned to him and Wu Xie yelped.
Outside the hut, the last sounds of conflict died out. Wu Xie heard voices approaching, his second uncle surveying the rescue operation and shouting orders. The man's eyes had fallen closed again. There was the heavy drag of combat boots, and Wu Xie was about to call Pangzi in to help, when he heard Panzi's voice coming through the thin wall instead, a dull thump like a sack of potatoes behind dumped accompanying it.
"Here's another," Wu Xie heard him announce. The other in question whimpered and from the sound of it scuffled on the ground.
"Please," he heard the man beg, voice unfamiliar with the sounds of their dialect, "please sirs, don’t shoot. No money here, but treasures! Take the treasures. Take all of it!"
"Shut him up," ordered Erbai, and another thump followed, which only served to make the man beg harder.
"Don’t kill me please! Look, look, there's treasure on the dead guy inside of here, take it if you can! It's magic, very valuable. You can take all of him!"
Erbai ostensibly ignored him. "We'll deal with retributions later, let's round them up first. Where has Wu Xie gone now?"
"I'm in here," called Wu Xie.
In the doorway, obstructing what little light there had been, appeared his third uncle's trusted right hand, holding a neon bright water gun with the gesture of a man who has known real firearms. Purple liquid dripped from the nozzle down his army fatigues but he was soaked with it already, just like Wu Xie himself was, and didn't seem to notice. What he did notice was the man lying on the ground behind Wu Xie and he sprayed him with the gun before Wu Xie could stop him - from the brief flashes of them he saw, the man didn't have the tell tale red rimmed eyes of the poisoned slaves, so he didn't need the antidote. What he needed was medical assistance.
"He's okay!" Wu Xie found himself yelling, throwing his own body in front of the spray. Some of the liquid splashed onto his front and into his nose, pungent, bitter and overly sweet all at once and Wu Xie recoiled from it just as much as he had when he was mixing it. Once he was done spluttering, he noticed his uncle coming in, holding one of the slave owners by the scruff of his neck.
"Who's that?" asked Erbai of the guy, who was bleeding heavily from what appeared to be a broken nose.
"Very valuable!" repeated the man. "He can go anywhere. But he is dead now, soon dead, but you can take him! Take the other one too!"
"What other one?" asked Wu Xie and his uncle in unison.
"Other guy with treasure, very dead, died yesterday, and he is dead too soon," he said with a nod toward the man on the ground. "It's magic," he added, as if it explained everything. “Can’t take it off.”
Wu Xie deeply regretted that his nose had already been broken. The man on the ground had marks around the necklace indeed, deep scratches as if someone had tried to pull it off of him, maybe with a knife. Acid flushed up his throat at the thought, and he tightened his grip on the man's arm. Looking back at the man, he was maybe even paler than he was a minute ago and sweat beaded on his forehead, his brows deeply furrowed even in sleep. Wu Xie called to his uncle.
"We need to evacuate him."
Erbai nodded. "Do you know what's wrong with him?"
"It's magic!" repeated the guy before Panzi could kick him again.
"What do you mean?"
"Other guy is dead, so he is dead too."
"What other guy?"
"Guy with the treasure on his arm," he said, shaking around his bound wrists. "Dead guy. Bastard," he added, spitting on the ground.
Wu Xie frowned. "Is he…?" he asked his uncle.
Erbai shrugged. The slave owners compound was a side discovery to their rescue operation. Sanxing had been taken by what was most probably that dumbass' gang, who were waging war on another antiques smugglers gang. Following them had brought Erbai, Wu Xie, and the rest of their team to the entrance of a cave complex where not only had there been kidnapped members of the first gang, collateral victims like his uncle, but also a few dozens mindless, zombie-like but still very human slaves, who had attacked them during their first attempt at a rescue. A few had died, more had been injured, and they had managed to take one of them back bound and gagged to their encampment.
It had taken Wu Xie a couple of days to come up with an antidote for the poison they'd used to control them, but it had been efficient - apart from those helpless puppets, the smugglers’ defenses were non existent, and the Wu’s small team had overpowered them in a matter of minutes once everyone had been doused with some Super Soakers bought at the nearest toy store filled with the antidote. They had destroyed the poison vats as soon as they could reach them and were now going through the shambling buildings one by one, looking for other victims or cowardly smugglers, which was how Wu Xie had come across the man on the ground.
Erbai grabbed the radio from his belt and called for a vehicle. Pangzi's voice almost interrupted him, anxiety ringing clear through the static.
"Is Wu Xie okay?"
His uncle snickered at Wu Xie before responding positively. Wu Xie barely heard him though - the man had opened his eyes again and surely enough they were not red, just tense with pain.
