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Chapter Text

The summer heat pressed down like a hand that didn’t know its own strength. The training yard steamed. Dust clung to sweat and turned every breath into grit. Boys stood shoulder to shoulder with spears braced at the same angle, stances trembling, knuckles white. Somewhere behind them, the Crown Prince’s flag moved in the wind—soft, unbothered—while the world under it learned how to ache properly.

Mu Qing counted the seconds in his head to keep from looking. Four heartbeats in. Four out. Hold the line. The drill master paced, sandals scraping, voice dry as old stone. Mu Qing fixed his gaze straight ahead and tried to become a blade: cold, precise, without hunger or heat.

He lasted twenty seconds.

His eyes slid—traitors—searching for the center of the yard’s brightness.

Feng Xin.

His hair was tied into a careless bun that never fully obeyed him. Strands broke loose and clung to his temples, dark against sun-warmed skin. Even with sweat shining at his throat and dust smudged along his jaw, he looked like a thing the sun had chosen for itself. The wooden spear sat easy in his hands, the line of his shoulders strong and certain. When someone in the row behind them whispered a joke, Feng Xin’s mouth pulled into that too-wide grin, the kind that made people stand a little straighter just to be closer to it.

Mu Qing ground his back teeth together and faced forward. The spear shaft groaned in his grip. He could feel the heat gathering at his nape, not all of it from the sun. Ridiculous, he told himself, almost angrily. He knew better than to admire what didn’t belong to him.

His own skin refused the sun’s generosity; it stayed pale no matter how many hours he spent in the yard. His hands were careful, not reckless. His stance relied on stillness, not swagger. If Feng Xin was the color of late harvest—gold on gold—Mu Qing was winter left too long in the shade.

He preferred it that way. It made it easy to believe he didn’t want what warmth promised.

“Lower your shoulders,” the drill master barked somewhere behind them.

Several boys flinched. Feng Xin didn’t. He breathed and adjusted by an inch, balance slipping into place like a key turning. Mu Qing saw it out of the corner of his eye and matched the position precisely. He didn’t have a natural ease. He had studied, and the stubbornness to keep doing something until the body learned to obey. It would be enough. It had to be.

The row broke form on command. Everything loosened at once: noise, limbs, the hard edges of discipline. The Crown Prince lifted a hand and the yard rippled toward him—Feng Xin first, because of course. He covered the space between them in a few long strides and took the waterskin from another servant without being asked, offering it up with that smile he saved for His Highness alone. Xie Lian laughed at something, light as wind chimes after rain.

Mu Qing turned away with a frown he didn’t bother to flatten. His mouth did that on its own whenever Feng Xin smiled like that at someone else. It wasn’t jealousy—he knew jealousy, knew how it corroded. This was…something narrower. Meaner. He didn’t have a word for it and didn’t need one. Words made things real. He preferred to keep this unspoken, a splinter he could carry in his palm and pretend not to feel.

He headed for the water trough, hands already moving in tidy habits: rinse the wrap, cool the pulse points, rebind the wrist. The wrap’s knot, tight since dawn, had carved a thin line into his skin. He tugged at it. It bit back.

“Hold still.”

The voice came from too close. A hand closed over his, warm and thoughtless. Mu Qing’s body tensed on reflex.

Feng Xin untied the knot as if it had offended him personally. “You’ll lose feeling if you bind like that.”

“I’m aware,” Mu Qing said, too evenly, tugging his hand free. “I managed it myself. I can undo it.”

“You ‘managed’ to cut off your circulation,” Feng Xin snapped, and then he grimaced like the words had come out wrong. “Give me your hand.”

“Give me your manners.”

Golden-brown eyes flashed. For a heartbeat, Mu Qing saw something in them that wasn’t irritation. Worry, maybe. He looked away before he could mistake it for something larger. Feng Xin took the wrap anyway, movements brisk, fingers sure. He rebounded Mu Qing’s wrist with efficiency that bordered on tenderness and then ruined it by saying, “Try not to be stupid about your body. We only get the one.”

A knot pulled tight in Mu Qing’s chest. He hated the way it felt. “I’ll write that down and frame it.”

Feng Xin rolled his eyes, mouth quirking as if he couldn’t help it even when annoyed. “You’d frame your own reflection if you thought it would help you train.”

At his back, the Crown Prince called his name. Feng Xin turned, the whole line of him changing instantly—sharp attention softening into open devotion. “Coming!”

