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dvd commentary: pantingbed, pt. 2 of 2
It continues, “it” being the DVD commentary to panting like a dog at the edge of your bed, my TGCF fic about He Xuan, sexual trauma, and gender as a (ghost) ship of Theseus. The first half is here.
Since I posted the last half of this commentary, I’ve published Burial at Sea: Trans Gothic and Tian Guan Ci Fu, a zine that emerged during the writing process of this fic and is an effort to articulate via lit crit the same themes this fic explores.
As with the first half, I’ve just posted the entire text of the fic in here and done my in-line commentary in bold. I have more to say about some parts than others, so just skim through for the juicy bits. If you want to read the story properly, go to the AO3 version!
Also, mood music, if it suits you?
chapter six
I. THE GREAT MARTIAL AVENUE
This chapter was tough. I wanted something like Chapter 1 in structure, but instead of doing a greatest hits run of events that were recapped in the novel secondhand, it’s a retelling of canon chapters from a different POV. I didn’t know how much setup to give or how long to dwell on any specific tableaus… I hoped (maybe overly optimistically) that people would remember the specific scenes I was retelling and be able to just kind of roll with it, but TGCF is long and sometimes confusing, especially since we didn’t really understand what was happening in a lot of these scenes until the reveal, so… I tried to make up the difference with these “setting headings”, but IDK how well it worked. They were also an attempt to evoke stageplay scripts, since this chapter leans theatrical.
He Xuan is not there in person when it happens; his body is some far way below the ocean’s surface, occupied with watery tasks that are immediately rendered unimportant.
Hard to get through a chapter (or a fic) like this without some levity.
He is still present from the first, however; his shell in the Palace of Ling Wen is triaging requests for his patron’s attention when lightning flashes outside the windows, thunder cracks, and Ling Wen lifts her gaze from her overflowing desk. She cocks her head, mutters, “What now,” and turns for the door.
His shell exchanges a glance with the other deputy officials in the room—He Xuan’s consciousness seeping more intentionally into this body—and they follow her abrupt departure into the sunlight.
In this way, He Xuan thinks that the reappearance of His Highness the Crown Prince of Xianle bears the signs that one might expect to herald a god of misfortune (though He Xuan has been sharply cautioned by Hua Cheng not to refer to Xie Lian as such.)
He sighs to himself, and relays the news to the man in question. No point in delaying the inevitable.
Hua Cheng responds immediately. « Can you see him now? »
Yes.
His next response is slower, like it takes him a moment to find the words. When he replies, his tone is hushed. « How does he look? »
He Xuan is wary, speaking on this subject, so he keeps things plain and factual: Surprised.
II. PARADISE MANOR
Ming Yi’s body looks rather frail in death. When He Xuan reaches Paradise Manor on Hua Cheng’s summons, he finds it crumpled in on itself on the floor.
He crouches to inspect the corpse. There’s no clear evidence of cause of death—no stab wounds, no signs of blunt force. The look on Ming Yi’s face is twisted up in pain or surprise, but He Xuan glances at it only briefly.
He Xuan gets to his feet, and strides toward the only living person in the room. “I don’t understand how this could be so difficult for you to explain.”
Behind the pained smile of his demon mask, Yin Yu inclines his head in the barest show of deference. He has has been more or less useless since He Xuan arrived.
Yin Yu continues to be a load-bearing structure of He Xuan’s psychology. “I may be totally miserable, but I could be even MORE of a pathetic failure reliant on Hua Cheng!”
“He was exactly as my lord finds him. I’ve found nothing else suspicious.”
He Xuan scoffs. This is the level of competence for which he’s continued to accrue interest on his never-ending debt?
The matter of how Ming Yi escaped his cell is, though infuriating, inconsequential in the face of everything else. The flare he shot into the sky—an act of desperation?—is immediately pressing, as now Heaven is involved. Yet what He Xuan wants to know most is whether Earth Master Yi thought that he was going to survive it.
Without that knowledge, he is at a loss. Though there is perhaps no material difference to the actions He Xuan must take in response, he wants to know: did Ming Yi believe there was a possibility of genuine rescue, or had he merely wished to—what, draw attention to himself before he went? For what purpose? A misguided attempt at justice, or to ensure something of himself would be remembered?
This art informed my understanding of the relationship between Ming Yi and He Xuan in this fic quite a lot, even though it’s only present in brief flashes. Ming Yi is the proverbial skeleton in the closet even before he dies. He’s the one willing to name He Xuan’s hypocrisy and cruelty, and He Xuan treats him very callously while also respecting him and regretting that he has to (“has to”) do this at all.
He Xuan has now supplanted Ming Yi in earnest. Everyone else he’s replaced has been a monster or dead thing, and these, he’s eaten; they go on, in some way, within him. Ming Yi was alive, and now he is so much meat on the floor of a dungeon in the underworld—and even now, part of He Xuan’s mind considers logistics; there’s no point in keeping the remains here, and he ought to build a proper shrine to quiet the man’s spirit, but he doesn’t want a fresh corpse stinking up his own place—not to mention the mess—ah, but the arowanas might be of use—
A familiar unwelcome drawl comes down from the far end of the hall: “Black Water, you silly goose. This was a placeholder phrase I was going to replace with something else, but everyone who read this draft for me was like, “No, you need to keep it.” Talking to my servant like you aren’t just mooching off his good graces.”
He Xuan whirls to face Hua Cheng. “Care to speak to this lapse in your security? I may as well have just kept him on the island.”
When he first took Ming Yi’s life, He Xuan’s manor was only partially built, and he lacked the facilities to keep him. Later, he could have moved him to his own lair, but He Xuan preferred to keep some degree of separation between the two of them.
“I’m looking into it.” Hua Cheng nods perfunctorily to Yin Yu. “Leave us. We’ll inspect when I’m done here.”
“Chengzhu.” Yin Yu salutes in his blandly dutiful way, and leaves the two of them alone.
Hua Cheng smiles. “Your pet god chose the worse time in the world to make his lucky break. Of all the times for your messes to become my problem, it’s happening now?”
“I thought this place was impregnable.”
“Something’s off, I’ll give you that much, but I don’t have time for a real investigation right now, and neither do you.”
“They’ll find nothing. I have a plan for the remains. And the heavens have no jurisdiction here, no matter what they suspect. Jun Wu will send someone, but they can’t move openly.” There will be covert investigation of some sort, no doubt. Even now, Jun Wu has called all Upper Court officials to report back to the Heavens. The only gods exempt are those who rarely set foot there or have some other alibi, such as the Earth Master. He Xuan is surprised that Jun Wu has yet to contact him directly, but he suspects it won’t be long.
“No, they won’t find him.” Hua Cheng has a nasty glint in his eye. “They’ll find you.”
He Xuan narrows his eyes, but he understands at once. It’s the most logical course of action, an explanation as perfect as if Jun Wu arranged things this way from the start. As such, He Xuan can hardly protest; he is nothing if not pragmatic. But he dislikes the obvious enjoyment the thought gives Hua Cheng, and he is quite certain that at least some of what they’re about to stage will be less than comfortable for him.
It's stated that Jun Wu knew He Xuan’s Deal and liked having that in his back pocket to use against Shi Wudu if necessary, but the hows and wherefores are not clear to me…
“How is His Highness?”
“Weren’t you just with him?” He Xuan is taken aback by the sharpness of his own tone.
“So? I’m not now, am I? Isn’t it your job to be my eyes and ears in the Heavens?”
So they’re back in the territory of deals and obligations. When speaking to each other, they share whatever kind of relationship suits Hua Cheng in the moment. Not friends, of course, but is He Xuan supposed to believe Hua Cheng carries on with Yin Yu behind closed doors the way he’s entertained He Xuan over the years?
If nothing else, the two of them are compatriots in a trial that no other creature, alive or dead, has emerged from intact. It sets them apart from the world, together yet alone—but the balance has tipped, He Xuan realizes; there now exists another circle, one which He Xuan can scarcely look within, let alone enter. Not that he’d want to.
lol
Several doors have shut between them, some of which He Xuan should have closed years ago; not only between Hua Cheng and himself, but in all areas of his existence—
III. PUQI SHRINE
—but what is one more time, after so many in the past? The transition between these sections is definitely not as clean and sensical as I’d hoped, but hopefully it’s semi-comprehensible… writing HX POV is hard sometimes, okay… He Xuan ought to indulge herself, when she stands on the cusp of vindication—or would that be indulging Shi Qingxuan, at a time when it has never been more pressing to keep her appeased? They walk together through Puqi Village: He Xuan lost in consideration of things to come, and Shi Qingxuan, He Xuan’s little suckling pig, trotting at her heels. Their hands brush twice.
I have He Xuan refer to Shi Qingxuan as a pig (hornily) constantly. It just feels right.
An indescribable shivering giddiness fills her, making it difficult to think. So it’s really begun, He Xuan wonders, as though it’s a new realization. Nothing that’s happened since she called forth the shade of that deplorable creature—Wretched beginning, wretched end!—has felt real; nothing has been more real since He Xuan died. It approaches, the time to enjoy the fruits of her labours, the gratification long delayed. They descended together, He Xuan conceding to wear the Lady Earth Master’s guise for what she suspects will be the last time.
PUT MY LITTLE RED PARTY DRESS ON…
It makes me feel crazy that both halves of Beefleaf are in female form at the start of this scene in canon. “One for the road”??????? He Xuan is such a dyke.
Feng Shi Niang Niang is a nickname given to SQX specifically, but I have HX using Lady Earth Master here (ironically & within her own brain) as a way of drawing subtle kinship/comparison between the two of them even at a time where she’s supposedly distancing herself from SQX. (This impulse is what drives me mad about the form changing here, anyway… sure, she could just be giving SQX what she wants, but why even bother at this point? They’ve surely maxed out the S-Link by now. Why let yourself be seen in public demonstrating this particular type of companionship/mirror-imaging if there was no personal stake in it for its own sake? If it’s intended as some kind of oblique fuck-you to Shi Qingxuan, it makes no damn sense. Unless.)
One could be forgiven for mistaking Shi Qingxuan as relaxed. Even in the weak autumn sun, her habitual radiance shines through, but her eyes flit wildly toward any sudden movement. Shi Qingxuan has spent a lifetime hiding, and has now been found. That creature’s voice itches to emerge from the pit of her again; it provokes a convulsive reflex of some kind in He Xuan’s chest, akin to a suppressed laugh, but not quite.
He Xuan had tried to talk Shi Qingxuan out of this visit on the way down, but Shi Qingxuan was insistent on wanting the Crown Prince’s advice, and none other. Crimson Rain might be away, He Xuan reasons. He’s a busy man, and surely he has a little shame.
No <3
They push through the door of Puqi Shrine. Xie Lian is immediately on his feet, his gentle face creased with surprise and a touch of dismay. Xie Lian’s role in this fic cracks me up. Over his shoulder, Hua Cheng is washing dishes. He Xuan feels momentarily blind with rage for reasons she does not quite understand.
Something that surprised me during the writing process was the degree to which He Xuan is jealous of Xie Lian without being in any way willing to cop to that. It adds layers of tragedy to this whole situation, in the sense that not only is she immolating every emotionally meaningful relationship in her life, but has to witness the degree to which Xie Lian truly is Hua Cheng’s priority. He Xuan always knew that, but I imagine it'd be hard to internalize if Xie Lian was nothing but an abstract concept for hundreds of years until suddenly materializing as A Guy.
But they have a performance to act out. He Xuan backs up against the wall, as Ming Yi might when encountering a dread entity who recently beat her and tossed her in a cell. She exaggerates for the sake of their audience, but at the lack of any but the most insincere of mirth on Hua Cheng’s face, her abdomen tightens with genuine unease.
The rest of this scene includes some of the earliest-written stuff in the fic, giving you a sense of what my initial concept of the HX-HC relationship was like:
Shi Qingxuan springs between the two of them, fan in hand. “Crimson Rain Sought Flower!”
She’s trying to protect me, He Xuan realizes. How absurd.
Hua Cheng ignores Shi Qingxuan entirely, and gives He Xuan’s current body a pointed survey, head to toe to tits. “Lord Earth Master looks lively.”
Bastard.
“And Lord Ghost King looks leisurely as always.”
Over the private communication array, Hua Cheng’s voice is just as falsely merry as it is out loud. « Did you get bored of playing sick? Decided you hadn’t had enough of inconveniencing us? »
An “us,” now?
This isn’t about either of you, and you know it.
Hua Cheng’s tone sharpens. “Leave. I don’t care what important business you have. Do not come anywhere near here again.”
« One thing. One thing I’ve ever asked of you. And I’ve cut you a hell of a lot of slack. »
It takes her by surprise how insulted she feels. As if he matters to He Xuan enough for her to involve him by design, in this, the matter for which she’s spent the last few miserable centuries in wait.
She has no doubt as to where his loyalties lie. But it galls her, to face this kind of immediate ill will for the sake of a man who had been an ideal to Hua Cheng for eight hundred years, and nothing more or less.
I’m scared this makes me seem like a Hualian hater, which couldn’t be further from the truth!
She lets some of her frustration leak into her voice, for the sake of the witnesses to this farce, and hopes it reads as desperation. “Coming here was not my will.”
Hua Cheng’s face betrays no genuine emotion at all besides a veneer of false fury. He has looked at He Xuan many ways over the centuries, but never like this.
Shi Qingxuan watches He Xuan anxiously, looking for Ming Yi to cue her to action. Xie Lian surveys the scene before him with polite curiosity, and not even a token effort to restrain the ghost king he’s entertaining in his shrine from threatening a heavenly official (as far as he’s aware.) She’s momentarily struck with genuine fear: does he know? Has Crimson Rain, for all his talk of deals and obligations, broken their terms? She doesn’t think so; if it were the case, they would have bypassed civility and testy displays. But the question lingers, and she realizes that she doesn’t know for how much longer she can trust him to keep his word.
Am I her handler? AM I SHI QINGXUAN’S KEEPER???? How do you think this works, exactly?
His voice, in her mind, is condescending and fatigued.
« Do you have the situation under control or not? »
Almost overlapping comes another voice: « Are you okay, Ming-xiong? I don’t want to fight Crimson Rain again in His Highness’ shrine, but I will! »
Angel. Sweetheart.
He Xuan grinds her teeth—at the name, and the whole mess of an encounter. This is not a significant setback, yet, no matter how disconcerted she feels—it’s just absurd, utterly absurd, to speak with both of these people at once, each thinking they understand her: one who knows nearly everything, and one who knows nothing at all.
IV. THE TERRACE OF CASCADING WINE
Shi Qingxuan is exactly as easy to manipulate as his naivete would suggest. Hua Cheng, for his part, has committed to his role as the thorn in He Xuan’s side.
In canon, this is all a side adventure for Xie Lian, which can make for a frustrating reading experience when he gets distracted canoodling with Hua Cheng while Shi Qingxuan is going through the wringer. This made the retelling-canon-events-from-HX’s-POV thing fun to write, because He Xuan is experiencing it as the climax of the mythic arc of his life, so the whole tone and approach is very different from how we experienced it in the novel.
He Xuan tips his head against the outer wall of the abandoned building that Hua Cheng has chosen as the backdrop for their illicit rendezvous. Sexually charged word choice intentional, of course. HX is sooooo not over this the way he thinks he is. The area is suffuse with eerie calm. Hua Cheng’s fist, clenched in the front of He Xuan’s robe, is nowhere near tight enough to pin him, though of course Hua Cheng would be more than capable of it, should things come to that. (He Xuan notices, hatefully, that this weak living form’s heartbeat quickens from the proximity and expectation, like a stupid animal performing a trick.) But they are not there yet. They are not playacting violence, as they have in the past. They have never drawn closer to crossing that line in earnest than they are at present.
“My tolerance for your incompetent antics is reaching its limit,” Hua Cheng begins, conversationally.
I’m never not thinking about the bit during the “rescue” of “Ming Yi” where Hua Cheng says this:
“Earth Master? What Earth Master?” After a pause, he continued, “Oh, did you mean the one the Wind Master is carrying? He’s nothing more than an inept subordinate of mine.”
Particularly as, later, he has the following exchange with Xie Lian:
Hua Cheng replied, “That’s why he impersonated the real Earth Master and infiltrated the heavens to investigate. Pretty brave, if I must say so myself.”
“If not for killing the real Earth Master afterwards and dragging in over two hundred fishermen, then he really can be called courageous and clever.”
However, Hua Cheng said, “Gege, I don’t know if the real Earth Master was killed by him. But, I’m afraid the one who dragged those fishermen into the stormy East Sea is someone else.”
My takeaway = Hua Cheng considers He Xuan courageous and clever and also knows that the best way to aggravate him is to insult his competence, lol.
“I’m trying to divert him, but he’s… obstinate,” He Xuan grits through his teeth.
“Yes,” Hua Cheng replies, with a look of rueful fondness. “Very. Try harder.”
Despite Xie Lian’s return to the heavens (and He Xuan being brought into closer acquaintance with him than he would have ever desired), he’s come no closer to understanding what it is that Xie Lian has done to earn Hua Cheng’s devotion. He’s not sure there’s an answer. At a certain level of fervour, all devotion becomes self-delusion.
Unlike vendettas, of course.
“I have my own concerns. He’s a god, isn’t he? If you don’t trust him to stay out of harm’s way, stow him somewhere until this is through. It won’t be long.”
“I would never keep him somewhere against his will.” Hua Cheng sounds truly disgusted. “I’m not you.”
Hua Cheng likes and admires He Xuan far more than he lets on, but doesn’t entirely trust him. Prepared to throw him under the bus if he must, but would really, really prefer not to. That said, the only people I think Hua Cheng trusts more are Xie Lian and, to a more mundane degree, Yin Yu. But he’s under no illusions about He Xuan being a better person than he really is, or being willing to prioritize anything over his Terrible Purpose.
He Xuan’s lip curls. He shoves Hua Cheng’s hand off of his chest and makes to turn away, only to be stopped by Hua Cheng planting a hand on the wall by He Xuan’s shoulder. Not touching him, but nearly.
HUAXUAN KABEDON LET’S FUCKING GO
“Do you think I wouldn’t tell His Highness the truth about you? Because I would. If you’re no longer holding to your end of the bargain, I don’t see why I should do my part.”
“Yes, what about the truth? Does he know about you?”
“What are you on about now?” Hua Cheng’s blithe tone would be convincing to anyone else, perhaps.
He Xuan gives him a rictus smile. “Does he really know you haunt the earth for him? Or should I just tell him about the statues?” They’ve been coming back to him as of late: patchy, lurid memories nearly occluded by the force of fire. “They don’t leave much to the imagination—”
“If you keep this up,” Hua Cheng replies peaceably, “I’m going to find your ashes and feed them to you, and I don’t make idle threats.”
I think this is really hot <3
“This is the only reason I exist.” The sense of drunken lightness that had borne He Xuan aloft a mere day ago has left him. His insides have gone cold and leaden. “If you’re going to renege now, you should have struck me down before I came out of the Kiln, and saved us both the trouble.”
…and I think this is really sad 💔
“Sometimes I really wonder why I didn’t,” Hua Cheng replies, but he steps back, dropping his hand from the wall. Some levity has returned to his manner, but He Xuan is still unaccountably raw. He must regain control of himself, and quickly, before he returns to being both director and performer in a production staged for Shi Qingxuan’s sake alone.
It was a matter of days prior that Hua Cheng took indulgent relish in beating He Xuan with the aim of producing dramatic bruising. He Xuan took it without much complaint, not wanting to give Hua Cheng undue satisfaction, but one way or another they will likely never touch each other as much as that again, whatever the context. He Xuan is obviously mad they didn’t have hateful sex at the time. He Xuan may dissipate within the fortnight, if all goes well, and Hua Cheng has a beloved for whom to save himself—and He Xuan draws maudlin mirth from the thought that for so many years, Hua Cheng doggedly protected his own virtue, such as it is—
In a poisonous undertone, He Xuan says, “Are you ever going to tell him what it is you really want? Does he even go for that? Or was your training dummy I feel like that phrasing is a reference to/borrowing from another fic of someone else’s fic, but I can’t recall what… let me know in the comments if it rings bells! not enough to prepare you for the real thing? I really would pity you if you suffered through putting your tongue in lesser holes for nothing.”
Hua Cheng blinks, but looks less immediately angry than He Xuan had hoped. “It’s like you want me to undermine you out of spite.” He leans in closer, and tilts his head in a way that He Xuan dislikes. “That reminds me, though. Did you ever make it with Little Shi? I had to try not to laugh when I saw you two at Banyue looking like that. Everything suddenly made so much sense.”
When I was hashing out this conversation in people’s DMs, Hua Cheng’s dialogue came out verbatim to how it appears in the fic, while He Xuan’s had to be punched up to sound more in-character and appropriate for the setting. Hua Cheng kind of just… talks like that. He has a certain Deadpool quality.
A muscle jumps in He Xuan’s jaw, and Hua Cheng’s grin widens.
“Too late for that now, I guess. If you’d wanted me to take on a specific form, you could have just asked. I take requests—”
Hua Cheng up to his old tricks of downplaying his own involvement in favour of pretending he’s just been elaborately trolling He Xuan via sex.
He Xuan hisses, “You are insufferable and tasteless, and I have always loathed you. Dissipation is a fair price for no longer being obliged to associate with you.”
”Insufferable and tasteless” are hardly top-shelf insults, but Hua Cheng’s reputation as a twisted fucking cycle path is such that he could not care less about being accused of any of really bad shit (much of which is overblown anyway.) He Xuan has enough insight to know that Hua Cheng puts a lot of effort into appearances and maintaining his over-the-top flashy-and-trashy-yet-genteel persona. It makes sense to me that in a situation where He Xuan is genuinely really angry with Hua Cheng, he’d fall back on the idea that his formal education gives him access to cultural and intellectual superiority.
Also, this is how I wanted Hua Cheng’s dialogue to feel throughout this story, but especially here:
Hua Cheng murmurs, “You owe me too much money to pass on. I’ll keep you in this world by the scruff of your neck.”
Saying something incredibly moving and romantic without copping to have any feelings…
Before He Xuan can think of a response, Hua Cheng turns away, wandering back into the quaint, scholarly townscape in which he is so out of place, no matter the form. No matter where he goes, he is too striking to be real.
He Xuan has complex feelings about having been “lowkey” by necessity for all these years, and, by extension, suppressing his desire for sincere self-expression, joy, etc, in comparison to HC, who is always his glorious tacky self in full colour.
V. THE PALACE OF WIND AND WATER
This (canon) scene is a lynchpin of my readings of Beefleaf/the Shi situation, and it’s pure distilled gothic horror to me. I spend about half of my zine picking it apart, so you should read that.
The Palace of Wind and Water is, undoubtedly, one of the most luxuriant places in Heaven and Earth. He Xuan has entered the palace countless times—enough to replicate the floor plan for his own manor—and has been inside Shi Qingxuan’s personal quarters on a number of occasions. Previously, however, he’s used the door.
