Chapter Text
The Gate of Life and Death was but a crack, shrinking by the second under the hands of Taxian-jun, and Xue Meng was among the handful of people who were yet to cross the border into the other world. A new world, not taken over by the chaos of Hong Meng, this primeval state of being.
Looking over at the water that had swallowed up everything he knew, Xue Meng hesitated.
“Young master!” the people of Sisheng Peak hurried him over, but Xue Meng shook his head, indicating his younger self with his chin.
“Your young master is that one, not me.”
In the shocked silence that followed, he continued,
“One mountain does not allow two tigers. So how could there be two Xue Meng? Wouldn’t that be a mess?” Xue Meng laughed, but a frown appeared at the corners of his eyes, speaking of the weariness he now carried deep in his bones. “I don’t belong to this mortal world of yours. Now that I was able to do my last bit for these two lives, my wish was fulfilled. Also, I’ve been tired for too long, I’ve been wanting to rest for a long time now.”
He walked in the direction of the Black Tortoise Spirit Formation without looking back. By that point, the enchantment was so fractured that fissures took over most of its surface, and there were chapped holes everywhere.
He walked by Taxian-jun, who was still holding up the formation, and gave a complicated look to the man—cousin, brother, enemy, murderer of his parents, guilty, innocent. He was so many things in one, and there were so many feelings attached to that once familiar face, that Xue Meng found that he had nothing to say. There was simply no bridging that gap for them anymore.
“Young lord!”
“Young master Xue!”
Behind him Sisheng Peak’s members called out for him, but so what? Even in this reality, his parents had passed away.
After he arrived at Sisheng Peak only to discover he’d been too late, only to watch Chu Wanning turn to ashes in his arms, he hadn’t been able to rest. Taxian-Jun had returned from the dead, and Shi Mingjing had revealed his green fangs. They had started an unprecedented massacre that made Taxian-jun’s previous actions look like child’s play, and the human world had been reduced to a ghost realm. To Xue Meng, the deaths of his old friends had transformed him. When he was young, he had buried a jug of wine under a tree, but if he dug it up again, who would be drinking it with him?
If he went to this new world, so similar and so foreign all at once, where would he even start? What would there be for him?
He let out a sigh, but he was not altogether unhappy with his decision. Rubbing the back of his neck and feeling the blood vessels from his near ruptured meridians pulsing, he could almost say he was content. He felt a grin form in his face.
So this is what it was like to get old, he realized, though he had never felt his age as heavily as he did at that moment. Sometimes, one’s mind would wander and conjure up things, borne of memory and dreams alike.
Sometimes, he would be able to see Xue Zhengyong’s silhouette and the curve of Madam Wang’s smile.
Even more often, he would look out of a window and glimpse three little fellows from his youth shouting around a white-robed cultivator, “Esteemed shizun, esteemed shizun!”
And these were all things that belonged to him, and no one could take them away.
So no, he was not upset he had to go.
He took another step forward.
Then a voice rang out clear as a whip, giving him pause: “Xue Meng!”
Xue Meng turned back around slowly, obediently. He could not find it in himself to ignore the call of his shizun, not when he’d longed to be a dutiful disciple for all the years Chu Wanning had been gone.
“Yes, shizun?”
“Stop. Do not do this.”
“I have to.” Feeling an uncharacteristic lump in his throat that he’d thought himself above, resigned as he was, he continued, “I’m tired.”
“Please,” Chu Wanning said, and, as tall and proud and unwavering as he stood, his eyes were looking suspiciously shiny. “Don't let me fail you again.”
He glanced at Taxian-jun still holding up the barrier, regret and guilt clear in his face.
Xue Meng heard between the lines, don't let me fail you as well.
Xue Meng felt his heart torn in two, not knowing whether to jump into the abyss or give his shizun this final wish. Whether to revisit his old friends and family in more than just a bottle of wine, or to see what life might still have in store for him.
“I don’t belong to that world,” he pointed out helplessly. “What would I even do?”
Lost, not finding the answers in his shizun’s face, whose sword-straight eyebrows were pulled over severe eyes in a frown, Xue Meng turned his head to the Mei brothers. He’d come to call them comrades somewhere along the way, and then friends, and they were the only ones who’d never abandoned him in all these years, the only ones left from his world in whom he could trust without reserve.
With a laugh he’d meant to make derisive but that fell just short, he asked, “What, divide the sect obligations and leadership with my younger self? I can’t imagine that going over well.”
At the mention of his person, the younger Xue Meng snapped to attention. He yelled out with all the impulsivity and brashness he was known for at that age. “You could, I wouldn’t mind! You could—”
Xue Meng laughed, cutting him off. “Nah, kid.”
Before his younger self could protest the form of address, Taxian-jun bit out, gritting his teeth from both pain and effort, “Could you fucking decide already? This won’t hold forever.”
Mei Hanxue spoke up then, a little smirk tugging at the edge of his mouth. His older brother stood like a sentinel by his side, but his gaze on Xue Meng was unwavering, steadfast, loyal.
“We’ve accomplished what we set out to do, so I’m with you either way, Ziming. Though if we go to the other world, I confess I don’t quite see us going back to that sect life.”
Curious and nonplussed, Xue Meng asked, “Then. What else is there?”
It was odd. None of them were the same people anymore, and on the worse nights Xue Meng wondered if he’d made a mistake not jumping into that roiling apocalyptic torrent. If he’d wronged all three of them, making them reinvent themselves at this stage of their lives and falling short, like three old dogs who couldn’t learn new tricks.
He could hang himself from the ceiling, from a loop of rope. He could fall on the edge of his own sword. He could drink from a vial of poison. He could purposefully underperform during a nighthunt, get ripped open by a vengeful spirit or a demon. He could die a number of deaths, each more inventive than the last, but he wouldn’t, because he’d promised Chu Wanning, and because he would never be as brave as he had been that day at the edge of the world.
All that was left now was this dreadful boredom, this day to day, roaming from village to village, flanked on either side by the twins who never complained but who showed the wear of this routine in their own unique ways, and it weighed on Xue Meng.
Xue Meng’s will to depart from the mortal realm was a languid thing now. Contemplative, almost. Something he entertained in bed at night before sleep claimed him, something that flashed through his mind when he was fighting off a ghost and wondered, “what if…?” and almost pulled his blade at the last second, letting sharp claws gut him.
There was no escape from the memories. This world, if anything, served as a stark reminder of the one he’d lost, of all the people he’d seen killed by Taxian-jun’s chess pieces. He would find himself smiling at a bunch of rowdy kids playing together in the streets, and the warm feeling in his chest would last for all of two seconds before turning sour, before the images of small bodies littering the road would chase it away.
The smell of rot followed Xue Meng around, pervasive. He’d thought he was going crazy, but no matter where he went, how many times he washed, where he looked, he could neither get rid of it nor find its source. It was a familiar smell, but it did not belong in this still healing world. Just like Xue Meng didn’t.
He wasn’t sure how much of his struggle was apparent to the twins. He tried to hide it as best as he could, but he’d never been good at dissimulation or deceit, always been an open book, skilled in cultivation and not in much else.
He was sure they at least had a clue that something was off. It would be hard not to; he could feel the temper of his youth, from when he’d been the darling of the heavens, the young phoenix, making a reappearance when he was at his limit. It took considerable effort to hold back snide comments at the littlest things the brothers did. His more rational mind, his temperance, even his fondness for them, all seemed to fall on the wayside, chipped away like a rock slowly eroded by dripping water in a cave.
A day. And another day. Another nighthunt. Another nightmare.
Drip, drip, drip.
And, just like in a cave, the sound echoed, the small noise turned deafening. Trapped inside, Xue Meng fought to hold back his screams.
The Mei twins also showed signs of the effect of this new world. They were a study in contradiction, at the same time the same and entirely different people. In looks, they didn’t seem to have aged a day in comparison to their younger counterparts who were native to this world, while Xue Meng had acquired a few age lines around the eyes and a scar that ran diagonally across the left of his forehead. On the other hand, they were now wandering cultivators same as Xue Meng, and, as rogues, they no longer wore crystals in their brows, no longer adorned their hairs with jewels, their clothes were no longer made from the frozen mist silk that characterized the disciples of Kunlun Taxue Palace.
It was too conspicuous to walk around in the fancy embroidered robes of their sect. Their coloring was already attention-grabbing enough, and none of them wanted to attract undue scrutiny, living on the road as they were. Though they could certainly defend themselves if need be, they weren’t looking for trouble, and many people reacted to the fact that they were from another world with either overt interest, wariness, or outright hostility.
So the twins, once known for their fashion sense and peerless elegance, wore robes of dark green and brown and gray just like Xue Meng, made of simple and sturdy and trusty fabric, durable and practical. They didn’t seem too heartbroken about it either, and Xue Meng suspected that, like him, they didn’t feel like a part of their old sect any longer.
In personality, there was also a subtle play with continuity and rupture, change and sameness. Mei Hanxue, the youngest, still flirted with every woman he came across, beautiful or ugly, young or old, and still took to bed the prettiest ones, who fell for his charms without fail. However, now it seemed that he was more forthcoming about his intentions, since they hadn’t had a single incident while on the road, not one young lady complaining about broken promises of marriage and lies about undying love.
Xue Meng supposed that it must be easier, in a way, to accept that nothing would be coming from an entanglement with an older rogue cultivator, just passing through one’s village, than it was to accept the same from a young da-shixiong from a reputable sect, especially one who whispered sweet lies to lure untouched young women to his bed.
Xue Meng respected this facet of Mei Hanxue’s womanizing ways more than the last. After all that he’d seen in his life, he was no longer scandalized by either of them, but he would always find sexual entanglements dishonorable when accomplished through duplicitous means.
And it was not as if Mei Hanxue had suffered for it. If anything, he laid with even more women than before, in and out of his bed after a few short days of passion, at most shedding a tear and asking for a promise to visit if he ever happened to pass by.
For all that he continued to entertain women between the sheets more often than not, the younger twin had been altered in more ways than simply not deluding the fairer sex anymore. There was something almost jaded about him now, at times, this cynical quality to his gaze, this twist to his smirk that turned it grim and bitter where it was once just jovial. It wasn’t all the time, it wasn’t even noticeable if you didn’t know where to look, but they had been at each other’s sides for over ten years and counting, so Xue Meng would dare say he knew the man well.
He was haunted by his own ghosts, as much as he tried to hide it.
Mei HanXue, the oldest, still retained the cold and aloof personality he was known for, formal and reserved where his brother was friendly and good-natured. But he’d taken up drinking, and though he held his liquor surprisingly well—not quite like Chu Wanning, but a far cry from a lightweight like Xue Meng—it was concerning how many nights a week he fell asleep after indulging in a few jugs of wine.
Not only that, but he’d also become more temperamental. When they were younger, as children and teenagers, he had liked to provoke Xue Meng when they were alone, at the very least saving him face when in front of others. As they grew older and faced unspeakable horrors side by side, he mellowed out somewhat, teasing giving way to a quiet camaraderie. Regardless, those old comments had been well-aimed barbs delivered with a layer of frost, as was his wont, but carrying no real bite.
In this new world, Mei HanXue had begun prodding Xue Meng with snide remarks again, which almost felt nostalgic, like they were reminiscing simpler times. But, with Xue Meng on the edge of a breakdown at any given moment, the two of them were like oil and fire put together, flammable and dangerous.
The three of them hadn’t had a serious argument on the road yet, even though they had been doing this for close to a year. Xue Meng knew it was only a matter of time.
Mei HanXue kept looking for something to complain about. A move that he claimed was poorly executed by one of the other two during a nighthunt, one of his brother’s girls moaning too loudly in the room next to his, the latest stupid, arrogant, foolhardy thing Xue Meng had done, the last of a very long list, if he was to be believed.
Xue Meng would grit his teeth against the constant need to snap at the twins. Annoyed at the noises they made as they turned in their sleeping mats when the three of them had to share a space for the night. Angry that he couldn’t order pork in a dish that the three of them would be eating together. Irritated by the sound of them playing music around a campfire.
Mei Hanxue was arguably the least confrontational of the lot and even his patience was waning. He appeared to have noticed the state of his brother and his friend, and seemed intent on testing their limits. He would deliberately do more of any given thing that he knew annoyed one of the others, a taunting smile tugging at his lips. If that wasn’t enough, this new demeanor of his, this coarseness and flippantness, was in itself more than enough fuel to enrage Xue Meng and Mei HanXue.
And, though he did not set out to start any fights, something about the challenging glint in his eyes told Xue Meng that neither would he be backing down from one.
They hadn’t fought yet because at the critical juncture, at the very moment they would cross the line, eyes narrowing, mouths twisting, nostrils flaring, one or both would take in deep breaths, would leave the room entirely and go cool off outside, staying clear of anyone else for the rest of the day. It was an unspoken agreement not to mention the rising tension, but it was clear that it was in all of their minds.
After so many years of the three of them being the closest of allies and then friends, and the twins being as united as they were since birth, it was almost disturbing to see them become almost strangers to one another. Business partners who shared a coin purse and who hunted vicious spirits and demons together, but who spoke to each other less and less, all unwilling, it seemed, to talk about that last life—the ravaged ghost world it had been, and the drowned wasteland it became—as well as this one. The only three people in the universe who’d shared this experience, and they drifted apart more and more by the day.
One night, after they had successfully cleared a haunting in a medium-sized village in Jiangdong Hall, Xue Meng came back from the inn hot springs to see Mei HanXue drinking by his lonesome in the courtyard. He had begun walking away, back to his room, when something made him reconsider, turning his body back to his friend. Perhaps it was the way Mei HanXue looked so pitiful under the moonlight, in those drab robes that were so unlike him, that made him look so unlike the man he had fought so many battles with.
“Care to share?” he asked as he sat down by Mei HanXue’s side.
The man didn’t flinch or react in any outward way to his arrival, except by passing him the jug, eyes still trained forward.
“Easy hunt, huh?” he tried, making a face at the sourness of the wine, scratching its way down his throat.
Xue Meng drank to remember, and occasionally to forget. He sure as hell did not drink for the taste.
Mei HanXue said, “Not many these days that aren’t.”
Xue Meng took a couple more swigs before handing him back the wine.
“… Right.”
So he wasn’t the only one feeling frustrated by the monotony of these small-time hauntings. It was to be expected, he told himself, after over a decade of fighting the ultimate foe in the shape of Taxian-jun and his endless chess pieces.
But still, Xue Meng was the reason they were here and not grit at the bottom of a world-large ocean, so some part of him took it personally, felt that he had to defend their bread and butter.
“Well, it keeps us fed, helps people, passes the time.” Mei HanXue drank. Xue Meng continued to list, “We get to sightsee.”
“Mn.”
It was Xue Meng’s turn to drink. He could feel it going to his head already, his tolerance to alcohol almost as bad as it had been the first time he’d tried it.
“And our prices are lower than the sects’ except for Sisheng Peak, which makes people choose us over their corrupt sects. Which, again, helps people.”
“That’s true.”
“And if it’s not strenuous, all the better, right? The lighter the work…” He trailed off. Pointed out, “We’ve earned it.”
The more Xue Meng spoke, the more ridiculous he felt. He kept waiting for Mei HanXue to interrupt him, to look at him, but he never did.
“It’s almost a retirement, really.”
At that, Mei HanXue shot him a look that was for a brief moment so scathing and disbelieving that it caught Xue Meng completely off guard. He fumbled the jug of wine for a second before he regained control of it, nearly dropping it and shattering it on the floor.
As quick as it had appeared, the expression vanished from Mei HanXue’s face, coaxed back into impassiveness as he merely shrugged.
“I suppose so. And careful with that.”
But Xue Meng wasn’t listening, having latched onto that flash of emotion so rare on the older twin’s face.
“You don’t agree with me,” he said, almost accusing.
He had his opinions, of course, buried deep inside his own fetid heart, but he continued to ignore them at all costs. He wanted Mei HanXue to give voice to them, so he could fight him, could fight the ideas themselves, could maybe silence them by countering one by one.
He knew he was being unfair, but he couldn’t seem to rein himself in.
“I very explicitly agreed with you. Are you turning deaf as well as dumb?”
“Don’t give me that bullcrap. You don’t like this.”
He made a vague gesture to encapsulate all that surrounded them, meaning—everything, this inn, this lifestyle, being a rogue, being alive—
Mei HanXue quirked a brow and for a moment looked so very much like his brother did nowadays when he was feeling particularly sardonic.
“What’s there not to like?”
“You came here,” Xue Meng pointed out defensively.
“I did.”
“I didn’t force you, I didn’t ask it of you—you—”
Mei HanXue sighed, and he sounded like a man who carried the weight of the world on his shoulders.
“Ziming,” he cut him off. “Go to bed.”
He got up and plucked the bottle from Xue Meng’s numb hands. With one last inscrutable look sent Xue Meng’s way, he spun on his heels and walked in the direction of his room. Xue Meng knew he would be drinking the contents of that jug and perhaps another tonight.
He wondered which it was, for him.
For the taste, to remember, or to forget.
For the following days, Xue Meng and Mei HanXue avoided each other, until the younger brother started to send suspicious looks their way. It was uncommon for any of their almost-disagreements to last that long, always burning out after a few hours or a day at the most of mutual cold shoulder. By the dawn of the third day, Mei Hanxue seemed to have reached the end of his tolerance and started to poke fun at them.
“C'mon, don’t frown now, Mengmeng,” he said, taunting. “You’ll get even worse crow’s feet and where will that leave us? People will start to think you’re our father.”
“You should be so lucky,” Xue Meng sneered, resisting the urge to vainly prod at the edges of his eyes and consequently prove him right.
When Mei HanXue tried to reach for the chili oil and found it was placed too far away from him, he asked formally, “Would you pass me the chili oil please?”
Xue Meng did, though he could feel his face doing something unpleasant. The two of them were very careful not to let their hands touch as the exchange of the small glass bottle happened.
Mei Hanxue whistled.
“Sheesh, if I didn’t know better I’d say Ziming plucked your flower and then abandoned—”
“But you do know better, so shut up.”
Mei HanXue’s coldness had the younger twin raising his hands in surrender, and it seemed to satisfy the oldest. Xue Meng still sputtered, feeling that he was owed his pound of flesh too.
“Wh-what are you on about? Why would your mind even go there?! N-not everyone is as obscene as you!”
Mei Hanxue laughed around a mouthful of dumpling, sounding delighted.
“Or is it that Mengmeng left ge unsatisfied?” His eyes shone with a wicked light as he turned them on Xue Meng. “I could give you some pointers, see…”
A hand shot out lightning-fast and gripped Mei Hanxue’s wrist in a firm hold, his brother glaring at him with a ferocity Xue Meng wasn’t sure he’d seen before in those eyes, at least not since the worst of battles in the war.
“Didi,” he said, somewhere between a murmur and a hiss.
Mei Hanxue tried to pull his wrist away unsuccessfully.
“I only meant that I am experienced in the ways of the bedroom, whilst he is not.” Mei HanXue still hadn't let go of his brother’s wrist, so Mei Hanxue insisted, lowering his voice to a whisper he clearly didn’t mean for Xue Meng to hear, “That’s all it was. I promise. You know I wouldn’t.”
His tone was apologetic enough, and Mei HanXue let go after a beat, apparently mollified. His gaze was still unfriendly, though, and he got up without finishing his breakfast. The light pink flush of anger across his cheeks was odd, for Xue Meng was quite sure up until now that the Mei Hanxues simply did not blush. Too thick-faced, and, in Mei HanXue’s case, too much in control of his own emotions.
After a moment of reflection, Xue Meng frowned, confused. That was what he had understood as well from Mei Hanxue’s comment—what other meaning could there be? And what could possibly incense Mei HanXue so?
He was reluctant to appear naive, especially at his age, so he kept quiet about it and continued to eat his meal in silence. Mei Hanxue did not try to strike up conversation again, and steered clear of the subject of Xue Meng and Mei HanXue’s disagreement for the one more day that it lasted.
In the aftermath of the disaster that devoured his world, Xue Meng and the Mei brothers thought about staying in their respective sects to help rebuild, at least for the very first weeks. Sisheng Peak in particular had a lot of work to be done after the loss of its sect leader, and the younger Xue Meng, though awkward in the presence of his older self, expressed his respect for the war veteran and said that he’d be thankful for any help he could get.
The Mei Hanxues weren’t interested in going back to Kunlun Taxue Palace, which not only still had its sect leader Ming Yuelou but also both its first disciples, young and eager to help. When their shizun asked, they simply said they were not needed there, and, with a respectful farewell to her, who had been long dead in their own world, the Mei twins departed.
The three of them almost stayed with the younger Xue Meng to assist the son of the phoenix in his rebuilding efforts, but, in the end, sect work was not why they chose to try their hand at this new life. They had agreed to see the world, an unbroken world, and help the common people where they could, side by side and unburdened by the hardships of war for the first time in countless years. The work they would find in Sisheng Peak would be neverending—first it would be to resettle everyone back into the sect, which would already be a tremendous endeavor, but it didn’t end there. Then, they would need to get it to work smoothly again, assist the new sect leader, find new disciples, elect new elders, establish new trade routes, form new treaties between sects. Where would it end? When would it be the right time to consider their assistance done, and pick up their things and leave? And at which point would Xue Meng be stepping on his younger self’s toes, two Xues in command of Sisheng Peak?
No, it was better this way. They accepted the offer of money from their sects, a sum much humbler on Sisheng Peak’s part than it was on Kunlun Taxue Palace’s, and set off with a few sets of robes, the twins’ instruments, and their weapons.
As Sisheng Peak reestablished itself, the three of them also took jobs in the lower cultivation world, though the price at which the sect used to offer its work before the death of its sect leader was impossible to beat as rogue cultivators. There were, after all, three of them to feed and keep warm, while Sisheng Peak got most of its money through other means. For now, though, a good portion of the nighthunting effort of Sisheng Peak was put on hold, due to both a lack of personnel and a focus on the rebuilding of the sect, so Xue Meng and the twins roamed through the villages and towns charging lower rates for their services and helping where they could.
Most of their work was done in the upper cultivation world, however. The sects couldn’t care less about the common people, overpricing the assistance they would have felt obligated to give had they any morals, and it was fertile soil for wandering cultivators.
Rogues weren’t forbidden per se, though they were heavily frowned upon by the upper cultivation sects, seen as encroaching on their territory, but the three of them couldn’t care less. They offered better work for a much lower price, and, if all they cared about was the status quo, they would have bowed to Taxian-jun in the other life rather than go to such lengths to challenge and beat him.
During one of these hunts in the upper cultivation world, in a Taobao Mountain village a few days' journey away from Lin’an, Xue Meng and Mei Hanxue were sparring. Mei Hanxue’s Shoufeng shined green from his spiritual core and Xue Meng held his father’s golden fan in his grip. They fought alone at the edge of the woods, far away enough from the village that they couldn’t be seen or heard by the villagers.
The sword being a close combat weapon, the fan was not its most adequate contender, but Xue Meng tended to practice more with Longcheng than with it, so he was dedicating the day to its techniques. Mei Hanxue was a skilled swordsman, and, as the afternoon sun beat down on them, Xue Meng could feel sweat pouring down his face and back in rivulets.
Early in the morning, the older twin had said he’d be meditating and training with his pipa before disappearing into the trees, and Xue Meng had begun practicing his forms with the golden fan. Mei Hanxue had watched over him for about an hour, piping up with unhelpful commentary that Xue Meng only responded to half the time. The younger twin lounged with an insouciant air, as comfortable leaning back against a tree trunk as he would be in a plush chair in a fancy sitting room, and, after he finished his handful of loquats, he’d jumped up and proposed they sparred.
Their constant struggle was to get the other into the ideal range for their own weapon. The fan being a mid range combat weapon, Xue Meng kept trying to put distance between them through violent slashes of the fan’s edge through the air and his quick and graceful footwork, trying to either pull back or force his opponent to step away. Mei Hanxue, in turn, was an adaptive fighter, creative and bold in how he feigned and parried, taking any openings to get up close and personal to Xue Meng. He was a lot more reckless in spars than he was when he fought for real—when it was more technical excellence than daring, more prudence than risk—and it was harder to counter now because he was such a wild card when the stakes were low.
“C’mon, Ziming!” he crowed, spinning the pommel of his sword on his grip. Show-off. “Make it worth my while.”
Sometimes, when he wasn’t feeling so sorry for himself and when the boulder pressing on his chest didn’t threaten to crush him, it felt good to be able to joke around like this. To have Mei Hanxue poke fun at him and to get angry quickly and to forget it just as fast. To feel like he was a young man again, unburdened by death and loss, screaming that he would win the Spiritual Mountain Competition, that he would acquire a spiritual weapon one way or another, sooner or later, that he would take Sisheng Peak to unforeseen heights and shock all the other nine sects in the process.
By the end of the war, when the Gate of Life and Death had merged the two worlds, Xue Meng didn’t have much of the arrogance he’d been known for in his younger days, the arrogance that had made his cousin aptly nickname him “peacock”. He had lost his sect and his home, had been defeated in battle again and again, had borne witness to his parents’ murders, had been ridiculed and denied assistance at every turn except from two siblings not much older than himself. A spoiled child with loving parents and a promising future, Xue Meng had never faced much hardship in his early life. The mighty had indeed fallen.
In this new world, in these ratty robes, living a wanderer’s life with little money and even less prestige, he wouldn’t say his past self would find much to boast about either.
But still, something in him, a part of him he’d thought dead, yelled back at Mei Hanxue:
“You better make it worth my while and stop playing around! Once a pretty boy, always a pretty boy!”
Xue Meng kicked up a bit of loose dirt and, with a burst of chi on the soles of his feet, performed a backflip while Mei Hanxue blinked sand away from his eyes. Though he was tearing up, sclera red and painful-looking, a smile was painted on his lips.
“A pretty boy now, am I?”
Xue Meng gaped, mouth opening and closing like a fish.
Mei Hanxue’s voice was dripping with suggestion in a way it hadn’t in a long time, not since their early youth when he would weaponize his sexuality to make Xue Meng uncomfortable with his own inexperience. It was a tone he still heard sometimes, when he happened to be near Mei Hanxue and one of his conquests as he sweet-talked her, cadence honeyed and self-satisfied.
“I-I-I! I mean— I meant, like, like foppish, useless pretty boy!”
Mei Hanxue lowered his sword and opened his mouth, and Xue Meng was certain that whatever it was that he would be saying, it couldn’t be any good. He practically stumbled back and threw his fan, sloppier than he would like, making it spin through the air in a deadly arc that Mei Hanxue had to raise Shoufeng to protect himself against.
“There's no need to be upset! You’re not so bad yourself.”
“Not so—! Not so bad mys— I'll have you know that I am beautiful! I am—you should get your eyes checked!”
Mei Hanxue laughed a full-bodied laugh, one that shook his shoulders and left him wiping tears that had nothing to do with the dirt Xue Meng had thrown at him. Through it all, Xue Meng watched with an annoyed face, golden fan once again cradled in his hands as he tapped the edge against his wrist impatiently.
When Mei Hanxue seemed to have finally stopped laughing, he complained, “Done already?”
“Aiya, Mengmeng, you sound just like you did when we were young. Hah.” He shook his head. “I’d say never change, but…” he shot Xue Meng a commiserating look, but Xue Meng wasn't sure what they should be commiserating about.
He shrugged it off as one of Mei Hanxue’s many eccentricities, which only seemed to have increased in this new world.
“Stop slacking off!” he yelled, and attacked with his fan once again.
In a turn of events that surprised Xue Meng to no end, when there was finally a fight that tore a crack through the foundation of their trio, he wasn’t in any way involved. As a matter of fact, he’d been peacefully asleep before the twins woke him up with their argument, and he had allowed it to unfold without any sort of interference on his part.
It was mid winter, and they’d had to buy cloaks and coats lined in fur to withstand the temperatures. That, coupled with the string of villages they’d visited which hadn’t needed their services made for a worryingly empty coin purse, which, in turn, had led them here. To this shared room in a small, poorly insulated inn.
There were two single beds and a sleeping mat. They’d drawn lots and Mei HanXue lost, picking the shorter stick, so he slept curled on the floor atop his sleeping mat, shivering slightly despite the pile of blankets covering him.
Before they’d fallen asleep, Xue Meng had tried to jest, “Don’t tell me you’ve grown unused to the cold. What would your sect’s people say?”
The scathing look Mei HanXue had aimed his way let him know just how receptive he was to humor at this time.
Xue Meng deflated, feeling insulted and a bit humiliated.
“Whatever,” he grumbled to himself. “Fuck me I guess.”
That’s what he got for thinking he could joke around with an old friend, he thought.
He settled into his bed and turned to face the wall, unwilling to stare at Mei HanXue’s ugly mug. Despite the bitterness in his heart, he fell asleep so quickly and so seamlessly that, when voices woke him up at some point in the night, it felt as if he’d only just laid down and closed his eyes.
“—not my fault!” one of the twins was saying in a loud whisper. “You’re almost asking to be stepped on.”
Xue Meng blinked confusedly for a moment before the fog cleared from his mind. Oh right, he thought. Mei Hanxue had been out tonight, probably warming some village woman’s bed. Though the sky was still dark outside, it must be late for him to be back already, probably close to dawn.
“Ge, I met this widow—”
“Go to sleep. I am not in the mood.”
That sullen tone could belong to none other than Mei HanXue, berating his brother. Xue Meng himself had been just as easily dismissed not too long ago in the exact same way, ordered to sleep like an annoyance the older twin couldn’t be bothered to entertain. Interested to see where this was going, Xue Meng kept quiet, still facing the wall, every muscle taut and even his breathing controlled so the twins wouldn’t notice he was eavesdropping.
“When are you ever?” Mei Hanxue’s voice took on a plaintive note, mock-whiny. “Once you used to ditch clingy girls for me, and now you treat me like this! It’s like you don’t even love your didi anymore.”
The words were ridiculous, and Xue Meng was entirely prepared to hear either a scathing reply or nothing at all. Yet, Mei HanXue didn’t ignore his brother’s antics, but rather spoke quietly, “Lay down and sleep, or I’ll take your bed for the night.”
He sounded perfectly level, that smooth even baritone.
“Take my bed?” Someone hummed, contemplative. “Why do that when you used to have no problem sharing?”
“You—!”
Xue Meng frowned, not getting what was so offensive about the question.
The sound of fabric rustling. Xue Meng guessed that Mei HanXue was getting up from his pile of blankets.
“Are you trying to rile me up?” he asked, and there was something different about his voice now, but Xue Meng couldn’t discern what. Perhaps if he were able to see them, watch their body language… perhaps just a quick glance over his shoulder…
But no. He would most certainly get caught, and he was too morbidly fascinated to cut this voyeuristic session short.
While the emotion in Mei HanXue’s voice was lost on Xue Meng, the sarcasm in Mei Hanxue’s was easy to identify: “I wouldn’t dare.”
“Enough. What is wrong with you today.”
This was already escalating past whatever disagreements any of them had had in all their months on the road.
"What is wrong with me indeed."
"Knock it off."
All of a sudden, Mei Hanxue’s temper flared, quick and destructive like wildfire.
“You want to know what is wrong with me?” Once upon a time, Xue Meng would have thought him incapable of anything but breezy cheerfulness and light teasing. That was not what this was. “A better question would be what isn't wrong with me!"
"Don't be fanciful."
"Oh so now I'm fanciful?" A harsh exhale. "What isn’t wrong with all of us, ge?! I just fuck and eat all day, you’re a fucking alcoholic now, Ziming’s fucking dead inside,” ‘hey!’ Xue Meng wanted to protest, “and we both keep pretending like we aren’t two freaks—”
“Shhh,” Mei HanXue hissed.
“You shh!”
“Ziming!” the elder brother spat as a reminder.
Xue Meng didn’t get what they meant by freaks. In a sense, Mei Hanxue’s womanizer ways could be described as freakish, but there was no trait both brothers shared that he could see falling under that category.
The volume of their argument, which had increased during Mei Hanxue’s outburst, went back down to a low hum just shy of a whisper.
“First of all, we are not having that conversation,” one of the brothers said, Xue Meng wasn’t sure which. “But what do you suggest we do about the rest? We’re living in this world now.”
“A bit of a stretch to call it that, don’t you think? Living.”
Xue Meng bit his lip against the wave of nausea he could feel rising up in him.
“Any suggestions, then?”
A brief pause.
“No? Hmph.”
The derisive sound was so familiar that Xue Meng could see Mei HanXue’s minute expressions in his mind’s eye.
“I don’t have all the answers, but at least I’m not a smug coward. I can see what’s going on.”
Silence.
“What? No snippy comeback? Not gonna call me a floozy again? Last time I called you a coward, you said—”
“That was a long time ago.”
“You still think it!”
“Don’t project.”
“Argh! Fuck you. I can see it in your eyes, every time I leave with one of them. You’re not gonna make me out to be crazy.”
“Jump into as many beds as you like, if it’s what makes you happy. I didn’t oppose it when it was I cleaning up your messes, I’m not going to object now.”
“It isn’t working! Is this what we signed up for when we left our world?”
“It’s a respectable life.”
“It’s a shoe that doesn’t fit.”
“What do you want me to do about it, Hanxue?! Contrary to what you may believe, I can’t wake up tomorrow on my day as us, while you use the human skin mask, and magically fix it all for you. It’s about time you grew up.”
“Don’t play the immaturity card.”
Xue Meng was getting dizzy from their vicious back and forth, body humming with nerves and the effort of holding back. He wanted to jump up and get in between them, order them to just quit it already, to listen to each other.
This wasn’t right. They shouldn’t be like this. The Mei brothers shared everything, from a name to a face to an identity.
Nothing about this world was right.
“Hard not to when you still act like a little child—”
“Not fair. You know, I–I fought a war same as you, with you—”
“—vying for big brother's attention like this.”
“Who wants your attention?!” Mei Hanxue hissed, all concerns about volume forgotten.
“You, ever since the womb and every day since. You think I don’t see it?”
Mei HanXue’s words were cruel, cutting deep even Xue Meng, who felt his eyes sting in sympathy.
Not to be outdone, the other brother spat, “Well, on Naihe Bridge they’ll split us up and you’ll get your peace and quiet, since I’m such a burden. If only we’d stayed behind and sped up the process, we’d be free of each other already.”
Xue Meng gasped, a small noise of shock that went unheard thanks to the heat of their tempers and how focused they were on each other.
Mei HanXue, keen to get the last word in, said coldly, “Perhaps you’re right.”
No more words were exchanged between the brothers, and Xue Meng heard only the sound of padding feet and whispering sheets as both of them settled in for the night. It took him a long time to fall back asleep, throat choked by the certainty that this must be the beginning of the end.
Chapter 2
Notes:
happy new year! 🎆
Chapter Text
“And this has been happening for how long now?” Xue Meng asked the couple who’d hired them, whose faces looked wan with sleep deprivation and fright.
“Two weeks now, daozhang! Two weeks, I really don’t know what to do anymore, I bought all sorts of talismans and charms, but these things keep happening…”
The woman let out a hiccup, choking around her own cries.
“First it was Snowflake, and now I fear for my little girl… You have to help us!”
