Work Text:
he is not human.
how could he be? flesh masks and shining eyes and stone faces cannot change the nature of one’s being. a heart of gold dominion cannot be changed by the lies he so carefully strings, the lies he tells himself, the lies he tells others. a king is not a pawn, no matter how well he paints his crown.
how could he be human, when his chest is full of such an empty void? gods don't feel, rulers don't grieve, statues don't crumble.
(this is a lie. he sinks to his knees under the weight of it, of the lies and the feelings and the emptiness. the flowers he presses to her stone are red. it's sick. it feels sick. it clutches his heart and he feels it like a hand grabbing his own.
he crumbles. he grieves. gold turns to burning flesh, mourning blood.)
it is cruel, the way he has dug her grave. uncaring hands have shaped dirt into a bed for her to lie in, her ashes to scatter across the earth he cast from his very soul. it is her and him alone, a matchstick blackened into nothing, blackened into ink on a contract’s signature. permanent, fleeting. gone.
it's cruel, it's all cruel and fake and unjust. he's wrong to act human, to shed tears like it's not all pretend. he has never been of the same world as her. he has no right. he can't seem to stop.
hu tao, written in stone. death’s tribute. he has dug her grave with envy. rex lapis grieves mortality when the closest thing he has ever known is corrosion.
he is unfeeling, uncaring, inhuman. he is a liar. and now he is alone.
the wangsheng funeral consultant takes temporary leave. they do not know if he will return. they pray he will. he killed the god they pray to, the god he buried in a casket on a hill. he is a specialist in death, who cannot stop carving graves. they pray for him in his own name.
his godhood is sanctified in grief and tears. he sits in a field of glaze lilies, picks red flowers, feels trampled under the weight of the world. his breaths are in time with a beating heart. he has killed here before. he didn't dig graves during the war.
it's sacrilegious. he never built this same tribute for those nameless corpses. he reaped their souls with stone remorse, and now her grave sits here, on a hill, the memory of a human built above the bodies of forgotten gods and faceless men.
he lays the flowers next to her name. hu tao. it aches the way only a memory can. zhongli makes a contract with death.