Chapter Text
The warehouse at night smells like rotgut and cold iron. Like cheap liquor and cheaper lies.
Maomao doesn’t flinch when the screaming starts. She just tugs the knife from her boot and adjusts the satchel strap across her shoulder.
Then the growling starts.
Low.
Visceral.
Too deep for a human.
She huffs.
“You absolute mutt,” she mutters to no one in particular, as she hears bones break below.
She’s already climbing down the ladder when she sees the blur of movement—a man—no, a shifter, half-shadow, half-lethal, slinging the proprietor against the wall like he weighs nothing. Tall and broad-shouldered. Claws out. Eyes golden. Clothes rumpled but tailored. Blood on his sleeves.
And Maomao, from the gangway above, simply kicks a stack of bottles off the edge.
They crash down between the proprietor and his escape route.
"Fucker!" the man screams, slipping on the liquid fire that leaks across the concrete. "You brought another?!"
The shifter looks up.
They lock eyes.
Maomao’s eyes are sharp as broken glass. Her shirt is streaked in ash. Her hair is braided back with copper wire, bits of dried herb tucked at her nape like tiny secrets.
She doesn’t look afraid.
She looks inconvenienced.
“You’ve made a mess,” she says mildly. “He was about to talk.”
The wolf wipes blood off his knuckles.
“He wasn’t.”
“He was.”
“Too slow.”
“Too rabid.”
They move at the same time.
She hits the ground floor first, faster than he expects.
Slides into the office just ahead of him, hands already crackling with magic, boots crunching glass.
She grabs the folder on the desk.
And he grabs her wrist.
“Put it down.”
“Why?”
“You’re not Court.”
“You’re not the boss of me.”
“You’re in the way.”
“Try to move me, fucker.”
She slams her elbow back into his ribs, twisting free.
He lunges, gets in close enough to slice her side, the dark claws on his fingers catching skin and tearing fabric.
She gasps—
And snarls.
Her eyes blaze silver-blue, pupils narrowing to pinpricks, and she claps both hands together, dragging the sigil in the air with a hiss of old, bloody dialect.
A bolt of lightning snaps from her palm. It rips through his shoulder and pins him—momentarily—to the concrete wall.
“I hate Court,” she breathes.
She grabs the file. Takes one last look at him—grimacing, teeth still bared, breathing hard—
And launches herself out the window.
Too high for any human.
Perfectly angled.
He hits the ground of the office hard, arm smoking, as the window bangs open and she vanishes into the night.
Gaoshun kneels in the aftermath, panting.
He touches his shoulder, snarling at the smell of scorched skin.
“Witch.” Then, grudgingly—almost admiring: “Fuck.”
Notes:
I've decided to lean into it and align academics and writing, because these two are not letting me go in the least.
Chapter Text
Gaoshun is still wrinkled from the warehouse fight—his shirt smells faintly burnt, one shoulder in a medic's tight wrap under his blazer. Jinshi sits behind an immaculately clean glass table. The court-liaison and fixer in too-neat slacks and a shirt collar that looks like it never met a wrinkle.
There are chairs, but Gaoshun prefers to stand.
The room hums with filtered air and surveillance feeds on mute. Jinshi doesn’t look up from the file in front of him, hands under his chin.
“You’re certain?” he asks quietly.
Gaoshun sighs, dry as dust as he replies: “As certain as I am that she tore a hole through my shoulder.”
Jinshi finally looks up. His gaze is always mild. Always unreadable. But one brow ticks upward just a little—interest, maybe. Or irritation.
“There have been no records of witch activity in your sector,” he offers thoughtfully. Then adds: “Not through the channels I monitor.”
No new pacts, then. No initiations in any of the Shifting Clans.
Jinshi’s eyes swerve to the screen to his left. “No flagged anomalies in the last… six months.”
Gaoshun doesn’t let his face change. “Then you missed something”
And, perhaps, something crucial. The Witch hadn’t smelled like Shifter. Pact-Witches always did. Smelled like the Clan they hailed from, doused and drenched in scent that would declare the emissaries to any other shifter they’d come across lest someone gets ideas.
Except that if she didn’t smell like shifter, and wasn’t a pact-made witch initiated into a shifter clan. That would mean that she was born.
True-born witches are extinct.
According to the records, at least.
Jinshi leans back. Taps his pen against the manila folder once. Twice. Still no expression, but his foot shifts against the floor—tells.
“Not impossible,” he finally permits. “Unlikely, but not impossible.”
Gaoshun huffs lowly. “That’s one word for it.”
Jinshi finally flips the file shut. Stands. Paces once behind his desk, fingertips trailing over the edge of the chair back like he’s brushing away lint. He turns toward the reinforced windows. The city below looks like it's smoldering in filtered dusk.
“Witches don’t just appear,” he thinks loudly. “They don’t move without purpose or without Clan.”
Gaoshun thinks of the electric-blue lightning in the eyes of a woman two heads smaller than him. She didn’t move like prey.
Jinshi turns back, eyes Gaoshun. “And she hit a Court Agent. That’s a declaration of war. Or desperation.”
Gaoshun’s head tilts contemplatively. “She was there for information,” he offers. “The intel we were hunting. She knew where it was and didn’t hesitate to take it.”
Jinshi’s groan comes from deep within his chest. His fingers pinching the bridge of his nose. “That’s not working for another clan,” he maons. “That sounds like working for the government.”
Gaoshun isn’t too certain.
“A Witch?”
“Stranger things have happened,” Jinshi argues. “What else would it be?”
Gaoshun can think of several things. Personal things. He knows he’d have gone rogue for Taomei before their divorce and if anyone lay a hand on his pups woe betide the fool.
But Jinshi is young, and he doesn’t have, yet, this kind of social connection to others that would burn down entire cities for their well-being.
He wonders how old the Witch is.
Jinshi hums. Lightly. It sounds like disapproval. Or perhaps amusement. “What did she smell like?”
Gaoshun’s lips curl, fang flashing in memory as he tastes the ozone of her attack on his tongue. “Lightning on copper wire,” he growls. Breathes. “Burnt sage. Storm-season.”
Like salt and spite and electric fences.
Jinshi’s lips curl into a cold smile. A brow tilts up. Gaoshun shrugs.
It’s rare that anyone gets under skin.
But it’s also rare that anyone manages to hurl him on his ass in a direct confrontation.
“Start digging then,” Jinshi orders lightly. “If she wasn’t trained by a Court-sanctioned shaman or inducted into the Records, she’s off-grid. That makes her either old-school…”
“Or Feral,” Gaoshun nods.
Jinshi eyes him from his seat. Quiet when he cautions: “Feral witches don’t last long.”
Gaoshun hums. “She’s lasted this long.”
And she’s hunting the same trail he is, from the looks of it. Ferals tended to implode at a young age. She must have been old enough, at least, not to raise too many flags in the illegal distillery he’d busted.
Jinshi folds his arms, leans forward on his polished glass table with a smile that is more of a threat than anything else: “Then it’s a race,” he challenges.
And the Witch is fast.
Gaoshun hums. Nods. Turns to leave.
He has a Witch to Hunt and a trail to pick up.
Chapter Text
The city hums outside, soft and indifferent. Rainwater whispers against rusted beams. Somewhere below, a train rattles by like an old god dragging chains.
Maomao slips in through the grate behind the alley’s third dumpster. The one with moth-bitten caution tape and the scent of iron soaked too deep into concrete to scrub out. She doesn't leave footprints. Her scent fades before it can settle, a faint sizzle of storm-magic curling the air behind her until the room smells only of ozone and dead metal.
She doesn’t pause. Doesn’t sigh.
She walks like her boots still remember blood beneath them.
Up the narrow metal stairs, through the hollow corridors of the factory’s ribcage, into the room she’s claimed for herself: old air compressors dead in the corners, a mattress stolen from a youth shelter pressed against the wall, a single table with too many secrets stacked on it.
The light floods in from the broken signage outside—VIRAG, pink as a wound, flickering like it’s trying to say something.
She tosses the file down. Hard. Papers skitter, but she doesn’t stop them.
Behind a thin curtain strung with bent nails, she finds the lantern. Flicks it on. Yellow warmth, bright enough to see and low enough not to give her away in a building that should have been torn down five years ago.
Only now—only now—does she strip her shirt off. Peels it away like old skin. The gash along her ribs has stopped bleeding, but it glistens wet and angry. She hisses between her teeth.
Presses her palm to the wound and holds her breath before she even thinks of the next thing.
Lightning sparks between her fingers. Sizzles into skin and behind her eye-lids.
The cauterization is fast. It burns clean. It takes everything she has.
She screams, but swallows it behind pressed lips and bloodless cheeks. Smells the burn of flesh against heat and thinks of a wolf pinned to white-washed concrete, gold eyes and dark-blue coat soaked with blood.
Her knees buckle. She catches herself against the edge of the wash basin. The metal rod groans under her weight.
A breath.
Another.
She swallows down nausea, reaches for her potion vials by instinct. Knows the line-up. Checks against the light if it’s purple. Makes a face even before she drinks it in one go. Bitter as fury. Thicker than blood.
Everything she needs tastes like punishment these days.
The bed is close. It’s her only retreat – her only luxury. An old salvaged frame under a thick mattress, a pillow low enough to be discounted as such and a thick duvet under a dark day-blanket to protect from dust.
Vermin can’t pass the layout of her runes and sigils, but dust is another matter.
She drops into it like someone being lowered into water.
Above her, the wall looms—a caseboard, a map of heartbreak. Strings like blood vessels. Newspaper clippings. Bus tickets. Surveillance printouts from stolen cameras. Xiaolan’s photo in the center—wide smile, two front teeth still uneven. The only one that matters. The one she refuses to fail.
Maomao stares.
Her fingers twitch. Her sight blurs. Her side pulses hot and insistent.
Then she breathes out, low, cracked.
And offers her exhausted prayer.
“Just one more day.”
Chapter Text
He's not looking for the Witch.
He's not.
He needs to stay ahead of the case and remain aware enough that he'll run into her again and that's that.
Except one of his informants works at the Verdigris, a Go-player by the name of Meimei, who offers information behind veiled flirtation and tabs he needs to close that he never even opened.
And this time he angers her.
Treads too close.
Close enough to have an iron knife at his throat and his fingers on a copper-wire in her locks that he hasn't noticed before.
"You know who she is."
She might be under him. And, indeed, wear nothing but expensive underwear, stockings and high-heels sharp enough to kill him, but the knife against his throat says that she is not powerless, even with his fangs, even with his hand in her hair, she will not give ground.
"I don't know who you mean," she snarls.
Gaoshun hums. Gentles. Steps back. "You're too valuable to me to anger much more," he offers.
Not quite an apology. Not a truce.
Meimei's eyes are angry when she sits up. "You should have thought of that before you laid hands on me, wolf," she snarls. "I should have you strung up."
Gaoshun hums. "You could," he offers.
It's a truth he's always known.
Gaining Meimei's trust had meant earning it. And that had meant honesty--as much as he'd been able to give it. Shifters have vanished from the general populace, and for good reason, but The Verdigris House is too old an institution not to remember the time when they'd still been present.
Meimei's pulse is racing, loud and heavy, but her breath is calming and, slowly, the tension leaves her shoulders.
"She can't help you," she says quietly then. "She left a long time ago."
The street outside is quiet. A thin haze of smog settles over sodium-orange light. In the alley, Gaoshun leans against his motorcycle like he’s trying not to put his fist through the fuel tank.
He can still smell her.
Not the Witch. The Verdigris girl.
Meimei.
Vanilla and whiskey and something artificial—like melted cherry lip balm and expensive desperation. But under that, woven into the tight braid she'd worn high on her head like a challenge, was copper wire.
Not ornamental.
Witchwire.
He rubs the back of his neck, eyes tracking a rat skittering along a gutter pipe. A sharp throb pulses in his shoulder—the one the Witch lit up two nights ago. He hasn’t stopped thinking about the way her magic tasted. The charge of it. The way she moved like she belonged in violence.
She’d almost killed him.
He breathes out slowly. Not in pain. Not in fear.
Want. Not even sexual. Instinctual. Something deeper. Something his wolf doesn't understand, because witches are gone. And the Court has always said trueborns are gone.
So why did that copper wire spark with her scent?
He pulls it from his pocket—thin, scorched at the ends, no longer than a twist-tie. Hadn’t meant to keep it. Didn’t know he had.
But he can still smell the storm on it.
Copper and burnt sage and the tang of blood-heavy ozone. It’s her, without question.
The witch is in his case.
He stares at the wire a long time, twined around his finger. Tight. Like a promise. Like a snare.
Then he opens the secure compartment of his saddlebag, drops it inside the folder marked Operation: Hollow Crown. It's not marked, not yet.
But it’s tagged red.
High Priority.
Gaoshun swings his leg over the bike. Helmet under one arm. The throb in his shoulder echoes in his palm. His wolf stirs restlessly under skin.
He's not looking for her.
He’s not.
But if she crosses his path again, this time?
He won't let her vanish without answers.
Chapter Text
The satchel bites into her shoulder.
The city bites harder.
Maomao pedals with one leg and curses with the other. The chain skips on the fifth gear and the rear brake is squealing again, but it’s not like she’s paying rent to fix it. The bike’s seen more miles than some cars. She trusts it more than people. It’s fast, light, and doesn’t ask questions when she needs to turn down an alley or jump a curb.
The delivery vest is reversible. The name-tag is fake. The packages are legit—usually.
She gets paid in cash. She pockets what she can. She carries two phones—one for work, one for the hunt—and she checks the latter at every red light.
No new messages.
Her ribs throb in the cold.
She downs half a painkiller and spits the taste into the wind.
Doesn’t matter. She has a route today.
She stops in District Nine. Pretends to lock her bike. Doesn’t.
She drops a package at a vape shop that smells like chemical strawberries and sex-spray for teenagers. She makes change for the man with the tremor who works the counter. She slides an extra bill into the tip jar. He looks up once, meets her eyes. Says nothing.
That’s how you make an ally.
At the corner of Jie & Wu, she slows near a barrel-fire. Four men. Tattoos on elbows and chests, skin faded from too much sun and not enough sleep. They look at her like they’re expecting her to flinch.
She doesn’t.
“Seen a girl with white-and-black feathers out the back of her head?” she asks, low. “Little thing. Might talk your ear off if you let her.”
They don’t answer. Not right away. One of them chews his cigarette like a dog working a bone. Another watches the steam off his own breath like it might whisper back.
Finally, the oldest one says: “Birdshift?”
Her hand tightens on the strap across her chest.
He nods, slow. “Think I seen one like that. North end of Tenth. Near the squat block. Not in a while though.”
Maomao doesn’t say thank you. Doesn’t make promises.
She just leaves a folded cigarette pack on the crate near them—paper money inside, tightly pressed.
“Don’t smoke,” she mutters.
“Didn’t ask,” he replies.
They don’t call her back.
But they also don’t lie.
At her third drop, she scales the side of a convenience store to reroute a camera feed. Just for ten minutes. Just long enough to slip into the condemned building next door and check a basement squat she’s been marking on the map for three days.
Nothing.
Just old junkies and the thick smell of piss. Her ribs scream when she crouches. Her magic pulses once—weak, frustrated. She doesn't let it loose.
Back on the bike. Back to the next district.
In the hour before dusk, she buys three pork buns and only eats one.
The rest go to the woman in the alley next to the mechanic shop who sells stolen shampoo and army socks from a cart she welded herself. The woman doesn’t speak. But she passes her a zippo lighter with K-56 etched into the side.
It’s a mark. A hint.
A warehouse Maomao hasn’t checked yet.
By the time she gets back to the factory, her bones hum. Her side is a dull burn.
But she’s made notes.
Marked maps.
And one of the leads smells like hope.
She peels off the vest. Pulls off the gloves. Washes her hands with cold water that stings her knuckles.
Then, quietly, she kneels in front of the red-string board.
And she adds a pin.
Chapter Text
The map says it’s a rustbox.
She believes it.
K-56 isn’t lit on newer grids, but the bones of the city still remember it: an old transit shipping warehouse, squatting in a deadzone between disused tracks and the garbage canal. From above, it looks like a scab. Too square. Too quiet. The roof is bowed. There’s a barrel fire inside that wasn’t there last week.
Something’s moving again.
Maomao’s been on the roof since dusk.
It’s cold and wet and every shift of her ribs makes her head pound. She’s wedged into a vent-slit just below the duct line. Hood up. Gloves cut off at the knuckle. Her breath stays shallow.
She’s seen three men move crates. One of them has a spider tattoo that matches the elbowed bastard who didn’t care for her non-smoking advice. That’s something.
She sketches it, quick. Hand shaking. She hasn’t eaten in eight hours. The potion wore off four ago.
But she’s focused.
Until he comes.
It’s not the snarl that gives him away.
It’s the silence before it.
Predator-sharp.
A chill down the spine.
A shift in the air.
“You’re in my way,” a voice growls behind her.
She rolls. Too slow.
A heavy body slams her into the rust-metal grating. She snarls. Elbow back. He grunts. Her boots skid. He pins her down with a knee to the back.
“Thought I’d catch you snooping again,” he breathes. His voice is too close. “You lot never learn.”
She plants her palm against the rooftop and channels just enough spark to make his teeth grit. He doesn’t flinch.
“How are you still—” she gasps.
He doesn’t give her the chance to finish. Grabs the back of her coat. Hauls her up and throws her.
She hits the edge of the vent-duct and bounces. White-hot fire lances her ribs.
She chokes on blood. Bites off a scream.
Coughs.
Eyes blur.
He walks toward her. Calm. No rush. Like she’s already beaten.
“Off my case,” he says. “Or into the Court. You pick.”
Maomao rolls, wheezing. Grits her teeth.
One hand lifts, limp-wristed. Fingers clasp like a gun in a Hail Mary she doesn’t usually reach for.
She whispers the word in old tongue.
And fires.
The magic isn’t strong, but it’s smart.
It finds the puddle.
Rides the water.
Lights up in a crackle of electricity and fury.
The wolf hits the rooftop like a dropped stone. Twitching. Three steps from her boots.
She doesn’t crow. She barely breathes.
She crawls to the edge, one arm clutched to her side.
Marks the building on a mental map. Draws a sigil into the ledge and, before she has turned fully, shocks him again for good measure. He twitches, but doesn’t wake.
And—because she’s petty and prideful and pissed—she takes the FUD from her belt pouch, unzips, and stands in the corner of the roof to rain piss on it like a dog marking territory.
“Try again, mutt,” she wheezes when she throws the silicone away.
Then she disappears over the edge of the building. Hits the ground with a wet splat under boots and doesn’t stop moving.
She doesn’t leave bed the entire day.
Not once.
She lies in the semi-darkness. Wrapped in every blanket she owns. One potion left. One rib likely cracked. Her side feels like hellfire. Her throat raw.
And the bastard’s face won’t leave her memory.
Golden eyes. Clean shirt. That stupid lock of hair that fell into his face when he got up after she already socked him in the fucking ribs.
She curses him in six dialects.
And groans.
And promises to put a third bolt through him next time.
Once she can move again.
Notes:
What's an FUD? A female urinary device, basically a small silicone funnel that, if used correctly, can allow women to pee standing - and yes Maomao is (literally) pissing territorial here, that's the point
Chapter Text
The coat doesn’t go in the washer.
It goes in the hazardous materials chute, and he punches the button hard enough that the light flickers. The air reeks of iron and burnt copper and her. The wolf under his skin snarls once before going silent.
He still smells like piss and ozone. The fucking audacity of the wench.
The medbay is white and cold and quiet. It smells of antiseptic and recycled air. He’s on a cot, one shoulder bare and bleeding again, the slash from her second strike glowing faint around the edges like something alive. A physician—fox-shifter, ex-surgeon, no bedside manner—grunts as he peels away the gauze.
"You cauterized?" the fox grumbles disapprovingly.
“No,” Gaoshun mutters, jaw tight. “I got cauterized.”
A beat. Then, “...Right.”
A hiss of antiseptic. Gaoshun doesn’t flinch. His teeth grind instead.
Across from him, Jinshi watches. Immaculate and clean. Not a speck of lint on him. Hair smooth and shiny. Shirt pressed. Like he hasn’t spent the last twelve hours chasing intel that got Gaoshun nearly torched.
“Do I want to know what happened?” Jinshi asks mildly, voice smooth as polished glass.
“She was staking K-56.” Gaoshun’s voice is low. Flat. “My stakeout. She hit me. Twice.”
“She does seem to have a pattern,” Jinshi says lightly. Then, dry: “You do know we’re trying to avoid provoking her?”
Gaoshun lets out a breath like smoke. “She’s lethal.” And provoking him just by being out there. In his way. In his case.
The physician starts stitching. Gaoshun doesn’t wince.
“She’s also pulling intel,” he continues. “Alone. With precision. She got past three of our outer traps before you even flagged her. She’s tracking the ring same as we are. And faster.”
“That doesn’t make her an ally,” Jinshi replies. “That makes you sound compromised and incapable.”
Gaoshun’s golden eyes flick toward him. “I’m the only one who’s seen her. The only one who’s survived a direct hit from her. Twice. That’s not compromised. That’s prepared.”
Jinshi exhales through his nose, fingers steepled.
“If she’s truly feral—”
She’s not.
But Gaoshun doesn’t have enough evidence to call her trueborn yet. Trueborn are supposed to be extinct.
“—then she’s more dangerous than all of Lakan’s armory contracts.”
Gaoshun tries to follow the logic. Hits on a snag he doesn’t like. His eyes go up to Jinshi’s calculating gaze.
“She won’t sell,” he cautions.
“You’re certain?” Jinshi smirks. “Most beings aren’t—up to a certain point.”
The witch doesn’t move like she’s for sale. She moves like she’s desperation incarnate. She moves like she has a reason to be up a week after he’d nearly torn through her ribcage. Moves like she needs to.
That doesn’t sell out in Gaoshun’s experience.
Jinshi’s lips press together. Not a smile. Not yet.
“Stick to the plan,” he says finally. “We’ll have Lihaku deal with the witch.”
Gaoshun snorts. A sound too soft to be a laugh.
“He’s capable,” Jinshi reminds.
Yes. Gaoshun nods. But he’s also young. The Witch will eat him alive and spit him out somewhere too remote for them find on time.
He doesn’t elaborate.
Jinshi’s glare is soft, but weighty. “Stick to the plan, Gaoshun.”
Gaoshun swings his legs off the cot, shirt still open, dressing crooked. His body is scarred. Lived-in. Not for show. For survival.
He buttons slowly. Smooths back his hair. That one damn strand falls back into his eyes.
He doesn’t say yes.
He just walks out.
He needs a damn shower.
Notes:
In-World Idea: Witches
So we've encountered three kinds of Witches at this point and I can't really say if it's logical the way they're set up so I'm going to, briefly, info-dump here.Witches were, originally, trueborn. Meaning that they were just "born that way". Either to parents who are shifters, or to parents who had witch-lineage or even to parents who had neither shifter nor witch in their lineage (probably something of a rarity in this universe).
Now, there's "pact-Witches", i.e. people with witch-lineage who make a pact with a shifter-clan and gain both their knowledge and their powers from that pact, from that rite.
And there are "feral Witches" - meaning a Witch that has no grounding, one that 'awoke' at a later point, maybe, or one that was pushed out of a shifter-clan, or one that's an untaught trueborn. Rampant magic, basically. Which is also why they don't survive long.
I'm kind of miffed I couldn't find a good way to integrate that into the story and I have to explain it here to make myself feel explained but like... fuck it, if it helps, it helps (nobody's perfect and all that jazz).
Chapter Text
Her side burns hot. Fever radiates from the injury that re-opened and won’t close again with the same heavy hammer of cauterization where it frayed at the edges. Her cheeks burn, her lips feel cracked, her head aches with a steady, mutilating drumbeat.
But the city around her doesn’t stop. And Xiaolan is still missing.
Maomao pulls a cracked sigil charm from her pack. Slides it into the inside of her left boot. Another ward spell sloppily inked into her shirt seam. One she sticks to her throat. One above her navel. They’re not complete. They’re not entirely safe. But they’re enough. Enough to cloak her. Enough to move unseen.
The Court won't expect her back at the rooftop so soon.
At least, that's the gamble. That’s the whole hope.
She doesn't run. She slinks. She breathes under the gray twilight of the city under smog and between the cracks of daylight. She’s all shadow, all spell-rot, all teeth clamped tight against nausea and pain. Her ribs throb like they want to break again. But she makes it. She always makes it. That’s her curse. That’s her gift.
K-56 crouches like a dog about to bolt. She watches. Waits. Counts guards.
Then she sees him: Spider-Tattoo. Smoking. Alone. Back turned.
She slides off the roof before she can think better of it.
The spell she carves into her palm should be illegal. It should take two witches. It only takes her. Just this once. It glows like moonlight gone feral and slithers into his skull like a whisper of wire.
She hears everything. The scream that never makes it out of his mouth. Just a long, garbled crack between lips opened for a last drag of nicotine.
She gets a name. A location. A gate. A time. Her hand trembles as she pulls back.
It costs him everything.