One could hardly ask for a more pleasant place to be confined, Check your prison-comfyness privilege… My read on how He Xuan justifies all the imprisonment he does of other people is that he frames his own prison trauma as primarily to do with physical deprivation and violence, rather than the inherent trauma and violation of enclosure. He needs to be a little bit dismissive of Shi Qingxuan’s suffering on principle before he can shift into rage on Shi Qingxuan’s behalf. but as Ming Yi would have said (and He Xuan laughs darkly at this thought passing through his mind while he struggles to bend the Earth Master’s spiritual tool to his will), comfortable captivity is captivity nonetheless. He Xuan will not offer either of them undue pity—Ming Yi’s memory, or Shi Qingxuan’s newly diminished life—but he thinks he may be more willing now than once he was to concede the point.
These next two paragraphs are another vestige of the initial sketches I did back when I thought this would be a short fic:
He has his plans. They have been fomenting a long time. His intention has always been that He Xuan would see Shi Wudu make another fateful choice: that he must look the possibility of utter ruin in the face, which He Xuan suspects will be a less appetizing prospect for him than sheer death would be.
Even so, when he emerges from the makeshift tunnel and sees the sordid scene inside Shi Qingxuan’s bedchamber—the cords binding Shi Qingxuan to the bed, his state of dishabille, the smell of soporific— I really had to thread the needle of how overtly sexual to get with the Shi sibling stuff here since it wasn’t adequately tagged on the fic from the start. The force-feeding sequence in the book reads to me as a thinly veiled-by-subtext rape scene, so it’s hard to entirely avoid, especially in this fic specifically. I aimed for “Vibes.” He Xuan fears that, one way or another, he will not be able to let Shi Wudu get out of this alive. He wants to look the man in the face and say, You will not have him; you have had him long enough.
Once again, real care is masked as possessiveness.
He should know by now not to trust that Shi Qingxuan will know what’s good for him, but the Water Master has gone to these lengths for a reason. Shi Qingxuan has been uncooperative to his brother’s wishes ever since He Xuan puppeted that ghost of a ghost into revealing a portion of the truth. Shi Qingxuan surrendered divinity of his own volition. If things had been otherwise, He Xuan may not have bothered—may have left him here to rot—but Shi Qingxuan has at least earned the right to further tests.
“I can push him left…”
Above all: He Xuan alone has the right to keep Shi Qingxuan in captivity.
🤪
This thought is some solace as he frees Shi Qingxuan from his bondage. This is not a rescue; Uh huh… He Xuan is not delivering Shi Qingxuan from his brother’s clutches so much as drawing him into his own. Shi Qingxuan grasps at He Xuan’s sleeves with clumsy fingers. Graceless, when he naturally embodies lightness and ease—and the fresh, sweet smell of the oil he uses in his hair is mixed with the lingering smell of medicine, on his breath or lingering on his chin and neck.
He Xuan has been in this room many times; he has never put Shi Qingxuan to bed or removed him from it. Lurid, revolting parts of him surge forth in excitement at the feeling of kneeling, even briefly, next to him on the mattress to pick him up.
I think this moment is super romantic and sweet, but He Xuan isn’t capable of thinking of it that way, for a host of reasons. He’s focused on the sexual undertones, with himself in a predatory position, even though he’s here to break Shi Qingxuan out of captivity. On the list of fucked up and creepy stuff He Xuan has done to Shi Qingxuan, this is near the bottom. But it’s intimate to pick someone up in your arms from their bed and carry them away on your back even when you aren’t life-ruiningly in love with them, and too many wires are being crossed in He Xuan’s brain for him to focus on anything but the power dynamics.
Shi Qingxuan is so happy to see him. He clings to He Xuan with what strength he has in his drugged, mortal limbs. As He Xuan carries him out of there, into the darkness below, Shi Qingxuan presses his face against the nape of He Xuan’s neck. He Xuan feels the soft point of his nose, and for a moment the even softer press of his lips brushing against the ridge of He Xuan’s spine. There for a moment, and then gone. He’s not certain he didn’t imagine it. He considers dropping Shi Qingxuan on the ground where they stand.
VI. YUSHI COUNTRY
It’s a scarce few hours from the Heavenly Capitol to the Rain Master’s realm. After a scarcer few hours than that, Shi Qingxuan heeds his brother’s summons, by way of Pei Ming, like a witless fool.
I elected not to give much in the way of context because this wasn’t a scene I had much to say about in terms of a POV-switch retelling. I also realize that not everyone has an encyclopedic memory of every Beefleaf scene from the book, so it may or may not be clear what’s going on. Oh well.
For his efforts at the palace, He Xuan has achieved nothing but to give Shi Qingxuan the opportunity to disappoint him once more. Though that, too, makes things easier.
VII. BLACK WATER ISLAND: THE FOREST
I was going for some Hill House vibes here, I think… Beefleaf is always yuri to me even when it’s not.
Futility continues to define his efforts. He puts a great deal of energy towards allowing Xie Lian and his accursed protector an exit—once again—only for the next wave of the Water Master’s tribulation to wash them all back up on the island’s shores like nothing had happened.
If there’s anything I love in a fictional character, it’s failure :)
It’s immaterial in the end. The tumult at sea has not undone anything in a way he cannot fix. None of the important parties have escaped his jaws, and he is alone with Shi Qingxuan again, which is both a relief and not.
Shi Qingxuan shivers, and tucks his knees up against his chest. “What an awful place this is.”
He Xuan takes in the the surroundings—dense underbrush, steel-grey skies, the suffusion of evil energy. “What did you expect from a demon lair?”
“Crimson Rain’s was pretty nice,” Shi Qingxuan replies, and then has the gall to, at a time like this, look guilty again for razing Paradise Manor to the ground. He Xuan tears some grass into little pieces.
Sometimes I just like to make myself laugh.
“Thanks for sticking it out. With me. I know you didn’t have to come along, you just did it to help me, and now you’re all hurt like this, and it’s my fault, and I just…” Shi Qingxuan puts his face into his legs and hugs his knees. His voice comes out muffled. “I feel so bad.”
Fanon underplays Shi Qingxuan’s moments of being protective of Ming Yi in favour of making Shi Qingxuan more of a useless passive bottom type. This is one of the most basic misreadings of SQX’s character… they’re actually incredibly active, they take initiative constantly, and they take care of Ming Yi, or try to. Shi Wudu is really the only person around whom they get passive…
“It’s a bit late for an apology,“ He Xuan mutters, turning away, and winces from the movement. Getting bitten by a bone dragon is painful whether or not one engineered it.
Shi Qingxuan looks up, and through the dim light of the underbrush, He Xuan detects an imploring glimmer in his big, dark eyes.
Excuse my petty swipes at eye colour fanon, lol
“Ming-xiong—I’m being really serious right now, okay?”
He Xuan has always hated being called that name in such familiar tones, but since Ming Yi’s death, it actively revolts him.
A headcanon I didn’t realize I had until writing this: part of the reason He Xuan reacts so badly to being called Ming-xiong during The Critical Moment is not only that it represents Shi Qingxuan’s attachment to his false persona and (perceived) inability to come to terms with reality, but it also reminds him (if only subconsciously) that he has the blood of Ming Yi, an innocent man, on his hands… and for what?
“I don’t know what will happen when we’re out of here, but I…” He falters; He Xuan has never heard Shi Qingxuan speak so softly, nor with such uncertainty.
From Shi Qingxuan’s POV, everything Ming Yi has done for them up to this point is deeply caring and romantic. Rescuing them, accompanying them this far to help with what is first and foremost Shi Qingxuan’s brother’s mess, going so far as to get mauled by a ghost king’s guardian bone dragons? Even if Shi Qingxuan hadn’t already had a crush, this is “maybe I’m in love with you actually???” material… except Shi Qingxuan is mortal now, and soon-to-be-disgraced and exiled from their social world, in a best case scenario. It’s both the best and worst time for a feelings confession.
Shi Qingxuan grabs He Xuan’s wrist, too tightly for comfort.
“I’ll always remember you. Do you promise not to forget about me?”
Over the course of a handful of days, He Xuan has obliterated what little goodwill remained between himself and Crimson Rain, and he’s seen Ming Yi’s fresh corpse reduced to nothing but bone. He owes Shi Qingxuan more contempt and loathing he does than either of them.
Eventually, He Xuan grumbles, “How old are you, asking things like that? Ten?”
Shi Qingxuan smiles crookedly, and shoves He Xuan’s shoulder. He hisses. Shi Qingxuan whispers, “Sorry, sorry, sorry!” before rubbing at He Xuan’s back as one would comfort a crying infant.
He Xuan listens to the crashing of waves through the trees, and considers what will ensue. The two of them must rejoin the rest of the cast of characters before He Xuan may move them all toward the next act, and Shi Qingxuan cannot be allowed to guide the course of action, either; at every opportunity He Xuan has given him to make a different choice, his loyalties have been plain. No, He Xuan needs the two of them to find their way somewhere the others can come across them without finding it suspicious for them to have ended up there—ah, he thinks, of course; the master of the island will have them detained—but before he can take arrange for any of his minions to spring a convenient ambush leading to a stint in the island’s prison, Imagine getting that @/everyone message from your boss on Slack. Shi Qingxuan’s hand stops moving on He Xuan’s back.
He Xuan turns, and catches Shi Qingxuan paying his own face a stolen, guarded glance. Their eyes snag. Shi Qingxuan looks afraid, but not as much as he ought to.
He leans across the scant distance necessary to press his lips to He Xuan’s forehead. I felt this should be a forehead rather than cheek or mouth kiss because I wanted it to occupy that space between platonic and overtly romantic, but also because the implied power dynamic between the two of them is the opposite of what it is in reality. For a few mortal heartbeats, there is a kiss, and then Shi Qingxuan releases him.
Also, the iconic lines from Louise Gluck’s “The Encounter”:
Then you kissed me—I felt hot wax on my forehead. I wanted it to leave a mark: that’s how I knew I loved you. Because I wanted to be burned, stamped, to have something in the end—
At first, He Xuan’s mind is full of nothing. It is then filled with quite a lot. Ravenous. Squeamish.
He knows, as cool fact, that if he were to proposition Shi Qingxuan in any way, he would be able to prove Hua Cheng wrong: it’s not, in fact, too late to fuck Shi Qingxuan. They are in peril, together; Shi Qingxuan has never been so delicate and fragile in hundreds of years; to Shi Qingxuan, these trials they’ve endured together are a testament to the profundity of his relationship with a dear and reliable friend; and Shi Qingxuan is desperate for comfort and affection. This is a way of providing both that is unavailable to Shi Wudu, and that alone is enough to recommend it. He Xuan feels sick to his stomach.
Poor He Xuan… the “genuine horniness or intrusive thought?” dilemma… though I do think that “this is a kind of intimacy Shi Wudu can’t claim” is an element of He Xuan’s sexual fascination with Shi Qingxuan, which gets complicated the more skeevy the vibes between the siblings become.
He will regret it if it happens, for a hundred reasons, but he can feel it almost bodily: the surprised, nervous, delighted expression Shi Qingxuan would make if He Xuan laid him down in the moss and twigs. The heat of his body pressed between He Xuan’s legs, still warm and alive despite no longer being divine. Shi Qingxuan might be tentative or may throw caution to the wind, but He Xuan doubts that Shi Qingxuan would deny him. They could rut away in the dirt like animals all they liked, until reality forced itself back onto them.
One of my Grand Beefleaf Theses: to He Xuan, Shi Qingxuan is an embodiment of innocence, and because of the person He Xuan is and the experiences he’s had, that innocence is cast as sexual naivete. He Xuan resents Shi Qingxuan for that, while also coveting that state of being and Shi Qingxuan himself.
Over time, He Xuan picks up the unsettling dynamics present between the Shi siblings. Awareness of the control and violation of agency to which Shi Wudu subjects Shi Qingxuan further threatens He Xuan's attempts to villainize Shi Qingxuan within his own head, which he needs to do in order to justify manipulating them and using them. The fact they're palpably into each other is in itself frightening, because to He Xuan, sexuality is essentially one of many vectors of power and violence; just a way that people dominate other people. With all that in mind, the disjunction between Shi Qingxuan’s desire for something soft and pleasurable and life-affirming in the middle of traumatizing experiences and He Xuan’s conviction he’s on the verge of giving the game away with Shi Qingxuan evokes horror.
He sits, frozen, for long moments until Shi Qingxuan laughs, high and strangled, and claps his hands.
“Okay,” he says, breezily, as if he has always kissed Ming Yi’s forehead whenever he likes, and then gets to his feet. He Xuan’s hands curl into fists by his sides where they’re planted in the earth. “Let’s go find the others.”
VIII. BLACK WATER ISLAND: THE MANOR
Shi Wudu follows directions obediently enough, with Shi Qingxuan limp and mortal in He Xuan’s grasp, and stays mulishly silent up until He Xuan is securing in the most literal sense, only… Shi Qingxuan to the far wall, opposite the altar. Just as the cold metal bolt of the lock around Shi Qingxuan’s wrist clicks shut, the other one speaks: “Let him go.”
He Xuan turns around with his brows lifted in faint surprise. Fully playing the villain now. Trying to prove something to himself. Shi Wudu is the one figure in the room to not shrink back, Shi Qingxuan notwithstanding. They have been trailed by a mob of madmen; the creatures have become even more detestable over the past few years, with no one’s company to keep but each other’s. He Xuan pays them little regard. They’re too frightened of him to come close.
EVERYTHING WITH THE PRISONERS IS SO FUCKED UP… BRO WHAT ARE YOU DOINGGGGGG… CYCLES OF VIOLENCE BE CYCLING
“Do you think you’re in a position to make demands?”
He makes his languid way toward the place he deposited Shi Wudu in the centre of the room.
The wretches have gradually encroached closer to Shi Qingxuan in He Xuan’s absence. They’ve been fascinated by him since He Xuan arranged for the two of them to be discovered trapped in the island’s prison; they look at Shi Qingxuan as though the key to something very dear is braided into his hair, or a talisman of hope rests on his tongue—stupid creatures; that’s just how he is, what he does to people—
If MXTX didn’t mean for me to read the prisoners’ fascination with Shi Qingxuan as reflective of He Xuan’s repressed id, I have no idea what she did want me to take away from all that. It’s not relevant to the story whatsoever otherwise, besides having an opportunity for Shi Qingxuan to get groped gothic heroinely again… except it’s not all or even mostly sexual in nature? Some of them treat Shi Qingxuan like a beloved small child? HELP. It’s HX!!! He wants them in a most confusing way!
“Can you really expect me to stand by and watch while you… put your hands on him?”
He Xuan nearly laughs. “Why should he get out of things so easily, time after time?”
He steps closer, and gives Shi Wudu a leisurely backhand slap to the face.
“I spent three years in prison. That fate belonged to your brother. I think he can manage being in chains for one evening.”
There’s a moment of faint confusion on Shi Wudu’s visage, and He Xuan seizes upon it: “Did you not know I went to prison?”
It should be impossible to realize again and again how insignificant He Xuan is to this man. He has, regrettably, given the question of Shi Wudu’s inner life much thought over the years, in the interest of knowing his enemy. He’s never believed Shi Wudu either capable or worthy of absolution, but He Xuan has entertained himself with speculation of whether the guilt of his own family’s fate ever weighs on the Water Master, if for no other reason than the fear of having such a weighty secret uncovered. It seems only fair that he be tormented—the possibility of such torment is what led Shi Wudu to take pains to keep Shi Qingxuan from the truth, after all. But He Xuan is coming to understand that, within Shi Wudu’s own heart and mind, his conscience is clean. One cannot be haunted by that of which one is only dimly aware. He Xuan’s life and death are nothing more than a few strokes on a scroll buried in Ling Wen’s halls.
Writing that bit really bummed me out, in the sense that it brought up a lot of very mundane emotions about how much it sucks when someone has not only really fucked you up, but they don’t care that they did, because they don’t care about you. Like, “you can’t even do me the courtesy of being my nemesis”! It sucks to be the one to care too much in general, but especially about things that literally do not matter to anyone but you, to whom they matter A Lot.
He can just make out the rhythm of Shi Qingxuan’s unconscious breath behind his back. He Xuan steels himself against the impulse to turn around and observe Shi Qingxuan—what would it accomplish, beyond possibly earning more of his brother’s proprietorial ire?
Saliva wells behind his teeth, as if his body prepares to either vomit or swallow. He circles Shi Wudu like a vulture, and considers how to pass the time. He gives into the temptation to kick the back of Shi Wudu’s legs. The man stumbles, but doesn’t fall over, so He Xuan shoves him to the ground with a hand on the skull. He feels a sweet prickle at the fact that Shi Wudu can’t stop himself from hissing as his knees hit the stone.
“I didn’t give you permission to stand in front of my parents.”
His family’s urns on the altar burn in his awareness even when he’s looking in the other direction. He is doing this for them: this is true. That he is glad that they have passed on, and they cannot see what it is he is about to do: likewise. He imagines they would be frightened, no matter how well-deserved the outcome may be.
His robes swish gently around him as he moves; it’s drafty, and he is narrow and wan. His words echo in the vastness of the great hall. He is so unused to being seen in his true form by anyone living that each time he speaks, he feels like an actor reciting lines. He could not have built this room better as a purpose-made stage if he tried. It is the perfect heart to this house: grandiose and hollow. He Xuan has rehearsed this moment times beyond counting, and he’s given no shortage of thought to the perfect speech to break Shi Wudu’s spirit before He Xuan sends him to the depths of hell. But words are not the route to satisfaction. There’s a sickly craving in him for escalation, to see things through in some impossible way; it lands in his gut as something between arousal and the anticipation that accompanies the stalking of prey.
I’m compelled by the thought of He Xuan being turned on in the moment by the prospect of humiliating or torturing Shi Wudu, and having to acknowledge that part of himself. He Xuan has so much libidinal investment in the gratification of enacting his vengeance, and nothing else he’s done so far has provoked genuine terror and remorse, which is what He Xuan needs to see from Shi Wudu to feel satisfied (theoretically.)
Of all the debasing things that have happened to He Xuan, a list which is very long, few are as potent as coming to understand that, to the person whose actions have determined the course of centuries of your life, you have all the significance of a carcass tossed to pigs.
“Get on your hands, and crawl.”
The pseudo-petplay came from my desire to come up with something surprising and engaging for HX-SWD to do in the time that SQX was asleep that wouldn’t disrupt canon compliance; they couldn’t talk about anything in too much detail, because most of The Conversation comes up in the novel, and the feeling I get is that they were just biding time until SQX woke up. I considered having SWD make more obvious insinuations about HX being sexually predatory towards SQX than he actually does here, but I thought that would send HX off the deep end too quickly, so it became a question of, “what might HX want to do to SWD that is interesting and novel to a reader, and that he wouldn’t do in front of SQX’s (conscious) face, but that still feels in character and doesn’t conflict with canon?” …Which I answered, “sexually charged but not explicitly sexual humiliation”, because I’m me, and this fic has themes and throughlines and whatnot.
Shi Wudu’s stoic brows draw deeper, but he’s otherwise motionless and tense—waiting for a reprieve, or for He Xuan to reveal that it was all a jest. He Xuan is not the jesting sort.
He licks his parched lips, and adds, “Now.”
If they were truly alone together, He Xuan doubts he would ever succeed in pushing Shi Wudu to this end, no matter the leverage, but against the collateral of Shi Qingxuan’s life, Shi Wudu deigns to crawl.
Collateral brings us back to commerce-language to describe Shi Qingxuan’s being, which is never a good sign…
He Xuan never toys with his food to this degree. Not to claim undue gentility; it’s only that his fellow monsters are too afraid of him for there to be more than a few minutes’ entertainment to be yielded. Here, in He Xuan’s own domain, where the wound that is his presence has engulfed all of his enemy’s divine power, Shi Wudu is surely afraid, on some level of his arrogant heart, but he is skilled at withholding anything from which He Xuan could draw satisfaction.
”Wound that is his presence” stuff definitely a stealth KOTOR 2 reference… IYKYK.
Shi Wudu mutters something—He Xuan takes him by the hair, and tugs his head back. “What was that?”
I wanted this scene to be horny-scary; I wanted you to be almost afraid of what He Xuan will do, about being privy to it, and having to ride alongside it as you continue on with the character and the story. Because I’m a sicko.
The man smiles crookedly, inasmuch as his facial muscles can move while being pulled back by the scalp. “I said that ghosts are all degenerates.”
He thinks of Shi Qingxuan, bound and straining on the bed—the heady drugged smell of that bedchamber prison—and He Xuan laughs, despite himself; it bursts out of him. “I’m the degenerate? While you’ve spent centuries letting your worshippers build statues of him as your wife?”
AND IS HE WRONG TO SAY IT???
He regrets it, almost instantly, because he can feel the attention of both himself and Shi Wudu shift; they are drawn magnetically back to Shi Qingxuan, inert against the wall. To what degree I could be said to ship shuangshui, it’s in this way specifically. It’s always about SQX on some level. Shi Wudu makes an effort to right himself, and He Xuan kicks him down; they repeat this several times before He Xuan plants his heel on the back of the man’s head, and forces him down onto his elbows.
“I’ve changed my mind. I don’t think you deserve to use limbs. You should be groveling like a worm.”
The pressure of a boot-heel on a still-intact skull is something He Xuan already knows he enjoys, when he is the one standing. He has never liked it more than he does now, when it’s Shi Wudu’s face he presses into the stone. He Xuan would never be glad to see Shi Wudu, but the sight of him debased is something new; he reckons that no one has seen Shi Wudu in such a state once in the man’s miserable life. It feels as though the outline of He Xuan’s being is expanding outwards—like he has never been so large, so capable of crushing something—and the urge to do so is overpowering. He wants to carve Shi Wudu open; to peel him apart and expose the rot within; to create a rupture in him so deep that even if he survives this, he will not, truly, survive this.
That’s another one of my personal favourite grafs.
He is brought back to reality by the rustle of chains on the far wall.
Shi Qingxuan blinks, returning to consciousness slowly. He Xuan quickly removes his heel from Shi Wudu’s head, and hates himself for it—what does he have to be ashamed of?
Shi Wudu struggles upright, rasps, “Qingxuan,” and stands as though to go to him. He Xuan swiftly forces him back into a kneeling posture—some things, he really can’t allow—but he makes the mistake of glancing at Shi Qingxuan’s face.
The two really do look alike. Their blood relation shines through, despite the differences in temperament. It’s impossible to see one of them without being reminded of the other.
When he holds Shi Qingxuan’s wide-eyed gaze, He Xuan feels, for a moment, unaccountably embarrassed by all of this—the scale and depth of everything that he is. Not a moment later, he is more enraged than he’s ever been. If he cannot see this through, he will truly have shown himself a failure, in death as in his afflicted life. He will have been unworthy of the food his parents gave him.
His limbs are steady with the rigidity that is one of death’s gifts, but within himself, he trembles. He Xuan, as he is, was forged, not born; he was cast and smelt in many crucibles. Hold fast, he tells himself, as he’s told himself many times before: while withstanding his second cremation in the beating hearth of the Kiln, panting without breath, choking on glory, coming as close to an ascension as he ever would, and his blood evaporating inside his veins—while methodically towing his aching body from door to door, noting the screams of fleeing servants, wiping sweat and gore onto his clothes so his grip will stay fast on the knife-handle, trembling from the effort of staying conscious, animating himself with conviction stronger than fear—while biting his own lip, hissing as quietly as he can, enduring indignities of various sorts, ignoring the burning ache in places that before then had belonged to him only, knowing that he is an animal here (they are all animals here; shortly after, he will meet the eye of a particularly industrious and brazen rat and wonder what it sees when it sees him, whether it assesses him for edibility, as he regards it in turn), casting his attention into the dark shadows of the room to make less vivid the thing to be persevered, feeling his distant body clinging to its own shape even as it disintegrates, the whole of him sustained as one thing by will alone.