She sobbed, her husband crouched over her and rubbing a comforting line up and down her shuddering back. The man stared with supplicant eyes up at the three cultivators in his living room as he caressed his wife.
“We’ll pay double your rate, we’ll– cover all expenses, just, please. I just want them safe.”
He looked at his child, sleeping peacefully bundled in blankets. She rested in a basket not too far from her parents, which wasn’t surprising, considering Xue Meng wouldn’t want a baby of his out of his sight under these circumstances either.
Their house, if Xue Meng’s suspicions were correct, was haunted. Strange events had begun happening not long after they’d moved in, ranging from food going bad before its time and things moving without any external force, to the family cat being found strung up by its own bowels in the rafters.
Xue Meng’s first guess had been a spirit's resentment, due to some vengeful instinct or unfinished business from when it had been alive. The couple claimed they were unaware of any grudges held against them and that they thought they had been fairly well liked before the haunting. However, the Chen family mission in Butterfly Town, that Xue Meng went on with his shizun and his fellow disciples when he was fifteen, came to mind when that idea first manifested. His shizun’s teachings were always valuable, after all, and he had taught Xue Meng that day that, to save face and prevent others from denying assistance, many would lie. Even if it meant offering half-truths that could jeopardize that very assistance.
However, old lessons aside, that theory simply did not fit the family’s profile and circumstances. It was too much of a coincidence for the disturbances to have started happening just after they moved in, and, though Xue Meng judged appearances with a grain of salt—he’d been clueless as Mo Ran descended into madness, after all—they did not appear to have terribly wronged someone so much that their ghost would be unable to move on from sheer resentfulness.
It was much more likely that the house itself was haunted, that something terrible had happened in it, tying the deceased to the physical location of the tragedy. It both made things easier and harder, because, while the couple would surely cooperate, Xue Meng needed more specifics if he wanted to successfully exorcize the house, and it was improbable that they knew much more than what they’d already told him.
Still, he had to try them first.
“You say you’ve just recently moved in. Can you tell us a bit more about that?”
Mei HanXue added, “What was the moving like, what do you know about the house, if there were any strange markings or objects here.”
Xue Meng nodded at Mei HanXue gratefully for complementing his inquiry. He tried not to pay too much mind to the sour face Mei Hanxue made at the sound of his brother’s voice, lest he lose his temper in front of a client.
The twins had been like this for weeks, and, though Xue Meng was still steadfast in his resolution of keeping out of it, it was made difficult when they let their personal problems interfere with the night hunts—their livelihood and their very life’s purpose, as it were.
Buried underneath Xue Meng’s anger, though, was a frustration aimed at himself for knowing he was unable to help his friends through their disagreement, neither as mediator nor as a confidante, and guilt for feeling he had been given so much over the years and had given so little in return.
He sighed, chest aching.
Turning his back on the twins, Xue Meng focused entirely on the clients, whose problems he could actually solve. He needed to ascertain the cause of the events, because, if it wasn’t a haunted house, there was another option which could explain the strange happenings almost as satisfactorily. It explained everything but for the uncanny coincidence of it all starting just after the family moved into the new house, which, for him, wasn’t an unimportant detail.
A curse was the other possibility, but one that he couldn’t confirm immediately because he didn’t possess his shizun’s Rising Dragon Array, which could detect any spells in an area, from the most insignificant to the most powerful. Xue Meng’s strengths as a cultivator lied on his attack prowess, though, and he was unskilled in spell work and summonings alike. To find out which curse had been cast on the family, he would have to create an identifying formation which took a lot of time and spiritual energy, and he was hoping to avoid unnecessary expenditure. He was still recovering from the fight with Taxian-jun and the Black Tortoise Armor, after all, which had almost broken his spiritual core not a year ago.
Considering a curse and a haunting required different approaches, a countercurse and an exorcism respectively, he needed to be sure of which it was before he got to work.
“Well… we’re both from a town far from here, and we came here because my boss needed a representative in this district,” the man said. “We have no family in town and no one to help us… in the beginning our neighbors were kind, but, after these things started happening, they… I think they think we’re bad luck. People avoid us in the streets now.”
Xue Meng nodded, once again risking a glance back at the twins who stood flanking him on either side. They had regained a professional air, thankfully. Mei Hanxue had a sympathetic look on his face, one that never failed to calm the fearful clients, and Mei HanXue was listening intently, mind probably running through the same possibilities Xue Meng’s was.
At first glance, one wouldn’t notice much difference in their demeanor. Only Xue Meng, with the knowledge and familiarity of over ten years of friendship, could notice how they were marginally farther apart, how they were inclined ever so slightly to face away from each other, like reverse sunflowers.
After trying futilely to obtain more useful information from the couple, the three of them headed out of the house, stepping into the streets side by side. Xue Meng was in the middle, acting as a buffer as he had been for the past few weeks. Snippets of the twins’ argument kept replaying in his head, but, no matter how much he tried to make sense of it, how much he tried to pick it apart in all its half-spoken double meanings, the vitriol the brothers had displayed eluded him.
Xue Meng’s anger had always been an upfront, uncomplicated thing. At first, anger for trivial things, anger that always burned out before long because the kindle that sustained it was so precarious—twigs rather than logs. Then, as the sweetness of his youth bitterned, he’d had real reason to hate, hate the people who turned their backs on him and hate the cousin who’d taken everything from him, but still it wasn’t a particularly nuanced feeling.
He was at a loss now as to why the brothers had fought, when it was clear how much they cared for one another, and when the reasons appeared, to him, so nebulous. If it’d been a passing disagreement, he would’ve understood it, but they were nearing the month mark and the Mei Hanxues were yet to exchange more than two words except when absolutely necessary for a hunt, and even then the tone was sharp with frost, as if they carried the bite of the weather of their sect.
Breaking the silence as they walked, Xue Meng said, “I’m thinking either there’s a spirit haunting the house, or a curse has been placed on them. Leaning towards spirit.”
“Agreed,” Mei Hanxue said.
“I was hoping to avoid casting an identifying formation. It will leave the caster weakened, and we need to reach the next town as soon as possible. But they also didn’t give us much to work with.”
“We should talk to the people,” Mei Hanxue suggested. “Perhaps their hostility towards the family won’t extend to us and they’ll be willing to talk if they know something.”
Xue Meng nodded, and they started walking as a unit towards the front door of one of the closest houses to their clients’. The three of them didn’t even need to say that there was where they were headed; they just redirected their steps as one as soon as their plan had been established. In a way, they’d developed a sort of intuition over the years, a harmony that allowed them to fight together, predict each other’s steps, almost with no need for verbal communication.
Xue Meng knocked.
After a few seconds, a woman in her forties with a plump figure and flour streaked across her cheek opened the door, wiping damp hands on a towel. At the sight of them, she first narrowed her eyes in confusion and then widened them in recognition. Immediately, a guarded look took over her face.
“Good morning,” she said, voice raising in the end, signaling a subtle question.
“Good morning, miss,” Mei Hanxue stepped in, exerting his easy charm to the maximum. Xue Meng was thankful for that; he did well enough with clients, but he was no good at coaxing things out of reluctant people, especially women. “I hope we’re not bothering you. My name is Mei Hanxue, that is my brother, Mei HanXue, and this is Xue Ziming.”
At the sight of Mei Hanxue’s smile, the woman’s brow softened a little and she tucked a strand of loose hair behind her ear, though her posture still remained somewhat tense.
“Just doing some chores. What could three cultivators I’ve never seen before want with me?”
“Just to ask some questions. If that’s not too much of a hassle, of course.”
The woman hesitated, and Xue Meng noticed her subtly glancing towards the left, in the direction of their clients’ house.
She knows something, Xue Meng silently communicated with Mei HanXue over Mei Hanxue’s back while the younger twin focused his attention on the woman.
Mei HanXue answered with a barely there nod. Yes, I agree.
“It’ll have to be quick, I have some food on the stove, so…”
“It’ll only take a moment of your time.” Mei Hanxue waited for her to nod reluctantly before continuing. “Would you happen to know anything about the Quan household? They moved in not too long ago, and they’ve been experiencing some… issues. I was wondering if anything noteworthy ever happened in the terrain of their home, or if you’re aware of anyone, alive or dead, who could have a grudge against them. Some disagreement or rivalry.”
Her face turned paler the more he spoke and she made a sign to ward off evil, all the progress that Mei Hanxue’s charm had made vanishing.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about. Get out!”
She tried to close the door, but Mei Hanxue, who was closest, wedged his foot into the crack.
“Please, miss, we just—”
“If, if you don’t leave now, I-I’ll scream for help!”
Mei Hanxue stepped back and raised his hands in surrender.
“I’m sorry, I—”
The door closed on his face without cerimony.
A beat of silence.
“You must be losing your touch,” Xue Meng remarked with a smirk.
An answering curve started to tug at the corner of Mei Hanxue’s lips, but, when Mei HanXue snorted softly and derisively, the smile vanished. The younger twin shot his brother a cold look before averting his eyes in dismissal.
Xue Meng wanted to sigh.
“Perhaps we could go to a tavern. This town has a few of those, surely someone will be willing to talk.”
“And who are you going to ask? A random person from the next table over? The waiter?”
“… Well, yes,” Xue Meng said, keeping the slight defensiveness out of his voice.
Mei Hanxue shrugged, looking unimpressed.
“What? What’s wrong with it?”
“I’d say it’s not the best kind of establishment for information gathering.”
“Do you have a better suggestion?” When Mei Hanxue had started walking away, leaving Xue Meng and Mei HanXue behind, Xue Meng hurried his stride to catch up. “Hey! What do you suggest?”
“Let’s try it your way first. Who knows.”
“What’s your suggestion, huh?” he asked. “A brothel?”
Mei Hanxue stopped, making his two companions halt in their step too, and shrugged.
His brother rolled his eyes. “Of course you’d suggest that.”
Mei Hanxue didn’t rise for the bait. “I said it already. Let’s try the tavern.”
The town was not very big, but it was well-off for its size. There was a quaint and well-maintained temple up the mountain to the north that saw its fair share of worshippers, and the city was located atop a hilly terrain that was surprisingly not foggy, allowing people to appreciate the sights. Also, there was an abundance of hot springs that meant that not only inns and richer households possessed them in their properties, but there were also public ones for anyone who wished to partake. It was, all in all, a successful tourist center, and there were taverns aplenty.
They entered one at random and chose a table in the corner of the room, not so far away as to not be able to listen to gossip from nearby patrons. They ordered a duck dish and Mei Hanxue once again was given the task of being the charmer, though he was more friendly than flirty when speaking to the young man serving their table.
It was all going well up until he mentioned the Quans, at which point the waiter closed himself off and his smiles took on a more plastic quality.
“I don’t know much about them,” he said, avoiding eye contact under the excuse that he was placing the dishes atop their table. It was clearly a nervous—perhaps even guilty—tick, since Xue Meng had seen him serving other patrons and balancing piles of plates on his arms without needing as much as a passing glance at his own movements. “We’re a small town but not that small. They’ve mostly kept to themselves, never eaten here.”
“And you didn’t happen to overhear anything about them? Or their house?”
“Wh-what about their house?!” the waiter squeaked, eyes widening on his pimply face.
The three cultivators shared meaningful looks.
“A-a-anyway. I have people to serve! Call me if you need anything, misters.”
Mei HanXue took a sip of his drink, face detached but gaze calculating.
“That was odd. It must be the house.”
Mei Hanxue tightened his lips, unwilling to concede completely. “Still. It could be a tragedy in the property, but what if there’s a body buried somewhere in their yard? We have to know so we can dig it up, otherwise the exorcism won’t work. Or the land could be cursed, even.”
A cursed house? It was far-fetched but still an option. Xue Meng had the feeling Mei Hanxue had spoken mostly to contradict his brother.
“Unlikely,” the older twin said, paying little mind to the suggestion.
When Mei Hanxue opened his mouth to fight back, Xue Meng stepped in as a peacemaker.
“Well, even if cursed land is unlikely, the possibility of a buried body is worth checking. If we do a half-assed job and leave town, that family is dying.”
The twins avoided his gaze, which meant they agreed, though they didn’t want to if it meant meeting their brother halfway.
“Hanxue?” he asked. “Could you ask someone from our neighboring tables?”
“Sure can, Mengmeng. Say the one and it’s done.”
Pursing his lips, Xue Meng surveyed the room and found a table occupied by an older woman and two kids, probably her grandchildren. The lady looked the nice motherly type, and would surely be charmed by Mei Hanxue’s… everything.
“That one.”
“Good pick. Be back in a second,” he said, and got up with a fluid movement that lent improbable elegance to his drab robes. Xue Meng could almost see him with a crystal dangling from his forehead, jewels adorning his hair, pale frozen mist silk robes draped across his wide shoulders and cinched tight on his trim waist.
No matter how much time passed, it was comforting to realize, some mannerisms of his would always be those of the dandyish young master of Kunlun Taxue Palace.
The granny’s table was too far away from theirs for Xue Meng to be able to listen in on their conversation, but Xue Meng could imagine it well enough. Mei Hanxue approached with his characteristic smile, perhaps less rakish and gentler than usual, and asked if he could sit. There was one empty chair pushed against the table, and, with the granny’s assent, he sat down, taking something from his robes.
“I wonder what that is…” Xue Meng said to himself.
“Sweets,” Mei HanXue said quietly next to him, startling him.
“Sweets? I didn’t know he had a sweet tooth.”
Were Mei Hanxue and his shizun more alike than he’d imagined?
“Not quite. He just really likes sachima, has ever since he was a child. He always keeps some on his person.”
“Oh.”
Strange, how he’d never noticed that. Mei Hanxue must’ve never eaten any in front of him.
“Also helps when he needs to talk to children, like now.”
Xue Meng was sure that that was just one among the multitude of small facts Mei HanXue had collected about his brother over the course of their lives. For a moment, Xue Meng wondered what it was like, knowing someone that deeply, so much that you were familiar with all their idiosyncrasies, knew all of their deepest fears and dreams and secrets. Wondered what it was like, for that same person to know you just as well in return. The people he knew best in the world were the brothers, but the bond Xue Meng shared with them and the bond they shared with each other was substantially different, much paler, the same way water is thinner than blood.
In his more fanciful moments in the past, Xue Meng had hoped he’d find that bond in a wife, but even that was beyond him now. A wanderer’s life with two other men was not appropriate ground for a marriage to bloom, and Xue Meng himself wasn’t much of a potential husband.
He shook off the melancholic thoughts. Focusing back on Mei Hanxue, he saw him making small talk and winning the granny over. After another couple of minutes, another woman from the table next to the granny’s got up and came to stand next to Mei Hanxue, shaking her head and looking nervous. Mei Hanxue tried to argue back, gesticulating and smiling, but the woman seemed to be getting more hostile, and the granny started to get up with her grandchildren.
Mei Hanxue appeared to ask them to stay, judging by the way he motioned at them, but the granny was hearing none of it. The waiter went over to them and got in Mei Hanxue’s space, and the aggression of it made Xue Meng close his hand around the hilt of his sword in preparation, heart racing. When HanXue tried to get up, though, he realized they were overreacting, Mei HanXue’s lack of control helping him find his own.
He grabbed the elder twin by the forearm and tugged him back down.
“It’s just a civilian. Hanxue can handle himself.”
Mei Hanxue came back shaking his head ruefully, but his tiny smile was unrepentant.
“Well, I tried,” he said when he got within hearing distance.
“What do we do now?” Xue Meng asked.
The waiter was walking behind Mei Hanxue and arrived at their table at that moment.
“I’m going to have to ask you to leave. I can’t tolerate the disturbance of the other clients, sirs.”
His voice was a bit fearful, be it from their obvious strength as cultivators or from whatever it was that was related to the Quans, but there was steel underneath. They paid and left, Mei Hanxue almost with a spring in his step.
“What’re you so happy about,” Xue Meng said, gloomy. He hadn’t even finished his portion of the duck dish, and it had been one of the first spicy meals he’d had in a couple of weeks.
“Well, dear Mengmeng, what’s there not to be happy about? The sun’s shining, the town is beautiful, we’re still alive against all odds. And, oh, I’m taking you to your first brothel, of course!”
They had to leave their swords behind, since Mei Hanxue said it wouldn’t be welcomed to enter such an establishment with a deadly weapon. The absence of Longcheng by his side made Xue Meng feel more naked and vulnerable than being surrounded by scantily dressed women, but the gold fan was at the very least a comforting weight in his hand.
Mei HanXue was a stiff figure at his side, either glaring holes at his brother or stonily facing the ground. Mei Hanxue, on the other hand, appeared to be in his element, though Xue Meng knew for a fact that it had been a long while since he had set foot in a brothel. They did not have the money to spend on trivial things such as these, and Mei Hanxue was no longer the rich and privileged da-shixiong of a well off sect. It appeared he’d missed it.
After they crossed the threshold of the establishment, bypassing and pushing aside drapes of translucent red fabric strung up from the ceiling, they entered a room occupied by beauties, who sat next to the walls eyeing the newcomers with interest. An older woman who was dressed more lavishly than the rest got up from her plush seat, walking up to them. Xue Meng guessed that she was the hostess.
"Welcome, gentlemen, to the Lilac Rose Pavilion. Your every wish is my command. What would you be looking for?"
“We—” Mei Hanxue began.
“I would like a booth separate from them, and a young man to entertain me, please,” Mei HanXue asked politely.
“M-man?!” Xue Meng couldn’t help but let escape, gaping.
The hostess was unfazed and simply smiled with her rouge lips, heavily powdered face forming cracks and creases when she wasn’t expressionless.
“Of course. Anything else?”
“I’d rather he be able to hold decent conversation, with an agreeable face.”
“Very well, sir. If you’ll follow me…” Before she left, she told the other two, "I will be back soon to attend to you."
Mei HanXue departed the main hall after the hostess, leaving behind his brother and a flabbergasted Xue Meng.
Xue Meng knew that there were cutsleeves out there, okay. He knew for a fact that his cousin had been one and that he’d married their shizun in his maddened state, and even that this world’s Chu Wanning was this world’s Mo Ran’s partner. But he’d known the twins for much of his life and never had he associated cutsleeve with either of them, only to be confronted with it now. He had thought that they were both normal! He couldn’t be blamed for his shock; everything he knew had just been turned on its head!
He turned to Mei Hanxue, opening his mouth to ask if he was as shocked as Xue Meng, if he’d known about his brother’s proclivities, if—
The expression on Mei Hanxue’s face gave him pause.
Mei Hanxue was staring after his brother, at the doorway he disappeared through, and he looked… Xue Meng wasn’t sure what, but it couldn’t be good. His pale brows were softly furrowed, lower lip contorted in a small pained moue. It was subtle, but it spoke of an ache that appeared somehow deeper for its subtlety than if he’d looked outright devastated.
“Mei Hanxue,” Xue Meng said softly. “Are you okay?”
Mei Hanxue blinked out of his stupor, and his eyes focused on Xue Meng as an easy grin split his face in two.
“Incredible. So, what do you think?” he asked, indicating the room. “Everything you never knew you wanted?”
Rather than give his opinion on the questionable charms of brothels, Xue Meng insisted, “You look sad.”
Did Mei Hanxue have an issue with cutsleeves? He didn’t appear to have anything against Xue Meng’s shizun and this world’s Mo Ran.
Or perhaps Mei HanXue hadn’t told his brother about his tastes, and now he was feeling betrayed. Yeah, that sounded more likely.
Mei Hanxue dismissed Xue Meng’s concern with a shrug and a vague gesture.
“No, it’s better this way. With us divided in two groups, it will be more likely for us to get something worthwhile.”
“Can your brother—? Will he be fine? I mean, won’t they—?”
Won’t the whore bleed him dry of money with his… manly… guiles? Mei HanXue wasn’t like his brother, wasn’t a seasoned player or an experienced seducer. He might get taken advantage of, and where would that leave all of them?
“Trust me, he can handle himself just fine,” Mei Hanxue said, smiling without humor, a weirdness to his voice that frustrated Xue Meng to no end.
It was as if he walked around with the brothers experiencing the world with one less sense, like he couldn’t see or smell, and there was a layer to reality that was lost on him. He wanted to demand that Mei Hanxue explain what it was that he meant with his weird comments and suggestive voice inflections, but was afraid of being dismissed with the same flippantness Mei Hanxue treated everything else.
“Why are we in two?” he asked instead, sulking. “Why not split in three?” He didn’t want to be alone with a prostitute, but it was the principle of the thing. “The Quans said they’d cover our expenses, and a talk can’t be that expensive.”
“HanXue should be fine, but you,” Mei Hanxue laughed, “you wouldn’t know what hit you.”
“Wh—I’ve never been fooled by a pretty face before!”
“Hm. Maybe…” The younger twin hummed. “But if they know what they’re doing, they’re chewing you up and spitting you out. Either way, you aren’t capable of charming an experienced courtesan out of her secrets.”
“Yeah?! Well, try me! I want separate booths too.”
Mei Hanxue shook his head with a snicker.
“We aren’t doing that.”
“I bet I could.”
“Yeah?”
Xue Meng nodded defiantly, glaring into Mei Hanxue’s amused green eyes.
Mei Hanxue stepped closer, slow, deliberate. He was looking at Xue Meng intensely, like he was searching for something. Xue Meng could see the flecks of blue and gold in his irises, and he swallowed around a suddenly dry throat.
Almost contemplatively, Mei Hanxue asked, as if he were wondering aloud to himself, “How can a person who doesn’t understand attraction elicit it in another?”
“I-I—” Xue Meng’s tongue felt swollen in his mouth. “Of course I know what attraction is.”
“Really? You have the face to say that, after that gourd showed you yourself, remember, when we were young?” Mei Hanxue huffed. “I don’t gather you’ve changed much.”
“Attraction is when… when you want to be together with someone.”
Mei Hanxue was still uncomfortably close, and his smug air was irritating. Infuriating. Xue Meng was inflamed. His stomach was burning with anger. He couldn’t stop stammering, which only made everything worse, more undignified.
He was nearly forty, for fuck’s sake!
Mei Hanxue shook his head and said, very patronizingly, “I will give you a lesson, because it’s almost pitiful, really. So be sure to listen closely.”
“I—!” Xue Meng started to protest, but no real words seemed to be able to come out of his mouth.
Mei Hanxue said, “Attraction is when you want to be together, but do you know what that entails?”
“Wanting to k-kiss, and—”
“It’s when your pulse races and your heart beats faster in your chest. When you want to be touched and it feels like trails of fire when you are. You want to touch too, and your fingertips tingle when you do.”
Mei Hanxue raised one slender hand, his musician fingers, and grasped Xue Meng delicately by the chin. His thumb rubbed softly against the thin skin of Xue Meng’s jawline, and Xue Meng shivered despite himself.
“Your body erupts in goosebumps that have nothing to do with the cold. You are fascinated by another person. You wanna crawl inside them, that’s how close you’d want to be. That’s what ‘together’ really means.”
When he said ‘close’, Mei Hanxue came yet an inch closer, until his breath fanned over Xue Meng’s face. He didn’t smell anymore like the fancy ambergris incense he used to favor in the other world, but his breath was fresh and whatever cheap perfume he wore was pleasant to the senses. Yet it was a headier, underlying scent that caught Xue Meng on its hook, made his eyes want to flutter shut, tangy and piquant like clean skin that had worked up a light sweat.
“Can you really make someone want that?” Mei Hanxue whispered, eyes intent on Xue Meng’s face, racing from one eye to the other, to somewhere lower. His nose, it looked like. “Can you even want that in the first place? I always wondered.”
Xue Meng blinked quickly, gulping. He had never felt so itchy and hot at the same time, and closeness had never felt like this, dangerous and breathtaking and scary. He wanted to close his eyes to escape from Mei Hanxue’s gaze, wanted to step closer so he could smell him better.
“Aham,” someone cleared their throat delicately.
Xue Meng jumped away from Mei Hanxue like a startled cat.
The hostess was staring at them from a few feet away, smile polite and welcoming on her painted face.
“I have led your friend to his booth. Would you like yours now?” she asked. “A… man for the young masters as well?”
Xue Meng sputtered, horrified at the suggestion. Just because Mei HanXue—that didn’t mean—
“N-no! We are not—I am not—!”
Mei Hanxue interrupted, “A woman, if you please. One who’s young and pretty and nice to talk to.”
The hostess nodded with a smile. “I have just the one for you. Follow me.”
She led them through corridors of gauze, past giggles and muffled conversation and into a nook covered by fabric. She pulled the gauze aside to show them the booth and waved for them to sit.
“I’ll be back shortly with your companion.”
They sat down facing each other and Xue Meng avoided Mei Hanxue’s eyes, staring down at his lap. His mind was still in what had happened in the foyer, in the strange closeness and the stranger feelings. Mei Hanxue had been clearly bragging about his prowess, showing off how he led countless women to his bed, and he was evidently quite skilled. But shouldn’t Xue Meng be immune, since he wasn’t a cutsleeve? Or was Mei Hanxue simply that talented, that preferences didn’t matter, and anyone would react in such a way?
Was that what Mei HanXue was doing somewhere in the brothel house, whispering into the ear of a beautiful young man? For some reason, the thought did not sit right with Xue Meng. He probably just wasn’t used to the thought of Mei HanXue with a man. But that couldn't be it; he didn't like picturing him attached to a woman's side either. He surely just wasn't used to seeing Mei HanXue with anyone else, and as such it caused some very natural strangeness. In all their years, Xue Meng didn't know of Mei HanXue taking a lover. He'd thought he was either very discerning and picky, just like Xue Meng, or that he wasn't interested in romance at all.
“So,” Mei Hanxue began, distracting Xue Meng from his thoughts. His head snapped up, and, upon meeting those eyes that had been so close not five minutes ago, Xue Meng felt his face burn with a furious blush. “You didn’t answer me earlier.” Xue Meng’s eyes widened in panic, wondering if Mei Hanxue was asking again whether he was capable of feeling attraction. “What do you think of your first pleasure house? Everything you’d hoped for?”
Xue Meng deflated in relief, then squinted at Mei Hanxue suspiciously. He wondered if he was being mocked. After a moment, he decided Mei Hanxue was trying to pretend the moment in the hall hadn't happened and was more than happy to follow his lead.
He picked up his fan, and, with a loose gesture, said, “They sure attempt to make the distasteful… tasteful.”
“That's brothels for you.” Mei Hanxue shrugged. “You'll see it when the girl gets here too. Everyone puts on airs but it’s fun. Part of the schtick. Everyone is playing make pretend.”
“And that is… attractive?” Xue Meng couldn't help but ask, though he chastised himself as soon as the words left his mouth.
But Mei Hanxue didn't mock him.
“It can be. If that's what you like.”
“There are people who don't?”
“Many as a matter of fact. They find it impersonal and transactional, and that's not something everyone enjoys.”
“But you do.”
It wasn't a question, yet Mei Hanxue answered anyway.
“Sex is fun.”
Xue Meng looked away, feeling his ears heating up. It was embarrassing to talk about such things, yes, and he never would have years ago when he was more prudish and prickly, but there was something about it now. The same compulsion that makes you pick at scabs or ask your debauchee friend of over ten years what was the appeal of a pleasure house.
“But…” Mei Hanxue began thoughtfully. “Remember what I said about fascination?”
Xue Meng nodded mutely, a bit unwilling to return to that particular conversation.
“It can be different for other people, and I know people whose pleasure and attraction depends on the element of anonymity. Or even variety. But in my experience the deepest attraction you can possibly have is for someone you have true regard for. That's where true fascination lies.”
Xue Meng had always thought Mei Hanxue a libertine and a lecher, whose sexual exploits revolved entirely around those two elements he seemed to consider inferior—anonymity to a lesser degree and, especially, variety. But now he was saying, what? That he was actually attracted to people he was in love with?
“You are more attracted to people you have regard for?” Xue Meng asked, not bothering to hide his skepticism.
“Indeed, I am.”
“And how many people have been lucky enough to be in your regard?”
Mei Hanxue laughed at some joke only he understood.
“Eh, one or two. You know how it is.”
Xue Meng frowned. He really really didn't.
He was about to ask why he slept around, then, if it was such a sub-par experience compared to laying with someone he truly liked, but at that moment the hostess came back with a young woman in tow.
The young woman introduced herself, “Hello, esteemed sirs. This one is called Xiao Li. I will be your company during your stay here.”
She was pretty enough, slight and delicate-looking, though her bearing and speech were a little meek and unrefined. She didn’t meet Xue Meng’s standards, but that was okay. They were here for information, and, anyway, he hadn’t met a single woman who did.
“Sit,” Mei Hanxue said pleasantly, and the hostess left them with their prostitute.
For the following minutes, the whore plied them with wine, and Mei Hanxue plied her with smiles and personal questions. She was all smiles, answering everything he asked with a willingness that was very promising.
Xue Meng found it irritating how she was practically draped over him.
Before long, the conversation started to turn towards the relevant topics.
“We're travelers, new in town.”
Xiao Li ran her eyes over Xue Meng but didn't linger much, dismissing him.
“Ohh, tourists. I love tourists. Do you have a nice story to tell about where you're from?”
“Sure I do, but I'd much rather hear about this place,” Mei Hanxue pouted, pulling her closer until she was almost on his lap. She giggled. Xue Meng frowned. “It's such a beautiful town. Even more beautiful women…” Xue Meng’s frown deepened. “Such a view of the hills.”
“Yeah…” She nuzzled his neck.
“We came to visit some friends of ours. We're staying next to the apothecary east of town. There's a lovely hot spring over there.”
“I'd love to see you in one. I bet you look dashing.”
“Nothing compared to the present company.”
She giggled again, and Xue Meng wondered if she felt the way Mei Hanxue had described earlier. The goosebumps and the heart racing and the—the flash of heat. The way he'd made Xue Meng feel for a moment with his peerless skills.
To be the same as Xiao Li had acid churning in his stomach. But he was, wasn’t he? Mei Hanxue wasn’t seriously seducing her, just like he hadn’t been seriously seducing Xue Meng.
“The only problem is that our friend lives near this couple… the Quans, I think they're called? And there's something wrong with them, my friend says they're marked by evil.” He sighed long-sufferingly. “I knew I should have stayed at an inn.”
“Oh, the Quan couple! I heard of them.”
Xue Meng saw Mei Hanxue’s eyes flashing with interest, but his voice was blandly curious when he asked, “Really? Do you know them?”
“Well, we can't leave the pavilion and they haven’t come here, but we hear things. I heard…” her voice turned into a whisper. Xue Meng had to lean forward to be able to listen. “The previous owner was murdered by a competitor, you know, in business. The competitor killed the owner of the house and the wife, though some people say he also… did things to her, and then he killed himself. The family’s two young sons were shunned and have gone god knows where, but their parents are dead.”
“Oh no,” Mei Hanxue said in a shocked and sorrowful tone. “That is so heartbreaking. There is no end to this world’s cruelty and greed, is there?”
The woman went on a long spiel about virtues that Xue Meng didn’t bother to listen to.
“But why won't anyone speak of it?” he asked with curiosity, wondering if there was more to this story.
The young prostitute shrugged, picking at the long flowing sleeves of her dress. “We're a tourist town. Those types of crimes drive away business. The patron who told me about it said the town sort of agreed to hide it. And then the house was sold.”
“So there's something with the house?”
“Haunted, from what I hear, by the spirits of the previous owner and the competitor. They fight all through the night, and if you walk by you can hear the sound of wailing.” She deflated, losing her storyteller flair. “Or at least that's what they say. I wouldn’t know.”
“And do you happen to know where they're buried?” Xue Meng butted in, speaking for the first time in a while.
“Huh?” she appeared distracted, forlorn. “No, why would I? In the cemetery, I guess?”
“And their names?”
“I’m not sure… Jiang, or Fang, or something…”
They were quiet for a moment, Xue Meng and Mei Hanxue considering the words, and Xiao Li, by the looks of it, contemplating her existence as a caged bird.
After a moment, she perked up, and said, “But enough about death! Do you want to accompany me upstairs?” she smiled coyly. With a glance at Xue Meng, more considering than the last, she added, “If he’s coming with, we charge more. And nothing of both of you at the same time that could hurt me.”
Mei Hanxue made a big show out of pretending to have a sudden stomach ache and had to promise that he’d be back as soon as he was feeling better. She was disappointed but relented when he mentioned that he thought he was about to have an emergency inside the booth. They left Xiao Li behind with a tip and the hostess guided them back to the foyer while she went to fetch Mei HanXue.
Because the idea of Mei Hanxue being unable to enjoy a sexual encounter due to diarrhea was too hilarious, Xue Meng teased, “Beaten by your own bowel. A tragedy for the ages.”
“Oh shut up.”
“But it's just as well. Imagine if you two were together, you know, all that closeness and ‘climbing inside’, and something decided to climb out of you. Not too pleasant, I imagine. Or fragrant.”
“I said crawl inside, not climb,” Mei Hanxue corrected without a shred of embarrassment. He pointed out, “And you seem awfully fixated on our previous conversation.”
Having the tables turned on him, Xue Meng colored, feeling shamefully transparent. Before he could reply, though, Mei HanXue was back, trailing after the hostess. When he stepped from behind her, Xue Meng could see that his robes were a little askew and, if he wasn't mistaken, his half ponytail was also a little messy. Some instinct had Xue Meng turning to check Mei Hanxue’s reaction, but he looked perfectly emotionless.
They paid and pushed aside the gauze that separated the front door from the foyer.
“Did you get anything useful?” Xue Meng asked as they stepped outside, cheeks still feeling hot.
“Some,” Mei HanXue replied, descending the stairs with quiet clicks of his boots’ heels. “Haunted house. Violent murders. We should exorcize the bodies before cleaning the house.”
“How do we find the bodies?” Xue Meng asked. “The girl who was with us didn't know much about it.”
“My prostitute knew the couple’s names, and that of the business rival. We can search the cemetery for their graves.”
A few seconds went by during which no one spoke. Xue Meng could feel tension so thick in the air he could almost run a knife through it. His skin was pricking with annoyance at being caught in the middle once again.
Mei Hanxue finally spoke.
“I'm impressed. Didn't think you could multitask so well.”
His brother didn’t honor that with a response.
“And ‘your’ prostitute was so cooperative, too; I see you haven’t lost your touch.”
“Stop that,” Mei HanXue ordered, and glanced at Xue Meng with an unreadable gaze.
“Oh please, he's like a child.”
Xue Meng’s tenuous patience finally broke, after all these weeks of hostility and half words and insinuations.
“I'll show you child!” he barked, getting up in Mei Hanxue’s face. He grabbed a fistful of the younger twin’s robes. “You wanna fight?”
“Not at all, Ziming.”
Mei Hanxue’s apologetic demeanor didn’t work on Xue Meng. There had been too many instances lately of these half innuendos, of Xue Meng being excluded from something he couldn't even grasp, for him to be so forgiving now. He shook Mei Hanxue by the lapels of his robes and Mei Hanxue’s hands came to lay upon Xue Meng’s arm bracers, not pulling or pushing, just resting atop them.
“It was just a dirty joke.”
Xue Meng ignored him.
“I don't care whatever the hell happened with you two, but keep me out of it. We have a job to do here and people to save. Can you guys get over yourselves for a second and do it?!”