Maomao is at his back before his knees can sag and the blood can seep through his eyes. Presses her fingers to his jugular, just once. His pulse is fast, panicked, his eyes unseeing. His mind torn to splinters and shreds that will never recover.
“Thank you,” she says. Quiet. Gentle. Tired.
She gives him a clean death, a quick twist of the neck. Almost like a vertebrae re-arranging.
And then she walks back through the city that raised her and betrayed her. Back to her hideout. The day doesn’t stink any less of rust and guilt and duty than the night.
Maomao drops face-down into the bed. Doesn’t undress. Doesn’t reach for her potions. With the fever setting in, it’s too late anyways.
She turns her head against the pounding in her skull, stares at the red strings through blurry eyes. At Xiaolan’s face. At everything that’s left.
There was a time when she wasn’t this. Grit and blood and curses. When she’d let people hold her. When she’d let herself be soft and kissable and wanted.
Now she just wants to burn the fucking city down for a girl no one cared about but her.
She coughs. Winces. Her ribs jolt.
Maybe she should leave the file on the rooftop. Let the wolf take it. Let someone else finish this.
She closes her eyes. Feels the weight of her fever on her shoulders. The weight of Xiaolan on her conscious.
No one else came for her. No one but Maomao.
“One more day,” she prays through cracked lips. “One more lead.”
Gaoshun is late. Not too late. Just enough that the scent has faded, and the blood is cooling. Just enough that the echo of magic still clings to the air, humming against his teeth like a warning left behind for anyone clever enough to listen.
Up on the rooftop the air smells of copper and rain. The sky hangs low, the kind of grey that presses on the lungs.
The body’s cooling in a slump against the duct at the side of the narrow street below. Gaoshun investigates quietly. One of the runners. Spider-tattoo. Jaw slack, eyes fogged. Death like a switch thrown—clean, clinical, no mess but total. His neck is broken. Gaoshun doesn’t need to touch to know it. He’s seen enough death sentences slumped like this one on his tours and missions.
There’s blood on the face though. Tears that have caked on cheeks, lips painted in rivulets coming from the nose.
But it’s the scorch mark nearby that makes Gaoshun pause. A sigil. Barely there. More a fingerprint than a full cast. But it buzzes. It sings.
Witchwork.
Her work.
He crouches beside it, careful not to step into its hissing residue. His hand hovers over the ground. He can still feel it. The charge. The way her magic doesn’t just strike, but seeps—low, deliberate, practiced.
This wasn’t an accident.
This wasn’t feral.
This was surgical.
He breathes in. And tastes her on the air.
Not the sweat of a clean spellcaster. Not the sterilized clarity of sanctioned rites.
But fever. Blood. Pain.
She did this wounded. Thrown against a duct-vent on torn-open ribs and still she has the strength to cast, to put him down, to come back, to find leads before he is even back on his legs again.
His lips curl, not in mockery, but something that might—in a different life—be admiration. Something that aches a little.
His eyes sweep the skyline. Nothing but rooftops and smog. She’s already gone.
He straightens slowly. Every joint in his body complains. The shoulder she lit up still aches beneath the fresh dressing. Pulses against new stitches. The bruises haven’t faded even with shifter-fast healing. It’s his pride, however, that stings most of all.
Lihaku is nowhere to be seen. Gaoshun isn’t surprised. But the absence doesn’t bring relief either. Only a dull, familiar weight.
He’s tired.
He wants this ring ended.
They’re losing time.
The Court is slow, and she's moving fast. Too fast.
And alone.
He clenches his jaw. Considers. A decision presses up from his gut before he can name it.
Collaboration.
Not to control her. Not to leash her. But to offer something the Court cannot—something she wants. Something honest.
They share a goal. A target.
If he can convince her that he is not there to bring her in—
He breathes deep once more. Scent-maps the air. Follows the faintest drag of blood over concrete. It’s a trail. Not a loud one. Not deliberate.
But she’s wounded; and he’s a wolf.
If he finds her…
Maybe.
Just maybe.
He leaves the alleyway without calling it in. No flags. No reports.
Just the scent of her lightning under his skin.
Notes:
Fun-fact about the word collaboration:
For a long time, and especially during WW2, it was considered a bad word used for the work one would do with the enemies-- in Europe at least. And the dictionary of my mothertongue still translates it first as "cooperation with the war enemy, with the occupying power, directed against the interests of one's own country"
the more you know and all that
Chapter 9
Notes:
They don't kick each other's asses in this! Progress!!!
Chapter Text
The place is barely legal. Half-permitted under a false name. The license on the wall is crooked, dated six years ago, and probably belonged to a laundromat.
The drinks are watered down, the music recycled, the booths sticky with old laughter and older deals.
Maomao doesn’t care.
She’s three nights without proper sleep, two ribs tight-wrapped under her fake corset-top, one location wiser thanks to a corpse with a tattoo and a bad habit.
She slips behind the bar like she belongs—cleaning, serving, listening. The trapdoor in the back leads to rooms that never appear on city blueprints. She’s here to get names. Faces. She’s just about to slip out when she feels him.
Ozone. Pinewood. Wolf musk and golden threat. Her stomach sinks.
She’s too public. The bar has too many witnesses. Whatever he wants, she can’t do magic here. Not in her current state. Not even if she’s on the top of her game.
She doesn’t look up from where she’s busying herself with wiping down a sticky black table. Doesn’t have to. She feels him—the way the lights dim in his shadow, how the hair on her arms rise like they want to flee.
He doesn’t hide. Walks slow. Quiet. Like he belongs. Because that’s the best way not to call attention. And he knows that. Of course he does.
She feels him at her back as she moves with false aimlessness towards the corridor towards the backrooms before she hears him. The golden glow of his eyes in the red boudoir lighting is almost obscene in the smeared mirror.
“You’re bleeding again,” he rumbles as he moves close enough to stop her from more movement than the turn she barely gets in.
“You have to be stalking me,” she snaps. “That’s three coincidences too many.”
He hums. Eyes amused and lips twitching like she is funny. “Better than torching rooftops.”
She tries to push against him. But he’s solid, and tall enough to hide her from the rest of the bar. Her breath doesn’t catch (it doesn’t; she swears).
“Better than hurling innocent women into duct-vents.”
A pause.
He steps in closer still. The scent of pine curls at her throat. Her breath hitches, just once, before she masks it.
There’s a hiss as antiseptic touches the edge of her ribs—he’s pulled a med-wipe from his coat, the bastard. He presses it under her shirt with one gloved finger, smearing gently, like he’s helping. Like he knows how to help.
She bows into him. Closes her eyes against the sting and focuses on not swallowing her tongue for all of five seconds.
Then her mouth is on his shoulder, biting down. Not deep, but not gentle. Sharp enough to punish, to give back. A hurt for a hurt.
He doesn’t growl. Just stills. Breath rough as he wipes down her injury with gentle care.
When he stops, her lips come away blood-bright. His shirt has holes. He doesn’t move.
“Truce?” he asks, voice low, almost amused.
“Fuck you,” she wheezes. “Buy me dinner next time before you fondle me like that.”
She pushes and he moves with a glint in his eyes and low hum in his throat. “I’ll take it, little witch”
She leaves through the back and doesn’t come back for two nights.
The Shēngyīn burns in ribbons of witchfire—blue-white and brilliant, licking through the liquor lines and crackling glass.
He watches from the cobblestones of the alley, hands in his pockets and coat lined with the stiff copy of the files she’d left for him.
One page is marked.
One word circled: Yinghua.
Chapter 10
Notes:
mind the slow-build tag ;)
Chapter Text
He’s back at Court before dawn, the city still steaming from the witch-fire; explained away as faulty electricity and fraudulent code-violations.
The copy she left him is tucked under his coat. No one checks him at the door. He’s high enough clearance to move quietly.
But where he’s going, they’ll notice everything.
Sub-Level Archives aren’t just deep—they’re silent. Buried under three reinforced doors, fingerprint and scent-coded. He has the clearance, but only because he’s known to take orders from Jinshi, whose name is a code in itself. He clocks the two watchers at the entrance. Eyes like glass, one shifter, one human. They let him pass. Don’t greet him.
The folder rests in his hands, light like a whisper. But inside—
Yinghua.
The name alone stops him.
He runs the search manually. No digital interface. Only the old drawers, the cross-referenced indices. It takes time. But it’s better than being clocked before he’s ready.
When he finds the file, it’s thinner than expected.
Too thin.
Her name is listed as a personal assistant to Lady Gyokuyou—one of the Emperor's oldest partners. One of the founding figures of the Court. The reason they were able to go semi-public at all.
Yinghua had been trained in etiquette. Light defense. Communications. Her profile glows under Court approval. She’d been poised to rise. She'd been…
Marked.
There’s a note in the margin: Recommended for Oath Ceremony, postponed indefinitely.
No reason.
No follow-up.
The final line: Presumed deceased or vanished. Case closed. No retrieval scheduled.
Case closed.
But Gaoshun knows better. He has the proof burning through the inside pocket of his coat.
The Court lost her. Let go of her name either with shame or with tears or with something more sinister. There is no name of any case-worker under the stamp. No X to mark the dotted line. It almost looks like they let the thread fray. Whether by choice or by incompetence, it doesn’t matter.
The Witch found her.
The air in the archive is too cold. His hands curl around the file until the edges bend.
He breathes out through his nose. Slowly. Controlled.
This is going to go above Jinshi.
Above his cover.
Above whatever leash he thought he was working under.
If someone finds out that he’s been tracking Yinghua off-book, collaborating with an unsanctioned, probable feral—and not reporting it—
The Court won’t ask politely.
They’ll send someone worse than Lihaku.
He folds the file shut. Does not return it to the drawer.
Instead, he presses his thumb to the top edge. Not enough to leave a print. Enough to leave a claim.
And walks back out with a weight in his coat and a tremor down his spine that feels like a badly repressed growl.
The office is sunlit. A false peace. Glass polished too clean, orchid in the corner blooming like nothing could be wrong. But Gyokuyou doesn’t come for tea. Doesn’t come with ceremony. She closes the door behind her and places the file on Jinshi’s desk—paper creased like it’s been opened and reread more than once.
Her voice is quiet.
“Yinghua’s name was flagged.”
Jinshi looks up from his screen, that reflexive court-trained mildness in his eyes. He folds his hands. Waits.
Gyokuyou doesn't sit. Her hair is carefully knotted up with a thin gold pin in the shape of a Crane. Her Shifter Clan. She’s the only CEO he knows to dress in dark wine-red and still, somehow make it look soft instead of aggressive. But her eyes are shadowed. Not angry. Just… worried.
“Someone accessed her file. A closed file.” She taps the name on the copy she’s laid out.
“I see,” Jinshi hums carefully. Eyes on Gaoshun’s name. “He has not… reported the context yet.”
Gyokuyou takes a seat. Crosses her legs. Here to stay. Here to wait him out.
Here for answers.
“What do we know?”
Her voice is even. But her nails gleam in the fluorescent light like a warning, fingers trembling just once before they still again. She was the one who trained Yinghua. Raised her like a daughter, in many ways. Watched her vanish, year by year, until the Court stopped saying her name.
Jinshi doesn't answer immediately. He looks away. Taps a key on his console, closes the data slate.
“We lost track of her. You know that.”
Gyokuyou doesn’t frown, but her mouth pinches reprimanding. “I know what I was told,” she dismisses. “And now, someone’s gone back for her. I want to know why.”
A long silence stretches.
“I’d like to be involved,” Gyokuyou says gently. “If something was found… if there’s been movement, I deserve to know.”
Jinshi exhales slowly. This isn’t like her. Or perhaps it’s exactly like her—and he’s only now remembering how dangerous worry is when paired with memory.
“I’ll get you the full report,” he promises with a soothing smile that she has always been able to look through. It doesn’t work this time either.
“And if there isn’t one?” she challenges.
Then Jinshi has more problems on his hand than the reappearance of a name the Court has forgotten in the Archives for the past handful of years. If Gaoshun goes rogue, Jinshi is out of a right-hand-man. That will hurt him but, worse, it will hurt The Court.
“Then I’ll pull him in.”
A pause. A beat between them that’s heavy with the weight of unspoken names and abandoned promises.
Gyokuyou leans forward slightly. There’s a glint in her eyes—not of accusation, but of conviction.
“You were the one who told me the Court protects its own.”
“It does,” Jinshi answers, quieter this time. He believes that. He has to believe it. If he doesn’t then none of the work they are doing makes sense.
She watches him. Long enough that the air gets thin between them.
“Prove it,” she says softly. Not a plea. Not an order. But weighty in its own way.
She leaves without slamming the door. The weight of her worry lingers like incense—quiet, warm, and impossible to ignore.
Chapter 11
Notes:
I remind you of the tag that said "Moral Ambiguity" and "Morally Ambiguous Character" (which, really, counts for like... all the characters in this story if I think about it correctly - I don't think I spared anyone that dubious honor)
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
The door shuts behind him with the quiet click of something inevitable.
Gaoshun doesn’t bother to sit.
Jinshi is already there—waiting, of course—seated behind a desk too immaculate to have ever seen real work. His shirt is cream, collar uncreased, sleeves folded once at the forearm in the casual affect of someone pretending they might get dirty. He doesn’t look up immediately, just finishes scribbling something on a tablet before setting the stylus aside.
“Agent Gaoshun,” he greets lightly, like they haven’t worked together for years. Like the name is a formality and not a shared history. “You’re late.”
Gaoshun says nothing. Just unclips the folder from under his arm and sets it down.
“From the bar?” Jinshi asks.
“Yes.”
The copy of the folder that the Witch had left him whispers over the table as Jinshi turns it to read better. It’s not a lead per se. Not a lie either.
It’s a reason, maybe, and hopefully an explanation of the question Jinshi hasn’t asked yet but must ready himself to.
Gaoshun is here for a reprimand. He’s under no illusions.
Jinshi flips the folder open. Scans quickly. The blacklight image of a girl—fever-eyed, smiling, mid-step—burns faint under the scan. The name: Yinghua. Circled. Bold.
Jinshi hums tonelessly. Closes the folder.
“You’re not authorized for off-book searches through Sub-Level Archives,” he says casually, as if it were a parking violation.
“I know.”
“And yet,” he sings—too sweet to be anything but a warning
“You wanted results.”
“I wanted a report,” Jinshi corrects with more iron than his face lets on. His smile never reaches his eyes. “I didn’t expect nostalgia.”
Gaoshun’s jaw flexes. “It’s not nostalgia.”
“No?” Jinshi tilts his head. “You accessed the file. Reopened a closed record with nothing but a maybe.”
Gaoshun doesn’t let the inaccuracy land. “If her name turns up on an active list during an active investigation, I’m going to look into her case,” he drawls. “Working with half the information is a request for suicide I’m not ready to hand in.”
“Oh yes,” Jinshi says, low and silken, “Because fraternizing with a possible Feral isn’t.”
The younger man throws out a grainy image of the Witch, walking away from him in a cobblestone alley, a burning building between them.
The room stills.
But Gaoshun doesn’t bite. He hums. Inspects the picture. “I told you she’s quicker than we are,” he finally says and puts the print-out down. It doesn’t prove anything. It’s just a prop to get under his skin.
“She’s working the ring. Better than most of our agents.”
He doesn’t tell the man that she’s the one to find Yinghua’s name. That she’s done more for Gyokuyou’s assistant than the Court managed in five years.
“She’s dangerous,” Jinshi says.
“So am I.”
The silence stretches.
“Stick to the plan,” Jinshi says eventually. Almost gently. Like it’s still a request.
Gaoshun doesn’t move.
“Find the ring,” Jinshi continues. “If Yinghua is there, recover what you can. If she isn’t…”
The words hang.
If she’s been lost.
If she’s broken.
If she’s better off erased.
Gaoshun doesn’t ask for clarification. He doesn’t need it.
Jinshi folds his hands. “There will be rewards,” he says, “If you bring this to a clean conclusion.”
The word rewarded tastes like rust. Like rot.
Yinghua was someone the Court raised, used, discarded (or “lost” as they put it).
And now they want her back.
If she’s intact enough to be useful.
He nods, once.
Not because he agrees.
Because the game is on, and if he’s going to protect the witch, if he’s going to find Yinghua before she becomes another forgotten name on the altar of pragmatism—
Then he has to play the Court’s hand. Until he can deal his own.
He turns. Walks out.
His shoulder aches with a bite he’s not ready to let the medics see.
Notes:
Yes, Jinshi is a bit of a corporate sleaze and that's okay, he means well most of the time, okay? (ish...)
Chapter 12
Notes:
I said character development and I also said slow-burn, just a reminder ;)
Chapter Text
Maomao hates that it works.
Hates that she breathes easier now.
That the antiseptic wipe he pressed to her ribs did more for her than the magic she burned herself raw to wield. It wasn’t flashy. It wasn’t even precise. But it was clean. And sometimes clean mattered more than pain did.
The memory of his touch—impersonal, practiced, maddeningly steady—still burns against the angry red of her wound.
So she does what any self-respecting former-medic would do: she goes to the next corner store with an attached pharmacy. Her father would be appalled that it hadn’t been her first instinct either way, but the lower a profile she keeps, the better.
She wraps a scarf around her chin. Slouches her posture. Adds a limp she doesn’t need to the right side of her gait. Better safe than sorry. Just a girl with a strain in her back and a long grocery list.
The store smells of synthetic lemon and refrigerated guilt. The harsh lights don’t like her shadow much. They twitch when she moves.
She grabs ramen. Frozen dumplings. A jar of chili paste. Antiseptic wipes. Bandages. A heat pack. Electrolyte powder. She tells the suspicious clerk: “Friend of mine busted his knee. I’m his errand dog tonight.”
She smiles and believes it until it’s no longer a lie. Just a story.
Back in her hide-away, she unpacks slowly. Lays out supplies on the table beside the caseboard. She wipes the wound again. Tapes it shut. Her fingers don’t shake as badly now. She sits. Breathes. Feels the scab itch. Feels the fatigue like a second skin she can't shed.
She picks up the folder she’d shed on the table days ago. Cuts out a picture. Tacks another face to the board.
Yinghua.
A Clean scan. Captured from a blacklight file. Smiling. Mid-step. Still whole.
She’s a beautiful, young woman. Maomao can’t see a single sign of her being a shifter. But the woman at her side—tall, pant-suit, hair-needle in a perfect coiffure—screams Court in a way only one other person has in recent memory.
Her fingertips hover over the edge of the photo longer than they should.
She pins it between Xiaolan and a red string marked Missing from records. It’s the first time the threads start to look like a net, instead of chaos.
She exhales.
And then, before she can stop herself, she sketches the wolf.
Not well—her hand’s too stiff for proper lines—but clear enough. Clean jaw. Crisp collar. Eyes like a blade right before it bites. That one lock in his face.
She tears a bit of tape. Pins him next to Yinghua. Not in connection. But in proximity.
Her eyes fall to his shoulders.
The ones she’s marked.
Lightning, carved into the left. Teeth, sunk into the right.
Burns and bruises in her shape.
She remembers. Knows he wears her now—like a warning.
Hates that it feels like triumph.
That she remembers the way he smelled. Tasted. That antiseptic now makes her feel safer than sage. That part of her—deep in the belly where instincts used to rule—has stopped flinching when she thinks of him.
She leans back in her chair. Stares at the board.
Chapter 13
Notes:
hard cut from one chapter to another, sorry, also... we're taking a step back here :/ because of the slow-burn tag, and also the enemies-to-??? tag and because I'm the deity of this fanfic and I said so
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
He hates places like this.
Not because of what they are—but because he knows what they used to be. What they promise, before they sink their claws in.
The Yǒng Yè House looks clean from the outside. Glass storefront, chic signage, street-kid-friendly prices, a side room for mahjong and dice. But Gaoshun’s nose flares the moment he crosses the threshold through the back—where the light changes.
Blue-black neon. Cheap incense masking blood. Floor too clean. Walls too thin.
A place that feeds off desperation.
A den.
Prostitution. Substances. Debt-reclamation. The Court has it pegged on surveillance. There’s an undercover agent somewhere around here, but they’re trying to get into the upstairs rooms from the inside.
Gaoshun doesn’t have the patience for that. Or the time.
Not when he catches the whiff of ozone and blood from the moment his boots hit the first staircase.
Maybe it’s instinct—wolf-honed, guilt-fed. Maybe it’s that the ache in his chest spikes before he even hits the upper floor. Maybe it’s how the back hallway buzzes with ozone the moment he touches the tapestry of the upper level.
It’s quiet.
And she’s there.
The Witch.
Half-slumped in a rickety chair and dressed like she’d been serving drinks earlier. Scantily. To blend in. Her hands are bound with zip-ties. Her face bloodied. One eye swollen, lips split. There's a half-dried smear of blood on the wall behind her, and a discarded bag of her satchel contents spilled like guts across the floor.
Trap, he realizes even as he checks the hallway and steps further into the room.
This wasn’t a failed stakeout. This wasn’t bad timing. This was them baiting her.
And perhaps, now, them baiting him.
But he doesn’t think.
He moves.
Slips a knife from his coat and flips it open to cut her loose in silence. Feels her shudder once against his chest but doesn’t speak. Doesn’t dare. Her eyes are blown wide with adrenaline when she looks at him. And still: she leans on him. Just enough to let him know she’s aware.
That she remembers their half-assed discussion of truce the last time they’d met.
They make it halfway to the stairwell before the shout comes.
Lihaku.
Rookie stance. Court clearance. Eyes wide and shifter bright and way too loud.
“Who is that?”
The Witch flinches.
Freezes.
And then—
Snaps.
She spins before Gaoshun can catch her.
Electricity screams from her hands, dancing across the neon-inked tiles like wildfire.
Her legs buckle— but the fury in her body crackles up her spine like she’s touched a live wire. Her vision goes white. She moves anyway.
Lihaku goes flying.
Hits the wall with a yelp and a grunt and drops like a sack of startled pride.
“Shit—Wait!” Gaoshun tries to grab her elbow, but she’s already twisting again, lightning at her knuckles, eyes burning feral.
“You set me up,” she hisses. “You—you son of a—”
He snarls. “He wasn’t supposed to be here.”
Her eyes crackle like lightning. Her hands flail away from him. He has no idea how she’s standing.
“You brought him.”
“I didn’t know—he's just a kid—”
“Fuck you!” she bites. Her eyes flash. Fear. Rage. Magic. “And fuck your fucking truce!”
Her hands clasp like a gun—he ducks before it can hit him in the chest, but the ozone cackles down the hallway like a bolt. Screams echo through the den, glass splinters, lights go out.
When he ducks out of the doorway again, she’s long gone.
In nothing but panties, bra and stilettos.
Lihaku groans from the floor.
Gaoshun hauls him up like he has to answer for all his crimes.
Which he does.
He presses the heel of his palm to his temple. Feels her blood on his hands. Feels her absence like a fever in his chest.
So fucking close.
He shakes Lihaku unkindly. Smiles darkly at the groan that emerges from the Junior Agent. “You just got me marked for war,” Gaoshun mutters, dragging the kid up by the collar. “Congratulations,” he grumps as he tears them down the emergency stairs and away from the guns coming up in the lift.
A lot to answer for given they make it out alive.
Notes:
But also: LIHAKU! :D
(I made up Yong Ye House, fyi, as well as the bar a few chapters back, just because I think places should have names but like... pfffft, no idea if this is an actual place - if it is, my version of it is not in any way based on it because I am, at the current moment, convinced it's not a thing)
Chapter 14
Notes:
MAGIC! LAKAN! WHOOP!
Chapter Text
They don’t even do it in person.
The suspension comes through a secure ping—clean, clinical, and stripped of emotion.
Temporary ban on field work pending further review.
No explanation. No direct address. Just sanitized procedure. Like they’re already washing their hands of him.
He closes the notification without reading the timestamp. Without wondering if it came from Jinshi’s desk or from one of his assistants’. That way lies madness he can’t afford right now.
For the first time in a decade, he’s out of the loop. Not reprimanded yet. Not reassigned. Benched.
He doesn’t break anything, but for a moment he wants to. Doesn’t growl, though his teeth clench. Doesn’t shift even though it might release the pressure building in his chest like a shaken fizzy drink under pressure.
He just sits. Stares at the ceiling-high library-wall tucked into the very back of his apartment and wonders what the Witch is doing right now. Wonders how she found her way home.
Wonder if, tomorrow, there will be tabloid pictures of a woman with sea-green hair and an arrest for indecent exposure in a name he doesn’t know yet. There’s a tumbler of something alcoholic at his side, but he hasn’t even sniffed at it.
He eases out a breath that doesn’t relax him and turns his churning mind towards the conundrum of a Witch.
What would he be doing in her place?
What could she possibly be planning now?
The air on the rooftop is wet. Heavy.
The pink flicker of the VIRAG sign next to her makes the back of her head pulse uncomfortably, a stab to the eyes and a high-pitched hum that drills into her ears with every second.
Maomao ties back her hair with trembling fingers. Fingers that still ache from breaking her fall two nights ago. Fingers that still remember the scrape of ductwork and the throb of fists.
She breathes.
No more running tonight.