He left without looking back. Mu Qing watched his shoulders recede through the press of bodies and wind-tossed flags, the half-unraveled bun catching light like a signal. The wrap on his wrist warmed with the heat Feng Xin’s hands had left behind. He flexed his fingers and told himself to stop feeling anything about it.

He didn’t stop.

By evening, the yard emptied into chores. They moved like ants: scrub this, haul that, fetch, carry, put away. Mu Qing liked chores. They gave his hands something useful to do while his mind arranged things into shelves: weaknesses to fix, patterns to exploit, a list of ways to refine himself into the sort of servant no one could look down on.

The bucket handles dug into his palms, and the weight balanced against his shoulders. He took the longer path along the tiled corridor that skirted the lotus pond on purpose; it was quieter there, and the breeze off the water cut the heat. He reached the corner just as someone barreled around it, nearly colliding with him. A slosh of water leapt for the floor.

“Whoa—sorry.” Feng Xin steadied the bucket without thinking, fingers brushing Mu Qing’s again. He seemed to realize whose hand he had touched and withdrew his own as if burned. “You should watch where you’re going.”

Mu Qing arched a brow at the corridor’s emptiness. “Words to live by.”

“Don’t twist them, you—” Feng Xin caught himself. His mouth twitched. “Mu Qing.”

The way he said it never sounded soft. It scraped. It had scraped since the first month they’d shared a broom closet of a sleeping room with four others and taken turns pretending not to notice when the roof leaked onto someone’s blanket. Mu Qing had thought then that he could get used to it—this boy who shouted first and apologized later and glowed like a hearth. He’d been wrong. He hadn’t gotten used to anything. He’d merely learned how to carry it.

“His Highness needs towels,” Feng Xin said, as if that explained his near collision. “I’m fetching them.”

Mu Qing nodded; the conversation was already cooling into dismissal, and he preferred it. “Then don’t let me keep you.”

Feng Xin’s gaze flicked to the bucket handles biting into Mu Qing’s palms. The furrow set between his brows again. The same one that made Mu Qing want to bite something just to feel steadier. “You could ask for help sometimes.”

“I could,” Mu Qing said. “But I don’t.”

Feng Xin looked like he wanted to argue, then shook his head and jogged off, bun slipping another inch loose. Mu Qing didn’t watch him go. He told himself that it was a fact and not a lie.

The ponds turned molten under the late sun. Dragonflies stitched the air. In the laundry courtyard, a group of girls giggled over something one of them had drawn in the dust—two dots and a line turned into a smile and a pair of bright eyes. “It’s him,” one said, delighted. “It looks like him, doesn’t it?”

“Not quite,” another answered. “The grin needs to be wider.”

They were not talking about Mu Qing. They never were. He felt the idea slide past him like a familiar breeze. He stacked the folded tunics tighter, binding the pile with cord as he bound his thoughts.

That night, the barracks smelled like wet cloth, floor polish, and the salt of tired bodies. Someone snored. Someone prayed under his breath. Someone whispered a story about a mountain where oranges grew as big as bowls. Mu Qing lay awake on his narrow pallet, looking at the ceiling beams and counting the knots in the wood. He tried to think about stances. He tried to think about how to hold his breath underwater longer because the drill master would test them again at dawn. He tried so hard not to think about a voice saying, Try not to be stupid about your body, and fingers fixing a knot with more care than the words allowed.

He turned over and buried his face in the rough weave of his pillow. It smelled like the sun. Not a mercy.

A memory rose without permission. Not from this summer, but from a spring downpour months ago when the roof in the courtyard had turned into a drum and the gutters overflowed like small rivers. They’d also been on bucket duty, racing leaks against buckets, trying to keep storerooms dry. Feng Xin’s bun had lost that battle in the first hour. Rain soaked it through, and gravity did the rest. He shook his head, and strands poured down his back, darker and heavier with water, clinging to his neck. He had laughed, grinning up into the rain like it was an answered prayer rather than a nuisance.

Mu Qing had handed him a spare strip of cloth without looking him in the eye. “Tie it back.”

“Why? You like it like this?”

Mu Qing had scowled and turned away. “It’s impractical.”

Feng Xin had made a sound that was almost a hum, nearly an agreement, and almost something else. “Right. Impractical.” He’d twisted the cloth and tried to secure his hair one-handed, failing gloriously. The strip slipped; the hair slipped with it. He’d cursed cheerfully and turned to Mu Qing like he had forgotten who he was asking. “Help?”