After Mei Hanxue’s nod, he turned his head to look at Mei HanXue over his shoulder. The older brother also nodded his assent.
“Good.”
He let Mei Hanxue go with a huff, glaring down at the ground.
He kept trying to keep his mind away from his own frustrations when he was working a job, and had to do it even more so now that the twins were barely on speaking terms. He had to act as the glue in their trio, but Xue Meng wasn't born to be a mediator or the most emotionally controlled person in a room. It was wearing on him, and he could feel himself turning more resentful towards the brothers, which was not something he wanted. They were his life companions, and, for all that this world was an ill fit for Xue Meng, it would be unbearable to withstand alone.
They headed for the cemetery, where they split up to look for the tombstones engraved with the names Mei HanXue had discovered. After no more than an incense stick, Mei Hanxue found the couple’s graves side by side, and called out for Xue Meng and his brother.
The exorcism was performed quickly and without much issue. Soon after, the murderer’s corpse was also exorcized. Before too long, they were knocking on the Quans’ door again, this time with an explanation for the disturbances that had been plaguing their new home.
“That poor family,” the wife said, a hand to her chest.
“So, the town simply… didn’t want to warn us?”
Mei Hanxue answered the husband’s question, “I think they were afraid it would cost the town its revenue. The tourists.”
The husband shook his head, looking revolted and scared.
“They didn’t even have the decency to lower the price of the house!”
“Oh, and to think that three deaths happened here… under our very roof…” the woman said faintly, sounding appalled.
“It’s all going to be okay,” Mei Hanxue comforted.
“We’d like you three to leave and go somewhere safe while we take care of the spirits.”
“Where is it safe? We can’t trust anyone. You said it yourself, they were all in on it.”
“Go to a tavern. Even if they’d rather not have you there, they’re not going to do anything. You will be safe.”
The Quan family left the house and the three cultivators started working on the final part of the exorcism. As Xue Meng banished the ghosts, the vengeful spirits came forth, brimming with resentful energy and bloodthirst. The brothers protected him, and he didn’t even have to divert his focus from the exorcism he was performing to defend himself.
Once the house was peaceful once more, Xue Meng and the twins realized they hadn’t given the Quan couple a time at which to come back with their baby, so they would just have to wait around for their return.
Finding it a little invasive to stay inside their home while the owners weren’t there, the three cultivators sat down on the chairs in the yard where the Quan wife planted a variety of vegetables. Xue Meng extended his legs in front of him and let his mind wander as his eyes settled on his surroundings, on the misshapen tomato growing two meters to the left, on the gardening utensils leaning against the side of the house.
The setting sun showered them in its mild rays and made the twins’ light blond hair look a shade of burnished gold against the backdrop of the colorful sky. For one of the first times in his life Xue Meng let himself look his fill, where he was either too distracted or annoyed or concerned to bother. It felt, in some ways, like seeing them anew. Mei Hanxue had his eyes closed and was either meditating or taking a nap, and Mei HanXue was staring into the horizon, only his jawline and the pink of his lips visible from where Xue Meng was standing.
They really were exceedingly beautiful, Xue Meng thought, even—or especially—without all the embellishments they used to wear. But more than appreciation for their beauty, there was a warmer feeling in Xue Meng’s chest when he gazed upon them, a gratitude and a protective drive and a loyalty that he knew they felt for him as well. Despite all of the negative emotions that arose during this hunt and over the past few weeks of the twins’ fight—hell, over the past few months of their life in this new world—the complete trust and gratitude he felt when they had been performing the exorcism, when the twins had had his back once more, overshadowed it all.
Xue Meng hoped that they bounced back from their disagreement, whatever had been its nature. He had no idea if or for how long all of them would be able to keep up this precarious life of theirs, when this congenital inadequacy in this world felt like the universe’s way of righting itself: it wasn’t natural for two realities to intermingle, so their anguish was this world trying to kick them out. But he knew for certain that he could not do it without them, and that they couldn’t do it without each other.
Chapter 3
Notes:
a huge thank you to my amazing friend and incredible beta petitallegro for working wonders on this chapter and with the brainstorming! you are, as always, the mvp!!!
and off we go on a little trip down memory lane (this whole chapter is flashbacks)
tw: mild animal gore and mild panic attack + intrusive thoughts
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
After the final battle, the three of them—mostly Xue Meng, who’d nearly had his meridians ruptured—recovered in Sisheng Peak under the care of Tanlang Elder and the sect’s disciples who were trained in the medical arts. Initially, Jiang Xi had offered to provide him with the best care in the cultivation world in Guyue’ye, but the young Xue Meng had taken such offense it was as if Sect Leader Jiang had offered to treat his older self with piss concoctions.
“Sisheng Peak takes care of her own, I’ll have you know,” the young Xue Meng spat viciously. “You can take your offer and—”
Feeling that the young Xue Meng would not budge so easily, the older thanked Jiang Xi for his kindness but said that he would recover in his own sect.
“Hmph. It seems like you acquired something akin to manners with age.”
“Uh, thank you.” It almost came out as a question.
“Perhaps there’s some hope yet for that foolish, disrespectful boy.” The “boy” in question started to protest ardently. “Though I fear perhaps he came out wrong this time around.”
Then the sect leader left them, turning with a graceful sweep of his wide sleeves, giving a glimpse of layers of teal and chartreuse and amber that spoke of inner robes as lavish as the emerald outer one.
When Xue Meng was sure they were alone, he said to his younger self,
“You should be more respectful of him. If nothing else, he is a principled man who died a war hero in my world.”
“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” the other Xue Meng said, serious and very unlike him.
They both decided to leave it at that.
And so they went back to Sisheng Peak following the final battle. Xue Meng had to be carried in Mei HanXue’s sword, body too weak and spiritual energy too depleted to tackle the journey on his own. Mei HanXue was a warm presence along his front, warm enough that it seemed as though his body was out to challenge his name, and Xue Meng held onto his waist as the landscapes rushed by them, feeling the wind biting at his hair and face.
Upon arrival, Xue Meng scanned the Sisheng Peak grounds for similarities and differences—from the Sisheng Peak of his memory and from what it had become under Taxian-jun’s rule. It was closer to the first than the latter, though it was so empty as to be eerie. Before, there were always people walking around, the sound of voices, of disciples sparring, the hubbub of life. This stillness felt. Wrong.
“What happened?” he asked the young sect leader.
“To defend the Peak, mom…” his voice broke. Curious, Xue Meng glanced over at his other self and saw him grit his teeth, jaw thrown into sharp relief, “ignited Guyue’ye’s immortal phoenix flames. It didn’t harm the sect, but we haven’t had time to come back since, what with. The war, and…”
The young Xue Meng seemed a bit choked up, so Xue Meng did not insist on the topic, even though he was burning to learn more about how his mother had died this time around, whether his dad had been there for it, what dangers the sect had faced, who was to blame, who had stood with them.
He was led immediately to the infirmary, idly waiting while the Tanlang Elder was summoned from Wuchang Town. Xue Meng was told that that was where he and many others from the sect who hadn’t participated in the battle had relocated while they awaited for the return of their sect leader.
“Rogues,” Mei Hanxue drawled with a wicked glint in his eyes, leaning his hip against the bed. “It has sort of a nice ring to it, does it not? Rakish, almost.”
Xue Meng rolled his eyes, finally able to relinquish his firm control over every muscle as he laid down on an infirmary bed. His legs had started shaking halfway through the sword ride to the sect, and he had been holding himself up through force of will alone.
“Of course your mind would go there. And rakish is not a good thing.”
“Course it is. It’s dashing.”
“It’s disreputable.”
“Untethered to a sect, untethered to a house, free of most worldly concerns. Just three cultivators roaming the world in search of the horizon—”
“And helping people.”
“Sure, sure, that too,” Mei Hanxue waved the idea away as if it were unimportant.
Xue Meng huffed, amused.
When Xue Meng was starting to feel his breathing pattern turn labored, Tanlang Elder arrived at last, Mei Hanxue having kept up a steady stream of senseless chatter while they waited. His brother had piped up once or twice before he tried adjusting Xue Meng’s pillow only to be rebuked. After that, he sat down on a chair and interlaced his fingers atop his lap, watching Xue Meng like one of the birds of prey native to his sect.
At the sight of Tanlang Elder, Mei Hanxue breathed out in a whisper, “Finally,” inspiring a burst of fondness in Xue Meng.
Like he had been so slick in his attempt to distract Xue Meng.
Over the following days, the twins played up their own fatigue and injuries, claiming that they, too, needed more time of convalescence in the infirmary, all so they could stay by Xue Meng’s side and so that he wouldn’t lose face for taking so long to heal. Even though it was a bit insulting, as if they thought he could not be trusted to be on his own or like he needed the company, he didn’t antagonize them over it, feeling secretly grateful for their care and thoughtfulness. Tanlang Elder seemed to realize that the three of them did not wish to leave each other's sides, and allowed the Mei twins to remain in the infirmary occupying the beds next to Xue Meng’s even though their shallow wounds and cuts healed in a matter of a couple of days. The infirmary wasn't full to capacity, anyway, so it wasn’t as if they were jeopardizing the care of people who actually needed it—which was just as well. Xue Meng was feeling out of sorts, and their constant presence, the only thing familiar about this foreign world… settled him.
He spent a week in Sisheng Peak confined to the infirmary, and another two recovering in the best guest courtyard the sect had to offer. The young Xue Meng treated him as an illustrious guest, providing him with comforts perfectly suited to his tastes, from the food to the incense in his rooms to the clothes he’d wear, all personal details the young Xue Meng was, naturally, more than familiar with. While Sisheng Peak was far from the richest sect, made even poorer by the war, it was luxury the likes of which the older Xue Meng had become unaccustomed to.
In the other world he didn’t have stable housing, routinely fleeing from one safehouse to another. And it was even worse, of course, when he happened to be on a battlefield encampment fighting his cousin’s empire—probably his lowest, living conditions-wise. Back then, simple amenities weren’t to be taken for granted, and it wasn’t rare that he’d go without heating or clean clothes or even bathing water for long stretches of time. Battlefields brought with them obvious limitations, but even when he was in hiding or strategizing, Taxian-jun had had eyes everywhere, and Xue Meng and his allies had always been his biggest opposers.
From scion of a major sect to the most wanted man in the empire, he’d lived a life of near deprivation for so long it felt surreal to be given back these comforts.
He spent a lot of time walking around the Peak grounds, accompanied or not by the twins depending on his mood and on the destination. He walked into Loyalty Hall, through the disciples’ quarters, through the training field, through the forbidden back hills where the veil between the planes was at its thinnest, and across Naihe Bridge. All those places he visited with the twins strolling by his side.
But he also went to visit his parents’ tablets, given that Taxian-jun hadn’t given them even that much in the past life, denying them the dignity and Xue Meng the comfort. He entered the Red Lotus Pavilion, mourning the shizun he’d lost despite all of his attempts to save him, and somehow also mourning the shizun who was still alive somewhere in the world.
For those types of visits, he was alone.
It was nice to have the freedom to go about as he wished, unlike when he'd been confined to an infirmary bed. The downside, however, was that he had to see and be seen by the people of the sect, from disciples to Elders to staff, who greeted him with artificial politeness and followed him around with their eyes in poorly masked curiosity. He already felt like a freak, seeing his own younger face traipsing around in shoes too big to fill and surrounded by the old home that did not belong to him anymore, but the constant surveillance exacerbated the issue.
“Sect Leader Xue,” a disciple bowed as he passed them by in the path that led to his guest courtyard. He was just coming back from a visit to the cemetery.
“Good afternoon.”
He was not their sect leader, but he had given up on correcting people once he realized that they would just ignore his protests.
He entered his rooms to find the brothers already gathered around the low table with their lunch spread out in front of them. Xue Meng didn’t mind; there was little necessity for decorum or ceremony among them. They shared all their meals after all, they could very well let themselves into his quarters when Xue Meng wasn’t present.
Xue Meng had tried eating in Mengpo Hall like the rest of the sect, but he found that the scrutiny from all the eyes in the room made him lose his appetite without fail. As for the Mei twins, they kept going along with whatever Xue Meng desired, awfully accommodating in a way that started to irk him enough that he snapped.
“But what would you rather do?” he asked brusquely, words bordering on annoyed. “You can eat by yourselves; I don't mind.”
I am not the boss of you.
“I don't have a preference either way,” said Mei HanXue in a detached manner.
“Except that we'd rather not part from you,” Mei Hanxue continued. Xue Meng glanced as his twin in confirmation—for all that they were very attuned to each other, Mei Hanxue could not speak for his older brother—and Mei HanXue gazed back with a level stare, his lack of denial assent enough. “If it's all the same to you.”
And so they began having their meals together in Xue Meng’s quarters, the largest of the three. At their request, breakfast, lunch, and dinner were delivered at the same time every day, with a notable lack of prying gazes that finally allowed Xue Meng to relax and enjoy his food.
During those meals, eating his favorite dishes prepared by the hands of his sect’s cooks, next to the Mei twins, the three of them unburdened by an ongoing war for the first time in countless years… Xue Meng felt the closest thing to peace than he had in a long, long time.
But, of course, it could not last. Their stay in Sisheng Peak was always meant to be temporary and brief, and it was only on the twins’ insistence that they had waited as long as they had—the full convalescence period necessary for Xue Meng to get back to cultivation and strenuous activity, according to Tanlang Elder. Xue Meng didn’t even bother to protest much before acquiescing to the medicinal demands, because, as much as he liked to pretend otherwise, he was, perhaps, just a little bit soft on the brothers, just as they were on him.
It was a spring morning when they left Sisheng Peak for good. The Mei twins had already said their goodbyes to Ming Yuelou after the final battle, and, during their stay in Sisheng Peak, a letter arrived from Kunlun Taxue Palace with funds to help them as they began their new life as rogue cultivators. The young Xue Meng helped with his own humbler contribution, but, the older Xue Meng noticed with some humor, the young sect leader appeared to be somewhat embarrassed over being outdone by Taxue Palace.
“It’s what the coffers can spare at the moment, so…” the younger Xue Meng said, avoiding his older counterpart’s eyes as he handed over a coin purse. “With the trade agreements having to—”
“It is enough. More than enough,” Mei Hanxue said diplomatically at Xue Meng’s side, saving Xue Meng—who was biting back a laugh at his younger self’s foolish pride—from having to answer. “Thank you very much, Ziming.”
It was a rare instance of one of the older twins taking the younger Xue Meng seriously, no tease worked into his words.
The older Mei Hanxues and the young Xue Meng hadn’t interacted much under Xue Meng’s eyes, but it was always interesting to watch as it happened. They seemed to be endlessly fascinated by him, though Xue Meng couldn’t begin to fathom why—in his opinion, he'd been artless and naive at that age, almost simple at times. And yet, the older pair of twins poked more fun at him than even their younger selves did, tossing him around amongst themselves like a ball of yarn. It had an air of condescension to it, as if they were so much more experienced and worldly, or like they had him all figured out. In reaction to that, the young Xue Meng seemed torn between the respect owed to an elder and veteran, and the same brand of annoyance that he usually reserved for the twins of his own world.
All of them, both Xue Mengs and all four Mei Hanxues, were gathered at the top of the stone staircase, as were some elders and disciples, though they kept a respectable distance and only kept an eye on the proceedings. They had already paid their respects during the moderate banquet that had been thrown for the departees, and now the moment was an intimate one.
The three thousand seven hundred and ninety-nine steps stretched down beyond what the eye could see, and at some point, they became shrouded in mist, some of the winter chill still lingering in the Sichuan Province.
“I wish you the best of luck,” Mei HanXue told Sect Leader Xue, almost solemn, as they were about to depart.
The young Xue Meng blinked, seemingly surprised at the earnestness. Then he blinked again and some of his usual cockiness returned to his expression.
“I don't need any luck! The sect will flourish under my leadership. You'll hear word of it far and wide on your travels.”
Mei HanXue let out a slightly humored, slightly disbelieving huff.
Afterwards, the two Xue Mengs were a little ways away from the two pairs of twins, who were saying their own less stilted goodbyes.
“Sisheng Peak will always welcome a Xue with open arms,” the young Xue Meng said with a grandiloquent air, as if trying to appear more dignified than he really was. “Should you meet any hardships on the road, don't hesitate to seek help. You or—them,” the last part was said reluctantly as he shot a mildly hostile stare at the four Mei Hanxues.
“I thank Sect Leader Xue for his grace and hospitality.”
The young Xue Meng made a gesture as if shrugging the matter away, but the older Xue Meng noticed how his chest puffed out in pride.
“You would do the same,” he pointed out, and it took Xue Meng a second to realize that his younger self was being cheeky.
“Hmph,” he hummed in amusement. “I can't argue with that.” He paused. “You, take care.”
It took the young sect leader a while to speak, and, when did, it was something unexpected.
“I received word of shizun and Mo Ran. They have decided to live in Nanping Mountain, and I'm not certain when… if. They'll come live here again.”
Xue Meng wasn't sure what to do with that information.
“Uh, thank you. For telling me.”
The lilt in his tone lended an inquisitive note to his words.
“If you ever want to visit,” the sect leader clarified.
“Of course. Thank you.”
An awkward silence followed, both Xue Mengs avoiding each other’s gazes. The Xue Meng from the other world was able to hear, then, the conversation taking place not too far from him, between two of the twins. Upon closer inspection, glancing with the corners of his eyes, he noticed that one of them was younger, born in this world, and the other was one of his. He made that realization not due to their appearance—Kunlun Taxue Palace’s method of cultivation made it so the older twins did not appear to have aged much, if at all—but because of their demeanor, that marked both of them as Mei Hanxue.
“—you have one too,” said the first, crossing his arms over his chest.
“And I wouldn’t change him for the world. But he was so much fun at this age! Like a puffer fish, fun to poke at and see him inflate with rage.”
In front of Xue Meng, his younger self began a new topic of conversation, saying, “Do you know where you’ll start? Your travels?”
Next to them, one of the twins agreed with a snicker, “And then he deflates just as easily.” Then: “Don't you tease yours anymore?”
“Uh, sorry?” Xue Meng asked.
“Not as such,” said the older Mei Hanxue vaguely. As if noticing his answer was unsatisfactory, he elaborated, “Sometimes, but… We haven't been exactly light-hearted for many years. It's been refreshing, actually, to see what we used to be in the three of you.”
The young Xue Meng repeated, “I asked where you’ll begin, offering your services as a rogue cultivator. Is there a town in mind? A different sect?”
“So… it wasn’t a—shift, in your bond that made you stop teasing him as much?”
“We’ll, um, begin around here, I think. The lower cultivation world has a gap in its protection as Sisheng Peak recovers.”
“I appreciate that, though—” as the young Xue Meng rambled, the older Xue Meng tuned him out.
“Of course?” the older Mei Hanxue sounded confused. Xue Meng sneaked a glance at him to see him frowning at his younger self. “He needed us in a different capacity, as allies and—”
“Not that,” the younger Mei Hanxue said through gritted teeth, sounding frustrated. “I mean—you didn't—”
“Oh— oh. Oh, no, I—” it was more stuttering than Xue Meng had ever seen on Mei Hanxue. Xue Meng wasn’t even bothering to hide his eavesdropping now. “No, he's still very much like your Xue Ziming. No appetites to speak of.”
He frowned at the mention of his name. So they were talking about him. Still, it shed no light on the situation and he still had no idea what they were talking about. And he had a perfectly healthy appetite, he simply wasn't a glutton! No one had ever accused him of eating too little, at any rate.
“Such a waste of a beautiful face.”
What little of his vanity he had left preened at the compliment to his looks.
Speaking of faces, Xue Meng noticed that his younger one was staring at him expectantly, so he asked dumbly, “Say that again?”
The older Mei Hanxue said, “And you must be insane if you think that it would make me stop teasing him. If anything, I'd tease him twice as much.”
“Fair enough,” the younger Mei Hanxue laughed.
Xue Meng had been about to turn his attention back to his other self when the Mei Hanxue from this world said something that caught his attention.
“And… ge?” he asked, almost tentatively. “You never…?”
“Don't,” the older Mei Hanxue interrupted, a little more urgent than he usually was. He started to surreptitiously look around, and Xue Meng turned his head just in time not to be caught snooping. “Don't let him hear you say that.”
“So nothing has changed, then.”
A few long seconds of silence stretched between two versions of the same person. Xue Meng jolted when he got poked in the ribs by a hard, pointy thing—his father’s closed fan.
“I’m sorry, could you repeat—”
“Are you even listening to me?!”
After Xue Meng stared at the young sect leader in silence for a beat too long, his other self groaned in exasperation and spun on his heels, marching up imperiously to where the two Mei HanXues were engaged in conversation.
Xue Meng focused back on the Mei Hanxues, now without distractions or disturbances. He took out his own fan, pretending to test its balance so he’d have an excuse to simply stand there doing nothing.
“Our fallout was, I assume, the same as yours. But then… once. Early in the war. But not since. You know how he is.”
The young Mei Hanxue huffed out a humorless laugh. “I'd hoped…”
“What happened to me does not necessarily have to happen to you. It isn't set in stone and I am not future-you, because you won't go through the same things I did.” Gentling his tone, he suggested, “Perhaps… your ge will…”
“Yeah right.”
The young Mei Hanxue sounded doubtful, even uncharacteristically mocking.
“Or perhaps Ziming.”
“Now I know you're just feeding me delusions.”
Not too long after, all farewells had been said and the Xue Meng and the Mei brothers from the other world stood at the summit of the stairs. They looked back at the sect that had been lost in their own universe, first to Taxian-jun then to the flood, and that had welcomed them again in this life. Xue Meng thought that he should be feeling something straightforward, perhaps grief, perhaps loss, perhaps longing for what could not be. Even a messy amalgamation of emotions. But all he felt was a hungry pit of emptiness that threatened to swallow up his whole being, like quicksand.
To distract himself from the feeling, he turned west, and said, “That way lies a mountain called Nanping. My shizun and this world’s Mo Ran reside there now.”
“Should we visit them before we start traveling through the jianghu?” Mei HanXue proposed, steady and like he would support Xue Meng’s decision either way.
“No. Let us go.”
They stepped onto their swords and departed, Sisheng Peak becoming a smaller and smaller stain on the greenery atop the mountains until it vanished completely.
From the start, the new world did not agree with Xue Meng. Not only was his life tedious and banal, but he also could not escape his wrongness, his non-belonging. The birds didn’t sound the way they used to in his memory, the colors were not as bright, the nights not as well-slept. The knowledge that some of the people that he loved were alive in this world—his shizun, a sane Mo Ran—served as little comfort, as he felt the absence of the ones who'd died even more acutely for it.
The survivors also didn't quite feel his, like he wasn't entitled to them. Or maybe that was what he told himself to feel less guilty over his inability to come face to face with them.
When he'd decided that the sect life wasn't for him anymore and that he would roam the jianghu as a rogue, he hadn't quite meant it as severing all ties with everyone he knew and never allowing himself to meet them again. He wasn't sure what it was that he’d meant, exactly, only that being a rogue had seemed like a better idea at the time than playing sect leader with his younger, less cynical version, and so he’d done it. But it had become that somewhere along the way—he’d severed all ties and burned all bridges—since he could not envision himself dropping by Nanping Mountain for a casual visit or going back to Sisheng Peak for another trip down memory lane.
He had wiped himself into a blank slate because to be anything but was inconceivable.
It was easy to develop a routine to occupy his time. A man who wasn't anyone and who had no bonds in the world was nothing if not malleable and had nothing if not time in his hands. It was also almost as natural as breathing to work alongside the twins again, like he had in the other world leading the rebel forces, stepping into battle. They lived a simple life, no longer sect heirs and head disciples, but rather simple itinerants. As long as what was asked of them was righteous, they did their best to deliver.
Those first few weeks were uneventful, Xue Meng having barely even settled into his new life. As he did, though, and as he realized that this day-to-day was all that he had to look forward to for as long as he lived, an endless procession of towns and villages, an awful feeling began to set in. His nightmares of the day of the final battle increased tenfold, numbering even more than the ones where he'd see his parents murdered by Taxian-jun—something his brain never tired of conjuring, creating scenario after scenario to torment the son who hadn’t been there to bear witness. But there was something off about these nightmares, a darker quality that sometimes made him avoid sleeping altogether in fear of finding it again: when Xue Meng woke up panting from adrenaline and fright, the memory of jumping into the torrent so vivid he could still feel the strain on his calves, the burn in his lungs, it wasn't fear that poisoned his heart and kept him from falling back asleep. It was longing.
‘What if I'd done it?’ his dreams seemed to say. ‘Wouldn’t it have been better? Wouldn’t it have spared me some suffering, given me some rest? I will never rest for as long as I live now.’
He felt like he'd missed his chance, in a way.
Xue Meng began to pull away from the twins. He became snappish, embittered, sour. He started to retreat into his own mind, a most unpleasant place to be.
Yet he hadn't, to be honest, taken his own thoughts very seriously. He contemplated death frequently, yes, but it was never with any real sense of planning, any intent to take action, so his idle thoughts didn't raise alarm bells. It was just a vague longing, after all… a simple wish that he’d taken the step he’d been either too cowardly or too brave, too respectful of his shizun or too indebted to him, to actually take. What harm could these sorts of conjectures even do?
Xue Meng had truly believed it would pass in time. That he’d get used to his new life, that he was going through an adjustment period and homesickness—though what was there to miss in that ravaged wasteland was beyond him, other than the fact that it had been his.
He’d believed it was just growing pains, and he'd been wrong.
His lowest moment happened four months into his life in the new world.
In the end, it was that damned smell that did it. Like the tsunami that washed over his universe, it tore through his mind, dragging away the foundations he had painstakingly built in this new life. Not happiness and contentment, as it had been when he was young, or purpose and vengeance, like it had been after Taxian-jun’s ascension, but. Stability.
That day, he’d been stealthily walking through the back alleys of a large town, following a lead during a night hunt. It was the poorer side of the city, and, at that hour, people were walking to and fro in the middle of the street, some carrying baskets with recently bought produce in their hands or holding mysterious bundles of unknown contents under their armpits. It was the type of place where everyone minded their own business and avoided catching each other’s eyes.
Xue Meng had just seen the person he was meant to tail turn left in an alley when a familiar and awful stench hit his nostrils, burning on the way in.
In the corner of the sidewalk, as if it had been pushed out of the way, guts torn open and attracting maggots and flies, there was a dog. Pitiful and broken, it appeared to be spotted underneath all the blood. People were walking by it, taking no heed of the bowels spilling over the ground, of the smell, the accursed smell that Xue Meng was suddenly certain was the one that had been following him ever since he set foot in this new world months ago. A smell that he had so far thought he’d been imagining, which was enough to give him pause.
He felt bile crawling up his throat, breath leaving his lungs in a pained exhale. He lost sight of his target, the night hunt the last thing on his mind as he stared at the dog torn open on the floor. People walked around Xue Meng like a stream whose flow parted around a rock, and he stood there, staring sightlessly at spilled blood and crawling larvae.
Thoughts spiraling but mind paradoxically filled with clarity, he thought, I, Xue Meng, am the dog. That is why the smell has been following me. He was the dog with the paws eaten away by disease and putrefaction, but unlike this dog laying in front of him, he was a dog that walked, breathed, and spoke. A dog who had been birthed into this new world a stillborn. Almost as if… he'd died in the tsunami, he realized in dawning horror.
It was only natural that a child should bury their parents and not the other way around, but there was nothing natural about Xue Meng. Just a bunch of decomposing meat forced together and its awful stench.
A heavy weight settled atop his chest, and he couldn’t breathe, couldn’t think, could only heave and clutch at his chest, grabbing a fistful of his own robes. He wanted to call out for his dad or his mom, but he could not. He had no air with which to do it, because he was already dead, and he could not escape his own smell or the bite of the vermin feasting on his remains.
“—ey, hey, Ziming, hey, are you, breathe—”
Someone was speaking, but it was nearly impossible to hear them over the cacophony on Xue Meng’s ears—he wasn’t sure if it was blood rushing through his head or if it was the sound of the tsunami from the other world.
Perhaps he had died there and had been rotting ever since; that was why he could hear the roar of the water now. He still carried it with him, the apocalypse.
He started to get dizzy.
“Ziming, please, c’mon…”
An indefinite amount of time later, Xue Meng’s perception of it reduced to feverish flashes, the brothers were gathered around him in his inn room. Xue Meng crashed back into his own body, cataloging the most urgent facts first.
Alive. Unharmed. Cold. A warm cup in his hands.
He stared at the wooden floor with a blank expression, avoiding the eyes of the twins who hadn’t spoken since their first attempts had gone ignored.
For their night hunt, Mei HanXue had been searching the target’s house while Xue Meng and Mei Hanxue followed her wherever she was going. They’d been hoping to find anything that could help them perform a counter-ritual—a curse sigil, a suspicious pouch with their client’s hair or belongings, or even a trace of resentful energy. Xue Meng had been stalking closer to the suspect, while Mei Hanxue trailed after him, since two men of visible noble bearing (simple clothes notwithstanding) walking together in that part of town would be too conspicuous. To account for the possibility that the curse had been set up in a different location to the caster’s house, they’d been hoping she’d lead them to it.
However, Xue Meng had lost focus midway through the chase and they’d lost her. Mei Hanxue hadn’t been any better, more concerned with taking care of him than with continuing on the pursuit. He sent a spiritual butterfly to his brother and they met in the inn they were renting for the week, Xue Meng pinned between them by their worried gazes.
“The dog stank.”
The sound of Xue Meng’s voice was sudden in the quiet of the room, broken only by the whistle of the wind pushing against the lattice of the window panels. It startled both brothers, whose heads snapped toward him and then each other.
“Ziming…”
Mei HanXue, who hadn't seen the dog, asked, “What do you mean? What dog?”
“The dog, the, uh, dead dog in the street. I was stalking the woman, and then the dog… it stank, I…” Xue Meng’s head began to ache an awful thing, a pounding drum on his left temple that made his vision swim.
“Could this dog have done this?” Mei HanXue asked, but it wasn't directed at Xue Meng. “Did you see it? Was there anything abnormal about its carcass?”
“It was a dog, ge,” Mei Hanxue said pointedly, emphasizing the word dog. “Don't encourage him like this; I don't think he's in any condition to say much.”
Xue Meng wanted to say he wasn't to be spoken of as if he wasn't there. Wanted to say that he wasn't sure he wasn't dead already, that his very existence here was an abnormality, that he should have never left.
The room was drafty and cold, his chair uncomfortable, but his focus, his entire world, was narrowed down to the heat of the cup of tea, warmth slowly spreading from his palms to the rest of his body.
As his faculties returned to him, he started to notice the position he was in. How he was making the brothers worry, how he was exposing too much of himself, how the nakedness burned and chafed. All of it, spurred by the visual decay of an unfortunate animal and by the sensory input of its smell. Ridiculous.
Banishing all thoughts that tried to read more into the situation, he rationalized: it was just a coincidence that the smell of the dog seemed to coincide with the one he'd been feeling for months; perhaps he'd simply been reminded of a scent from the other world. Perhaps he recognized it as the smell of a dead body left in the sun for too long until it reached a certain stage of putrefaction—the gods knew that Taxian-jun had made sure more than his fair share of bodies littered the streets like macabre symbols of his majesty and power. Perhaps it was even the stench of some disease that Xue Meng had encountered back then and been unable to forget, and the dog had died of the same cause.
And it wouldn’t go away because… it had made an impression. That was all.
Self-soothed, he said blankly, “Nevermind.”
“No, Ziming, we are talking about this,” Mei HanXue said firmly, face set in a grim expression.
“That can't happen during a fight,” Mei Hanxue said, and oh, he looked almost as serious as his brother, though his tone was milder. “You froze on me, you—you panicked. That's never happened before.”
“The smell was too foul. I was just caught off guard.”
Mei HanXue opened his mouth to protest, but Mei Hanxue sighed and put a hand to his shoulder, making the words die on his throat.
“Let's give him some space. He must still be shaken.”
“Shaken. I’ll show you…” Xue Meng couldn’t find it in himself to finish the challenge.
Mei HanXue seemed as if he would object for a few seconds.
“We'll finish the case by ourselves,” decided Mei HanXue, conceding.
“I can—”
He began to protest, but was cut off with finality, “You'll work on the next one if you're feeling better. Ziming, you cannot even tell us what happened. It's prudent to give you a little time, both for your sake and the case's.”
After a few seconds of a tense standstill, Xue Meng nodded.
“Next one.”
Mei HanXue nodded.
“It's no punishment, Ziming. We don't blame you, we're just taking precautions out of concern.”
“Whatever,” he mumbled.
The twins didn't ask him anything else, even though they kept sending him looks until Xue Meng retired to bed. He was a little upset with them, and the soundness of their logic did nothing to mitigate that.
When he fell asleep, his dreams were intranquil and haunted by nightmares. Unlike anything else he’d ever experienced in the embrace of the night, however, he didn't wake up with a start when the tsunami swallowed him whole. No, it dragged him under and rolled him around with the current, and he could not wake up. He was aware that it was a dream, but it hurt no less for it, unable to die and unable to breathe.
Xue Meng fought to break the surface, first with the instinct of a creature struggling to survive, then with the desperation of a man haunted by ghosts. There, above the water, were two blurry silhouettes peering down, and he was somehow certain they belonged to his parents. Then, the fact that it was just a dream slipped out of his mind entirely.
Notes:
if you were hoping to see a resolution to the twins' disagreement... sorry, not this chapter! stay tuned tho, next chapter we're back at the present
Chapter 4
Notes:
uhh i think there's only one (big) chapter left, but i might break it into two depending on how i feel about the readability and flow
the rating will indeed go up next chapter!! also, sorry about how long it took me to write this. first there was carnaval, then my classes got hectic, but now i'm on break and hoping to finish this within the next two weeks at the most!!
i don't think i've shared the fic's playlist yet but i've written it listening to this!
thank you to everyone who comments and leaves kudos!!
Chapter Text
While the Mei brothers had been barely on speaking terms with each other, Xue Meng had been angry with them both for fucking up the easy camaraderie they all had used to share. Angrier still over the way they inadvertently tossed him in the middle of their scuffle, at times as the middleman, forced to conciliate so that they’d be able to get things done, sometimes as the rope they would fight over in their little tug of war, like he was a thing to conquer in their quest to one-up the other.
Xue Meng was aware that ‘easy camaraderie’ was, however, a little off the mark as a descriptor for the three of them after they’d begun traveling as rogues, taking into account the mounting tension in their trio. They all felt the strain of change in their particular ways, and at times it seemed as if they couldn’t bear to be in each other’s presence. Still, whatever they’d been before the fight—even if they had been on the verge of snapping and lashing out, even if their relationship had been a brittle and eroded parody of what it had been in their original world—it had still been better than the subsequent hostility and loaded silences.
And then, Xue Meng’s obsession with the fight began. It was, at first, a self-serving thing. He made use of it, as a matter of fact, in a sense at least: his feelings about his new life were so convoluted, his routine so dull and bland, that if he didn’t find something to occupy his mind with he’d invariably return to memories best left forgotten or feelings he didn’t want to pry too deep into. So he focused on their issues to ignore his own, occupying his sleepless nights trying to make sense of the brothers’ half-meanings and the fateful argument he’d overheard, the very one that had caused their fallout. For all that it was a childish obsession, it was better than the alternative. Better that than to remember the solitude of war, than to feel the solitude of right now. Than to reminisce about those who'd left and would never return.