She kneels on the cracked tarmac. Where the concrete is scarred and unfriendly. Where it feels real.
She draws the circle by hand.
The old way.
Blood mixes with the chalk where her knuckles split. The lines buzz against her palms even before she finishes laying the threads.
The spell is raw. Power-hungry. Old.
It costs her more to cast than it should. It would cost her more to not cast it.
Yǒng Yè House left a trail. A small one. A tight-wound group with old ties to bigger predators. If she can find where they’re taking the girls—
No. No ifs anymore.
Maomao breathes shallowly. Presses her palms to the runes.
Chants.
Old words. Words too rough and cracked to belong in a human mouth. Words that taste like rust and taste like rain and taste like power pressed into her skin until she burns.
The circle ignites.
The sigil flares in dirty blue-white, a strobe of agony under her ribs, under her breastbone, behind her teeth. It’s loud enough, bright enough, wrong enough that the Court’s sensors—buried in the bones of the city itself—will see it.
There’s no masking this. Not even if she wanted to.
The spell lurches outward, dragging blood from her nose, her ears, her bitten tongue.
Maomao gasps, sucks in air heavy with copper and iron and fire.
Through the shimmering rip in the veil, she sees a loading dock. A black van with no plates. A woman shoved into a crate. A handprint burned into the back door of a warehouse she recognizes.
She sees the target.
And she sees the cost.
The magic tears back from her like a broken leash.
The circle collapses.
The ground shudders once. Twice. And Maomao folds over herself, coughing, heaving in the cold drizzle.
Eyes wide and wild.
They’ll come for her now.
Not the traffickers.
The Court.
He wakes to the punch of a Scryflare vibrating through his chest, jostling him up from his half-hearted rest.
Ozone oozes through his cracked window. Subtle, but not quiet. The kind of magic meant to be noticed. Burned through the wards of half the city like a bloody thumbprint pressed to glass. Lightning and blood and bone-memory magic, spiking sharp and ancient through the surveillance net.
The Court will recognize it. Jinshi will respond.
If he continues as he has, he will send Lihaku.
Underestimating the Witch might lead him to the decision to send only Lihaku. Maybe as a test. Or a punishment.
Maybe both.
Gaoshun’s already halfway to the door when the knock sounds.
One short. One long. Followed by two short taps. Familiar.
Except not at his front door.
He opens it to find the Court’s Grand Strategist Lakan standing there—dressed not in full regalia but in something that fits the shadows: long coat, cufflinks like old silver coins, eyes amused in that fox-coiled way that means he’s been watching and knows something others don’t.
"You’re not cleared for fieldwork," Lakan says without preamble.
"You’re not cleared for my apartment," Gaoshun replies, just as flat.
"And yet," Lakan says, handing over a datapad.
On it: the Scryflare’s signature, the mapped grid of magical interference, the location triangulated to a block Gaoshun has walked a hundred times.
“This looks like a breach report,” Gaoshun says slowly.
“You must be reading that wrong,” Lakan answers, mellow and friendly in a way that should make anyone cautious, “This is supposed to be a head start.”
His voice is like velvet pulled over broken teeth. “She’s probably an hour ahead of you. If Lihaku catches her first, she’ll gut him. And if she does, the Court will make her a problem no one walks away from.”
“You're interfering.”
“As any clever strategist should,” Lakan sing-songs like a mockery. “Think of it as betting on the one person who hasn’t failed us yet.”
That catches him.
Stillness like an echo in his chest.
The datapad is warm in his hand.
Burnt sage still clings to his sleeves. Copper lightning on his collar.
There's a war inside him—brief, brutal, already over.
He grabs his coat.
Chapter 15
Notes:
I had to adapt this chapter a bit, but I think I'm somewhat more happy with it like this, means that there's potentially less chapters though because I just merged two but psssssst that's a secret between us, okay?
Chapter Text
Gaoshun picks up her scent long before he sees her: Lightning and sage. Blood and bone-tiredness.
She doesn’t smell of fever this time. An improvement he doesn’t know how to take.
The scent cuts through the chemical rot of the docks, a livewire on the back of his tongue. It’s the only thing he tracks now—the only thing that matters. Not the ring. Not the orders. Not the plan.
Fuck the plan. He’s suspended from the plan. His cards are out of his hands, so now he has to play the ace he hid up his sleeves.
He moves through the underbelly of the city fast, weaving past oil barrels and dead dock-carts and shuttered cranes. The world here is rust and forgotten things.
So is she.
He finds her half-collapsed over a man in a bolted-down chair, breath sawing ragged through cracked lips. Even through the dust of half-baked cement he can smell the blood on her. Her palms are pressed flat against the man’s temples like she could burn the truth right out of his skull.
The man grins through swollen lips. Spider tattoo on his face. Eyes already purpled with punishment.
The spell hanging in the air is brutal. Vicious. It's going to eat her from the inside. And she’s still pushing. She’s about to pour herself into him—mind-to-mind, magic to marrow—when something shifts in the air behind him.
Gaoshun doesn't think. Doesn’t ask. Moves like a blade.
He crashes into her from the side, yanking her clean off the man, hurling them both into the shaded filth behind a rusting crate-tower. The corner stinks of piss and rot—revolting, but good. It’ll mask them.
She snarls, fights, but he clamps his hand over her mouth before she can light him up. Snaps his arm around hers in a punishing bind that makes her jolt against him. Feet kicking. His body cages hers against the crates. His scent smothers hers.
Footsteps.
Too loud.
Lihaku.
The kid crashes into the warehouse floor, weapon half-out, stance sloppy and loud and wrong.
The Witch stills under him. Breath trembling. Not because she’s afraid.
Because now she’s listening.
A beat.
“Who are you? Who’s here?”
The man in the chair throws his head back and bites down hard.
A wet crunch. A gurgle. A spray of blood bubbling past grinning lips. Wet coughing. More gurgling. Lihaku’s panicked call for back-up is not going to save this one.
But it might spell trouble for Gaoshun and the Witch. He looks around. Shifts to the heavy sound of plastic dragging over unfinished concrete.
By the time Lihaku stumbles forward to check, the man is already slumped. Silent.
Dead.
The Witch sags into Gaoshun’s chest, the fight bleeding out of her in shivers. She doesn’t speak as he maneuvers them out through a gap in the trailing plastic, away from the ambient light of the street and towards the darker innards of the unfinished complex and away from a man who’d rather bite off his own tongue than say another word.
Somehow, they get out. The complex is big enough. A skeleton of concrete once supposed to be a shopping center and abandoned in money-laundering scandals. The districts twist too darkly around its corners. The Court Agents are too eager to run toward noise instead of watching shadows.
Gaoshun pulls them into an alley that stinks of smoke and wet concrete. His coat flares around her, hiding her battered frame. Cloaking her from view. From scent. From consequence.
She tucks under his chin, breath hitched against his throat—close enough to bite.
And she might.
Her head presses into the curve of his shoulder, hair tangled, mouth a line of stubborn tension. He feels her magic, tight and vicious, barely restrained under her skin.
The only reason she hasn’t lashed out yet is because in this moment, they both want the same thing.
Out.
Alive.
And she is too street-clever to bite the hand that leads her through a blockade.
Gaoshun rumbles low in his chest. His sharp teeth ghost the line of her throat. Not warning, not invitation—just command.
Stay still. Stay hidden. Stay with me.
And don’t even think about trying anything.
The Court’s sweepers jog past the mouth of the alley without sparing them a second glance. Two shadows. Another pair of dockland junkies trying to get lucky in a city that has stopped caring.
Only when the footsteps fade does she shift against him.
He doesn't let her go immediately. Just enough to drag a swab from the inner lining of his coat.
She hisses when he presses it to the fresh cut leaking sluggishly from her side.
“You just happen to carry that with you, huh?” she grits out with eyes closing against the sting.
He hums low, voice velvet over steel. “Routine field kit.”
She snorts against his chest, sharp and scornful. “Court-pampered dog.”
He chuckles once—bone-deep and rough. “Suspended, little spitfire.”
His fingers smooth the wipe along the wound with brutal care. “If anything, I’m a Court-suspended mutt, if you have to be derogatory at all.”
“I do.”
Her voice is dry as gunpowder.
“Sharp-toothed viper.”
She shifts, trying to pull back, but he tightens his grip by a fraction—enough to hold her up without caging her.
“Cat.” She bristles. He feels it roll through her like heat.
“Nuh-uh.” He tilts his mouth near her ear, where his breath brushes her skin. “Not while I’m a mutt. You’re a viper as long as you can’t find your manners.”
“Fuck you,” she snarls—but her voice frays at the edge, cracked and hoarse and trembling with heat.
He laughs again. Quiet. Almost fond.
“You haven’t earned that right yet.”
That earns him a weak shove to the shoulder that still stings with the remnant of her first lightning. His body barely rocks with it, but the stubbornness of the gesture makes something animalistic bare its teeth in his chest.
She stares at him, weary and mistrusting. Her skin hot enough to burn. Her magic a trembling, furious thing between them.
And for a moment—just a moment—he thinks she might lean. Might stay. Might ask.
But then she jerks her chin up.
Sharp. Proud. Cold.
Peels herself free of the coat like it burned.
The cold hits harder than he expects.
“Don’t follow me,” she rasps. Low. Vicious.
“Too late,” he answers.
Because it is.
Chapter 16
Notes:
!!! They're finally getting somewhere !!!! YAAAAAAAAAAH!
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
She’s tired. Frayed enough that the alley shakes a little when she leans too hard into the concrete. Worn enough that the wolf's shadow feels closer than the sound of her own heartbeat.
And he’s still there.
Still breathing down her spine.
Still wrapped in stubborn, silent protection like he’s her problem now.
Too late, he’d said, and she really thought he wouldn’t follow her out that alleyway. Really thought the pursuit predator wouldn’t follow.
She snorts—low, guttural, half a laugh and half a growl.
She has three options. None of them good.
She could gut him.
One spike of lightning—one clean sigil on her tongue—and he’d be down. Maybe not dead. But burning. And maybe she’d bleed out after, ribs breaking inward, heart hammering out its last furious beat against her cracked sternum.
Or—
She could trust him.
(The thought alone tastes like copper and betrayal. Like old blood and the echo of fists against a door that never opened.)
Or—
She could use him.
Keep her enemies closer. Learn what she could. Stay one step ahead until she didn’t need him anymore.
Her lips peel into a tired, feral grin.
“Come on, mutt,” she rasps, not bothering to look back.
Not offering him a hand. Not offering anything, really, except the chance to follow.
He does.
Of course he does.
The factory hideout looms in the distance, stitched into the rusted ribs of the dead district like a scar the city never bothered to close.
She drags herself up the stairs, boots scraping, ribs howling. The VIRAG sign lights the rusted stairwells weakly through dirty windows, bleeding pink light into the grime.
The wolf follows without a word.
She palms the runes by her door—careful not to trigger the layered failsafes she’d laid. The sigil flares once, grudgingly, and lets them in.
The inside looks bleaker than she is used to.
Concrete bones. A table stacked with intel and blood-streaked sketches. The curtain to her privacy open, revealing her bed: a mattress hiding under a mess of blankets.
And, on the wall—
A board of string and paper and faces.
At the center: A girl.
Not older than thirteen. Wide smile. Crooked teeth. Big dreams.
The room smells of copper, dust and storm. The pink fluorescent light of the advertisement from the other roof is interspersed with the bright yellow lights of The Court’s Forensics team, busy mapping out the runic layout she’d rolled over the tarmac one roof over.
The Wolf watches only briefly through the window.
“Right under our noses, huh?” he muses quietly.
She shrugs, sags onto her chair and peels off her wet jacket.
He steps inside carefully—like a man stepping onto hallowed ground. His eyes move over the evidence of her war.
The maps. The photos. The names of men and women she’s marked for death and judgment. The names of those who should have protected them and didn't.
If he’s the spy she suspects he will become, he will use this against her. A ledger of all her sins.
He looks at the girl in the center of the board.
The girl nobody else is searching for. The girl the world let vanish into nothing.
She exhales.
“This is why,” she says, voice raw. “We’re not chasing the same thing, mutt. I’m chasing her."
Gaoshun’s hands curl into fists at his sides. Not out of anger.
Out of understanding. Out of the terrible weight of knowing exactly what it means to have someone small and precious torn away from you, and realizing you are the only one left to remember.
“She’s a shifter?” he asks softly, even though he already knows the answer.
“She’s mine,” the Witch says. As if that settles it.
It does.
Something in Gaoshun’s chest—something old and cracked and stitched too many times—locks into place.
He looks at her then.
Really looks.
The blood on her face. The bite in her voice. The fury she carries like it’s armor.
She’s younger than she should be. Not much older than he had been when he’d first ducked out of the whistle of a bullet and heard the impact of it when it had burrowed into the skin of a countryman behind him.
And he knows—knows—That he's not here to catch her.
He’s here to hunt with her.
Even if she doesn’t realize it yet.
Notes:
So: considering taking the stories out of anonymous - maybe because I started to use it so that I could feel more protected while I was waiting to see what people would think of "my freak" (i.e. GaoMao as a ship) and the way you people just keep showing up and the way there are now like... more stories is very encouraging? I'm not promising anything yet but just... I love where we're going and it's sort of funny to me that everyone's posting under Anonymous and maybe I'll talk to my therapist a bit more about feeling less shame here and being a bit more outspoken about the work I put in here. I love reading the works of others in the GaoMao section though so I'd definitely love it if more stories showed up <3
Chapter 17
Notes:
Interlude between Jinshi and Gaoshun a day or two after Gaoshun's first stay at Maomao's - because I have no sense of timeline or geographic coherence and it didn't occur to me until now (whelp)
-enjoy
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
The room is colder than Gaoshun remembers. Or maybe he’s just more awake now.
Jinshi is standing when he enters. Not behind his desk. In front of it.
Arms crossed loosely, weight on one foot, leaning against the glass table with casual grace—in the way a man stands when he's cornered himself and won't admit it yet.
There’s no one else present. No surveillance. No pretense.
Just them.
Jinshi wastes no time.
“She’s a Trueborn Witch,” he says without preamble. “She has to be.”
Gaoshun says nothing.
Only stands, the very image of obedience. Of the perfect soldier he was bred, trained, expected to be. The image of the dog who’d been slapped on the nose and learned his lesson.
But inside, something old and wary slithers awake.
The same instinct that once warned his grandfather when the contracts got heavier and the pay stayed the same. The same instinct that told his mother when to fold up the diner, when to move to a city where no one looked at her calloused hands like a problem.
“She’s unclaimed,” Jinshi continues, his voice low and too calm. “No Court ties. No shifter scenting. No ties.”
No leash.
Gaoshun doesn't blink. Doesn’t twitch. Only watches.
Jinshi leans forward, hands bracing on the back of a chair as if the words themselves need weight behind them.
“She’s power,” he breathes. “She’s everything we could need.”
There’s a beat. A hitch.
“She could solidify the wards over the shèqūn1. Bind them like iron. We could shelter everyone. Everyone, Gaoshun. No more Kowloon2. No more having to hide in human blindspots. No more losing our people in the cracks.”
The vision hangs between them.
Tempting.
Terrifying.
Gaoshun’s heart is a slow, heavy drum against his ribs.
Not because the vision is wrong.
But because it’s too much like the ones his ancestors were promised too.
You’ll be protected, they said. You'll be respected.
All we need is a little more from you.
A little more labor.
A little more loyalty.
A little more of your life.
He knows how that ends.
They call it opportunity until the bones pile too high to climb out.
Jinshi straightens again. Smiles. Not kindly. Not cruelly.
Like a man who believes he’s just handed out a gift, instead of a death sentence.
“You have to bring her in,” he says. Soft.
Final.
“For the sake of the Court. For all of us.”
Gaoshun nods.
Sharp and precise like a salute.
Empty like a lie.
He wonders if it had always started like this in the offices of human societies too: as hope; right before it had started to smack of fears and turned into chains.
When Gaoshun turns away, his face shows nothing.
When the door closes behind him, his hands curl just once, tight enough to pop the bones in his knuckles.
The era of leashes and chains is over.
He will not be the first link to reinstate it. Not while he breathes.
Notes:
shè qún. Chinese for "community" (check it out here) and, in world, meant as sort of shifter-exclusive gated communities that are usually warded by Clan-Witches for protection of the shfiters. Which is good and well for the shifters of the Clan but can cause issues for the magic, when the communities expand beyond a certain clan - i.e. modern society where not everyone is a clan-shifter and the communities take in shifters from non-traditional unions and even those trueborn shifters that have been found by shifters in communities. Back
Kowloon Walled City. Read up about it (also here), watch Youtube about it (this was my introduction to it), it is such a fascinating part of Chinese History. Not going to expound too much on it here, because we'll meet it again in the story and I don't want to spoiler. Back
Chapter 18
Notes:
(See the end of the chapter for notes.)
Chapter Text
The knock is soft.
Three taps. No urgency. No threat.
Maomao sits on the bed, her side stitched roughly with steri-strips under gauze and stubbornness. She doesn’t move immediately. Just listens.
The wards don’t flare. The alarms don’t scream. Only the heavy presence of someone who knows how to breathe quiet, how to fit their pulse between the cracks of a damaged place. She knows exactly who it is.
She gets up slowly. One hand braced against the wall to keep from weaving.
Opens the door.
And there he is.
The wolf. Tall and dangerous and absurdly… domestic, somehow, in the half-light.
A takeout bag slung in one hand, a battered canvas book-bag hanging from the other. His coat darker than the dusk behind him, his hair mussed just enough to look real.
No weapons drawn.
Just… there.
She squints at him.
“What do you want?”
He lifts the bag that smells like cholesterol and heaven like an offering. "Peace offering," he says, deadpan. Lifts the other bag: "And work."
She hesitates. One beat. Two. Then, with a sigh that sounds more tired than suspicious, steps back. Lets him in.
The door clicks behind him.
Her home looks like it always does: half-forgotten, half-defiant. The caseboard sprawls across the cracked wall—Xiaolan’s photo at the heart of it, the red strings a map of desperation. New faces have been added. New links.
He sets the food down on the only table and pulls out the book-bag, unceremonious.
Documents. Files. Hard copies leak from the worn seams of manila folders.
She watches, narrow-eyed, as he fans them out. Surveillance photos. Warehouse manifests. Internal Court reports she’s never seen. Names she recognizes—and some she doesn’t.
"You've been busy," she says flatly.
He shrugs one shoulder. The one her lightning didn’t wreck. "Seemed fair," he says.
Her gaze flickers between the files, then up to him. Something wary loosens, just a fraction.
Then, voice low and cutting, as she reaches for the rustling plastic of take-out: “You stole my lead on the docks, you know.”
He hums. A glint in his eye, too sharp to be safe.
“But if you’re willing to help," she continues, "I can find a way in there. Find a way to the files.”
He tips his head. Watching her like a wolf watches the first misstep of prey.
“No illegal sigils this time?” he drawls.
She snorts. Crosses her arms over her still-tender ribs.
“…It gets me where I need to be.”
His face tightens. “It poisons you from the inside out.”
“All things have a price, Wolf.”
He steps closer. Not menacing. Just there. Close enough she has to tilt her chin up to meet his eyes. The scent of rain clings to him.
“Gaoshun,” he corrects, voice low.
Not Wolf. Not Dog. Not Mutt. A name. His name.
Maomao smirks, but there’s no real heat behind it. "Tall Disaster."
A rumble almost like a laugh shakes in his chest.
“Cornsnake,” he volleys back, mouth twitching into something like a smile as he shifts just enough to reach for the take-out-boxes and find one that smells like meat and days-old-fat. Her stomach gurgles.
She reaches for another warm box and narrows her eyes. “…I can’t decide if that’s an upgrade or a downgrade.”
“Yes,” he says easily, spearing a piece and biting into its heat as he leans against her rickety table with ease and leisure that grates at her.
She does laugh then—short and rough-edged and real.
But her breath hitches when he asks, quieter: "Will you poison me too?"
The question isn't light. It slides under the ribs, sharp and cold. Something flickers in his gaze. Something that looks terribly like resignation, a recognition of terms he could possibly make himself live with.
A Wolf ready to lie down in brambles.
She exhales slowly, a sound like gravel. Her eyes slide away from him. Her feet feel cold against the ground. “…Not if you don’t make me.”
A silence stretches between them, thick and trembling.
Then: “How do I help?” he asks again, softer this time.
She stares at him for a long breath.
Finally—finally—she sits down. Not in surrender. In calculation.
“The other spell… it’s cleaner,” she murmurs around a piece of stir-fry. “But it takes more. Especially…” She rubs at her bandaged side, grimacing. “…Especially now.”
“You’re used to the quick fix,” Gaoshun says, voice gentler than the words.
“These things work like drugs,” she mutters, not meeting his eyes. “It’s an addiction. And I haven’t really cared for an alternative in a while.”
He doesn't flinch. Doesn’t scold.
Just: "How do I help?"
She lifts her head. Her eyes are molten and hollow at once.
“…It’ll lash back on me, probably," she says. "If you want to help—” She hesitates. Then pushes through it. "Just don’t let your Court get to me when I stumble."
“Still not my Court, little Cornsnake,” he says, one corner of his mouth tilting in a half-smile.
She glares at him. It’s weak. It’s almost affectionate.
“I’ve decided that you’re insulting me.”
He laughs quietly.
Notes:
We are getting somewhere with these two stubborn idiots--finally
Chapter 19
Notes:
trigger warning for vomiting and physical violence.
Also, please remember the ambiguous morality of like everyone in this story, yes? I did say nobody would remain untouched concerning that.
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
Gaoshun gives Jinshi just enough warning: A rough timestamp. A place. Nothing more. He’s suspended, but he’s not going to dig himself deeper than strictly necessary.
Enough to let The Court scramble the agents. Enough to make it official. Enough to keep his ass, and hers, barely covered.
It means they have to move fast, though. Faster than The Court will.
The Witch slips into the warehouse under the ragged gray of a borrowed hoodie. The stench of fishgut and motor oil masking her well enough to pass as a runner. Nobody questions a girl carrying crates. Nobody wants to question her when she keeps her head down and shoulders hunched and smells like dockside rot.
It doesn't take her long.
She spots the spider-tattoo—a nasty coil of ink on the man's throat—bold and stupid and perfect.
She flags him without words. Doggedly. Relentlessly. Trails him like a shadow stitched to his heel.
Gaoshun catches the signal.
Peels off from a loading bay where a broken light stutters overhead. Slips into an alley jagged between two half-toppled warehouses. An ugly gap of concrete and rust. Lets himself be seen on the cigarette break of a man with a spider-coiled around his throat.
The bastard follows the lure like a rat sniffing at poisoned cheese. Gaoshun waits in the half-shadows until he’s too deep to run.
By the time the asshole realizes that he’s too far away to be heard, the Witch strikes.
It’s not flashy. But it’s oddly clean in the way a slow horror of a spell unspools like an infection through blood and bone. It’s neat when she presses her palms against the man’s skull from behind, binds him, with a rough command. His pupils bleach white. His hands spasm. His mouth gapes in a soundless scream.
She pours into him. Filters cleanly through memories. Catalogues them. Maps the rot with surgical precision and not a single drop of blood wasted.
Gaoshun watches grimly. Watches the sweat bead on her forehead. The way her mouth tightens. The way her knees almost buckle before she catches herself. The shake of the bastard’s hands, then his chest. The slow, dawning horror on his waxen face.
She's taking too long.
She tears herself free just before the spider-man keels over. He staggers, bloodshot eyes and slack-mouthed, confusion dripping from every pore.
And alive.
Gaoshun’s mouth tightens into a thin, grim line.
Alive means he remembers their faces.
Alive means witnesses.
He moves before the bastard can find his voice.
Grabs the man by the collar and cracks his skull against the brick wall. Hard enough for a concussion, not hard enough to kill. Not this time.
The man slumps with a whimper.
Not dead. Not talking.
A siren slices the loaded silence. Court agents swarm the broad delivery roads in seconds, noisy and clumsy, boots clattering like amateur hour.
Perfect.
In the chaos, they slip away—into the broken teeth of the district, over rooftops slick with old rain.
The Witch barely makes it three roofs before she crumples to her knees and vomits violently against a rusted vent. She hurls insults through thinning vocal chords and heaves like a seasoned drinker. Retches until her ribs quake.
Gaoshun stands guard.
Silent. Patient.
When she’s done—when she wipes her mouth with the back of a trembling hand—she snarls something at the sky. A rough, warbled curse torn from lungs too raw to whisper.
He chuckles once, low and not unkind, and crouches beside her, offers her a tissue.
"Now that you’ve barfed all over me," he drawls, "will you finally tell me your name?"
She glares up at him, cheeks flushed, hair stuck to her forehead with sweat and stubbornness. She takes his handkerchief with a reluctant swipe and a brief look at him.
“Didn’t even touch you,” she mutters as she coughs to the side, spits out a piece of something he doesn’t want to inspect too closely. His nose is already picking up on the sharp, acidic stench of her bile.
He just raises an eyebrow, waiting.
"I like Cornsnake," she croaks as she wobbles herself upright. "I’m keeping it. No take-backs."