"Help is on the way, just hang in there," he told him, rubbing his arm gently.
The man's eyes closed again and Wu Xie was not certain that he had even heard him. Please, he wanted to say, though he didn't know why, or why it was so important to him.
Maybe it was the emotional overload, from the fear and the fighting and the general misery of this place. The slave owners weren't ghosts or monsters, they didn't have that excuse. Wu Xie would have prefered to have been dragged into a tomb as his uncles had always threatened than to be here. He was only supposed to come decipher Sanshu's codes and maybe help identify a few things. He wasn't a grave robber, for fuck's sake!
Now that his favorite and most volatile uncle was safe, all he wanted to do was go home and kiss all of this bullshit goodbye. This wasn't a world he wanted to get involved with. Look at what it made of you, he thought, pushing damp strands of hair away from the man's face. God, he was so young. Barely the same age as Wu Xie himself, if not younger. How long had they all been here, he wondered. Had these bastards kidnapped the slaves from a nearby village?
No, he corrected, the man didn't look local. Maybe they should bring him back to Wuzhou for treatment first. They could always put him back on a plane later.
Right.
Wu Xie was distantly aware of Panzi taking the smuggler away, and of his uncle's hand patting his shoulder briefly before following him out. The man was becoming agitated, as if he was battling a fever of some sort, but his brow was still cold when Wu Xie touched it - too cold, even. Could he really be dying? His state certainly wasn’t improving. His eyes seemed more sunken, his skin even more pallid. Sweat pooled on and around the matte grey curves of his necklace.
Wu Xie briefly touched it and felt something react to his touch, like an electrical current. There was definitely magic at play in this. He needed to find the other man. Maybe there were more clues on him.
Just as the thought crossed his mind, another dull thud resounded outside the hut, before Pangzi appeared, dragging a body wrapped in burlap behind him.
“Hey, you alright?” he asked as he entered. Wu Xie nodded distractedly.
“They said to bring him to you. Who’s the guy? And who’s this one, for that matter?”
“I don’t know,” answered Wu Xie truthfully. “But he’s not like the others. And he’s not doing well.”
“Oh, hey, they’ve got matching jewelry. Must be pals. We should get some.”
“In your dreams,” replied Wu Xie with the ease of habit. For years, his uncle’s man had been trying to recruit him, and the game of refusing his advances was soothingly familiar. They were actually friends now, to the point of sharing rooms in Wu Xie’s shop whenever Pangzi wasn’t on an expedition or in his hometown up North.
Wu Xie extracted the dead man’s arm from the sack and looked at the bracelet. It matched the necklace indeed, at least in texture and in the convoluted shapes of the carvings adorning them. Both were roughly an inch across, fairly thin, and almost molded to the skin of their wearers, but less like bespoke jewelry and more like an airtight container. Wu Xie reached out a finger and ran it over the grooves.
“Yeah maybe don’t do that? Plenty of bad things can happen when you touch tomb stu- Oh you’re doing it anyway, alright.”
The bracelet gave off the same weird energy as the necklace had when Wu Xie had touched it. He thought back to what the smuggler had said. If there was a correlation between the man’s state and that man’s death, maybe it was energetic feedback gone awry.
What they needed to do was disconnect it.
“Pangzi, help me take it off of him,” he asked, following his intuition.
“That’s the spirit! We’ll make a grave robber out of you yet, young Wu! Although the guys we run into are usually a little more… well, dead, than this.”
“Can you ever shut up? Here, hold his hand.”
Wu Xie brought out his pocket knife, a ninth birthday gift from his third uncle, and wiggled it between the bracelet and the man’s skin while Pangzi made a show of shaking the body’s hand like a business meeting.
From behind them came a low moan of pain. They both startled, Pangzi dropping the hand, Wu Xie stabbing his knife into it accidentally, and the moan deepened. The man rolled almost to his side, hands still in their white-knuckled grip around the hilt of his sword, before his entire body shook. Wu Xie struggled to get the knife out before going back to his side.
“Hey, are you alright?” he asked while holding up the man’s head and settling it on his own thigh.
Under the twitch of his bruise-purple eyelids, the man’s eyes moved as if he was trying to wake from a nightmare. That’s not so far off, thought Wu Xie bitterly, one hand curling under his neck for support.
“We’re trying to help,” he told him, painfully aware of the uselessness of it.
If only he had taken that CPR class Ershu had enrolled him in when he was in high school, instead of skipping to go smoke behind the building with Xiao Hua! The man’s shivers weren’t abating, and from up close, he looked even worse than he had before. His jaw was tightly clenched and his brows were drenched in sweat. He really didn’t have long. Wu Xie frowned, desperately trying to think of a solution.