Xue Meng would thumb through his mind, analyze his impressions of the brothers and their interactions, coming up empty every time. They seemed to be written in a language he could not read. It made him feel as foolish and naive as he thought his younger self was. No wonder the Mei twins had always mocked him relentlessly, he thought with no small amount of bitterness, if this was how stupid he had always been, how oblivious, how obtuse, how foolishly unself-aware.
Then, Xue Meng’s fixation became less self-serving and more proactive. He made it his goal of sorts to resolve the tension and restore the brothers’ relationship to its previous harmony. He agonized at first over how to accomplish that, since he still remained the very opposite of diplomatic—even the help he'd gotten at the end of the war had been less about his convincing skills and more about things escalating to a point no one in the cultivation world could persist in their denial of the threat the emperor presented anymore. Those skills were supposed to be passed down from father to son when Xue Zhengyong prepared to step down from the seat of sect leader, passing the mantle onto Xue Meng alongside the traits he would need if he hoped to keep it.
And then it occurred to him: one thing he had learned as a rebel fighter was how to lie. How to keep a straight face while omitting or misleading. It had been an invaluable skill when he was organizing troops and leading them into battle, when he was stuffed into war rooms with the sect leaders and their petty grievances. Hopefully, it would also prove to be an invaluable skill now.
If it worked, that is. If it didn't, he risked driving the brothers away even further.
He began to feed them little white lies. A small prodding here, a tiny suggestion there.
“Are you okay? Your brother told me you were injured.”
He had noticed Mei HanXue favoring his right side the morning after a night hunt, and extrapolated from that.
Mei HanXue stared at him impassively for a few seconds. Xue Meng gazed back at him, steady and calm, though his heart beat a hummingbird rhythm inside his ribcage.
“Just a superficial wound.”
Xue Meng glanced down at his leg.
“Want me to take a look?”
At the lack of response, he looked back up into the older twin's eyes to find them narrowed at him.
“... No need,” he said after a long pause, icy green eyes searching Xue Meng’s face for something. “Hanxue saw me get hit?”
“No, he noticed you had a slight limp, told me to check up on you.” Xue Meng frowned, affecting a look of discomfort. “Don't tell him I told you that, though.”
Xue Meng left Mei HanXue behind with a pensive furrow on his brow, a small self-satisfied smile tugging at his own lips.
Tricking Mei Hanxue was a bit more difficult. Not because he was cleverer than his brother, but because Mei HanXue’s temperament and pride made a lot of Xue Meng’s admittedly poor ideas lack verisimilitude.
He had to try, though, even if he couldn't be as upfront or ambitious.
After a successful night hunt, they decided to spend a week in a fairly large town, where the prefect offered to pay for their stay in thanks for their services. On one of those days, Mei Hanxue left the inn before the sun rose and came back after it had set, and Xue Meng decided to try his luck then.
Casually, he commented, “Your brother looked worried. You were gone for a long time.”
Mei Hanxue had invaded his room and dropped unceremoniously down onto the bed, stretching his legs so that they were draped across Xue Meng’s lap. Xue Meng pushed them off with a scowl.
“Are you sure he wasn't just constipated? Those two expressions are quite alike on his face.”
“Your face too,” Xue Meng pointed out.
“I don't suck on lemons as he does.”
Xue Meng rolled his eyes and said, “Pretty sure it was concern though, from how he kept glancing out of the window.”
Mei Hanxue leaned back against the headrest and closed his eyes, the picture of a feline basking in the sun. He put his legs on top of Xue Meng again, but this time, Xue Meng didn't bother pushing them off.
“He was probably wondering if I was with some woman. Judging me for it.”
His voice was mild, and that, coupled with his closed eyelids and serene face, lended him an air of casualness that Xue Meng knew to be false.
Some part of him wanted to ask, ‘And were you?’, but he had an agenda here.
“Or perhaps he was just concerned for his brother.”
Mei Hanxue opened his eyes and tilted his face to the side, face dawning in realization.
“Waaait a second. Are you seriously trying to, what, manipulate us into reconciling?”
Xue Meng flushed, sputtering.
“W-well, I just think it isn't right for the two of you to not be on speaking terms.”
“Never took you for the sentimental type. That’s so cute, Mengmeng.”
“I'm not! I mean—argh, fuck you!” This time, Xue Meng didn't push Mei Hanxue, but rather got up from the bed himself and almost threw Mei Hanxue on the floor in the process. He strode over to the corner of the room to pick up his sword, suddenly feeling like he needed to release some pent-up aggression.
Before he could leave the room, Mei Hanxue raised himself up on his forearms, posture still relaxed but gaze turning sharp and shrewd.
“I see it now. The day before yesterday, during dinner, you tried to strike up a conversation with me and ge.” It had been a resounding failure, with neither of them contributing or appearing the least bit nostalgic. “Talking about the days of old—”
Caught, Xue Meng tried to defend himself, “I just remembered the time we—”
“—so I can only assume this is part of your,” he whispered conspiratorially, “devious plan. You usually avoid the past like the plague, good and bad.”
It was all part of his ‘devious plan’, if it could be called that, but Xue Meng was not about to admit to it. He left the room shamefaced, chased by the sound of Mei Hanxue’s laughter and yell of, “You're not slick!”
So it was fair to say that his intervention with Mei Hanxue had been less than a resounding success. Xue Meng was a bit put off by that development, since he'd counted on Mei Hanxue to be the one to take the first step in the direction of his brother. The lies he'd told Mei HanXue were mostly meant to make him more receptive when that happened, ease the way so to speak.
And yet, for Xue Meng’s immense surprise, when someone did make a move, it was the elder twin, reaching out for his brother in a way that couldn’t be mistaken for anything but an olive branch.
“Your robes are torn.” At his brother's words, Mei Hanxue started to scan his clothes for tears, but, after a few moments of fruitless search, the older twin said, “On the left side. Near the hem.”
Mei Hanxue found the tear in the fabric and cursed.
“Must've caught on a branch or something.”
A beat of silence, during which Xue Meng didn't think anything else would be forthcoming. Then, Mei HanXue said, surprising the other two, “I can take care of it. I was planning on mending mine anyway.”
It was said in an offhand, careless manner, as if he didn't care either way, but it was not something Mei HanXue did for just anyone, and especially not for someone he was at odds with. The younger twin seemed to notice the importance of the gesture as well, blurting out a rushed thank you before leaving to change clothes. The sight, later that night, of Mei HanXue sewing by the fire was surreal to Xue Meng, who felt warmed nonetheless by the thought that the twins might actually be okay.
He couldn't help glancing at Mei Hanxue, however, and trying to catch his eye. It took a few moments and a few jerky gestures, since he was a little too busy staring at his brother and pretending not to stare at his brother. When Mei Hanxue’s eyes were finally on him, Xue Meng arched a single brow, as if to say, I told you so.
He who laughs last laughs best indeed.
After that, it was the both of them trying to reach out—carefully, almost tentatively. Like the thawing of a frozen landscape, the weather warming enough for ice and snow to melt, the twins drifted closer. Slow and inexorable like the departure of winter.
At first, Xue Meng noticed how they began exchanging more words that were superfluous in nature, not necessary to accomplishing some goal or task, which was the opposite of what had been happening for a couple of months. It was done with such ceremony and formality that it was impossible not to make note of it:
“Did you enjoy the stew?” Mei Hanxue asked, having been the one responsible for cooking.
They tended to take turns between the tasks of hunting; gutting and cleaning the animal; and cooking, whenever they happened to camp out in the woods.
“The star anise was a nice touch.”
“Mn. I’ll be sure to add it again.”
They were almost trite at times, their words, but, in light of how difficult things had been for the three of them lately, out of tune and snapping at one another, Xue Meng couldn’t even begrudge them the skittish way they were circling each other, like two wounded animals. (Or a predator species attempting to mate. He suppressed his laughter at the thought). Xue Meng just kept to the sidelines, a constant, steady presence as they worked through their issues.
What followed was a string of great night hunts, cases solved seamlessly and almost effortlessly by the three of them. Not only were they fighting with almost telepathic levels of awareness of each other, but also their rapport was better than it had been in a long, long time, even better than before the fight.
Xue Meng began to feel as if a knot of tension had loosened in his back, the crick in his neck all but gone. He might even dare say he was starting to enjoy his day-to-day, the thrill of cracking open a case, the satisfaction of knowing he’d helped save someone’s life.
In this new world, Xue Meng had first been devastated, and then he’d been numb. The numbness, if it was possible, was even worse than the devastation, since at least then he still felt as if he were alive. Even a limb in pain was in a way preferable to one he would hit at and slash open and it would just lay there, dead meat, dormant.
But Xue Meng was thawing too. He was in spring, sprouts breaking the ground, blooms bursting forth from buds, heralding new beginnings and warmth and life. Summer was incoming, his chest aching with the pins and needles of muscles fallen asleep from inactivity. And he was curious about the future. Not hopeful, not quite, but he wondered. Would there be fruits? Would they hang heavily from the branches, would they be ripe, would they be sweet?
It was in high spirits that Xue Meng went to investigate a string of mysterious deaths in a remote village of Shangqing Pavilion. The rumors that had reached them in a larger city were vague; a traveler sent to seek help spoke of increasing lethargy until the ailing person wasted away within a few days, a week at the most. The village had already spent most of their money hiring a healer from Guyue’ye, thinking that the problem was medicinal in nature, but the healer said that whatever ailed the villagers was not a disease, but rather something related to a curse, a spirit, or a demon.
“That narrows it down,” Xue Meng murmured.
Mei Hanxue elbowed him.
“T-that is to say,” Xue Meng corrected in a hurry, widening his eyes at the poor man who had traveled so far to seek help. “He couldn't determine the cause?”
The traveler shook his head, looking weary and frightened. He was wringing his hands together anxiously.
“The healer is a cultivator and has spiritual energy and all, but he said he isn't strong enough to fight off a strong ghost or demon. Said we'd better try our luck with a non-healer cultivator.”
“Where is your village located?”
“To the south, daozhang. That way,” the man pointed. “That's the path I took to get here.”
“We'll try our best to rid your people of the threat.”
The man nearly sobbed in relief.
“Thank you, oh thank you! My son had just started showing symptoms when I left, thank you! We don't have much money left to give, but—”
“Don't worry about it.”
So as to not slow them down, the traveler said he’d go back to his village with a caravan, and the three cultivators flew to their destination atop their swords, hoping to get there and solve the case before the people currently debilitated passed away.
They followed the road the traveler had taken, and, in a few hours time, reached a small village whose most notable feature was the rice paddy hugging the curves of the hills. The village sat at the bottom, nestled by the mountainous terrain, small and unassuming. The sun was just setting over the horizon, lending the sights a misleading air of picturesqueness. Xue Meng landed in the middle of a street with the twins, and within a few seconds they were already surrounded by villagers talking over each other, all of whom seemed to have sprouted out of thin air.
“—over a week!”
“—asleep, and then—”
“—all of a sudden, I swear, I think it’s that—”
“Hey hey… one at a time, one at a time!” Mei Hanxue tried to get a word in edgewise, with limited success. He raised his voice. “Can you take me to your chief and to the healer? Time is of the essence here! We can talk later!”
He continued to be mostly ignored. In the hustle and bustle, a small form broke away from the crowd and reached out to him, taking his hand in her own. It was a child, who began to wordlessly pull him forward, and Mei Hanxue followed, pushing his way carefully through the villagers gathered around the cultivators. Xue Meng and Mei HanXue followed behind, the younger twin being tugged in the direction of the buildings where, hopefully, the village chief and the Guyue’ye healer were.
The house the little girl led them to was the largest of the village as far as Xue Meng could see. There was an arc in the front, marking it as different from the rest, almost official-looking. If Xue Meng had to guess, he’d say it was a village building of some sort, perhaps a communal space.
Mei HanXue knocked on the front door, and his brother crouched to talk to the little girl.
“Thank you. You’re a very brave girl. What’s your name?”
The girl kept silent and averted her eyes, staring down at her shoes.
“It’s okay, you don’t have to be scared. We’ll defeat whatever it is that's harming your friends. I promise.”
She raised her eyes hesitantly to meet his, and he smiled in response. “Do you like sweets?”
The girl nodded, starting to relax.
“Here you go,” he took one of the sachima he always kept on him out of his robes and handed it to her. Xue Meng bit his cheek so he wouldn’t smile, secretly charmed. “Do you have a sibling who likes them too? Or your mom?”
“My mommy is in there,” the little girl said in a whisper.
Xue Meng’s heart dropped to his stomach like a stone.
“Oh,” Mei Hanxue said. After a small pause, he reassured her, “I’ll get this thing, okay? I promise you, I won’t let whatever this is get away with it.”
The door opened just as the girl nodded her assent, a middle-aged man filling the doorway and squinting at them.
“Are you the cultivators Hou Zhong went out to find?” he asked in a deep, severe voice.
“Yes, sir.”
“Oh thank heavens,” he exhaled, losing most of his severity. “My name is Geng Tao. How are the esteemed xianjun called?”
“I’m Xue Meng, and they’re called Mei Hanxue.”
“Both? Please, please. Enter.”
Geng Tao stepped aside to allow them through. As he did so, he glanced at the little girl and sighed.
“Your mother is being well taken care of, Xiao Da. Guyue’ye has the best healers in the world. Go on home now, go.”
The little girl frowned, bottom lip trembling as if she was about to start crying. Before she could, she spun on her heel and ran off, disappearing into the encroaching darkness of night.
“Sorry about that. She is very shaken by her mother’s illness.”
“We understand, sir. If you could offer us more information, we might be able to help.”
The man nodded. “Of course, how remiss of me. It’s been very stressful as village chief. Uh, come. Follow me.”
They followed the man deeper into the house, past the foyer and into a room that appeared to be used for celebrations and village-wide events. It was a large space with decorative fabric covering parts of the walls, long wooden tables pushed up against the corners. On the floor, on top of sleeping mats and covered by blankets, Xue Meng counted seven people, some moaning weakly, some asleep, some so gaunt and still they appeared dead. A man wearing the characteristic robes of the Guyue’ye disciples was grinding some herbs in the corner, having made a working space of sorts out of one of the tables. He turned around when they entered the room, and put the mortar and pestle down to bow to the newcomers properly.
“Hello. Are the three of you the cultivators sent to help the village?”
“Yes,” replied Mei HanXue.
The healer introduced himself as Xia Wuying, and reported all that he had learned about the illness. All he could tell, medically, was that the condition drained yang energy, and fast. The village chief contributed with some information the healer either wasn’t privy to or didn’t think to share, especially about the deceased, the ill, and the village in general.
“We’ve never had anything like this happen to us,” Geng Tao said mournfully. “We were a very peaceful village, no crimes, no other village in walking distance. No tragedies in all of my years of life, and none in my parents’ years either. This completely blindsided our community.”
Xue Meng asked, “Is there anything in common between the sick? These seven and the dead.”
“Nothing that I can think of. Not all of them work in the rice paddies, different sexes, different ages.”
“Hm…” Mei Hanxue walked back and forth, thumbing at his lower lip pensively. “When they fall ill, you said that it takes them a while to notice, right? That initially it felt like they were just tired.”
“Yes,” the chief agreed.
“While they still could, they didn’t report anything odd to their families? Anything out of the ordinary that happened just before.”
The village chief and the healer frowned, but didn’t speak.
“It would help us if we had some idea of where to start. It can be anything, even something you think is useless.”
“No…” the chief’s despondency melted away as his eyes lit up and he piped up, “The first ones who died were all out on a hunting party before they started presenting the symptoms!.”
Mei Hanxue shook his head. “But the next ones weren’t.”
The chief deflated. “Oh.”
“Anything else?” Xue Meng asked. “There’s no such thing as irrelevant, we’ll even be investigating the woods because of what you just said.”
The chief scratched his beard, appearing a bit embarrassed, and said, “Well, in that case… Um. It’s probably a child’s imagination. No, it’s definitely a child’s imagination.”
“It’s okay,” Xue Meng reassured.
“Uh. The little girl you met, Xiao Da? She kept insisting her mother was talking to someone the night before her symptoms appeared. Her dad was part of the hunting party and passed away, so it couldn’t be him, but she said she heard her talking late at night. Like she was having a conversation.” The man seemed to dismiss the girl’s words entirely, but continued, “Of course, it was a neighbor, or she was talking to herself, or maybe Xiao Da was dreaming, I don’t know. I don’t think someone would be capable of this.”
The three cultivators exchanged glances, eyes calculating as they ran through the possibilities in their minds.
“Thank you, sir. We will get right to work.”
“About the payment—”
Xue Meng cut him off, “Worry about that after we’re done. We won’t take from you what you cannot give.”
After another round of effusive thanks from Geng Tao, Xue Meng and the twins asked only for some water and a place to leave their belongings. Then, they left the house to find the previously crowded streets completely empty, the doors and windows of the houses barred in the half hour it took for them to go back outside. There wasn’t a sound to be heard other than that of crickets, and only a couple of the houses had dim light escaping through the cracks of the window.
“Night has fallen,” Mei HanXue said, seemingly thinking the same as Xue Meng. “They’re trying to keep safe.”
“I think something spoke to Xiao Da’s mother,” Mei Hanxue said. He’d been looking upset ever since they learned that her father had died. Xue Meng felt his sorrow as well: she might soon become an orphan if they didn’t fix this, soon, and that was a life he wouldn’t wish upon anyone, especially not one so young. “We should patrol the town tonight, and, if we don’t find anything, tomorrow morning we head into the woods.”
They split up to cover more ground, even though the village wasn’t that large. Xue Meng walked with Longcheng in hand, his way lit up only by the glow of the crescent moon and the stars in the sky, the village deathly still and lifeless all around him. He made his rounds, bumped into the twins on one occasion, and continued to patrol long into the night.
A few hours in, Xue Meng’s mind slipped out of his control, turning to things other than the mission. He still kept walking, his eyes, adjusted to the dark, still searched his surroundings for anything amiss, but his thoughts wandered away from the village.
Predictably, he thought of his parents, thought of how lucky he was for being born into such an amazing family. How lucky he was that he hadn’t lost them at Xiao Da’s age, had gotten to share a few more years alongside them. How unlucky he was that he hadn’t had them for that much longer, and that their deaths were the painful, violent, bloody betrayals that they were.
When he’d been a little child, Xue Meng would go to bed confident in the knowledge that he had the next day. And the next. And the next. A whole procession of next days, days of comfort, love, and support, this unshakable certainty. After he learned what death was, a knowledge brought by the loss of a pet or an elder of the sect, he struggled to sleep for a little while, imagining the deaths of his parents as he stared up at his ceiling. In the dead of night, it would feel as if some heavy weight was bearing down upon his small chest, compressing his lungs, bruising his thundering heart. He didn’t quite understand what death entailed, but it still left an impression before the notion was obfuscated by the glare of the light of his puerile happiness. And he forgot the very real danger he was in every second of every day. The halcyon days of his youth were like that, filled with honey sweetness and innocence. Self-assuredness and undeserved arrogance. It all ended the day his parents died, when he was cast out of paradise.
Thinking of their deaths made him think of his cousin. Mo Ran. Taxian-jun.
To picture his face in his mind was almost like touching burning metal. It made Xue Meng recoil, pain flashing through his body in a split second of agonizing pain. The instinct of an animal eager to get away from what hurts it. And it hurt, to see those crazy eyes, filled with an obtuse, rabid rage. Someone he’d learned to hate, someone he’d struggled for so long to understand, someone he’d dedicated his life to defeat. He’d also taken a great portion of Xue Meng’s sleepless nights. Wondering where it all went wrong, where the descent into madness began, what they could’ve done to stop it. Xue Meng, deep down, had once loved Mo Ran as a brother, and struggled for too long to accept him as a foe. It hadn’t make sense. Not the way he treated his uncle and aunt, especially not the way he treated his shizun.
Xue Meng gave up on rationality in favor of revenge. He hadn’t needed things to make sense anymore, he’d needed his pound of flesh. Nothing had made sense until he learned Mo Ran’s true reasons for being so unfilial, so wicked, so evil.
Nowadays, Mo Ran still claimed Xue Meng’s sleep sometimes. Both the Taxian-jun who emerged once every two days, and the Mo Ran who had returned in time into this world. Xue Meng would be lying if he said he didn’t still feel some resentment towards the both of them, that they would get to live their idyllic life when they’d ruined Xue Meng’s. Even worse: that that life revolved around the man Xue Meng had spent ten years trying to rescue from Mo Ran’s cruelty, a man Xue Meng knew Mo Ran did not deserve.
Xue Meng also missed him an awful thing. A lot of his anger was that: misplaced hurt. Resentment aside, flower or no flower, he missed what they’d once been and what could never come to be.
Mo Ran and Chu Wanning in that mountain, just the two of them as far as the eye could see. That dog better be treating shizun right, Xue Meng thought viciously. And, softer, I hope they make each other happy.
That last thought had Xue Meng blushing suddenly and almost dropping his sword. He remembered something Mei Hanxue had told him when they were visiting the brothel, about how the deepest attraction and fascination one could have was for someone you had true regard for. Knowing of Mo Ran’s exploits—he’d always been one to visit whores, had even been married twice as emperor—Xue Meng doubted his relationship with his shizun was a chaste one. Xue Meng shuddered just thinking about it.
“Nononono,” he whispered to himself, shaking his head violently to banish the image.
The one that replaced it was just as bad. Another memory from that day in the brothel, Mei HanXue returning from his booth, robes askew, hair messy, after doing gods knew what to gather information. Doing it with a man.
Xue Meng’s hand closed tighter around the pummel of his sword, choked by discomfort to a degree he hadn’t felt even when he’d been thinking of his shizun and Mo Ran being intimate.
He couldn’t grasp the idea that Mei HanXue had been entangled romantically with someone. Even past the baffling realization that he was a cutsleeve. He had always seemed so safe, an outsider to these things just as Xue Meng was. Before the brothel, Xue Meng had never even contemplated the notion, hadn’t even been able to picture it, even though he’d seen a face identical to Mei HanXue’s seduce countless women over the years.
How was Mei HanXue like, when he was with a man? To manage to gather information like his brother had, he had to be able to smooth talk. To manipulate. But, even though he’d managed to get the information they needed, Xue Meng couldn’t begin to imagine the elder twin flattering a man out of his secrets.
For Xue Meng, all of a sudden, Mei HanXue’s wiles became one of life’s great mysteries.
Mei Hanxue had said that Mei HanXue could ‘handle himself’. What had he meant by that?! Xue Meng nearly screamed the twins’ name, wanting to demand an explanation.
Xue Meng turned the corner on the street and huffed at what he saw. Speak of the devil and he shall appear. A few meters in front of him, one of the twins stood with his back to him, blond hair almost white under the ray of moonlight that filtered through the clouds and lit him up. Xue Meng was about to say something scathing, too unsettled after his musings to be reasonable, but the twin spoke first.
“Ge?” he called, clarifying which of the two it was.
Xue Meng started to walk closer, but halted when some movement in the shadows put him on high alert.
Mei HanXue stepped out of the darkness, striding towards his brother just a touch too quickly to be normal.
“Ge…?” it sounded even more confused now.
Xue Meng had a bad feeling about this.
When Mei HanXue was standing just in front of his brother, his right arm preternaturally narrowed to a point, sharp and deadly like a weapon. His face was cast in shadow, but its contours looked eerily inexpressive.
“Hanxue!” Xue Meng yelled in warning.
The impostor pierced Mei Hanxue through the stomach, and Mei Hanxue didn’t even seem to think to react. It made a sickening noise, meaty and muffled, squelching on the way out. It ripped its arm away like one does a sword, only no sword had this thick a blade.
Mei Hanxue collapsed to the side with a gasp, clutching his stomach with one hand as he held himself up against the wall of a house with the other. Xue Meng glanced at him desperately for a second, watching blood pool beneath him, black in the poor lighting.
Xue Meng roared, raising Longcheng to attack the creature. It parried with its dripping arm, hissing at him and backing away.
A shapeshifting monster, Xue Meng thought, mind working in parallel with his body. One who fed on yang energy and had taken to draining the villagers after it found a few in the woods, following them back home. It pretended to be someone they knew to cast its curse on them, and slipped away unnoticed, feeding from afar as the victims had their energy slowly depleted to death.
Xue Meng continued fighting it, blinking back tears. It was too skilled for him to afford to get distracted, but he ached to check on Mei Hanxue. He hadn’t gotten a good look at his wound, but he could imagine the gaping hole the monster’s arm had left behind.
“Didi!” someone yelled nearby.
Xue Meng almost sobbed in relief. He heard the sound of footsteps, running behind him, and knew that Mei HanXue would protect his brother.
“Take him away!” he yelled.
“But you—”
In a moment of distraction, the monster managed to stab Xue Meng in the thigh. He groaned in pain.
“Zi—!”
“THE HEALER!”
With a barely there sound of displaced air, the twins were gone, Mei HanXue carrying his brother with the flashy qinggong Xue Meng had never been more grateful for. He gave his all to the fight, managing to retain the upper hand even though he was slowed down by his injury. The monster got more cautious, and it was undeniably powerful, but Xue Meng was confident in his chances.
The fight dragged on for minutes. When Mei HanXue got back, Xue Meng almost sighed, knowing they’d won.
“Finally,” he grumbled, not really meaning it.
They finished the creature off, ganging up on it so that it stood no chance against their combined power. It died with an ear-piercing screech, crumbling to the ground in an ungraceful heap and shapeshifting back into a grotesque creature. It was just as well. Xue Meng felt sick to his stomach fighting that beloved face with the intent to kill. Xue Meng and Mei HanXue were left panting, Xue Meng a lot more than Mei HanXue, swords hanging limply by their sides.
For the first time since the fight began, Xue Meng registered how wet his trousers were under the robes. The monster must have caught a vein.
“Leg,” he mumbled, and lost consciousness even before he hit the ground.
When Xue Meng woke up, he found his leg practically healed already. Xia Wuying said he was able to mend his ruptured artery easily enough, but that Xue Meng would feel weak for a while because of the blood loss. The healer had given him something to help with the blood, but, overall, Xue Meng just had to take it easy, not force his injured leg too much for a few days, and rest and eat plenty.
Mei Hanxue was in far worse shape. His stomach didn’t have the gaping hole Xue Meng had imagined, but it was a close thing. He still hadn’t woken up, despite the steady stream of spiritual energy he was receiving at almost all hours from his older brother and from the Guyue’ye healer.
“Let me help,” Xue Meng insisted for what felt like the hundredth time.
Mei HanXue didn’t merit that with a response.
When he’d first offered, Mei HanXue, hair oily and messy, eyes swollen from sleep deprivation and what was probably tears, said with a hoarse voice, “You will do no such thing.”
“I'm fi—”
Sternly, Mei HanXue said, “I will not lose you both. I nearly did.”
“Oh please, it was just a nick.” When his joke didn’t land, Xue Meng tried another route. “He’s your brother. You shouldn’t lose him. After all you two have done for me, in this world and the last, I should lay down my life a hundred times over.” Figuring that wasn’t his strongest argument, he amended, “Which I won’t. Because I’ll be fine.”
Mei HanXue still managed a fairly intimidating glare with puffy eyes and a pale face. He still managed to sound dignified when he spoke, though the restraint he was known for was beginning to crack.
“I will lose neither, and you owe us nothing. And I won’t choose. Don’t be an imbecile.”
Xue Meng puffed up in annoyance, heart aching at the sight of his friend so distressed. “So losing your own life is okay?!”
“If need be.”
“‘Cause that’s what will happen if you keep transferring energy you don’t have.”
His words were met with silence.
Xue Meng groaned in exasperation.
“The healer is exhausted after caring for me, Hanxue, and the sick villagers. You look dead on your feet. You’d best serve him with a few hours of sleep in you, if you want your strength to help him get better.”
After looking torn for a moment, between the logic of the argument and his stubbornness, the latter seemed to win out, though even the hesitation softened Xue Meng's heart a little. Mei HanXue was not a yielding person, and for him to consider Xue Meng’s input in a moment like this—it made him think that their bond, forged over the course of a bloody decade, might still be there, alive and breathing, despite whatever had been going on lately. It made him hope that, in times of strife, they could still lean and count on each other like this, regardless of which world they were in. Even the senseless overprotectiveness was heartwarming in a way. It meant that he cared, enough that he refused extra help to his brother, even though it clearly pained him to do so.
Xue Meng felt like his soul was being pulled in two different directions in a tug of war that threatened to snap him in two. He ached at the very sight of Mei HanXue, was furious with himself and his inability to be the shore to his boat, as Mei HanXue lived through his other half nearly having been ripped from him. On the other side, Mei Hanxue laid pallid and almost lifeless under the covers, thick bandages covering his middle, white linen bleeding red all too often for comfort. It wasn’t right, for a face as lively and animated as his to be this still. It was like seeing the sun rise in the west.
When the healer came to take over for a while in passing his spiritual energy to Mei Hanxue, Mei HanXue got to rest. He laid in a cot next to his brother, not wanting to go far, especially because he wouldn’t be getting much sleep anyway.
“I won’t be able to do this for long,” the healer had warned.
To make matters worse, Mei HanXue’s sleep was not a peaceful thing. Xue Meng took it upon himself to monitor it, in a fruitless attempt to not feel so useless, cataloging his reactions, the flutter of his eyelashes and the twitches in his face. Every fifteen minutes or so he’d flinch and jerk awake, and immediately after waking he'd check on his brother with a poorly concealed franticness that sent a sympathetic pang through Xue Meng’s chest. He could not relate to this, his parents had been taken from him too abruptly, no time for bedsides and waiting. He felt affection for Mei Hanxue, yes, even love in a way—he felt a burning embarrassment for putting it like that, but what else to call it?—yet Mei Hanxue was not his family. The immensity of Mei HanXue's pain was unimaginable to Xue Meng, who felt like his insides had been scooped out himself.
He didn't think he would be able to stand it, to continue to live in this world, if his dearest friend were to die, but what would be left of Mei HanXue if his other half was gone? In any world, under any circumstances, there was not one without the other. That was a bond Xue Meng admired, envied, and ached to protect.
Even though it was clear that the Guyue’ye disciple was getting annoyed with Mei HanXue’s constant fretting, he didn’t say a word. No one with an ounce of empathy could begrudge Mei HanXue his hovering.
Finally, the healer asked, “Can you take over for me?”
Mei HanXue appeared almost relieved to have his brother back in his arms, even though it meant draining his already depleted energy. At this point, it was getting dangerous, Xue Meng thought with trepidation.
“I got him.”
When he was pouring spiritual energy into his brother once again, Mei HanXue locked eyes with Xue Meng, who was facing the pair from his sickbed.
“Did I wake you up?” Mei HanXue asked in a lower voice than usual.
Xue Meng shook his head.
“Aren’t you tired?”
Xue Meng nodded, too tired even for the admission of weakness to sting.
“Go to sleep. You need the rest.”
“What’s it to you?” he asked, but was already closing his eyes to sleep. He mumbled, “When I wake up, I’ll take over for you.”
He dozed off in a matter of seconds.
He was in those early stages of slumber, in which one does not even realize they are asleep, when movement made him blink his eyes open. Blearily, he turned his head to see the older twin still transferring energy, hand placed securely atop Mei Hanxue’s heart, a far more intimate position than the one the healer had used.
“Are you okay?” Mei HanXue asked in an urgent whisper, and Xue Meng almost opened his mouth to confirm. Then, Mei Hanxue spoke, voice thick and choked up.
“Ge…”
Xue Meng’s mouth fell open in awe and relief. He was awake…! Before Xue Meng could try to get up, Mei Hanxue fit his hand around the back of Mei HanXue’s head, cupping his nape in the cradle of his elegant fingers, and pulled him forward. Mei HanXue let himself be moved without protest and the brothers came closer and closer, distance dwindling, until Xue Meng was sure they were about to hug. But Mei Hanxue had another destination in mind for his brother, and, when his hand ceased its inexorable pull, the twins’ lips were already connected.
All the air seemed to have left the room as Xue Meng struggled to process the scene. He realized he had jumped up at the sight of the kiss, sitting upright on the bed. His thigh protested the abrupt movement but he didn’t pay it any mind. One of the twins was lying down and holding onto his brother’s neck, the other had a hand still pressed to his brother’s chest, body leaning over its own identical form. They were not moving, they barely seemed to be breathing, petrified against each other’s lips in a bubble of time separate from the rest of the world. The older twin’s golden hair spilled down and curtained them, making them look like a pair of deities, entwined in a love so pure it must be godly.
“Oh,” escaped Xue Meng’s lips, and they sprang apart with a start.
For a moment, all was silent in the room.
“Ziming—” Mei HanXue began.
Mei Hanxue tried to get up and then groaned, and the other two turned their attention back onto him. Mei HanXue forced him back down with a stern reprimand.
Xue Meng started to ramble, “You should call the healer. And get him some water. I’m really glad you’re okay, Mei Hanxue, I hope you’ll forgive me if I go to sleep now.”
“Ziming.”
“I just need a lot of sleep to heal the wound on my leg, and—and. Wake me up if you need anything. Uh, goodnight. Yes.”
Xue Meng turned his back to them and covered himself with the blankets up to the chin. The twins were silent for a moment before one of them sighed.
“He’s right. Do you want some water?”
“Mhm.”
“Here.” The sound of someone drinking. “I’ll go fetch the healer, be back in a second. Don’t move, and yell if you need me.”
Mei HanXue’s footsteps got farther and farther away, but Xue Meng didn’t watch him leave. Not only was he turned to face the wall, but his eyes were also shut tight. He could not escape it, though. The sight of their kiss was imprinted onto the backs of his eyelids, a sight so horrifying, so unthinkable, so profanely beautiful, that he was sure he would never forget it for as long as he lived.
When he dreamt, he dreamt he was back in that brothel booth, sitting across from Mei Hanxue as he flirted and charmed his way into someone’s graces. Only this time, the person he was charming was his own twin brother.
Chapter 5
Notes:
rating >has< changed, as i said it might! so watch out for that
also, the chapter count went up! next one is the final one
enjoy!
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
They remained in that small village for nearly two weeks as Mei Hanxue recovered from his injury. Since most of the money the villagers had had available had been spent hiring a disciple from Guyue’ye, Xue Meng and the twins refused payment, but they were thankful for the food and shelter they were offered for the duration of their stay. The village chief himself offered a room in his house for them to share, which they accepted with gratitude.
The Guyue’ye healer stayed for four days after the monster had been slaughtered, until both Mei Hanxue and the sick villagers were out of the woods and on their way to make a full recovery. The villagers recuperated fairly quickly, rest and yang-rich food working wonders on getting them back to health. Mei Hanxue’s injury, however, was of the physical kind, and required poultices, bandages, and energy transfers, as well as constant vigilance so his stitches wouldn't break or lead to a festering wound. After teaching Mei HanXue and Xue Meng how to care for Mei Hanxue, the healer departed, back to his sect after a successful mission.