The rain wasn’t loud enough to hide the jump of Mu Qing’s pulse. He did it anyway—took the cloth, stepped closer, and swept wet hair up in both hands. It was heavier than he expected, and silkier. A stray leaf had nested itself near the nape of Feng Xin’s neck; Mu Qing plucked it free as if he hadn’t noticed. He tied the knot so neatly a court sewist would have nodded. When he let go, his fingers brushed the warmth at the base of Feng Xin’s skull. His own hands felt suddenly too cold.

“Thanks,” Feng Xin had said, half-turning to smile, that sun-big grin barreling toward Mu Qing like a thrown spear.

Mu Qing had stepped back as if avoiding a blade.

The grin missed. “Right,” Feng Xin muttered, throat clearing. “Impractical.”

He’d gone back to hauling buckets. Mu Qing had stood there for a heartbeat too long, his palms aching to warm and for no good reason. He’d told himself he hated that feeling. He told himself again now, face pressed to his pillow in the dark.

Somewhere outside, the Crown Prince laughed. Feng Xin answered him with a line of words that blurred into each other, full of gentle teasing and affection that sat effortlessly on his tongue. Mu Qing listened and learned nothing new. Feng Xin’s voice was always soft when it turned toward light. It sharpened when it turned toward Mu Qing.

He could live with that. He preferred sharp things. They made sense.

In the morning, the yard steamed again. The drill master set them to paired forms. Mu Qing always got the boys who didn’t know where to put their feet; he was good at fixing what was crooked. He corrected stances, moved elbows, and pressed a knee with two fingers until it bent enough to lock a pose. He didn’t praise. He didn’t waste words. He watched people learn to hold themselves up.

“Switch partners,” the drill master called.

The crowd turned like a tide. Mu Qing turned with it and found himself facing Feng Xin.

They stood there for a breath, balanced between excuses. Feng Xin’s mouth twitched first. “Try not to break me, Mu Qing.”

“I don’t waste effort,” Mu Qing said.

They bowed, touched spears, and began. The form demanded closeness and timing. Where Mu Qing was exact, Feng Xin was instinctive, which meant he moved wrong in all the ways that worked. It maddened Mu Qing. It made his chest feel too full. When Feng Xin missed a step, Mu Qing’s spear corrected it not with force but with insistence, guiding him back into the pattern. When Mu Qing overcommitted to a thrust by the smallest margin, Feng Xin flowed with it, hand coming up to steady Mu Qing’s back, palm warm through the thin linen.

“Don’t overreach,” Feng Xin murmured.

“Don’t talk.”

“You first.”

They circled. The yard noise thinned at the edges of Mu Qing’s awareness until all that remained was the scrape of wood, the catch of breath, the sun, the line of a mouth he tried not to see. They moved faster. The form blurred into something with teeth. Mu Qing’s wrist flared with a dull warning, and he ignored it. He could hold anything that hurt as long as he named it discipline.

Feng Xin saw the flinch anyway. He always did, damn him. In the next pass, he used the butt of his spear to knock Mu Qing’s weapon just enough off-line to force a pause. “Stop.”

“We’re not finished.”

“I said stop.”

It wasn’t a command he had the right to give. Mu Qing stepped in instead of back, bringing them breath-close. “Make me,” he said, too low to be heard by anyone else.

Feng Xin’s eyes darkened—not with anger, but with something softer that always wore anger’s mask when it turned toward Mu Qing. His hand came up like reflex, like gravity, and closed lightly around Mu Qing’s bandaged wrist. Heat shot up Mu Qing’s arm, bewildering in its simplicity. He hated that his body noticed warmth like this and stored it greedily.

“Idiot,” Feng Xin said, which held more fear than insult. “Do you think I want to watch you damage yourself?”

Mu Qing opened his mouth to bite back and found no blade ready on his tongue. The space in his chest that wanted a fight faltered. He pulled his hand free instead, not sharply, not gently. “If you want to see something unwise,” he said, “keep assuming you know what I think.”

Feng Xin’s mouth parted. For a strange, suspended second, Mu Qing thought he’d say something that would move the ground under their feet. He didn’t. He swallowed and stepped back. “You make it very hard not to assume,” he muttered, half to himself.

