Work Text:
“Look away, Qing-er,” his mother urges, her hand a quiet woollen shape against his back.
His fifth winter is long and indifferent. He cranes his head around her arm, padded with layers and layers of hemp. He doesn’t see much of the man tucked under logs of wood – only his bare legs peeking out, gaunt and mottled-blue.
“It’s Fang-shu shu,” he says, blinking up at her.
When Mu Qing speaks there is smoke coming out from his mouth – a little chimney, his mother had teased earlier that morning as he huffed and puffed over the thin congee in his bowl. He liked that it was warm, keeping his hands cupped around the clay bowl long after he had finished the last bits of maize. He made his mother hold it too, her larger hands resting around his.
“I know, Qing-er,” his mother is saying, voice tight. “Look away, children shouldn’t be seeing this.”
The streets are hardly deserted, people trickling steadily into the morning markets to make ends meet and haggle for the sake of it. There’s snow on the cobbled road, and more shavings of ice drifting down. He catches it on the tip of his nose and shivers. The air is cold, clean, and stinging. He can barely smell anything.
“Let’s keep moving, yes?”
He takes her hand. “He’s dead, mama.”
She drags him along. “Yes.”
“We gave him a quilt,” he says. He sewed along the hems for practice.
“I know, Qing-er.”
“It didn’t help?”
She pauses, tugging him out of the way of a peddler. “It did, do you remember what he said?”
He nods. “Fang-shu shu said thank you. And he said I was very obedient.”
“Yes, our Qing-er is very obedient and kind.”
They’re some distance away from the pile of logs. He keeps up with her even, slightly hurried pace.
“Is he in a better place?” Mu Qing asks.
Someone balancing three baskets in one hand passes them by. A waiter of the restaurant is lazily setting up banners to his right. His mother tightens her grip on him.
“Let’s stop by the temple, okay?” his mother says, a pinched smile on her face. “We’ll pray for him.”
He nods quickly. “Fang-shu shu said he’ll be an ox in his next life!”
There’s a stutter in her footsteps, and he almost trips on a chipped stone in the path.
“Come on, Qing-er,” she says, with some rallying cheer. “We don’t have all morning.”
The next thing he knows, he’s back in his tent – a thick, iron stench – as though he’d never left it. Xian Le’s war.
It’s a furnace here, even for Mu Qing, and he feels like a frog boiled alive. There’s a threat in this heat, even as the carnage of groans and moans outside become muffled by the heavy leather of the canvas.
It’s palpable. It feels a little too vivid to be a memory marred by centuries.
“General,” a soldier calls, and even the hint of a Xian Le tongue is enough to stir something in him. “We have the new recruits lined outside.”
He has a suspicion, but it feels foolish to call it foul play at this stage. His feet are heavy, like he’s pushing against the sluggish resistance of water.
“Understood, I’m coming,” Mu Qing says. He’s surprised by how easily it rolls of his tongue, light.
When he exits his tent, he sees the line.
There he is. Hua Cheng, now a mere boy with bandages over his face. He’s almost at the end of the line; the boys before and after him are almost his height. Mu Qing scoffs internally – sharp as always, even as a child.
But Mu Qing knows. And Mu Qing remembers what he had to do. If this is his memory, a nasty prank by his mind, then he might as well get it over with.
He kicks him out of the line up. Hua Cheng protests. Mu Qing is harsh, cold and cruel. Hua Cheng’s eyes are wide. Mu Qing turns his heels on him.
Hua Cheng, as expected, sneaks into the army regardless. Hua Cheng dies, an arrow lodged in his chest. It is red, and no one can tell where blood begins and where red oak ends. Mu Qing sees it happen.
He is too far from them.
Mu Qing looks away, slashes at yet another enemy attempting to reach Xie Lian. It’s useless; no one can reach Xie Lian anyway. Xie Lian dances, sword easy and brave.
But Mu Qing slashes, and cuts, and slices, and sees nothing but the thick sludge of war.
That night, they reconvene, they strategise; he calls Feng Xin an idiot for proposing a pincer attack when their numbers are almost evenly matched, the new recruits haven’t had enough training, he might as well paint targets on their faces.
He breathes, and a soldier is calling out to him.
“General,” he says, and Mu Qing’s heart lurches. “We have the new recruits lined outside.”
He’s back in his stifling tent, brown leather thick and muffling. There are bandages on his bed.