Xue Meng and the twins did not speak about what had happened when Mei Hanxue first woke up. As far as Xue Meng was concerned, things were perfect as they were, and he preferred to be left in blissful ignorance rather than be subjected to an explanation of all that. He would rather just forget it entirely. Out of sight, out of mind, wasn't that the saying?
Only… that wasn’t quite true. Every time he saw them next to each other, which was all the time, since Mei HanXue scarcely left his brother’s side, Xue Meng was reminded. Rudely so. Their hairs tangled, their breaths mingling, a mirrored image that couldn’t seem to make sense in his mind.
How? Since when? Wasn’t it wrong? Wasn’t it dirty? Had they been doing it for the entire time Xue Meng had known them? Since adolescence, during the war? Had the fight been, what, a lover’s spat?
How could Xue Meng have missed it?
He tried to push those thoughts away. He rested, he walked around to get some exercise on his healing leg, he ground plants and herbs for the poultices. And he changed bandages.
The first time he did so, it was just after the Guyue’ye healer had left, and Mei HanXue looked about to faint from transferring so much spiritual energy to his brother. When Xue Meng took fresh linens and the recently prepared concoction, sitting at Mei Hanxue’s bedside to change the bandages, Mei HanXue protested.
“I can do it,” he said.
“What, now I’m too fragile to even change some dressings?” Xue Meng snarked, still a little upset he hadn’t been allowed to transfer energy to Mei Hanxue.
“If you wanted to see me undressed so desperately, you just had to say the word,” Mei Hanxue said with a twinkle in his eye, making Xue Meng sputter.
“You—” he was unable to come up with an appropriately scathing comeback on the spot, so he spat, “Since when are you a cutsleeve anyway?!”
Mei Hanxue sobered up a little and asked, “Are we talking about this?”
He looked a bit paler and more gaunt than before the injury, but far better than even a few short days ago. The wound on his stomach still looked gnarly, but Xue Meng couldn’t glimpse at his insides anymore, so he counted it as a win.
“Talk about what? I don’t know what you mean.” Xue Meng avoided eye contact.
“Okay. Have it your way.”
Mei Hanxue allowed his light robes to be pushed off his torso, exposing lean muscles, pale, small nipples, and the violent red-and-purple of the wound, which had been a little smaller than an orange and the same round shape. Now, it was stitched closed, the flesh pulled together over a previously gaping injury. Xue Meng touched his fingertips to the edge of it, delicate and fearful. He still remembered the panic and searing pain he’d felt when he’d seen Mei Hanxue get hurt by the shapeshifting monster.
“You were. Impaled.” The words left his throat in an aching whisper.
It was a miracle he’d made it through, but Mei Hanxue had always been a fighter.
“Yes, good times.”
Xue Meng looked up from the wound with a frown. “What?”
Mei Hanxue snickered, which made him wince in pain from the movement, while his brother scolded him with a stern, “Hanxue.” It didn’t seem to be entirely because of the laughter.
After a delay of many seconds, mind running on overdrive, the meaning of the innuendo dawned on Xue Meng. Caught between blushing and scowling, he almost threw the contents of the bowl on Mei Hanxue's smug face.
“Shut up, or I’ll make sure this hurts.”
Xiao Da and her mother came to visit Mei Hanxue as soon as the woman was well enough to do so. Mei HanXue was out like a light after a grueling few hours of spiritual energy transfer, so they kept their volume down in order not to wake him up. Xue Meng, however, was atop his bed watching with amusement and pride as the mother bowed deeply to Mei Hanxue, nudging her daughter to do the same, which she did with the clumsy gracelessness of a young child.
Mei Hanxue asked them to get up, smiling in his usual charming manner, but there was a hint of embarrassment there if Xue Meng wasn’t mistaken.
The mother straightened up, but wasn’t done singing Mei Hanxue’s praises.
“My daughter told me about your promise. If it weren’t for you…” she looked down at Xiao Da with fearful eyes. “My daughter would’ve had to grow up without both her parents.”
“It was nothing, but I’m glad we were able to help. I am very sorry to hear about your husband.”
“Thank you for your sentiment. And it wasn’t nothing. It was… it was everything, both the saving me and the giving my little girl hope.”
She gave him a tremulous smile, wet around the edges. Mei Hanxue seemed at a loss for words, a first for him. The mother thanked Xue Meng as well, and then turned to leave with her daughter. The child seemed to remember something and ran back to Mei Hanxue, pulling something out of the pocket of her dress.
It was a bundle of small wildflowers, a bit crumpled from being compressed by her clothes. Xiao Da extended the bouquet shyly, and Mei Hanxue took it from her with care, as if holding the most precious porcelain.
“Is it for me?” she nodded bashfully. “It’s beautiful. Thank you, Xiao Da.”
The girl went back to her mother and both of them left the room, the woman holding the child against her side with an arm around the shoulders. Xue Meng’s eyes were on Mei Hanxue, who was staring down at the flowers in his hand with a tiny, fond smile. He felt a matching grin form on his face, hopelessly endeared by the sight. Mei Hanxue had always had a soft spot for children.
“Sap,” Xue Meng accused.
Mei Hanxue looked up from the flowers. His soft smile turned teasing.
“Jealousy is a bad look on you.”
“No look is a bad look on me.”
There were moments like these, moments of uncanny normalcy when Xue Meng could forget anything out of the ordinary had occurred. The twins respected his wishes to be kept out of whatever it—they—were well enough. At the end of the first week, Xue Meng was almost able to pretend he'd never seen the twin brothers he'd known for most of his life kissing.
Then, one day he came back from a walk around the village and was about to enter the bedroom the three of them shared. He halted just outside the doorway, overhearing voices that he knew belonged to the two brothers. Curiosity got the best of him, propelling him to stand there and get a glimpse at the people they were together when no outsider was watching. The door had been left ajar, he reasoned, telling himself he couldn't even be blamed for eavesdropping, especially since they weren't making any particular effort to keep their voice down anyway.
“Oh yeah? And if I jump off a cliff?” There was a lilt to the words that made them sound like a challenge.
“I'd follow.”
The second voice was most definitely Mei HanXue’s, in all its propriety and gravitas.
“Do you see how ridiculous you sound?” There was exasperation, now. “You would die.”
“I'd still follow.”
Xue Meng’s breath caught and his eyes widened at the tenderness of the feeling, the intensity of the devotion. He'd always known Mei HanXue was loyal to a fault, both of them were, but to be a bystander, a witness where he was used to being the recipient, left him reeling under the onslaught of a strange mixture of emotions. Envy. Wistfulness. A sense of wrongness.
He stepped closer, looking through the gap in the door and into the room. Mei Hanxue was lying in bed, propped up by pillows, while his brother was sitting next to him, back facing Xue Meng. All Xue Meng could see of him was his hair and his body language, but that was telling enough.
Suddenly, an old memory resurfaced, and he was reminded of a family dinner that took place many years ago, when his Sisheng Peak hadn't yet fallen. As he and his parents had dined, his father kept dropping his chopsticks to hold onto Madam Wang's forearm or hand, stickier than usual even for his standards. He bodily leaned towards her like a daffodil, as if there could be nothing more important than her presence, like another inch of closeness was the difference between agony and peace. Mei HanXue leaned towards his brother in a similar way. Xue Meng remembered feeling alone and overlooked then, too, a young teen sitting across from his parents at the table but feeling as if he might as well be on the other side of the planet. Yet despite that, he'd also looked at his parents with hope in his heart, confident that one day he would be the one to whom the rest of the world faded away.
As so many of his adolescent dreams turned out, it did not come to fruition, crumbling to dust in his hands. Xue Meng left the doorway without doing what he'd gone there to do, mouth tasting of ashes, and vowed to put the whole thing behind him. However, he was unsuccessful at that too: he could not seem to get the twins or their conversation out of his mind for days.
When they finally left the village, they'd decided upon flying at a lower speed than usual, and not so far up from the ground, since Xue Meng’s leg was still twinging with pain every once in a while, and Mei Hanxue’s wound was still on the mend.
Mei Hanxue flew behind his brother, hands on Mei HanXue’s shoulders so he wouldn't fall. His older brother insisted on the arrangement, and though, to Mei Hanxue’s credit, he did protest, claiming to be able to fly on his own, it was a weak attempt at best. They weren't chest to back, but Xue Meng was acutely aware of their closeness, and suddenly wondered if this was how it was going to be from now on. They had either grown closer and more intimate in his presence in a decidedly romantic manner, or Xue Meng was becoming uncomfortably aware of it in a way he’d been blissfully oblivious to in the past.
They had also agreed they'd make frequent stops to stretch their legs and rest. After forty minutes of flight, they made the first one in a clearing in the middle of the woods, Mei HanXue checking his brother's bandages immediately upon landing.
It came rushing out of Xue Meng’s mouth before he could think to hold it back, a tormented question he’d been asking himself for days.
“All this time?” Regretting it immediately, he backtracks. “Forget it, I don't know why I—”
Mei Hanxue looked up from where he'd been staring down at the top of his brother's head, Mei HanXue kneeling as he changed the linens for a fresh set. Judging from the look in his eyes, Xue Meng knew that whatever he was about to say couldn't be worth listening to, so he insisted,
“Nevermind, shut up, shut up—”
Unrepentant, Mei Hanxue asked, “What did you think we did all those years in the caves?”
Xue Meng’s mouth fell open.
“Y-you. You were five!”
He was so scandalized he felt as if his brain was melting out of his ears.
It was Mei HanXue who spoke then, a monotone from his kneeling position: “At the beginning. In the end, we were fifteen.”
“Still!”
Mei HanXue huffed, which was really too insulting.
Xue Meng pretended to look for something in his provisions, mumbling to himself in aggravation.
“Of course you two are…!” he couldn't bring himself to say it. “Fucking narcissists.”
Mei Hanxue laughed, his bare torso rippling with his laughter. Xue Meng was distracted by the movement for a second before ripping his eyes away with an angry sneer.
“You're one to talk, Mister Saw Himself In The Gourd.”
“That's not what it meant! I don't want to—with myself—!”
“Imagine that, ge,” Mei Hanxue drawled as his brother finished tying his dressings and rose up from his knees. Once Mei HanXue was standing, he closed the sides of his brother's robes over his chest for him, tying the sash around his waist securely. It was such a familiar, intimate act that it made Xue Meng’s nape heat up. “Two Ziming, just like us.”
“Mmn.” Mei HanXue's hum was dragged out, as if contemplative.
“Preposterous!”
They had become two devils. Xue Meng should swear at them. Should curse them ten generations forward so that their bloodline never knew peace. Instead, he felt the need to get away lest something very dangerous happen, a sense of impending doom looming over him.
“I’m going to train. Very far from here! Kindly refrain from talking about me while I'm gone.”
Xue Meng worked on his forms for half an hour, sloppier than he could remember being in decades. He was unable to concentrate, mind drifting to the two bastards he’d left behind in the clearing. After messing up a basic move he’d mastered at twelve, he cursed and decided it was time he went back, since he was hardly accomplishing anything there.
At that point, he felt he could face them without combusting on the spot. He was nearly forty years of age, he reminded himself as he stomped back, trying to rally up his pride and defenses. It was ridiculous to get so scandalized at a ribald remark, but, in his own defense, it had been many many years since he'd been the butt of the joke in such an outward, shameless way. It was also the first time Mei HanXue joined in, which Xue Meng was still unsure of how to feel.
Once he got back to the clearing, the twins saved him some face and acted as if he hadn't just stormed off, keeping the conversation to safe topics. The three of them got on top of their swords and departed after drinking some water from their canteens. Mei Hanxue flew with his brother once again, this time attached to his back like a barnacle, like he had lost all shame after Xue Meng had finally acknowledged their entanglement. He was speaking to his brother words Xue Meng couldn't hear over the rushing wind. Most surprising of all was the way Mei HanXue was indulging him, talking back some as his hands gripped Mei Hanxue's forearms across his chest, as yet another precaution for his safety. But perhaps it wasn’t surprising at all; after all, what did Xue Meng know of the intimacy of their relationship? Of the way Mei HanXue was when it was just the two of them?
Xue Meng averted his eyes, turning his gaze to the scenery. He wanted to be able to muster up outrage over the impropriety, but their brazenness seemed to have the opposite effect. He wanted to shy away from the glare of their affections, scalded by the sight, the ease with which they occupied each other’s space, the contentment he could see coming off them in spades. It was as if they had settled into their skins, not only for the first time ever since their fight, but much further back. Earlier than their arrival in this new world, even.
Xue Meng’s eyes stung, and it had nothing to do with the wind. He tried to picture himself with a woman, riding behind him on the sword, a sweet and gentle lady like his mother had been, and found that he could not. From the moment his cousin rose to power, it had stopped being a concern of his, finding a wife, but at that moment he realized that he might just get left behind. Not literally, he was confident in the twins’ promise that the three of them would walk side by side in this new world for the rest of their years, but things would be different different now. He could already tell. Mei Hanxue’s callousness and sharp edges seemed to have been smoothened, the cynic he’d become giving way to a man to whom genuine laughter came easy, a man whose eyes grinned even when serious. Mei HanXue hadn’t touched a bottle of alcohol in a while, denying the village chief’s offers, when he’d hardly gone three days without indulging before. Even his temper was milder now. Still cold and stern, but less quick to anger. Indulging in jokes, playing along with Mei Hanxue.
It seemed that they had found their missing pieces in each other, in spite of this mess of a new world, and Xue Meng was left as the only broken one.
There had been a common thread between all three of them. They had all been on the brink, balancing on the tightrope of existence, half of themselves having died in the waters when Hong Meng had swept over their world. He hadn’t been glad for the brothers’ suffering, but it had only been natural. They all went through it together, each one isolated in their own pain, shutting the others out, but together. They screamed underwater, and the other drowners could hear, and that way Xue Meng knew he wasn’t alone.
But now… it was silent but for his own voice beneath the surface. It seemed as if the sickness was in Xue Meng. If it wasn’t the fact that he’d come from another world, it was that he was unfixable, unlovable, unfit for love and happiness.
Mo Ran had been stepped and treaded on from the moment of his birth. He’d been mistreated, abused, cursed, made into a weapon to hurt those he loved, and he’d still managed to find a safe haven. Something in one of the worlds that was his. Even Mo Ran, who had suffered beyond Xue Meng’s understanding.
Xue Meng was all of a sudden desperately, desperately lonely.
After one more stop, they landed for the night in a nice little city surrounded by cattle farms, with a bustling market in the city center. They agreed to check it out the following morning, to see if there were any good offers, and headed for one of the simpler inns, who looked nonetheless like it was clean enough. Mei Hanxue had spent too many hours standing up and clearly needed the rest, and even Xue Meng could feel his leg starting to protest the strain it had been put through during the day.
They entered the inn and Xue Meng headed for the reception, nodding at the nervous-looking young man behind the desk.
“Do you have available rooms?” When the receptionist replied his assent, Xue Meng requested, “I’d like three rooms, please.”
“Two,” Mei Hanxue, who had snuck up on him without his noticing, corrected.
Xue Meng frowned.
“We have the money,” he said lowly, so only Mei Hanxue could hear.
They hadn’t gotten paid for their last job, but their coin purse was full enough that they could afford separate rooms.
“It’s not about the expense,” Mei Hanxue said with a smirk.
Xue Meng’s eyes widened in realization, and he gawked for a few seconds, mind going blank.
“I-I…”
“North-facing rooms, if possible,” the younger twin told the receptionist. “ We’re still unsure of how long we’ll be here, so we’ll pay you at the end of each day, if that is acceptable.”
They were led to their rooms, Xue Meng still dumb in the head by the knowledge that the brothers might… tonight…
He knew, theoretically, that people who kissed did those things, but. He hadn’t expected to be made aware exactly of when! And wasn’t it too soon? Mei Hanxue was still recovering, for one.
For another, Xue Meng had just been made aware. They should give him more time to get accustomed to the idea before going around… tumbling each other!
The receptionist stopped in front of two identical sliding doors. “These are your rooms.”
“We’ll share, ge,” Mei Hanxue said cheerfully, guileless like the innocent child he certainly was not.
His brother seemed to share Xue Meng’s distrust, narrowing his eyes.
“No other rooms available?”
“Uh, no, gongzi,” the receptionist said. “There are. Your brother asked for just two.”
“Did he now.”
Mei HanXue’s eyes on Mei Hanxue were serious and blazing, burning with something that could almost be mistaken for anger. Xue Meng wished he could mistake it for anger.
“I-I can get you another one!” the receptionist offered, sounding a little frightened.
“No need. Thank you.” It was a clear dismissal.
“I’ll bring water for your bath and call you down for dinner as soon as it’s ready! Good night!”
The receptionist scurried off as fast as his legs could carry him, leaving the three cultivators behind in the inn hallway. Xue Meng was still staring at the brothers with a lump in his throat and a bottomless pit in his stomach.
“You are injured,” Mei HanXue told his brother.
“My intentions are entirely honorable, dear brother. It’s very hurtful that you think so lowly of me.”
The saccharine tone was ridiculous, but Mei HanXue just stared at him silently for a few seconds before he broke eye contact and the awful tension that had built around them dispersed.
“Good night, Ziming,” he told Xue Meng.
Xue Meng opened his mouth to reply, be it to chastise them or wish him a good night as well, but all that came out was a croak. He spun on his heels, mortified, and disappeared into his room, sliding the panel of the door shut with a resounding clang. He heard Mei Hanxue saying through the wood, “Poor thing. So scared of the birds and the bees.”
“No birds or bees tonight, didi.”
“Of course.”
After a few minutes, the receptionist and another inn worker brought him pails full of water for his bath, and Xue Meng soaked in the wooden tub for long minutes, washing his hair with too-rough motions. He scratched at his scalp, combed through the tangles with his fingers and then brushed through the strands with a comb. Oil made it fall in a dark sheet over his shoulders, and he braided it so it wouldn’t get too messy while he slept.
His dinner was brought to his room not long after, since he’d asked for a tray when the employees came to prepare his bath. He received the food in his under robes, ready to go to bed already.
“The two gongzi are in the dining area downstairs,” the young man said, eying his clothes like he couldn’t understand why he would rather eat alone.
“Give them my regards, and tell them that I’m tired and will meet them tomorrow morning.”
It was unusual of him, since all three of them usually took their meals together. But Xue Meng needed the space for himself, having been surrounded by them ever since the kiss—sharing the same room, the same air, Xue Meng being forced to watch their odd little courting rituals, caught between disgust and anger and shame and solitude. He needed to get his head sorted out and he needed to do so away from what was scrambling it up.
It took him a long time to fall asleep, but he did eventually. His sleep wasn’t as restful as it could’ve been, but the fact that he’d had no nightmares could already be counted as a win. Xue Meng dressed and went down for breakfast, finding the twins chatting, but there was only tea on the tabletop.
“Not hungry?” he asked casually as he took a seat.
“Ziming!” Mei Hanxue greeted him brightly. “How was your night? Lots of beauty sleep?”
Xue Meng narrowed his eyes, wondering what business he had being so happy, especially this early in the morning.
“We were waiting for you,” his older brother said.
“There was no need.”
And yet, Xue Meng felt a hint of satisfaction as, a few minutes later, the waiter brought their plates, knowing the twins had still thought of him even if in afterthought, despite how caught up they seemed to be in each other.
During breakfast, the three of them talked about where they planned to go after they departed from this city, discussed the previous mission, and made an itinerary for the day. Once they were done eating, they left the inn and headed towards the market, where the citizens and tourists seemed to all be gathered, people perusing the stalls of meat, produce, children’s toys, jewelry, cultivation talismans, and various trinkets.
They bought some spices, knick-knacks that were useful on the road, a new set of robes for Mei Hanxue, since his had been ruined by the monster, a couple of books Mei HanXue found interesting. Xue Meng had noticed he was running low on hair oil, so he restocked his supply, choosing one that smelled of violet and ylang-ylang. He picked up a couple of vials, and, before he could pocket them, Mei Hanxue took one out of his hands and unstoppered it, sniffing the contents.
“Hmm… ylang-ylang. It is said to be a potent aphrodisiac.” He smiled winningly. “Any lucky young lady we should know about?”
It hit a sore spot Xue Meng didn’t even know he had, the certainty that there wasn’t anyone and would never be anyone. Xue Meng’s blood boiled with anger he didn’t fully understand, and he ripped the vial of oil out of Mei Hanxue’s hands, handing it back to the vendor with a scowl alongside the other one.
“We don’t rescind purchases, young master,” the woman said quickly, loath to lose the money she’d gained.
“That’s okay, can I exchange them for these?” He picked up two vials of another oil whose scent he’d also liked.
“Sure,” she shrugged.
Xue Meng turned to the twins and said, almost growling, “You two can continue shopping. I will head back to the inn, maybe meditate a bit.”
“Wait, Ziming—” Mei Hanxue called out as Xue Meng pocketed the hair oil and turned to leave.
In a tone that brooked no argument, Mei HanXue told his brother, “I trust you’ll keep yourself out of trouble.” And, to Xue Meng, “I will accompany you.”
“I don’t need a chaperone.”
“That’s not what this is.”
Xue Meng walked away with large strides, but Mei HanXue kept up with him easily.
“Scram!”
“This is a public road.”
Xue Meng conceded the point none too happily, showing his displeasure in his facial expression and in the quickening of his steps.
They arrived back at the inn, and Xue Meng went up the stairs first, stomping childishly so the impact of his boots on the wood echoed. He was annoyed beyond reason at the blond shadow following close by and even more annoyed at the blond asshole he’d left behind at the market. He opened the door to his room and was about to close it when Mei HanXue held onto the panel, keeping it forcibly open.
“May I come in?”
“No.”
“I would like to talk to you.”
Xue Meng was about to deny vehemently, but Mei HanXue looked far too obstinate for that to be an easy win for him. So he just sighed and stepped aside, allowing him through.
“I don’t have any tea or anything, so unless you want to go downstairs to order some, I’m afraid I’ll have to be a poor host.”
Mei HanXue ignored his sarcasm.
“This is fine.”
Xue Meng sat down on his bed, sulking, and motioned for Mei HanXue to take a seat at the room’s only chair, pushed up against the writing desk.
After Mei HanXue was seated, he seemed to take some time to choose carefully what to say.
“My brother…” he started finally, “he doesn’t mean to be so crude.”
Xue Meng scoffed.
“Yes, he does.”
“I… yes, he does. But there’s no ill intent behind it. You know he deeply treasures you.”
Mei HanXue’s voice went up in the end in a way that lent his words an almost inquisitive nature.
“Why are you even justifying his bullshit anyway? He should be apologizing, not you.”
The older twin ignored his words and said instead, “I’ve noticed you are uncomfortable, but Hanxue doesn’t know when to stop.”
“Oh, and you do?” Xue Meng commented, surly.
Mei HanXue didn’t rise to the bait. Even as early as a week ago he would have said something cutting in that devastating, glacial tone, but now he just took it in stride.
“It was fun at first to poke a little fun at you, it almost seemed like those times before Taxian-jun. I hope you’ll forgive me for indulging in that nostalgia. But it occurred to me that you might genuinely be upset about our… entanglement.” He paused. “I know that we are two brothers, but—”
“Have I been lied to all this time?” Xue Meng interrupted all of a sudden, blurting out his biggest insecurity. “All these years, have you been—together, and I was just made the fool?”
It wasn’t the only thing that bothered him. Far from it. Xue Meng felt disgusted, out of sorts, out of his mind, obsessed, abandoned, lonely, envious. Felt resentful of the fact that they seemed happier than ever and it had nothing to do with him, and while he privately acknowledged that it was a most selfish sentiment, he couldn’t help but be haunted by it.
What he could help was what he told them, and he would choose not to burden them with his spitefulness.
“You haven’t. He and I, we were together like that for a while, before Taxian-jun’s ascension. We loved each other, and back in the caves… Well, afterwards, I was the one to call it off. I felt ashamed of what we were. He did not. That’s when he started his philandering, partly because he is very hungry for human contact, and partly, I suspect… because he wanted to punish me.”
Xue Meng’s lips had parted in shock, a furrow on his brow that was both sympathetic and pained. He felt for them both, and was angry at them both for how they had handled it.
He wanted to march up to their past selves and order them to stop being such idiots about it.
“So I did not do anything as he continued to pursue and seduce his women. As I had done my entire life, I cleaned up his messes and dismissed the women whose hearts he’d break.”
“Weren’t you…” Jealous? Angry? “Sad?”
“Yes,” Mei HanXue replied simply, no shame attached to the emotion. Xue Meng couldn’t imagine admitting to the same thing with the same amount of serenity and candor.
He tried to reciprocate on some level, feeling compelled to do so by Mei HanXue’s vulnerability.
“I keep wondering if I’m a bad friend. For not noticing.”
“We kept it a secret and hadn’t been together since before we made it to twenty years old.”
Xue Meng shook his head.
“Still. So much of our lives have been around my issues and my revenge and my fight.” Mei HanXue opened his mouth to protest, and Xue Meng held up a hand to silence him. “No. I mean. Notwithstanding how you two claim you can choose otherwise, you always go along with what I want or say.”
Mei HanXue stared him down in a way Xue Meng couldn’t interpret.
“That is very presumptuous of you.”
“Excuse me?!”
“We don’t ‘go along’,” he explained. “We want it, wanted all of it. At first, because we are loyal to your parents, the most honorable Sect Leader and Sect Lady we have ever met, even discounting the fact that they were our benefactors. Then, because we became loyal to their son… for the man, and friend, that he was.”
Xue Meng squirmed in place, unaccustomed to praise. Once upon a time, thinking highly of himself came as second nature, and he’d felt that to be lauded by the entire cultivation world was his prerogative. Darling of the heavens, son of the phoenix, heir to the Sect. That hadn’t been the case for decades.
Mei HanXue continued, “Also, wanting to stop a genocidal emperor is hardly a single man’s fight. It is, rather, a fight for everyone who is brave enough to rise up and stand against him.”
Xue Meng shook his head in slight astonishment, but was at a loss for words. Mei HanXue filled the silence for him.
“When I was five, I came with my brother from a faraway land. We had a hard time at first. We didn’t look like them, we didn’t speak their language well.”
Xue Meng looked at his green eyes, his blond hair, his striking beauty. He had always stood out, but looking at him now, self-assured, strong, and confident in his own skin, it was hard to imagine it hadn’t always been in a positive sense.
“Once, I was visiting an allied sect and a few bullies tried to pick on me. Another child came marching up to us brandishing his sword, that was almost as big as he was, mind you, and scared the bullies away. He made quite the first impression, and I never stopped thinking about him in the caves, for more than the fact that he was the son of my benefactors.” Xue Meng’s heart thudded in his chest at the admission. “It was fate’s cruel joke that you already hated me when we met again because my brother’s reputation preceded us.”
“Wh—that’s bullshit! No way I made such an impression! You poked fun at me relentlessly even before the caves! I haven’t forgotten that!”
“That was didi’s idea, and I can never deny him anything.” Mei HanXue’s lips twitched with the shadow of a smile. “And, to be fair, you did have us wear girl clothes.”
Xue Meng pouted, aggravated, though he felt some odd sense of satisfaction hearing he’d been on Mei HanXue’s mind while he was in secluded cultivation.
“Well, my first impression of you was of a chubby boy who looked like a girl.”
Mei HanXue raised an unimpressed eyebrow.
“My point is, you were important to me from that first moment. You have never been a bad friend, especially not for not noticing that my brother and I nurtured feelings for each other.” He paused, and, when he spoke next, his words carried a gravity that hadn’t been there before. “I will never say I wouldn’t change a thing, because I won’t ever not wish for a different outcome for your parents. But I don’t regret you, Xue Ziming. I never imagined I could come to care for another like I care for my brother, but somewhere along the way you proved me wrong.”
Xue Meng was suddenly very nervous, sweat pooling on the dip of his spine.
“Not… quite like you care for him, right?” he asked in a weak attempt at a joke. His smile was a yellow, feeble thing at best.
Mei HanXue stared at him strangely, and said, “Yes. Of course.”
An awkward silence settled over the room, Xue Meng avoiding the older twin’s eyes, looking at anything else—the floor, the far wall, his own lap. Eventually, he mustered up courage and said,
“I do not not feel uncomfortable. About you two being together. Which I suppose you are now, from the way you spoke. But I will get used to it, and I’m happy that you make each other happy. So don’t worry about me not accepting you. You two… deserve something of your own.”
I’ve drained too much of you already.
Mei HanXue looked as if he wanted to say something, but seemed to give up and just nodded.
“I will leave you to your meditation now. Don’t worry, I will talk to my brother about what is proper and what kind of jokes cross the line.”
When Mei HanXue exited the room, Xue Meng didn’t do a lot of meditating, but he had plenty to think about, anyway.
Xue Meng was woken up in the middle of the night by the twins once again, and he would have been vexed, he would, but this time he was thankful. They had dragged him from the grip of a horrendous nightmare, one he could already feel himself forgetting, but that had cold sweat beading all over his body, pulse thudding in his ears. The faces of his parents faded away from his mind, bloodied and swollen blue-and-green from being tortured by his dream’s Taxian-jun. He shuddered as chills swept over his skin.
His bed was backed up against the wall that he shared with the twins’ room, which meant he could hear them arguing through the wood. Once the shock of the nightmare waned, Xue Meng felt like sighing, wondering if this was about to become another fight like the previous one, with its months of torturous avoidance and passive aggressiveness.
“It's been far too long,” one of them bemoaned.
It could only be the younger twin complaining.
“Be quiet,” Mei HanXue berated. “Ziming will hear.”
At least one of them had some consideration for his sleeping hours.
“Let him,” Mei Hanxue hissed. “Don't you want him to know how well you—oh oh, yes—”
Understanding of what was happening fell over Xue Meng like a bucket of water thrown over his head.
“Stop trying to goad me.”
“Is it working?” asked Mei Hanxue breathlessly.
“You menace. I've,” a small grunt, followed by twin moans, “taken your bullshit for too long. Your women.” A small pause, and a gasp. “Your taunting.” A thud and an odd sound. To Xue Meng, not knowing what it was was more maddening than anything else. “Never again.”
“Please, harder…”
“Your stomach—”
“You won’t hurt me. Please.”
Xue Meng felt like he was burning up, a hundred thousand degrees in this mild autumn evening.
“You don’t want anyone else,” Mei HanXue stated.
He couldn’t hear a response, but Xue Meng assumed Mei Hanxue responded in some way.
“Liar,” Mei HanXue accused, and for a few moments Xue Meng could only hear amorous sounds through the wall and no discernible words. He felt sick to his stomach.
“So do you.”
For a long stretch of time, they only moaned, higher speech lost to both of them.
Then, the sounds subsided and one of them said, “Tell me you won’t abandon me again.”
“I didn’t go anywhere.”
“You know what I mean.”
“And you know I won’t.”
“Maybe I just want to hear you say it.”
“Brat.”
And then they seemed to go back to what they’d been doing previously, sounds of pleasure leaking through the wall and invading Xue Meng’s ears. Instead of covering them, of running out of his room to go for a night walk around town, of doing literally anything to put some distance, literal or metaphorical, between himself and their—intercourse—Xue Meng could only lie in bed in horrified, petrified fascination.
Things seemed to escalate as he heard a slight thumping and dragging noise. Was Mei HanXue moving the bed with how forceful his movements were? How could that be pleasurable? Xue Meng wanted to scream at them to keep it down, that there were other people in the inn and, especially, right next to them.
“Ge ge g-ge ge…”
What the fuck… why did Mei Hanxue sound like that?!
Xue Meng spun around in his bed, burying his head in the pillow to muffle his scream. His scalp was tingling and it had little to do with the cold draft in the room. The sounds from the other side of the wall seemed to reach a crescendo, and, as they did, Xue Meng noticed he was subtly moving his hips forward, humping the mattress. Aghast, he turned on his back once again and fisted his hands by his sides so he wouldn’t be tempted to do anything unthinkable.
By the time the twins settled down in the next room over, Xue Meng’s hardness was throbbing, almost painful in his trousers. He managed to get it to subside with meditation, as his shizun had once instructed, but the heat that had pooled on his belly, the itchiness under his skin, were much harder to will away.
Notes:
:D
Chapter 6
Notes:
chapter count went up once again because this chapter, that i thought would be the shortest one, ended up being, like, thrice the usual amount of words lmao
the next one is already done and should be uploaded this weekend, as i get the finishing touches in! it's a little longer than this one (and the rest of the chapters in this fic)
thank you so mUCH @ petitallegro my amazing beautiful talented beta reader who is a true godsend, helping me face various challenges such as finding an adequate place to split the 21k monster into 2 chapters, dealing with xue meng's emotions, AND keeping track of three people in a fuckfest. you are my MVP
enjoy!! see you in a bit
Chapter Text
Xue Meng was freaking out.
The days that followed his overhearing the twins’ intimacy were among the most agonizing of his life. He thought he’d known discomfort, that he knew obsession, that he was familiar with the acid bite of shame, but it was nothing compared to the way he felt now. The morning after, he was much quieter than usual, withdrawn and unsociable, afraid that any misstep would have him revealing not only that he’d listened, but that he’d—felt—that he’d gotten—
The brothers did not even notice his reticence. Caught up in each other, they spent the rest of the day much like they had spent breakfast, while Xue Meng dug quietly into his bowl: smug in a self-satisfied way, sending each other subtle looks. Mei Hanxue kept smirking like the cat that got the cream, both at his brother and at the world in general, whilst Mei HanXue had this odd, scorching intensity to him, especially in his eyes, glaring at the side of his brother’s head. It was nauseating.
Xue Meng’s brain was not equipped to handle this. He had never once felt this way, a landslide of muddled emotions and a cause-and-effect equation he could not make sense of.
He couldn’t help but sneak glances at Mei HanXue, thinking of the sounds he’d heard, sounds the younger twin let out because of whatever devilish things his older brother was doing. Xue Meng never would have imagined… how could it be… His whole face flamed, horrified at his own train of thought. At that moment, Mei HanXue glanced his way, as if made aware of Xue Meng’s less than innocent conjectures, and Xue Meng’s blushing got exponentially worse. Their gazes met, Mei HanXue’s scrutiny like tinder to a fire, making color spread to Xue Meng’s ears and down his neck, almost painful in its heat. He averted his eyes quickly, heart pounding worse than if he'd been caught committing some unforgivable crime.
“Are you feeling alright?” Mei HanXue asked, leaning closer to inspect Xue Meng's furious flush.
“Yes,” Xue Meng choked out. “Food is not agreeing with me.”
He excused himself to go to relieve himself and, when he came back, Mei HanXue dropped the subject easily enough.
In what could be interpreted as either a blessing or a curse, Mei Hanxue was being courteous and mindful of Xue Meng’s limits. Apparently, the conversation Mei HanXue had promised to have with him had gone over well. However, in a most paradoxical fashion, this newly enforced distance between them only served to highlight the unnatural state of things, leaving Xue Meng all the more hyperaware of Mei Hanxue’s presence.
It wasn’t even that Mei Hanxue was cold towards him now. No, he was perfectly respectful while still playful in an innocent manner, straying far from the lewd innuendos and bawdy insinuations he’d favored before. But—and Xue Meng felt like throwing himself off of a cliff for admitting to it, even in the privacy of his own mind—he might just miss it. The attention.