He huffs a laugh, rough and real.
"Cornsnakes can’t barf," he points out mildly.
"Says you," she snaps.
He watches her for a beat—sees the fire banked deep, the survival stitched into every frayed corner of her frame—and feels something dangerous curl low in his gut.
Carefully, carefully, he slings her arm over his shoulders.
"Come on, little Cornsnake," he murmurs. "Let’s get you home."
She doesn’t argue this time.
Notes:
Are we actually getting somewhere? We don't know. They don't know. But we're in it now
Chapter 20
Notes:
Have some Taomei >:)
Chapter Text
She shakes through the night. Violent tremors that rattle through her bones no matter how many blankets she pulls up around her.
Gaoshun watches from the chair beside her bed under the pretense of sifting through her research, a shadow melted into the cracked gloom. Pretending not to watch every breath.
He’s seen this before—in addicts clawing their way back through hell, in soldiers going dry from magic, from blood, from poison.
But never like this.
Never from a witch burning herself down from the inside out.
Her fever runs high, burning hard enough to make her whimper once in her sleep, fists curled tight into the thin mattress. Her sweat smells sour and heavy, coats the back of his tongue like rotten felt.
He doesn’t touch her.
But he waits. Quiet. Watchful. Counts the beats of her heart as it evens out. Shoulders dropping only when her breath rattles less and sinks deeper into her lungs.
When morning edges gray across the factory floor, she kicks him out.
Literally.
A boot thudding weakly against his shin as she snarls something about "dignity" and "not your damn charity".
He goes.
It’s against the nature of a wolf to go when a packmate is wounded and alone. But that’s exactly why he steps through the doorway and shuts the door behind him.
She’s not pack.
She’s not anything.
He’s got work to do.
And not enough time to deal with something like her.
He stops at home only long enough to scrub the stink of bile and magic out of his skin.
The water runs rust-brown down the drain of the white tiles under his feet and eases heat into his shoulders until they drop away from his neck.
By the time he emerges from the shower, fresh clothes clinging clean to his frame, he smells it: Sandalwood. Fresh-cut pine. Familiar.
Taomei.
He’s not dressed enough for the occasion, but unfortunately for the both of them, he doesn’t have enough fucks to give after the night.
Towel and boxer-briefs it is.
He finds her standing in his tiny kitchen like she owns the place. (She had, once.)
Sharp-eyed. Sharp-nosed. Sharp-tongued, when she wanted to be. Not cruel—never cruel. Just astute in all the most uncomfortable ways.
She doesn’t say hello. Doesn’t tease him like she once would have. She just leans one hip against the counter, legs crossed at the ankles, and watches him with the kind of patience that always spelled confrontation.
"You smell like trouble," she says after a beat. Cool and unimpressed.
He grunts. Drying his hair with the towel. "That's rich coming from the ex-wife who stands in my kitchen at seven-ten in the damn morning."
Her gaze skims over him. Lingering a moment on the healing bite scar at his shoulder.
Her brow quirks smartly as she takes a sip from a cup that smells like coffee. Sharp as a blade slipping between armor.
Gaoshun huffs.
“None of your business,” he reminds as he catches sight of the second cup of coffee she has prepared to wait steaming on the counter. He doesn’t reach for it.
“And you can’t really be here to tell me what I smell like when you’ve spelt trouble from the moment you socked a classmate in the jaw at ten.”
“I pick my own trouble,” she hums. “I know what I walk into when I pick it.”
Her perfectly manicured nails clink against the ceramic.
"You smell like you’re already overwhelmed."
He says nothing.
Taomei pushes off the counter with an elegant shift of pleated trousers against white. Moves closer. Fingertips light on his wrist—not to hold, just to remind.
"You have people to lose," she murmurs.
Not a threat. Not an accusation. Just a reminder that weighs more than either. The words sink deep. Heavy like cement around his feet.
People to lose. People to protect.
And him, caught somewhere in the middle, straddling a line between duty and something else he doesn't want to name yet.
"You can't afford to forget that," she says, softer now. "Not even for a case. Not even for The Court."
And not—for her. The Witch with lightning in her blood and grief stitched into her knuckles. The Witch who burns herself alive chasing the last scraps of her family.
He meets Taomei’s gaze. Feels the old, quiet bond between them tighten like a well-worn noose—not romantic, but real and familiar, rooted in the ache of survival.
"I know," he says.
It sounds too thin. Too tired.
She lets it go. Doesn’t press.
Just pats his shoulder, careful of old scars and new.
"Good," she nods, and takes a last sip of her coffee. Her smile is brittle when she sets it down. "I’ll leave you to it then.”
And so she does.
Leaving only the quiet, only the coffee cooling on the counter, and the heavy memory of her hand on his wrist.
Chapter Text
She kicks him out. Firmly and unapologetically.
Because the Mutt—(his name is Gaoshun, she reminds herself, even when it’s easier to call him something sharp and demeaning)—sticks around too easily. Fills up the battered factory space with too much weight. Too much... concern.
She doesn’t have time for concern.
She has errands.
To hell with the fever still clinging to her brow and the weakness in her bones. She’s still got a job to do.
Bike courier doesn’t pay much, but it keeps her fed. Keeps her invisible.
She pulls on her oldest jeans, yanks a hoodie over her head, and strings her battered messenger bag across her shoulders. Her boots are scuffed and loose at the ankle. Perfect. She’ll blend right in with the rest of the rot blooming across the city’s belly.
The city leers back at her.
Windows broken. Sidewalks sticky. Air thick with the stink of fried oil, dogshit, and tired bodies giving up their ghosts.
She pedals harder.
The first few drops are easy: some pharmaceutical samples. A packet of documents she doesn’t bother to read. A shitty plastic crate filled with dead hardware parts that smells like burnt rubber.
She takes the scenic route after that.
Uses the errands as an excuse to visit the corners no one respectable goes.
Corners where the graffiti peels in angry, bleeding colors. Where tags and old territory markers battle each other across concrete and steel. Where old men in bomber jackets and busted sneakers mutter secrets over bottles tucked into brown bags.
She buys whispers with cigarettes and loose change.
Trades tired nods and lukewarm buns with kids who don’t go home anymore.
Picks up a handful of crumbs she can maybe use to follow a trail later.
The work shreds what's left of her strength.
By the time she hits her final delivery, she’s running on fumes, sweat soaking through the cheap polyester at her spine, her hands trembling against the handlebars.
She pulls up to the address scrawled in ink across the last envelope.
Blinks.
Frowns.
She hasn’t noticed that she’s veered into the clean part of the city. The part where the streets don’t stick to the soles of her shoes and the graffiti loses all meaning. Where the windows are shuttered, not smashed.
The white, mostly clean, complex in front of her is non-descript in the way that middle-class tenements tend to be.
It’s not… the usual kind of clientele one gets when running errands as a bike-courier.
But the address matches.
She steps off her bike, warier now. Sweaty and smudged, she sticks out like a sore fucking thumb that the neighbors would call security about.
She crosses her fingers under the long sleeve of her hoodie and wipes her brow with the other sleeve.
Prayers to whatever deity listens that she’s not about to blow her cover.
She’s still debating if she can just yeet the envelope through the cracked mail slot and bolt, when the door swings open.
The Wolf fills the frame.
Golden-eyed. Barefoot. Shirt that stretches across a broad chest and jeans. Smelling faintly of soap and clean linen.
He takes one look at her—sweat-slick, gray-faced, breathing like she just fought her way uphill through a swamp—and his mouth tightens.
"Get in," he growls.
Maomao lifts her chin. Summons what’s left of her dignity and credulity.
"Fuck you," she snaps throwing the thick envelope at his chest. "Buy me dinner first."
She sways on her feet and doesn’t give in to the wave of nausea that makes her want to fold over and brace against her knees.
He steps back just enough to let her stumble in if she wants to. His glare doesn’t soften.
"You spread the takeout I brought two nights ago over at least three rooftops," he says, flat. "You're taking a shower before I feed you anything again."
"Why?" she mutters, wiping sweat from her mouth with the back of her wrist. Her mouth tastes sour.
"You stink, little Cornsnake," he says, not unkindly. His eyes are scanning the hallway. "Stop arguing."
He nudges her with a careful hand at her back. Not rough. Not impatient.
Just enough to push her over the threshold. Carefully he kicks the door shut behind her.
And without waiting for permission, steers her with a hand at her neck toward the bathroom, as if she’s something half-wild he intends to rinse the grime off of and de-lice. Maybe feed it a can of tuna and monologue at or whatever it is that middle-aged men do with critters they find in the street these days.
Chapter 22
Notes:
Alrighty, TW-time: the tag that said 'Spiders' and 'Nightmares', we're doing that here. Spiders in nightmares (and body horror now that I think of it, gonna tag that) so if Spiders are a squick for you and spiders coupled with the illoigcal fragmentation of nightmares is something you might not want to read, skip this part. It's totally fine to skip it, take care of yourself first. There's a summary at the end.
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
The shower scalds her clean. Weeks of grime sluice off her as she hisses into the steam where the heat touches mending skin and the soap burns at the edges of a slice that is still pink against her ribs.
When the water runs clean, she feels begrudgingly lighter. Maomao refuses to acknowledge this.
She stumbles out of the neatly tiled cubicle on fawn-shaky feet, barefoot and dripping. But he’s the kind of guy who has a bath mat and her toes sink into faded, red fluff before the steam clears enough for her to find the large towel and the clothing he’s left folded on the sink.
Everything smells too clean.
He’s even slid in a toothbrush.
She dries her hair with the towel, while she rinses her mouth, shoulders hunched, trying to ward off something she refuses to name.
The shirt is too large on her. Threadbare and oddly sensual where it slips partially down her shoulder, baring her skin and she can’t help but notice that she’s not wearing anything under the sweatpants that slide dangerously low on her hips. Too wide for her. Too large.
When she pads into the living room, Gaoshun’s already peeled open the envelope she delivered—thick with paper, the couch half-drowned in the scatter of old files.
He glances up at her—sharp and assessing—and chuckles low in his chest.
"Look at that," he drawls. "One dunk in the shower and your scent turns almost palatable."
"Screw you." Her voice is cracked but firm, a cat’s hiss after being doused.
"Not while you still stink of rot, piss, and vomit, little viper," he hums without missing a beat. "My nose couldn’t take it."
She narrows her eyes at him. Stalks across the floor, dripping indignantly and refusing to be ashamed about it.
"Poor little Court-Poodle," she bites back, snatching the protein bar he chucks at her before the rest of whatever he's cooking in the kitchen even gets a chance to brown properly.
Gaoshun snorts. A short, breathy thing not meant to be amusement but not entirely free of it, either.
They settle, shoulder-to-shoulder, in front of the paper-filled couch.
She peels the wrapper with her teeth and scans the mess of documents he's fanned out.
Each page bears the same mark: Case closed. No retrieval scheduled.
Stamped. But not signed. Not dated.
Eighty at least, probably more.
Yinghua’s file was only the first thread in a much bigger, uglier tapestry.
Maomao’s eyes flash as she lifts one sheet, brows knitting. She traces her finger along the margins like she can will them into yielding something more honest.
“There’s something rotten in your state of Denmark,” she mutters.
Gaoshun leans back against the counter, arms folded, face unreadable.
There’s a long pause.
Then, almost grudgingly, Gaoshun says, "I’ve been reinstated to work."
"Not surprised," she murmurs. Bites the protein bar in half with a vicious snap of her teeth. He’s too competent to bench for long. If it was her call, she wouldn’t even have gone that far, but it’s not.
He exhales slowly. Looks at the pile of files like they’re already a noose tightening around his own neck.
"...I don’t have clearance for this," he says after a beat. Voice low. Weighted. "But—"
She looks up at him. Razor-sharp.
Waiting for the only answer that makes sense.
"But if you don’t look into these," she says, "what kind of work are you even doing?"
Gaoshun meets her gaze. The muscles in his jaw flex once. Twice.
"Not the kind I was thinking, apparently," he mutters.
He watches from the kitchenette, jaw working as she wilts—small and stubborn and sickly. Gravity slowly grasping at her petite sides as her eyelids lower over the deep, purple bags under her eyes until they close and the armrest of his couch catches her descent. The borrowed clothes hang loose around her. Her shoulders exposed and the neckline loose over pale skin. Sweat beads slick at her temples. Her fingers twitch around the paper still in her hands—half in dream, half in muscle memory.
Gaoshun watches the shiver that wracks through her frame. Makes her curl tighter. The hemline of the shirt slips over her side, exposes more skin. Makes her shiver again.
Less violent than the fevered fits of last night—but still there. Still enough to carve concern into the slope of his shoulders.
He crosses the room. Pauses. Counts the uneven stutter of her breath. Sees the tremor ripple down her spine like an aftershock.
After a moment’s hesitation, he pulls the heavy throw blanket off the couch’s back. Crouches. Drapes it over her, careful as a man defusing a bomb. Tucks it around her ribs and cold feet.
For a moment he lingers.
An arm's length away.
His hand hovers briefly over her hair—thinking better of it, of the boundary it would cross—before he settles for tugging the blanket more securely around her shoulders and feet.
Tucks one of the fallen documents into her limp hand.
Maybe it'll calm her. Maybe it'll remind her she's still fighting.
He turns away.
He doesn’t go far.
Her mind won’t stop whirring, spinning its teeth like broken machinery under her skull even after the couch's rough woven fabric has long molded into the skin of her hipbones.
At first, it’s just the bird.
Tiny. Soft. A puff of white and gray with a tail too long for its body—trapped in a net of silk.
A long-tailed tit, she thinks distantly.
It flutters.
Calls.
Desperate.
Wings sticky. The more it struggles, the more it sinks.
Strings pulling tighter with every frantic beat.
Then the spider comes.
A mass of glistening fat and bristling legs.
Eight black eyes bulging.
Pincers clicking—working—like it’s already savoring the meal.
She tries to scream.
Tries to warn the bird.
But when she opens her mouth, it’s not the bird anymore.
It’s her.
Tangled. Crushed. The web biting into the tender meat of her arms, her ribs, her throat. The spider descends. Slow. Sure. It crawls up her shin, sharp legs needling into sensitive skin. Across her belly. Over the frantic hammer of her heart. Until pincers scrape at her jaw. Until the hot, rancid stink of its body fills her mouth, forces her jaw open—
She chokes.
It forces its way inside her.
Past her teeth.
Down her throat.
Crawling, crawling, filling her chest, her lungs, her veins with silk and rot.
She fights.
But the silk wraps tighter and tighter, sealing her inside a cocoon of bone and blood and blind, suffocating panic.
She wakes thrashing.
Sticky cotton tangling around her limbs. Hands clawing at invisible webs.
Breath locked. Choking.
The blankets bind her like a snare, dragging her deeper into panic. She kicks. Flails. Nails catching on fabric. A hoarse, broken sound tears from her lips.
Someone is there. Something is reaching for her—too close, too heavy, too fast—
She lashes out.
Arms tearing free. Fingers curled like claws.
She snarls—wild and blind—every instinct screaming fight, tear, escape—
The hand catches her wrist in mid-air.
Another presses her down, hard and steady at her chest, pinning her back against--the couch.
A growl vibrates through her before she even fully registers it—a low, brutal rumble, not threat, but anchor.
Not spider.
Wolf.
The stink of silk and blood is shoved aside by something else—something pine-sharp and rain-washed and real.
Wolf.
Gaoshun.
She blinks—wild, half-feral—and for one dangerous heartbeat, almost sinks her teeth into the nearest thing she can reach.
But the grip on her wrist stays steady. Unyielding. Unjudging.
"Breathe, little Cornsnake."
Low. Gravel dragged over stone.
The words cut through the remaining threads of the nightmare like a blade. The voice vibrates against her ribs.
A sound deeper than voice. Deeper than words.
It roots her.
Maomao’s lungs seize, then stutter a breath in. Her muscles shake with the effort of staying still instead of fighting.
The world shudders back into focus—white walls, heavy air, the rough weave of the couch digging into the backs of her thighs.
She shivers. Shakes.
But she breathes.
She doesn't say thank you.
Doesn’t say anything.
Just lets him stay there, a steady weight holding the world from swallowing her whole for one more trembling moment.
Notes:
Maomao and Gaoshun examine a disturbing collection of falsified case files that someone sent via Maomao's couriers, hinting at deeper systemic corruption. Despite his reinstatement, Gaoshun admits he lacks clearance to pursue the evidence—but both understand that ignoring it is a betrayal of their purpose. At night Maomao suffers a traumatic nightmare, symbolizing her entrapment and fear, and violently wakes, nearly attacking Gaoshun. He grounds her with quiet strength and presence, anchoring her back to reality without judgment.
Chapter 23
Notes:
(See the end of the chapter for notes.)
Chapter Text
They don’t talk about it in the light of the day.
Not the nightmare. Not the hands. Not the weight of his body pinning her to the real world until the silk and spiders receded.
The Witch wakes, pulls on her clothes like armor, and acts as if nothing happened.
Gaoshun mirrors her.
Silent. Patient.
He knows better than to bare his teeth to wounded things learning how to stand again.
She lets him leave for work with a quiet order to meet her at the abandoned shopping complex he’d first stopped her in and swings up on her bike like it’s the most natural thing to do.
The Witch drags him out that night. Tugging him through alleys where the streetlamps flicker and the trash steams sour in the cold.
A new stakeout. A new corner of the city bleeding rot.
They wedge themselves between two skeletal apartment blocks, just close enough to the train tracks to feel the rumble of cargo trains shaking the ground. High enough to see the warehouse they’re casing. Low enough not to catch fire if things go wrong.
Gaoshun leans against the crumbling ledge. Arms folded. Watchful. He doesn’t bother to hide his side-eye at her stubborn stance.
"You ever rest?" he rumbles.
She doesn't look at him, eyes locked on the warehouse window flickering with movement.
"When I'm dead," she mutters into her cupped hands, blowing warmth onto her frozen fingers. "Or when I've found her."
A beat.
"So no," he translates dryly.
She huffs something close to a laugh. "Says the man who’s been a thorn in my side for months now. Do you ever rest?"
She glances at him sidelong—sharp, tired amusement glinting under her grime and feral fire.
"Shifter biology allows for a more... vicarious lifestyle," he says, too dry to be innocent.
She snorts. Low and rough. "Is that what they’re calling it these days?"
He grins—sharp teeth catching against the dark—and doesn’t deny it.
They’re moving crates when something goes wrong.
A yell splits the night. Gunfire snaps the air into jagged pieces.
She shoves him sideways without hesitation—a hard push to the ribs—and a bullet slaps into the concrete where his head had been a breath before.
"Move," she hisses through the sudden rattle of heavy artillery.
Tires squeal in the dip below them where the warehouse lights up in calamity.
A pack of boys too young and too stupid to keep their blood inside their bodies knifing war-cries into the night that cut off before they can echo.
Steel flashes.
Voices crack with desperate thrill.
“Shit.”
Gaoshun breaks down a side door with one shoulder, not even bothering to check if it's locked.
The shouts behind them sharpen, splinter—too professional to be gangbangers.
Court Agents. “Through here.”
The black of the Agents sprawls through the small back-alleys. Moving hard and fast with no thoughts to consequence. Only orders.
It’s the wrong timing and the wrong damn place.
A stray bullet clips his side—white hot and sickening—and he staggers. Stumbles between two towers of crates, the Witch burrowed in his side, half-dragging him upright
Another high-pitched scream. A clang. A tumble. A squelch.
Chaos splits the district.
His side burns. And suddenly the Witch is jerking him back into a broken stairwell by the scruff of his coat.
"Come on!" she hisses, shoving him ahead of her into the dark.
He doesn't argue. They're outnumbered and off-plan, and he can smell the wrongness rolling off the agents in waves. Not their people.
It’s by the skin of their teeth that they make it out—through back corridors thick with old oil, over rooftops that groan under their weight.
Both bleeding. Both wild-eyed.
Both alive.
The Witch is shaking by the time they stumble into the back courtyards near her hideout—but it’s not fear that shines behind her teeth.
It’s fury.
She grabs his wrist—small hand, iron grip—and yanks him with her through the labyrinth of abandoned shops and broken courtyards.
Pulls him home.
She scrubs their scent from the streets behind them with quick, furious spells—bitter-smelling sigils thrown against the cobblestones with enough force to crack them.
By the time they slam the factory hideout door shut behind them, Gaoshun’s jacket is sticky at the seams with blood.
It’s her who moves first.
Not tenderness. Not sweetness.
Just sheer, pissed-off necessity.
She marches him toward the cracked kitchen counter, pushes him into a chair hard enough that the wood protests, and digs through a battered tin for a suture kit that looks like it’s seen better wars.
"Take it off," she orders, snapping open the alcohol bottle.
"Or what," he grumbles, peeling off jacket, shirt, everything—blood-wet and half-clinging—"you gonna cut it off me?"
"I have nothing that would fit you," she mutters as she yanks the gauze into reach. "And it’s too cold to have you running around topless."
Her hands aren’t delicate, when she moves in. “Breathe,” she reminds him and makes him hiss with the first spray of antiseptic against his side. Her movements are sure. Brutal and clean.
She doesn't coddle. Doesn’t talk.
Just sets her lips into a thin line and gets to work. Her stitches are oddly pretty. Neat in a way an untrained civilian shouldn’t manage – good and not too tight.
Less painful than he’s used to. Faster, too. Efficient in a way that makes something sharp and hot lodge under his ribs.
Her fingers are steady against his skin, keeping the flesh taut while she drives the needle through.
He watches the way her lips pinch in concentration. Watches the little wrinkle between her brows. The sweat still clinging stubbornly to her temples.
She finishes with a careful tug of thread and ties it off.
Steps back.
Meets his gaze.
"Next time," she says hoarsely, "try not to catch a bullet with your spleen."
He grins, slow and dangerous. "Next time, little Cornsnake, try not to drag me through a warzone."
She snorts once, sways slightly—and he catches her without thinking.
Just a hand at her elbow.
“Your turn,” he insists, tilting his chin towards her. “Whatever that is on your arm, it hasn’t stopped bleeding yet.”
“Just a scratch—”
“Sure,” he growls. “And if you don’t let me wipe it down now, I’ll set my teeth to your throat and let you whimper through the first drag of antiseptic like the last time you did shit all about a field injury.”
The Witch’s mouth curls. She sits. “Have at it.”
“Why thank you.” he deadpans.
He crouches in front of her, picks up the gauze, and gets to work.
Notes:
Are they getting somewhere? Nobody knows. Probably not even them.
Chapter 24
Notes:
Two kinds of confrontations.
Warning: Remember the tags where I said Violence and Blood and Injury and Fighting, yes? The Story Warning about Graphic Depictions of Violence, also yes? Good. Because that's what this chapter has.
Chapter Text
The warehouse was a bust.
No new names. No new faces.
Just a scattering of runners and bruisers too low down the ladder to bleed anything useful.
“That and the absolute fuck-up of an op,” Gaoshun grunts over the glass-table. Who even authorized a hit that sloppy? Slinging Court Agents into a gang-war. That isn’t what The Court is for.
Or it hadn’t been.
Gaoshun files his report clean and clipped, barely keeping the disgust from his voice.
Jinshi doesn’t sit at his desk. He stands—arms folded, gaze sharp as broken glass—silhouetted against the reinforced glass wall. Below them, the city sprawls grey and restless.
"You’re moving too slow," Jinshi says without ceremony. His tone polished to perfection. The edge beneath it anything but.
"I’m building the net," Gaoshun replies, voice steady. "It takes time to make it airtight."
"Time you don’t have," Jinshi cuts in. He nods towards the datapad on the table between them. "You’re not the only agent I can assign to this, Gaoshun."
The implication is clear.
"If I don’t see progress," Jinshi continues, "I’ll put Lihaku on the case with you."
Gaoshun's jaw tightens. Barely.
Lihaku.
Green, eager, loud. The last thing a case like this needs.
The last thing she needs snapping at her heels.
“On the ring,” Gaoshun digs, “or on the Witch?”
The Court wants results.
The Court needs both: the ring and the Witch. Except only one had already put Lihaku on his ass once—and wouldn’t hesitate to do it again.
“That’s none of your business,” Jinshi smarts back. “You can’t afford to forget that. Not even for a case.”
Gaoshun's mind clicks once, cold and sharp.
The phrasing. The cadence. The sharp, manufactured concern that had wrapped itself around Taomei’s sudden visit days earlier.
It wasn’t coincidence.
It was leverage.
A warning.
Jinshi had sent her.
Gaoshun doesn’t flinch.
Doesn’t bare his teeth.
Just breathes, once, through his nose and gives the younger man a look with golden eyes that catch against Dragon-slit-irises.
“I’ve heard that phrasing before,” he rumbles lowly.
Jinshi doesn’t blink. “It felt like a good time to give you a reminder what The Court has done for you.”
Done for him.
Gaoshun breathes.
Rolls his tongue over his teeth rather than flash them at his superior. He’s better than that.
Then plants his hands flat against the table—voice like gravel dragged over stone: "You stay away from my family."
Jinshi blinks once—slow, measuring—but says nothing.
He doesn’t have to.