“Coming,” he says.
He’s pushing past oceans.
Hua Cheng is the fifteenth boy, surrounded by the two shorter members of the line-up. Mu Qing breathes.
He is harsh, biting and cruel.
Hua Cheng sneaks onto the frontlines. They’re all screaming the same, desperate chant: “Your Royal Highness, to die for you in battle is my greatest honour.”
Hua Cheng’s voice doesn’t falter; not even as an arrow pierces through him. Red oak.
Mu Qing looks away. The same enemy, the same chest plate scratched open. He aims for the neck, as he did before. It is practice made perfect – no one reaches Xie Lian.
The third time Mu Qing opens his eyes, he sees the bandages on his bed, and the small basin of bloodied water at the base of his bed. A soldier calls him General, says, the new recruits are lined outside.
The fourth time, the soldier calls him General. His name is Chen Guokang. He grew up in the slums, only a year or two younger than Mu Qing. He joined the guards, and did well for himself.
The seventh time, Mu Qing remembers this: Chen Guokang will die in the next wave, trampled by a horse, an arrow lodged in his shoulder. As his direct supervisor, Mu Qing will sign off on the consolatory letter to be delivered to his family: he died in battle with the greatest honour.
Another foot soldier will insert a lock of Chen Guokang’s hair and his bracelet in the package. They will burn his body at the pit ten li to the East of this camp.
The ninth time, he catches the way Chen Guokang is favouring his left - turning a second too slow to face him. The boys in the lineup all look too small for their age, their arms bare and unguarded. Some of them look eager, some of them nervous.
Hua Cheng is resolved. When he shakes, it is with the force of his entire body.
The fighting is the easy part, and his mind knows it. His instincts are honed by phantom experience, but his body is too slow. It cannot perform, and Mu Qing never has time. Not like this, trapped in his mortal body while his godly mind churns and wrings and fails.
All he can do is will his mortal limbs to work, and at the very least they never stray off course – Hua Cheng will die, Mu Qing will be far away and Mu Qing will slash at the soldier with a chipped Yong’an crest on his chest, and Mu Qing will look away and there will always be another charging soldier.
All that to say – this is likely a curse, a never-ending nightmare of sorts. But none of it makes sense; this isn’t Mu Qing’s cross to bear, this isn’t the weakest chink in Mu Qing’s armour, the darkest shame of his heart. He has nothing to fear here, nothing to resent. It is just war, and it is just fighting, and Mu Qing is just doing what he does best.
The repetition wears at him.
He looks at Chen Guokang this time, and the name falls from his mouth, “Zhao Meiyan.”
Chen Guokang does a double-take. This reaction, so new and so, so terribly young, feels like a win. Mu Qing knows her too – Zhao Meiyan, two years younger than Chen Guokang, an eager lass who gave up before she learned how to properly embroider from Mu Qing’s mother. Zhao Meiyan, who was far more talented with braiding scraps of leather into fashionable bracelets.
“Yes… General,” Chen Guokang flushes uncomfortably, but then he’s lowering into a bow. “I- this one shouldn’t be distracted on the battlefield!”
“That’s not-”
“To die for his Royal Highness in battle is our greatest honour!” Chen Guokang is shouting. It in turn inspires the recruits outside to follow suit.
All their voices smothered, smothering. Mu Qing takes a deep breath – aged leather and dirt and the carnival of hot-headed foolishness. Mu Qing feels like he’s just been speared by a feint. Maybe this is his curse.
It is not enough to kill him.
Mu Qing steps past Chen Guokang – still in a stiff bow – and out into the sun.
Hua Cheng dies. Mu Qing looks away. Behind the falling enemy soldiers, more of Xian Le’s own soldiers are shot down like flies, or crushed like ants. There’s so much sand.
It is inevitable. It is blind. Mu Qing hates that he remembers which of his children, his peers, were enlisted. Mu Qing hates that he can’t distinguish their sprawled, stacked bodies – all of them in Xian Le’s signature armour, uniformly discarded in death.
Mu Qing does not tell Chen Guokang, “Think of her.”
Mu Qing does not tell Chen Guokang, “Take care of yourself for her.”
“You will die out there,” Mu Qing says, and his voice is so calm it surprises himself.
Hua Cheng glares at him. “I won’t. And even if I do, I’ll take as many bastards down with me.”