The drill master clapped them into the next sequence, the moment snapping like a thread pulled too far. They moved again, safer, the form corralling them away from whatever edge they’d found.

Afterward, when the yard spilled into noon, Mu Qing stayed behind to run the sequence alone, neat as writing. He thought better when his body was busy. Between passes, he looked toward the flag and the steps below it, where Xie Lian sat with a book in his lap and a smile on his face while Feng Xin stood just below him, one foot on the stair, leaned in to listen.

There it was again: the set of Feng Xin’s shoulders softening into an attentiveness that cost nothing and gave everything. Mu Qing felt that familiar, narrow ache open inside him, not the kind that begged to be soothed. The kind he could live with—the kind he chose to.

If he could not have that smile turned toward him—fine. He had something else. He had the scowls. He had the furrowed brow. He had the exasperation that showed up only when he was around. He had the roughness that smoothed for other people and sharpened into edges for him alone.

They were not gentle things, but they were his.

He planted the butt of his spear, squared his shoulders, and reran the form until the line of each movement etched into bone. The sun watched. The flag watched. If the world wanted to split itself between warmth and frost, he would stand exactly where they met and pretend the cold suited him.

In the corner of his vision, a figure lingered at the yard's edge, not leaving until Mu Qing finally set the spear down. By the time he looked, the figure was gone, only the faintest impression of a bun coming loose and a hand tucking it back in place.

Mu Qing pressed his fingers to the new wrap on his wrist and felt its heat, caught there like a secret.

He told himself it would be enough. He would make it enough. And if the price of having any part of Feng Xin was taking the part that cut, then let him bleed neatly, where no one could see.

He looked up at the flag and the sky behind it, so blister-blue it hurt, and promised himself he would not rush toward anything. Not toward victory. Not toward ruin. Not toward truth. He would move only when the ground was firm and the blade was balanced.

Even if it took years.

Even if it took centuries.

Chapter Text

Dawn came thin and blue, the kind of light that made the palace roofs look like the backs of sleeping fish. The bell had only rung twice when the dormitory doors slid open in a chain, boys stumbling into the chill that bit at wrists and ankles. Breath fogged. Bare feet learned the cold of stone.

Mu Qing liked mornings like this. The air pared everything down. No glare, no heat-sick mirages shimmering over the training yard. Just the square of ground, the straightness of lines, the honesty of cold.

He washed quickly at the basin, water numbing his fingers, and bound his wrists in fresh cloth. The old wrap—Feng Xin’s knot—had held the day before, snug and clean. He’d kept it on longer than he needed to. Stupid attachment. He stripped the cloth and tied a new one, neat enough to please an inspector.

A cough in the doorway. “You’re up early.”

Feng Xin leaned on the jamb like it had invited him, hair already pushed into a bun that was, against reason, obedient this morning. He rubbed at one eye with the back of his wrist, then noticed the basin and added, “You’re always up early.”

Mu Qing dried his hands with even strokes. “It helps to train when there aren’t a dozen bodies wandering into your reach.”

“So you can pretend the world is tidy for an hour.” Feng Xin grinned.

“So I can work.”

“That’s what I said.”

Mu Qing rolled the bandage end under and tucked it. He lifted the spear from its place over the door and stepped past. Their shoulders brushed. The contact was brief and unremarkable and burned through him anyway.

Outside, the yard hadn’t shaken off night yet. Flags hung limp, colors muted. The first birds were still thinking about whether to sing. Mu Qing took his place at the edge and ran through warm-ups until there was warmth to be found. His body kept its lists: ankles, calves, hips, shoulders. The world returned in increments—more color, more sound, the scrape of the door again and the thud of feet.

Feng Xin wandered in with a yawn half-swallowed, rolled his neck, and dropped into stance beside Mu Qing without being asked. That was the trouble with him. He made things feel like invitations that Mu Qing hadn’t issued.

They moved together. Where Mu Qing’s angles were square, Feng Xin’s were arcs. Mu Qing’s breath counted out beats; Feng Xin’s found its own rhythm and then fit to Mu Qing’s without either of them saying a word.

The cold surrendered to sweat. By the time the first batch of servants spilled into the yard and the drill master cracked his voice across them, Mu Qing had already run the form twice more, and Feng Xin had stretched by balancing on one foot and leaning into the sky like a heron that couldn’t take itself seriously.