The Court knows wolves are loyal.
But wolves are also pack animals. And pack animals do not bark when their family is threatened.
They bite.
Hard enough to tear out your throat.
Gaoshun leaves without being dismissed.
He doesn’t look back.
The first sign is the broken lock on her door; the crack in her runic array around the entrance. It should have been enough to make her turn around and abandon ship, but Maomao knows what she keeps in her home and she cannot leave it without a fight.
The second she streps through the door, she notices the way the shadows stretch wrong across the factory floor. Too long. Too still. Too purposeful in the neon glow of the advertisement from the other building.
She’s three steps in when they spring.
Oily scent. Metallic bite on the back of her tongue.
She spins as the first knife flashes for her throat—ducking low, letting the edge whistle past her temple and ducks into a spider tattooed over a smooth, broad chest under open shirt-lapels.
Electricity snaps from her fingers, crackling vicious and wild.
An arm slams across her throat, tight enough to crush her windpipe.
She kicks out—fights blind—nails catching fabric, teeth snapping at whatever skin she can reach.
An elbow catches against a rib. The arm loosens. She scrambles.
Wheezing and disoriented.
A boot cracks against her temple.
Her vision sways, blurs. Stars burst at the edge of her sight.
Pain flashes white-hot down her spine.
Everything swims.
She spits blood against concrete.
Kicks upwards when one shadow comes too close. Hits softness. Kicks again. Cracks a knee.
Watches the shadow stagger—but not fall.
A hand in her hair. Yanks. Tears.
She snarls, fists swinging instinctively.
She lands a hit—bare knuckles against a jaw.
Feels the sickening shift—her fingers tearing wrong out of their sockets.
Pain knifes up her arm so fast it takes her breath.
They crowd in closer, sneering.
Too many. Too fast. Too tall.
They’re going to pin her down.
And she will not be pinned.
Maomao snarls, wordless and furious, and lets the storm inside her break free.
The air cracks open.
Blue-white fire explodes outward—lightning riding her broken blood.
The screams are high and ugly.
The smell of burned hair and fear clogs the back of her throat.
She tears free—feet slipping in blood she doesn’t know if it’s hers.
The factory is a blur.
She stumbles. Goes for the only thing she can grab—Xiaolan’s picture.
Not the files.
Not the money.
Her fingers close around the crumpled edges of the print a heartbeat before the shadows close again.
And she runs.
Half-blind. Half-broken.
Lightning still buzzing in her bones.
She flees through the broken side-door, over broken glass, into the howling dark of the alleys.
She doesn't look back.
Chapter 25
Notes:
shower scene ;b
TW: mind the blood and injury and aftermath of -- tags
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
The report hits the Court servers barely an hour after the dust settles.
Unauthorized shifter engagement. Abandoned sector. One known dead. Several burned. Location structurally unstable. Old Factory.
It shouldn't ping Gaoshun's sensors. Shouldn't tug him out of his temporary assignment logs at all.
Except he knows that address.
Knows that factory—burning and hot, plastered all over the news channels.
Knows the spells burned into its bones.
He doesn’t ask for clearance.
Doesn’t ask at all.
He moves.
Through the city, past the prying eyes of the Court assistants and agents, a dark-blue streak of rage and something too hungry for fear.
He reaches the ruins too fast.
Heart hammering; ribs hollow.
The factory (her home) gapes open like a torn throat—blackened, emptied, violated.
He scents the air.
Nothing but ozone and charcoal. Blood spatters that end in the dizzying miasma of confounding spells, thick and heavy and wrong.
No clean blood-trail. And too late for a heartbeat he can track.
Fuck.
His vision whites out at the edges as the first forensic team patters onto the scene. Rolls out yellow tape and throws up privacy screens none of the dead bodies will need.
Gaoshun already turns.
Eyes uselessly searching the surrounding side-alleys.
If he’s lost her—
He's not back at square one.
He's back at zero.
Dead Witch. Dead leads. Dead promises.
And he’ll have let it happen.
He roils with it. Nearly shifts right there, fists driving against the urge to tear something, anything, apart.
And he can’t.
Not right now.
Not here.
Not until he knows what the fuck happened.
He can’t afford to—
You can’t afford to forget that.
Gaoshun breathes through the vertigo of another confounding spell. Tears through its diaphanous presence until he stands at the other side and breathes. Thinks.
Someone knew where she lived.
Someone went looking.
His head lifts, slow and wolf-keen.
If they knew about her hideout—What were the odds they’d left him alone?
He’s more cautious about his own route home. Wary of the moving shadows and the eyes that follow him. Slow to enter the street towards his complex, ears perked, senses sharp.
Then—
A flicker.
A wrongness. Too still.
A scent, so faint, half-drowned in smoke and copper, it almost slips past him.
Gaoshun jerks his head up. Follows it.
Around the back of his own damn apartment complex, tucked into the blind corner where the dumpsters cast a permanent shadow, there she is.
Collapsed. Half-curled. Hidden.
The Witch.
Her fingers are wrong—dislodged, bent at sick angles. Her face is swollen, pale and split along one cheekbone. Blood oozes out of her nose. She's half-unconscious, breathing in shallow, broken hiccups.
But she's alive.
The growl that tears through him is raw and low enough to rattle the air.
He scoops her up—no ceremony, no gentleness, just brutal necessity.
One hand behind her head. The other under her knees. She weighs less than the fury boiling in his chest.
The climb up the stairs blurs. He doesn't remember it. Only the way her heartbeat stutters against his chest like broken wings.
He barely remembers to unlock his own door rather than break it down.
Doesn’t bother with lights. Doesn’t bother with shoes.
Straight to the bathroom.
He yanks her under the shower, clothes and all, cradling her against the cold tile with a hand braced behind her head and her knees slung over his thighs.
The water blasts them both—ice-cold first, then scalding.
She jerks once. Whimpers low in her throat.
The moment she stirs—half-conscious, instincts shredding through what little awareness she has—she strikes.
Bites down into the thick muscle of his shoulder, a scream locked and burning behind her teeth.
Gaoshun doesn’t flinch.
Lets her bite. Lets her teeth tear through his shirt and into his skin. Lets her anchor herself to him the only way she can. The pain is white-hot and glorious—a reminder that she’s here, that she’s still fighting. Proof.
He braces them against the slick tile, arm banded around her narrow back, his voice low and rough against her temple: "Easy, little Cornsnake," he murmurs. "Easy now. I’ve got you."
Another shudder wracks her.
Her fingers clench—broken, cracked, desperate—against his ribs.
He sets his mouth against her temple, breath hot on wet hair, and carefully, carefully catches one dislodged wrist.
"This’ll hurt," he warns. "But it'll feel better after."
She growls—raw, barely human—but doesn't pull away.
He braces the heel of his hand against her palm.
And snaps her fingers back into place with quick, brutal precision.
One. Two. Three.
She screams into his flesh. The sound tears through her, half-cry, half-snarl.
Gaoshun doesn't let her fall.
Just holds her there—soaked, shivering, furious and alive—as the water burns clean the blood and grime from her battered skin.
"That's it," he mutters against the crown of her head. "Breathe, little Cornsnake. You made it out."
She doesn’t answer. But the teeth in his shoulder slowly ease off. Slowly give as she sags against him, broken and stubborn and still here.
Notes:
So.
As I'm nearing July I'm playing with the idea of simply dumping the rest of the chapters on you so as not to leave you hanging while I'm out there in the world and doing things far away from a keyboard or even WIFI access. The story, as it is, is finished and I could, but also I've enjoyed our journey and I feel that some of you have needed some time to sort of warm up to the tone of the story and I'm undecided. Either way: you're forewarned for a) a long pause or b) a chapter dump.
(Also, never fear, it's not like these two left me alone at all and I have like... one draft building into proper chapters right now and another draft in the works so like... even after a break I'll come back... hmm...) And I am planning on doing AU-gust with GaoMao as the central focus, so we'll see how that goes, won't we :D
Also: got you with the shower-scene, didn't I ;b
Chapter 26
Notes:
being close and touchy for purely medical reasons
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
The shower hisses off.
The Witch sags against him, boneless and shivering, breath a low rattle against his collarbone.
Gaoshun catches her—scoops her up again with hands that remember how fragile she isn't, but still treats her like spun glass.
The bathroom’s floor is slick, puddling underfoot, but he maneuvers them out of the stall with a kind of grim steadiness.
She makes a noise against his chest. Half-protest, half-promise-to-bite.
"You can gnaw on me later," he rumbles, too low to be real amusement. "Right now we’re getting dry before you catch your death."
He sets her down on the closed toilet seat, one steadying hand braced against her lower back, and grabs the nearest thing—the clothes she’d worn the last time she’d stumbled through his door.
He strips out of his own shirt, slinging it aside with a wet slap against the tile.
Peels most of her sodden clothing off with brisk, practiced care—not rough, not tender, just efficient.
She sways under his hands but doesn’t fight until it’s down to her tank-top and underwear.
Her body—bruised, lean, still crackling faintly with leftover electricity—shudders under the cold air.
He pushes the shirt at her and turns his back.
Doesn’t look into the mirror as he steps out of his own pants, hides behind a towel just large enough to keep his decency as he hauls the sweatpants up over his hips, barely bothering with the drawstring, and leaves the rest of their drenched clothing in a heap for the washer to devour.
The machine clunks to life, rumbling low as it whirs up to speed.
He turns back to find her sniffing at the shirt.
“Smells like wet dog,” she rasps with hazy eyes.
She’s still sitting on the white lid of the toilet, swaying like a drunk, blinking slow and stubborn.
“Get used to it,” he challenges her as he opens the bathroom door towards the apartment. “Can you walk?”
Her mouth tugs into a half-sneer. Half-challenge.
"I’m fine," she croaks, hoarse with exhaustion.
"Sure you are," Gaoshun says flatly.
She tries to plant her foot to stand—he’s faster.
He grabs her under the knees and at the waist and drags her bodily up into his arms. Ignores how easily she fits into his hold and turns, careful of her head, towards the bed, ignoring the flailing protests that barely make it past her cracked lips and die in the bare flesh of his shoulder.
"Last time I left you on the couch you woke up thrashing, little Cornsnake," he grunts, planting her dead-center in the rumpled sheets and pressing the blanket firmly over her to ignore how bare her legs are in just his shirt. The collar slips on her shoulders. "I only have the capacity for one heart attack per day."
She glares at him. A hot, flickering thing, full of pride and teeth.
He glares right back.
"Stay down," he orders, voice dropping into something dangerous and warm.
She mutters something foul under her breath that might’ve been a curse—or an agreement.
“Anything else cracked?” he asks.
She grunts gracelessly. But shakes her head when he looks.
Gaoshun watches her a beat too long. Reaches for her face with steady hands and swallows when she lets him touch. Tilts her chin gently, until the soft lamp light spills over the purple bruises blooming along her neck.
"Tell me how tender it is," he warns, and carefully presses at the sides of her throat.
She hisses low when his thumb brushes the tendons under her ears.
A classic choke-point.
His mouth tightens. Not anger. Not pity. Just quiet cataloging.
"Should feel like cotton tomorrow," he says. "If it gets worse, you tell me."
He shifts, adjusting his knees against the mattress. His gaze doesn't waver.
"Anywhere else?"
The Witch’s shoulders curl up, stubbornly small under the too-large sweatshirt.
“Boot to the noggin’,” she offers mulishly. “Made everything swim for a second.”
Her breath hitches when he finds the lump above her ear. But her pupils respond right. Her focus sharpens.
She whines low in her throat when he lets her go—half-pout, half-resentment—and collapses sideways, curling instinctively into the bulk of his duvet and the battered softness of the mattress.
She smells like smoke and salt and stubborn blood.
But not fever.
Not death.
Gaoshun watches her breathe. Watches the tension leak out of her in slow, dragging exhales.
Only when her breathing steadies again does he move.
He turns off the overhead lights. Leaves only the soft glow of the kitchenette lamp burning, a half-forgotten sentinel.
And then he sits.
At the edge of the bed, facing away, one foot planted firmly against the cracked floorboard. One ear tuned to her breathing. One hand half-curled near where she sleeps, just in case.
Just in case she thrashes again. Just in case someone comes looking.
He sits there for a long time.
Listening to her breathe.
And tells himself he’ll get up soon.
Tells himself he’ll be smart enough to walk away from this.
Notes:
I have decided that I'll do my best to update chapter-wise until I am absolutely not going to be able to anymore and then dumping the rest on you before I dive into the great wifi-less-unknown for July ;)
Chapter 27
Notes:
TW: Blood and Injury to a not-main-character (also death of said not-main-character) and all-around more "noir"-ness for this part
On the up-side: Lihaku!
Chapter Text
Gaoshun finds out halfway through a half-assed debrief about the factory attack, still smelling the Witch's blood under his nails and feeling the pulse of her teeth in his shoulder.
He catches the whisper first—an assistant murmuring about "new materials recovered."
Then the sight: Photos pinned in the wrong place, red strings cut and retied by foreign hands, half the files stripped bare of context, the edges singed black.
His heart drops like a stone.
For a moment he doesn’t breathe.
Jinshi, lounging at the head of the conference table, meets his stare with the easy polish of a man who’s already played his move.
"It’ll transfer to your department," Jinshi says, matter-of-fact. "Our first evaluation has tied it to at least five of your cases."
A low murmur moves through the assistants seated to the left and right between him and his supervisor.
Gaoshun breathes. Nods once.
But his mind is whirring—teeth on gears, snapping loose.
His boots are sharp against the polished marble of Court HQ, but nearly silent against the carpet of Lihaku’s division.
His eyes flash bright enough to make Junior Agents scramble. They know that walk. They know that look.
He makes a beeline for the Oversight Room.
“How,” he bites out, “did we know that the factory was a shifter event?”
Lihaku looks up, startled.
Blanches.
"We—received a tip?" It sounds more like a question than an answer.
Gaoshun’s hands flex, bone popping under skin.
"From whom?"
A pause.
Too long.
"I’ll find out?" Lihaku stammers.
Gaoshun doesn’t wait for the answer.
Her place is swarming with Court Agents. Even if she hadn’t set fire to it, there’s nothing she’ll be able to salvage now after they’ve picked her former hideout clean.
If she’s lucky at all, they won’t question how she got her hands on Gaoshun’s files, but luck hasn’t been on her side recently.
Chances are they’ll do worse to him than a suspension this time.
…And when did she start to care?
She huffs at herself. Moves behind the bricked-up chimney as she watches the ant-hill-busyness of Court Agents crawling through the “structurally unsound” remains of the factory that had been her home for the past six months.
It’s a pity she’s had to leave it behind.
It’s also quite intriguing that The Court would be all over the place.
Her files will be gone.
Her caseboard will likely be confiscated.
They’ll hunt her down now for sure.
Maybe try to pin one or two murders on her.
Well…
Close a handful of murder-cases as it were. She’s not exactly innocent on that front.
She winces.
Turns her eyes back towards the factory. Towards the white vans bustling in and out of the charred perimeter holding secrets no one would get to see.
All that’s left, truly, are two things.
Well… two things she can work with.
There’s Xiaolan’s picture. Frayed and rumpled, but a clear survivor of the battle, tucked carefully into one of the folders back in Gaoshun’s apartment.
And there’s the Spider Tattoo.
Every information—every lead until now—had been the result of a collision with people inked with the fat, turgid body of an eight-legged spider. On the elbow. On the face. On the throat. On the chest.
The Spider knew things.
And she’s cracked open from the inside out—rage, grief, magic burning low and sour in her blood—that she doesn't stop to plan.
There’s nothing to plan really.
There’s a lead.
And so long as she has a lead, she has a reason to go.
Her throat aches and her head thrums low with the promise of pain if she doesn’t rest soon, but she bares her teeth and steps away from the chimneys.
She has some vermin to catch.
By the time he reaches the rusty bridge over the train-tracks, the sun has sunk low enough for his eyes to flicker wolf-gold in the gathering darkness.
He moves like smoke—long strides, head down, a predator in bureaucrat's skin, trying not to scare the prey whose knees are shaking with every step she takes away from him.
Of course, it’s one of their own.
A shifter.
Clerical.
Assistant tier.
The woman is slight. Gray coat, sensible shoes, ash-blonde hair undone and swaying softly in the chilly breeze. Too careful to stand out.
He follows at a good distance.
Keeps sight of her even as she turns through a broken-down gate into a dark cargo-yard that a woman like her would not fit into.
That’s when she starts running.
Sprinting, really.
Feet rabbit-quick and steady as she darts around corners and into open doors, up iron ladders.
"Wait," Gaoshun growls, low and harsh, but she doesn’t listen.
She climbs—fire escapes, iron ladders, her shoes slipping on wet rungs.
He follows, matching her pace, closer, closer—
She shoves open a fire-exit.
Clambers out into the cold high-stack of a service balcony.
He follows.
She doesn’t scream.
Doesn’t plead.
Just throws herself.
One clean, desperate arc over the rusted railing, vanishing into the concrete sprawl below.
By the time Gaoshun reaches the edge, all he sees is the loose spread of her hair on the cracked asphalt.
A broken marionette.
Gone.
The bile rises fast and hot in his throat.
He turns back, fists clenched so hard the nails cut blood from his palms.
Half the files from the Witch’s board are missing. Cleanly extracted from evidence. Neat as an amputation.
The Snake—whoever they are—is still slithering through The Court’s veins. Maybe closer than he thought. And he had been this close—
This close to sinking his teeth in.
He growls low, a sound more beast than man, as he reaches for his phone and jams the line open.
“Clean-up,” he growls. “Warehouse 17, old train-yard.”
The line clicks dead.
Gaoshun leans his head back against the cold iron of the fire escape.
Maybe he’s getting too old for this bullshit.
Maybe he’s getting too close to burning himself alive.
Chapter 28
Notes:
Verdigris!!!
Chapter Text
The Verdigris House glows the way it always has.
Soft light behind cracked green shutters. The low hum of old music curling through the ironwork fences. Warmth, too stubborn to be bought, too real to be stolen.
It smells like jasmine incense and sweat.
Like home.
It’s too early for the clink of glasses, for the thrum of bass and the low ink of red light painting tantalizing shadows against semi-thick drapery. But Maomao knows that the Verdigris House she knows and the Verdigris House the city sees are two very different places.
She hesitates across the street, the hood of her jacket pulled low, one hand fisting tight around the picture of Xiaolan in her pocket.
She’s not afraid of the Verdigris House.
Not even of the Old Madam who will undoubtedly try to entice her to work for her again.
She’s afraid of what she’ll bring to its doorstep.
Of what it will cost.
What she owes the women here is a debt she can never hope to repay. Joka, with her chalk-dry hands and wicked laugh. Pairin, who could read a man’s heart with one glance. Meimei, stubborn and soft, who patched up Maomao’s cuts and blisters whenever she’d come crawling in from the streets.
People who had adopted her long before her father had found her and raised her with his silicone gloves and the bitter smell of burnt sage clinging to his washed-out shirts.
She doesn’t want to be the thing that kills them through implications and the target on her shoulders.
But she doesn’t have the energy to run anymore.
Has no leads to run towards.
She crosses the street.
The side door creaks open before she even knocks.
"Little Cat," Meimei breathes, voice raw with something like anger and heavier with relief.
Before Maomao can duck, she’s wrapped in Pairin’s arms, squeezed into the pillowy chest of her sister, until her bruised ribs creak in protest and she can’t breathe anymore.
She lets it happen.
Lets herself breathe in the smell of massage oil and sandalwood.
Lets her body sag for a heartbeat before she steels it again.
"You're late," Meimei scolds, pulling her out of Pairin’s embrace to get one in herself before she flicks her forehead with a practiced snap. "And you gave us a damn fright, you hear?"
Maomao blinks. Warily. "Fright?"
Joka is next to wind around her. Muscular arms and thick cleavage soft against her cheeks. She smells freshly washed. “Not out here,” she issues gently as she presses Maomao closer. “Come up for a quick bite.”
Meimei crosses her arms, hip cocked, eyebrow raised, but she trails after when Joka simply absconds with her, hands on her hips.
“You’re not eating enough,” her sister laments mournfully. Pairin hums a sad agreement as she pokes at Maomao’s flat chest.
“You need more carbs, little cat,” she nods. “Enough sugars to round you out. Thick thighs save lives, haven’t you heard?”
Maomao lets it happen. Listens half-heartedly as her sisters fold her into the old, familiar rhythm of their clucking and poking as they move her past poles, cages and velvet booths around sturdy, black platforms that already gleam and blink in anticipation of the night.
The upper level is clean as usual, doors open to reveal tinkering laughter and vivid conversation of the girls as her three sisters shepherd her past and into the coffee-lounge at the very end of the hallway.
Meimei is the first to sit down on the chaise-longue that usually serves as napping post for their securities when their rotations allow breaks.
Pairin squees happily as she pushes a box of chocolates at Maomao. Joka pulls cups from the boards and checks a thermos for left-over tea. It’s hot enough to steam into her face with a waft of something earthy.
“So,” Maomao says around the first obligatory bite of praline. “What do you mean I gave you a fright?”
Meimei sighs, eyes closing like Maomao is a hopeless case. “I have a regular,” she starts. “You know the kind. Animal in the sheets. Courtly on the streets.”
Joka snorts and Pairin giggles into her tea. Maomao nods.
“A few weeks ago he came in asking for you.”
Maomao stills.
Wracks her brain for someone fitting the description.
Animal in the sheets, probably meant shifter. Courtly in the streets likely linked the man to The Court.
Now there were many male shifters working for The Court—or at least she supposes there are.
Recently, however, there’s really only one that counts.
"Tall, dark and growly?” she breathes incredulously. “Golden eyes and a mean-streak wider than the fucking Cháng Jiāng?”
Pairin’s eyes glow amusedly over the rim of her tea as Meimei sputters into her cup. “Court agent in civilian clothes?” she whispers quietly. “How the fuck would you know him?”
Maomao stiffens.
Her mouth tightens.
“…How do you know him?” she finally returns for a lack of a better answer.
Meimei smirks like she’s caught a fish nibbling the bait. "He caught up to me on the side-street by the dumpling shop. Polite enough. But he had teeth under it."
Maomao mutters a low curse under her breath and drags her hand through her hair. There’s no guarantee, of course, but it’s clear enough that they’re talking about the same person.
The wolf.
Gaoshun.
Sniffing around the places that matter most.
“How?” she repeats again, dry and too curious for her own good.
Meimei shrugs.
“You know the old bat likes to play all angles. Keeps us out of bad disputes and in good business.”
Maomao nods.
The Old Madam is an institution in her own way. Some say she’s seen the rise and fall of the Ming Empire. Maomao doesn’t believe that the old hag is that old but sometimes she, too, wonders.
“So he’s a… regular?” she probes, uncomfortable with the idea.
Meimei’s smirk widens behind the lip of her cup. “He’s quite good with his hands,” she teases with shifting eyebrows.
Ugh.
Maomao would rather not have known.
Their professional life is one thing, Maomao has no issues with sex-work. It’s a means of survival and a means of living. Some went about it the smart way and some didn’t and that’s just how it went—from what she gathers, it’s not so different from how people navigate the corporate world. Some with smarts; some without.
But Meimei is…
And Gaoshun is…
A bright giggle pulls her out of her wool-gathering and she looks up to Joka’s delighted face as she laughs. Even Pairin is giggling.
Maomao looks at Meimei for answers.
Her sister shakes her head with a fond smile. “We play Go, Maomao,” she says drily. “He asks for help sometimes and I give him the hints the Madam has vetted. He’s a very smart man, your wolf.”
Maomao’s nose curls into her tea. “He’s not my wolf.”
Meimei hums and refills her cup.
Joka leans forward on the table and pushes the box of chocolates towards Maomao again with a heavy hint. “So, little cat,” she hums when Maomao has picked another chocolate, “what brings you to us after all these years?”
Maomao bites into the dark bitterness underscored with the bright filling of sweet-sour orange bursting on her tongue and swallows too quickly to truly enjoy it.
Her hands shake as she reaches into her pocket.
She fiddles with the photo, hesitates.
Her sisters are quiet when she finally puts it on the table.
“This,” she swallows thickly, “is Xiaolan. She’s mine and she went missing.”
At the kitchen table—scarred, worn, loved into existence by a thousand meals and a thousand secrets—she lays it out.
Quietly.
Xiaolan.
The case.
The girls who disappear and don’t come back.
She doesn’t ask them for help.
She’s learned better than that.
She asks for whispers.
Asks if the streets have seen more legs and more eyes lately than they should.
For a long moment, there’s silence.
Then Pairin hums low in her throat, tapping a lazy beat against her teacup.
"You know," she drawls, "now that you mention it... there's been a lot of spiders around lately."
Meimei snorts. "Can't get rid of them. Sticky fingers in the wrong shops. New faces, bad business. Even the old Madam has been swinging the broom at them."
Joka narrows her eyes. "Spiders build their webs in the corners people forget to sweep."
Maomao's fingers tighten around the mug and listens.
Chapter 29
Notes:
Kicking ass and sniping at each other
TW violence, injury, blood, biting
Chapter Text
The nest stinks of sweat and desperation. Sickly sweet and potent on the corners where youth stand with red, dead eyes and joints too thick to pass as cigarettes.