Mu Qing doesn’t disagree. He stares at the sand-covered thatch of the other tent. It’s bleached white in several spots by the sun. “And you think your god will be grateful for your meagre sacrifice – as if he couldn’t singlehandedly eliminate the same in the blink of an eye?”
Hua Cheng yells, “I won’t leave him alone! I’ll never leave him alone! You’re just jealous because he said I’m better than you with the sabre!”
“Oh please,” Mu Qing scoffs, rolling his eyes. “He only said you had potential.”
“I won’t leave him!” Hua Cheng’s balled his hands into fists.
“With your shoddy skills, with your age, you’ll die before the second charge.”
Hua Cheng shouts, “It is my greatest honour to die in battle for my god! I won’t leave him, not even if I’m dead!”
Mu Qing is so sick of this. He wants to laugh.
“Perhaps,” Mu Qing says, shading his eyes against the sun now. “Is it his greatest honour to have a child die for him in war?”
Hua Cheng falters.
“Leave,” Mu Qing says, final.
Hua Cheng, obnoxious in his determination, dies on the battlefield. Mu Qing watches him fall – the same trajectory, the same shocked gasp of his mouth.
He tamps it down, that twinge in his chest – he has no pity for Crimson Rain. Maybe this is Crimson Rain’s nightmare, and Mu Qing is slated to play villain forever, even here. It doesn’t matter. Hua Cheng will die, and Mu Qing will breathe, and Mu Qing will wake up to another world where Hua Cheng is alive again and Mu Qing is just another passing marker on his journey to die in frenzied devotion for his god.
“I’m not weak! I’m not weak like you!” Hua Cheng screams this time around. “I’m not a coward like you!”
He’s so small, but his voice is so loud. Mu Qing pinches the bridge of his nose.
“Sure,” Mu Qing says, and it sets off another round of angry, broken screams.
It’s desperate and bare and bitter. Mu Qing feels a scant passing envy at this – to feel the full brunt of rage, to have it tear through the quaking of his ribs, maul past the sharp hurt of his chest. He hasn’t felt anything in full for a long, long time. There’s always space – an eagle’s view, keeping his body to the strict, measured lines of custom, decorum, and pride.
He doesn’t know what possesses him; Mu Qing says this, “I’m sick of it. I’m sick of this.”
Hua Cheng’s eyes widen, and then narrow accusatorily.
“Call me traitor,” Mu Qing says, because Hua Cheng will die, and Hua Cheng will not remember anything. “Call me coward. I don’t care.”
“You- you- you-!”
“The only person who has ever mattered,” Mu Qing stares right into Hua Cheng’s eyes. “The only person I have ever cared for is my mother. Every single day I am here, every single second I am here, is time stolen from her. It is the biggest sin I have to make over and over.
“This war will not end. It will destroy Xian Le. It will destroy you, and me, and his Highness, the same way it has destroyed every single child Xian Le has abandoned. I am destroying my mother.”
Hua Cheng shakes. It is testament to his youth that his eyes glaze over with indignance.
Mu Qing straightens up to his full imposing height – an advantage he will soon lose, he thinks wryly. “Go. Live.”
Hua Cheng dies. Mu Qing turns away, his own sabre already poised to slice through the same jugular.
“You will die, when the gong strikes for the twentieth time,” Mu Qing recites, flat. “It is an arrow made of red oak. You are not the only one to die when the archers fire.”
“I won’t die.” / “You’re bluffing.” / “If I die, it will be in my god’s name.” / “It is my greatest honour to die for His Highness in battle!”
At last Hua Cheng lashes out, “If I die, then LET ME DIE!”
His face is red with effort. It is not venom that drips from his mouth. There is light in his eyes, and it blazes with the fervour of a dream.
“Did he not tell you to live for him?” Mu Qing sneers – there is smoke all around, indiscriminate fires lit to burn, to cook, to signal. “Is this how you wish to honour your god? By making him a liar?”
You were alive all this time, Mu Qing thinks. If you could have held on by his word, if you could have-
Hua Cheng stills. And then he is charging at Mu Qing, an imitation of battle, his screams unwieldy and coarse and bitter. He does not go easy on him.
(Hua Cheng is kicked out. Hua Cheng dies with an arrow in his heart.)
There is no staying in dreams.
It isn’t a matter of fault; it’s a matter of responsibility.
“Look away, Qing-er,” his mother says, a mercy.