If you boil this story down to three elements, I’d say it’s a triangle made up of violence, desire, and identity. This paragraph is an attempt to draw in the “identity” leg a bit more strongly, in terms of how it relates to the others. Also, I love getting an opportunity to write a 213-word sentence.
It was there he first learned that though he could survive, he would never make it out intact; that there was no getting better; no reprieve, no hope, no joy, no rest, no mercy ahead of him; and as such, no acceptance of defeat, no end until the ending, at which they have finally arrived. He is grateful for it—he must not forget, and he must not let go. He is sick of it all, too; he is ready for this to be finished. He is ready to be put to rest.
This passage is the only point after the beginning in which the rape is mentioned other than passing implication, and it’s listed alongside the Kiln and He Xuan’s murder spree as the corollorary to a heavenly tribulation; the events that pressurized him into the thing he is now. I go back and forth as to whether I wish I had pointed to it more frequently in the rest of the narrative, but I think it was the right choice not to. It’s always there, and it’s not one of the things on which He Xuan wishes to brood, because it’s not productive. It’s only at times like these it becomes unavoidable.
Even now the mawkish smell of the attic somehow finds me, I do not want / to inspire pity so much as revulsion, I want people to despair / like I despaired…
It’s not really necessary that he keep holding onto the head, but he’s not sure where to put it down.
There’s a lot of great and evocative art depicting the climactic events of Chapter 124, but this one was especially on the brain while I was writing.
The extrusion that was Shi Wudu is everywhere; he must be careful with his footing to avoid taking a fall. He makes two methodical I do things methodically / m-m-m-methodically / […] just even it out… circuits of the room, the drip-drip of blood trailing from the thing in his hand the only accompaniment to his footsteps, and he does not look at Shi Qingxuan, who remains as motionless as when He Xuan first put him under.
This is a fleshy story, rather than a spectral or ethereal one. There are elements of the HX-SQX-SWD beheading tableau I find striking and even darkly romantic, but I wanted here to focus on the horror, just flipped to be a different POV than in the novel—the horror as experienced by the person doing violence.
They cannot stay here, he realizes, by here meaning this room, in front of the altar, surrounded by crimson pulp. If—when—Shi Qingxuan wakes up, he’ll start screaming again, and then they won’t have gotten anywhere from where they left off.
With no little distaste, he stows the head inside a qiankun pouch in his sleeve. He takes a long, last look at the crumpled body on the floor—it looks so small now— Trying to echo back to Ming Yi at the start of the chapter; good and bad people look the same in death, huh? and steps over it, toward its prone but breathing brother.
Standing over Shi Qingxuan’s limp form, He Xuan has never felt more like a wraith. When he lifts him up, he is taken aback by how insignificant a burden he is to carry, though his mass is just the same as when He Xuan carried him out of the palace.
Perhaps it’s only the residual alertness keeping him unnerved, and after he exits his state of shock, the relief will set in. He feels his hold over the curse of the waters around his lair slipping from him further with every moment, which must mean something, mustn’t it? That his end is approaching, even if restfulness has never felt further from him? He’s half-expecting to crumble into nothingness, and be spared having to resolve any of this. His plans did not extend far beyond the moment of vengeance itself, being as he was unsure of how long it would take for his spirit to accept that it had fulfilled its purpose, and needed not to labour any longer. He is no closer to having the answer, but rather than tranquility, he feels an unaccountable degree of panic.
The elder one is finished. He Xuan has no idea what he needs from the younger in order to be satisfied, besides that he has not gotten it yet.
Heavenly officials are going to come looking for them soon. He doesn’t have much time. The island and the manor are disposable, though it brings him a twinge of regret to contemplate abandoning them. They will not suffice as a place to stow Shi Qingxuan, or the urns, the only other thing here of true value. Take another shot for the $ of it all. He has options—there are countless lairs he’s seized from ghouls he’s hunted, some of them above ground—but then what?
Though the cultural context and therefore architectural styles/aesthetics/etc are all wrong, there are several pieces in the art book Castles by Alan Lee that informed my mental image of Nether Water Manor and environs with regards to colour palette and energy. Pardon my terrible pictures.
Something so evocative about the sea as the grave, the castle as the grave, perhaps sovereignty itself as the grave…
Shi Wudu was right to keep Shi Qingxuan coddled; he can’t possibly survive for long on his own. He is a soft thing in a hard world. It would be a kindness, in a sense, to keep him—not that kindness is what Shi Qingxuan is owed.
Tiptoeing up to the edge of a “SQX sexy imprisonment” AU here, which I found compelling enough to start another WIP about…
Shi Qingxuan breathes softly, and He Xuan notices that the blood at his hairline is drying into a crust. If it gets like that, Shi Qingxuan is going to pitch a fit when he wakes up—he’s so vain. Not to mention that if He Xuan casts him into the mortal realm, as he probably ought to, the mess is going to draw too many questions. The idea of him jailed for murder he didn’t commit rankles He Xuan; Shi Qingxuan refused the opportunity, and He Xuan alone deserves the credit for his brother’s death—he won’t let Shi Qingxuan take this from him, too.
As he thinks, He Xuan wets a scrap of cloth, and idly daubs away the blood sticking in Shi Qingxuan’s hair. When Shi Qingxuan’s hair is free of its reddish film and restored to lustrous black, He Xuan moves on to his face, sponging off the flaking, tacky residue of Shi Wudu’s illustrious immortal life. Something twists in him as more and more of Shi Qingxuan’s face emerges back to looking like itself; he could be peaceful like this, restful. His vanity is unfortunately justified in that, even without a celestial glow, he is one of the most beautiful people He Xuan has ever seen. He passes the damp cloth over Shi Qingxuan’s temple, and at first thinks he’s imagining it, a fearful and wistful trick of the light, but then Shi Qingxuan opens his eyes.
A sluggish blink or two. Unfocused. He Xuan is deathly still. He wishes he was invisible, a silent eye beyond mortal perception. Shi Qingxuan comes into himself, into his body, into this dark room in a dismal house; his gaze sharpens, and he sees He Xuan.
In all He Xuan’s fearful fantasies of someday revealing his true nature, he was right, he was always right: with the masks done away, Shi Qingxuan is terrified. He opens his mouth as if to speak or scream, but nothing escapes, as if even the sound in him has hidden itself away.
He Xuan pulls his hand back, and lets the cloth drop to the floor with a wet splotch. The sound is redolent of viscera, and Shi Qingxuan flinches. He does, however, glance down, and then up at He Xuan’s osseous fingers, blotted with rust. Shi Qingxuan has never been able to keep his feelings to himself; the fear doesn’t lessen, but it mixes with repulsion and confusion. The latter is well deserved; He Xuan can’t answer for himself why he’s doing this. Even so, he will not suffer to be looked at in such a way—plaintive and dolorous and lost—by this, of all creatures.
Shi Qingxuan’s tongue darts out to wet his bottom lip, and he whispers, “He-gongzi, I…”
Without thinking, He Xuan takes Shi Qingxuan’s jaw in his hand. A smothering power flows through him; Shi Qingxuan’s pupils go wide and dark. He shrinks back, but even before He Xuan’s cold fingers have made contact with his warm cheek, Shi Qingxuan’s eyelids fall shut once more, and his head lolls. Before he wakes, he will be deposited somewhere far beyond He Xuan’s concern, and He Xuan will be rid of him.
It would be difficult to number the times that He Xuan has imagined rejecting Shi Qingxuan’s apologies. He doubts there is a single thing that Shi Qingxuan could do or say now to which He Xuan would know how to respond.
I’m still a little dissatisfied with this as an ending to what is kind of a blockbuster chapter, but oh well.
chapter seven
It took some thinking to figure out how to do this part of the story, the passage between two high points of emotion, in an elegant way.
There’s only darkness, until a small ahem of a cough intrudes upon its consciousness. It/its indulgence, once again… The sleeper ignores the sound, until it’s followed by a softly-spoken sentence:
« Hello, I’m looking to speak with Black Water Sinking Ships? »
Bringing in Xie Lian was an idea that came to me late in the process, and it was super fun to explore his dynamic with He Xuan while Hua Cheng is AWOL.
There’s a long delay before the thing slumbering on the floor of the trench regains its ability to string together words.
I was visualizing a serpentine massive sea monster form that other creatures would give a wide birth, but He Xuan is so depersonalized right now that I didn’t think much description would be appropriate.
Where did you get my verbal password?
Xie Lian sounds embarrassed. « I don’t want to get that person in trouble… »
Imagining these two on a phone call just kills me.
Familiarity and annoyance bring him back to self-knowledge. Fucking Yin Yu. Hadn’t he died?
« I’m sorry to bother you, but I’m in need of help. »
Go ask someone else.
« Actually, in this case, my lord is the only one I can ask… »
He knows where this is going, but he’ll make Xie Lian work for it.
And why’s that?
« You’re the only other Supreme… well, the only other Supreme I can consult with about this kind of thing. »
He’s still groggy, struggling to clear his head following his hibernatory reverie; he hasn’t spoken to another conscious being in months. There’s no reason he ought to humour Xie Lian.
What do you want to know?
He Xuan sees no reason not to be seen in his true form by Xie Lian, whom He Xuan assumes knows as much as anyone but Hua Cheng, at this point. It’s strange to be himself under the light of the sun. As he walks the path up Mount Taicang’s slopes, he imagines his own dark figure as an inkblot on the land.
When He Xuan comes in sight of the cottage, he sees Xie Lian kneeling in the dirt, weeding a scraggly cabbage patch. Xie Lian looks up in excitement, and then wilts when he realizes that his visitor is not the one he’s been hoping for. He Xuan has not yet readjusted to prolonged consciousness enough to feel emotions as anything but distant pieces of information, but he registers his scorn. Has Xie Lian been doing this to everyone he sees, for months?
Xie Lian recovers quickly and smiles, though it’s a cooler expression than most that He Xuan has seen on his face before. No surprise there. He Xuan knows that Xie Lian is still in contact with—well.
Once again overusing one of my old tricks, in the sense that Shi Qingxuan doesn’t get a name until the end of the chapter.
“Lord Black Water,” Xie Lian greets, in his typical manner, which is to address everyone with the attitude one would use toward a stranger’s grandmother. “Would you like lunch?”
He’s really so fun to write.
He Xuan has no desire to contract food poisoning at the hands of the same man twice, so he replies, “Just tea.”
The cottage is simple, but less shabby than Puqi Shrine, though that’s hardly an feat. The interior is spare, tidy, and feels barely occupied, though as far as He Xuan’s aware Xie Lian has spent the bulk of the last several months here.
Xie Lian sets the table and pours He Xuan a cup of tea, which He Xuan finds he’s in no hurry to drink. His host takes a dainty sip from his own cup, sets it down, and turns a clear-eyed, beseeching gaze on He Xuan. “I wanted to ask you… about San Lang.”
He Xuan doesn’t dignify a statement so obvious with a response.
“In the battle with Jun Wu… he… was dissipated.”
He Xuan is aware: dissipated to break Xie Lian’s cursed shackles. How very romantic.
“Are his ashes intact?”
“They’re intact.” Xie Lian blushes. “Very intact.”
In a show of politeness towards his host, He Xuan keeps his expression only mildly revolted. He definitely thought, “What, did he make you an ash-crystal cockring or something”? “Then you don’t have anything to worry about. He’ll reform eventually.”
It’s theoretically possible that Hua Cheng’s self-sacrificing gesture on his beloved’s behalf has fulfilled his spirit and caused him to fade away peacefully, but He Xuan doubts it. Hua Cheng is avaricious. He Xuan can’t imagine him content to leave Xie Lian alone again after such a long time spent in wait. And passive dissipation is, as He Xuan has learned, not easily achieved by ghosts like them.
Xie Lian looks only marginally relieved, and He Xuan waits impassively for him to spit out whatever it is that he actually wants. Whatever Yin Yu or whoever else couldn’t do for him.
Xie Lian has clearly noticed that He Xuan isn’t thirsty, as he helps himself to the rest of the tea without a shred of shame. His face turns pensive. “The ones who emerge from the Kiln are different from other ghosts, aren’t you? The mountain… changes you.”
He Xuan lifts an eyebrow. “You’re wondering if there’s a way to speed up the process?”
Xie Lian leans forward with enough force to jostle the teacups. “Is there?”
He Xuan smiles crookedly. “No.”
He’s being such a cunt right now, for… several reasons.
For the first time since he arrived, He Xuan glimpses visible irritation on Xie Lian’s face. He finds this gratifying in a dull way.
Yet He Xuan asks, against his better judgment and out of something not unlike sympathy, “How long has it been?”
“Half a year.”
“Probably a couple months more, then. Maybe a few years. No more than that.”
“No more than… a couple months to a couple years?”
“Correct.”
“I… see.“
Hua Cheng might know something of substance about all this; he always seemed very knowledgeable about the Kiln and its workings. But if he was around to be asked, He Xuan and Xie Lian would have nothing about which to speak to one another.
Xie Lian is visibly unsatisfied. He Xuan, unmoved, is about to rise to his feet when Xie Lian tilts his head.
“How… did you meet him?”
“Our paths were bound to cross, given the circumstances.”
Xie Lian’s expression goes from bashful to dismissive. “No doubt, no doubt. But…” He bites his bottom lip, which He Xuan finds strangely eye-catching. You are not immune to the wife beam… But, also, He Xuan is on some level seeing Xie Lian through Hua Cheng’s eyes, or attempting to. Trying to see him as an object of devotion and desire. He wants to “get it.” “How did you meet? Can you describe it for me? What was… what was he like?”
It is not a time He Xuan thinks of with nostalgia. He was weak.
“Mount Tonglu had yet to open for me. Crimson Rain was… his usual self.”
Xie Lian’s brow relaxes. “Was it a chance encounter?”
He Xuan reluctantly draws up the scene. The backdrop: the Gambler’s Den, standing brash and tacky in the centre of Ghost City centuries ago, as it does still. The players: neither wearing their true forms, testing the waters, curious whether the other could be put to use. He Xuan admits that he was gambling for information. He doesn’t specify that it was about the Water Master and his relations. Xie Lian can no doubt make the leap, but chooses not to remark on it.
Grudgingly, He Xuan adds, “Crimson Rain was feeling generous that day. I was… arrogant. He had no reason not to put me in my place before I could give him trouble.”
A dreamy glimmer steals into Xie Lian’s eyes. “Does he do that a lot? Put other ghosts in their places?”
Really, a heavenly official ought to try harder to sound disapproving of that kind of thing, or at least make it less obvious he finds the thought arousing.
Darkly, He Xuan replies, “Not as often as you’d think, the way he goes on.”
Xie Lian fiddles with the pot as if to make more tea, but never quite gets there. He looks up at He Xuan shyly through his lashes, which causes He Xuan to feel nonsensically flustered and indignant, not least because he’s certain Xie Lian isn’t doing it on purpose. He’s seen this man eat food retrieved out of piles of garbage, a low that even He Xuan has only sunk to on particularly debasing occasions.
“Do you know the story of how he got his title? I know the story, but San Lang never got to—never told me the details.”
“Before my time. But he’s had many battles with the Green Ghost.”
On a single occasion did He Xuan accompany Hua Cheng to one of Qi Rong’s lairs. Very fun to contemplate them wrecking house together. Qi Rong had set himself up in a swamp, neither distinctly land nor water, and things had been dull for both Hua Cheng and He Xuan in the months previous. He’s scarcely finished a clipped retelling of that unsavoury escapade before Xie Lian asks He Xuan how he and Crimson Rain first entered into what Xie Lian terms their “arrangement.” It’s not long after that He Xuan realizes he has made a mistake.
Xie Lian has only to ask an occasional prompting question, and He Xuan finds himself divulging more personal details—if only indirectly, through recountings for the benefit of someone more interested in Hua Cheng’s history than He Xuan’s own—than He Xuan has ever confided in another being since he died, aside from when he first told Hua Cheng the story of his life and death. He hates it. The words continue to spill forth.
He’d always thought of them as a pair of dark stars, fated to pass one another on the celestial sea without another soul to witness. Picture me crying, screaming, etc. Naturally no one would ever truly know what they were to each other, if it could even be said that they were anything to each other. The thought was not an unpleasant one. At least, He Xuan had never before considered it such. There is now a cold ache in his chest.
The above paragraph is incredibly romantic to me. I love to think about the Supremes as these un-gods who share a bond of mutual struggle and trauma, and I find it affecting to imagine He Xuan romanticizing the whole thing, against his better judgement. For fanmix reasons, I associate He Xuan with the imagery of dark stars: wandering stars, for whom it is reserved / the blackness, the darkness, forever; // you're not the dark star they want you to be / you're just a black dot in the sky; // dark stone in space / spins in place / behind the glass / inside the case; etc. It was only while I was working on this scene that I considered the synchronicity with Hua Cheng’s connection to the Star of Solitude.
Xie Lian’s countenance warms considerably as the noonday sun slides into afternoon. The stories, brief and stiffly told as they may be, seem to bring him more comfort than any reassurances prior. I feel very tender about Xie Lian, here. He’s admitting and honouring, in a way, the fact that He Xuan knows Hua Cheng deeply, that their history means something—and this goes a long way, both towards He Xuan reaching a point of acceptance about the whole thing and for Xie Lian to comfort himself by soaking up all the information he can on the person he loves. He Xuan considers, in a maudlin and petty way, whether it would be satisfying to drop a passing insinuation about the nature of some of his other encounters with Hua Cheng over the years, in order that Xie Lian might be left to chew on the uncertainty, but He Xuan discards the impulse, as it would result in little more than self-humiliation; Xie Lian is, after all, the man in favour of whom He Xuan failed to tempt Hua Cheng out of his half-measure of celibacy.
Eventually, his mind catches up with itself sufficiently for He Xuan to get to his feet. “I have business elsewhere,” he lies.
Xie Lian sees He Xuan to the door, and it’s only as He Xuan is about to step through that Xie Lian speaks up: “Has my lord visited the Imperial City recently?”
He Xuan stands perfectly, uncannily still, the way he once could not permit himself. “Why?”
Xie Lian has the decency to sound somewhat sheepish, but not enough to stop himself from prying. “I was wondering if you’d seen…”
As acidly as he can manage, He Xuan replies, “Don’t be concerned for that person on my account. He is less than nothing to me.”
Got nothin’ to say to you anyway / I don’t need no closure, it’s really okay…
“I don’t believe you mean him any harm. It’s only that he—”
Shards of ice spread into his limbs, his heart, and he is frantic to silence Xie Lian. Frantic, yet frozen. If he hears any more of this, He Xuan may splinter.
He swallows, with difficulty. “You have meddled enough in this matter.”
“Pardon me,” Xie Lian says, without sounding particularly apologetic.
We enter the section referred to in my outline as “Hua Cheng’s voicemails.”
« Hey, Black Water. Did you miss me? »
« Aw, are you ignoring me? »
« Come on. Don’t you want to catch up? Just drop by the Gambler’s Den, I’ll handle the catering. »
« Are you actually ignoring me? Don’t push your luck. »
« I can tell you’re still around, idiot. If you were gone from this world, I’d know. »
« I went by your place. It looks like a pile of shit. You seriously haven’t cleaned up since the old man trashed it? »
« Where are you? »
« I figured you’d be in a snit, but for real? »
« Look. I don’t have anything to apologize for, but if you want to throw a tantrum to get it out of your system, I’m game. You can throw things, call me names, try and fail to kick my ass, whatever. »
« His Highness told me to say thank you, by the way. »
This next scene probably also in the top 5 of most difficult for me to write in the story. Trying to get characters to talk about things they really don’t want to talk about, ugh. You can see some of the many iterations it went through:
Fu Gu is about twice as big a town as it was when He Xuan was born here hundreds of years ago, but it’s still quiet enough that He Xuan can hear the approaching footsteps from afar.
About eight paces back, the interloper calls to him. “You had to know I’d find you here eventually. I mean, this is one of the first places I’d check. Definitely in the top five.”
He Xuan pauses for just a moment before resuming his task of scrubbing centuries’ worth of grime off of the outer walls of his family home. “Make it quick.”
Divorced dad era. He’d have a beard of sorrow if I didn’t feel like that would give him gender dysphoria.
“Nah. Come have lunch. Just like old times. Don’t worry, I’ll pay.”
He considers refusing, but feels utter apathy about the outcome either way. Hua Cheng is already here, and it would doubtless take more effort to make him leave. What’s there to be afraid of? What more could conceivably go wrong, at this point?
Hua Cheng takes the two of them to a seafood shop in the south-east that sits on the site of an even older, long-since-demolished seafood shop that He Xuan used to visit semi-frequently. It’s the same place as in chapter 2, obv. The choice of venue annoys him for reasons he can’t identify. They sit out in the open, where mortals can see them. Civilized behaviour only. Hua Cheng in the guise of a clean-cut young master, with all facial features intact; He Xuan’s form is a highly forgettable man who he realizes too late looks rather regrettably like Yin Yu, under the mask.
He Xuan picks at his food in silence. He’s hardly had an appetite in years, besides occasional painful cravings that lead to yet more painful binges.
He Xuan’s appetite is interesting, because it’s clearly a maladaptive trait that’s become magnified and blown into something fantastical due to the nature of being a ghost, but it’s also one of the only links he has to being embodied in any meaningful way.
Hua Cheng snorts. “You’re in one of these moods, huh? I knew you were doing poorly, but I had no idea.”
He Xuan looks up abruptly. “I don’t want to do this here.”
”Do this” in the sense that He Xuan still thinks Hua Cheng wants some kind of further retribution, and that they’re on terrible terms.
Hua Cheng quirks an eyebrow, but lays a generous amount of coin on the table and gets to his feet, half-eaten meal abandoned.
The shop is at one end of a pier, and they make their way along the rocky shoreline towards no destination in particular. It’s not lost on He Xuan that Hua Cheng chose to take them to neutral territory. What, does he think he’s being considerate of He Xuan’s delicate feelings?
”Yes <3” — friend and beta rigormorphis
“So what’s been keeping you so busy?”
“Renovating.”
It may not be his particular gift, but one does not impersonate the Earth Master for hundreds of years without learning the principles of how to build and maintain a solid home. He Xuan is not a master carpenter or craftsman, but some things a man must do himself.
It’s crucial for the vibes of a depression-related home reno project that He Xuan is not, like, particularly good at it.
“Oh, how nice. Entertaining a lot of guests, these days?” He Xuan glares at him sidelong, and finds Hua Cheng grinning. Hua Cheng adds, “His Highness told me about your little tete-a-tete.”
With great detachment and not a trace of audible dread, He Xuan asks, “What did he tell you?”
Hua Cheng’s smile widens. “What? Are you afraid he passed along something embarrassing?”
He Xuan says nothing, but regrets ever coming here until Hua Cheng laughs with only his usual level of cruelty. “Don’t look so sweaty, you freak. He told me the gist of it. Gege said you were very helpful. That’s in comparison to those idiots in Heaven, of course, so don’t let it get to your head. But if there’s one thing that people should be rewarded for, it’s giving Gege what he wants.”
“I’m still waiting on the reward, I suppose.”