Concrete walls sweating through with damp. Brown where the bars start to rust through bad construction jobs. Flickering bulbs buzzing overhead like dying flies.
The air thick with the stink of men who think they own the dark.
Maomao slips into the work-entrance of the cathouse with the practiced gait of someone used to brothels and just nods meekly when the wrinkled madam asks if she’s the new hire.
She accepts the bleached white garters and underthings—the white that says lamb to a slaughter—and pulls her hair up just enough. She wobbles only once in the platform shoes before she does a quick jaunt over the linoleum floor and her ankles remember how to balance in Pleasers.
The Madam nods.
Maomao already regrets having to do this in underwear again. Of all the things.
She doesn’t flinch when she steps into the center of it--Patchouli-thick and red-tapestry.
Doesn’t look away from the men who rise from battered chairs, slow and a little confused—tattoos crawling up their throats and over their arms like living things.
She could still run.
Instead, she grabs one bottle off a waiter’s tray her and sashays her way up to the only full booth. She smiles: bright, bloody, bare-teethed.
“Gentlemen,” she purrs, voice like sandpaper dragged over silk, “I hear you’ve been looking for me.”
There’s a heartbeat of stunned silence—and then they surge.
She smashes the bottle over the head of the closest, burly security. Drives the jagged neck into the next closest throat.
The girls scream.
Scatter.
Chairs scrape and men roar.
She fights like a cornered cat. Wild. Fast. Magic sparking off her palms in bursts sharp enough to crack the air.
But there are too many.
One grabs her wrist. Another her throat. Another slams her hard against a platform, making her ribs scream and her vision pulse red-black-red.
She snarls. Brings up her foot and cracks a thick sole into a knee. Someone goes down howling.
The chandelier above spins sickeningly. The magic building in her blood burns hotter, sharper, rattling her bones.
Electricity burns in her veins, shaky and sharp, when the biggest one grabs her by the hair and forces her head back—grins wide and ugly.
She's winding up to blast the lot of them into ash—
When something heavier slams into the man pinning her.
A blur of dark fur and snapping teeth.
Wolf.
Golden-eyed, furious, and snarling. Hurling its body into the side of the asshole over her with enough force to send the burly Spider into the wall. Plaster snows down from the ceiling.
Claws click against the acrylic platform, dark hackles raised next to her. A low growl. A warning no one heeds.
The Wolf launches.
Gives her space—like he trusts her—and Maomao doesn’t waste it.
She slams both palms into the cracked floor and lets the magic rip through her like a grenade.
A wicked spasm of lightning that shrieks outward and throws the nearest Spiders screaming onto their backs.
"Move!" someone snaps, and she catches the flash of teeth in the corner of her eyes. Tall. Dark.
Gaoshun.
She slips off the platform.
It dents under the weight of three Spiders.
Her hands clap into a gun.
A crackling bolt sizzles into the open drizzle of a sprinkler-system.
Water explodes overhead.
Steak-scented smoke rises from scorched flesh.
They drag each other out—half-crawling, half-running—snarling and snapping as they stumble through the ruined corridors.
"You could've waited for backup, dumbass," he snarls, catching her when she stumbles. “What is it with you and brothels?”
"I don't need babysitting," she snaps back, teeth bared. "Not from a damn Court Dog—"
"Still rather get bit by you than scrape your corpse off a concrete floor," he snarls as he pulls a scarf off a door and drags her into a dark side street.
She wobbles precariously as she fastens the fabric around most of her. Ducks into the alleys that stink and hiss. Covers their retreat with the angry snaps of erasure runes.
They’re nearly clear when the alarms start—sharp, high-pitched wails splitting the night air—and the Court Agents spill into the streets, heavy boots slamming on cracked concrete.
Gaoshun moves before Maomao can argue.
He grabs her—fast and rough—and presses her back into the shadowed crook between two battered walls.
His body cages hers like a living shield.
Hands sliding up to shove her thighs around his hips in a way that’s pure, practiced survival.
"Play along," he growls against her ear, breath searing hot.
Maomao snarls. Bites him—sharp and punishing—into the thick muscle of his shoulder.
He doesn’t flinch.
He bites her back.
Teeth scrape the tender crook of her neck, drawing blood.
A low, warning growl rumbles out of his chest, vibrates into her bones.
Stay still, it says. Maomao digs her own teeth deeper in defiant response.
Her heart punches against her ribs. His slams into hers.
When the Court Agents sweep past—flashlights slicing through the broken dark—they don’t even glance their way.
Just a streetwalker and their john, lost in the filth and shadows of the city.
Gaoshun doesn’t loosen his grip even after the last flashlight fades.
Doesn’t put her down.
He lifts his head. Licks the blood from her skin in one long, deliberate drag of his tongue.
"You’re going to get yourself killed," he breathes against her jaw, rough and almost—almost—pleading.
Maomao’s breath is jagged.
Her chest feels like a faraday cage about to shatter.
Still furious. Still burning.
"If I die," she growls, "it’ll be on my own damn terms."
Gaoshun huffs a low, broken laugh.
"Not tonight," he says.
He shrugs out of his coat and shoves it at her.
"Take it," he orders, voice a gravel-drag against her raw nerves. "I’m not passing as your john again tonight."
Chapter Text
They make it to his apartment door in one piece, barely—the Witch huffing low curses into the crook of his neck with every other limping step.
The door swings open.
And there—sitting cross-legged on his ratty couch like she owns it, cigarette trailing lazy smoke up to the ceiling—is Taomei.
Her perfectly plucked eyebrow is curled just so: amusement and sharpness in equal measure.
Maomao stiffens against his doorframe.
“Is this how your pack does interventions?” she mutters, shifting out of the platform shoes.
Suddenly she’s two heads smaller than him again.
Gaoshun grunts. "It’s how The Court fashions its leashes," he rumbles, voice low and warning.
Taomei blows a smoke ring. Watches it float toward the water-stained ceiling.
“She’s pretty,” Maomao notes—way too casually.
“She’s also an ex-wife, little viper,” Gaoshun drawls back, steering her firmly by the elbow. “Go wash up. And don’t think you can hide your limp from me.”
“Got me this far,” she snaps back, stubborn to the bone.
He swats at her shoulder like a herding dog, not ungentle. “I’ll bite you, vexing creature.”
“Gotta catch me first, old mutt,” she tosses over her shoulder as she limps off toward the bathroom, chin tilted high and still stubbornly wrapped in his coat.
He watches her until she disappears into the hall. Hears the rattle of the faucet.
Only then does he turn his attention back to Taomei. Steps out of his own shoes.
The cigarette between her fingers has burned low. Her smile is sharp as broken glass.
"Quite the spitfire you’ve got there," she muses.
"What do you want, Taomei?" Gaoshun says flatly, he pulls the collar of his shirt from his neck. The fabric gives too easily.
Another one ruined by tiny Witch Teeth.
She tilts her head. Studies him with that terrible patience only old packmates possess.
"You’re not quite as stealthy as you think you are," she says.
"You don’t say," he grinds out as he shudders out of the button-up and inspects it.
Yeah. That one’s done for.
"I told you..." she exhales smoke slowly, deliberately, "you can’t afford to forget you have people to lose. Not even for a pretty face."
His jaw ticks. Tight.
"Is that all you have to say to me?"
Taomei leans back, blows another lazy smoke ring into the battered air.
"If that isn’t enough," she says coolly, "then I think I might already be too late."
The shower shuts off with a clunk from the hall.
Silence falls. Heavy. Charged.
"You can tell Jinshi," Gaoshun says, voice gone knife-calm, "that if he values his life, he’ll keep the children out of this. Bad enough he couldn't keep his hands off you."
He bins the shirt. Opens the fridge for something cool to roll over his shoulder where the undershirt is dabbed with blood.
"You make it sound so sinister," Taomei hums, eyes half-lidded.
"I make it sound like it looks," he growls low. Then, after a moment: "Leave the keys, Taomei."
Her mouth twitches. Half a smirk. Half a wince.
"Already kicking me out?" she drawls as she rises. "And here I thought I might get to know your new bite-mark."
"No." His voice is iron now. "None of your business. Leave the keys. And get out."
He doesn’t wait for a reply.
Thinks of the way his Witch spits her Fuck You at him.
Turns his back on her and listens to the soft clink of keys dropped onto the chipped kitchen counter, the click of boots against the floor, the squeak of the door swinging shut.
The moment she’s gone, Gaoshun scrubs a hand down his face.
Lets the tension bleed out of his shoulders.
Just for a second.
Then he hears it—
bare feet padding out of the bathroom.
The soft shuffle of a Witch wearing his oversized shirt and nothing else, her hair wet and clinging to her collarbones.
And the war inside him starts all over again.
Notes:
Dump is probably coming tomorrow - 11 chapters to look forward to for all of yous ;)
Chapter 31
Notes:
All of the characters! All of the resolution! Or any resolution?!?!? Suspense! Darkness! Despair! Magic! Come one, come all, to the magic mystery chapter dump!!! MWAHAHAHAHAHA!
sorry, I haven't slept and it shows.
chapter dump incoming, idk if I'll manage to remind y'all of the tags and trigger warnings so I'm reminding you again to mind the tags. There is violence. There is biting. There is blood. There is noir in this. There are morally grey characters. There is Lakan. Just... keep it in mind. Please. Please.
That said: have at.
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
He picks the small spoons from the drawer. Just because he doesn’t, technically, mean anything by it.
Except for how he also does.
"What,” he intones throwing the first spoon at her head, “the fuck,” the second spoon lands harder, “were you thinking?!" the third spoon crashes past her, sticks into the plaster of his wall.
Gaoshun's voice whips across the small apartment like a lash.
The Witch snarls right back—already in his face, battering at his bruised jaw with the damn kitchen roll.
"I was thinking I could get one of them!"
Her hands are fists. Her face is flushed and furious and too damn alive for him to look at directly.
"One of them," she snaps, stabbing the air between them with a bruised pointer finger. "One spider. With all the information he had stitched into his rotten skin."
"You almost got yourself killed," Gaoshun growls, stepping into her space, pushing her through the open doorway.
"You always think you know better, Court Dog," she spits, jabbing a finger into his chest.
He grabs her wrist—tight enough to sting, loose enough not to crush her.
She twists free, body snapping lithe and sharp against him, and suddenly it’s a fight.
A real one.
No spells. No pretense. Just hands and raw, frantic desperation.
They crash into the coffee table—papers, cups, everything flying. Leftover brew soaks the carpet. Ceramic shards scatter like shrapnel.
Gaoshun curses.
The Witch rakes her nails down his face hard enough to welt.
He shoves her back against the arm of the couch.
She kicks him in the ribs.
He catches her ankle.
She flips them. Knees digging into his stomach, hair wild around her face, breath a hot snarl.
"You're an idiot," he bites out, trying to pin her again.
"You’re a Court-lapdog," she grinds back, twisting like smoke and knives.
He plants a hand against the small of her back and flattens her against him.
Chest to chest. Hip to hip.
The heat between them unbearable. Blistering. Alive.
Her magic crackles against his skin—sharp, warning—but she reins it in at the last moment.
Just enough to singe the air.
Just enough to say I could.
"You think I wanted you caught in this?" Her voice is low. Raw. "I didn't want you implicated, you stupid, stubborn mutt. Even if you're nothing but a Court Dog!"
The admission hits him harder than any punch.
He growls low, rumbling deep in his chest, something feral and electric between his teeth. His thigh pins her hips, and she bucks hard enough to almost throw him off.
Almost.
They grapple again—hands sliding, catching, bruising.
Skin scraping skin.
Teeth flashing.
Breath hot enough to burn.
The world narrows to the drag of their bodies, the bare truth they carve out in every shove, every bite, every raw, desperate clutch.
And then—they slam back to the carpet, breathless.
Neither of them lets go.
Neither of them moves.
Instead, they both freeze—listening to the thudding pulse between them, to the thunder under their ribs.
“Who the fuck are you,” Gaoshun wheezes, low against her temple. “And where the fuck did you come from?”
She answers by snapping her head into his, hard enough to rattle his teeth.
"Fuck you," she snarls.
“Nope.” He pulls her lower. Twists her enough to threaten her shoulders if she doesn’t take care and leverages his larger build and heavier weight as he settles over her. “No,” he huffs when she wiggles on the wet, stained carpet, too close to the shards of coffee-cups.
“Not until you tell me your damn name.”
She grunts. Groans. Bucks and writhes. And finally, slackens.
Gaoshun’s head drops into the nook between her shoulder and her cheek. Her face is warm, his temples are sweaty. She smells like his soap and exhaustion and fresh, coppery, salt.
There's a long, shuddering pause.
“Maomao,” she murmurs into the thick weave of his carpet.
Cat.
Gaoshun exhales. Sagging over her.
“Pleasure,” he grunts as she tries to jab her elbow into his side.
He catches her wrists—locks her down—sets his teeth, warning-sharp, against the side of her throat when she tries to squirm free.
“Where are you from?” he rumbles into her skin.
“Around,” she grits.
He sinks his teeth just enough to make her flinch.
“Fuck you,” she bites. “I’m from here. Grew up in the Verdigris House. Meimei sends her regards.”
That stops him short.
“Meimei?”
Lightning snaps. She bucks under him—crackling defiance—but he rides the jolt out, slams her bad side lightly against the coffee table (careful enough not to break anything more important than her pride), one hand on her throat, pinning her there.
“Little beast,” he snarls into her face. Barely escapes her snapping teeth. “Be still, damn you.”
“No.”
Except there’s no way to go and he’s too heavy for her to fight when she’s still catching her breath. Gaoshun huffs.
“You’re a true-born Witch,” he says, flat and final.
The air shifts.
She stills.
Electric-blue eyes sliding away from his.
He jostles her. “Who taught you?”
“My father,” she bites. “Not that your lot would know about him.”
“And why not?”
“Because you marked him dead and buried under Kowloon Walled City rubble,” she spits.
Gaoshun sags—hating how much that makes sense. “A survivor?”
“A doctor,” she bucks, fruitlessly and not fought out yet. “And smarter than your Court by large.”
He must be, to have survived the Aftermath of that massacre.
Kowloon Walled City marks one of the darkest parts of Shifter History. As a refuge for most unwanted citizens of Hongkong, it had drawn a large number of shifters seeking sanctuary from the human society—torn between treating shifters as folkloric demons or exploitable beasts no better than rats.
When it had grown too large and too infamous to handle for bureaucracy, the city had issued the order to level it without consideration to those who lived within its walls.
There were legal and valid reasons to this decision of course—the rabid drug use and human trafficking being one—but there had also been a more hidden agenda to the decision.
The capture of unregistered shifters and their consequent enslavement under pretty-sounding names like reintegration programs.
Many had chosen to be buried by tons of concrete rather than face an outside world they’d run away from in the first place and human bureaucracy had not cared enough to check beforehand whether the first shèqún of its kind had, indeed, been emptied before levelling it to the ground.
It had been declared an administrative error.
And no reparations had been needed to make to a people that, on paper, had never existed in the first place.
Convenient.
“He must be pushing eighty,” Gaoshun muses into the contemplative lull between them.
The Witch—Maomao, he might as well get used to her name now that he has it—considers this for a moment. Shrugs.
“Ish,” she agrees. “They weren’t all that neat with the paperwork back when he was born.”
Classic.
Gaoshun sighs.
Drops his head.
“And how come you weren’t registered?” he asks—because he has to. Just to cover all his bases. Just… to know.
Maomao wiggles under him. He presses her down lazily, heavier.
"Because my father worked for the Court once," she mutters. "He didn’t want me to be another name on the ledger."
Smart man.
And yet, here they are.
Her eyes slide to him. There’s a sneer on her face. “Anything else?”
So many things.
But the most important first. “Why’d you go for the people with Spider Tattoos?”
Her brows furrow. Somebody opens the door to the house and a chilly draft whistles through the slit under the door to his apartment.
In the low light, he takes care not to drop his eyes to the reactions of her body. He’s very aware that there isn’t a lot between her body and his shirt. Or his body and the uncovered parts of hers. He’s trying not to think about it.
"A lead," she mutters. "Old one. From before I met you. Some ritual, bad as it fucked me up. But there was a phrase—The bright breeze carries the spider overseas. It just—”
“Say that again,” he orders.
“The bright breeze carries the spider overseas,” she intones carefully.
The words vibrate against his ribs.
Something clicks.
Hard. Final. Irrevocable.
Her eyes look at him like she’s trying to decipher him. “What does that mean to you.”
Maybe nothing at all.
Except maybe—
He huffs. “Something’s rotten in the state of Denmark,” he reminds her. “And I haven’t been able to figure out who it is yet.”
“Your problem,” she snaps and bucks her hips against his. “Get off.”
“Tempting,” he hums. “But no. I’m going in, tomorrow, to see if your Spider Lead gets me anywhere.”
He spreads heavier over her then. Mellows his strength into a truce that feels heavy, but isn’t confinement.
Gaoshun shifts. Lowers his forehead against hers for a moment, just breathing with her. Just letting it sit.
"Get off me," Maomao mutters again, voice rough, hating how small it sounds.
"No," Gaoshun says, cheek pressed to the top of her head. "You’ll kick me."
"Scout’s Honour, I won’t," she huffs, too tired to mean it.
"I don’t believe for a second you were ever a girl scout," he grumbles, too fond.
"Had to try," she smirks weakly against his collarbone. "What’re you gonna do, fall asleep on me?"
"You’re too bony to be comfortable," he mutters.
But he doesn’t let go.
And when he tilts sideways—dragging her half over him in the sprawl—she doesn’t move away either.
Their breathing evens out, slowly.
Reluctantly.
Notes:
Ah! Remember when I said I'd reveal the Kowloon thing! There it is! If you haven't read up on it yet, do read up! It's mighty intriguing imo and quite a part of Honkong History!
Chapter 32
Notes:
Nothing to see here, sir, madam, esteemed reader, just two people cuddling and playing possum. Move along, please!
Chapter Text
Her breathing has changed roughly fifteen minutes ago.
Gaoshun has been holding himself carefully lax. Heavy. Playing at unconscious even though he, very much, is not.
She shivers slightly.
Curls closer on instinct sometime between one breath and the next, legs tangling into his, nose pressed against the curve of his collarbone where scent is strongest—he wonders what she smells when she inhales.
Her fingers twitch once against his ribs. His arm, heavy and warm over her cool side, shifts slightly, draping more fully across her back like a living furnace.
Neither of them says a word.
The carpet itches. The bruises ache. The whole apartment smells like sweat and ozone and the ruined aftermath of their fight.
But it’s... quiet.
It’s almost peaceful.
If she closes her eyes and tilts her head just like so, she can almost make herself believe that this is not the reality she lives right now. That she’s not hunting for a sister who nobody else cares is missing. That her body aches from different things than fighting things bigger and meaner than herself. That the man who smells like pine, leather and the faint metallic tang of blood is a warm body next to her not because of coincidence but because of choice.
Maomao lets her forehead settle just a little deeper against his chest. Lets herself breathe in the weight of him. Lets herself drift. Just a little.
Gaoshun stays still.
Mostly.
One hand tightens, just briefly, against her. Tactile wolf-nature even in rest, shifter heat bleeding through the threadbare cotton with a weight that grounds her. Settles her.
They might have dozed a little like that. They might not.
It’s hard to tell where exhaustion blurs into simply existing together.
The morning light is gray and bruised when the knock rattles the door.
Both of them jerk upright immediately.
Maomao nearly clocks him under the chin with her forehead. Gaoshun grunts, catching her by the shoulder before she can bolt, half-crouched and magic buzzing under her skin like it’s ready to kill something.
The second knock is softer. A package thunking dully against the front step.
They freeze.
Exchange a glance—wary, tangled, still too close.
"...More of your interventions?" Maomao mutters, voice roughened by sleep and disuse.
"No," Gaoshun grunts, willing it to be real. “Also,” he reminds, “Ex-Wife.” Because somehow that’s important.
Still half-twined around each other, they listen hard.
The echo of the hallway reveals nothing. No footsteps retreating. No shadows shifting under the door crack.
Finally, Gaoshun untangles himself—slow, careful. His hands brushing her as he pushes to his feet.
He crosses the living room with a soft, limping gait.
Checks the small peephole as he unlocks the door and waits a beat.
Behind him, the Witch moves, cautiously. He won’t fool himself into thinking she’s not getting ready to blast whoever will try to force their way in with enough electricity to take out the complex’ grid.
He peels the door open silently.
Nothing but the cold bite of morning air.
And a plain brown package sitting innocently on the welcome mat.
He brings it inside.
Locks the door behind him and checks the peephole again.
Nothing.
Finally, their eyes settle on the package. Gaoshun sniffs it carefully.
Nothing that rings any alarm bells.
"...Well?" she croaks.
Gaoshun arches a brow at her. Maomao is crouched, as predicted, in an easily defendable spot. Still wrapped in his massive shirt, her bare legs ghost-pale against the carpet.
Still careful, he puts the box on the table with a soft thud.
They eye it like it might explode.
It doesn’t even rattle.
Maomao bends over the tag plastered to the side while Gaoshun feels for the knife in his coat.
Her brows are already furrowed before he slices the box open.
Inside—
Clothes.
New. Clean. Plain.
Pants. Shirts. Underthings. Socks.
Clothes for a woman just about her size.
Maomao’s mouth parts as she reaches inside.
"I didn’t order anything," she says needlessly.
"Neither did I," Gaoshun mutters, rifling through the contents with her.
Everything’s standard. Quality. Basic enough to blend into the city unnoticed.
Except—
“These are mine,” she muses as he pulls the boots away from the very bottom of the box. “As in—”
“—not new.”
It’s clear the moment they are laid out next to the rest of the clothing.
The black is washed out, the texture of the canvas lived in, the gum of the soles just worn enough to suggest wear-and-tear. Gaoshun notes that the make wouldn’t have been amiss on a soldier.
Maomao stares at the neat, folded stacks.
Her throat works once as her eyes veer to him. Towards the door. Back to the clothing.
Gaoshun bends back over the box. Peels out the stuffing for any kind of clue.
Because someone knows she’s here.
And someone knows she needs clothing.
"You have fans," Gaoshun says dryly, slicing the tension with a careful flick of humor because he comes up empty on his search for hints and he doesn’t know how else to deal with this.
She glares at him, weary and prickly and still too warm.
"You’re the one who collects strays," she bites back.
He smirks.
Chapter 33
Notes:
No, we still haven't moved from Gaoshun's home ;)
Chapter Text
Her hand is still clutched around her boots, fingers flexing. She sets them down like she’s only just realizing when something… moves.
Inside the boot.
Rolls.
Maomao freezes.
She tilts the boots backward, careful, suspicious.
Something small and polished tumbles out into her palm with a muted click.
Gaoshun’s eyes sharpen the second the abalone-shine catches the light—white and black Go pieces, glossy and unmistakably deliberate.
"Meimei?" he hazards, already doubting even as the word leaves his mouth.
Maomao just shakes her head.
Slow. Grim. Her face flattening into something heavy and worn.
She shakes the pieces out into her palm with care, thumbing them absently, brushing across the cool curve of one.
Silence stretches thin between them.
Too quiet.
Her shoulders slump the second she lifts her head to meet his eyes.
"Remember when I told you my father got out of the Court?" she says, voice hoarse.
Gaoshun nods once, slow.
She tips the pieces into his palm—cool, weighty things that seem to anchor the room around them.
"My father..." she murmurs, almost more to herself than to him. "He adopted me. Raised me. But before that..."
She trails off.
Gaoshun stays very, very still.
"There’s a man," Maomao finally says, setting her jaw tight against the ache rising under her words, "in your Court. He's been sniffing after me for a while."
Gaoshun’s head snaps up. But she’s already shaking her head.
"Not like that—" she hesitates. Shrugs one shoulder like she can dislodge it. "Or maybe. Who the fuck knows with him. But mostly..." A bitter, tired huff. "...because he's convinced I’m his child."
Gaoshun’s mind whirrs. Catalogues the limited list of names he keeps on mental retainer from The Court. The pieces in his palm clink quietly as his fist closes loosely around them.
There’s only one name in particular that would fit with Go stones.
“Lakan?” he rumbles.
Maomao groans, rubs a hand over her face like she’s trying to scrub the name out of existence.
"The Weirdo," she spits. "With the monocle and the fox-shift."
Gaoshun blinks.
"He’s your father?"
"Sire," she corrects sharply, teeth flashing.
Sharp distinction.
Not father.
Sire. Blood without bond.
And that’s…valid. That’s a very important difference for some shifters. Not usually one that matters to skulks, but he’s not entirely certain how that pans out when the offspring isn’t shifter themselves.
He breathes her in again carefully. Tries to parse even the most underlying scents of her. Storm and fire and witch blood. Nothing sly. Nothing fox-kin.
“You don’t smell like him one bit,” he says gruffly as he looks at the stones in his palm. “He’s sure you’re his?”
Lakan seldom erred, no matter how outlandish his theories and gut-feelings.