And his mind reassures – he will be fine no matter what you do. He will die, and live, and suffer, become king, and suffer further still. It is not Mu Qing’s fate to meddle, not Mu Qing’s to stem. He dares not deign to take accountability for another life.
(If he has tried, it has not worked – a raindrop, a stream, a river; lands change, vary, erode, and there is no stopping a river from breaching the sea.)
Because Hua Cheng will suffer, will persist, will claw his way through hell and back, and seize happiness in the heart of his burnt, ruined palms. This is not a man to pity. Mu Qing is no salvation, much less a soothing salve.
“Look away, Qing-er,” his mother says, deliverance.
There is an ending to this tale; he knows it well. It is happy. It is everything Mu Qing needs – a justification, an out. Mu Qing is no butcher’s knife, no bloodied axe. He is merely a stone cast in a gushing river, a hapless, fruitless attempt at principle.
With slow, aching eyes adjusting to the glare of the sun, Mu Qing realises this is what he sees in front of him: a child.
He falls into the same trap.
Hong Hong-er snarls at him like a ‘child’ is meant to be an insult.
“You will one day lord over cities,” Mu Qing says, and finds it is not pride that lodges itself in the dry shudder of his throat. “You will be so powerful even the heavens will fear the sound of your footsteps. You will wield a deadly scimitar, unparalleled, unrivalled. You will be celebrated, and you will have no use for their idolatry.”
Hong Hong-er looks at him, torn between hope and disbelief – it matters not. It is hurt all the same. Mu Qing wonders if this is cold comfort, or if he has crossed the thin line into faithful cruelty.
This is what Mu Qing does not say to him: you will wear the silver of your mother’s land; you will scatter butterflies across these lands and they will bring you the sight of every prized sunset, every delicate flower, the dew of a mountainous tree. And when your scimitar is tired of drawing blood, you will have it dice cabbage instead. There will be soup in the pot at night, and you will know peace enough to imagine yourself living in it.
This time he gathers himself, marches to His Highness’s tent. Feng Xin is already there, and his warm, handsome face twists into a frown. Mu Qing looks away from him, staring straight at Xie Lian’s widened, tired eyes.
“The child you saved is here,” Mu Qing says.
When Xie Lian blinks at him, Mu Qing continues, “The boy who fell during the procession. The boy you told to live for you-”
“Oh! The boy who had potential with the sabre!” Xie Lian says, lighting up.
It is easy to see what devotion he inspires; with a few simple words he knights a child. Tomorrow he will bestow upon the frontline soldiers a blessing of their lifetime. Mu Qing will never possess the same wilful grace, not when his generosity is spun on cheaper flax, common and practical and dulled by use.
“He’s the one that’s... young,” Feng Xin finishes lamely.
Xie Lian’s eyes are bright. “Oh, he’s here, isn’t he? I’ll go to see him at once!”
Xie Lian hurries to put on his socks. It is not unrecognisable, this insatiable, excitable urge of his. Mu Qing is hit with a wave of fondness and an equally devastating, undefined shape of grief – this isn’t his Xie Lian. This is no longer his Xie Lian; his Xie Lian is unbearable lightness, is free to wander, to heal and be healed in turn.
His Xie Lian has suffered and loved. This Xie Lian will suffer and love. There is nothing more equivalent.
Mu Qing is stock still, a constant sundial between waning shadows.
“Mu Qing?” His Highness says, pausing at what must be the inscrutable, open wound of his face.
“Yes, your Highness,” Mu Qing says.
Feng Xin scowls at him from behind His Highness. It is enough.
He doesn’t get to meet Hong Hong-er. When His Highness steps out from his tent, they’re seized by the bellowing of horns: a sudden, vicious skirmish breaking out along the sides of camp.
In the midst of violence, an arrow rains down with divine precision.
Hong Hong-er dies. It is not his battle.
“Get up,” Mu Qing says.
Hong Hong-er glares at him, but quickly gets to his feet, sword in hand. Mu Qing nods.
“You’re faster now, but you’re too reliant on your right eye,” Mu Qing says. “It leaves your left side vulnerable.”
Hong Hong-er doesn’t stop glaring, his grip white-knuckled over the hilt of the army-issued sword. “Again.”
He parries an arrow. Mu Qing looks away - hubris.
A sword pierces through Hong Hong-er instead.