“I don’t know, I thought the crab was pretty good.”
“If married life agrees with you so well, why are you here?”
“Maybe you’ve forgotten, because I know I don’t mention it very often, but you owe me a lot of money. I have a reputation to protect as a harsh but fair creditor.”
“I don’t believe you have any intention of letting me settle my debt. You enjoy having errand boys too much.”
“You have your uses,” Hua Cheng concedes.
Hua Cheng is just being cheeky, not even cruel on purpose, and if we recall, He Xuan was thinking about Hua Cheng in these exact terms early on… but this is hitting a sore spot at the moment, for sure.
Too quickly, and with too much vitriol, He Xuan hisses, “Uses that justify bombarding my communication array for a year? Don’t you have a husband to be doting on? Or worshipping? I’m sure it involves kissing his feet either way.”
Big talk for someone who, next chapter, is going to… you know what, nevermind.
“You don’t want to know what I do with His Highness’ feet,” Hua Cheng replies airily.
“So it was worth it, then? All your dutiful abstinence?”
Hua Cheng narrows his eyes, but before he can reply, He Xuan cuts him off. “I do wonder why you agreed in the first place. You must regret it now. Settling. You must have been desperate.”
He Xuan readies himself with sour glee for the cool veneer to dissolve. He’d like to see things finally fall apart. It’s not as if they last parted on particularly warm terms.
Hua Cheng is silent and stormy-faced, but the tone of his voice, when he finally speaks, is absent of smooth bravado. “I know you’ve been through a lot of shit. I know that. And I was curious what you were like underneath it all, when your guard was down.”
This scene was so difficult because I wanted Hua Cheng to tell the truth here, sort of. To admit that he had some level of personal investment in things, even if it was asymmetrical. It’s honest because deep down he wants them to have some form of intimacy again, even if it’s not physical. But it’s also to throw He Xuan off guard, and omits any of Hua Cheng’s own stake in it, instead making it all about meeting He Xuan’s needs, and it’s that exact framing which has been driving He Xuan mental this whole time.
He Xuan’s mind slows to a crawl. He digs his nails into his palm. Hua Cheng won’t look at him; both eyes of his nice-young-man’s disguise are fixed on the ember glow of the darkening sky.
“That was the first time. Then, after that, I guess I figured there was no harm. Seemed like you needed it.”
He Xuan is, for a short time, beyond words, and then—
“That’s what you’ve been telling yourself all these years? You were doing me a favour? I knew you were delusional, but this is impressive.”
Hua Cheng opens his mouth, but He Xuan doesn’t give him a chance to speak.
“Don’t expect me to believe you were moved to altruism on my account. I bet it was very nice to tell your prince that you’d kept yourself unspoiled goods. I’ve no doubt you enjoyed having a chew toy to relieve the boredom, since eight hundred years is a long time to spend with just one’s hand. It’s only natural to make use of the resources at your disposal.”
It’s not unlike when he was speaking with Xie Lian; He Xuan cannot seem to stop, which has never been a problem before. His consciousness has been a silent world since his revenge was achieved. He has no shells any longer, and his use of the imagination is limited without plans to be made or things to look forward to. He doesn’t know how to sit with the absence without imploding; he doesn’t know how to bear the crushing pressure in the void of himself. His purpose has been borne out, yet he remains resilient as ever, despite being not much more than vengeance’s afterbirth.
HX is one of those characters whose good and bad qualities aren’t very distinct.
“And you made it. Congratulations for keeping your pants on. You’re so devoted and self-sacrificing that you even went and died for him again. You must have just loved that. And now you’ve got everything you wanted, but something’s not quite right, is it? You won’t get out of my array whether or not I have any interest in speaking with you, so one wonders whether it’s not everything you dreamed of. Do you not know what to do with yourself if you’re no longer a martyr? Or is he just bad in bed—”
He Xuan had not run out of things to say, but is prevented from continuing by Hua Cheng smacking him backwards so hard that several ribs break and He Xuan finds himself blinking up from the bottom of a man-shaped crater.
The Huaxuan crater moment in canon cracks me up so I enjoyed getting to imply this is a recurring thing.
A loathsome silhouette casts him in shadow. “Are you done?”
He Xuan wipes the stream of blood from out of his nose with the back of his hand, silent but uncowed.
Hua Cheng grabs He Xuan’s shoulder and tugs him out of the hole, depositing him ungently on the earth, where He Xuan sways for balance.
He Xuan settles himself on his haunches, spits out a broken tooth, and says, in a measured tone, “Enlighten me.” He tilts his head. “Why didn’t you tell your prince the truth about me, if you were so worried about him getting caught in the middle?”
Hua Cheng sits back on his heels, in turn, and looks wry. “What good would it have done, at that point? Everything was already fucked. It’s not quite an admission of his own conflicting priorities and feelings, but it’s something. And I figured I’d made it clear enough to you already that there’d be consequences if anything happened to him.”
“Why did you think that would have worked? For all you knew, soon enough I wouldn’t remain to face the consequences.”
Hua Cheng gives him a pitying look. “You were the only one who thought you were going to be put to rest by all that.” He Xuan’s nostrils flare, and Hua Cheng laughs. “What, you think you’re the only one who can offer unsolicited advice?”
He Xuan is past ready for this to be over; he gets to his feet to find the nearest secluded patch of earth and draw a distance-shortening array, but before he can turn away, Hua Cheng looks up at him askance. “He wants to see you, you know.”
“Your husband can bother me himself.”
“That’s not who I mean,” Hua Cheng drawls. “You know who I mean.”
Hua Cheng poised to reenact Penny’s iconic tweet:
He Xuan’s flesh is as stone. He can feel his ribs steadily knitting themselves back together, yet he’s rarely felt just so dead.
Hua Cheng stands, and adds, “He nearly died, you know. Recently. I kind of figured you’d know, because I assumed based on your, ah, voyeuristic proclivities that you’d be keeping an eye on him—”
He Xuan leans in and hisses, “—As if that wasn’t for your benefit—” Way to deploy fake outrage in response to what is by far the least important part of that sentence, babe <3
“—But I mean, good for you. Old dogs can learn new tricks. I’m serious, though. He really did almost die. Gege has been helping him out some since then, and you-know-who won’t stop talking about how he wants to see you. To the point where Gege asked me if I’d track down your sorry ass.”
His mind is empty but for two questions: what happened to Shi Qingxuan, and how bad must it have been to make him want something as senseless as to see He Xuan? Hua Cheng may have surprised He Xuan with his persistence, but he’s never been normal, and perhaps temporary dissipation makes one sentimental. But Shi Qingxuan—some things cannot be come back from. He isn’t sure which of the questions will come out when he opens his mouth; however, Hua Cheng cuts him off.
“I thought he might have taken a blow to the head, because why would anyone want to talk to you when they’re at death’s door, not least him—no offense—but I didn’t ask.”
Hua Cheng passes He Xuan a crumpled piece of paper. He Xuan unfurls it reflexively, and quick glance shows an address in the Imperial City.
“Before you freak out, that’s all I agreed to do. I didn’t say I’d make you go to him. But I don’t know how much longer he’ll be there. Probably just a few more days.”
It’s unclear to He Xuan whether Hua Cheng means that Shi Qingxuan is getting ready to finish recuperating or to leave this world. He doesn’t ask for clarification.
“This is what you came for? To twist my arm into seeing that person?”
“I’m not twisting your arm into a damn thing.” Hua Cheng pauses, then sighs. “I’m wasting my breath, I realize, but…” Here Hua Cheng begins to look physically pained, “Friendship was a mistake” –Hua Cheng but grits out, “You did it, right? You evened it out? It’s done. Ma and Pa are going to stay just as dead whether or not you do what you want for once. This world is rotten, we both know that, ← the core of their connection, IMO! but either hurry up and kill yourself or live a little. This in-between thing is fucking annoying.”
“What do you know about what I want?”
“More than a little, I’d say.” Hua Cheng laughs, shakes his head a little ruefully, and kicks a rock, like the lackadaisical youth he plays at being. Only then does he meet He Xuan’s eyes. “Anyway. We’re done here. Don’t be a stranger. Or do, whatever, but at least find better places to hide.”
He Xuan is locked into inaction for several hours by the force of dread, before his mind suddenly makes itself up, and he makes for the Imperial City.
de-rom on tumblr draws a lot of my favourite He Xuan art, and these two pieces distilled the vibe I was going for here.
He finds the inn without trouble. It’s spacious and inviting. Hua Cheng is covering the bill, no doubt. He Xuan climbs the stairs, one foot over the other, and feels a disjunction between the hems of his long dark robes and the painted wood. He could have kept his earlier disguise, but what would be the point?
He Xuan approaches the door to the lodging with the softest of tread. He can overhear snippets of conversation through the panels: Xie Lian is saying something about being adrift in a boat for a month, and then Shi Qingxuan gasps theatrically—He Xuan still recognizes the way air sounds entering his lungs, it seems. He Xuan’s stomach flips, as if his presence has somehow caused this response, but then Shi Qingxuan laughs, and asks, “But, Your Highness, what did you eat?”
Xie Lian responds, modestly, “Oh, you know, I must have caught at least one fish, maybe two—but we have a visitor. Excuse me, please.”
He Xuan has a moment of silent panic, but before he can retreat, Xie Lian is opening the door.
He meets a pair of warm brown eyes. Xie Lian smiles with politely feigned surprise. “Lord Black Water. You got here at the perfect time. We were just about to have dinner.”
I got to do Xie Lian Nice Mode, and now it’s time for Xie Lian Bitch Mode.
He Xuan can’t see much of the room past Xie Lian’s shoulders, can’t make out Shi Qingxuan at all, but he can sense him, and—
“I’m not hungry.”
“That’s alright.” Xie Lian looks considering; not unfriendly, but wary—warier than he’d been the last time they spoke, though his despondency is gone. “Will my lord step out with me for a moment?”
Reluctantly, He Xuan follows Xie Lian down the hall, where Shi Qingxuan can no longer hear them.
“How much did San Lang tell you?”
“Little.” He Xuan aims for indifference. “He’s… asked for my presence.”
Xie Lian nods. He Xuan feels the room around him sway. When he was talking to Hua Cheng, He Xuan didn’t fully believe anything that was said. It’s different, hearing such things while meeting Xie Lian’s gently concerned gaze.
“Is he dying?”
Xie Lian quickly shakes his head. “He’s stable. I’m sure he’d like to tell you about it himself.”
He Xuan despises the relief that floods him as quickly and intensely as had the earlier dread.
Despite the gentleness of his bearing, Xie Lian has a pointed look on his face.
“I consider Lord Wind Master a dear friend.”
Something in He Xuan skitters at the force behind his eyes, but it doesn’t matter. He’s given way to Xie Lian enough as it is.
Xie Lian hesitates, looking as though each word is chosen with care. “He was very insistent that I ask San Lang to reach out to you.”
Imagining the conversation where SQX tries to convince XL to make the call is sooooo funny.
He Xuan remains wordless—he has nothing to say to that—and the two of them continue to make unforgiving eye contact, until Xie Lian adds, “He’s doing well, considering, but… he’s recovering. Any shocks to the system…” He says this very meaningfully. “Anything distressing… I don’t think that would be very good for him right now.”
“I understand the workings of mortal constitutions.”
Xie Lian gives him a crescent-eyed smile. “Of course, my lord is very knowledgeable.” When Xie Lian opens his eyes, however, the severity returns; he looks like he’d like to say more, but either cannot or will not.
After several more excruciating moments of silence, they exchange stiff nods, and then Xie Lian heads for the inn’s ground floor. He Xuan listens to the stairs creak.
He could leave. He Xuan has no reason to think that indulging Shi Qingxuan’s whim will accomplish anything beyond bringing both of them unnecessary agony. He made no promises, to Hua Cheng or Xie Lian or anyone else. He could turn around and submerge himself in the depths for another year or two, and then—
He Xuan registers the scuffing sound of a door sliding in its tracks in the hallway behind him, and turns around before he hears the voice.
“He-gongzi?”
Shi Qingxuan has stuck his head out of the doorway, into the hall. His skin blanches when their eyes meet, but he doesn’t look away. Shi Qingxuan licks his bottom lip and adds, as quiet and measured as He Xuan has ever heard him, “There’s food. I made sure that we got a lot, though I wasn’t sure if you were coming. Crimson Rain’s paying for it all, so…” He trails off, looking embarrassed for… something. He Xuan cannot fathom what.
He grinds his teeth, says, “I said I’m not hungry,” and sweeps past Shi Qingxuan into the room.
chapter eight
After Shi Qingxuan slides the door behind He Xuan, the first thing he asks is, “Have you been well?”
Being a ghost means that things are fundamentally not well. At least, this is what He Xuan would have said three years ago, before having to witness Hua Cheng’s nauseating domestic bliss.
“I have nothing to say to you,” he manages, by way of reply.
“Ah, alright, then.”
Shi Qingxuan’s skin is burnished from the sun, and there are the beginnings of crow’s feet near the corners of his eyes. Smile lines. They are topped by naturally elegant eyebrows. His cheeks are more sunken than plump, and the lips of his insouciant mouth are chapped. He’s much tidier in appearance than He Xuan last saw him—clearly he’s bathed recently—but at close range, the lingering signs of physical deprivation are disturbing. Shi Qingxuan ought to be fat and lustrous. In the first draft, that line went, “…like a little otter.” I regret taking it out. He is miserably lovely regardless.
Shi Qingxuan starts up again: “I guess I figured we may as well catch up, now that we have the chance. And I am, um, interested. In how you’ve been.”
“Little has changed.”
“Are you still… on your island?”
“I’ve relocated.” He Xuan would rather not lay his head down somewhere every official in heaven can find him, even if none of them have seemed interested in causing him personal trouble. (They have had other concerns.)
Shi Qingxuan seizes upon the admission with desperate fervour. “Oh? Is your new place… I mean, I’m sure it’s very… impressive. No doubt. But do you like it?”
“Why would I make my own lair somewhere I didn’t like?”
He feels like a dolt for implying there’s anything sentimental about his choice of domain. It also feels odd to refer to his lair in such terms to Shi Qingxuan, though he doesn’t know why. It’s not as though Shi Qingxuan doesn’t already know what he is.
It’s all well and good to be a supervillain until you get self-conscious about it in front of your crush :/
“Ah, right.”
He Xuan could ask what Shi Qingxuan has been doing since they parted, but he already knows the broad strokes; he has not succeeded at staying entirely away, though he has kept his distance. Glimpses of Shi Qingxuan’s profile from afar, that sort of thing, as confirmation that he’s surviving. He Xuan’s been strict with himself not to pry further, but he’s seen enough to know that Shi Qingxuan has been living an exceedingly boring and desperate life. He Xuan would despair if, after all this, Shi Qingxuan somehow achieved his former prosperity, but what He Xuan would rather see is a question he cannot answer.
I was having a lot of trouble with the pacing for this section until I halved the originally drafted dialogue and cranked up He Xuan’s “desperation and insanity” knob. It’s really annoying that killing your darlings works.
He Xuan hasn’t moved from where he first came to stand upon entering the room. “Don’t bother asking how to make anything up to me. My forgiveness is not available to you.”
Shi Qingxuan blanches, and turns away to sit by the table. He brings his hands together in his lap and murmurs, “Alright.”
He Xuan feels like a child’s drawing of an evil-doer, an ill omen in the shape of a man. He feels smeared at the edges of himself. Why did he travel all this way? To menace a person whom any stranger could tell neither means him harm nor is capable of doing him any?
The last time they stood before one another in their own forms, Shi Qingxuan was in the throes of mortal terror at the sight of He Xuan’s face. Shi Qingxuan still watches him warily, but his manner is less threatened than He Xuan would have imagined. He should have anticipated it. Shi Qingxuan is brave even when he’s afraid.
“He-gongzi… You said you weren’t hungry, but there’s tea.” Shi Qingxuan pours a cup, and looks up at He Xuan expectantly. Though he’s using his left hand to pour and just steadying the pot with his right, the stream is mostly even. While He Xuan was sleeping, Shi Qingxuan was practicing how to live.
Reluctantly, He Xuan takes the seat opposite Shi Qingxuan, and takes the offered cup. He doesn’t drink, just holds it in his hand, distantly registering its warmth. “Don’t call me that.”
Shi Qingxuan glances across the table. His gaze skitters around He Xuan’s face, just shy of making eye contact. “Lord Black Water? Or do you prefer being called Ship-Sinking Black Water every time?”
The question annoys him, but he doesn’t know what to suggest instead, so he ignores it.
“What happened to you?”
From the way he’d been summoned here, he’d expected something other than Shi Qingxuan appearing only marginally more frail than usual.
A burst of painfully earnest feeling gleams through Shi Qingxuan’s expression, though he quickly subdues himself. “Right. Ah, I’m not sure where to start. So much has happened, though I guess you know most of it. About the array, and all that. I even heard you came by for that party at Puqi Shrine—is that true? I didn’t see you there.
”But yeah, how I got here. Well, I’ve been staying at the temple the last while, and that’s been working out pretty well for everyone. Or, it was. But it’s been a really cold winter, way worse than usual.“
He Xuan had only been vaguely conscious of the fact it was wintertime. He’s not spent much time in the mortal world of late.
AKA handwaving my intra-fic continuity struggles, lmfao.
”I don’t think anyone knows exactly what happened, but there were a lot of fires going indoors without proper chimneys, and people were sleeping up too close. I just woke up and knew that something was really wrong, and the room was brighter than it should be, and it was already too late to do much.“
Shi Qingxuan glances his way, but He Xuan says nothing, so he goes on. ”Everyone was in a panic, stumbling around, and it was still hard to see, it was so smoky, so there was just a lot of confusion… everyone wanted to grab their things, since they don’t have much, you know? But we didn’t have that kind of time, so I was doing my best to shoo people out, and then to help carry the ones who can’t walk, but my leg was pretty sore from the cold…“
”That was reckless, even for you.“
Shi Qingxuan replies, in a patient tone, ”Well, there were a lot of old people there.“
”You’re ancient.“
”Only in a way of speaking.“
”How lucky those beggars are, to have such a selfless hero among them.“
”I’m lucky to have them, too. I know how things look, but I’ve really been getting by pretty well, apart from all this. Anyway, everyone got out, but the place did burn right down, and I got pretty sick from all the smoke. I don’t really remember that part. I was in and out for a while. But of course all my friends there remembered the Crown Prince ever since they went to the shrine for their chicken soup. So they sent out some prayers, and I probably would have managed otherwise, but I guess he’s got spiritual power to spare these days, and it’s been nice to rest up somewhere comfortable.“
Shi Qingxuan swallows, and fidgets with a pair of chopsticks on the table. ”And then, well… While I was still sick, I was thinking a lot about… about you.
“I was tossing and turning, and I kept thinking that I wanted to see you one more time. If I… if I died without getting to speak to you again, I would’ve regretted it. By the time I was better, I’d made up my mind. So I asked His Highness to pass on the message, and now… you’re here.”
Somewhat wildly, He Xuan says, “I won’t apologize.”
Shi Qingxuan laughs. It’s raspy, but still has the merry quality of pealing bells, despite the somber look on his face. “Oh, no, no. I wouldn’t… I understand why you did it. I’m not upset with you. We… we earned it.”
He Xuan’s throat tightens. The flesh around his eyes hurts. “Yes. You did.”
“So there’s nothing to apologize for.”
“Indeed.”
“Well, ah, I’m glad we agree.”
I wanted this conversation, from Shi Qingxuan’s end, to consist of things that are guaranteed to make He Xuan crazy, and also showcase what it is he loves about them.
He Xuan tilts his head. He ought to protest, as the idea that they agree on anything is absurd. “You’ve done enough, haven’t you? Made a show of being irreproachable? Yet you make a production out of your humility before me. Your arrogance is impressive.”
A furrow forms between Shi Qingxuan’s brows, and he starts to say, “That’s not—” before cutting himself off. He Xuan hates it. It seems he can’t stand to see Shi Qingxuan deferential.
“Go on. I came all this way for you to speak to me, so speak.”
“I don’t want anything from you. Just to see you.”
“Now you have. I hope it satisfies.” His hands are shaking, and it fills him with a black fury. “Have you any other requests, or may I be on my way?”
“I… no. I guess that’s all.”
This answer is more irritating than anything yet.
“Really? There’s nothing at all you want? Nothing you miss, out of all that I took from you?”
“It’s really not so bad, mortal life,” protests Shi Qingxuan, which does not answer the question.
“You sound so nonchalant.” He Xuan sets down his untouched cup, and leans across the table. “I stripped you of your spiritual powers. The loss of your freedom is nothing to you?”
A muscle in Shi Qingxuan’s jaw twinges, providing some dull satisfaction. “There’s no point dwelling on things like that.”
He Xuan approximates a laugh. “You expect me to believe you don’t miss changing form?”
So, if we read He Xuan as having a highly controlled relationship to his “true form,” which is about deprivation, then taking on a female form is a method to side-step that self-control as well as, itself, a vehicle for pleasure—not merely sexual pleasure but a more encompassing and quieter pleasure. Especially postcanon I imagine he would feel insane about this, so why not take it out on Shi Qingxuan, like always???
“I don’t know what you want me to say.”
Shi Qingxuan’s eyes follow He Xuan as he rises, circles the table, and stands above him.
“I’ll lend you the power. If you’re really content with this life, tell me you wouldn’t do it again. Prove me wrong.”
He Xuan stands between Shi Qingxuan and the lantern, and his presence pitches Shi Qingxuan into dimmer light. Shi Qingxuan’s eyes are still locked on his. No longer skittering away to safety. “Why would you do that?”
“It’s not enough to remind you of what I took from you? Of what you are—a selfish creature, not a saint?”
To overexplain myself beyond all limits: He Xuan’s traumas, and in particular the self-undoing-and-reconstituting experience of prison, cause him to begin thinking of himself as something other than human even before he dies. Incarceration is a dehumanization event. He Xuan isn’t human anymore, but neither are other people; he sees himself as, on the one hand, just one of the animals, and is trying to master the rules of the game so that he can be elevated above everyone he’s competing with in this Hobbesian nightmare world.
On the other hand, he retains this hard-cultivated rationality and intellect and willpower, and he considers this the thing that elevates him above the rest of the rabble, that makes him superior, despite the degradation and suffering he’s experienced—he’s persevered through those things without completely losing his mind, which has always been his greatest strength. And the proof of that self-discipline is the way he’s subjugated and distanced himself from his physical form, his desires, his connection to the body as anything but void and hunger, anything that could become a distraction from his Purpose.
That self-image is necessary to prevent disintegration, especially with all of the spirits and false selves jostling inside him. The body is something that he’s formed an almost antagonistic relationship to, because he’s terrified of losing control and because to be an embodied person is just too painful—it’s the marker of continuity between the self he once was and the self he is now, but since his whole existence is predicated on righting wrongs from the past, maintaining that continuity is both awful and crucial. Not to mention the way it’s tied into filial piety and the need to honour his parents. But, again, those are conceptual things, those are ideas. Anything that brings him back into the body, into sensuality, being really engaged with the material world, having hopes and wishes and longings, it threatens the entire structure, because to live is to be changed. You can either be the cryo-frozen effigy of your parents’ dutiful son, or you can be a creature that continues to learn and grow and play and fuck and express itself etc.