“What am I supposed to do with him now?” interrupted Pangzi, dead body still propped up beside him.
Wu Xie shushed him. The man’s lips had opened and he was mouthing words that Wu Xie couldn’t hear. “What was that?” he asked, bending forward so that his ear came near the man’s face.
“Bring him to me.”
“Oh! Yes, of course. Pangzi, bring him over!”
Maybe they really were close. If dying together was their last wish, Wu Xie would do all he could to grant him at least that.
He gently settled the man’s head back onto the ground and went to help Pangzi pick the body up with a little more dignity than before, laying him down on the straw beside the man. They stepped back to give them some privacy, but Wu Xie made to step forward again when he saw him struggle up, trembling elbow propped under himself to look at the other man. He still held onto his sword with one hand, and Wu Xie thought of how precious it must be to him, and maybe to his companion-
Oh.
Before Wu Xie could even shift from his position, in the space of a mere second, the man had moved, unsheathing his sword and swinging it down with lightning speed and terrifying force. It cut straight through the dead man’s arm, through skin and bone and layers of straw underneath, hitting the stone ground with a loud clang. The bracelet around the severed arm seemed almost to reinflate, returning to a rounder shape almost as soon as it was slipped off. The man held it for a second before falling backward, unconscious, the bracelet dropping from his hand.
For a moment, Wu Xie and Pangzi were too shocked to move. It was the arrival of someone behind them that brought them back to reality. They turned as one to find Sanxing’s face popping through the entrance to the hut, his mouth first stretched in a victorious laugh, then rounding out to equally stunned surprise.
“Zhang Qiling?!”
"What do you mean you know him? Since when?"
Wu Xie observed him minutely but his uncle didn't lick his teeth or get that twitch in his right eye he had when he was obfuscating.
"Something like… 8 months ago? He was with me in that tomb in Suzhou when we got ambushed. He was the one that was supposed to get us to the coffin chamber. I thought he was dead, guess either one of these clusters of assholes took him with them instead."
Erbai, who had joined them in the hut after hearing their cries, frowned and started picking holes in his brother's story with the ease of habit.
"I thought you'd said Hangzhou."
"Yeah, it's in between. The guy interred there had been kicked off the local court, they weren't gonna bury him somewhere easy to find."
"Why bury him in a tomb like that at all, then?"
"That's not the moment to ask!"
Wu Xie huffed in annoyance.
"I hate to say it but he's right, can we focus here? Sanshu, you say you know him. He wasn't like that the last time you saw him, right?"
Wu Xie wasn't quite sure what he was referring to exactly regarding the man's state, but it seemed unlikely that his uncle would hire someone like him. Strong, burly men like Panzi and Pangzi were more his type, usually.
"Hell no! That's Zhang Qiling, kid. He's a legend among grave robbers."
"Did he have the necklace already?"
"Not that I know of, he was always covered from head to toe - no wait, he did take off his shirt for some reason when we approached the chamber, and he had a really cool tattoo on his torso, but nothing of the sort, no."
"A tattoo? It can't be him then."
"Well it's either him or his twin brother. But how would someone else who happened to look exactly like him fall into the exact same guys' hands is beyond me."
Wu Xie hummed pensively. He knelt back down next to the man while his uncles bickered above them. Knowing his name didn't help much. The man had stopped shivering but without the tremors he looked all but dead already. Wu Xie shook his arm briefly. After a few long seconds, the man exhaled slowly and Wu Xie worried that it had been his last breath until the man's mouth moved again. He bent forward, one hand braced against the man's arm.
"Put it on," he asked, voice barely above a whisper.
"What?"
Under his hand, the arm moved slightly. It wasn't the one holding the sword, but the one that had briefly held the bracelet. Wu Xie looked for it and found it in between Pangzi's greedy fingers, turning it this way and that and, if Wu Xie knew him, mentally tallying up a hefty price. He snatched it from his grip before Pangzi could react.
"Gimme that!"
He turned back to the man. "What do you want me to do with it?"
There was another long pause during which the man gathered the energy to speak.
"Put it on."
"On you?" asked Wu Xie hopefully.
He had a bad feeling about this.
The man shook his head. His hand moved enough to bump into Wu Xie's knee.
"You," he said when Wu Xie got close enough again.
"Yeah no, I- I can’t do that."
"Please."
The man shook with another shiver of pain. A bead of sweat ran down his neck and caught on the edge of the necklace.
Wu Xie couldn’t see his chest move anymore.
Beside his knee, the hand had stilled.
The man was dead.
Before he could let himself think, Wu Xie slipped the bracelet over his left hand. The last thing he felt was the tightening of metal around his wrist, stopping just short of painful.
Then all was dark.