“This is a sabre,” Mu Qing declares, breaking Hong Hong-er’s standard issue sword in half. “Take it.”
Hong Hong-er is quick on his feet, lithe body darting between bulky sets of armour. He is crushed under a war horse, and he doesn’t let go of Mu Qing’s old sabre.
“Stay close to me,” Mu Qing says, and they both know it is an impossible ask.
“Use me.”
“You would hate to die before I do.”
He finds Hong Hong-er skewered on a spear in the aftermath. His culprit has been thoroughly trampled beside him.
Mu Qing holds his breath, keeps it in the hollow of his ribs. He turns away – to another battle, another body, another iteration of the same mindless butchery.
"Don't look, Qing-er," his mother had said, pressing him against her stiff apron.
But he saw enough – the blackened bruises of his father's ankles, the long, heavy chains dragging on the floor, the trickle of rotten fruit down his mottled calf. The crowd went mad with indignity, howling and hooting and eager to debase. A passing sport.
Mu Qing looked away, looked down the alley they were hiding in, at scraps of paper strewn on the dirt. He heard everything, heard his mother's sob, heard the sound of rust, a blade unsheathed. The crowd chanted, rose, set alight; indistinguishable, thunderous, like the heavens had truly split apart to cast its judgment.
“Don’t look, Qing-er, please, don’t-”
His mother pressed her hand against his ear, pulled him in. Her tears rained down on him, and they stayed like that - until all he could smell was the dusty, earthy scent of herbs and dried flowers stuffed in her apron.
Even later, he never looked. As though his eyes knew to avoid this particular spot of the city walls, as though his throat knew when to run dry as he neared, as though his chest was seized by the invisible hand of some merciful spirit every single time. Even when his father's skull was returned to them, wrapped carelessly in hemp, even when Mu Qing helped to dig at the soft ground, to place his head at an approximate distance from the rest of his body. Even when the weight of it, the contour of some fractured bone could be felt through the scant fabric.
Maybe this is penance. Maybe this is what living does to someone like him.
He hooks his thumb against the shallow, sallow wound against his side, feels the tenuous split of half-scabbing skin, and the mortal rush of hurt stinging red beneath.
“This is how you dress a wound,” Mu Qing says, pulling gauze over his side. “Help me. Feel it here, the stretch.”
Hong Hong-er is wide-eyed and cautious and disdainful. Mu Qing has seen this strained look too often. It is a signature of Xian Le's youngest victims - a legacy of poverty. If he picks up a mirror it is always never too far away from him. Hong Hong-er presses his hand to Mu Qing’s shoulder, holding the bandage in place. Mu Qing winds the roll around himself, up his back as far as his hand can reach.
“Take it,” Mu Qing says. “And pass it to me in front.”
Hong Hong-er follows.
“You have to be firm. Tighter. Yes. But not too much – calibrate it. You don’t want to restrict circulation, but you need it to hold. Can you feel the tension?”
Hong Hong-er’s hand trails after his. “Yes.”
“Good. This is what it should feel like,” Mu Qing’s eyes dart up to the loose bandages around his head. He doesn’t offer to rewrap it for him. “Clean bandages, always, where you can.”
Mu Qing tucks the end in place. He pushes the bloodied basin further beneath his bed. Hong Hong-er is quiet when Mu Qing dons his inner layers.
“You said you’d teach me to fight,” Hong Hong-er accuses, but it’s less hostile.
Mu Qing shrugs – it is wry, brittle, yet it is also the loosest definition of defiance. “I said I’d teach you to survive.”
The white of a bone burns grey, silver, then blackened by soot. An illusion of precious, impenetrable metal. Flesh is simpler – melts and chars, inseparable from fabric.
Hong Hong-er dies with an arrow in his chest. His eyes are wide open, startled again by the true liability of his mortality. It is red oak, crudely shaven, split at the end. Mu Qing retrieves his old sabre, flung a few feet, and places it by Hong Hong-er’s side.
He goes to cover Hong Hong-er’s eyes, and-
“Hmm,” Mu Qing’s fingers brush dirt away from gauze, stretched taut over Hong Hong-er’s face. “Not too shabby.”
In the heat of his twentieth summer, in the smothering wake of his forty-ninth devastation, Mu Qing feels it rain – warm, stuttering and wet.
He lets it fall with the weight of his memory, of names long forgotten.
Hong Hong-er does not die again.