Maomao shrugs. “I’m pretty certain too,” she admits. “My dam only had me and according to her owner at the time, she only had one client who could’ve been the sire.”
Gaoshun stills.
Dam.
A shifter's word. Old and sharp-edged. Not mother, not maternal warmth—just the fact of creation.
None of her words make sense, exactly. At least not at face value. But there are pieces that fit into the empty slots her bare narration leaves.
One, in particular, fits surprisingly well. Like snapping his jaws shut around a bone.
“Verdigris House?” Gaoshun mutters, piecing it together. “You said you grew up there but—”
“Her name was Fengxian,” the Witch sighs, voice scraping low. "The Old Madam’s own. Lucky enough to survive. Unfortunate enough to have me."
She shrugs again, brittle, and Gaoshun feels the pieces shift beneath his boots.
The quiet keystones of the city’s underbelly and Court politics—tied to her blood.
Gaoshun holds, in his hands, a quiet secret of the city that could topple two Houses with nothing more than the opening of his mouth. And the very foundations that the quiet foundation of The Court is based on.
A trueborn Witch—not extinct after all—descended of House La—the Court’s very own source of Military Strategy in and out of the country—and the proprietary line that has held Verdigris House—the city’s most stable hub of underbelly information—for more than fifty years now.
A nexus of power wrapped up in only one conundrum of a Witch, standing in his apartment wearing nothing more than one of his ratty shirts.
Gaoshun looks at her—really looks.
At the curve of her bruised shoulder, the stubborn jut of her chin, the glint in her too-bright eyes.
Fragile.
Unbreakable.
One impossible, dangerous, maddening woman.
Gaoshun scrubs a hand down his face. Exhales through his teeth.
"Fuck me," he mutters.
Maomao just smirks, small and sharp, like she knows exactly how far past fucked they already are and chirps a taunting “Not today, good sir.”
Chapter Text
Gaoshun leaves for The Court, gruff and grumbling.
He wants to pull the thread of the bright breeze while it’s still taut. Wants to see what, if anything, Lakan might reveal about his interference — whether by choice or mistake.
Maomao has her own steps to take. Steps she can't afford to take with a wolf breathing down her neck — no matter how warm or how steady that weight has become.
She slings the battered messenger bag over her shoulder, dresses in the new-old clothes Lakan so graciously provided, and disappears into the city’s crumbling veins.
The courier office is loud with the scrape of bike tires and the tired curses of bodies that already smell of sweat and exhaustion. She blends in easily. Head down, hoodie up, face shadowed. Until another envelope, brown and weightless, is slipped into her hand.
No return address. No name. Just a request that it be her to deliver it towards the end of her shift. Extra pay for overtime. No questions.
It smells fishy before Maomao even takes a look at the address.
The round Portier Desk looms in front of her — a reinforced checkpoint behind the administrative front of the unassuming corporate building in the bustling, economic district of the city. From the outside, looking through the glass revolving doors at the marble interior is like looking at any other office building. The only difference being that Maomao can feel the magic in the masonry of the building.
That and she would have to be blind and deaf not to recognize The Court when it bit her in the nose like right now.
She considers setting the missive aflame.
Considers turning around and lying to her shift-supervisor. Tell them that no one was there. That the address is bogus.
Except for how she needs to eat.
And needs a new home.
And needs money to pay for her leads.
Ugh.
Why.
Mulishly she considers the front of the supposed office building again. The many levels of the behemoth of a scraper in front of her.
One could probably get lost in that.
One could probably very conveniently be forgotten in that.
Maomao swallows.
Thinks of Xiaolan.
Thinks of Gaoshun.
And exhales.
Gaoshun will sniff her out.
There’s no question about that.
If he’s found her in Yǒng Yè House where the scent-confusion must have been that much more potent than in what she assumes is going to be a relatively clean working space, then he sure as hell is going to find her in an environment where that nose of his works to his advantage.
Also— she takes a deep breath, rolls her shoulders—she can’t quite deny that this is a very particular tickle of hers that she’s getting to cross of her list by delivering this.
Who, after all, has ever entered The Court while they were being looked for?
She smiles as she pushes through the revolving doors and walks in like she belongs. Like she doesn’t know anything wrong with the world.
A thick-necked shifter manning the round entrance desk narrows his golden-yellow eyes at her immediately. "Only shifters past this point," he rumbles.
His uniform fits badly over his chest and his shoulders. Tight in points where he would need to move and Maomao catalogues that quietly.
She flashes the envelope and a fake smile, all sunshine and teeth. "I'm just here to deliver a damn package, man."
He sniffs the air, frowning. His nose wrinkles like he’s caught the scent of something that doesn't quite fit. "You smell weird. What kind of shift are you?"
Maomao beams. Innocent. "Cornsnake," she says sweetly at the shifter as he bends over something on the computer screen in front of him.
The shifter blinks up at her from his prone position. "Never heard of that."
"We’re pretty rare," she chirps. "Can I deliver the package now, or are you going to sniff me all day?"
The shifter grunts. Unimpressed but ultimately lazy. He shoves a blue Visitor’s Pass across the counter without another word.
There’s no name on it. But it reads: Visitor Access – Cornsnake.
Maomao clips it onto her shirt, gives the man a two-finger salute, and strolls in like she owns the place.
She has no idea where she’s going.
Gaoshun’s instincts are prickling before he even rounds the third hallway.
Something’s off.
There’s the usual stink of bureaucratic sweat and metal-tang of old blood from the old shifter wards, but underneath it—
A crackle.
A thread of storm.
He doesn't even need to scent the air to know it’s her.
He tracks her through the maze of glass corridors and locked archives, silent on the padded floors, the predator in him too awake, too ready.
What the hell are you doing here, little viper?
The instinct is to drag her out by the scruff of her neck. But Gaoshun forces himself to slow when he finally catches up to her.
Wearing a Visitor’s Pass like a badge of audacity, smelling like rainwater and bad decisions and stubborn, infuriating life.
She’s moving with a courier's casual lope, ignoring the stares she draws, badge swinging, boots thudding soft and deliberate. She’s heading toward the old records wing.
It doesn’t take long before she feels it.
A ripple in the air. A familiar pressure at her back.
Predator.
She glances sideways — slow, careful — and there he is. Gaoshun.
Golden-eyed, furious, stalking her like she’s a particularly troublesome rabbit.
He corners her near the polished glass elevators, one broad hand braced above her head against the wall.
"Cornsnake, huh?" he mutters, catching the swing of her Visitor’s Pass in the reflection, voice dry enough to scrape bone.
Maomao smirks up at him, sweet and poisonous. "You got a problem, old mutt?"
He huffs a sharp, disbelieving laugh under his breath. "You’re gonna get yourself skinned alive one of these days," he rumbles low enough only she can hear.
"You better hope you’re fast enough to stop it," she tosses back, slipping sideways under his arm and into the open elevator.
Gaoshun doesn’t stop her. He follows.
Notes:
Yes, Maomao is now inofficially a Cornsnake. She's already said she's not giving it back. It's hers now.
Chapter 35
Notes:
Lakan and his BS
Chapter Text
Lakan is already seated at the black-lacquer shogi table like a cat waiting for a mouse to notice it's already in the cage.
Maomao tosses her envelope onto the table with a careless flick of her wrist that fools no one. “You’re lucky I didn’t actually set it on fire,” she hums as she takes a seat.
Lakan barely looks at it. Instead, he gestures to the board.
"Play a game with me."
The words are silk and bait in the same breath.
Maomao crosses her arms, every inch of her screaming no — but her fingers twitch toward the pieces.
Curiosity is a shackle just as strong as blood.
"If I win," Lakan hums, brushing imaginary dust off a rook, "you’ll let me handle this matter personally."
"Not a chance in hell, flea-bag," Maomao spits, but she’s already leaning forward in the chair. Her visitor's badge — Cornsnake — swings lightly against her chest.
"Such strong language," Lakan muses, resting his chin on the back of his knuckles, "for someone born from a House of silk."
The game starts with casual brutality.
Lakan plays slow. Careful. Testing her defenses. Maomao plays vicious. Like a starving stray thrown into a lion’s pit — fast, hungry, no regard for her own king’s safety if it means gutting his offense.
A corner trap springs closed around one of Lakan’s bishops before he even smiles properly.
"Aggressive," Lakan notes, voice light.
Maomao smiles, all teeth. "Adapt or die," she says sweetly.
Maomao’s sleeves are shoved up. Her boots are planted wide. Her hands move over the pieces with brutal, deliberate aggression—none of the grace of a trained Court strategist.
She plays like she fights: fast, reckless, and sharp enough to bleed.
Lakan watches her with the indulgent, unsettling calm of a fox watching a wildfire crawl toward his den.
Gaoshun keeps behind her, watching with narrowed eyes. His instincts snap taut under his skin, prickling harder with every breath. He shouldn't be here. He shouldn't let her be here.
But the thing is: she’s here anyway. And watching her now — watching the game she plays with a fox that Court officers and even the CEO of The Court itself tread lightly around — he realizes: She’s dangerous. Not just magically. Not just physically. But here, where it matters most. In the game of moves and countermoves. Strategy.
Gaoshun smirks at her back. She’s smarter than she pretends. Maybe smarter than either of them are ready for.
Another capture. A feint and parry. Her fingers move like knives across the board, fast and certain.
Her pawn slams forward like a knife to the throat.
Lakan’s smile flickers at the edges.
"Must you always bite first and ask questions later?" Lakan murmurs, sliding a bishop neatly across the board.
"Must you always assume you’re playing a child?" Maomao returns sweetly, countering with a swift flanking move that nearly traps two of his pieces between her own.
Gaoshun feels the corner of his mouth twitch — just once — at her audacity.
Lakan leans back, lacing his long fingers together. Intrigued. Curious. Pensive in a way that would have unnerved any junior officer worth their boots.
"This temper of yours," he says thoughtfully, moving to rescue his bishop with a knight's arc, "reminds me of Fengxian."
“I don’t care who I got it from,” Maomao presses the assault. “For all I know I got it from biting the hands that tried to feed me sweets and ask my name when I was eight.”
A beat. The clack of wood on wood as another of her pieces promotes.
Lakan studies her for a long moment. Sharp as knives behind his amused veneer.
"Do you truly believe I'd harm you?" he asks softly.
"I believe," she says, slamming another promoted pawn down like a dagger, "that blood alone is a piss-poor excuse for loyalty."
For a heartbeat, even Gaoshun forgets to breathe.
The board is brutalized. Lakan is bleeding territory — small, almost invisible concessions — but they are there, each one slicing clean and exact.
He smiles finally. Genuinely. And moves his king forward two squares, knowingly into a trap.
Three moves later, Maomao has him pinned. Not a traditional checkmate — not yet — but an absolute inevitability.
She sits back. Arms crossed. Breath hard but even.
"You yield," she says flatly.
Lakan's fingers pause over the board mid-reach. Just a fraction too long. The smile doesn’t falter—but it goes still, calculated, his gaze sharpening.
When he chuckles, low in his throat, it's an oddly fond, resigned sound. “Apparently," he concedes, voice almost proud, "I do."
Gaoshun feels it too. The cold ripple under the skin. Something old and inevitable curling around them.
Because you don’t teach a daughter to bite unless you intend for her to draw blood.
And Lakan — wily, grinning, bleeding across the board — had wanted her to win. Had wanted to see it.
Lakan leans back. Taps two fingers against the table edge.
"You’ve never wondered," he murmurs, "why the spiders are flooding the lower blocks now? Why now? Why with this intensity?"
Maomao’s jaw tightens.
"You sent the package," she says flatly. "You sent the damn Go pieces."
Lakan smiles. Thin and terrible.
"Would you have come otherwise?"
Across the room, Gaoshun’s teeth grit silently. He feels the game behind the game — Lakan pulling threads, tangling them tighter around Maomao’s throat.
The fox is clever. Always was.
But he’s clever in a way that leaves corpses in the corners no one sweeps.
Lakan sighs. Taps a claw lightly against the polished edge of the board.
"You reek of bad decisions," he muses to Maomao, ignoring Gaoshun entirely. "But you also smell of curiosity."
Maomao leans in, all predator-bright and dangerous.
"You gonna tell me what’s at the end of your spider thread, sire?"
The last word is spat like a curse.
Lakan chuckles low, the sound curling like smoke. "You’re getting close," he admits, voice dropping into something sharp and knife-like. "Closer than you realize."
He dusts his sleeves, gives Gaoshun a lingering glance like he’s measuring him for a grave. Gaoshun moves to tower two steps behind Maomao. Not a threat to her. But back-up.
"You’ll find," Lakan says, voice conversational, "that the spider you’re chasing built her web closer to the heart of the court than you think."
"Name," Maomao snaps, almost bending over the board now. The air cackles with ozone and electricity and Gaoshun wonders quietly if he should step in. If she would, in fact, sock her sire into the shoulder with a bolt like she has with him that first time they’d met.
Lakan smiles that terrible, fond smile only old monsters know how to wear.
"Fengming," he says, voice low and final. "Assistant to CEO Ah-Duo. Keeper of soft lies and hard bargains."
The name hangs between them, sharp and heavy.
The woman trusted by one of The Emperor’s closest partners.
The woman who, behind silk smiles, is siphoning the city dry.
Gaoshun stiffens, laying out the pieces under a new light: The quiet removal of Yinghua. The maneuvering around the nobility and unregistered shifters. The growing rot under the Court’s supposedly pure skin.
Fengming.
Bright Wind.
A snake in the garden.
Maomao doesn’t speak. Her fingers curl, crackle bright. A filament of magic hisses out from her palm, burns a hairline scar into the lacquer of the board. She doesn’t apologize.
Lakan inclines his head — mockery and benediction in the same tilt.
"And now," he murmurs to Maomao, "you have a choice. Hunt wisely, little witch. Or you’ll end up another fly in her web."
He turns and walks away, leaving the pieces strewn like broken teeth in his wake.
Gaoshun watches Maomao stand there, fists clenched, breathing sharp and shallow.
He steps up beside her.
Reaches out.
Curls his hand around her neck. Grounding, solid.
"Come on, little Viper," he rumbles, quiet and rough. "We’ve got a breeze to catch."
She lets him pull her with him when he turns toward the war waiting outside.
Chapter 36
Notes:
Oooooh, Jinshi!
Chapter Text
Gaoshun doesn’t knock. Just walks into Jinshi’s temporary office and drops a stack of folders with a flat, deliberate thud on the table.
Jinshi raises one elegant brow. “You’ve found something.”
“You asked for results,” Gaoshun says, and taps the top folder. “These are eighty unsolved files. Every one of them has two things in common.”
He flips the first open. “They’re stamped Case Closed. No retrieval scheduled. No signature. No date.”
Jinshi exhales slowly. His eyes flick to the seal, and then back to Gaoshun. “And the second thing?”
“Each file,” Gaoshun says evenly, “had one name pass through as assistant caseworker at some point in the process.”
He doesn’t say the name.
He doesn’t have to.
The first three folders open in Jinshi’s hands. The case-worker in question becomes quickly clear.
Jinshi’s jaw tightens as he turns his eyes up questioningly towards Gaoshun. “…That’s high up.”
“Why do you think I’m bringing it to you.”
There’s a pause. Jinshi’s eyes stay level. Cold. Calculating.
“…This is above my clearance.”
Gaoshun’s mouth quirks, humorless. “Is this a good time to mention the Ka-Clan has a very distinct scent?”
The room stills.
Something ancient flickers behind Jinshi’s gaze. Something draconic and imperial.
Gaoshun holds the silence.
Among The Court he is one of the handful that has ever been in the direct presence of the CEO himself. He’d only been twenty at the time, but the scent of Dragon-shift is not one you forget easily.
Nor is it easily mistakeable.
Jinshi is clever.
Had traded dragon for reptilian in his official paperwork, and most that passed him by or worked with him wouldn’t know the difference. That is: except if they’d met the CEO of The Court, possessed an unusually keen nose and were smart enough to put two-and-two together.
Unfortunately for Jinshi’s cover, Gaoshun had all three.
And had known that he’d been working for royal blood for the entirety of his duty.
“…I see.” Jinshi doesn’t smile, but there’s a rueful twitch at the corners of his mouth. “You’re already on this,” Jinshi adds, softly. “Aren’t you.”
Gaoshun hums. “As per usual.”
Jinshi sighs. Closes the folder in his hands. Nods. “Consider your back covered, then.”
“I appreciate it.”
He turns to go. Jinshi stops him with a quiet, deliberate, “Gaoshun.”
A pause.
“…About the other thing.”
Gaoshun doesn’t turn fully. Just glances over his shoulder.
“The Witch?” he says.
Jinshi’s smile is expectant and false.
Gaoshun nods. “Sometimes you have to pay upfront.”
He gestures toward the folders. “This is part of that.”
Jinshi exhales. “So the Witch—”
“—is part of this,” Gaoshun finishes. “Yes.”
A beat.
Jinshi settles back in his chair like he’s just made a very clean, very final move on a board only they can see.
“Good,” he says, low and satisfied. “Very good.”
A pause.
“You may go.”
“…Sir.”
Chapter 37
Notes:
Catching some air, clearing the air, tension in the air...
Chapter Text
The rooftop is quiet. High enough that even the smog-thick sky can’t mute the wind here. It slices cold across exposed skin. Paper wards flutter on the ground like nervous birds in the humming neon lights of surrounding advertisements.
Maomao stands in the center, arms folded, jaw set.
Gaoshun leans against the doorframe behind her, hands deep in his coat pockets.
Between them, old chalk marks from an uneasy circle around the gravel-stained center. A ritual space cut from scavenged supplies, spiked with copper dust and salt.
And the unmentioned list of warehouses in this city and the next three.
All part of the Consortium Fengming’s father had built from the ground in the wake of the fifties and sixties’ economic boom. A legend in The Court. A shifter who had managed to climb a mountain many of his brethren had been crushed under, coming out on top of what would, historically, later explain the rapid extinction of shifter blood in human society.
Warehouses that stocked materials and products. All being held by the family.
No mention of active use. Just held. On retainer. As investment.
As convenient blank spaces no one bothered to look at.
Even knowing, now, that the shifters—and Maomao’s Xiaolan—might be held at one of the warehouses, they had an advantage that was hard to navigate.
Knowing about the warehouses meant that they had to choose wisely which warehouse to raid first without giving their hand away prematurely.
It meant a decisive hit, and soon—before Fengming caught wind of their hunting her and, perhaps, sussed out who they were looking for in the first place.
The Court wanted results, and if Gaoshun wanted to keep Maomao away from them for a bit longer, he was pressed to give them some.
Maomao wanted Xiaolan and if Gaoshun wanted to keep her close then they had to keep moving into the direction of the girl.
Finally, Gaoshun huffed. Chuffed his shoe against the rough tarmac of the flat roof. "How do we find them?"
He asked directly. Didn’t try for alternate routes. The Witch did not appreciate the flowery pomp of The Court. Even if it hurt, he knows she’d rather take the direct approach.
Maomao sighs. Tips her head up into the steady drizzle. And blinks. Her throat is oddly vulnerable like this. Pale and stretched and offered to him in a display that tightens something uncomfortably behind his sternum. "Do you want the quick fix or the proper way?"
He huffs, dryly. “Which one is more sustainable.”
She makes a sound. A garbled noise of disgust and fed-up that meets with the flat, unimpressed look she shoots him when her chin tilts back down. “I hate you.”
It doesn’t sound like she really does.
Gaoshun waits.
Quietly.
Patiently.
Then: “…I can’t do that alone,” she admits quietly. Scuffs her own boot across the roof.
Doesn’t meet his eyes when he asks “How do I help?” and, instead shakes her head at the question.
She turns slowly, eyes storm-dark. Her fingers twitch. The air around her is already starting to shimmer — sharp with the tang of ozone.
“This isn’t something you can do,” she negates. “Or at least, not easily.”
His brow furrows. His pride stings. “If it helps—”
“No,” she cuts him off. “Listen. This is—”
Her voice drops. Rough now.
"The last time I did this it drained me so badly I couldn’t contain the flare at all."
Gaoshun nods. “I felt it back in my apartment.”
He thinks back. Considers.
“When I caught up to you, you looked like something cracked you open and tried to wear your skin.”
She sighs. A deep sound.
“Something nearly did,” she admits quietly. “It’s not just… seeing. It’s feeling. Smelling what they smell. Hearing what they think. If I’m not careful… I bring something back with me.”
She shivers. Not from the cold.
"The only reason I didn’t have at least fifty shifters on me the moment I scried is because most of them are locked in the shèqun The Court set up. Their wards deaden their senses. But if I do this the way it was intended—"
"You’re nervous," he gruffs. Irritated.
"Listen."
"I’m trying,” he bites, not ungently. “You’ve yet to get to the point."
"For fuck’s sake!"
Her hands spark. One of the old chalk runes flares too bright, too quickly, and shatters. A small explosion cracks the air.
He exhales with her.
"You good yet?"
A long silence. The wind moves. The sky doesn’t.
"You bit me once,” she remarks, almost off-handedly. Quietly.
Gaoshun swallows. Can still taste the skin under his tongue. The blood that had welled up under the piercing bite of his teeth. “…yes.”
She breathes. “For this to work… I’d need you to do that again.”
Gaoshun stills.
“With feeling,” Maomao emphasizes.
Oh.
“Do you understand?” she searches his eyes now. “The proper way needs an exchange of energies. A balance. Duality. This isn’t—”
“Okay.”
Her words strangle themselves in her throat. “—what?”
She takes a reflexive step back. Not fear. Surprise.
Gaoshun doesn’t move.
Steady.
Lets her see his eyes when he repeats. “Okay.”
"Now wait a second—"
"Maomao."
He interrupts her gently.
She stills. Voice. Body. Magic. Everything about her pauses. Breaks against the disbelief spreading over her face.
He steps forward. Carefully. Not like she’s dangerous, but like she matters.
"Come here, little Cornsnake."
He reaches for her — not with force, but with certainty. One big hand curls behind her neck. Grounds her.
"You bit me first, remember?"
She nods, breath caught. Her hands lift to his ribs like she’s done it a dozen times and still doesn’t know why.
He leans his forehead against hers.
"This isn’t nothing to us wolves,” he admits. “That much is true. There’s a reason Taomei was—"
She huffs into his loose embrace. "...Territorial?"
He snorts in agreement.
Silence folds in.
"Just… Promise me that if it gets too much you talk to me before running."
She tenses. Tries to step away. "...I’m—"
“Hey.” He’s firmer this time. Lets her step away just enough to gain space, but not enough to get away from him. His hand slides to her chin. Almost naturally. Their eyes catch.
Hold.
Sharp. Intimate.
"Where’s the little Viper who told me to go fuck myself and pissed territorial on a stakeout roof, huh?” He searches her face. Mirrors the oddly off-guard-smile he manages to draw from her. “Promise me you’re not going to compromise your own comfort for mine. If something doesn’t work—I’d rather you kick me in the teeth than vanish into the night."
She swallows.
A loud sound that he feels against his palm now.
For all her abrasive behavior, she is soft to the touch in a way he hasn’t let himself catalogue all the times they’d gotten close before.
"You’d find me again before dawn anyway," she deflects hoarsely.
"Damn right I would,” he affirms. Low. Certain.
She breathes in once, sharp and shaky.
He’s not entirely sure what he has on his hands here. Doesn’t know what this will make of them. Of him. But he cannot deny that she has bitten him thrice already. That he wears the mark her teeth have set into his shoulder like he’d wear a more serious claim. That he likes knowing that she can throw him around.
“Okay,” she finally agrees. Quietly.
Nods when he gives her a look.
“I promise I’ll come kick and scratch if something doesn’t work.”
“Good,” he rumbles, brushing his thumb over her cheek. “Any last words yourself?”
She huffs a smile. Rueful. Grateful. Loaded. “Later,” she shakes her head, “right now let’s just—”
“—do this,” he nods.
Doesn’t think too much of what this is going to be.
A bite.
An exchange of energies.
A mating.
Chapter 38
Notes:
Rituals? Rituals.
Uh! TW for Biting and blood!
Chapter Text
The new rooftop she’s chosen is quiet.
No sirens reach this high. The city’s glow fades beneath the haze, neon flickers too far to matter. It might be idyllic—if not for the sweet, noxious reek of something chemical rising through the vents.
Maomao steps into the circle.
Chalk under her black boots. The wind cold against her skin, where she’s shrugged out of her jacket, biting through the bones. Spell-lines bloom around her—chalk and copper flaring in pale golds and bitter whites. Old language crackles up through the stone. It hums like a warning. Like breath held too long.
Gaoshun moves into the circle behind her.
Wordless. Steady.
One arm loops low across her stomach. The other curves over her chest, firm and anchoring. His nose brushes the side of her jaw as he settles close.
She doesn’t flinch when his teeth scrape skin—she leans into it.
Lips moving through an old dialect as she casts. Tendons moving under his lips, skin teasing his teeth. Her fingers twitch. Sparks stutter down the length of her arms. Her chant roughens in her throat. Her body begins to shake, breath stuttering.
Still she keeps going. Pours into the spell. Into the circle now lighting up around them. The magic starts to crackle through the air like static charge before a storm. Hair lifts. Skin tightens. Gravity forgets itself.