It chafed to exist near them, the whip of Mei HanXue’s coldness and harsh words, the sandpaper of Mei Hanxue’s purposefully infuriating charm. Skin chafed raw, yes, but also balm-affection. Life itched.
To be around them was to be assaulted on all fronts.
Meanwhile, the twins made an effort to act normally in his presence, but it was clear that they were going through some sort of honeymoon period. Eyes drifting to each other when they thought no one was looking, small touches to the shoulder and lower back, a little casual, a little possessive, mostly just needing to be near.
Three days after Xue Meng heard them through the wall, there was a festival taking place at night, celebrating the town’s anniversary. In honor of the date, there would be a public fair and itinerant traders and performers coming to entertain. The three of them had decided that they would depart the following day, having rested enough already, and because there were no jobs available here for them. They figured that, since they were in town anyway, they might as well attend the festival. There wasn’t a lot of money to spend between the three of them, but they thought it would be fun nonetheless. Well, Mei Hanxue at least seemed very excited, and Mei HanXue seemed willing to go along with whatever he wanted. Xue Meng just wanted to get lost in the crowd, get away from them for a while, forget they existed if he were lucky.
As he got ready, Xue Meng stood in front of his scant belongings before deciding to don his best robes for the occasion. He also adorned his hair with a guan he'd bought on a whim a long while ago, fumbling a little while securing the pin. It had been about a year since he'd last used a guan, sticking to practical hair ties and ribbons, but, once the ornament was on, he found that he felt somewhat good about the face staring back at him in the mirror. Vanity had not been a major concern of his in so long, for the duration of the war and especially when he became a rogue. But now he was starting to regard his clothes as more than pieces of fabric meant to cover his modesty, his face and hair as more than the product of his parents’ traits intermingling. He wanted to appear a certain way, for his own benefit and for the eyes of others, but he was unused and unsure of where to restart. He feared looking silly; the last time he'd been this invested in his own appearance, he'd been a much younger man. No age lines, no facial scar, no loss of innocence. Still, he gathered his courage and left the room, wordlessly knocking on the twins’ door to signal that he was ready to head to the festival. Spine ramrod straight, he affected a confidence he didn’t entirely feel.
“Ge, Ziming's ready!” he heard from inside the room.
A few seconds later, the door slid open, the twins occupying the doorway side by side. Xue Meng took a few moments to drink them in, parts of their hair braided in intricate patterns, similarly to their youth, coupled with darker robes than those they had used to favor back then. None of the special Kunlun silk in shades of white and light blue and pale green, but brown and navy and forest green. They looked handsome all the same, possessed of a beauty unlike any Xue Meng had seen in either world. His mind conjured up the image of them brushing and then braiding each other's hair, belonging together in a way that he only now could see was indisputable.
“So?” he asked with as much dignity as he could, prompting the twins, who were still staring at him silently, to speak. “Shall we go?”
Mei Hanxue was the one to respond. “Sure, let's…” his eyes perused Xue Meng from head to toe. “You dressed up.”
“So did you.”
Some awful, awful part of Xue Meng wanted him to say something suggestive, about whom Xue Meng might be dressing up for, or, even more, about how he looked dressed up.
“I hope there’s tanghulu, I haven’t eaten it in ages,” Mei Hanxue said instead after a long while.
Xue Meng cursed him internally. He looked over at the older twin, but only found an icy mask staring down the hall.
The three of them left the inn, finding the streets much livelier and more crowded than in the previous evenings. Most of the town seemed to be out tonight enjoying the festivities, from children to adults to the elderly. As he made note of that, a small girl ran by him, almost colliding with him in her recklessness, holding a toy in her hand that sparkled and exploded like a miniature firework, forming the shape of a small red dragon. It reminded Xue Meng suddenly of his shizun’s little candle dragon, and imagining him being manhandled and treated so disrespectfully by a civilian girl made him laugh to himself, able to picture perfectly how he’d screech in indignation.
Movement in the corner of Xue Meng’s eyes had him averting his gaze from the running girl and turning to face the twins. They were staring at him with identical dumbstruck looks on their faces, and Xue Meng asked, defensively, “What?”
“Nothing, you just…” Mei Hanxue began. “That’s the happiest I’ve seen you in a while.”
“You can’t be serious.” When Mei Hanxue didn’t say anything further, and his brother did not contest his words, Xue Meng began to feel uncomfortable, and justified himself, “I just remembered something funny, is all.”
“Care to share?” the younger twin asked as they began to walk again, headed towards the fair.
“Nothing important.”
He tuned them out as he considered Mei Hanxue’s words. Xue Meng didn’t feel the happiest anything at the moment; as a matter of fact, he was as confused as a child, disturbed like a child by the stark reality of the twins' entanglement, ashamed like a child of his own thoughts and reactions, lonely like a child who has no one to talk to because he can't put into words what it is that he is feeling and knows not whether, in the eyes of adults, that which he is feeling is reprehensible.
But it was true that he had changed, perhaps, for the better. Even in this festival, he didn't feel like a porcelain doll among the living and breathing. Death did not come to him anymore as a long lost friend that he yearned to reconnect with. He hadn’t even smelled rot for months. Apathy was a distant memory now—he felt, rather, everything entirely too much. The aches and cravings and pains and losses. Maybe there was room for joy somewhere there, too, he hoped.
They arrived at the main area of the festival, occupied, on one side, by the stages and tents of the performers; on the other, by the stalls of food and items for sale.
“We should purchase some sweets first, and then we check out the acts.”
They approached one of the best smelling stalls, whose sweets shone with oil and sprinkled sugar. Mei Hanxue and Xue Meng both got tanghulu, while Mei HanXue opted for dragon's beard candy. They ate standing up, perusing the other stalls, getting drawn in by the scents and the vendors advertising their products. Mei Hanxue stopped in front of a display of jewelry, scanning the options; he seemed particularly focused on the guan pins.
“What do you think?” he asked, addressing his brother.
The deliberate exclusion of Xue Meng and the disregard for his input stung. Mei Hanxue wanted his lover to opinionate, and that was fine, understandable even. It was a matter of whose eyes mattered, whose eyes he wanted upon him, whose eyes he wished to entice. Xue Meng tried to not let that get to him.
“I prefer this one.” Mei HanXue picked up his favorite, showing it to his brother.
Agreeing, Mei Hanxue told the vendor, “We'll take this.” The vendor, after receiving his payment, tried to take the object from Mei Hanxue’s hands, but the cultivator kept the pin away from his reach.
“Don't you want me to wrap it?” the vendor asked, confused.
“No, I'll be using it now. Thank you.”
Xue Meng frowned in bemusement, and the frown deepened when the younger twin turned to face him.
“May I?”
“Uh?”
He was utterly puzzled now.
Mei Hanxue gestured to his hair, at his headress more specifically, and Xue Meng realized with a start that the pin was a gift. For him.
“Why the hell would you waste money on that?!” he chastised, flustered. “My pin is perfectly serviceable.”
“But look,” Mei Hanxue said. “It's a little phoenix.”
He shook the pin a little, making the bird dangling from the thin silver chain dance gently.
“That's a magpie,” Xue Meng pointed out dumbly.
“Even better,” Mei HanXue said, and really, he at least should be the reasonable one between the two of them.
Xue Meng tried to ignore the symbolism surrounding magpies, beyond omens of good fortune and birds of joy. Tried to ignore how they also represented married bliss. Tried and failed to brush off the folktale of the cowherd and the weaver girl, in all its undeniable romantic tragic nature, the bridge of magpies that reunited the two lovers every year on the seventh day of the seventh month.
It was an unfortunate coincidence, but it was really preposterous how Xue Meng couldn't seem to brush it off as such.
Paralyzed and reactionless, Xue Meng allowed Mei HanXue, who’d been handed over the pin, to step behind him, the weight of his presence most likely imagined, but still making him curl his toes inside his boots to keep from reacting in a more visible manner. The older twin removed his pin, holding the hair in place as he weaved the newly purchased magpie pin through the guan. He pocketed the old pin and stepped back to Xue Meng’s front, assessing his appearance alongside his brother.
“Looks good,” he said with an unaffected, albeit unmoved, air. Detached, as if he were commenting on the weather, but not a trace of mockery to be found.
Xue Meng wasn't sure how to interpret that, and much less how to feel about it. Mind and heart in a jumble, he snapped at them, “Shouldn’t you be giving each other stupid trinkets?!”
“Give it back if you don’t want it, then,” Mei HanXue said with a hint of bite in his even tone.
“I—” the thought of giving it back seemed inconceivable, ‘looks good’ echoing in his brain. “It’s mine now.”
“Excuse me,” a woman said from behind them, bordering on snappish, motioning for them to move away from the vendor’s stall.
They walked towards a less crowded area, so they wouldn’t obstruct the way of the other festival goers, in the in-between stretch of space that separated the commercial and the entertainment parts of the festival.
“Shall we see what performances are there?” Mei Hanxue suggested.
They went over to the other section of the festival, walking by a fire breather, dancers, and a puppet show. There was a cabin with a sign announcing Madam Tao’s Fortune, and Xue Meng was just about to walk by it without a second glance when Mei Hanxue held him by the sleeve.
“Wait.”
He turned in the direction of Madam Tao’s cabin with a grin.
“Divination?” Xue Meng deadpanned. “Seriously?”
“I want to know if my good fortune will hold.”
He sent his brother a cheeky, suggestive look that had Xue Meng’s stomach churning. Mei HanXue appeared unimpressed, saying, “A fortune teller who works in small town festivals such as this is rarely ever a genuine soothsayer, and certainly not learned in the divining arts.”
“It’s worth the try. Don’t you think so?”
Xue Meng was suddenly possessed by some devil that made him blurt out, “I’ll go first.”
Both twins' unwavering attention on the other broke, and they turned to Xue Meng in surprise.
“Really?” Mei Hanxue asked, humored and skeptical.
In as dignified a manner as he could, Xue Meng stuck by his statement.
“There are things I wish to learn.”
“By all means,” Mei Hanxue said grandly, laughter woven into his voice. “Go right ahead.”
Xue Meng got in line, refusing to look back at the twins who were, he assumed, still waiting for him a few meters to the side. After a few minutes, a young man came out and Xue Meng went in, the fabric of the tent closing behind him as he entered.
There was cheap incense thickening the air, and, taking up most of the available space, a low table with paper, a set of brush and ink, and a bamboo cylinder on top. Sitting down behind it, an older woman, heavily powdered and painted with rouge so Xue Meng couldn’t be sure of her age, gestured at him to sit down, movements graceful in an affected way.
“Ah, I see, I see,” she said as he sat down. “In our great universe, there are no mere coincidences, and such is the case of this meeting, which was orchestrated by fate. I can sense that something greatly troubles you.”
The twins immediately came to mind, but he dismissed it, knowing most people who visited fortune tellers must be ill at ease in some way. It must be the fortune teller's standard greeting, to set the tone for the rest of the session.
“Hello, grandma,” he greeted, inclining his head to the elder. “Uh sure. Greatly troubled.” He couldn’t tell her he’d gotten himself into her cabin for a reason unknown even to him, so he was left only with the option of playing along. He’d stopped believing fate when it had taken his parents so brutally from him, when it had allowed his cousin to suffer for the ruthless goals of Shi Mingjing, when it had destroyed his world even after all the suffering he and so many others had gone through to salvage it, when so many injustices had gone unanswered and so many selfless acts had gone without thanks. He did not much care for fate.
“What is the fee?” he asked, remembering how the brothers had already, and unnecessarily, spent money on a hair ornament for him.
“Three silver ingots,” she said, giving him a measuring look, as if she had determined the price of her services based on her estimation of his wealth.
As he had put actual effort into his appearance today, she was clearly overcharging.
“One.”
“Fortune telling is expensive, son! I—”
“I am sure you’re not charging three silver ingots in this small town, where no one would be able to afford. So I repeat: one, or I leave.”
The fortune teller made a face, displeased.
“Very well. But for one ingot you only are entitled to some services, not all, no.”
Xue Meng had a feeling she was only saying so to be petty, but he wasn’t in the mood to argue, especially because he didn’t believe in fortune telling anyway. Some services, all of the services, whatever.
“And those are?”
“No fortune sticks,” she picked the cylindrical bamboo that held over a dozen sticks inside and removed it from the tabletop, putting it aside. “But I can do palmistry and face fortune telling.”
“That is perfect,” said Xue Meng, not caring either way. “Thank you.”
Madam Tao placed her upturned palms on the table and made a beckoning motion. Xue Meng put his right hand on hers, shivering when she smoothed over the lines of his skin with freezing-cold fingers.
“You have suffered a great lot. A life marked by strife and violence.”
And the big scar across my face has nothing to do with that assessment, huh? Just the lines on my hand?
“Indeed,” he said, humoring her.
“That is clear here, in your life line. Very branchy, denoting brutality and grievances in one's path.”
Xue Meng did not know much about palmistry, but that didn't sound right.
“Huh.”
The fortune teller looked up from his palm, examining his face and his somewhat unimpressed expression.
“But thankfully the end of your line is less so, smoother, suggesting calmer later years, after a troubled early youth.”
There was something disingenuous about it, as if she were trying to say what he wanted to hear rather than whatever it was that she was seeing in his palms, if she was even able to read anything in the first place.
“I see.”
“You are also… smart, focused. A very decisive and determined personality, able to handle erratic situations without much difficulty.” Madam Tao began to speak of his career, saying, “A prosperous line of work, a stable job with not much in the way of changes of environment.”
If Xue Meng had been sure she was a hoaxer before, that certainty was further cemented by that wildly inaccurate reading. His line of work was anything but prosperous and stable.
“The shape of your fingernails speaks of—”
“Are we done here?” Xue Meng asked somewhat impatiently, finding he was not interested in whatever else she had to say. He was already wasting one silver ingot because of his lapse of sanity, he didn’t have to waste his time as well, listening to a bunch of lies said grandiloquently.
“But I haven’t even spoken about your career, or your health, o-or your future children! Or your marriage and love life, for that matter.”
Xue Meng must have reacted in some visible way to the last two, for the fortune teller asked, somewhat gleefully, “Do you happen to fancy someone?”
“Do you want me to do your job for you?” he asked, grumpy.
Madam Tao’s hands flexed around his own, as if she was imagining hurting him.
“That is not how fortune telling works, my dear,” she said, too sweetly. “Now, shall I read you your love prospects?”
Xue Meng gave a dismissive shrug, but there was some part of him standing at attention like a prey animal who’d detected the presence of another creature nearby. Without his conscious input, he hoped for a sign of fate, printed onto his hands, fingers, nails, that there was indeed someone for him out there, that he wasn’t only past his prime as well as beyond love.
“I cannot see if this young woman you’re fated to marry is someone you already know or are yet to meet, but your marriage will be prosperous and long lasting. Two or three children, all healthy.”
The fortune teller looked up from his palms with a self-satisfied smile, but was met with Xue Meng’s irascible temper. For some reason, the mention of children and marriage angered him beyond any of the falsehoods she’d been spouting so far, and he pulled his hand away from her grasp.
“What else?”
Madam Tao blinked.
“Pardon?”
“What is the person like?” he demanded forcefully. “In personality, appearance, bearing?”
She scoffed, nervous and mocking. “That is far too much to gather from—”
Xue Meng interrupted, annoyed, “What kind of a sham of a fortune teller are you?! If all you can do is offer generic platitudes, I might as well not pay you at all!”
Her eyes widened, and she waved her hands, frightened by the possibility that she might not get any money out of him.
“I-I usually get into such detail when a client pays extra, but I will make an exception just for you, see, just for you! Let me—” She pointed at his hands, and he gave her his right with the palm up, reluctant and suspicious. “Let us see.”
She hummed.
“Hm… the woman you are fated to be with is beautiful indeed, demure and sweet tempered, and skilled in the management of a household. A lovely figure as well! All clear, in the– star and island shapes around the heart line. She will raise your children to be—hey, where are you going?!”
Xue Meng had ripped his hand away again and jumped to his feet in a choleric rage. He wasn’t even sure of the reason for his indignation, when the woman the fortune teller had described and the woman he used to dream about when he’d been young and dumb and naive sounded exactly alike. The sort of woman he’d imagined would be his sect lady, or he would have none at all: all his unreachable standards, making up a perfect creature beyond any living soul.
And yet, when he’d been listening to Madam Tao, against his better judgment he hadn’t been hoping against hope for perfection. Rather, he’d been entirely open to imperfection, of two different sorts. He’d been hoping either for a friendly, fun-loving flirt who was loyal and affectionate if one cared to look beyond the floozy demeanor, or an icy-cold, orderly, perfectly restrained girl who’d talk back rudely and burn with a fierce fire beneath the surface, hiding her noble and caring heart from view.
Both were far from perfect, but he could see himself loving either for the rest of his life. Leaning on them, and protecting them, for as long as they lived.
“My money!” the fortune teller yelled as he was about to rip the flaps of the tent open.
He threw her a silver ingot without looking back and left the cabin in an irate haze. Outside, the three people waiting in line were staring at him strangely, which was to be expected since he doubted the sounds of screaming hadn’t leaked out. A little ways away stood the Mei Hanxues, staring at him with expectant looks.
“You were right,” he breathed out. “She’s a hoax and a charlatan.”
“You don’t say,” said Mei HanXue with some irony, cold and succinct.
… Just like one of his dream women.
Xue Meng inhaled sharply when he realized that, wide eyes staring at the older twin. A horrifying idea took shape in his mind, and the more he tried to push it away, the stronger it returned. He looked at the younger brother with accusation in his gaze, petrified as he found too many similarities between him and the other type of woman he wished to marry.
In and of itself, he would not think it meant much, dismissing the similarities as unfortunate and disturbing coincidences. However, he remembered how he had reacted to the sound of them in intimacy. A part of him now hung limp between his legs, but it hadn't been so then, roused and helplessly responsive.
Did that mean that he was a cutsleeve?! He had come to terms with Chu Wanning and Mo Ran, though how much of his initial shock had been due to their proclivities and how much because they were his shizun and cousin, Xue Meng wasn’t sure. He had even resigned himself to the fact that the twins were together and that that wasn’t changing anytime soon, yet their brotherhood still instilled in him contradictory feelings of fascination and revulsion. In both cases, the relationships came indissociably entangled in negative connotations and unpleasant emotions to him, but there were other factors at play, so Xue Meng had never known for certain how comfortable he was with the notion of two men romantically involved.
When it came to his own person, however, Xue Meng found that the answer was not very comfortable, but more so than he had expected to be. In a knee-jerk reaction, he at first felt emasculated, hobbling in the unsteady ground of his manhood, after getting cast out from its shrine, that faraway fantasy of a wife, children, and being bigger and stronger and the provider. That was how he had always seen his father, a virile man despite his sentimentality, and to stray from the person he wished to be the most was a difficult reality.
But there was no mistaking how much he missed being the one Mei Hanxue made inappropriate comments to, ones that bordered on flirtation. The discomfort he kept feeling around them as they were absorbed in each other, orbiting around each other, loving one another unabashedly. It might not be discomfort at all, Xue Meng realized, but rather envy. Jealousy.
Xue Meng did not understand how someone could feel that way for two people at once. Two men at that. Most people he knew who were in a relationship or had fallen for someone had only done so once in their life, let alone for two at the same time, simultaneously. It was unthinkable.
His father had only ever loved his mother. Mo Ran had only ever loved their shizun, while his feelings for Shi Mei had been the effect of a cursed flower.
And, though it pained him greatly to admit… the twins had only ever had eyes for each other, for all that Mei Hanxue had fallen into bed with half of the female population of two different worlds. Was that not what he’d meant at the brothel? About true regard and fascination.
Xue Meng was a freak. He was an absolute freak, and one who would suffer watching the brothers live and love and be happy together, shining under the sun while he crawled in the dark. Incredible, how he’d thought that they were the dirty ones, when he was the one who was lowly, unworthy. To desire not only one, but both them, and to wish to have them for himself, to tear them apart. After all they’d done for him. All that they’d done and sacrificed in honor of Xue Meng’s parents. They deserved better than a friend like Xue Meng, if he could even call himself that.
“Are you okay, Ziming?” Mei Hanxue asked worriedly.
Xue Meng noticed he was still staring at him far too intensely. He blinked and tried to school his face into something more casual, but he wasn’t sure if he was being successful from the way the twins were still looking at him and then exchanging concerned glances.
“I’m fine,” he said, trying for snappish. “Just upset I spent money to hear someone say a bunch of senseless garbage.”
“I won’t go, then,” Mei Hanxue said, still examining Xue Meng’s face far too closely for comfort.
“Good.” He wanted to beg off the rest of the festival and hide back in his room, but, now more than ever, he didn’t want his feelings to be noticed. He had to play at normalcy, which meant he had to endure the rest of the night watching performances and couples and shining lights. “Shall we go?”
“How about the play?” Mei Hanxue suggested with a twist of his mouth. He looked all of a sudden very cheery, the way he would get sometimes when he tried to lift Xue Meng’s spirits during the war. “It looks as though it’s about to start. What do you think, Ziming?” Xue Meng nodded. “Great. Then we can check the firebreather over there. I wonder if you can do it too, with your core, gege.”
Mei HanXue, when Xue Meng looked over at him, had his eyes narrowed at Xue Meng. A glare by those eyes was said to frighten even the bravest of men, no less menacing for their beauty, but Xue Meng felt a swooping sensation in his belly that had nothing to do with fear. His skin itched for something, anything. His eyes fluttered with the heat of his burning nerves. Mei HanXue frowned, tilting his head in confusion at whatever he saw in Xue Meng’s face. Xue Meng swallowed around a dry throat, afraid that he was as a storefront to those eyes, puerile in his transparency.
“Is that acceptable?”
Mei Hanxue’s voice cut through the moment like a saber. Xue Meng looked over at him and felt love not quite like he felt for his brother, but not too dissimilar either, and felt like curling into a ball and screaming.
“Yes. Let’s– see the play.”
The three of them were on a good streak, the two towns they stopped at after the festival both having jobs available for them. In the first, the villagers were suspecting a yaoguai was responsible for the gruesome butchering of cattle and sheep in the pens and corrals during the night. Even a couple of shepherds had fallen prey to the yaoguai, though, unlike the animals, no parts of them had been eaten. However, when Xue Meng and the twins investigated, they came to find that a migrating pack of wolves was the cause of the killings, rather than anything spiritual or supernatural. They appeared to just be passing through, but, since no one could be sure of how long they'd stay and how much more blood they'd shed, the cultivators were asked to dispatch them. It was an easy night hunt and they got paid the same amount, which put the twins in a great mood.
Xue Meng was pleased as well, of course. Money was not always easy to come by, especially money as uncomplicated and non-dangerous as that. Regular animals presented no challenge to seasoned cultivators. Yet, all he seemed to be able to think of was the Mei Hanxues, his feelings for them, their feelings for each other; all that he seemed to be able to pay attention to was the way they interacted, like a bloodhound attuned to the smell of the quarry.
He hadn’t been talking properly with them ever since the festival, though he’d managed a veneer of professionalism during the yaoguai hunt. The twins seemed to find it strange, Mei Hanxue going out of his way to include him in banal conversations, which he responded to in a curt manner, and Mei HanXue kept sending him looks that could fall anywhere in the spectrum between puzzled, piercing, and worried.
To distract himself from the brothers and to give himself a somewhat plausible motive to be ignoring them, he made friends with the daughter of the family that was housing them, Wu Ming. She was the older child, and, while the younger ones had left the parents’ home, she had chosen to stay behind and take care of her elderly mother and father and their farm.
“And you don’t regret it, da-jie?” Xue Meng asked.
She was not old, only thirty-one, but women were usually married much younger and had at least one child attached to their hip by that age. She was good-looking, in a provincial, unremarkable way, taller than average, with rough hands and a slightly sun-burned face. Xue Meng realized that in the past he might not have had much in common with her, and would probably opt not to engage in conversation, not in a small part because his respect for women, taught by his parents, was accompanied by a deep lack of understanding of their subjectivities. But now he was finding that they might see eye to eye in more things than he'd anticipated.
“Who’s your da-jie?” she asked, laughing. “I am younger than you.”
They were both in the sheep pen, Wu Ming sitting in a stool nearby and Xue Meng mending the destruction caused by the wolves. The farm had suffered many losses from the wolf attacks, both structural and of livestock, due to the farm’s proximity to the forest.
She and her family had claimed it was not necessary, but Xue Meng and the twins insisted, as repayment for the food and room they had been freely given. The brothers were fixing the corral, which was bigger and had been more heavily damaged, so it was only proportionate that it would demand two pairs of hands rather than one. Wu Ming had also offered to help with the sheep pen, but Xue Meng had pretended not to hear her.
“Sorry,” he said, hammering a stake into the ground and then nailing a board to it. “Force of habit.”
“It’s fine.” A pause. “I could never regret it. My parents are frail and someone has to care for them. Back then, someone needed to mind the farm, raise my siblings.”
“Don’t you wish things were different?” he asked, partway wistful for her sake, partway for his own.
There were so many alternate lives he could be leading. He wished the Butterfly Boned Beauties had never suffered oppression, for their sake and for the sake of the lives that had been lost—his parents’ included—to rectify that injustice. He wished Shi Mei had never set foot on Sisheng Peak and been given leeway to cause that much damage. He wished Mo Ran had never been trampled on so severely that, by the time he arrived at Sisheng Peak, his heart was already blackened by pain and violence, both perpetrated and suffered.
There was no end to the things Xue Meng wished for, but sometimes he wondered: had he ever lived in better times? Was there any moment he could go back to in his youth that was unsullied? Or was it always meant to end up like this, the chain reaction and domino effect of harm done tracing so far back that he could not even ascertain the cause, let alone stop the calamities from happening.
“Don’t we all? I don’t see the point in wondering what could have been. I live a good life here. My younger brother sends us money when he can, and my little sister helps out sometimes with her husband. I have the company of my parents. It is more than many unmarried women can say for themselves.”
“I… had never thought about it like that.”
He was absolutely uninformed of the struggles of unmarried women, especially those who had very little to their name. It was a myopia of his limited upbringing and life, and he was oddly appreciative that she had put the question in his mind.
She shrugged. “It is what it is.”
He picked up a long, heavy nail, examining it for weaknesses, and, finding it acceptable, hammered it into the fence, attaching another board to a stake.
“You’re good at that,” Wu Ming pointed out. He looked back and saw her nodding at the fence. “Wouldn’t expect it from a cultivator.”
“There are all sorts of cultivators out there. Especially rogues.”
“But you appear… refined. Like you were brought up in a well-off family, or a martial sect.”
Xue Meng looked away from her, back to the fence, feeling mildly uncomfortable. “Both. But that was a long time ago, and I’ve done all sorts of things over the years.”
“Isn’t it humiliating for you? This sort of menial task?” she asked, genuinely curious.
A bark of a laugh burst forth from Xue Meng without his input. He remembered asking sect leaders, upstanding xianjuns, and the entirety of the cultivation world for help, cursing then negotiating then begging, for years. His home, taken over by the murderer of his parents, his shizun, kidnapped, his life, ruined. That had been humiliation.
“I’ve never met a rich person or someone from a sect before,” Wu Ming defended herself, sounding embarrassed and slightly upset. “People don’t really stop by this village.”
“Oh, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean—It’s just that. You have no idea what humiliation is if you think mending a fence is it. This is very honorable work.”
When she didn’t say anything in reply, he turned back to glance at her and found her smiling at him.
“You seem like a good man, Xue Meng.”
“He is,” a third voice interjected, and Xue Meng jumped up, dropping his hammer. He pulled his foot back at the last second, nearly avoiding getting it crushed by the tool’s heavy weight.
“Shit.”
“Your parents came by the corral, lunch is ready,” the newcomer said, the older twin judging by his demeanor.
Xue Meng wanted to run from the weight of that gaze, but he had nowhere to escape to.
Wu Ming got up from the stool, brushing off dirt and hay from her skirts.
“I’ll go wash up in the water pump first,” Xue Meng said, looking at his dirty hands and feeling the sweat coating his face.
“Of course,” said Wu Ming. “Excuse me, then. I’ll go ahead to see if they need any help.”
She left the sheep pen, leaving the two cultivators behind. Xue Meng tidied up a little, putting the nails inside their box, and started to walk in the direction of the water pump. Mei HanXue walked behind him silently.
“Your brother?” Xue Meng asked.
“Helping the Wu couple set the table.”
Xue Meng arrived at the pump and placed the bucket beneath the iron outlet. He pumped the handle repeatedly until the bucket was halfway filled with tepid water.
“You seemed to have made a friend,” Mei HanXue remarked.
Xue Meng didn’t want to make conversation, but it would be too rude and suspicious to not respond to a direct comment like that.
“Wu da-j…” he remembered her complaint and corrected himself: “Wu-guniang? She is a nice woman.”
Mei HanXue merely tilted his head, and accompanied Xue Meng back to the house for lunch.
After a few more days, they left the village. Xue Meng would miss Wu Ming, but he was already used to the lifestyle, and, like she had said, it was what it was. They had both made their choices for better or for worse, and had to live with them. Hers denied her a part of womanhood she might have otherwise wanted. His entailed a wanderer’s life and lack of roots, and the impossibility of forming long-lasting bonds.
“Take care,” he said after he’d already said his goodbyes to her parents.
“I should be telling you that. Your line of work is much more hazardous than mine.”
“One never knows. I heard yaoguai have taken to terrorizing farms around here.”
She laughed, uninhibited and klutzy. She covered her mouth at once, looking mortified.
Xue Meng said, “If anything like this ever happens again, or if you need some help, you might not be able to get ahold of me, but contact Sisheng Peak in the Sichuan Province, and say that the older Xue Meng sent you.”
“Older…?”
“Trust me, they'll know what you mean.”
She nodded, accepting it at face value but still appearing confused.
“That is—” she looked down at her own hands, where Xue Meng had just pressed a letter for her to send to Sisheng Peak if the need ever arose. She blushed slightly beneath her tan. “I… don’t know what to say.”
“Say yes. It’s not much, but—”
“It is more kindness than I deserve.” When he looked at her pointedly, she amended, “Yes, thank you.”
“What a gentleman,” Wu Ming’s mother said pointedly from beside them. Now, it was Xue Meng’s turn to flush. “Isn’t he, A-Ming?”
The old woman kept trying to clumsily push her daughter at him, making both of them profoundly uncomfortable.
Wu Ming clutched the letter to her chest and Xue Meng scuffed the tip of his boot on the ground, neither meeting the other's eyes, all too aware of the elderly woman watching them like a hungry hawk.
“So,” Xue Meng started awkwardly when the silence had gone on for too long. “I suppose. I will be going now.”
“Yes. Farewell.”
After bowing to her, Xue Meng joined the twins, both of them having already finished saying their own goodbyes. Xue Meng unsheathed his sword, ready to step into it, but the twins were not moving.
“Hm?” he asked.
“That was nice of you,” Mei Hanxue commented lightly. “Ge told me you'd gotten close to the Wu daughter, but I did not imagine that it was this much.”
Xue Meng looked at Mei HanXue with a question in his eyes, one that the older twin refused to answer, stern face giving up nothing.
“I guess.”
He didn’t say anything else, though it was noticeable that Mei Hanxue expected him to. Xue Meng’s interactions with them had been like that ever since the festival: clipped and to the point. Until he learned how to exist around them without feeling like clawing out his skin it was better to keep some distance.
They left Wu Ming’s village behind and headed to a larger town about an hour to the south, near the border between Jiangdong Hall and Shangqing Pavilion. They got lucky yet again as there was work for them there as well, and this time there was actually something spiritual afoot.
The town was located in the space between a large lake and a river, its livelihood revolving around fishing and other related activities. However, they only used the river for subsistence, and it had been so for many years, since the problem involved two sects and neither claimed responsibility. While the town was mostly in Shangqing Pavilion territory, the lake was Jiangdong Hall’s, and neither wanted to spend resources in the benefit of the other, nevermind that they were two allied sects.
The lake had been haunted for nearly a decade now. Many deaths had happened in the beginning, the latest being over a year ago. Now, even the children knew not to go playing in the deceptively calm waters, lest the so-called ‘boy of the lake’ take them away.
Xue Meng wasn’t sure how much of it was true and how much was superstition, but the locals claimed they would sometimes see a pallid boy around the age of six playing around the lake bank, but he would never answer when called, and would lure people into the lake to drown if they got too close.
In the end, it was a little harder to deal with than the pack of wolves, but only just. The fact that the malicious spirit of the boy didn’t wander off to the nearby town, confined to the lake, was a testament to its relative weakness, despite the fact that it had cultivated a physical form. It was a simple water spirit who was quickly exorcized, and, hopefully, the people would get to fish and swim and play in it again, returning it into the prosperous source of income and fun that it used to be. Once Xue Meng and the brothers were done dispatching the spirit, there was already a noticeable change in the mood of the town, the heavy weight of fear lifted from the shoulders of the townspeople. They thanked the three cultivators as they walked the streets, effusive and cheerful, like the gray sludge of their malaise had been washed away.
That same sludge seemed to have been all thrown over the three of them, tired and melancholy as they retired back to the inn that night. They climbed the stairs quietly, each absorbed in his own thoughts.
When Xue Meng was about to head into his room, his arm was caught in a gentle grip.
“Can we talk?” Mei Hanxue asked. His eyes held a candid intensity that frightened Xue Meng, and he knew instantly what it was about.
Chapter 7
Notes:
it got a little big because they just wouldn't stop fucking... oopsie
HERE IT IS, THE END!!! thank you so much everyone who read, and especially those who commented and left kudos. also, thank you everyone who will still leave comments and kudos in the future! finished works deserve some love too!
uhhh i don't think i have anything else to say other than what has already been said. if you had half as much fun reading this as i did writing it, you had a great time, and i'm glad
Chapter Text
“I’m tired,” Xue Meng said, voice coming out a bit hoarse.
There was a burning need in him to get away, to scurry off like a rat and a coward, and he thought he might as well be both of those things, because why else would he be pulling his arm out of Mei Hanxue’s grip in an attempt to hide himself beneath his sheets?
Mei Hanxue allowed him to free himself only to follow closely behind when he slid the door to his room open. His older brother was not far behind.
“Your beauty sleep can wait ten minutes.”
“Says who,” Xue Meng grumbled, but on the inside he was panicking.
He poured himself some water from the jar in his desk, noticing how his hand was trembling slightly only from the way the liquid sloshed around in the clay cup. He was too disconnected from his body to realize it had escaped his control.
“Says we,” Mei HanXue cut in none too gently. “You’re avoiding us.”
“Wh—! I am not!”
His pretend revolt was a bit overdone, but he was too nervous to deliver a better performance at the moment. He shakily threw back the rest of the water and put the cup down with a loud noise, cringing at his own obvious discomfort.
“We were all getting closer again,” Mei Hanxue said with a hint of sadness. He took the liberty to sit down in Xue Meng’s bed and Xue Meng flushed at the entitlement, at the familiarity, at the meanings it could possess but didn’t. “I don’t get what went wrong. Is something the matter?”
“You two got closer, no doubt, but I don’t see what that has to do with me.”