He Xuan’s ghost existence is a means to an end, whereas to Hua Cheng it’s another form of living, one that can have its perks and upsides if you let it. The rest of the fic after this point is about He Xuan standing at the threshold of making the same choice, and trying really really hard to keep from doing so.
Shi Qingxuan’s eyes are wide, wary, but he meets He Xuan’s gaze. This is what he looks like when he’s being brave.
On the way to the inn, He Xuan wore a sufficiently human guise to not attract unwanted attention, but the vestiges of life have ebbed away. He takes Shi Qingxuan’s chin between finger and thumb, and his sharp nails indent soft skin. Shi Qingxuan flushes, and He Xuan wants to laugh. Does Shi Qingxuan not know the way he’s left He Xuan changed? The things he’s made He Xuan want?
The moment feels like a sordid dream. He Xuan tore through Shi Qingxuan’s brother’s neck with this hand. Nothing has made sense in years, including their coming to face one another again, here, in the ragged tail of their long, braided existence. Shi Qingxuan is mortal. He Xuan is fading, or ought to be. They are in their twilight hour.
This is all so overwritten but WHAT AM I SUPPOSED TO DO
He Xuan tips Shi Qingxuan’s face upwards, waiting for him to flinch. Instead, Shi Qingxuan’s eyes flick down to He Xuan’s mouth.
Desire, like a troublesome guest, returns uninvited.
Shi Qingxuan gasps and clutches He Xuan’s shoulder as warm lips meet cold ones. To push him away or keep himself steady, He Xuan cannot tell. He gasps a second time as He Xuan pushes a current of roiling, resentful qi through the place where they meet. Cautiously, as not to put Shi Qingxuan’s fragile mortal body into shock. Shi Qingxuan tightens his grip and takes it in, until He Xuan pulls himself back, as if for air.
He grasps Shi Qingxuan’s shoulder and tugs him standing. Walks him back to the nearest wall. He Xuan is ashamed of himself, and it does not matter. He draws closer, presses him against the nearest wall, and takes his lips again.
The gender-changing-kiss stuff was among the earliest material I came up with, and I started to worry it was too silly and cheesy, but people seemed to like it?
Gradually the thing changes in essence, and where it once was an instrument of achieving an end, it becomes a kiss. A deep kiss, growing deeper by the moment. Shi Qingxuan’s mouth makes furtive, fumbling movements against He Xuan’s lips. His skin is scented faintly of smoke and stale sweat, and would be easily ruptured under He Xuan’s teeth. He holds Shi Qingxuan’s jaw between his palms and pours himself in.
Shi Qingxuan’s body begins to shift under He Xuan’s hands, and He Xuan follows it, mirroring the changes. As Shi Qingxuan’s face gets softer and chest presses more snugly into the meagre space between the two of them, the stuff that is He Xuan shimmers and contracts, shivers and expands. It’s luxuriant to let go of himself this way, as a snake sheds a skin. Something sleeker comes slithering into the air: no more alive than before, but capable of relishing the elegant composure of the dead. She might resemble something other than a ghastly testament to a crime, a corpse suspended before its burning or burial. He Xuan made this body to be beautiful.
Eventually, Shi Qingxuan must breathe.
After breaking the kiss, Shi Qingxuan’s chest rises and falls, pressing against He Xuan insistently. He Xuan backs away, lest she lose the remainder of her self-control. Shi Qingxuan leans back against the wall and swallows thickly before pulling her knees together and patting at her clothes, trying for respectability.
He Xuan will not be the Earth Master again, no matter the circumstance, yet the resemblances to Ming Yi’s female aspect are obvious. That form was formed with one wish in mind: for Shi Qingxuan to look at her. This one has a different history, but it’s close enough. Shi Qingxuan still wins. Shi Qingxuan always wins.
Shi Qingxuan’s tongue darts out to moisten her bottom lip, and she blurts, “I thought about doing that so many times, but I was too afraid.”
“You’re not afraid now?”
Shi Qingxuan laughs. “I don’t know what I am.”
She waits for Shi Qingxuan to say more, but she doesn’t. He Xuan lifts her hands to her own hair with the intention of letting it down, in hopes that will signal her hunger for crude things that she wants only slightly more than she wants not to have to ask for them. When Shi Qingxuan sees her, she steps closer and mumbles, “Here, let me.”
I usually hew strictly to the canon detail that Ming Yi’s female form has her hair all down, because it’s charming to me, but I strayed from it here because I wanted the hair-taking-down come-on so bad.
He Xuan stays very still. She can feel the soft puff of Shi Qingxuan’s breath against the back of her neck.
Shi Qingxuan’s left hand finds the guan and begins to pull it free. “I used to think about doing this, too.” All of He Xuan’s hair falls loose at once, covering her shoulders, burying Shi Qingxuan’s arm. Shi Qingxuan’s fingers twine at the roots, combing gently through the strands for snarls. “I always really loved your hair. I used to daydream about washing it for you, and combing it, and… well, you know.”
“Do I?”
Shi Qingxuan laughs again, this time more frantically. “I thought I was pretty obvious.”
“You were.” He Xuan’s eyes are unfocused. She stares at a bit of nothing on the floor.
Shi Qingxuan licks her bottom lip—He Xuan can hear it, hear her tongue—and replies, “I didn’t try to hide it. I wanted you to notice. I wanted you to… show me what you really wanted. I thought I knew what you wanted, I mean. Pretty stupid of me.”
He Xuan considers saying, I wanted you so badly it made me a beast. And beyond anything she could have done to Shi Qingxuan’s body, she had always been terrified of what Shi Qingxuan could do to her; what she could make He Xuan feel, or let go of.
Even now, part of He Xuan recoils. Hasn’t she done enough? Will she ever be satisfied here? Does she need to eat Shi Qingxuan up, too?
Your pure heart, your white light / and I should be put to death for ever being cruel to you / […] come closer now and step right into / the wide mouth, the sharp teeth of the one you love !!!!!!!!!
Shi Qingxuan is running out of tangles. If she removes her hands from He Xuan’s hair, He Xuan is going to begin smashing ceramics.
“And now?”
Shi Qingxuan hesitates, and then replies with admirable equanimity, “He-gongzi, are you trying to tell me you want to go to bed with me?”
“Don’t call me that.”
“Ah… Scholar He?”
The only people who call He Xuan by that name are townsfolk at a parade and Hua Cheng when he’s mocking her. The silence stretches until Shi Qingxuan adds, “I’m sorry. That wasn’t… I shouldn’t have—”
He Xuan turns around, dislodging Shi Qingxuan’s hand from her hair. It hovers in the air until He Xuan seizes her wrist, yanks her closer, and kisses Shi Qingxuan without any pretext.
I TELL YOU NOW WHAT FOR SO LONG I DID NOT SAY: / THAT IF I HAVE NO RIGHT TO WANT YOU, I WANT YOU ANYWAY
Julie Byrne’s record The Greater Wings was released while I was in the thick of it with this fic. Byrne’s longtime musical collaborator and friend Eric Littmann died, at 31, during the making of the record. It makes perfect sense, because grief is so palpable in the music, even as it’s preoccupied with the business of living. These are themes to which I always return, and I attribute the fact I was soaking in this album’s creative influence for a large part of how this story reached a more optimistic conclusion than I originally planned.
Shi Qingxuan jolts and makes a sound of stifled surprise—how can this still be a shock? Hasn’t He Xuan made her hunger very plain?—before she pulls her wrist free of He Xuan’s grip. Rather than pulling away, her left palm flies to He Xuan’s shoulders while the other alights on her waist.
He Xuan takes Shi Qingxuan’s lower lip between her teeth, and is terribly aware of its softness, of how simply she could tear into the flesh. She releases Shi Qingxuan before she, He Xuan, can have any more compelling ideas.
As one, they pause. Both of their mouths are ajar; Shi Qingxuan is panting, while He Xuan is still. Their faces are so near to one another their noses brush.
Shi Qingxuan scrunches her eyes shut and leans in. She presses light, elusive, desperate kisses over He Xuan’s mouth, her cheek, her chin. He Xuan’s head is spinning. Their breasts, thighs, hips push against one another, flesh on flesh.
He Xuan cups the back of Shi Qingxuan’s skull and pulls her back to a position from which He Xuan can lick inside her mouth. Shi Qingxuan permits herself to be thus invaded by her brother’s executioner.
I worried that everything happening here would just read as sloppy pacing—which is still possible—but I tried to demonstrate that the characters are rushing into things at a pace they really shouldn’t be going. They are trying to avoid confronting their feelings by having fucked up sex instead, the poor dears.
They sway in place as the embrace swells and peaks in intensity. Shi Qingxuan keeps tucking back a strand of hair that slides out from behind He Xuan’s ear each time she moves. It’s that which finally provokes He Xuan to walk Shi Qingxuan backwards to the bed; she cannot bear the heedless tenderness much longer.
Shi Qingxuan rosy-cheeked, eyes shining, and disheveled would make an image of soiled virtue even were there not an evil spirit knelt over her prone form. Said evil spirit wishes she knew whether Shi Qingxuan is experienced; it was never something He Xuan could determine with confidence. The idea of He Xuan being Shi Qingxuan’s first, after everything, is wretched, not least because some part of He Xuan finds it exciting.
I didn’t go into it because I wanted to keep us in the now, but I wrote this thinking of resonances with what happened to He Xuan’s sister and fiancee leading He Xuan to feel guilty for being turned on by the prospect of (theoretically) deflowering Shi Qingxuan. I don’t think it’s really as sordid as all that—there’s a possessive register, but He Xuan also just wants to feel special in the way she relates to Shi Qingxuan. This is He Xuan’s first time, too, in some senses. She’d prefer them to be on equal footing.
Regardless of her level of actual knowledge, Shi Qingxuan has always leapt before she looked, and she fumbles for He Xuan’s belt. He Xuan stays Shi Qingxuan’s hand, and says, with as much tight authority as she can summon, “I want to see you.”
Shi Qingxuan looks disappointed, but He Xuan’s current form is a liability. She knows its tendencies, knows how easily it can be reduced to something she shudders to imagine Shi Qingxuan observing: all He Xuan’s remaining self-mastery washed away by her wildness to be glutted on touch, filled to saturation, as though there’s nothing broken in her that keeps satiety ever out of reach.
”I can’t let her know I’m a slut when I’m a girl :(“
When He Xuan pulls Shi Qingxuan’s shirt open enough to suck on her bare shoulder, Shi Qingxuan nearly sobs. It sounds painful, caught in her throat.
He Xuan slides the sleeves further down Shi Qingxuan’s arms, and drops the shirt over the side of the bed. Shi Qingxuan’s flimsy human body is more striking than the heavens’ grandest sights. The curvature of her armpits is uniquely charming. There is a mole beneath her collarbone that He Xuan wants to bite off and chew. Her breasts are—
”Yes, He Xuan would be a pit gay” — Verity
If she were to taste Shi Qingxuan’s breasts, He Xuan cannot imagine she could move on from them easily, and she feels an inexplicable sense of urgency, like at any moment Shi Qingxuan will slip away. He Xuan places a splayed hand in the valley of Shi Qingxuan’s chest and drags her palm lower, across Shi Qingxuan’s stomach. Shi Qingxuan’s frame sags when He Xuan makes her way down her abdomen to the waistband of her trousers, arching into the touch. She shifts her hips to assist He Xuan in disrobing her completely. He Xuan doesn’t look at what’s revealed for more than a moment, lest she salivate like a dog.
He Xuan pauses over Shi Qingxuan’s nude form, struck by indecision.
There is little that He Xuan despises more than to feel incompetent, but she doesn’t know how to pleasure a woman. Forays with that red bastard didn’t provide her with much in the way of transferable skills, and she is adrift in her own naivete. If her innocence was to be lost, couldn’t she have lost it forever?
He Xuan used to imagine how he would fumble to extract Miao’er from her bridal gown with hands shaky from toasting wine, and he’d hope that if he wasn’t able to make her sigh, he could at least make her laugh.
The only direct reference to Miao’er in the story, I believe. I don’t see HX as dwelling on specific memories of the past so much as using memory as a kind of inchoate fuel for resentment, so it’s notable when something as specific and tender as this manages to surface through the compartmentalization.
“What are you thinking about?”
Shi Qingxuan squirms, restless in her nakedness, and He Xuan grinds her teeth. Has He Xuan ever felt differently while waiting for someone to touch her, even when she had much less to fear from the person doing the touching?
He Xuan kneels by the edge of the bed. She has never given herself up this way of her own will, and would refuse to do so if asked, but Shi Qingxuan may not wish to be loomed over, and could not be blamed for this.
In need of a purpose and for lack of a better idea, she catches Shi Qingxuan’s left foot in her right hand. There’s not much of her extending off of the mattress, and this is the closest part He Xuan can reach.
I’m just gonna c&p my rant on Mastodon about this: “OK so the thing is. I've now written multiple longfics that manifested 11th hour foot kink content. My complaints about having to write these scenes are sincere, and it's neither b/c of an "eww feet" judginess or b/c I'm overcompensating for a foot kink I'm in denial about. It's that the part of the scenes that are hot to me are not about the actual feet, which are neutral to negative to me because I actually find bare feet kind of weird and offputting. The appeal to me is the humiliation (everyone gasping in fake surprise) involved wrt the person kneeling or otherwise in some kind of subservient position at the other person's feet, especially if the person at the feet is quite prideful and/or uptight. Now they've lowered themself to worshipping someone else's literal feet, and it's so debasing while also very intimate (esp if their feet are bare vs. shorn) and carries religious connotations in certain cultures etc.
As a tableau it's dense with symbolic meaning... and also shame/humiliation/service type stuff that is like my id on a platter. What you'll notice is that this is pretty much all about the psychosexual valences surrounding the foot worship and not about the actual feet. The writing of the actual feet is so difficult to me because I don't intuitively understand what is sexy about feet qua feet. And I could just write it without dwelling on the feet, but especially if it's from the POV of the character doing the foot worship, THEY ARE REALLY THINKING A LOT ABOUT AND ATTENTIVE TO... THOSE FEET. IN THIS MOMENT. & I feel like it'd just read like being coy and squeamish because foot fetishists are a common punchline. If I'm going there it should at least be sexy to the foot kink havers??? Otherwise what's the point”
Shi Qingxuan squirms, lightly ticklish, as He Xuan strokes her thumb experimentally across the bottom of her foot. He Xuan notes the slopes and ridges of her flesh, the callouses and whorls.
The heavy layers of He Xuan’s robes rustle as she leans forward, and hair falls across her shoulder as she succumbs to the impulse to drag her mouth across the thin layer of skin covering the bones and blueish veins of her upper foot. Shi Qingxuan breathes heavily, and in the corner of He Xuan’s vision, her hand curls in the sheets.
The way that He Xuan must turn her head in order to trace her tongue over the inside of Shi Qingxuan’s ankle is inexplicably obscene. The skin is thin here, too.
OK. My specific rationale for the feet here: the tableau this moment leads up to is The Moment for which this entire fic is scaffolding. I needed He Xuan on her knees, fully clothed, doing something worshipful to Shi Qingxuan that is undeniably sexual, but without SQX’s genitals getting involved, because when they do get involved, it crosses a line and everything grinds to a halt. I could have had her touching SQX’s tits, or sucking her fingers, but both on a postural and a kink level, feet just felt like… the obvious choice. There’s a distance to it; you’re as far from someone’s face as you can be while still touching their body. It’s also distinct from the kinds of sexual acts that He Xuan associates with violation.
She’d like to wash Shi Qingxuan’s feet, He Xuan realizes; not because they’re dirty—they’re quite clean—but because her soles are still chapped and rough from poor shoes and hard living. She would like to soak Shi Qingxuan’s feet in fragrant water and rub at her toughened skin with a stone. He Xuan Jesus Christ moment. Kiddinggg! She wouldn’t be able to do it if Shi Qingxuan were to watch; she hates what Shi Qingxuan would think of what she saw.
This act may appear similar, but what she is doing is neither servile nor altruistic. This is the demon they call Black Water Sinking Ships. This is He Xuan taking what she wants. She closes her eyes and presses her cheek into the curve of Shi Qingxuan’s foot, just to feel the warmth of her skin. Shi Qingxuan’s leg trembles in her grasp.
He Xuan lifts her face just enough to brush her lips over the expanse of Shi Qingxuan’s sole, not so much kissing as charting a map with an organ more sensitive than her fingertips. She grazes the pads of Shi Qingxuan’s toes with her teeth—doesn’t bite down, despite the impulse—and mouths back to the inner arches. It takes her aback how delicate Shi Qingxuan is here, even surrounded by roughness. She presses long, sucking kisses into the softness of her flesh, and Shi Qingxuan gives a broken moan. He Xuan is not being self-aggrandizing; there is simply no other word for the sound. A shuddering wave of arousal flows down through her body from the top of her head.
She presses forward. Her advancing shoulders widen Shi Qingxuan’s spread thighs, and He Xuan’s lips travel up along the swell of her calf. Along the way, she sucks Shi Qingxuan’s flesh and holds it in her mouth, savouring it, before letting it drag its way back out past her teeth. Dark splotches remain on Shi Qingxuan’s skin, bruised from the suction of He Xuan’s lips and the press of her incisors.
She wraps a splay-fingered hand around the soft underside of Shi Qingxuan’s knee, ready to lever it upwards for better access to her thighs, and glances up to meet Shi Qingxuan’s eyes. Wide, somewhat petrified.
He Xuan smells it before she sees the proof of it, and her mouth wells up with saliva: Shi Qingxuan’s cunt is very wet, wetter than He Xuan had realized a person could get. It drips down onto the sheets.
She lowers her tongue to Shi Qingxuan’s inner thigh, and laps it up. Shi Qingxuan’s juices taste heady and lightly sour.
V. basic of me, but I wanted the vibes of He Xuan licking the vaginal fluid to feel vampiric.
A hand alights on He Xuan’s shoulder. Shi Qingxuan gasps and twists. This writhing would enflame any sane person, but He Xuan finds that she wants Shi Qingxuan limp. Softened for her. Every time her touch causes Shi Qingxuan to relax rather than stiffen up, He Xuan would like to plead, Let me have you like this. Let me have you melting in my mouth forever.
Hints of Shi Qingxuan’s inner labia are visible, warm brown and glistening. He Xuan’s upper thighs fill with a hot ache. She needs to feel Shi Qingxuan everywhere: the taste of her on He Xuan’s bottom lip, the heat of her on He Xuan’s tongue, the soft scratch of her curls on He Xuan’s cheek.
She has kissed her folds, just shy of where the rim of Shi Qingxuan’s cunt is hidden away, when Shi Qingxuan freezes. He Xuan senses the sudden tension in her frame, but Shi Qingxuan says nothing. After a pause, He Xuan nudges a little higher, gently nosing a path toward Shi Qingxuan’s clitoris. There’s a familiar peal of shrill laughter, and a stone sinks in her gut.
“I’m sorry, but I can’t—I don’t think I can do this.”
He Xuan looks up, glimpses the stricken look on Shi Qingxuan’s face, and wants to jump out of the window.
She does not. She releases Shi Qingxuan’s legs, wipes her chin with the back of her hand, and looks down at her lap. Keeps her face ruthlessly blank, or tries to.
Out of her sight, Shi Qingxuan whispers, “I feel so mixed up.”
He Xuan stares at her own balled fists. She can feel the silk of her own trousers sticking, soaked, to the skin between her legs, and it indicts her.
This is it! This is the moment!
Ages, and I mean ages, ago, I was looking at this fanart, which I had as my phone background for a million years because I love it so much, and experienced an alchemical moment—the colours and flow and expressiveness, and how it looks like He Xuan’s clothes/form, as well as her fishy companion, eddy and melt away into the swirling linework like they’re dissolving into the water, or maybe this is a dreamscape… He Xuan looks very melancholy, and I wondered what conditions would need to be in place for this image of He Xuan to be written about: fully clothed, gaunt, haunted, sick with desire and with herself, brought to a state of abjection by shame and love and the consequences of her own violence.
During periods of consciousness, she has continued to masturbate to thoughts of Shi Qingxuan. He Xuan often entertains fantasies of earlier times, moments where they could have reached out and touched one another, but also imagines the two of them as the people they are now. She imagines finding the words to tell Shi Qingxuan exactly what it is she still wants, despite all that’s happened, and then imagines Shi Qingxuan shying away in fear and disgust. There is a sick pleasure to being seen for what she is and judged utterly unpalatable.
At least in theory. All she feels now is perverse and gnarled up, sitting with the breadth of her failures.
One of the other major inspirations for writing this fic was… a thread on FFA. I don’t remember the subthread prompt but people were tossing around scenarios and the juxtaposition of these two comments did something to me. I posted the first chapter less than a month later.
He Xuan once thought that she liked the sight of Shi Qingxuan afraid. She realizes that what she liked was being the object of Shi Qingxuan’s full attention. Having her silhouette fill that gleaming eye. To have that available to her, without fear being the cost—He Xuan should have appreciated it while she could.
In the edge of He Xuan’s vision, Shi Qingxuan’s hand comes faltering closer.
“Are you alright?” Shi Qingxuan ventures. When He Xuan looks up, she meets a warm brown gaze and a scrunched brow.
“Why would I not be alright,” He Xuan asks tonelessly.
She takes Shi Qingxuan in. Her naked loveliness, the flushes and finger-streak marks on her flesh. A sight that moments ago made He Xuan lightheaded with desire and now leaves her queasy. This is the trouble with the things that bodies do to each other. The form in ecstasy, in anguish—it all looks so very similar.
“Well… I don’t know. You looked like you’d gone away somewhere. Are you here?”
He Xuan promised herself a long time ago to never again beg, and neither to apologize. She stays silent, as she has never come so close to doing either.
Shi Qingxuan bites her lip, and says, “Would you pass me my clothes? Please?”
He Xuan’s stomach twists at the caution in her tone, but she reaches for the discarded garments littering the floor around her. Withholding them from Shi Qingxuan, just out of reach, He Xuan’s voice cracks as she speaks. “Since when do you say please?”
Shi Qingxuan blinks, and as He Xuan hands over her threadbare clothing, Shi Qingxuan shakily laughs. After they slip through He Xuan’s fingers, He Xuan adds, “It’s a bit late now to pretend you weren’t spoiled.”
If Shi Qingxuan starts apologizing again she doesn’t know what she’ll do—He Xuan is so sick of the word “sorry” in her mouth; it’s never satisfied He Xuan before, and she doubts it will start now—but Shi Qingxuan smiles lopsidedly, though she also looks as though she might start to cry. Her eyes are glistening in that way.
Shi Qingxuan clutches her rumpled clothes to her chest, but doesn’t move to actually put them on. “Will you close your eyes? I’ll say when I’m done.”
He Xuan stares at her a moment longer, and sees nothing in Shi Qingxuan’s face to indicate that the request is anything but sincere.
She doesn’t close her eyes, but she looks away, and focuses on the murmuring of fabric and the sense of motion in the air. She would prefer to no longer be on her knees. She remains where she is, until Shi Qingxuan says, “I’m done now. You can look.”
He Xuan looks up to see Shi Qingxuan, dressed and returned to his own mortal body as before, though more rumpled, and still quite flushed. There’s a soft rustling in He Xuan’s chest, like the shutting of a book’s cover.