And when the power crests, sharp and wild and reaching—
He clamps down.
Hard.
Right where she’s bitten him before.
Blood wells under his teeth, bright and coppery against her skin. A song that hums into his throat, zaps down his chest and burrows in his lungs.
Maomao cries out—short, sharp, and real. A breath torn from her throat like a pulled thread.
Then the world splits sideways—hard, hot, and violent.
A child’s scream.
A man shouting—dialect wrong, rough.
Chains. A slap. Electricity arcs.
Burnt citrus. Bitter rubber. Blood.
A familiar perfume, cloying and cold.
Rot—masked under bleach and hospital soap.
A rust-red crate.
Yao Import Co.
A manifest—half-burned.
A spider-crest. Legs curled. A logo.
A brothel.
Yellow hallway. Blood smeared across tile.
A fox-shifter. Pacing. Gun at his side.
A wrist. Too small. Burned. Numbered. 726-H.
An orange 11. Spray-painted on steel.
Maomao chokes.
Her body seizes, back arching against Gaoshun’s hold.
The circle stutters. Wards flash too fast—screaming in tongues older than breath.
Her eyes blaze. Her mouth opens, and her breath isn’t hers anymore—it’s the air of the place she sees, filthy and poisoned and filled with screams.
Gaoshun growls. His voice is close and low and fierce. “You’re slipping—”
She doesn’t hear him.
Her arms are rigid. Lightning curls from her fingertips. Her skin glows from within. The air collapses.
Wards buckle.
The rooftop screams.
And Gaoshun does the only thing he can.
He drags his teeth down her shoulder and bites again, not in warning, not in grounding—but in claim.
Fangs break skin. Again.
His.
Whatever is trying to wear her skin, she’s his before that.
Magic claws back. It hits him like fire. Like rain. Like grief.
Her back bows hard against him. Her hips jerk. Her fingers scrabble for purchase against the air, against herself, and find nothing.
“Maomao,” he rumbles low, half-growl, half-prayer. “Come on—”
“I see it,” she gasps. “I see it—”
He tightens his arms around her middle, grounding her.
“Say it.”
Her breath catches. Her voice is not all hers. But the words come.
“District Eleven—North Quadrant,” she gasps. “Brothel. Crates. Marked with Yao—”
Her whole body pulses with power. Her skin sparks. The magic claws outward.
Her voice cracks around something else.
Then the air returns. A rush of wind and breath that almost chokes him.
The vision snaps like a rope gone too taut.
Maomao sags.
Gaoshun catches her.
The wards are scorched. The chalk circle is broken, half-smeared in ash and blood. The rooftop stinks of copper, ozone, and fire. Her hair is soaked through. Her legs have stopped holding her. She leans against him like a dying ember.
He breathes through his teeth.
She trembles. Shakes. Fights for every breath she takes.
“Got you,” he mutters hoarsely, pulling her into the lapels of his coat, his mouth close to her temple. “I got you.”
Her voice is ragged, faint. “Don’ let go.”
He huffs softly, arms tightening. “Won’t,” he promises.
She wheezes into the side of his throat. Whines. Low and aching and the spark in his chest, the pulse that feels like copper and witch-fire, roots into an emptiness in him he hasn’t felt since he’d divorced Taomei and had her mark healed by the Ma-Clan Witch.
She doesn’t argue when he licks her skin. Rough tongue over the open wounds on her neck.
It’s not something he can help now.
Not truly.
So much for walking away from this.
Chapter 39
Notes:
Joka! Pairin! Meimei!
Chapter Text
The Garnet Spider has been an up-and-coming challenger to the institutionalized seat of the Verdigris House that has been making business difficult for The Madam.
She’s tried, apparently, to barter with them. Haggle out a deal, and has gotten nowhere with them. Which is, in hindsight, a notably good reason for her to beat the broom at clients with Spider Tattoos when she wouldn’t, usually, raise a complaint against money going into the House whatsoever.
Except that this, too, gives Maomao an advantage.
Gaoshun leans against the archway of the Verdigris dressing room, arms crossed, jaw ticking. The scent of sweat and jasmine clings to the velvet drapes and perfume-drenched air, but all he can focus on is the Witch at the center of the chaos, quietly setting a mask over the imprint of his teeth on her neck.
Maomao stands in her underthings again — black this time, all sharp lines and too much leg — adjusting the straps of a corset that Meimei is cinching a little too smugly.
“You really do have a thing for brothels, little Cornsnake,” Gaoshun rumbles, just loud enough for her to hear.
Maomao doesn’t even flinch. Doesn’t look back as she steps into the knee-high, black pleaser-boots and zips them up with a small dagger in each sheath.
“You’re my john,” she says, matter-of-fact as she straightens again, “in case shit goes sideways.”
He snorts. “Aren’t I always?”
“You better be,” she replies, glancing at him now — blue eyes catching his, wicked and defiant — “after that bite.”
The growl he gives is low and possessive.
A golden flash behind his irises.
Meimei laughs into the lacing. “Careful, Wolf,” she murmurs, “you look like you’re about to mark her again.”
“Can it, Mister,” Maomao calls over her shoulder, half-sheepish.
“You started it,” Gaoshun mutters, but he falls quiet when the others begin to file in.
Joka and Pairin step into the room, dressed to match Maomao—except they are not going anywhere tonight.
Maomao hadn’t wanted to bring them any closer into the fray than she was already. A handful of the Verdigris girls that The Madam trusted was one thing. Any of the Three Verdigris Princesses (and the people Maomao considered family) another thing entirely.
It’s the girls behind them that Maomao will slink in with. Mingle with like she was part of them, a favor for The Garnet Spider—a concession that The Madam had made as if she were on the losing side of a bargain. Silks over armor, false smiles over steel — all of them veterans of things darker than the courts of lust — strap blades to their thighs and laughter to their lips. Painted faces. Combat boots disguised as heels.
Predators in lace.
“Everything set up?” Gaoshun checks one last time.
Meimei nods, applying lipstick to Maomao’s face with deadly precision. “Madam let us borrow the backroom codes from one of their lesser branches. They won’t know you’re not the usual cargo until you’re already in the walls.”
Gaoshun breathes slow. Counts heartbeats.
It’s dangerous. It’s not sanctioned.
It’s going to work.
His eyes find the Witch again.
“Sure you’re steady?” he asks, voice low now. Just for her.
Maomao shrugs on her jacket — short, black, deliberately torn — and buckles a knife to the inside of her thigh. A last resort. Her hair is slicked back. Her mouth painted cruel. But her hands?
Steady.
Steadier than his, maybe.
He nods. That’s all he needs.
The den they are supposed to serve is built into the docks. A side-branch of the larger prospect that is The Garnet Spider. It glitters cheap and red in the wet amber light.
Inside, the air is thick with salt, lacquered perfume, and old varnish too lazy to rot. It smells like money pretending not to be blood. The scent of girls is stronger— painted and painted-over, laughing with knives in their boots and runes under their false lashes.
Maomao walks with a slow confidence, too calm to be new, too sharp to be broken. Gaoshun is beside her, looming like every inch of muscle is money. His hand rests low at her back, fingers a little too tight.
She leans into him just enough to sell it. Her john. His asset. His problem, should anyone try to touch.
They pass the checkpoint. The girls titter on their way to the wardrobe and Maomao smiles saccharine as she pulls him along by the tie, away from the throng of people and into a Fire-Exit.
The hallway shifts. Music muffles. The smell of blood thickens.
Maomao doesn’t flinch when the first Spider sees her. Doesn’t hesitate when the knife sheathed against her thigh glints under red hallway light.
By the time the first alarm-sigil flares, she’s already moving— wolf on her left flank, blood on her lip and fire licking down her spine.
"Left," she barks, boot cracking against a guard’s kneecap. "That’s the staff corridor—check the right-side locks."
The hallway smells like rot under perfume. Like citrus and bleach and fear.
“Smells like your kind of place,” Gaoshun grunts behind her as he hauls a Spider into the wall hard enough to dent it. The man sags at his feet, hands lax, jaw slack.
She slices a rune into the air without looking and drops the next guard in his tracks.
Gaoshun takes out two more, moving in pairs. Clean, brutal. Fast. No hesitation.
Then the hallway opens.
That hallway.
Yellow lights.
Blood-smears in the tile grooves.
A fox-shifter pacing.
And a door.
That door.
Maomao’s breath catches. The moment is brief. Barely a blink. But Gaoshun hears it.
She moves.
She’s there in seconds. Fingers on the handle. Power cracking in her teeth.
Chapter 40
Notes:
(See the end of the chapter for notes.)
Chapter Text
The door groans as it opens.
What lies beyond is no hallway. No velvet-cushioned corridor. No whisper of incense or gold-trimmed sin.
It’s a warehouse.
A warren of pain and iron.
The air inside is wet with rot—like something left too long in heat. It smells of ammonium, bleach, old sickness. Something worse underneath. Blood, mostly. And fear. Tangy and raw, so thick even Gaoshun flinches when he steps in behind her.
The light is sickly. Pale yellow, guttering in dirty fixtures. Not quite bright enough to show everything, just enough to make you see enough.
Crates line the far wall. Not shipping crates. Cages.
Open-barred and bolted to the floor, like makeshift kennels in a slaughterhouse.
There are bodies in some of them. Small ones.
Shifter kits.
Some lie too still. Others blink slowly, eyes glazed, unseeing. A boy curls into himself in one crate. In another, a child with long ears whimpers, then goes still as soon as the footsteps echo closer.
They’ve been branded. Some are tagged. Some collared.
Some, not even that. Just... chained.
Maomao sways where she stands.
The bile rising in her throat is hot and coppery.
Her breath shakes.
And then she whistles.
Long-short-short-long.
A rhythm. A call.
A question she’s too afraid to hope has an answer.
Silence.
She whistles again. Quieter this time. Her mouth is dry. The sound cracks halfway through.
She moves past the cages. Boots scuffing. Her hands tremble where they brush the bars.
Another cage.
Another.
Then—
An answer.
Faint. Wobbly.
Long-long. Short-long. Long-long-long.
A repeat rhythm. Wrong, a little off-key, like it’s being remembered and recited by someone too scared to get it quite right. But it’s the right song.
Maomao freezes.
Then she runs.
She doesn’t remember crossing the room. Only that the cages blur past and the air feels thinner and her ribs are about to snap with how hard her heart is punching against them.
She nearly trips.
And then—
There.
Crouched in the farthest cage, hands trembling over the bars, eyes wide and glassy.
Hair tangled. Cheeks hollow. Wrist burned.
“Yinghua,” Gaoshun breathes at her side.
The girl blinks up at them. Tears start to roll as her eyes catch on Maomao.
“She taught me,” Yinghua whispers, fiddles with a slender, pale-yellow ribbon on her finger, voice barely more than a rasp. “She said someone might come.”
The rest of the world fades.
For a moment, Maomao sways.
Her knees give out so suddenly Gaoshun catches her elbow before she can hit the floor.
But she doesn’t fall fully.
She snarls.
Stands.
And whirls.
The first Court Agent who storms the backroom reaches toward her—uniform crisp, words prepped.
Maomao nearly decapitates him.
A blast of static arcs through the air as her hand flares, and only Gaoshun’s barked “Maomao!” stops her from ripping the man in half.
She’s burning.
Eyes wild. Crackling.
Her voice rips from her throat. “She taught you?” Her gaze doesn’t leave Yinghua. Her hands tremble with rage. “She told you someone would come?”
Yinghua nods. Tearful. Shaking.
“Said you’d be angry,” she murmurs. “Said you’d be mad, but you’d come anyway.”
Maomao turns to the wall beside her and punches it. No thought. Only danger. Lightning cracks the concrete. Ozone rattles in Gaoshun's chest. Skin splits across her knuckles.
She breathes like a caged thing.
Her shoulders shake. Her jaw grinds.
The Court arrives too fast.
Not backup.
A full tactical team.
Too clean. Too timed not to have been informed.
Fuck.
Jinshi’s signature is obvious in the sweep. Gaoshun sees it in the formation. In the way the collars are already waiting.
Maomao, still on her knees in front of Yinghua’s cage, snarls. A guard reaches for her. She nearly slices his arm open before Gaoshun stops her again.
“It’s done,” he growls. “Maomao—stop.”
She doesn’t listen. Not right away. Not until Gaoshun steps in front of her. Hands raised. Protecting her from herself.
She breathes like she might explode.
Yinghua is crying.
The collar clicks. Cold iron. No magic.
The cuffs slam shut.
Gaoshun flinches when he hears it.
Outisde, Jinshi’s voice rings like silk over glass.
“Well done,” he says, loud enough for the team to hear. “You brought us the Feral.”
Maomao’s eyes blaze.
Gaoshun doesn’t look away.
He doesn’t smile.
He just watches as Maomao, barefoot, still in corset and bloodied thigh-highs, is walked to the transporter like a bomb too close to going off.
Notes:
I'm gonna run in zig-zags so none of you can hit me? :|
Chapter 41
Notes:
aaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhh !!!!
Chapter Text
The room is too clean.
The light doesn’t just illuminate; it interrogates. It sharpens the edges of her cheekbones, pools coldly in her clavicle. The floor doesn’t scuff. The silence doesn’t echo. The entire room is designed to remind her she doesn’t belong.
Neutral light. Bright in a way that shows all your sins. No windows. One table. Two chairs. The walls hum softly with enchantments—nothing flashy, but enough to keep a Witch’s magic banked and bleeding slow.
The collar around her throat is still warm from activation. Her cuffs bite when she moves too abruptly.
She doesn’t twitch.
She doesn’t speak.
She watches.
The door opens.
The man that steps in looks familiar in the way all the slick business-types do when they have their finger in too many pots to count.
All polish and precision: sleek blazer folded over his arm, sleeves perfectly cuffed, shoes that don’t scuff no matter how many corpses he’s stepped over to get here.
He doesn’t sit immediately.
Just studies her.
Maomao doesn’t offer a greeting.
She lifts her eyes. Calm. Flat. Studies him back.
His hair is long, even tied back into the low pony-tail he wears. It shines oddly violet in the strong over-head light. The skin of his face is so smooth it could probably serve as a mirror if it were wet. He is tall, roughly around Gaoshun’s height, but slender, where the wolf tends to broadness. Sleek like something reptilian. Hands soft around the folder he deposits gently on the corner of the table. There’s probably not even a scar from a papercut on those fingers.
It's strange, she thinks, that the first employee of The Court that she’d actually met would have been Gaoshun, who, truly, seems so unlike the quintessential Court Drone sitting opposite her right now.
Finally, he speaks.
“Lady Maomao” the man greets, not unkindly, “You’ve made quite the entrance.”
Maomao stretches out her legs beneath the table, steel cuffs clinking against the metal lip. “I’m not a Lady,” she replies. “But I’m told the drama runs in the blood.”
“Must be an interesting lineage,” he hums. “Would you mind telling me more?”
He sits. Elegant and smooth. A motion that seems trained and rehearsed.
“I would, in fact,” Maomao drawls. “I’ve heard it’s polite to give a name in return for greetings.”
Her smile turns sharp. “Unless, of course, you’re the Unseelie Kind, in which case, I’m more fucked than I thought.”
The man’s smile is paper-thin. “You may call me Jinshi,” he offers. “And though I haven’t heard of the Unseelie Kind in a while… I am here to offer you… terms.”
“A deal,” Maomao muses, voice still dry. “Interesting.”
“We find incentives work better with people like you.” He places a small tablet between them. Doesn’t turn it on. “You cracked a human trafficking ring The Court has been chasing for three years.”
“I cracked a door.” Her voice sharpens. “And I found children.”
“Yes,” Jinshi says softly. “That too.”
She says nothing. The air crackles faintly around her—residual magic, nothing active. But Jinshi notices it. She sees the flick of his eyes toward her cuffs.
“You’re a trueborn Witch,” he says at last. “One of the last.”
He waits for her to rise to the bait.
She shrugs. “I’m a person.”
“You could help people,” he continues, voice even. “You could work with us. Under proper guidance. With protection. We’ve seen what you’re capable of.”
A beat.
A long one.
“I’ve had collars offered with softer words before,” she murmurs. “Still a collar.”
She thinks of Gaoshun’s Ex-Wife. The woman he must have loved. Maybe still loves. The woman he’s called a Court Leash.
“I’ve seen what your kind think help looks like,” her voice is still calm, but it cuts sharper now. “I’ve seen what happens to people who take your collars willingly. They rot in paperwork. Or vanish. Or get posted to the front lines with a smile and a name that isn’t theirs.”
“We don’t do that anymore.”
“Yes,” Maomao snaps, “you do. You just got better at hiding it.”
She leans forward. Her hands rest on the table—knuckles bruised, dried blood on her wrist where the cuff scraped raw.
“I’d rather help where it’s actually needed,” she says. “The ones you locked away. The ones you weren’t prepared for in the first place. The ones who slipped through and lived anyway. Those are my people.”
“You’re angry,” Jinshi says agreeably. “I understand.”
“No,” her voice is quiet now. Dead calm. “You don’t.”
Another silence. Tighter this time. Ticking.
“You should know,” he says as he stands, voice returned to smooth ice, “that there’s no reason for us to hasten this. We have time. We have rooms. And you have… nowhere to go.”
He moves to the door. Pauses.
Looks back over his shoulder.
“If you change your mind,” he offers, and taps a spot under his ear, “the collar has a bell.”
Fuck you, she wants to spit. But the words don’t fit right anymore. They’re not for him anyways.
“Tell The Court,” Maomao replies, smiling her teeth at him, “to go fuck itself.”
He leaves.
The door hisses shut.
The lights dim by one degree.
And Maomao, breathing carefully now, closes her eyes just long enough to remember the whistle. The rhythm. The way Yinghua had said, She told me someone might come.
Maomao feels the smallest thing crack inside her ribcage. Not break. Not yet. But something shifts. Something bruises.
Because Xiaolan is still out there.
Alive enough to teach.
Alive enough to plan.
And that?
That means Maomao isn’t done.
Not even close.
Chapter Text
She is transferred, collar and shackles and coarse cotton jumpsuit, into a nondescript cubicle with a stone-bench. No obvious amenities and given that she doesn’t, in fact, have a lot of experience in these situations, she assumes that this might be an equivalent to a holding cell.
One wall is missing, replaced by thick, iron bars that make the situation uncomfortably real.
The lights in the adjacent hallway never fully go out. But they dim, just enough to trick the body into thinking night might come.
Just enough to make hope hum low and thin in the bones.
Maomao doesn’t sleep.
She sits cross-legged on the cold floor, bruised knuckles resting on her thighs. The collar hums faintly against her throat. Its magic is dulled now, but the pressure hasn’t faded.
She hasn’t touched the food tray left at the door.
The eggs are gray. The bread is damp. The water smells like iron.
Her body aches, but her mind?
Awake.
Sharp.
Still calculating.
She closes her eyes. Counts backward through the rhythm. The whistle.
Long-long. Short-long. Long-long-long.
Her breath slips out quiet through her teeth. Not a whistle. Just the ghost of one.
She taught me—Yinghua had said. Maomao presses her head back against the wall and exhales like it hurts to breathe.
Then—
A scrape.
A shift.
Movement.
She doesn’t rise. Doesn’t twitch.
She just slides her eyes open.
And there he is.
Gold-eyed.
Silent.
A wolf half-drenched in shadow.
He doesn’t speak at first. Just stands there. Watching her through the bars like he’s memorizing her shape. Like if he looks hard enough, he’ll know she’s still whole.
She lifts her chin. Barely. Enough to show she sees him. Enough to remind him she’s not broken.
Not yet.
Finally, his voice — low, gruff, almost tender through the steel. “Eat up, little Viper,” he says. “You’re going to need that bite.”
Her throat tightens.
“Thought you’re being celebrated for bringing in a Feral,” she murmurs.
He tilts his head, and something wolfish flashes in his face. Not anger. Not pity. Something older. Something pack-shaped.
He hums, almost smiling. “Never did get used to loud people.”
She doesn’t smile back.
His voice is a quiet, terrible hush when he asks. “Who bit first?”
Maomao remembers the taste of his detergent in her mouth. The smell of terrible alcohol, sugary drinks and cold cigarette smoke that had seeped into the cheap leather of a bar she doesn’t even know the name of anymore.
She remembers the terrible, gentle, swipe of his gloved finger under her cloth.
She shifts. Leans forward. Picks up the tray.
Stares at the metal edge of the spoon like it might still be a weapon.
And then—
She bites into the bread.
Hard.
The click of something round and metallic rings out in her skull like a bell. She chews just enough to grimace around what tastes like mildew and regret, but she swallows the lump around the metal.
Swallows again as she makes out the shape.
She wipes the crumbs off her face with stilted, shackles hands. Metal clicks against metal. Hollow and deliberate.
“Good girl,” Gaoshun says, voice so quiet she almost doesn’t catch it.
Then he turns.
And disappears down the hallway.
But the mark he leaves behind burns hotter than any collar.
Maomao bares her teeth at the bars and rolls her tongue against the round weight of the key in her mouth.
Witches survive.
Wolves… hunt in pairs.
Notes:
You Guys!
It's been a ride!
It's the first time I've written anything noir and I had never been content with it, but I do feel like this is well enough done and I'm happy with it. Thank you all for your comments, for your kudos, for your bookmarks, for your encouragement and your input. I sincerely love where we're going with this pairing.
Now like I said I'm not going to be around much for July, but I've already prepared a few GaoMao pieces for AU-gust and will read you then and I hope you're all having a good July and please take care of yourselves in whatever fashion is most important to your current situation.
Very much looking forward to writing more for the pairing, and THANK YOU again for reading!!!
Pages Navigation
GhostInTheGutter on Chapter 1 Mon 26 May 2025 03:59PM UTC
Comment Actions
whitetiger1249 on Chapter 9 Sun 11 May 2025 04:12PM UTC
Comment Actions
Out_Of_Custody on Chapter 9 Mon 12 May 2025 04:24PM UTC
Last Edited Mon 12 May 2025 04:25PM UTC
Comment Actions
whitetiger1249 on Chapter 13 Fri 16 May 2025 03:41AM UTC
Comment Actions
Out_Of_Custody on Chapter 13 Mon 19 May 2025 02:53PM UTC
Comment Actions
whitetiger1249 on Chapter 16 Thu 22 May 2025 10:44AM UTC
Comment Actions
Out_Of_Custody on Chapter 16 Sun 25 May 2025 04:30PM UTC
Comment Actions
aldergroves on Chapter 16 Sat 24 May 2025 06:13PM UTC
Comment Actions
Out_Of_Custody on Chapter 16 Sun 25 May 2025 04:30PM UTC
Comment Actions
whitetiger1249 on Chapter 18 Mon 26 May 2025 11:21AM UTC
Comment Actions
Gravityxx on Chapter 18 Mon 26 May 2025 08:35PM UTC
Comment Actions
Out_Of_Custody on Chapter 18 Mon 02 Jun 2025 10:12AM UTC
Comment Actions
whitetiger1249 on Chapter 19 Sat 31 May 2025 03:00PM UTC
Comment Actions
Out_Of_Custody on Chapter 19 Mon 02 Jun 2025 10:09AM UTC
Comment Actions
whitetiger1249 on Chapter 21 Thu 05 Jun 2025 02:44AM UTC
Comment Actions
Out_Of_Custody on Chapter 21 Thu 05 Jun 2025 07:36AM UTC
Comment Actions
Ruby41 on Chapter 22 Mon 09 Jun 2025 06:48PM UTC
Comment Actions
Ruby41 on Chapter 23 Mon 16 Jun 2025 02:56PM UTC
Comment Actions
Ruby41 on Chapter 25 Sun 22 Jun 2025 02:24PM UTC
Comment Actions
whitetiger1249 on Chapter 25 Sun 22 Jun 2025 02:35PM UTC
Comment Actions
LikeStartledBirds on Chapter 25 Sun 22 Jun 2025 06:46PM UTC
Comment Actions
Ruby41 on Chapter 26 Thu 26 Jun 2025 10:09PM UTC
Comment Actions
LikeStartledBirds on Chapter 26 Fri 27 Jun 2025 12:04AM UTC
Comment Actions
Out_Of_Custody on Chapter 26 Fri 27 Jun 2025 02:23PM UTC
Comment Actions
Ruby41 on Chapter 28 Sun 29 Jun 2025 04:51AM UTC
Comment Actions
Out_Of_Custody on Chapter 28 Mon 30 Jun 2025 09:17AM UTC
Comment Actions
LikeStartledBirds on Chapter 30 Mon 30 Jun 2025 12:06PM UTC
Comment Actions
Gravityxx on Chapter 30 Mon 30 Jun 2025 03:16PM UTC
Comment Actions
Ruby41 on Chapter 30 Mon 30 Jun 2025 04:39PM UTC
Comment Actions
Out_Of_Custody on Chapter 30 Tue 01 Jul 2025 04:17AM UTC
Comment Actions
Ruby41 on Chapter 30 Tue 01 Jul 2025 03:43PM UTC
Comment Actions
Pages Navigation