“Do not play the fool,” Mei HanXue said harshly. He had walked over to the window and leaned his back against the wall, pressing his shoulder against the window frame. “You’re not the same person who panicked over a dead cur on the street,” Xue Meng flushed at the reminder, so tactlessly worded, “and neither are any of us, not just me and didi, as hostile to the others as we once were.”
Mei Hanxue agreed, “We were good.”
Xue Meng tried to come up with an appropriate rebuttal, but found that he could not. They were right and their confusion and anger was understandable; there was no apparent reason for his sudden distance other than the truth: that he had decided that avoidance was the best possible course for his own heart, for the two of them, and in respect for what the brothers had together. Xue Meng had all their best interests in mind, trying with actions and rationality to make up for his wretched emotions, but the twins were not privy to his reasoning.
The only satisfactory answer he could provide was the inconceivable truth, one that would occupy the space around them like a living entity, a locust whose buzzing would be inescapable every single moment of every day. Any reaction from them would be unwelcome, be it pity, disgust, or a refusal do acknowledge Xue Meng's feelings. No good could come of it, after all. In any and all scenarios, Xue Meng would come to resent them, or they, him, and they would be torn asunder. He could not allow that, when each other was all that they had. The only answer Xue Meng could offer them, for all of their sakes, was a non-answer.
“I think,” Xue Meng began, trying to make his words as sharp and biting as possible, “that you are now living your idyll, finally—” he gestured vaguely at the two of them, willing himself not to blush, but not entirely sure if he’d succeeded, “and think that everyone is as content and well-adjusted as you.”
Perhaps with callousness he could get them to let it go.
Mei Hanxue was the one to speak then, laughing in the subtly cruel way he’d adopted once he’d come into this world, but which Xue Meng hadn’t seen in a while.
“I think no one would dare call us well-adjusted. You don’t have the monopoly on suffering, Xue Ziming.”
Realizing what he’d said and what the twins had understood of his words, Xue Meng sputtered, horrified. Guilt engulfed him like a lick of fire, and he backtracked.
“Of course not,” he blurted out in a quick, shameful rush.
For him to even imply that, when he’d seen first hand the small ways that they had broken under the pressure; when they had only ever followed him, been loyal to him; it wasn’t right that he would be cruel or dismissive of their pain and dedication just because he wanted what they had, wanted to get in between them. It wasn’t right that he would punish them for his own ignobility.
There was quite a lot that people misunderstood or overlooked when it came to the Mei Hanxues. First, it was the mistake of assuming that they were one and the same, because they shared the same face, the same name, the same sword, the same identity to the rest of the world for so many years. They had a self, individuality, clear to anyone who spoke to them for more than five seconds, clear in the difference of their temperaments, the cadences of their speech, their facial expressions, their spiritual cores.
Second, it was the no less grave mistake of thinking that they were entirely distinct from one another. The contrasts were so stark at times that it might seem as though they were complete opposites, and not parts of a spectrum, complimentary, similar and dissimilar at turns. Xue Meng had known they were intertwined beyond hope of detangling ever since he had gotten close to them, long before he’d learned that their bond extended beyond that of brothers. They were twins, who’d shared a womb, toys, playmates, and even the perception of the outside world of who they were—always, as one. Xue Meng had never had a sibling, much less a twin, so he couldn’t hope to understand fully what it meant, but he also knew it did not mean complete rupture. What brought them together was much stronger than what set them apart.
Another great error was to underestimate the magnitude of their feelings because they might not be as outspoken about them as most people. That misconception had taken Xue Meng more time to figure out, and he still forgot it sometimes, such as now. Xue Meng suspected it had something to do with their childhood: being strangers in a foreign land, being taken in as Ming Yuelou’s first disciples and perhaps feeling a sense of duty regarding her and Kunlun, owing such an incredible honor debt to the sect leader and lady of Sisheng Peak, no matter how often they insisted that there was nothing to repay in the first place. Their course of action always had to be thought out with the other brother in mind as well, so they had gotten used to making concessions, to some degree of compromise and abdication, no matter how unyielding Mei HanXue seemed, how hedonistic Mei Hanxue might appear.
During the war, they had followed and fought beside Xue Meng for ten long years, with not as much as a complaint about the harsh living conditions or the ostracism or the humiliations or the danger. They had looked worn out, they had worried, they had panicked when the other brother or even Xue Meng got hurt, they had grieved the deaths of their comrades, but they had, all in all, appeared surprisingly put together. So much so that one might call it a lack of feeling if they did not know better.
Xue Meng should know better.
After Hong Meng, they had chosen to live with Xue Meng, and this new world had done to them in a year what the previous one had not managed in a decade. Mei HanXue, who did not drink, took up the habit, which became a vice; his temper, legendary for its coldness, became sharper, covered in barbs like a frozen toxic rose. Mei Hanxue remained that same easy-going womanizer, vivacious and unserious, but it was as if someone had poisoned the waters of a stream. It still flowed limpid and cheerful, but there was danger now, a callous, sardonic, insouciant twist to his personality.
“That was insensitive and untrue,” Xue Meng continued, by way of an apology.
“It’s fine,” said Mei Hanxue, softening at once. “Are you willing to listen to us now, then?”
Xue Meng ground his teeth together and shook his head. No.
The younger twin insisted, “Please, Ziming. We just want to fix this.”
The soft, pleading tone was almost too much for him. Xue Meng glanced at Mei HanXue, looking desperately for a way out, but the older twin was no help at all, as per usual, arms crossed over his chest imperiously. Xue Meng got distracted staring at him, at the striking color of his blue-green eyes, at his slender neck, at the width of his large shoulders which made Xue Meng’s breath falter.
He had never felt this before. How could people go about their lives when a feeling as all-encompassing and destructive as this was wreaking havoc inside of them? If this continued for much longer, all that would be left of Xue Meng would be skin, bones, and his mushy insides ground to a pulp.
Was that love? How could he know what love meant if he’d never felt it before and hadn’t much cared to find out?
Tentatively, so as not to alert them of his feelings, he phrased the hypothetical question: “How did you know that, what you… feel for each other… was—uh, l-love?”
Xue Meng had been staring down at the floor as he asked, but looked up in time to see the twins exchanging a look he wasn’t able to decipher.
“How did you realize it?” he asked, almost inaudible.
After a long moment, Mei Hanxue spoke. “Why the sudden curiosity? I thought you wanted to be shielded from it as much as you could.”
“I…” Xue Meng had nothing to say to that, so he snapped, “Just humor me, okay?”
“Fine, fine.” Mei Hanxue laughed. “But this is a give-and-take. I tell you that, and you tell us what is going on with you.”
Xue Meng assented with a vague, impatient gesture. He would just make up some lie. First, he needed to know this. It was an imperative.
Perhaps it was not love at all. Perhaps hearing them in bed together had just led him to misconstrue and misapprehend his feelings for them, when all it was was a simple awakening to carnal matters. That it was them that had made him aware of his body in such a way was inconsequential, it could have been anyone, really.
“I don’t know, I am not sure even of my brother’s answer,” Mei Hanxue said, looking at Mei HanXue with a quirk to his mouth. Mei HanXue stared evenly back, in a manner that made Xue Meng want to shake him just to get some reaction out of him. “It’s difficult to be precise. I have obviously always loved him, since before I was born, and, as a child, that love was still fraternal and pure. Our puberties were spent inside the sacred caves, only the two of us, so, while I did feel some… things… I did not know enough of the world to know it for what it was.”
“Love. Romantic love,” Xue Meng sought to clarify.
“Yes and no. Maybe it was just want.”
Xue Meng flushed and frowned, hot all over and finding it supremely unhelpful.
How was he supposed to tell which was which if even Mei Hanxue, lecher that he was, struggled with it?
“At that stage, at least,” Mei Hanxue continued. “It might have been just want, adolescence, and fraternal love still. I did kiss him, in the caves, in our last year there, but I didn’t fully understand the implications. I had been locked up apart from civilization since the age of five, after all.”
“Then why did…?”
Even now Xue Meng had a hard time understanding matters of the body, but as a teen? His first instinct would never have been to kiss someone, no matter how many years he spent locked up with them.
Mei Hanxue shrugged with a breezy air.
“I wanted him closer.”
Those four simple words were so striking as to rob Xue Meng’s chest of all air. Yes, that was what he wanted sometimes, when he looked at them. Closer, nearer, more. A scratch he could not itch, a rabid longing that he couldn’t soothe or appease.
“A-and you just—?” Xue Meng asked dumbly, gaping at Mei HanXue.
“I've always known,” Mei HanXue said simply.
The younger twin uttered a breathy, “Oh,” and looked at his brother with something untold in his eyes. Something foreign and warm. They held contact for a few long moments, like they had crossed oceans and lifetimes just to be able to sit across the room from each other and speak casually of their love.
“And.” Xue Meng’s voice failed and he cleared his throat before he tried again. “Hmh. And when did you know?” he asked Mei Hanxue. “That it wasn’t just want, or adolescence?”
“When I kissed someone else,” he began, and laughed at the look on his brother’s face, “Oh please, I was fifteen! That was hardly the last—”
“Your point being?” Mei HanXue said, irritable.
“So, it was when I kissed some people, because it was all about having fun to me, ge, and it wasn’t so serious, in my mind it was like, ‘look, I’d even done it with my brother!’ But it just wasn’t the same and it kept not being the same. It was not about the physicality, it went beyond that. I began to be integrated into society more and saw and understood that other type of love, and my feelings for my brother either were that or were becoming that, so I sought him out. And the rest ge said he already told you. How he rejected me—”
“But how,” Xue Meng interrupted Mei Hanxue’s pretend whining with an abruptness that caught both brothers off guard. “How does it feel?”
“I don’t know, it feels so easy sometimes. But other times it is like I can’t bear to breathe if he isn’t near, or like. I would face anything to be allowed to stand beside him.”
It was Xue Meng’s turn to utter an, “Oh.”
The way Mei Hanxue spoke, Xue Meng could almost pretend it was meant for him.
Mei Hanxue said tentatively, after Xue Meng didn’t add anything else, “How. Do you feel?” And, in a different tone of voice, “Ziming, are you… in love?”
The younger twin’s face was awash with shock, while the older one had his eyes narrowed at Xue Meng, searching as if the answer was written on his features.
“Don’t be ridiculous,” Xue Meng dismissed, turning his face away.
“I would think I know you better than that by now! Is that why you—Ziming, talk to us. Don’t be like that.”
Xue Meng, face still turned to the side, closed his eyes tightly, body coiled with the strength of his fight or flight response. Finally, he choked out,
“I… always thought it would feel different.”
“To love,” Mei HanXue said in a deadpan tone.
Xue Meng neither confirmed nor denied.
And he had. He’d always imagined it would feel nothing like this. He’d imagined, for one, that he’d fall in love with a single person, not two, that they’d be a woman, a gentle, beautiful, somewhat meek young lady who would make him as happy as his mother made his father. Apart from his dozens of unrealistic requirements on temper and looks… he’d envisioned a stable life for them. He’d imagined mild affections, bland companionship… a passionless marriage, he now realized. A life in Sisheng Peak, their children heirs to the sect, running around those beloved training grounds. All of which was inaccessible to him now. Why were the twins the ones that his heart desired, when they were the furthest thing from all of his past dreams?
The Mei Hanxues were peerlessly beautiful, yes, but they were men. There was no working around that. Their personalities were each unsavory in their own ways as potential matches. There was no stability in the future for them, no children, nothing that made them resemble the love he had wished for himself ever since childhood.
And still, here he was. Aching for them. Both. Either.
It did not even matter in the end, because they would never have him. They had each other, and he was the beast who had fallen for two people at once.
“And how does it feel?” Mei Hanxue asked in a whisper.
Xue Meng couldn’t look away, couldn’t seem to escape the trap of his eyes, their tumultuous insistence.
“Like I am going absolutely insane,” Xue Meng answered even lower, mouth barely forming words.
“I… I am glad for you, Ziming,” Mei Hanxue said, still sounding flabbergasted. He didn’t sound overly happy, which made Xue Meng frown. In response, Mei Hanxue smiled a beatific grin. “Really! I never thought I’d see the day. Wow. Congratulations on—loving!”
Xue Meng just opened and closed his mouth, at a loss.
Mei Hanxue’s at first lukewarm felicitations became more enthusiastic.
“No, really, I think this is really very positive! You deserve someone who cherishes you, and you deserve to experience the joys of love! Wow! I certainly did not expect this turn of events. Uh.” He got up from the bed and walked over to Xue Meng, lively and cheery. “Who is it? You should definitely pursue her! I am sure that if you put your mind to it there is not a single woman who won’t be charmed by you. I can even help! I promise, no fake tips or funny business, only my best seduction tactics.”
He made a gesture to promise his honesty. Xue Meng was still stupefied, staring at Mei Hanxue’s handsome, radiant face.
“Who is she? Huh? Don’t tell me it’s—” he trailed off, coming to his own conclusions. “Oh, that Wu woman! From the village! Such a… down-to-earth woman, not what I would have imagined for you, but she seems very nice. Very pretty, and gets along with you amazingly, of course, which is great.”
Xue Meng didn’t like the way Mei Hanxue entoned ‘down-to-earth’, so he said, “It is not a demerit to be down-to-earth. Not one of us in this room is a bright-eyed youth.”
Mei Hanxue’s overt show of excitement quieted down some. “Of course. I didn’t mean anything by it.” And, still in a softer voice, “You really like her.”
Xue Meng was about to deny it when he caught himself backed into a corner. He should never have asked these questions; damn his curiosity and vulnerability. If not Wu Ming, then who else? It felt wrong to use her name and image like this, lying about his feelings for her, but what else was he to do? Admit his feelings for the twins?
“I suppose I do,” Xue Meng said primly.
Mei HanXue spoke up then, much quieter than his brother.
“Congratulations are in order. It seems as if there is a soul in two worlds that is good enough for Xue Ziming.”
Xue Meng wanted to do something absolutely shameful. Something he hadn’t done ever since he was a small child of about three or four. He wanted to throw himself to the floor blubbering and yelling, sobbing and wailing, from how angry and frustrated he was with the two men who had been his companions for more than a decade. He was frustrated with how dumb they were, how much they wanted each other, how little they saw him, how whole they were without him.
As a concession to himself, he took petty pleasure in declaring, “And I intend to pursue her,” even though he knew neither of them cared.
“You what,” Mei HanXue asked.
“That’s right. Or do you think she wouldn’t have me? We got along very well.”
‘Just because you won’t have me, doesn’t mean nobody will!’ Xue Meng thought viciously.
Not… that Wu Ming would. She had seemed to treat Xue Meng as a friend and nothing else, as had he. But the brothers didn’t have to know that.
Mei HanXue’s face twitched almost imperceptibly.
“You can’t abandon a wife. And our life is no life for a woman.”
“Haven’t you heard?” Xue Meng asked somewhat bitterly. “She’s down-to-earth, she might just understand.”
Mei Hanxue cut in, “That is not what I—”
“To marry that woman with the intent to abandon her and whatever brats you have is childish and selfish.”
“And what do you know of it?”
“Of love? More than you.”
“Of marriage, of women, of children.”
It was a ridiculous insult on Xue Meng’s part since he knew about as much as Mei HanXue did, perhaps even less, but he would not allow himself to be disparaged without fighting back. Also, to imply that Mei HanXue was clueless because he was a cutsleeve was really too hypocritical, since Xue Meng was in this mess for the very same thing.
“Please, you two, there is no need—”
“Shut up, Hanxue,” Xue Meng barked, at the same time as Mei HanXue snapped, “Don't.”
Mei Hanxue flinched in front of Xue Meng.
“I think that the ones who ought to have a say in whether our marriage is acceptable are I and the woman I propose to,” Xue Meng pointed out, huffing.
At that moment, he didn't have Wu Ming in mind at all, but was finding it quite cathartic to vent his sadness and anger in a fight with Mei HanXue, who seemed all too willing to oblige.
“As your friend, I take it upon myself—”
“You do not sound very friendly right now, gege,” Mei Hanxue said in a lighthearted tone, that nonetheless still held a hint of warning.
“If you are willing to sit back while Xue Ziming acts in this cruel fashion to a poor farm girl, suit yourself, but I—”
“Take a moment,” Mei Hanxue began, placating and chastising all in one, “to step back and examine your reasons.”
Mei Hanxue, who had walked closer to his brother where he stood against the windowsill, finally seemed to get through to his brother. Mei HanXue lost some of the tension in his frame, but Xue Meng had just become even more incensed. It seemed as though they were back with the half truths and unsaid words and their nasty habit of speaking a language of their own, in which Xue Meng was allowed no part. It felt like rubbing his face in it and he wanted to draw blood.
“I may not have a monopoly on suffering, but you sure as fuck do not have a monopoly on love.”
“We never said we did,” Mei Hanxue said in the patronizing voice he had adopted for this argument. Like Xue Meng was a child that needed to be placated and pacified.
“No, you just strut around like you have.”
Mei Hanxue just sighed, but his older brother took the bait. Gone was the small progress Mei Hanxue had made with him.
“What does that even mean?”
The hostility in his voice was fuel to Xue Meng's own. His voice went a little higher as he raged:
“You are in my face all day long, touching non-stop, flirting, flaunting your relationship. I don't care if you are trying to make up for lost time, or if–if—whatever. Enough is enough. Have you no shame?! I heard you through the wall—” Xue Meng took perverse satisfaction in the looks of shock and horror that crossed their faces, “yes, that's right, I heard you doing—you know!—in that village the night before the festival. Kind of impossible not to, with how loud you…” Xue Meng remembered the sounds he’d heard, Mei Hanxue’s wild abandon, their lewd words, their sweet promises, and blushed from something other than anger. “I heard a-and I can’t stop hearing it and I'm going crazy. So tell me what right do you have to preach about my choices or my love life or— will you stop staring at me like that?!”
His chest was heaving from the rant and the aggression coursing through his body. Mei HanXue still appeared livid, seething against the wall, but what infuriated Xue Meng the most was the smug, amused, almost mocking look Mei Hanxue was throwing his way.
“You think it is funny being a hypocritical meddler, huh?!” Xue Meng asked. “Or are you just that much of a rotten pervert that you enjoy knowing other people could hear you?”
“Hear me what?” the younger twin asked in a challenge.
Xue Meng grit his teeth.
“No? Do not feel like saying the words?” When the question was met with silence, Mei Hanxue sing-songed, “If you can’t say it, you can’t do it…”
Snarling, Xue Meng spat, “Who says I want to…”
“How else did you intend to get married? Or have children?” In a playfully helpful tone, Mei Hanxue informed him, “Marriage tends to involve consummation, you know.”
Xue Meng bared his teeth at Mei Hanxue, trying to come up with a fittingly sharp reply.
Mei HanXue spoke first, glaring at his brother with a vitriol Xue Meng had only ever seen directed his way during their months-long fight.
“If you have nothing worthwhile to say, then please, do us all a favor and save your breath.”
“See, I would, ge, truly, but I don’t think it is in your best interest if I do that. In neither of our best interests.”
It was clear that Mei Hanxue wanted his brother to ask for clarification, but Mei HanXue had a nasty habit of being petty about the silliest things when he was in a mood, so he refused to humor his brother. In that room, Mei Hanxue was the only one finding the situation the least bit amusing, which was strange considering how he’d been acting the peacemaker before Xue Meng’s furious tirade.
With a hint of a pout on his face, Mei Hanxue spoke even without being prompted.
“What you are missing, ge, is what Ziming is trying so hard but failing to hide, but that is okay. I will give you a hint.” Mei Hanxue stepped away from his brother and walked towards Xue Meng again, deliberate steps that were meant to intimidate. Xue Meng refused to be cowed, despite the way the proximity to one of his beloveds had his heart galloping in his chest. He kept his chin raised in challenge even as Mei Hanxue came too close for comfort, almost looming over him.
Mei Hanxue was responding in a way Xue Meng was entirely unprepared to handle, and now he was at a loss as to what to do.
“Answer me something,” he said when he was inches away from Xue Meng. Xue Meng’s stomach did something funny, going both hot and cold at once. “Does your future fiance make you crazy too, or is it just us?”
Xue Meng was thrown for a loop.
“I’m sorry?”
“You. Love feels like going insane, you said. But it is just about us that you talked like that. When it was her, it was all ‘understanding’ and ‘down-to-earth’—”
“You said it, not me,” was Xue Meng's weak opposition. It was dawning on him that he had revealed too much of himself in his unbridled ire.
“Don't deflect,” Mei HanXue ordered, also coming closer. Xue Meng was truly cornered now against his own writing desk, and the older twin seemed to have caught on to his brother’s meaning.
“That is not how I would describe love. It was not how you described love. So make this make sense for me.”
With a hand to each of their chests he pushed with considerable strength, managing to escape the way they were caging him in. Once he was a few paces away from them, able to breathe a bit better, he said in a rush, without turning back around:
“I don’t have to do shit. I don’t like this conversation and this is my room, so. Get the fuck out.” He motioned with his hand in the general direction of the door, refusing to turn even a little to the side in fear of catching a glimpse of them.
There were footsteps, but they seemed to come closer, rather than further away from him. Xue Meng’s entire body coiled like a spring, restless, reckless, sick, awaiting. The seconds before anyone touched him were some of the longest of his life.
First, the steps halted right behind Xue Meng. He knew it from the sound, he knew it from the palpable presence and the heat seeping into his body, a line of fire all along his back. He remembered feeling something similar when Mei HanXue had stepped up behind him to put the new pin on his guan during the festival. This time, though, it was different. He felt weaker, malleable, worn thin by the spike and drop of adrenaline in the aftermath of the fight. His knees weren’t the steadiest they had ever been. His eyes threatened to flutter shut so he could better focus on whichever of the two was standing so close to him he could hear their breathing. In and out, and in and out—he felt his own change pace to match, ever so slightly too-quick.
The touch, when it finally came, wasn't upon his skin as he'd expected. A hand swept his ponytail to the side slowly, and he shivered when the hair brushed against one side of his neck. The other was further exposed when he was made to tilt his head, the tip of a nose tracing up and down the column.
“I've always wanted to do this,” the voice said roughly in his ear, no louder than a whisper. Xue Meng was so stunned and dazed that he could not be sure of which of the brothers had spoken, his more sophisticated brain functions lagging behind when it came to his ability to differentiate them based on intonation alone.
The twin standing behind him planted a close-lipped kiss on the arch of Xue Meng’s neck, lingering and almost reverent. Xue Meng shook like a leaf under heavy wind and the other twin circled to his front—Mei HanXue, answering the question of who was at his back—and raised his arms to support Xue Meng and keep him from falling. Xue Meng wanted to say something dismissive, but found himself only clutching at Mei HanXue’s forearms. Xue Meng felt the lips on him part, and sudden panic overtook him.
“Wai—!”
Teeth scraped over his pulse point, which felt like it was about to burst from the pressure of the blood rushing through it. The tail end of Xue Meng's word trailed off into a pathetic moan that made him close his eyes tightly in shame, and Mei Hanxue laughed against his neck, against his back. A huff of breath on his sensitive skin, a shudder that rattled his shoulder blades and spine. That was when Xue Meng noticed that the warmth against him wasn't just a vague perception, but rather a very palpable one, and Mei Hanxue had plastered his front to Xue Meng’s back when he was too defenseless and distracted to notice.
“You bastard,” he accused with what little bite he was able to muster up.
Mei Hanxue was really too devilish, too shameless, to exploit someone's vulnerability and then amuse himself with it!
“What's so funny,” he spat more viciously now, digging his nails into Mei HanXue's arms—the older twin was doing nothing other than holding him, probably staring at him like a creeper, though Xue Meng couldn’t be sure with his eyelids still tightly shut. Mei Hanxue laughed again.
“We're going to have so much fun. Ge and I have so much we can show you.”
At the mention of the elder twin, Xue Meng could not resist the temptation to open his eyes. The image that greeted him was exactly what he'd expected: Mei HanXue in front of him, so close Xue Meng could count each of his individual golden lashes, a shade darker than his hair. His strong eyebrows were pulled a bit lower over his eyes than usual, his look close to a glare but not quite. It was a look Xue Meng had seen directed at Mei Hanxue, but it was very different to have it aimed at oneself.
“And what do you have to say for yourself?” Xue Meng challenged. To get that look off his face. To make it turn even more heated. To provoke him into action. “Or do you let your brother do all the talking?”
Mei Hanxue rested his chin on Xue Meng’s shoulder, a smile audible in his voice.
“He got you there.”
Xue Meng let go of one of Mei HanXue's forearms to elbow Mei Hanxue in the ribs. His wrist was caught by the older twin before he could, and Mei HanXue said, very serious, “I am going to kiss you now.”
And was that not the worst thing he could have said? Xue Meng’s breath hitched.
If he’d asked ‘Can I kiss you now?’ Xue Meng would have gotten outraged, as one does, would have kicked and screamed and denied without even stopping to wonder why the refusal and whether refusing was really his heart’s wish. By telling him, warning him, and then taking a few seconds to follow through, he both made Xue Meng anticipate, stomach aflutter, and gave him plenty of time to push him away if he wanted to. Stripped him of defenses and plausible deniability.
Thus, forced to confront his wants, he found that… he didn't want to. Push Mei HanXue off. Pull away from either of them. He wanted to stand there and do nothing and let himself be kissed, though it frightened him beyond even his own understanding. It was something he would not be able to come back from, he knew, irrevocably altered, not as much by the act of kissing itself, though the very discovery of desire rattled him to his core, but by the fact that it was Mei HanXue that he would be kissing. He was walking on top of a frozen lake at the end of winter, the rising temperatures making the sheet of ice thin and breakable. Xue Meng did not know how to swim, Xue Meng was alone, Xue Meng would surely die if the ice broke underneath his feet. So why did the danger only excite him more?
When Mei HanXue finally kissed him, his brother stepped back, and Xue Meng almost pulled away from the older twin with a protest. He had gotten used to the solid presence against him, okay?! But a second later all thoughts vacated his mind, too preoccupied with the feeling of lips on his.
It felt like nothing much. Warm and smooth against his own skin, like he was kissing any other body part. Not dissimilar to pressing his lips to the back of his hand. At the same time, Mei HanXue’s mouth had a plushness to it that made kissing unlike any other contact. But that was not what made it remarkable.
For some reason, despite the simplicity and relative chastity of the touch, a shiver worked its way up Xue Meng’s spine. It was the heat of another person, it was the knowledge that it was someone that he loved, it was the hungry squirmy thing in his stomach that had only gotten more ravenous with the scraps it had been given.
Xue Meng’s world ended when Mei HanXue parted his lips and moved them against his own. And again. And then nibbled at Xue Meng’s lower lip. His mouth fell open in a gasp, and Mei HanXue took advantage of that to slip his tongue inside, a deliberate invasion. It was awful, slick, disgusting. Xue Meng moaned.
“Heavens,” Mei Hanxue breathed out from behind him, sounding winded. “You are easy for it.”
Xue Meng jerked his head away from Mei HanXue, face burning with embarrassment at his own wantonness. How obvious he must be for them. They were accustomed to each other, Mei Hanxue was even accustomed to his numberless women. How could he hope to hold their attention if even in a moment like this they treated him with condescension, his reactions causing nothing but amusement?
“If that's not to your liking, you can go,” he rasped. “Set yourself on fire for all I care.”
“Now, that was not what I meant. It is to my liking, it very much is.”
Xue Meng swallowed around a suddenly dry throat, neck prickling. He looked over his shoulder and there Mei Hanxue was, smiling with his eyes. Xue Meng wanted him close again, but he seemed all to content to stand back and stare, and Xue Meng’s face wasn't thick enough for him to voice his wants.
He turned back to the older twin instead and asked, “And you?” in a very proper tone that he hoped helped mask how pathetic the question was.
“It was just your first kiss,” Mei HanXue said. “We'll work up to it.”
“You—!”
Xue Meng grabbed Mei HanXue by the front of his robes, smashing their lips together painfully in an effort to prove his own skills. Their teeth clanged despite the cushioning of their lips, and Xue Meng winced in pain and humiliation. A second later, Mei HanXue's hands finally moved from where he'd been holding Xue Meng's upper arms—where they'd been ever since Xue Meng had been in danger of sliding to the floor—and touched him more intimately. An arm wound around his waist, pulling him closer; a hand on his neck, thumb brushing his jaw, fingertips tickling his nape. The arm on his waist exerted a bit of pressure, in and up, and Xue Meng found it easy to melt. When Mei HanXue softened the kiss, it was only natural that he'd follow, when Mei HanXue opened his mouth, Xue Meng did as well. He tilted his head to match Mei HanXue's and followed his lead, in a kiss that was easy, unhurried, and sensual. Still a bit disgusting, but Xue Meng was appalled to realize that he liked it like that.
“You're being selfish,” Mei Hanxue complained, and in the next second Xue Meng was being pulled away from the older twin.
Mei Hanxue kissed not entirely unlike his brother. Less forceful with his grip on Xue Meng, and his hands and fingers moved more in a subtle caress, but the overall feeling was similar. Or at least so it seemed in Xue Meng’s inexperience. He was gentler, but handsier—his fingers found some way into the hairs in Xue Meng’s nape despite the ponytail, nails scratching at his scalp, and a hand slipped down and palmed his ass. Xue Meng yelped against Mei Hanxue's snickering mouth and smacked his insolent palm away. He found that he missed it immediately after Mei Hanxue ever so obligingly took it away, so he bit Mei Hanxue's tongue without thinking, a brainless punishment for listening to his bluff.
“Ow!” Mei Hanxue complained, stepping back and prodding at his tongue with his pointer finger and thumb. “What was that for?”
Mei Hanxue looked up and stared at Xue Meng incredulously, making it clear that it was not a rhetorical question. Xue Meng tried to search for an insult to serve as justification.
“I… was expressing my dissatisfaction.”
“Because I took my hand off you when you made me?”
He sounded as if he thought Xue Meng was insane.
“No!” Xue Meng barked, then gritted out, “I find that your reputation is undeserving. As a rake.”
Mei Hanxue looked him up and down, at his heaving chest and flushed face, and raised both eyebrows.
“Is that so?”
Xue Meng grunted. Mei Hanxue’s eyes were sparkling with mirth.
“Thank you for letting me know.”
That rascal Mei Hanxue was definitely laughing at him!
“Subpar!” he accused with venom.
“You have a funny way of showing it.”
“You should try harder, didi,” Mei HanXue suggested. “Practice makes perfect.”
“As always, I bow to your superior knowledge,” said Mei Hanxue, faux deferential.
Realizing he was only digging his own grave deeper, Xue Meng kept silent even through Mei Hanxue’s teasing and mockery. “Poor Ziming, having to endure my unwanted, unskilled attentions.”
Xue Meng had to lock his jaw to keep immobile as Mei Hanxue caressed the side of his face. He brushed their lips together very fleetingly, like the whisper of a petal. When Xue Meng thought he would finally get a real kiss again, Mei Hanxue nibbled at his lower lip, and it was so sensitized that the action dragged a sound from deep in Xue Meng’s throat. Mei Hanxue muttered a low curse and pulled him back in, Xue Meng offering not even a token resistance. Mei Hanxue's hand did not travel all the way down again, but it found its place low on his back, in a way that pressed their bodies together head to toe, and it was somehow even more satisfying.
They spent a long time kissing before Mei HanXue poached him again, claiming his lips for himself. Xue Meng, for once, didn't think about implications or ramifications or even his self-doubt. His mind was quiet, his body hummed. He allowed himself to get swept up in it and never wanted it to stop.
“Aaand, I think that is quite enough,” Mei Hanxue said, slightly out of breath when he broke away from their kiss.
His lips were swollen and red and too pitiful looking. Unthinkingly, Xue Meng tried to move forward to catch them with his own again, but Mei Hanxue dodged with a laugh.
“There is no need to rush,” Mei HanXue said in agreement.
“There is no need not to,” Xue Meng argued, trying to get himself under control.
He wanted them wanted them wanted them.
“This was your first kiss? Right?” Xue Meng refused to answer Mei Hanxue’s question, but his silence was an answer in itself. “It's better to do these things slowly.”
“I am thirty-seven. Any slower and I’ll be dead.”
The brothers still seemed reluctant, exchanging a look, which made Xue Meng finally come to his senses. How pathetic he must seem, in all his inexperience, to be asking for this not to stop. What was in it for them? What appeal did he have that they couldn't find in each other? He wasn't a shameless, sexual creature like he knew they were, judging by what he'd overheard and only half understood. He was an old virgin with little to offer, who was getting ahead of himself by demanding more than what they wanted to give.
“Fine,” he said brusquely.
“Fine?”
“Yes, fine, I get it.”
He tried to extricate himself from between them, but was held back.
“I don't think you do,” the elder twin said in that infuriating way of his.
“Things are—perfectly clear. Now if each of us could have our rooms for ourselves…”
Xue Meng was ignored once again.
“We could give him a taste…” Mei Hanxue mused thoughtfully and mischievously.
“Didi,” Mei HanXue said in warning.
“Oh don't be mean. Can't you see how much he wants it?”
“…”
Xue Meng’s thin face begged him to protest the smug statement, but, with how he’d asked for it, wouldn't a denial be even more humiliating? Transparent in its falsehood.
Though it seemed as though Xue Meng would be getting what he wanted, the downy hairs at the nape of his neck all stood on end as if he were sensing a threat. Was it too late to back down now?
“What did you have in mind?” Mei HanXue asked, not fully convinced but at least halfway there.
“My mouth. You make sure he behaves.”
Xue Meng was pushed in the direction of the bed, garbling out half-spoken words of objection. “Wha–wai-w-hey—!”
Mei Hanxue was the first to climb into bed with him, immediately pushing him backwards so that Xue Meng's back hit the mattress, crowding him in with a kiss that was unlike any of the previous ones. It was all-encompassing, dirty, still slow but deeper, more intense. The hand that wasn't holding Mei Hanxue’s own body up was traveling up and down Xue Meng’s side, from ribs to waist to hip. One of his legs had wound up in the space between Xue Meng's own, and he closed his knees around it, trying to relieve the pressure building up inside him.
Xue Meng’s thoughts were running amok. Mei Hanxue’s mouth. His mouth? What did Mei Hanxue mean by that? Xue Meng tried to go through all the possibilities in his mind but found his knowledge of carnal pleasures woefully inadequate. Whatever it was, he would be going in blind.
Perhaps it would just be this. These lewd, horizontal kisses, these wandering hands. There was, after all, the undeniable involvement of Mei Hanxue’s mouth, and it was skillful indeed. Yet, that sounded wrong, somewhat insufficient, but he could not fathom what else it could be. When Mei Hanxue's tongue did something wicked and clever that Xue Meng couldn't hope to replicate, without Xue Meng’s own input his back arched to press his chest against Mei Hanxue's, swept away by the sensations.
Another weight bore down on the bed, but Xue Meng only made note of it in a vague, back-of-his-mind sort of way. Most of his focus was directed elsewhere.
“Don't be greedy,” Mei HanXue said.