She ought to return to her true form as well. She doesn’t know why she hasn’t yet. She is still brimming with swollen feeling, and finds it torturous.
“Will you come up here?”
She ought to leave.
Shi Qingxuan scoots back on the bed, and curls an arm around one knee. The expression he directs at He Xuan is full of nervous hope.
He Xuan rises, sits on the bed an arm’s length from Shi Qingxuan, and stares resolutely at the wall.
Shi Qingxuan ventures, “You can stay like this, even if I’m not. I like it for you.”
She scoffs. “I know.” She bites back the urge to remind Shi Qingxuan that He Xuan doesn’t need his permission for anything; quite the opposite.
“I do miss it. And I’m grateful, to be given the chance,” Shi Qingxuan says, almost apologetically. “But I just…”
A number of phrases could complete that statement: all reasonable, by Shi Qingxuan’s standards, and none of which she wants to hear. A sideways glance reveals that Shi Qingxuan is wiping away tears with the back of his wrist.
“You know, when I used to change form, that was the most like myself I’ve ever felt. I think I was hoping for a bit of that now, but it’s… it reminds me of a lot of things. I just live a different life now.” Shi Qingxuan adds, in a convincing impression of being chipper, “This body isn’t so bad, but I like it more when it’s the only one I’ve got. It’s harder to do that when I’m borrowing things that aren’t really mine.”
Shi Qingxuan had always been, of the two of them, the one who cared more about changing her appearance. How could it have come to this—He Xuan reluctant to leave her woman’s guise, and Shi Qingxuan gracefully declining the opportunity to enjoy his own? He Xuan is lost for words, beyond a plaintive, idiotic voice in her head that says, Will you just take it? I don’t have anything else to give you.
I didn’t want this fic to feel like He Xuan looking back on life after death from some later point, but for the reader to be tagging along with their consciousness in the present moment. The story is about being a ghost as a sort of enforced presentism—not so much being suspended in the past as being a thing from the past suspended in the present. Being stuck with He Xuan, the way that He Xuan is stuck with themself.
Shi Qingxuan’s face is still puffy when he turns to He Xuan, but his eyes are clear. “I should say the things I wanted to say when I asked you to come.”
He Xuan recalls every time she imagined humiliating Shi Wudu with the power of eloquence and righteous fury. Every fantasy she entertained of provoking Shi Qingxuan’s repulsion. It did not occur to her that Shi Qingxuan might have spent the last few years engaging in similar reveries about He Xuan.
“Sometimes I think I must be a really messed up person. I don’t even know how to hold it all in my head. I have a lot of friends, but nobody really understands, nobody really knows… I mean, I don’t hide anything, but nobody believes me!”
Shi Qingxuan laughs and worries at a fraying tear on his trouser leg until his face takes on a wry cast.
“I couldn’t expect you to care, and you must know it already, anyway, but… you made me feel so stupid.”
Shi Qingxuan is a fool. She’s known that for centuries. An innocent, kind, honest fool.
“I really believed in you, you know? I believed in you more than anyone. Even when I found out about Ge, I trusted you. And I might have picked you, if you’d let me. But you never let me.”
Shi Qingxuan grasps He Xuan’s elbow for emphasis, seemingly out of habit. He quickly realizes what he’s done and pulls his hand back, but He Xuan grabs Shi Qingxuan’s wrist before he can retract it entirely. The threat of its absence has made it clear that, for however much longer He Xuan has to spend on this earth, she wants to maximize the amount of it that Shi Qingxuan spends touching her.
He looks surprised, but he doesn’t try to shake her off. He meets He Xuan’s eyes, his face flushed. “If you only ever tell me the truth about one thing, can you tell me this?”
Shi Qingxuan looks very grave. How is it possible for him to have aged so much?
He Xuan is silent, but Shi Qingxuan closes his eyes, and says, “Was it only ever a lie? I mean… all the time I thought you cared for me.”
She doesn’t know how much time passes with her tongue thick in her mouth. He Xuan couldn’t speak if she tried. Perhaps she is trying.
“Right,” Shi Qingxuan says, and laughs. “I don’t know why I—”
He Xuan tightens her grip, digging her nails into Shi Qingxuan’s forearm.
She cannot allow Shi Qingxuan to believe that He Xuan was successful in her efforts to hate him. As a victory, she doesn’t deserve to claim it, and she is tired of the struggle.
Her spine caves in, and she braces her forehead on Shi Qingxuan’s shoulder.
Brandon Taylor’s work doesn’t always hit for me, but I appreciate his piece about “moments of grace,” and thought about it while writing here:
There are no redemption arcs in hell. I like to think about moments of grace, and I think of them as these shocking moments of piercing clarity where a character’s situation and circumstance become clear to them and they are able to hold that self-knowledge without recimination or judgement from themselves or the reader. A brief, glancing moment of wholeness, where they comprehend all they are and have been and will be. […] I think of my moments of grace as letting that human, gentle part of my characters for just a brief instant become the dominant aspect of their nature.
I strove for a feeling not of “you’ve got everything you wanted now and it's all fine,'” not “you’re forgiven” or “you forgive her”, just a moment of understanding and tenuous acceptance of what He Xuan is, a being with feelings and wants and needs who is brushing up against the possibility of a future that amounts to more than waiting to disappear. A kind of deep personal intimacy that was foreclosed by the original formative acts of violence are now coming back into view, not in spite of the person they’ve both become as a result of that violence, but because they are those people now, and love each other like that…
a ghost is literally alive innit.
He Xuan’s eyes squeeze shut, and she focuses on the sound of Shi Qingxuan’s heartbeat. His collarbone gently rises up and down as he breathes, taking He Xuan with it.
Shi Qingxuan swallows raggedly next to her ear. Slowly enough that He Xuan could shy away, he wraps his left arm around her back. When she doesn’t shrug it off, he mirrors the action with his right, and pulls He Xuan flush against his warm body. Her chin ends up propped on his shoulder, though she can’t recall consciously placing it there. Her limbs are lead. No embrace has ever felt as much as this. She might as well be drugged.
As Shi Qingxuan’s lungs expand and contract, they press against He Xuan’s inert form. It hurts to be held by Shi Qingxuan, physically hurts; not because Shi Qingxuan squeezes too tight, but because He Xuan’s chest is tearing itself apart.
Throughout it all, the part of He Xuan vile enough to still want Shi Qingxuan in these conditions is terribly, slaveringly awake to his nearness and heat. Shi Qingxuan ought to be able to smell the lust coming off her. It should provoke some sense of self-preservation, but Shi Qingxuan has never held that quality in large quantities. Any onlooker would say, Run while you can, fool. Before the thing you’re holding changes her mind.
“I’ve wondered about you every single day. And I miss you. Even though you broke my heart.”
He Xuan turns her face against his skin and bites a soundless scream into the join of his shoulder and neck. Shi Qingxuan’s breath hitches and his hand falters. He’s once more started to cry; stray droplets dampen her shoulders. He lays a hand on the back of He Xuan’s head more gently than anyone has touched her since she was a small child. She cannot do this anymore, any of it. He strokes her hair with his thumb. He Xuan rests her open jaws against his flesh, blunt of tooth and of intention, until she slackens her bite and digs her claws into his upper arms, cleaving to him.
I was very self-satisfied for using the word cleaving here, as it communicates both sticking together and splitting something in two.
chapter nine
On the other side of a paper screen, Shi Qingxuan gets into the bath.
He Xuan sits on the edge of the bed, hands clenched over his knees. It’s the same posture he assumed when Shi Qingxuan released He Xuan from his embrace to answer the knock at the door. He Xuan was angry at the sound, believing it to be Xie Lian returning unwanted, but when eavesdropping revealed Shi Qingxuan talking to one of the inn’s employees about a bath that had been ordered sent up, apparently by mistake, He Xuan’s feeling shifted to relief they were not interrupted sooner. She was grateful, even, to be freed from Shi Qingxuan’s cloying grip. Despite this, it feels as though Shi Qingxuan’s warmth has lingered on his skin.
“It seemed like too much trouble to make them carry it back down,” Shi Qingxuan said, after they were alone once more, now with a tub full of hot water. “I might…”
“Fine,” He Xuan replied, with hardly a glance in his direction.
He Xuan let the woman’s skin slide off him as soon as Shi Qingxuan was out of sight. He sat rigid, listening to the sounds of Shi Qingxuan undressing, and looked within himself, and thought of what Hua Cheng had said that afternoon about He Xuan’s voyeuristic proclivities.
It was his hope that returning to his true form would hasten the process of getting his head properly reattached, but he finds himself not only too frozen to get up and leave the inn while Shi Qingxuan is too distracted to stop him, but unable to make himself leave the bed. He hears the gentle splash of water on the sides of the tub, and occasionally glimpses the shadow of movement on the other side of the screen.
Most of what I write is an exercise in getting a character to leave their coffin.
He’s not sure how much time passes before Shi Qingxuan comes creeping back out into view. From the look on his face when he rounds the edge of the screen, he’s unsure whether or not He Xuan will still be there. He Xuan is somewhat gratified that Shi Qingxuan still believes He Xuan strong-willed enough to escape.
Shi Qingxuan’s expression when he registers He Xuan’s form is complicated. He Xuan is reminded once again that this is the body he wore when he looked Shi Qingxuan in his face and took his only family away from him.
Good. Neither of them should forget it.
Shi Qingxuan has emerged in a new pair of clean clothes, a simple shirt and trousers one could sleep in. His hair is all across one shoulder; he must have had it hanging over the edge, to keep it dry.
“Do you want the tub?”
He Xuan stares at him blankly. “I don’t need it.”
“But… do you want to? It’s still warm.”
“Why would that matter to a ghost?”
It’s the first time that either of them has admitted to each other what he is in so many words.
Shi Qingxuan looks somewhat chastened, but not enough. “Doesn’t it feel better that way?” Before He Xuan can respond, he adds, “I meant what I said before about your hair. And I haven’t forgotten the time you cleaned my face.” A cold shiver runs down He Xuan’s spine, though Shi Qingxuan’s voice is calm. Shi Qingxuan’s fingers curl around the edge of the screen. “Will you let me return the favour, at least?”
He Xuan’s mind trips over the question. He feels the weight of his own endurance, his stagnancy in the face of all decay. He contains both the youthful inexperience of an early death and the pulled-thin quality of an endless old age; he is wizened as a sage and ignorant as a child.
He is still unable to justify it to himself, but he gives way.
I can and will put a romantic bath scene in every single long fic I write.
As he strips, he watches Shi Qingxuan for flickers of revulsion. He Xuan looks like an emaciated corpse, which of course he is. Shi Qingxuan stares, blinking frequently, but whatever he sees doesn’t seem to deter him.
The immersion in warm water is pleasant, though cold water has its pleasantness also, which mortals are ill-equipped to understand.
Shi Qingxuan sits behind He Xuan on a low seat, and when he reaches over He Xuan’s shoulders to pull his loose hair down his back, He Xuan must force himself to stay still.
He runs some kind of soap through He Xuan’s hair, lathering it and pulling it through the strands. He can’t recall the last time he bathed in this manner, with intention. Not since he gave up on playing Ming Yi, at least. It’s simply not necessary for the kind of body he steers through existence. He Xuan is aware in a prurient way that this water was used to wash Shi Qingxuan’s body, and contains some intangible essence of him, so that when Shi Qingxuan rinses suds out of the strands, He Xuan is being granted a vulgar benediction. When one of Shi Qingxuan’s fingernails grazes his scalp, it’s difficult not to shudder.
Shi Qingxuan places a tentative hand on He Xuan’s shoulder, and when it isn’t brushed off, begins to gently lather along the craggy expanse of his upper body where it emerges from the water. Timidity suits Shi Qingxuan poorly. He should be brash and bold in all things.
“I still can’t believe it’s really you,” Shi Qingxuan says, with a small laugh. “I think part of me couldn’t imagine you would actually come. I mean, why would you?”
Why would He Xuan, indeed.
He doesn’t respond, but Shi Qingxuan is undaunted. He doesn’t use a pitcher or the like to rinse He Xuan’s skin, just uses his hands to gently splash him clean, and every so often he returns to run his fingers through He Xuan’s hair, working oil through it to smooth out any snarls. The fragrance of orange peel clots the air around them. The whole process is somewhat like an embalming, and he clings to the image with grim relief.
“I’ve wondered about you a lot. Do you have friends in the ghost realm?”
“No.”
“Really? Not even Hua Cheng? Seems a bit lonely.”
Shi Qingxuan’s fingers trace down the ridges of He Xuan’s spine. The more gentle and cautious his touch, the more strongly He Xuan feels that it ought to leave branding marks everywhere it lands. In a better lifetime, He Xuan would have been a different sort of person when he met Shi Qingxuan, one who could take these things as only comfort, with no thought of threat.
He must resist sentimentality. In a better lifetime, they never would have met at all.
“What have you been up to?”
“Rest and relaxation.”
Shi Qingxuan splashes He Xuan scoldingly. “I hope that’s true.”
“How can you say that?” He Xuan asks. How can Shi Qingxuan even stand to touch him, after the things He Xuan has done?
This story is primarily concerned with grief for oneself. He Xuan is trapped in a prison of their own making because leaving it requires the loss no longer being their entire identity. You need to be a person, not just a wound. I find Shi Qingxuan a very interesting counterpoint in that regard, and why they came to exert so much power over this latter portion of the story, despite how the power dynamic might appear. They’ve moved on, they’re becoming someone new, and that involves saying the things they need to say instead of lingering in the safety of unspoken feelings. To invoke Julie Byrne again, that night in the old hotel / I’d been learning you by heart / … I’m not waiting for your love.
Shi Qingxuan is quiet, for a time. “I’ve already lost most of what I ever had. I know that some things… there are some things I don’t know that I’ll ever be able to forgive you for. Sometimes I get so angry I don’t even feel like myself.” His right hand seems to have limited dexterity, but some motor skills and strength remain; he scrubs He Xuan gently with a washcloth. “Even if I can’t get anything else back, I’d like to think that all of it was for something. That at least you’re out there in the world, and,” here Shi Qingxuan’s voice cracks, “happy.”
With the catch in his voice, he fumbles the washcloth in his grip, and it goes falling into the water in the vicinity of He Xuan’s lap. Seemingly without a thought, Shi Qingxuan reaches for it where it fell, and He Xuan is unaware until that moment that, true to form, this body has been uncooperative. He isn’t quick enough to stop Shi Qingxuan’s grasp before his wrist comes in contact with He Xuan’s cock, which, within the relative privacy of the water, has come awake, inquisitive and thickened and alive.
He Xuan flinches away, but is also unable to suppress the hiss that escapes him, composed of pleasure and agony both.
The air around them is sharp with foreboding. Shi Qingxuan’s hands have retreated to his own lap, and he’s as still as can be expected of a mortal. He Xuan is desperate for his touch to return.
Fully aware of how inadequate a statement it is, He Xuan nonetheless mutters, “I didn’t intend…”
“It doesn’t scare me.” He laughs, though it resembles a sigh. “It’s kind of nice to know that all the time I thought you and I… well, that I wasn’t just being stupid.”
I imprinted on Sarah LuckyDiceKirby’s seminal work like a siren that can’t swim anymore , and the line Someday they’ll kiss him for real. has been a foundational to my reading of Shi Qingxuan.
For so many years, the only thing that kept them from going to bed was He Xuan’s restraint, but his grudge’s fulfillment has weakened him. The longing is now a source of acute physical pain.
Shi Qingxuan braces his forehead against the nape of He Xuan’s neck. “Earlier, it wasn’t because of you that I couldn’t... It was just a lot to take right then, with everything, and my body, and…” Shi Qingxuan takes in a raspy breath. “When I look at you, I still see my best friend.”
He Xuan’s shoulders are hunched up by his ears. He’s so tense his joints might creak. “I don’t want you groping me to settle a score.”
“If you really don’t want me to touch you, of course I won’t, but…” Shi Qingxuan’s left hand splays out against He Xuan’s shoulder-blade, and He Xuan cannot resist pressing back against its warmth, to leech from Shi Qingxuan’s vitality. “There’s so much suffering in the world,” Shi Qingxuan murmurs. “Don’t you think we should have the good things, when they come around?”
^ That line is kind of saccharine, but I meant to express that Shi Qingxuan here is not so much exercising saintly levels of forgiveness as that their current emotional landscape is pretty desolate. It’s less ,“oh well, water on the bridge,” and more, “I’m too tired to hate you when part of me will always love you whether or not I should.” It was one of the first lines of the fic I wrote; one of my first attempts to articulate how “postcanon Beefleaf reconciliation” could play out.
However, this story has a narrow field of vision, and I had to “play the character honest,” in TTRPG terms. In this moment, He Xuan is interpreting Shi Qingxuan as an idealized figure, to the point where He Xuan attributes less emotional grit and ugliness to Shi Qingxuan’s inner world than is perhaps realistic. Putting Shi Qingxuan on a pedestal like that allows He Xuan to grumble about them in their own head the way He Xuan always has, and is also a projection of He Xuan’s own self-loathing. My hope was to present both their earnest desire for reconciliation and the reality that there are a lot of tension and relationship issues going beyond just “you lied to me for hundreds of years and then murdered my brother.”
Do you hear howls?
A beast is opening its mouth
I know what she's saying
To kiss and be kissed…
He Xuan’s head slumps forward in defeat.
Rather than saying anything else, Shi Qingxuan presses his lips to the ridge of He Xuan’s spine.
At the first brush of his mouth—open, searching, wet—He Xuan’s fingers flex where they are curled, white-knuckled, around the edge of the tub. His nails gouge dented lines into its surface. Shi Qingxuan appears to neither notice nor care.
The visual of He Xuan gouging lines in the bathtub via hornygripping out of equal parts horny and terror remains dear to me, and pretty sexy.
As Shi Qingxuan kisses gently down the nape of He Xuan’s neck, He Xuan thinks he would rather be tortured. No, of course he wouldn’t, but being tortured would be easier to bear. He understands pain. He cannot fathom this. He used to think himself very clever, but He Xuan will never understand Shi Qingxuan, never be able to predict him when it matters. He Xuan is helpless for anything but to wait for each touch, as they either deliver him or dash him against the rocks.
Sometimes writing HX veers into intense melodrama… What are you going to do. This is a guy who has Sephiroth music in his head.
Very slowly, such that He Xuan has a wide window of time in which to object, Shi Qingxuan reaches back into the water.
When Shi Qingxuan’s palm cradles He Xuan’s tumescence, he is struck with a wave of dizziness. He could burst out of his skin. It isn’t that the sensation is displeasing; when Shi Qingxuan’s fingers curl around him and give him a gentle stroke, he isn’t sure he’s ever been shaken by something so simple. But it isn’t easy, like this; there’s so much debris to be pushed aside.
He is salivating so much that he must swallow in order to speak.
As I’ve said elsewhere, the fic’s title comes from the song "Name" by Midwife, though the relevant verse (Your god hates me / He can't feel my flesh / He leaves me panting like a dog at the edge of your bed) is an interpolation from another song, "1926" by Thalia Zedek. I associate "Name" with Beefleaf for other reasons (I bring the water to the sea / What are you doing hanging out with me?), but my brain kept getting snagged on the pantingbed line because of its combination of visceral desire and abject hopelessness. It can be so miserable and humiliating it can be to sit with longing and unfulfilled desire. Especially for someone who wants to think of himself as above/closed off from that for a number of reasons. How isolating that emotional-physical need for connection can be to experience, and how desolate.
It also reminded me of Tolkien's ringwraiths, and their state as undead roamers in thrall to things unattainable. He Xuan is a character of great appetite, for food and vengeance, who is tethered to the world by those hungers. Those intense feelings both tie him to the corporeal world and signify being detached from it ("I can't recall the sound of water, nor the touch of grass..."). But hunger and longing are very different things, as are satiation and pleasure.
“Wait.”
Shi Qingxuan makes to shy away, but He Xuan grasps his arm before he can go far.
“Not here. On the bed.”
“Oh, sure.”
He Xuan clears his throat. “And not in this body.”
This takes Shi Qingxuan aback. “Me, or you?”
“You can stay as you are.”
He can hear the smile in Shi Qingxuan’s voice as his apprehension vanishes. He is the most irritating and freehearted person He Xuan has ever met. “Okay.”
Once standing, He Xuan turns to face him. Water sluices off her skin, pours down from the ends of her hair. She props one foot up on the edge of the tub between them, though the two of them are of a height, so she cannot loom over him as she’d like. They regard each other, eye-to-eye.
She leans closer, and says with intent, “I won’t sit there and have you paw at me. It’s both of us, or nothing.”
Shi Qingxuan nods. His skin around his collar goes flushed and patchy. He Xuan cups his face between her hands, and the points of her thumbnails dimple his soft cheeks.
He Xuan has never been truly naked before, she thinks; not once, until now. Each new feeling leaves a bruise.
They move against each other’s lips in a way that is, at first, all at the wrong pace; the earlier frantic urgency has left them clumsy. They find their way in time, slowing down, until their kiss is nothing so much as a languid exploration of another person’s form. Shocking, the warmth of him.
Eventually, Shi Qingxuan pulls away, presses their foreheads together. She senses that he’s shedding tears again. He is laughing, too: a hoarse, nearly silent laugh, borne of relief, she hopes, rather than nervousness.
Don’t be afraid, she thinks, she prays. Don’t be afraid of me.
On the bed, she feels palpably nude, as her hair and bare skin drip water onto the sheets. Shi Qingxuan is clothed and mostly dry, for now. Their legs tangle as they kiss and grind against whatever surfaces provide themselves. His touch is characterized by a mixture of eager handsiness and courteous discretion. He’ll grip her back or her waist and then let go, as if fearing a reprimand. It was a mistake to tell him not to paw her when she wants so harshly to be wanted.
His desire makes itself known, in time. He stiffens in his trousers, just a layer of cloth between his body and her own bare skin. He Xuan snarls and bites his lip, rocks her mound against it, refuses to think about anything when she could instead be hearing the hitches in his breath, feeling the way his cock swells every time she thrusts against it. Despite it all, including Shi Qingxuan’s own propensity to shed his clothing at the slightest opportunity, she’s never seen him wholly naked, and she hungers for him.
After a time, He Xuan backs away to let Shi Qingxuan pant for breath. The heat of their mutual gaze never wavers.
She rids him of his shirt, baring the skin beneath. Dark hair spills around his well-kissed face, and he looks a little dazed. She considers how his stomach would flex and tremble if she had her cock in his ass. Her clit throbs in sympathy to the image.
She sits up on her knees and forces herself to meet his eyes. “I want to suck your cock.”
The urge itself is not surprising—what wouldn’t she take from Shi Qingxuan, what expanse of his skin wouldn’t she crawl for—but she is taken aback by its severity. If he denies her this, it will sting.
Shi Qingxuan’s mouth flaps like that of a beached fish. “You, ah. May.”
NSFW art at the link: When the Queen of the Night collects her souls lived in my brain for several months leading up to writing this scene.
She slowly pulls the trousers down his hips and then off his legs, braced for Shi Qingxuan to, at any moment, change his mind and place a gentle hand on her shoulder, pushing her away.
It never comes. He is long-legged and lovely. He Xuan straddles one of his calves, and her hair sticks to his thighs in slick black tendrils. She glances up. Shi Qingxuan takes in a sharp, quick breath and presses his knuckles to his mouth.