When the drills shifted to sword work, they were split into rows. The Crown Prince came out late, hair half braided by someone who hadn’t had enough light to see, and sat on the steps to watch. He pulled his robe tighter against the air, and the moment he shivered, a cloak was around his shoulders. Feng Xin, of course. He had crossed the yard without Mu Qing noticing, as if pulled by a string.

Mu Qing’s blade caught a ray of new sun and flung it back into his eyes. He blinked hard and reset his grip. He didn’t look toward the steps again. He didn’t need to. He knew what he would see there: soft attention, quick hands, his own absence.

They broke for breakfast on a bell. The kitchen steamed. Porridge, greens, a few pickled plums that vanished into sleeves the moment backs turned. Mu Qing stood in line, bowl cupped in both hands, eyes on the ladle’s portion. Balanced. Not stingy, not indulgent.

“More,” someone said behind him, an eager voice that had learned how to plead.

“We’ve got to feed everyone,” the cook snapped, harried and sharp. “Move along.”

The boy behind Mu Qing went up on his toes for a look into the pot and stumbled, shoulders bumping into Mu Qing’s back. The jolt sent hot porridge lapping against the bowl’s rim and then over. Reflex: Mu Qing shifted to spare the boy, took the burn across his own knuckles.

“Careful,” he said, steady.

“Sorry!” the boy blurted, eyes huge.

“It’s fine,” Mu Qing said, and it was, in the way that things that sting can be folded into a day. He stepped aside, set the bowl on a counter, and reached for a cloth.

Feng Xin’s hand got there first. He’d threaded through the crowd with that shameless ease of his. “You’re dripping,” he said, as if Mu Qing were a leaky roof that annoyed him personally. He took Mu Qing’s wrist, dabbed away heat, and blew on the reddening skin without thinking about it.

Mu Qing pulled back like he’d been caught cheating. “It’s nothing.”

“It’s your hand,” Feng Xin said. “You use those.”

“You plan to scold me for using my hands now?”

“I plan to scold you for pretending pain can be convinced to go away if you ignore it enough.” Feng Xin wrapped the cloth around Mu Qing’s palm, too careful for how his voice sounded. “You’re—”

“Clumsy?” Mu Qing said, daring it.

“Stubborn,” Feng Xin finished. His eyes flicked up. Something in them softened too far, then snapped back. “Eat before the drill master decides to teach us discipline by making us watch him eat instead.”

Mu Qing reclaimed his wrist with a motion that was almost polite. “Worry about yourself.”

“I do,” Feng Xin said, so quickly it almost tripped him. He coughed, turned it into a joke. “All the time. It’s a full-time job.”

Mu Qing rolled his eyes at the impossible man. He picked up his bowl and found a shadowed corner of the courtyard facing a wall. You couldn’t be accused of staring that way. Feng Xin didn’t sit with him. He never did. He ate with the cluster that formed wherever sound gathered—near the Crown Prince, near the center of a story, near whatever drew the brightest line through the morning.

The day’s tasks shifted like waves. After breakfast came errands, and after errands came a summons to the ceremonial hall to polish gilt fixtures before a minor procession. It was the sort of work that made wrists ache and shoulders complain, but the shine afterward was honest.

They worked in silence with other servants, cloths turning black at the edges. Incense snaked through the air. A junior attendant—too new, too eager—climbed a stool to reach a lantern bracket and overbalanced the entire pole with his weight. The stool kicked. The attendant windmilled. The pole came down hard.

Mu Qing saw the fall beginning and moved before thought finished forming. He stepped into the bracket’s path, braced, and let the metal crash into his shoulder instead of the tiled floor, saving a sound the entire hallway would have heard. The impact rang through bone. He held. The junior’s eyes filled with panicked water.

“Put it down,” Mu Qing said, through a tightness that didn’t reach his voice. “Slowly.”

Hands grabbed the pole’s other end—Feng Xin, appearing like a problem’s solution. Between them, they eased it aside and lowered it without calamity. The head attendant appeared in a sweep, mouth thin, gaze sweeping for blame. The junior went white.

“It’s stable,” Mu Qing said before anyone spoke, even before he decided to. “I misjudged the weight.”

The head attendant’s eyes cut to the angle of Mu Qing’s shoulder and the new stiffness trying to hide in the set of his jaw. He nodded once, satisfied with a culprit. “Then measure better.” He turned to the others. “Check every bracket. Twice.”