Xue Meng opened his eyes when Mei Hanxue drew back without warning, teeth snagging his lower lip. Only he hadn’t drawn back of his own volition. In shock, Xue Meng watched Mei Hanxue getting pulled off of him by the hair like a scruffed cat, and then dragged into a kiss by his brother, the twins sitting up in the bed over Xue Meng’s supine form. It was as biting as their kisses with him were, but it was also different in how it almost seemed like a practiced dance. There wasn’t a kisser and a fumbling fool (Xue Meng) who tried to reciprocate as best as he could; both of them were skilled and active and domineering. Despite the reciprocity and mutual skill, Mei HanXue appeared the most formidable foe with how his hand was still knotted in his brother’s hair, directing his head this way and that, drawing faint, almost inaudible whimpers from him.
Xue Meng bit the inner lining of his cheeks to stay put and quiet. If he had gotten affected by the sounds they’d made in the room next to his, the sight of them atop him was boiling his organs inside of his body. If he could, he would capture this moment forever, keep it inside a jar so he could take it out and gawk at it whenever he wanted. How was it possible for two people to be so beautiful, to fit together so well? It wasn’t just the fact that they were identical, which looked as uncanny as it did erotic. Even their kisses looked natural, like they had always been meant to be joined like this, two pieces of a broken vase coming together, edges perfectly aligned.
When, after what felt like hours, they finally separated, Mei HanXue looked down at him with the glare of a magnifying glass under a ray of sunlight. The effect it had on Xue Meng was about the same. He squirmed in place, pinned like an insect caught in the trap of a pretty carnivorous plant.
“There will be no wife,” Mei HanXue said, commanded, “and no one else but us.”
There never had been, but Xue Meng was not one to bare himself like that, so he kept the truth of it to himself. Still, he shamefully opened up like a flower when Mei HanXue descended upon him, mouth soft and demanding. When a hand pushed his head back, baring his throat, and a mouth latched onto his neck, teeth scraping over his Adam's apple, Xue Meng threw all modesty to the wind and moaned weakly, eyes blinking sightlessly at the ceiling.
“He’s so sensitive,” Mei Hanxue said, awed, while his brother was still attacking Xue Meng’s neck. “I hope he stays that way after the novelty of sex wears off.”
“Hmm,” Mei HanXue hummed against Xue Meng’s sensitive skin, making his body erupt in goosebumps.
“S-shut up. Both of you.”
Mei Hanxue snickered right next to them. The older twin pushed himself into a half sitting position and started to untie the belt of Xue Meng’s robes. Xue Meng felt a slight sense of unease, having reached what appeared to be the point of no return, not knowing what to expect on the other side, wanting to continue but being afraid it would be too much or not to his liking.
“We can stop at any time,” Mei Hanxue reassured.
Xue Meng turned his head to the side and the younger twin gave him an encouraging smile. He grimaced.
“I don’t need to be soothed like a maiden.”
“But you are,” Mei HanXue said, having untied the belt but not pushed open the robes it had held fastened together. “Untouched like a maiden.”
He looked at Xue Meng steadily, communicating that he wouldn’t move unless given permission, and Xue Meng closed his eyes before nodding with a jerky movement. He was afraid he would be forced to spell it out, but a second later his robes were being peeled open, exposing his bare torso to the room and to the brothers’ eyes. Xue Meng kept his own closed up until a hand was placed on his abdomen and slid up, stopping just above his sternum, close to his windpipe. A kiss followed, close to that hand, then another, then a tongue licked across his nipple, making him try and sit up with a jolt. He didn’t even process the feeling, just wetness and shock. The hand on his throat kept him down, the pressure it put on his airway making him dizzy with an emotion too disgraceful to name.
He was licked again on the same nipple, then on the other, and then Mei HanXue was closing his lips around the bud and sucking. Xue Meng yelped, wrapping his arms around Mei HanXue's back and digging into his shoulder blades with his fingers curled into claws. If he did not find purchase and tether himself to something, rooted to Mei HanXue’s body, the pleasure would sweep him away. It was a pleasure as viscous and sweet as molasses, and as watery and bitter as medicine. He wanted to get closer and to run away. For it to never stop and for him to be purged from these desires so he'd never have to feel anything like this again. In the end, his wanting won out, and he allowed Mei HanXue his attempt at crawling inside his skin, as Mei Hanxue had once described. Xue Meng understood it now.
The kisses started to move downwards, closer and closer to the top of his pants. Xue Meng stared wide eyed down at the top of Mei HanXue's head, protesting when he dipped his tongue slightly into his navel.
It was Mei Hanxue's turn to interrupt. “You're encroaching on my territory.”
“Maybe I want to do it myself.”
“You can fuck me afterwards and Ziming can watch. See how he likes it.”
While Mei HanXue thought about the offer, he nuzzled the small trail of hair leading down to Xue Meng’s groin. Panicking at his proximity to such a sensitive area, Xue Meng blurted out a snappish comment. “I am not a toy to be passed back and forth.”
Mei Hanxue made a sound as if he was conceding the point.
“I have no such qualms. You can toss me between yourselves whenever you wish.”
The idea was so absurd Xue Meng couldn’t even summon a coherent thought for a moment. Even the non-act of receiving their attentions was almost too much for him; to take a more active stance was beyond the realm of his imagination.
Paying no mind to their exchange, Mei HanXue crawled up his body, which made Xue Meng release the breath he hadn’t realized he’d been holding. They were back to safer waters, to kisses on the mouth, though the vulnerability of being half naked with Mei HanXue fully dressed wasn’t lost on him, his sensitized nipples brushing against the rough wool of Mei HanXue’s outer robes. The eldest twin settled on top of him, not holding himself on his elbows as before, pressing Xue Meng into the mattress with his weight. It restricted his breathing a little, but it was somehow good weight, comforting weight. It grounded him and suffused him with warmth. Nestled in between Xue Meng’s thighs, the last of Mei HanXue’s body came into contact with him as he completely stopped supporting himself with his arms on the bed. Hips aligned, there was no hiding, not with how thin Xue Meng’s pants were, the state of his hardness, but all self-consciousness evaporated when he felt an answering one pushing up against him.
“Why are you hard?!” he screeched.
“Don’t yell,” Mei HanXue grit out. “So are you.”
He thrust forward to demonstrate. Xue Meng’s mouth fell open in a soundless moan, eyes going half-lidded. At the receptive response, Mei HanXue did it again, slowly, gaze intent on the facial expressions Xue Meng made as he ground up against him. Then, with the care of a prowling fox, he nuzzled at Xue Meng’s neck and jaw until Xue Meng yielded and lifted his chin a little to give him more room. Having his neck kissed while Mei HanXue rutted against him was, apparently, more than he could handle. His splayed legs wrapped around Mei HanXue's hips, trying to keep him near, while he began to move in tandem with him. His hands grabbed large fistfuls of Mei HanXue in abandon—arms, back, robes. When heat started to coalesce in his pelvis and he felt on the precipice of something immense, Mei HanXue stopped.
Xue Meng looked up at him with hazy, betrayed eyes.
“Why’d you stop,” he said, voice almost thick enough to be called a slur.
Instead of replying, Mei HanXue moved from on top of him, laying beside Xue Meng on the bed. Mei Hanxue was on him the next second, settling between his legs and giving him a gentle kiss on the lips. It did little to calm Xue Meng down. Mei Hanxue made his way downwards, fondling and mouthing at Xue Meng’s body, until he was at the waistband of his pants, looking up at Xue Meng.
He hooked his fingers on the material, though he didn’t pull.
“Can I? I want to put my mouth on you.”
“On my—!” Xue Meng could barely process a thought in his state of shock.
Mei Hanxue waited for many seconds while Xue Meng got himself under control. He was still reeling from Mei HanXue's attentions and their abrupt withdrawal, and now Mei Hanxue spoke of putting his mouth on…!
Xue Meng crossed his arms over his head, elbows covering his eyes, so he could nod without exploding with embarrassment. A close-mouthed kiss was pressed to the place underneath his belly button, quick and fleeting, before his pants were tugged down.
His cock sprung up, and, as the chill of the room touched his sensitive skin, he shivered, some precome dripping from the slit.
“Look at you,” Mei Hanxue whispered to himself, sliding his hand up and down Xue Meng’s abs soothingly.
Xue Meng exhaled, trying to relax his wound up muscles underneath the touch. Some self-conscious part of him thought that there wasn’t much to look at, but that wasn’t up to him to decide, was it? If, somehow, he was pleasing to their eyes… if they were choosing to have him and keep him in this way… then who was he to question?
The hand left his stomach, and two held him down by the hips. The following second, a wet and hot stripe was being licked up his length, and Xue Meng let his arms fall away from his face to glare down, scandalized, at Mei Hanxue. Mei Hanxue wasn’t looking at him, however, lashes lowered, and repeated his action twice more before taking the tip of Xue Meng’s cock into his mouth. Xue Meng groaned deep in his chest, throwing his head back and trying to thrust up into that welcoming heat. Mei Hanxue’s strong grip held him down, pinned, and Xue Meng tried to push up against it again more because of the way the restriction made him feel than out of a need to bury himself deeper.
Mei Hanxue’s tongue played with his foreskin, dipping ever so slightly underneath. It sent a bolt of lightning through Xue Meng’s veins, making his whole body jerk uncontrollably, but Mei Hanxue let up in the next second, much to his relief and disappointment. Mei Hanxue suckled and teased the tip of his cock some more before taking him further in, hollowing his cheeks around him.
Xue Meng’s hands shot out to hold onto Mei Hanxue, but stopped just before touching him. It was as if he weren’t allowed, on his back with his legs opened like an offering, while Mei Hanxue feasted on him. To touch without permission would not only be far too revealing of Xue Meng’s hunger, but also a liberty he felt was not in his place to take.
“You can grab him by the hair, force yourself down his throat,” Mei HanXue said by his side. “He likes it.”
The vibrations around his cock from Mei Hanxue’s moan almost undid Xue Meng. His heels dragged across the bedsheets uselessly, legs falling open even wider on either side of Mei Hanxue’s head. One of Mei Hanxue’s hands moved from Xue Meng’s hips to his inner thighs, stroking and scratching at the thin skin in wordless approval. Xue Meng’s wide eyed, horrified gaze fell on the older twin, who he found already staring back at him with something dark and smug in his expression.
Instead of saying anything, he grabbed Xue Meng’s hand and placed it on top of his brother's head. Xue Meng first petted at the smooth strands, marveling at the contrast between his milky pale skin and the blond of Mei Hanxue's hair. He then grabbed a fistful of hair, but rather than ‘force himself’ as instructed, he just let Mei Hanxue go at his own pace. It felt too good, the sight of his cock stretching Mei Hanxue’s mouth wide was too filthy, and the tinge of red in Mei Hanxue’s cheeks was too enticing. If Xue Meng allowed himself to push and pull and take what he wanted, he was afraid he’d never be able to stop.
After a few minutes of exquisite torture, Mei Hanxue stopped moving with Xue Meng’s cock buried to the hilt in his mouth. His eyes were watering, but one of his eyebrows raised in challenge, like he was saying that he would not move unless Xue Meng manned up and made him.
Xue Meng did.
Unrestrained sounds, small ‘ah ah ah’s and bitten-off groans escaped Xue Meng’s throat despite his best attempts at holding them back. He guided Mei Hanxue up and down his cock, Mei Hanxue’s tongue doing something impish and mind blowing inside his mouth. When Xue Meng got too lost in it and shoved himself so far down that Mei Hanxue choked, he pulled off to pant breathlessly and cough a little against Xue Meng’s groin.
“Hold him down,” he said raspily. The gravel in his voice reverberated down Xue Meng’s spine like the earth was shaking underneath.
With what little was left of his wit, Xue Meng asked, “Sorry, are you hurt?”
He was ignored by the twins. Mei Hanxue took him back into his mouth and Mei HanXue took Xue Meng’s hand out of Mei Hanxue’s hair, pinning him down with his wrists over his head. It was an unbearably vulnerable position, but Xue Meng was the most turned on he’d ever been in his life. Mei Hanxue had redoubled his efforts as well, and soon Xue Meng was tossing his head from side to side, whimpering as he felt himself nearing the crest of something foreboding and dangerous.
When he was about to vibrate out of his skin, sounds reaching a crescendo, Mei Hanxue pulled off his cock, making him cry out at the loss. Before he could mourn it for long, though, he was grabbed by the back of his thighs, legs thrown over his own body so he was folded in half, and Mei Hanxue was licking a wide stripe from his hole, across his taint, all the way to the base of his cock. Xue Meng convulsed against Mei HanXue’s grip and came all over his own stomach, screaming.
The world whited out for a blissful few moments. Waves of sensation echoed from his groin all the way to his fingertips, to his skull, relaxing him more than any meditation, any sleep. His back, which had arched until only his shoulder blades were touching the bed, slowly melted back into the mattress, and he opened his eyes with a reedy sigh. It was the first time he had ever orgasmed. He had heard about it, of course, but had never experienced it until then, never having felt desire until recently and always suppressing any inkling of an urge with meditation and spiritual energy. He now knew why no one ever shut up about it. He owed his cousin an apology.
Mei HanXue said, “Ziming,” letting go of Xue Meng’s hands, and his voice was so strained and wound up it was a miracle he hadn’t snapped.
“Hmm.”
Xue Meng was floating in the clouds. He would let them do anything to him.
Mei Hanxue licked across his stained stomach and he didn’t even complain. It was filthy and disgusting and could be nothing other than the action of a degenerate, but he just laid there and allowed it to happen.
When Mei Hanxue went down to his cock again, though, one of Xue Meng’s legs kicked out in shock. The feeling was like prodding at an exposed nerve. Nonetheless, Mei Hanxue insisted and took Xue Meng’s spent cock back into his mouth, suckling leisurely, a devious gleam in his eyes.
Xue Meng used his newly freed hands to try and push Mei Hanxue away. Mei Hanxue shrugged off his weak attempts like a dog annoyed at an unwelcome pet to the head, pushing the boundaries of his oversensitivity with sadistic glee. Mei HanXue grabbed Xue Meng’s arms again, and he was worked past his limit, letting out wounded whiny noises.
Finally, Mei Hanxue eased off, mouth swollen and unrepentant as he smiled down at Xue Meng’s twitching body and tear-streaked face.
“You overdid it,” Mei HanXue said, voice rough. “It was his first time.”
“You’d have done worse, you hypocrite.”
Mei HanXue grabbed Mei Hanxue by the upper arm and threw him in the bed next to Xue Meng. It was rough and violent, rougher than any of them had treated him at any point, and he found he was not entirely opposed to being manhandled like that as long as he never had to ask for it. Not now, though… now he was too sleepy and spent to think about engaging in anything like that again… for the foreseeable future…
He closed his eyes briefly, dozing for a few moments. The twins were still going at each other next to him, kissing and tearing each other’s clothes off.
“Frisky, are you?” Mei Hanxue panted in between kisses.
“Shut,” Mei HanXue grunted, “up.”
Xue Meng blinked his eyes open and stared at them with more curiosity than arousal as they stripped each other bare. They looked beautiful beyond his wildest dreams, naked and entangled. When Mei HanXue procured a vial of a clear substance from his discarded robes, he asked,
“What's that?”
“Lubricant.”
It was Mei Hanxue who replied. Mei HanXue hadn't even looked his way when addressed. Xue Meng frowned a little, upset despite himself, usual defenses torn down by his afterglow and expression even more open than usual.
Mei Hanxue noticed his hurt feelings in his countenance.
“He can't even bear to look at you right now,” Mei Hanxue whispered mischievously. “He does that sometimes, when he's overwhelmed but can't do anything about it.”
Hearing his brother’s words, Mei HanXue glanced at Xue Meng briefly, jaw clenched and eyes red-rimmed. He averted his gaze all too quickly, though Xue Meng wanted to keep it on him just a little while longer—it felt like being hit by a wall of fire just as much as it felt like an accomplishment—but the older twin looked back at his brother underneath him. He uncorked the vial and poured some of the liquid onto his fingers, spreading his own knees wider so that Mei Hanxue would be forced to open his legs further to fit him in between. Mei HanXue took advantage of that and reached underneath his brother's body, pressing his fingers into the place Mei Hanxue had licked on Xue Meng.
As Xue Meng stared, transfixed, at Mei Hanxue getting fingered, he paid attention for the first time to the twins’ cocks. As the rest of their bodies were, theirs were identical to one another, pale and thick and long and flushed a dark pink. They were far too big, Xue Meng noticed with something akin to horror, and he couldn’t imagine how in the world Mei HanXue’s would fit inside of his brother, how any of theirs would fit inside him, but saliva pooled in his mouth just the same. He couldn’t deny he found them pretty. He couldn’t deny some part of him felt deprived and bullied, wronged, since they’d gotten to touch him but he hadn’t been allowed to touch as well. He wanted to wrap his fingers around them. He wanted to put one in his mouth, like Mei Hanxue had done for him—he slid his jaw from side to side, feeling the phantom stretch and aching for it.
Mei Hanxue was unabashed by his enjoyment of penetration. His sounds poured out without any attempt to muffle them or hold them back, and he rocked his hips down to meet Mei HanXue’s fingers, forcing them deeper and harder inside himself. The flush he’d had on his cheeks when he’d been sucking off Xue Meng had spread, taking over his entire face, and wisps of hair were stuck to his face and neck with sweat, turning a light brown. Xue Meng brushed them off, touch just shy of a caress.
Xue Meng had little to no knowledge of sex, but even he could tell that Mei HanXue was skilled. He was stunning on top of Mei Hanxue, muscles gleaming with sweat, arc of his spine sinuous. His hair was thrown over one shoulder, thankfully the one on his other side, so his face wasn’t hidden from Xue Meng’s sight. It was a beautiful, heady thing to witness his desire. It was even headier to be the object of it, he could understand why Mei Hanxue was so smug all of the time.
Eventually, Mei HanXue slid his fingers out with a squelch, Mei Hanxue letting out a forlorn sound at the emptiness. Xue Meng went a little crazy about it. Wanted to offer to stuff his fingers in him while Mei HanXue prepared himself. But before long Mei HanXue had already slicked himself up and had positioned his cock against Mei Hanxue’s hole, and Xue Meng sat up to have a better view, limbs no longer feeling liquefied.
Mei Hanxue made the most beautiful sounds, Xue Meng was coming to find out. A whole range of them, and he wanted to catalog them all inside his mind at some point. When Mei HanXue entered him, he made this soft exhale, a relieved sigh, like he was being finally released from an enormous pain, like his world had been set to rights. Like he’d been born missing something, empty, and Mei HanXue inside him was all he’d ever needed to be complete.
Unlike their kisses, they fucked with tenderness. Brows pressed together, Mei Hanxue whispering soft words into Mei HanXue’s ear, Mei HanXue rolling his hips languidly into him—a slowness that came coupled with a dirty, forceful shove at the end of Mei HanXue’s strokes. Xue Meng laid back down to watch it, feeling as content and spoiled as a cat basking in the sun.
“Put me on my stomach,” Mei Hanxue said. “I want to see Ziming.”
Although Xue Meng knew that he must mean something to them, something romantic, Mei Hanxue’s words still flustered him. Mei HanXue pulled out and backed away to give his brother room to turn around. The youngest twin pressed his chest to the bed and raised his hips, a position so wanton and shameless that Xue Meng felt like he was about to qi deviate. Mei HanXue crowded in behind Mei Hanxue, gripping his hips with his long-fingered, elegant pipa player hands. When he entered his brother again, his eyes slid shut for a moment, face slack in bliss an unfairly attractive look on him.
This way, Xue Meng had a much better view of both of them. Mei Hanxue was staring up at him, though he sometimes seemed to be looking through him, lost in his pleasure as he was. His back, bent into that impossible shape, was beautiful, trapezius muscles thrown into sharp relief, shoulders wide, waist tapered. His raised ass, that he offered to Mei HanXue so readily, was the most incomprehensible part of him. Xue Meng wanted to get closer, maybe have a look at where they were joined, run his thumb through them, but he knew that he was unworthy. He could only watch from a distance, captivated.
Mei HanXue picked up speed, going harder and faster than before.
“You’re next,” Mei Hanxue told him, half-lidded eyes trained on Xue Meng’s reddening face. His voice was tremulous, quivering slightly as his body was pushed up on the sheets with every thrust from his brother.
“Didi,” Mei HanXue moaned, and his gaze flitted to Xue Meng and stayed. His hips lost their fluidity, jackrabbiting erratically then stopping, before he regained his control.
That reaction emboldened Xue Meng. Feeling a little self-conscious but a lot like he was poking a sleeping tiger with a short stick, Xue Meng asked around a dry throat, “Won’t you?”
Mei HanXue inhaled sharply, but said nothing. Mei Hanxue spoke instead, rushed,
“Don’t worry, if he won’t I will, I’ve been waiting for so long, Ziming, I—”
Mei HanXue grabbed him by the hair and pulled, vicious. Mei Hanxue's throat bobbed, choking on a scream, the grip on his hair forcing his body into a nearly unsustainable bow.
“You will shut up and take it,” Mei HanXue said in a harsh tone, almost a growl. “Awful slut. I'll tie you up next time and fuck him in front of you so you can't touch anyone, not even yourself.”
The uncharacteristic vulgarity in his words set Xue Meng's blood ablaze. He could feel his cock stirring back to life against his hip, but it was a mild urge he was intent on ignoring. He was far too worn out for anything else tonight. But it did paint a nice picture… Mei Hanxue watching them, pulling against reinforced ropes helplessly, while all of Mei HanXue’s single-minded attention and skill were focused on Xue Meng. He would like that, he thought.
Though Mei HanXue had barely addressed Xue Meng or touched him after Mei Hanxue began to use his mouth on him, he came with his eyes fixed on Xue Meng’s, not closing them or looking away for one second. He held eye contact while his hips moved with aborted thrusts, emptying himself into his twin brother. Xue Meng squirmed in place, overwhelmed by the intimacy of it, the way it felt like he held a knife to Mei HanXue’s throat and his life in the palms of his hands. There was something violent about it, not Mei HanXue—he seemed, for a moment, as helpless and guileless as a newborn fawn—but the feelings it elicited in Xue Meng. He wanted to sink his teeth into it, though he wasn’t sure what ‘it’ was. It was a senseless craving that could never be satisfied, not even if he consumed Mei HanXue whole.
Mei Hanxue came as well, face pressed into the sheets and hidden from view, the quietest he’d been ever since they began. Even with a cock in his mouth he hadn’t been so silent. Once Mei HanXue had released his hair, caught in the throes of his orgasm, Mei Hanxue had collapsed like a puppet whose strings had been cut, burying his face in the mattress. Xue Meng had wanted to see him coming, know if he furrowed his brow before his whole face went slack like his brother did, but at least he’d been able to focus on Mei HanXue completely as he came.
He let them recover on their own, Mei HanXue pressing small kisses along Mei Hanxue’s back and neck and rolling him back to his front. Mei Hanxue was a mess, stomach streaked with his own come, face and chest blotchy and wet, sweaty and teary. They kissed, long and sweet, and not for the first time Xue Meng felt a slight ache in his chest, wondering how it was like to have one so close to one’s heart. He loved them, but they were barely even his lovers yet. Would he and the twins ever get close to that level of familiarity? Or was what he yearned for out of his reach entirely?
“Get over here,” Mei Hanxue rasped, stretching out a limp hand in his direction. Xue Meng couldn’t help but glance at Mei HanXue with apprehension, not wanting to intrude, but the older twin said, “Don’t be ridiculous,” and pulled him in himself.
Xue Meng decided now was not the time for such worries.
Mei Hanxue was a little too wrung out to do much more than kiss half-heartedly, but Mei HanXue pulled Xue Meng to his lap, noticing he was half hard, and jerked him off with one hand on his dick and the other groping his ass shamelessly. Xue Meng, embarrassingly, couldn’t help but move his hips, fucking himself into Mei HanXue’s fist, and neither could he stop the keening under his breath when Mei HanXue dipped his fingertips a little too deeply in between his asscheeks, grazing his hole. He came again like that, moaning against Mei HanXue’s lips, and found that he was even more senseless and malleable than after the first. When Mei HanXue pressed a bit of his come into Xue Meng’s mouth, he only grumbled a little before sucking his fingers clean.
After they had all exhausted themselves fully, laying in a tangle of limbs that would surely get uncomfortable very soon, Xue Meng contemplated his position in their relationship. He’d been the only one who had declared his love, no matter if unwillingly and by accident. As for the twins, they hadn’t said much, only proclaiming that he was forbidden from marrying anyone else. But that had to mean something, right?
“Are we… together now?” he asked awkwardly, not knowing how to phrase it properly. “I mean. Me and you two. Like the two of you are.”
“Yes,” Mei HanXue said, with no further explanation. Just yes. He leaned over Mei Hanxue’s body and put his lips on Xue Meng’s facial scar, more a nuzzle than a kiss.
“Isn’t it weird? I’ve never seen three people. Do it.”
Mei Hanxue laughed tiredly, lifting one of Xue Meng’s hands to his face and giving his palm a kiss. “You only live once. Might as well live as we want to.” He hummed. “Though, to be fair, the three of us have been known to get a second chance.”
They had, hadn’t they?
They were in an inn in a village that had been set up in what used to be the Rufeng Sect. The fires had burned everything to dust, until nothing remained to hold the land in place once the rain came. According to the villagers, there had been flash flooding and mudslides, and storms of dust and ash when the wind blew. However, of the refugees that managed to escape to the surrounding sects, many were not well received, the resources of the cities that had welcomed them stretched thin. As a result of the poor reception, some chose to go back to the desolate land they had escaped.
Thankfully, the rain that had continued the destruction that the fire started also breathed life back into the remaining landscape, allowing new vegetation to grow in the charred areas. Seeds stored in the forest floor began to germinate. Some new trees began to sprout branches from the buds of dead ones.
The people came back.
They existed in a liminal space. Belonging to no sect, and even worse, remnants of one the cultivation world saw with distrustful eyes, there was no one willing to help them. Since the small oases where they chose to settle, mostly around bodies of water, were each far away from the others, the Rufeng remnants were also isolated from one another and had difficulty asking for help from those who might sympathize. Their only hope was rogues if they ever met trouble of the spiritual kind, of which the healing land was full to the brim with, after so many people had died horrific deaths. It was ripe ground for resentful ghosts, ghouls, yaoguai, amongst other things.
Xue Meng and the twins had decided that they would go to every settlement and village, offering their assistance to all those in need, no matter how long it took. For a while, they would get even less in terms of payment than they usually did, but the villages who were facing trouble were happy to house and feed them, and the rest they could do without for as long as they were staying in what had once been Rufeng.
They had only been doing it for a little over a week and this was the second village they visited. Mei HanXue was reading outside, something about the rising sun always putting him in a poetry mood. Xue Meng wasn't one for poetry, but even he could admit that the sight of the barren land slowly filling with life put one in an introspective mood.
Mei Hanxue was writing something on the desk, which was unusual, but Xue Meng didn’t ask, deciding to allow him his secrets. As the only one doing nothing, he found that the weather was good enough for some training, and decided to grab his fan. He was walking past Mei Hanxue to do so when his axis tilted and he fell over a solid form.
“Yeep!”
Mei Hanxue had grabbed him by the elbow and pulled him into his lap. It was undignified, but they did it all the time, whether during sex or casually like this. And, as always, he protested out of principle.
“What are you doing?! Unhand me before I separate your arms from your torso!”
He cursed and threatened some more, settling down after what he thought was an appropriate amount of squirming and complaining. Mei Hanxue paid him no mind, simply holding him in place with a secure arm around the waist, his other hand busy writing the letter.
Once he was done, Xue Meng gave in to his curiosity and read its contents. If Mei Hanxue didn't want him to read the letter, then he shouldn't have put Xue Meng right in front of it.
Younger, dumber me,
This humble one prays this letter reaches you well. Is Sisheng Peak flourishing as Mengmeng so proudly proclaimed it would? It is my sincere hope that it is. Now I am standing on what used to be Rufeng Sect soil [...]
Xue Meng skimmed over the descriptions of the village and their project in the once-Rufeng to help the former refugees.
However, I write to you for more than to simply update you on the goings-on of our lives, though I would appreciate it if you could request reinforcements from your Ziming, if Sisheng can spare it. Any assistance from Kunlun, of course, is also more than welcome.
The true reason for my correspondence with you is a recent, significant change in my personal life, one that I think you will be quite interested in. Remember when we discussed briefly how my life had stagnated in a way quite similar to yours, with no gege and no Xue Ziming? That has since then changed. I have not only one, but both of them, and it is everything we dreamed of and more. I have never been happier.
Do not give up on your ge, or even on your Ziming. Our brother loves us a great deal, you know that, and it took us a near death experience, but he will come around, as mine did. Ziming bloomed like a flower, opened up to life, to affection, to the marginal existence of loving without being able to express it outdoors, something we and our brother have been familiar with for a long time. Give him space, but also a nudge. Charm him, but, if I may suggest a course of action, not while falling into bed with women, lest he think you are not serious.
Gege is still as delightful as ever. More, even, forceful and confident. Time has aged him like good wine: there is no greater bliss than that found in his arms. I try not to think too hard about whom he practiced with. Both of us went our separate ways, but it has led us here. It will always be worth it.
Do not hate me too much for bedding my Xue Ziming before you. I will sense it if you are cursing me all the way from the Kunlun mountains. To keep you company on lonely nights, here is a delicious tidbit of information about him. If you ignore his tears and force him past overstimulation, he can go again and again. So far, his record is at five, but me and ge are determined to push him further and farther. At some point, his spend comes out watery, it is the most beautiful thing. I hope you get to witness—and taste—it one day.
I will await your reply. Send it to Yellow Leaf village, in Bitan Sect, as it is the closest town with a post house.
Yours,
The best Mei Hanxue
Xue Meng blushed furiously and tried to push Mei Hanxue away, only to have his face peppered with small kisses. He refused to be mollified, still burning with rage and horror at the contents of the letter.
“There is no way in hell you are sending that.”
The recipient might be another version of Mei Hanxue, which made it ever so slightly less mortifying. But still the words alone had him on the verge of exploding! Mei Hanxue should have just said they were together, restored the young man's hope, and left it at that. Not whatever… that was.
He was trying to titillate his other self. Entice him with fantasies about Xue Meng. That was too depraved a suggestion, even for Mei Hanxue's standards. It was going too far, Xue Meng couldn't accept it, even taking into account the lewd acts he'd performed and the concessions he'd made ever since he and the twins got together.
“You didn't see him when we left Sisheng Peak, Ziming. He was heartbroken. When I told him I had neither of you, it was like he wilted, like life was drained out of him.”
Xue Meng felt a pang of sorrow hearing those words.
He had suffered for the twins. Not for long, since they caught on, confronted him and dragged the truth out of him kicking and screaming, but he did, and it had been unbearably painful. Excruciating beyond most of the pains he'd felt—every single physical one, and most emotional ones. Something he would not wish upon anyone. Especially not someone he loved.
The young Mei Hanxue might not be his Mei Hanxue, but he was a Mei Hanxue, so did that not make him Xue Meng's too, in a sense?
“Can I write a little message for him?”
“So that I can send it?” Mei Hanxue asked, joyful.
Xue Meng sent him a look, but his lack of denial meant an affirmative. He picked up the brush, dipped it in ink, and wrote:
The second best thing I did in my life was to never learn how to give up. It served me well in the other world. It allowed me to bring my enemies to reckoning.
The best thing I did was to never learn to know when I had already given up. It saved me in this world. Had I realized how lost I truly was, I would not have allowed myself the time to find myself, and the older you and the older Mei HanXue would not have been given the opportunity to light a fire to help guide me.
If ever you find yourself feeling as though the world has no place for you, be dumb. It is just possible that something truly great sneaks up on you.
Pages Navigation
kaos_sparrow on Chapter 1 Sun 31 Dec 2023 01:26PM UTC
Comment Actions
contranarciso on Chapter 1 Sun 07 Jan 2024 09:20PM UTC
Comment Actions
oXCheeseburgerMilkshakeXo on Chapter 1 Mon 01 Jan 2024 03:42PM UTC
Comment Actions
contranarciso on Chapter 1 Sun 07 Jan 2024 09:22PM UTC
Comment Actions
oXCheeseburgerMilkshakeXo on Chapter 1 Sun 07 Jan 2024 09:33PM UTC
Comment Actions
alatyr13 on Chapter 1 Sun 24 Aug 2025 08:20PM UTC
Comment Actions
litorea on Chapter 2 Fri 19 Jan 2024 12:03AM UTC
Comment Actions
contranarciso on Chapter 2 Mon 22 Jan 2024 04:03AM UTC
Comment Actions
alatyr13 on Chapter 2 Sun 24 Aug 2025 09:10PM UTC
Comment Actions
litorea on Chapter 3 Mon 22 Jan 2024 11:50AM UTC
Comment Actions
contranarciso on Chapter 3 Sat 23 Mar 2024 03:02AM UTC
Comment Actions
oXCheeseburgerMilkshakeXo on Chapter 3 Tue 23 Jan 2024 05:21PM UTC
Comment Actions
contranarciso on Chapter 3 Sat 23 Mar 2024 03:06AM UTC
Comment Actions
y_ooniii on Chapter 3 Mon 29 Jul 2024 05:45PM UTC
Comment Actions
alatyr13 on Chapter 3 Mon 25 Aug 2025 01:07AM UTC
Comment Actions
<3 (Guest) on Chapter 4 Sat 23 Mar 2024 11:53AM UTC
Comment Actions
contranarciso on Chapter 4 Tue 26 Mar 2024 11:11PM UTC
Comment Actions
litorea on Chapter 4 Sat 23 Mar 2024 12:46PM UTC
Comment Actions
contranarciso on Chapter 4 Tue 26 Mar 2024 11:24PM UTC
Comment Actions
oXCheeseburgerMilkshakeXo on Chapter 4 Sat 23 Mar 2024 08:11PM UTC
Comment Actions
contranarciso on Chapter 4 Tue 26 Mar 2024 11:26PM UTC
Comment Actions
litorea on Chapter 5 Tue 26 Mar 2024 07:51PM UTC
Comment Actions
contranarciso on Chapter 5 Sat 13 Apr 2024 10:28PM UTC
Comment Actions
oXCheeseburgerMilkshakeXo on Chapter 5 Wed 27 Mar 2024 02:49AM UTC
Comment Actions
contranarciso on Chapter 5 Sat 13 Apr 2024 10:31PM UTC
Comment Actions
Muvry on Chapter 5 Mon 15 Apr 2024 01:26PM UTC
Comment Actions
mojo_borahae on Chapter 5 Sun 16 Jun 2024 12:13AM UTC
Comment Actions
alatyr13 on Chapter 5 Mon 25 Aug 2025 02:17AM UTC
Comment Actions
Guest (Guest) on Chapter 6 Sat 13 Apr 2024 05:53PM UTC
Comment Actions
contranarciso on Chapter 6 Sat 13 Apr 2024 10:39PM UTC
Comment Actions
litorea on Chapter 6 Sat 13 Apr 2024 06:06PM UTC
Last Edited Sat 13 Apr 2024 06:35PM UTC
Comment Actions
contranarciso on Chapter 6 Sat 13 Apr 2024 11:09PM UTC
Comment Actions
clouds_hide on Chapter 6 Sun 31 Aug 2025 05:37PM UTC
Comment Actions
Pages Navigation