In the process of undressing, Shi Qingxuan’s erection relaxed, so when she takes him into her mouth, it is as a soft and tender thing. He Xuan rolls her tongue beneath the head, and feels the shaft twitch between her lips. There is a sharp exhale above her, but she can’t look, not yet. She sucks harder, feeling her cheeks hollow out, and holds her jaw lax, teeth as far out of the way as she can make them.
Shi Qingxuan’s hand curls on her shoulder, but rather than pushing away, he clings to her. He can’t seem to stay still, squirming and moaning, and he’s very hard now. His cock is bigger than she had at first thought, which she does not find displeasing. It nudges across her soft palate. The tip of her nose brushes his groin.
He Xuan glances up at his face, while her throat engages in a fruitless struggle to repel an object that she has no intention of releasing.
Shi Qingxuan meets her eyes, and whispers, “Jiejie, I’m really not going to last if you do that.”
He Xuan’s cunt clenches where it’s splayed against his calf. She wants him to call her his jie again with that pitiful look in his eye. She doesn’t want him to last; she wants him to dissolve on her tongue. But she does ease up.
Her nails are dark against his stomach and hips, where she digs her claws into him. She cannot imagine ever tiring of this. He’s very sensitive; he moans nonsense, as vocal as he is in any other area of life. She prefers this to most other kinds of his babbling.
It’s messy. He Xuan can feel it on her cheeks. Glistening strings of spit and precome connect them even when she pulls away. Shi Qingxuan is leaking out of the tip, and she slides her fingertips through it, smears it into his skin. Shi Qingxuan gets rather wet in all bodies, it seems, and she enjoys the girlish slickness. The fluid is bitter on her tongue, but pleasurably so.
His sex is smooth and warm in her hand, twitching delicately. He Xuan has been unable to fully let go of the idea that she shouldn’t be allowed to touch it, that she’ll crush it in her hands or sever it with her teeth, though these are blunt as any human’s. Whose idea was it to put genitals on the outside of a body? They are so vulnerable like this, so fragile. Surely, it would be safer to keep them concealed.
His tenderly grasping fingers twist in her hair. His hips can’t help but buck softly into her mouth, his sex brushing against the back of her throat, and she should hold him in place by the hips, but instead she wishes he would tighten his grip, push her head down, lose himself in her esophageal embrace. He Xuan has always been weak to his spoiled enthusiasm that unerringly seeks out the things He Xuan cannot let herself ask for. A distant part of her mind cries that this should be abhorrent to her, but imperious entitlement dwarfs her shame. She is a king of the underworld. If she wants something, shouldn’t she have it?
I’m clapping and cheering……
She is throbbing against his leg, and it takes all her self-control to not rock herself wildly against his calf in search of release. Eventually, she can take it no longer, and reaches down to touch herself.
Similarly, she cannot resist forever the urge to force him down her throat. She wants to be stretched, filled. To feel heavy and ripe. She bobs up and down, fucking herself with the sensitive head of his cock, and her thinking mind goes quiet.
The cool trickle of saltwater down her cheeks takes her by surprise. It seems she cannot suppress the choking reflex in all ways. She didn’t know her body retained the capacity to cry.
Shi Qingxuan’s hand in her hair tightens, and He Xuan’s fingers skid against her clit. She lets out a sound most unlike herself, a strained, high moan, and feels it hum around him in her mouth, her throat.
His cock shudders just before he comes, and the seal of her lips around his shaft slackens enough that, when he spills, a rivulet of come trickles out of the corner of her mouth. Without thinking, she sucks it back up. She swallows everything. No hesitation, no conscious thought. Shi Qingxuan lets out a strangled sound when she does this. Regretfully, He Xuan lets his softening cock fall from her mouth. His head tips back against the pillow.
He Xuan chases him; she rises on her knees, leans forward, and kisses him. Shi Qingxuan is yielding, but he moves with the kiss. His tongue ventures along her bottom lip, where she tastes like his come.
She clutches at Shi Qingxuan’s face with both hands. Their legs entwine once more. He is subdued with langour, and she takes great satisfaction that she has rendered Shi Qingxuan quiet and calm, if only for a time. Her hips still move against him restlessly. His right hand rests politely on her buttocks; she wishes it was a little less polite, more like his left, which has roamed down to palm her breast. Inquisitive of its weight, its density. Not too polite to pass the pad of his thumb around the areola and then squeeze the nipple. She jerks, grazes his lip, drags her clit against his thigh.
Shi Qingxuan pulls away to lean back and watch her face. He is openly curious, but not merely that. He looks at her the way one looks at the sea, beautiful and terrible beyond comprehension, but as if he will try to drink her up anyway. As he twists her nipple harder, she bites her lip, not against pain but to contain the excess of pleasure. She would let him do so much to her.
He releases her breast, and his hand runs slowly down her abdomen. He pauses on her stomach, just before the edge of the dark hair between her legs, and she takes his wrist, pulls him to her cunt.
Shi Qingxuan’s fingertips brush through the hair, and then they falter. He says, like he’s truly surprised, “Oh. I forgot you’d be cold down here too.”
“Be quiet,” He Xuan groans against his shoulder.
See… this fic is fundamentally about jokes.
She doesn’t want to think about the erstwhile Water Master even once again in her life—wants him to become truly inconsequential to her—and certainly doesn’t want him to enter the room with the two of them, but she thinks of him now: of the way he would chastise Shi Qingxuan for going out in her female form where she could be seen and preyed on by unworthy men. Imbecile. The Wind Master always shone brightest in that form, was most capable of protecting herself.
For He Xuan’s part, she could never take on such a well-rendered guise before took her place beside Crimson Rain as the most exalted of the fallen world. Whatever her body, He Xuan will never again fear a stranger. The thought that a man could look at her and want to shove something in her cunt makes her want to laugh: go ahead, go and try it; plumb those depths, where only death awaits you.
She thinks of her fantasies of rejection, the tableau of her sallow, looming frame pinning Shi Qingxuan down and asking—sometimes demanding, often begging—to take him as a lover. As a lover was part of the fantasy, as the discordance between impassioned sentiment and the crude reality produced in He Xuan’s mind a flash of desire and revulsion. She made herself come to the thought of Shi Qingxuan’s charming face blanching in shock and disgust.
He Xuan closes her eyes so she doesn’t have to see him, and says, “Stop playing and put them in.”
Two fingers stretch her opening before being taken in by her cunt. It is, indeed, wet as well as cold; his hands warm the core of her. His breath quickens against her cheek. She opens her eyes to see him in his beauty; his face is flushed, and, meeting her gaze, he rolls his hand up into her. She wants to fuck his mouth, wants to sit on his face and have him lick her cunt until his jaw is sore. She wants him to keep doing this forever.
From her position kneeling above his hips, she rocks slowly, removing her hands from his face to press one into the bed above his shoulder, keeping her upright. The other returns to circle her hardened clit, maintaining the spiraling force of arousal, the kind that moves through her body as a restless current under her skin. The other kind, the kind that comes from her cunt, is demanding, and located deep within a dark and yawning place.
There is an obscene sucking noise where he moves inside her. His wrist curls as his fingers pull back and push forward. The sound provokes her to groan. The pressure of the curves of his knuckles on her walls is exquisite. Her folds are fattening up with blood around his hand. The attention of her whole being is concentrated in that place where they come together.
The quotation in the tumblr post Listening to a non-fiction book about maritime disaster and the way this author is describing the ship sinking is so sexual had a very real effect on the way I approached writing He Xuan’s Ego Death Orgasm.
He Xuan has not, despite her title, sunk so very many ships over the centuries—she doubts she has as many vessels on her record as the Water Master on his—but there have been occasions. The boats she’s gone out of her way to submerge have been those of tyrants on voyages of conquest or loathsome merchant captains determined to squeeze every bit of gold from this world. Each time she’s wrecked a ship, He Xuan has stayed to watch its descent, and the water ghosts she’s devoured have brought with them countless memories of going to their watery graves.
She was hollowed out, not unlike a ship, a very long time ago, but she aligns herself with the cold depths, not the living things that float above. Yet—two of Shi Qingxuan’s fingers are inside her, that is all, and he has not used her roughly, but she feels them as a swelling force within and around her. The implacable lapping swell of water around a hull that is filling. Not yet at the tipping point of submersion, but too late to avert the inevitable. Inexorable might. It is torment to see one’s own miserable fate so clearly. To be entered and encompassed, held on all sides, and pulled into the whirlpool that grows around her. She quakes more and more frequently as the weight of harrowing pleasure comes bearing down on her. She will break apart, she thinks, with no little fear; she will splinter; she has been at risk of it so many times, but has always kept herself, if not whole, then a tightly-closed container. Her body sways, struggling to stay upright. Her hand on the bed braces more tightly. Futile. She will not be the same if she lets this happen, if she lets herself come undone at Shi Qingxuan’s hands; she will have unmade herself and been unmade by another. A sickly crunch of a mast under the deluge, and tipping, tipping, tipping, to overbalance, so close now to being taken inside a greater oblivion than even He Xuan contains, and she is scared of the pleasure she feels lurking on the other side of surrender.
But she has walked the sea floor, and amid the bones of great ships, scuttling things will make their homes, even in the darkest trenches. She would not mind, she thinks, delirious with the need to come, to disintegrate this way if she would become part of him, and he of her, until each is inseparable from the other and all debts are repaid and one name is all they need.
She moans like she’s being hurt. It does hurt, a little, as if Shi Qingxuan has pressed all along her raw nerves. She is vaguely aware that a great deal of fluid comes surging out from her, soaking his hand, his wrist, the bedsheets. She cannot bring herself to be curious as to what it is. Her thighs and arms and cunt all tremble. She slumps down on her elbows before rolling off him, landing partly in the wet spot, which she cannot bring herself to care about. Shi Qingxuan’s fingers slide out of her, but don’t go far; his palm rests sweetly on the slope of her thigh.
More than anything, my emotional touchpoint for this scene was another passage from Dawn Treader:
The very first tear he made was so deep that I thought it had gone right into my heart. And when he began pulling the skin off, it hurt worse than anything I've ever felt. The only thing that made me able to bear it was just the pleasure of feeling the stuff peel off. You know—if you've ever picked the scab of a sore place. [...] And there was I as smooth and soft as a peeled switch and smaller than I had been. Then he caught hold of me—I didn't like that much for I was very tender underneath now that I'd no skin on—and threw me into the water. It smarted like anything but only for a moment. After that it became perfectly delicious and as soon as I started swimming and splashing I found that all the pain had gone from my arm. And then I saw why. I'd turned into a boy again.
That passage was one of the most proto-erotic things I ever encountered in my youth, though Lewis would be rolling in his grave to hear it. It felt very right to pay homage, even if I’m not 100% satisfied with how it turned out.
Time passes before Shi Qingxuan turns to her.
He traces his fingers over her hip. “You’re really beautiful like this.”
Furtive warmth radiates in her gut, but she scoffs. “You have a thing for corpses?”
He looks at her oddly, then smiles. “Only the pretty ones, with such lovely melons…”
That line was supposed to be a placeholder but I went, “No, Shi Qingxuan would say that in a tender and earnest way.”
She turns away in disgust. Shi Qingxuan laughs, but soon goes quiet. She can feel him watching her. Doesn’t dislike his regard, but fears it. Feeding is painful when the stomach is accustomed to lack.
“You don’t need to be shy,” he says, so gently.
“Who’s shy,” she hisses, yet she curls in on herself. And her, a Supreme. Never has she considered herself a coward except when Shi Qingxuan is involved.
Another pause before he speaks. “I wish you hadn’t had to die. You’re right, I don’t like that part… being reminded of you suffering all alone, with no one to help. I wish… I guess it doesn’t matter. But I wish you weren’t by yourself. It makes me so sad I don’t know how to stand it. So I don’t want us to pretend anymore. I want to know you. So you won’t have to be alone.”
He Xuan has never considered herself immortal or eternal. She is dead, and her existence has a limited duration, though she may have an imprecise understanding of the specifics of her eventual expiration. Death—the total kind—doesn’t scare her. She’s disdained the gods for their aimless permanence, and she nearly envies Shi Qingxuan for the sense of urgency that his brush with true extinction has brought. He speaks with strange serenity of things you could not extract from He Xuan under duress.
She closes her eyes, feeling very weak. In the same matter-of-fact tone, he adds, “And you might be a ghost, but you don’t look like a corpse, I swear. Your skin is way too nice, it doesn’t look rotten at all.”
The food has gone cold, but she is more enticed by it now than she was when it was fresh. He Xuan can hear the imagined voice of Hua Cheng in her head: Always get hungry after, don’t you?
Yes. She does. Why deny it?
The flavours—ginger and cooking wine, chives and garlic, egg and plain rice—are familiar, but feel persuasive and novel on the tongue, as though she is being introduced to them for the first time. They dressed themselves, in the loosest sense of the term, before going to the table. He Xuan has not yet returned to her truest form; she wants to linger like this for a while longer. Shi Qingxuan munches on a bun, and watches her work her way through the platters.
I was thinking about the gamble HX made with his sense of taste, early in the story…
Eventually, he clears his throat. “My friends are going to make fun of me when I go back. They’re going to be like, ‘Old Feng, who’d you get all tidied up for?’”
She glances at him over her chopsticks. “Where are you going back to?”
“I’m not sure yet. I’ll figure something out. There are a couple other camps in the city. I think the folks I’ve been staying with might disperse—go stay wherever they have friends, you know. It’s not so easy to start a place from scratch.”
He Xuan makes a noncommittal sound of acknowledgement, and takes another bite.
“What about you? What have you been up to?”
She glances at him. “What do you think?”
He looks thoughtful. “Well… remember the Bloody Fire Social, in Fu Gu?”
How could she not? She shed the blood.
Shi Qingxuan has the grace to look sheepish. “The way the townspeople talked about Scholar He… You must have more free time now, right? I used to wonder whether you ever struck out like that, to punish the wicked.”
She gives him a disdainful look, though the idea is, if anything, overly flattering of her character.
I’d love to believe in HX, altruistic angel of justice, but I… don’t, at least not in this fic.
“But really, I just hoped you were getting a lot of nice things to eat.”
What a voluptuous life Shi Qingxuan imagines He Xuan to have. It is, she supposes, his own nature; no wonder he extends the same assumptions to others.
For reasons she cannot justify, she tells him the truth. “I’ve been staying in Fu Gu temporarily. My parents’ home is still standing, but it’s… fallen into disrepair.” It’s the plain truth, but she is ashamed to admit it. She is ashamed of many things. “I’ve been working on the house.”
“You’re such a good son.”
If she were as good a son as she’d like, she would never have let it fall into such disrepair in the first place, but it hurt too badly to see the place in daylight. She was spurred to repair it recently only because, even when it became clear the Heavens were uninterested in harrying her further, He Xuan couldn’t bring herself to put her family’s urns back in the great hall of Nether Water Manor. That altar is bare but for a skull. She could not sully her family home with such a thing.
No, the urns now lie buried in the earth behind the old He house, beneath simple, immaculate gravestones. It was to construct the family grave that He Xuan returned to the place; that He Xuan had allowed the house itself to fall into such a reprehensible state was a glum discovery, and she could not justify letting the state of being go on any longer. It’s not as though she has anything better to do.
He Xuan’s own ashes are buried along with the others, though she gave herself no headstone. The perimeter of the house is protected by array, and cannot be entered lightly. It is, as Hua Cheng would hasten to tell her, an obvious place to store her soul’s essence, but she is tired of hiding. She wants to rest where she belongs. Despite the things she’s done, her family won’t, she hopes, begrudge He Xuan for wanting to take her place among them.
This is about where I initially envisioned the fic ending, but it felt unsatisfying, obviously, so I had to pivot. The He house stuff wasn’t written in for this purpose, just for flavour, but flavour will save your ass more often than not.
She sets down her chopsticks. “Where will you be going?”
“What?”
“You said the camp will disperse. Where will you go?”
“I haven’t decided yet.”
“So you don’t know.”
“Not yet, but I’m not worried, I’ll figure—”
“Come to Fu Gu,” she says. Shi Qingxuan looks at her like she just grew a second head. “The house needs a minder.”
“What about you?”
“It’s landlocked.” She can visit, but can’t bring the bone dragons or the fish, so it would make a poor permanent residence. Besides, she doesn’t want that house to come to look like the manor. She wants blooming shrubs in the garden and a clean floor. Making it fit for the living, for the first time in centuries. She is not the one to achieve such a goal.
“I couldn’t do that.”
“It’s a busy place. There’s work. You’ll… meet people. You’re always meeting people.”
“No, really, He… He-jie. I couldn’t possibly. I mean, it’s your home.” There’s more anguish on his face than she’s seen since she arrived.
He Xuan snaps, “You said you want to know me? This is what I want.”
She feels as though she’s gone mad again, accessed some new plane of insanity, one not tempered by the cold logic of revenge. Desire’s fulfillment has made her delirious with wanton gluttony. She wants to push her face into dirty laundry just to drink in the smell of him. She would like to spend days pouring over recent commentaries on ancient poetry, and then to spend weeks composing an eloquent response, to be published under an elegant pseudonym. She wants quantities of fine food a mortal couldn’t imagine. She wants to have that, but eat it slowly. What greater luxury is there than knowing no one can take your meal from you? She wants sweetness in her mouth, and salt, and fermented tang, and slick fat, and the gratifying savouriness that surrounds other tastes while residing within them. She wants to be full, and still have room for more.
Neither of them deserves any of this, for good or ill. What they are to each other now is beyond such things.
“Okay, okay,” he says, as though she needs soothing. Her hands are, she realizes, clenched atop the table. His eyes are… fond? He covers one of her fists with a palm, and she hates it, loves it.
“If I did… there are a few grannies I want to bring.”
He Xuan blinks. “It’s not a very big house.”
He puts on one of his reasonable and deeply irritating expressions. “Just two or three, not a lot. I’d just feel too bad if I left them in the city, because they kind of adopted me…”
Her fists uncurl, as if in defeat, and he threads the fingers of their hands together. She allows it for the sake of the way it makes his eyes curl up at the edges. Besides, it’s probably for the best that He Xuan be spared the moral conflict around how brazenly she’d permit herself to fuck Shi Qingxuan inside her parents’ house. And she’d thought Hua Cheng avaricious.
He Xuan scoffs, shakes her head, and trusts that Shi Qingxuan knows her well enough to understand what it means.
chapter ten
The epilogue-not-epilogue of this fic caused me so much trouble. As I think I’ve said, this fic was not well outlined, because it was intended to be 10-15k of impressionistic vignettes that let readers infer the rest based on canon. I think it’s Jesse Armstrong who has the quote about a story ending when it loses interest in its characters, and when I arrived here I found that the story wanted to keep walking a while longer.
The core ideas for this fic arose from my ruminations on TGCF as a text about sexual violence. In the case of the Shis, this looks like a classic gothic incest dynamic, but I wondered where that left He Xuan in the picture. It makes sense that He Xuan has some history of sexual violence in his past, as everything bad that could possibly have happened in his life has happened to him. I didn’t want it to come across like I was inventing sad things to happen to my blorbo purely for the sake of making him the most tragic character of all time; I really do think it adds to the narrative to read He Xuan’s time in prison as the kiln before the kiln, the pre-death before the real death, which bifurcates his life experience, etc.
I think those elements carried through, but increasingly central to the end product was the possibility that becoming a ghost can be a do-over, an opportunity to have experiences you didn’t have when you were alive, an unshackling from social expectations, etc. That thread needed to be addressed or else my initial ending for the story felt abrupt. It took me more than a month to figure out how to wrap this up satisfactorily.
“The property has always been exempted in the contracts. It cannot be mortgaged.”
“As my lord says,” replies Yin Yu, in his tepid way.
“Check for yourself. And if your master has forgotten, do me the courtesy of reminding him.”
“No need,” Hua Cheng drawls from behind him. He Xuan wasn’t even sitting with his back to the door. He hates those butterflies.
He Xuan’s lip curls. “Crimson Rain,” he replies, making only the most cursory effort to call back over his shoulder. It doesn’t make much difference, anyway, as Hua Cheng lopes over to the large accounting table at which Yin Yu sits. Hua Cheng perches on its edge, folds one knee over the other, and fixes He Xuan with a satisfied look.
“Thought you were being clever? Coming by to renegotiate your contract without so much as paying me a hello? As if I couldn’t smell your rancid, fishy…” He Xuan fixes him with an acid stare, and Hua Cheng smiles. “…qi anywhere.”
He Xuan hoped to avoid him, but had little expectation his efforts would amount to much.
“I was under the impression you were a busy man. Has marriage made you lazy?”
“Doting on gege is a full-time job. Perfect timing for you to come by, actually. I need you to start filling in for me at the Den for a while.”
“What?”
Hua Cheng looks very innocent. “Aren’t I helping you? All these rush job renovations aren’t going to pay for themselves. Isn’t that why you’re here?”
“I’m occupied for the next few weeks.”
“Obviously.”
“Full access to the kitchens.”
“Get real. This is a business. You’d run the staff ragged.”
Yin Yu pushes counters around on an abacus as if there’s no one else in the room.
He Xuan blinks. “You’re free to enlist one of the other ghosts capable of convincingly impersonating you without burning down the city.”
“Yeah, yeah. And the fact remains that your crockery wishlist is longer than my arm.” Hua Cheng cocks his head. “About that. Fascinating choices you’re making.”
“Your opinion is neither solicited nor desired.”
“But really. Going from… all that, to living under the same roof?”
“Absurd. You think I’d move back to a town? With people?”
They get something down on paper eventually. Yin Yu stows the scrolls and makes an exit. He Xuan makes to follow him, but pauses in the doorway to cast a cold eye back in Hua Cheng’s direction.
“I mean it about the house.”
“Trust me, if I come by to collect, it won’t be for some ancient shack.”
He Xuan shakes his head, and spins on his heel.
“Black Water…” Hua Cheng sighs. “Have a little faith.”
I wanted Hua Cheng to show up in the ending, but Verity wisely told me not to make him too central to it. Sometimes you just don’t get ex closure.
From the moment he crosses the threshold, Shi Qingxuan looks perfectly suited to the small, old-fashioned house. Once, his radiance would have marked him as an obvious intruder, but today his shabby clothes and humble manner are apiece with the surroundings.
He stops just inside the entryway. He Xuan, several paces away, watches Shi Qingxuan’s face sidelong. Shi Qingxuan looks around the room with wide eyes and a parted mouth; he emanates curiosity and no small amount of reverence. The latter sends a searing pain of uncertain origin rushing through He Xuan’s chest, though he, for one, can keep things from showing on his face.
Shi Qingxuan’s coterie of elderly beggars are to be delivered to the He residence in one week’s time. It’s a more aggressive timeline for restoring the place to habitable standards than He Xuan had envisioned when this was an effort to simply ease personal guilt and pass the time.
But He Xuan is industrious, and has clones to speed the work along. Shi Qingxuan is also there, ostensibly to help, though the strength and fine motor skills in his dominant arm are less than half of what once they were, and his left leg is similarly unreliable. He hovers and makes a nominal effort to stay out of the way, until he doesn’t. He Xuan sets him to arranging the smaller furnishings indoors once the goods acquired on credit arrive, borne by a series of golden skeletons that the neighboring townsfolk seem not to notice.