The junior’s mouth worked. No sound came out.

Feng Xin stood very still. When the head attendant swept off, he turned, jaw tight enough to crack teeth. “What was that?”

Mu Qing wiped soot from a seam that didn’t need it. “The bracket didn’t fall.”

“That’s not what I asked.”

“I answered what mattered.”

“What matters,” Feng Xin said, quiet enough that the word had more weight, “is your shoulder. Turn around.”

“I’m working.”

Feng Xin stepped into his space with an insistence that would have been obnoxious if it didn’t come paired with hands that knew where to press without hurting. His palm flattened just above Mu Qing’s scapula. The muscle flinched. “You’re—”

“—fine,” Mu Qing said, automatically.

“—hurt,” Feng Xin said, not moving his hand. “And if you say you’re fine again I’ll pour the rinse bucket on your head.”

“You would waste water,” Mu Qing said. “Shocking.”

“Mu Qing.” Feng Xin’s voice landed on the name like a plea disguised as a warning. “Why do you do this? Why do you step in front of everything sharp and then act like it can’t cut you?”

“Because I can hold it,” Mu Qing said. He didn’t add: because you always hold the bright things. Because someone has to catch the heavy.

Feng Xin’s jaw worked, frustration and something deeper sharing a room and hating the company. “He should’ve taken the blame if he dropped it.”

“He’s new,” Mu Qing said. “You remember being new.”

“I remember wanting to be better,” Feng Xin snapped. “Not being treated like I might break.”

“And yet you expect me to be treated like I’m glass,” Mu Qing said, firing back before he could stop himself.

“I expect you to stop pretending you’re stone,” Feng Xin said, the heat in him flaring. “Stone cracks too.”

The junior attendant hovered three paces away, shame radiating. Mu Qing flicked his eyes toward him. Conversation over—for now. Feng Xin saw the look and swallowed whatever else he had ready, but the words stayed on his face: stubborn, infuriating, I hate you doing this to yourself. He turned away in a sharp line and bent to the next bracket like it had insulted his family.

They finished without disaster and carried the cloths out into the light to shake them. The soot rose in soft clouds and drifted on a breeze that had warmed since dawn. The cold had given up the yard to the sun again. The palace shifted into its daytime self—voices everywhere, sandals slapping stone, the sense of a hundred tasks knitting into something resembling order.

At noon, the Crown Prince passed through the inner court in plain robes to deliver offerings at a small shrine for a day-laborer who’d died in his sleep. He moved without escort. He always did when he could get away with it. Feng Xin shadowed him anyway, a step back, a half-step to the side, like a blade carried under a sleeve. Mu Qing followed at more distance, as they had been instructed: unseen unless needed, present without imposing. The three of them drew a strange line between them—devotion, duty, and something that refused to be named.

At the shrine, a child stood on tiptoes to set a wilted sprig in the bowl. He fumbled it three times, each attempt more desperate. The mother’s hands, chapped and splayed from work, hovered without interfering. The child began to cry, the sound small and held in.

Feng Xin’s face changed. The edges went soft as cloth left to soak. He crouched, big hands suddenly careful, and flicked one finger against the bowl’s rim as if asking permission. “May I?”

The child hiccuped a yes. Feng Xin guided his hands. The sprig slipped into place like it belonged there. Joy landed on the boy’s face so fast it was almost a shock. He looked up. Feng Xin grinned at him, that stupid, blinding grin that made strangers feel like they’d swallowed sunlight. The child giggled so hard he almost tipped over, then recovered with the solemnity of someone who has just done something important.

Mu Qing stood back and watched, and something old and narrow in him tugged. He didn’t begrudge the softness, not truly. He could even understand it. The world hurt in too many places; if you could fill one of them for a breath, what kind of person refused?

But the part of him that kept careful ledgers—give and get, owe and owed—wrote another line under a familiar column: that smile was not for him. It had never been.

The Crown Prince set his offering with gentle hands and bowed. When he straightened, his gaze passed over them both. He smiled—smaller than Feng Xin’s, but with a weight that sank deeper. “Thank you,” he said, as if they had done more than breathe near him.

Feng Xin ducked his head to hide how proud he looked. Mu Qing bowed with perfect form, because he could not bow with anything else.

On the way back, they cut past the lotus pond. The afternoon heat had finally arrived with its insistence. Dragonflies wrote fast messages over the pads. A few servants had stripped to their waists and were scrubbing sweat and dust from their arms at the far basin, talking in the elastic way tired boys do. Feng Xin peeled off his outer robe and tossed it to a bench. The bun finally gave up. His hair spilled. Sun found brown and made it a different kind of gold.

Mu Qing didn’t look. He failed quickly and looked. He didn’t have to go close to see the strands cling to the line of Feng Xin’s neck, to see water track a path over warm skin and disappear under the collarbone. When Feng Xin tipped his head back to rinse, he closed his eyes and sighed like the world had finally done one decent thing.

“Forgot you were attached to that mop?” someone teased.

“It’s magnificent,” someone else said. “I would never put it up.”

“It’s impractical,” Mu Qing said before he could corral his mouth.

Three heads turned. Feng Xin blinked water out of his lashes and found Mu Qing, something sparking that had nothing to do with sunlight. “Here we go.”

“You’ll drip on the floor we just scrubbed,” Mu Qing said, rescuing himself with pettiness. “Tie it back.”

He didn’t offer a strip of cloth. He didn’t trust his hands to be steady.

Feng Xin wrung water out with both palms, shook his hair like a dog, and laughed when half the basin squealed and fled. He reached for his discarded robe and found a sash. “I liked it better when you tied it.”

“You’re misremembering,” Mu Qing said. His pulse, treacherous, remembered perfectly.

Feng Xin gathered the hair and fumbled one loop, then another, turning himself into a problem he could not solve with strength or speed. He glanced, quick, to see if Mu Qing would come fix it. Mu Qing stayed very still. Across the pond a carp surfaced, mouth round and empty as an O.

Feng Xin’s mouth did a small twist that wasn’t the grin and wasn’t a scowl. “Fine.” He trapped the bundle and knotted it with stubborn fingers that had learned everything except elegance. It held. Barely.

They returned to the yard for afternoon forms. Heat roared. Shadows shrank to slivers that fit under the lip of the wall. The drill master set them to pairs again, rotating through partners so no one learned only one body’s rhythm. Mu Qing moved through strangers like a knife through cloth—slice, pass, out. When the rotation clicked and put Feng Xin in front of him again, the air felt thinner.

“Try not to show off,” Mu Qing said, because if he didn’t say something unkind he might say something reckless.

“Try not to pop a vein,” Feng Xin said, because if he didn’t answer he might confess something.

The form demanded a commitment step, a pivot, an exchange of lines. Precision mattered more than strength. Mu Qing loved it for that. They moved. It was almost clean. Then the junior from the ceremonial hall—shaken, still unsteady—cut across their path at the wrong moment, forgetting the rotation’s arc. Mu Qing adjusted to avoid him. Feng Xin adjusted to cover Mu Qing. Their blades kissed and slid. Mu Qing’s shoulder screamed with the echo of morning impact. He swallowed the sound, the way he always did, and finished the pass as if nothing had faltered.

Feng Xin’s face said he noticed anyway. He always noticed. They came out of the form and he caught Mu Qing’s elbow, not gently. “Enough.”

“Let go.”

“Enough.”

They stood too close for a courtyard argument. They did it anyway, words quiet and furious.

“Stop spending yourself like coin no one told you to pay,” Feng Xin said.

“Stop thinking you can tell me how to exist,” Mu Qing said.

“Stop acting like I’m picking on you when I’m—” Feng Xin’s mouth snapped shut. Something reckless had run to the edge of his teeth and balked at the jump.

“When you’re what?” Mu Qing asked, heartbeat like a drum he refused to hear.

“When I’m trying,” Feng Xin said, and the word landed bare. “When I’m—dammit, Mu Qing, look at you. Look at you.” He made a sound that wanted to be laughter and gave up as a snarl. “You act like the only things you deserve are the cuts, so you take them first.”

Mu Qing felt the words in his chest like a hand pressed there. He could have answered with a hundred sharp things. He could have said: and you act like the only things I deserve from you are the cuts, and you give them freely. He could have said: I know where I stand when you scowl. He could have said: at least your anger belongs to me.

Instead he said, voice flat, “You don’t know me.”

“I’ve known you since we were knee-high to a broom,” Feng Xin said. “I know when you’re lying.”

“To you?” Mu Qing asked. “Or to myself?”

Feng Xin took a breath like he might do something stupid. The drill master shouted for the line to reset, and the world resumed. They moved. The rotation tugged them apart again. Whatever would’ve been said dissolved into heat and repetition.

By evening, the sun had turned the courtyard’s dust into gold. The day’s edges softened. The Crown Prince drifted through like a quiet blessing and disappeared into a corner of the garden where the shadows were cool. Feng Xin hovered near the garden gate longer than he needed to, pretending to check a latch that didn’t stick. Mu Qing coiled practice ropes and stacked them by size.

When he finally left the yard, the sky had gone peach at the margins. The lotus pond kept the last of the light like a secret. He took the long path again. He didn’t think about why.

At the bend, two voices carried. The junior attendant’s small one, and Feng Xin’s. Mu Qing’s step slowed.

“…didn’t mean to,” the junior was saying, miserable.

“I know,” Feng Xin answered. “You’re new.”

“I thought I’d be strong.”

“You will be,” Feng Xin said. He didn’t have to think about faith; he handed it out like bread. “Strength isn’t not dropping things. It’s picking them up again. And saying ‘I’m sorry.’ And not letting someone take the blame for you.”

Mu Qing moved to step forward and stopped when the boy whispered, “He saved me.”

“He saved the lantern,” Feng Xin said, dry, and then softer, “He saved you from getting punished. And he’ll do it again. And then he’ll say it didn’t hurt. Don’t let him pretend you don’t exist because he wants to carry everything himself.”

Mu Qing exhaled, a slow, careful thing. He didn’t want to be seen like that. He didn’t want anyone seeing under the edges he had sharpened on purpose.

“And you—” the boy began, brave for a second. “Who saves you?”

Feng Xin was quiet long enough that Mu Qing almost stepped into the path, ready to break something he had kept balanced. Then Feng Xin huffed a laugh that had no humor in it. “I pick fights with someone who knows where to hit.”

He said it like a joke. It wasn’t.

Mu Qing left before either of them could see him. He skirted the pond and found a bench where the stone had kept the day’s heat in its belly. He put his bandaged hand on it and let warmth soak up through the cloth.

He’d told himself this morning that he liked the cold. He did, in the way you can like anything that makes sense. The cold sharpened. The cold clarified. But under all that, he could admit this much without choking: he was built of frost because there was a sun he couldn’t look at directly for long.

Across the water, laughter broke—bright, uncomplicated. Feng Xin again, probably chasing someone around with a towel or rescuing the kitchen from a dropped tray. Mu Qing didn’t check. He watched the lotus pads instead, their round backs casting coins of shadow on the pond’s skin.

Night would come. The day would compress into the ache already beginning to settle into his shoulder. He would sleep. He would wake to blue light and cold air and do it again. He would keep his lists: weaknesses, forms, debts he paid without letting anyone write them down.

He would take what belonged to him. If all he was offered were scowls and furrowed brows and the press of a hand that came rough because softness endangered something in both of them—then he would take that. Because those belonged to him. Because they came to him and not to the bright center of the yard where everyone else gathered.

When he finally stood to go, a figure moved at the edge of his sight, a familiar frame half-hidden behind the curve of a pillar. His first thought: how long had he been there? His second: of course you were.

“Mu Qing,” Feng Xin said, not stepping closer. The light had thinned enough that his expression was mostly shape. “About earlier.”

“Which earlier?” Mu Qing asked. “We give the day a lot of chances to trip us.”

“All of them,” Feng Xin said. He rubbed the back of his neck, sheepishness flashing over him like a cloud over a field. “I didn’t mean—”

“You meant every word.” Mu Qing’s mouth tilted. It wasn’t a smile. “So did I.”

Feng Xin’s exhale raked the air between them. “Do you ever stop turning everything into a lesson?”

“I don’t like failing the same test twice.”

“And I don’t like watching you bleed and pretend it’s ink.” The words left him before he could tidy them, raw and shaped like care.

Mu Qing’s heartbeat landed once, hard. He chose not to track the number after. “You’re not watching.”

Feng Xin’s laugh was low and defeated. “That’s the problem,” he said. “I am.”

Silence went long enough to become something with edges. The pond cracked a small sound; a frog had opinions. The last of the light flattened and went out.

“Good night,” Mu Qing said finally, because he needed a door and this one would do.

“Good night,” Feng Xin answered, because he would always stay in the hallway until Mu Qing closed it fully.

Mu Qing walked away with the precision he gave to forms. