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Jiaoqiu is settled down and reading at the alcove table, the air filled with a faint sweet smell, when Feixiao returns to her chambers. He looks up at her approach, finger stilling on the pages of his book as she caresses his cheek lightly in greeting before seating herself on the side of the bed close to him.
“Is that your latest invention?” Feixiao asks, glancing at the incense wafting lazily out of a hollowed pear stuffed with sandalwood and agarwood.
“Mm,” Jiaoqiu says. “I read that one of the noble families on the Xianzhou Yuque used pear incense to aid sleep, but it seemed like a waste of a perfectly good fruit, so I adapted it.”
Feixiao takes an exaggerated inhale. “I can almost taste the pear slices.”
That makes Jiaoqiu chuckle, uncrossing his legs so he can get to his feet. “Is the General asking for a nighttime snack?”
“Not today,” Feixiao says. She shifts, patting the space next to her on the bed. “Come here, lay with me. You can bring your book too, I’ll share.”
“Such bold requests today, General,” Jiaoqiu says, but he accedes anyway, book in hand. His tail wraps around her, a comforting, familiar weight. So indulgent. “Something on your mind?”
“No, not quite,” Feixiao says. “Don’t mind me, you can keep reading.”
“You realise that sounds more threatening than reassuring?” Jiaoqiu laughs, shaking his head. Something seems to catch his eye when he looks at her; he sets down his book on the bed and stands back up to rummage in the bedside cabinet, taking his tail away with the movement.
He returns with her peachwood comb. “Hair massage to help your blood circulation and relieve physical tension. Allow me?”
“Your tail would have sufficed for stress relief,” Feixiao grumbles under her breath, but adjusts herself so that her back is to him.
“You’ll get that later,” Jiaoqiu says behind her, a smile in his voice. “Think of it as a reward to look forward to.”
His touch on her is firm and sure and steady as breathing, as he brings the comb through her hair in rhythmic, even strokes. “Your hair is getting long, General,” he murmurs almost reverentially; her left ear twitches at the tickle of his breath.
She leans back into his chest, feeling him shift in surprise at the sudden movement. He is so close, and yet Feixiao does not mind the proximity a single bit. Behind her stands one of only three people she has ever willingly shown her back to, something she could not even have imagined of herself when she first joined the Verdant Knights under the former General.
Many of the troops had called her a feral child, then — a mutant, an abomination, one of the beasts that hunted and enslaved their own. They blamed the corrupted blood in her veins for her ruthlessness on the battlefield, and sometimes they wondered within her hearing if she would one day turn on them.
Feixiao didn’t blame them. She wouldn’t trust herself, either.
That was before she met Jiaoqiu. Jiaoqiu, who cooked the best food on the whole of the Yaoqing, who always dropped by the office to bring Feixiao and the General their favourite snacks.
Jiaoqiu, who had saved her life without thinking twice, who had cradled her worthless, mutated body in the middle of the wartorn Fanghu, and shielded it with his own.
Jiaoqiu, the hero who saved her, who has saved her, who keeps saving her, but has never thought that of himself.
“I haven’t had time to cut it,” she says. “Maybe I’ll get Moze to slice some of it off before we head to the Luofu for the Wardance.”
The laugh rumbles through Jiaoqiu’s chest. “As long as he uses his own daggers, and not my kitchen knives.”
Throughout their banter his patient movements with the comb do not stop; he presses it against random points on her scalp that she doesn’t understand but he says will help with blood flow and relaxation. She’ll give him that — it is very relaxing to have his hands in her hair.
Soothed by his motions, she lets her mind drift for a bit. At some point, he sets down the comb to massage her scalp with his fingers, careful to avoid her ears.
He’s always so careful with her. Feixiao hadn’t known what to make of it, at first — gentle is not the word anyone would use to describe her, but it is the only descriptor for how he treats her. The hot cups of tea in the middle of the night when he knows she has paperwork to catch up on, even though he is frowning when he brings it to her. The way he flips his pages slower, softer when she falls asleep next to him. The way he runs his fingers through her hair, working through all the little knots as though he has all the time in the world.
Like she is a person, not the weapon she has honed herself to be.
Languidly, her eyes drift to the book Jiaoqiu had left on the bed when he stood up earlier. It is another medical text, discussing the use of some rare herbs from the Tritus star system for purification. Even in his free time, it seems like he never stops searching for a cure for her.
Truth be told, Feixiao expected him to give up years ago. It is clear by now that there is no cure for her affliction. Her flare-ups are much more controlled now, under his careful eye, but he must know that they are merely buying time. He must know that she would not blame him, if he threw in the towel on this wild goose chase.
But whenever she offers to let him go, Jiaoqiu always brings up that promise he had made to her, that oath he had sworn. She had not known, back then, that it would become such a shackle around his soul — had not known that he would give up so much of himself for her.
Feixiao knows that she hurts him, the way she talks about herself and her own mortality. She came to terms with it a long time ago: those with Moon Rage never live long, and she has already lived far longer than most because of him. But she hears his grim silence, sees the way his eyes fall as though he is grieving, and she wishes she didn’t do that to him.
What can she do for him, knowing she has doomed him to a mission in futility?
“You’re quiet,” Jiaoqiu says, and Feixiao comes back to herself, notices that he has already settled back down beside her, peachwood comb kept and returned to its cabinet.
“Mm,” Feixiao hums. “Tail. You promised.”
“Yes, yes,” Jiaoqiu says, amused. His tail wraps around her side, and she reaches for it immediately.
“If I had a tail,” she begins.
“You would hug it to sleep instead of mine?” Jiaoqiu quips. He tugs at her, urging her to lie down, borrowed tail and all. She goes without protest.
Running her fingers through his soft and well-kept one, she considers it a bit before declaring, “I’m fine without one. I’d prefer yours still.”
Jiaoqiu’s hands come up around her then, finally embracing her. “I’ll keep it just for you,” he promises solemnly. She presses herself against him. He’s warm, like the fire he wields so easily to harm and to heal.
“Then I’ll keep coming home to you,” she says into his chest.
It is a good feeling to be loved, she thinks. She might be the Lacking General, but the one thing she has always had in abundance is love.