Few pieces of furniture from He Xuan’s time survived. This is a result of not only the natural decay of organic objects, but also the debts he was forced to take on in his latter days among the living. He was sleeping on the bare floor by the end.
He Xuan only just managed to hold onto the house. After his death, any of the few creditors who managed to outlive him wouldn’t dare walk past the place, let alone attempt to repossess the property. They were right to be afraid.
It was difficult to know how to explore the ideas I had in a way that wasn’t hopelessly corny. It came together when I returned to this “two steps forward, one step back” idea of recovery. The ending of Chapter 9 is quite positive, so I couldn’t end there… I didn’t want things to feel too pat.
Memories and sense-reflexes of the place stir at a disorienting rate. He Xuan often smothers them out of habit, as if they were only experiential residue from the digested others he encompasses. For a creature of lurking pastness, how efficiently he stifles all but the now.
It was necessary. Hatred made him strong, not regret. Hatred, and the economical action of the unseen hand.
Today, He Xuan is out in the open, and his felt hatred is largely internal. The harsh examiner in him snags on his own mistakes and moments of clouded judgement, though he knows little strength can be drawn from that exercise. What success He Xuan achieved was only ever a result of complete conviction. He is at his worst when he hesitates.
I don’t think of He Xuan as “insecure” in the way that’s usually understood in fandom—he’s quite arrogant—but postcanon I imagine there’s violent self-recrimination happening 24/7.
At night, He Xuan wanders, and Shi Qingxuan sleeps. To be precise, He Xuan wanders because Shi Qingxuan sleeps. He’s rarely silent while dreaming, and though it’s only the muffled whimpers of someone accustomed to sleeping among other bodies, He Xuan cannot abide being on the other side of a wall and catching the secondhand noise.
Several of the window frames are still empty, and on the first day, He Xuan nailed up spare blankets in order that Shi Qingxuan not freeze to death in the night. There are slight gaps at the edges, and when He Xuan tires of walking along the creekbed or pacing the empty streets, he finds his way back to the window.
Shi Qingxuan is beautiful in distress, though that’s not a new observation. He Xuan will look through the sliver of space into the room where Shi Qingxuan tenses and jerks under the covers, and listen for his own name amidst the muttered pleas. Hoping for it, dreading it.
The fits of restless sleep are punctuated by periods of quiet consciousness wherein Shi Qingxuan draws the sheets tightly around himself and stares vacantly into space. These visions are harder to stomach, and He Xuan will be drawn back to his nocturnal perambulations before long. He already knows what he’s done to Shi Qingxuan. There’s no use dwelling on the thing.
Late on the third day, He Xuan banishes the clones, and Shi Qingxuan makes dinner. They had been subsisting on street food for days. The meal isn’t anything elegant, just greens and tofu and rice, but Shi Qingxuan insists on cooking, and the result is adequate, even pleasant.
This is the first time any human has prepared food in here since he died, He Xuan thinks. The thought is quickly followed by irritation at his own nostalgia. It’s the first time in forever since anyone did anything; that’s been the case for days, about every little thing. The shine ought to have rubbed off.
The winter sun sank more than an hour ago, and the room is dim. Earlier in the evening, He Xuan conjured some spiritual lanterns in concession to Shi Qingxuan’s weak human eyes. Their pale golden light submerges them in a soft and forgiving twilight in which they could be anyone.
But themselves they remain.
“Your shell bodies are really impressive,” Shi Qingxuan remarks.
He Xuan glances up from his food only briefly. “I’ve had practice.”
He expects, perhaps hopes, that the flat reference to his infiltration of the heavens will unsettle Shi Qingxuan, but Shi Qingxuan appears unmoved.
It’s not a story about Shi Qingxuan in that way, so I didn’t try to see through a well-developed character arc for him, but I wanted him to have a chance to assert his own personhood and agency after spending most of the fic as a derided and adored doll/chew toy in He Xuan’s mind. I wanted Shi Qingxuan as a living, breathing person to triumph over Shi Qingxuan, abstract concept.
“I’ve wanted to ask. That Hua Cheng who met me at the human array, and gave me back my fan… that was you, wasn’t it?”
It seems absurd to lie, so He Xuan nods.
“I knew it. Hua Cheng isn’t so bad, but I don’t think he remembers I exist half the time.” Shi Qingxuan unconvincingly adds, “And I prefer it that way!”
“Trust me, you do,” he replies darkly.
Shi Qingxuan is silent for a few blessed moments before saying, “Besides, it was pretty obvious it was you from the way you were acting.”
He Xuan looks him in the eye. “What does that mean.”
Shi Qingxuan fidgets with his chopsticks. “Oh, you know, just the… well, you can be a bit, um. Dramatic.”
He Xuan grinds his teeth and returns to his bowl.
After the meal, Shi Qingxuan washes the dishes. All of this is done utterly casually, as though they have always related to each other in such a way, as if Shi Qingxuan has always lived here. He Xuan sits fixed where Shi Qingxuan left him. One hand rests on the low table, clenched against itself.
Shi Qingxuan, always conscientious of his elders, settled himself in one of the smaller rooms. It is the room He Xuan slept in for twenty-some years, even when he became the master of the house. He Xuan wonders whether Shi Qingxuan has guessed to whom it belonged, or if he is oblivious.
The night He Xuan tastes Shi Qingxuan’s cooking, greed calls He Xuan back to the house before the break of dawn. It has done so each night so far, but tonight, He Xuan doesn’t linger by the window.
The moon outside is a swollen pearl in the infinite black sea. A bright night, as they go, but very dark regardless. When Shi Qingxuan wakes from his restless dream, it’s all at once; he jerks upright, and the shards of white light that slip past the edges of the nailed-up blanket break upon his face and neck.
His head turns this way and that, until his eyes land on He Xuan’s outline. She stands just beyond the doorframe of the room where Shi Qingxuan sleeps, looking in. At this distance, her silhouette must resemble nothing so much as a woman-shaped hole in the dark.
A pause, then: “Why are you out there?”
“Can’t I go where I please?” Her voice could peel paint off wood.
“I just mean, is there a reason you don’t want to come in?”
He Xuan could laugh. She crosses the threshold.
She is wearing very little; she has nothing to fear from winter. When He Xuan crawls into Shi Qingxuan’s bed, her bare legs slip out of her robe, and he jolts at the touch. It was not her intention to bring the chill with her. She ought to have anticipated it, but there are lessons no amount of rutting with the dead will teach.
Shi Qingxuan recovers quickly, and pulls her close. She had been uncertain he would tolerate her touch at all under these circumstances, but he’s eager for her body. His face is cooler than the rest of his form, which has been swaddled in blankets. His skin is damp with cold sweat, and his body shows no signs of arousal. Why would it be otherwise? What sort of dreams does she think he’s been having?
Countless times these past few days, He Xuan thought, I shall not do that, here of all places; it would not be right, no matter the temptation, and I have weathered temptation before.
It has not become any less wrong, but neither is she able to justify continued hesitation. He Xuan already fucked him, already pleaded with him to occupy, in her stead, this house He Xuan can never truly return to and cannot bear to give up; He Xuan ought to be clear-eyed with herself. If she is to chart this course, she ought to do so decisively.
He is just so sweet on the tongue. Like a spring breeze, he brings liveliness wherever he goes, and like an animal, she is made foolish by it.
A lonely owl cries in the trees. In the dark, their own sounds are horribly loud: unsteady kisses, the rustling of sheets. His palms roam over her face, her neck, her shoulders. She’s gratified that he doesn’t tarry long before reaching through her robe to find her breasts. He pays them a kind of earnest attention that causes He Xuan to wonder how many times across the centuries Shi Qingxuan has masturbated to the thought of her tits.
His long eyelashes flutter against her cheek. He has such a straightforward, effortless beauty. He was born to have an abundant life, with the greatest complications being that his wives are all ravenous for his attention and his bevy of spoiled children give him grey hairs. Instead, he had a strange kind of husband, and now he has He Xuan: neither a wife nor an enemy, but something that comes creeping into his bed with sordid intentions all the same.
What would she have done if he hadn’t wanted her tonight, when she descended on him as a lustful phantom? Just lain beside him under the covers? Gone sulking back to the creek, more like.
I don’t want you as my lover, He Xuan spat at someone else once, hardly knowing of what she spoke, of what it is to want such a thing. How specific a desire, yet so vague.
They separate for him to suck in air, and then Shi Qingxuan leans in for another kiss. He Xuan interrupts him with a hand placed over his mouth.
His mouth moves, but she preempts him: “Don’t speak.”
It’s difficult to make out the look in Shi Qingxuan’s eyes, being as they are two pits of shadow framed by flashing whites, but he nods.
He Xuan’s other hand reaches down. She insinuates it beneath his waistband, takes him in her grasp, and pulls him out of his trousers. Shi Qingxuan’s eyes squeeze shut. His hot breath gusts against He Xuan’s palm.
She strokes him with a slow, firm grip. It’s an appropriate level of trivial good fortune that Shi Qingxuan was given such a pretty face and a cock that is—serviceable. She wants it inside her yesterday and wants it inside her never. It’s not as if she doesn’t know she likes having things inside her cunt. Has taken larger things without regret. Yet.
The hand clamped over his mouth pulls back just enough for He Xuan to press two fingertips to Shi Qingxuan’s bottom lip. “Open,” He Xuan murmurs, and is embarrassed but not surprised by the husky quality of her voice.
Shi Qingxuan has always been very obliging.
His tongue undulates beneath her fingers when he swallows. He Xuan’s thighs clench together wetly. She wants to crawl inside his skin and inhabit his insides. It’s so pure in there, so tender. She pumps her fingers lazily back and forth, and he gags around them before she pulls the slick digits free.
He Xuan’s wet fingertips drift down to his groin. They pass behind his genitals, still held in her other hand, and over his perineum, to skate across the furled skin guarding his entrance. She just… wants to answer a curiosity.
Shi Qingxuan gasps, squirms. Not away from the touch, merely around it. Her cunt pulses even as He Xuan thinks, with no little venom, don’t you know how much this hurts?
I’m not sure if this scene landed the way I wanted it to, with He Xuan framing the sex as a power game even though it’s actually quite sweet.
Her mind fills with the writhing of limbs pressed down as their owner—indistinct to her—struggles, as if to slip free of their prison of flesh and melt into the night. The thought both excites and nauseates her. He Xuan has seen violation from a variety of vantage points; she has witnessed Shi Qingxuan’s face contorted into more or less every form of human feeling. It is a wretched thing to think of now—the straining of Shi Qingxuan’s limbs against cords tying him to his own bed and the plaintive call of Ming Yi’s name in his mouth—but she thinks of it. The way he might look at her while split open.
She withdraws her hand, using it to instead pin his hip back against the bed. Her grip tightens on his cock. Their faces are close; his gasps quicken against her cheek. He Xuan is usually revolted by the snuffling, grunting sounds of men’s sexual effort. Something to be said for bedding other ghosts: none of that ugly nonsense. The passage of air through Shi Qingxuan’s throat is familiar and pleasing. It is the papery underside of his voice, which has always annoyed He Xuan, because she is fond of it.
He Xuan wants to lick her way inside him. Not now, but later. To steal in through an open window-shutter, roll him over, bare his ass, and take her fill. Let her hear him then. She thinks of this when she makes him come into her palm.
After he’s settled back into lucidity, Shi Qingxuan doesn’t cease to oblige her. She turns over onto her back, and draws his face between her thighs with a hand in his hair. Her knees are up as far as they can go, to make room for him; he is cradled between her folded legs.
The way Shi Qingxuan’s mouth feels on her pussy is better than she imagined, and He Xuan imagined it frequently. He kisses her cunt in a dozen places before bothering to drag his tongue up her slit. She shudders wrathfully, ecstatically. The first glow of dawn leaks into the room, and she thinks, Your eyes turn up at the corners when you smile. You like this that much?
A well-worn fantasy of He Xuan’s involves having Shi Qingxuan warm her clit between his lips until Shi Qingxuan complains of fatigue, following which He Xuan will force Shi Qingxuan to continue until He Xuan reaches satisfaction. In actuality, He Xuan is too close to the edge to have the patience to deny her own release, even for the reward of his put-upon expression. His right thumb applies teasing, light pressure to her clit. In conjunction with his soft tongue exploring her folds, it’s not enough to make her come, but she is being kept just below the brink.
Imagine if they become the kind of people who do these things. The time at the inn, He Xuan hadn’t thought it would ever happen again, and it was more like ritual than sex. The transmission of a difficult message, that was all. This, on the other hand, cannot be excused as anything other than what it is: furtive mutual gratification, in the face of all the unborn pasts and smothered futures pressing close around them.
To the people of Fu Gu, they are ye olde goth domme/femboy couple who are palpably sexually active. Having the world’s weirdest honeymoon phase. Cracking silly jokes sometimes and fucking a lot and lapsing into solemn silence on the regular.
He Xuan finds it hard to come without anything inside her, and Shi Qingxuan seemingly intuits this, or simply wants to fuck her; he doesn’t ask before pushing a finger inside. He doesn’t need to ask, and the way she spasms around him, clenching her fist in his hair, tells him as much. He probably remembered last time—he pays attention to her, that’s what she’s always liked about him—he notices things, except when he didn’t.
His finger moves in and out of her in a steady ebb and flow, and He Xuan keeps slackening and drawing tight, all at once.
When I started to think through how I wanted to handle the eventual sex with Shi Qingxuan in this fic, my mind at first went to the fairly obvious option of having stone undertones, but it didn't quite feel right, because of how He Xuan's motifs make them, like, Circlusion: The Character. So that’s how I ended up writing what is, in my mind, a transfeminine vagina dentata story.
After she is finished, Shi Qingxuan leaves a trail of quick, darting kisses up her stomach, between her breasts, to her mouth, where they become slow and lazy until they eventually subside. He Xuan experiences a brief reprieve of something approaching satiety. Brief, because before she can extricate herself from his bed, Shi Qingxuan embraces her.
Tries to, at any rate. His arms can hardly curl around her back before He Xuan has stiffened. However, she does not move away, and after a pause, he settles them on their sides, facing one another, with his arms loosely curled around her back.
The clinging, He Xuan anticipated. It was the price she was willing to pay to obtain an objective, a wanted thing. He Xuan is accustomed to compromises. With herself most of all. Yet, she finds the bearing of it harder than she’d expected.
Before long, Shi Qingxuan pulls back and laughs, before tugging the blanket up under his chin. “Do you not like being held?”
She stares at the far wall. “If you want to fuck, fine. But come now.”
When she glances his way, Shi Qingxuan looks confused and disappointed, which brings her one part vindication and two parts shame.
He Xuan is no longer interested in pretending they don’t want each other. She has also reluctantly come to terms with the fact that she wishes to preserve Shi Qingxuan in modest contentment for the remainder of his mortal days. These facts, even when taken together, do not negate the rest of who He Xuan is. What she’s done with him.
He still hasn’t replied. When she speaks again, her voice takes on a flat tone.
“Do you think I’m the sort of thing that you should hold?”
“But I held you before,” Shi Qingxuan says. He watches her face in the dim light.
Don’t remind her.
He Xuan flips him onto his back and holds him down with a hand on the centre of his chest.
“You know what I am. What do your night terrors look like?”
She would never have believed how close Shi Qingxuan has let her come back in to his life, his heart. It helps when she insists on spending a great deal of time around him in this assumed guise. It surely makes it easier for him to delude himself into the desirability of this companion. But really.
“Jiejie…” Shi Qingxuan says, with a note in his voice she can’t place.
She grips his jaw in one splayed hand. Her index finger extends along the plane of his cheek. He Xuan is thankful for the stillness of this corpse body; she thrums inside with the effort of holding back from falling into some terrifying enormity. “The things I’ve imagined doing to you.”
Without a tangible aim, He Xuan doesn’t trust herself around him. She can enjoy his presence for the time it takes for the both of them to sate their appetites. But to linger—she will engulf him someday, smother him. Shi Qingxuan has always brought out the irrational in He Xuan. Her self-control is a tenuous thread.
Shi Qingxuan waits until it’s clear that He Xuan has nothing more to say, and then replies, “I was right in front of you when you did it. When you killed Ge.”
He Xuan’s body reveals nothing, but his words hit her like a sudden dousing of ice water. She never expected to hear him name it outright, let alone while they’re pressed skin to skin.
He Xuan has to reckon with Shi Qingxuan not being a prize they lost (won?) or an innocent creature they ruined. Even having the opportunity to attempt reconciliation is humbling, because He Xuan would not be capable of doing this were she in Shi Qingxuan’s place.
He speaks in a careful, deliberate tone, and He Xuan feels the rumble of words beneath her hand as they pass through Shi Qingxuan’s throat. “I know he didn’t leave you much of a choice, but… I don’t think there’s anything you could do or say now that would surprise me. I know who you are.”
His voice has the same quality as it had earlier, and He Xuan recognizes it now: he sounds sad, in a manner so plain and sincere it seems to distill the whole emotion.
Once, He Xuan wanted to snuff out the light in Shi Qingxuan’s soul. Not to kill his body, just to smother his blameless spirit. His naivete was the greatest affront to He Xuan, that same innocence having been stolen from himself a long time ago. When it became clear that Shi Qingxuan would always choose his brother in the critical moment, He Xuan could not allow Shi Qingxuan to remain unsullied any longer. He Xuan would never be capable of a return to purity, but he could, at least, drag Shi Qingxuan with him into the world of the damned.
That was the idea. He Xuan failed even in that aim; Shi Qingxuan emerged from that hall with his hands still clean.
Her chest throbs as her dead heart strains against itself. To think she’d thought him weak, when he has held onto things He Xuan could not, even as she tried to wrest them from his grasp. She is sick with relief and horrifically envious. At what point had it last been possible for her to do the same?
Shi Qingxuan goes on. “I guess I don’t know what you thought about, but I don’t think you’d hurt me now. You’ve had lots of chances, but you’ve taken care of me. In your way.”
Receiving his mercy is intolerable. Being without it, also intolerable. He Xuan wants to run from him, and can’t stand to have him out of her sight for long. She is stranded beyond infatuation, beyond hope, beyond despair, in the unbearable realm to which love has exiled her.
Yet He Xuan has never done anything but bear the unbearable.
Shi Qingxuan takes He Xuan’s hand on his face, and lifts it away. Tugs at her sleeve until she lays beside him. He Xuan numbly allows it.
Until pretty late in the game I was going to have He Xuan get too overwhelmed and leave, but I got soft.
“I’d like to talk about something else now,” Shi Qingxuan adds, after a time. It unnerves her how quiet he’s become; it is one of her strangest legacies.
He Xuan’s eyes are open and glassy. She gazes into space, where the early morning light illuminates the scene around them. There is a chair not far from the bedside, which Shi Qingxuan is using as a makeshift nightstand. Besides the bed and chair, the room also contains the most functional item from the original house: a small, plain desk where He Xuan learned to write. She lets this awareness bloom within her mind, and resists the urge to push it back into the muck.
I was caught by the possibility that He Xuan could reintegrate some of their compartmentalized aspects of selfhood in a way that allows for existence past revenge; integrating her striving nature, her ambition, her appetite, etc. as an evolution of character traits that have always been present, even before The Traumas, and could persist after, too.
No small amount of time passes before Shi Qingxuan speaks again. “Was this your room when you were small?”
“Yes.”
“Would you rather I slept somewhere else?”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“Okay.”
His hair came free from its ribbon earlier, and hers is loose. The strands mingle on the sheets until she cannot distinguish to whom any of it belongs.
“Will you tell me a story from back then? Something you were proud of.”
Most obviously, this is a recursive gesture toward what the fic has been about—filling in the gaps of He Xuan's life, after being shown a specific sliver of it in canon. This fic, in turn, has its own agenda and leaves its own gaps, and that's what Shi Qingxuan prods at here. Shi Qingxuan’s ability to sense those things and inquire as to what else is being buried or occluded is really powerful and important to making beefleaf reconciliation work.
It’s a departure from the pattern wherein He Xuan (and, by extension, Hua Cheng) knows the truth while Shi Qingxuan only has access to facades. It also echoes the scene where He Xuan tells Xie Lian stories about Hua Cheng.
When He Xuan was a child, he nursed a sickly piglet back to health. His parents didn’t need to tell him not to get attached; they couldn’t afford to lose good meat, and rather than wanting a pet, He Xuan sought the satisfaction that would come from accomplishing something others around him had thought too troublesome to attempt. Despite it all, the day they butchered the grown hog, He Xuan cried. He ate the pig even so, and still recalls its particularly fine taste, but he wondered if he could have chased it away, had he chose. He hadn’t believed that it would go, having grown too attached to him for its own good.
It is the story that surfaces in her mind at his prompting, but she doesn’t want to tell it now. She closes her eyes, and looks within herself for something inconsequential.
There’s a writing adage that goes something like, “the ending of a short story should feel like watching a top stop spinning, only for it to rise up and start spinning of its own accord.” This is a long story, but I aimed for something similar.
Is this a happy ending? Yes and no; it’s about the despair and exhausted relief of giving up on something that is very bad for you. He Xuan is still miserable, but has downed the hard to swallow pill that things don't have to be so fucking hard all the time forever. It’s not that after this they will become “a normal couple,” but that she doesn't have to lurk in the hallway anymore. Next time, maybe she’ll get into bed.
FIN.
P.S. Since I posted the first half of this commentary, tshirt shared an astonishing piece of writing, BLESSED BE THEY WHOSE LIVES DO NOT TASTE OF EVIL, in response to the fic. I highly suggest you read it, as it articulates so much of what I was trying to get across, in a much more concise way that I was capable. so rather than being inhuman, we might call a ghost extrahuman. they have a surplus of humanity, overfilling overflowing from them. the ghost is simply too alive to categorize. at the heart of being human, is something very very strange.
P.P.S. There are two (!!) fics out there written in response to this one: take a drag, pull me in by rain11, and To Share Quilt and Pillow by villainousfriend! The former is a delightful modern AU take on the “Huaxuan weed smoking lesbians” concept, and the latter a heartwrenching canon era remix that picks up the thread of childhood memory and runs with it to crushing ends…
I was not anticipating this fic getting the reception that it did. Chase your dreams……. write the whumpy character study of your heart.
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She's cute and mischievous... It works..,,
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Lolol basically! I had a lot of trepidation about "giving HX what they want" (i.e. getting to be with SQX) because I didn't want it to feel like HX had performed the bare minimum of contrition and then been rewarded with love-interest-as-video-game-achievement, I guess?
The emphasis of the ending as I originally envisioned it was on shuangxuan having this fragile, vulnerable moment of connection and intimacy and then going back to their lives, with it left quite ambiguous whether they would see each other again, and at least some indication that HX might be able to pass on before too long, having been seen for what they really are and achieved some resolution with SQX. I don't think that would be a bad ending to a story in a vacuum, but as you've identified it really chafed with the themes and tone of the rest of this fic... But I was adamant I didn't want an overly perfect happy ending get-together, so striking a believable balance was really hard!
In the end I think I got there by realizing that it still counts as torturing my blorbo if I put them in a situation where, much like the canon situation, they get what they most wanted and it causes them untold suffering, it's just that this time the suffering is due to having to endure the pain of genuine connection and being seen for what you are...
For a long time I had internal resistance to writing postcanon beefleaf fic where they're actually together at the end because it felt like cope but now I'm enlightened and no longer care 😇
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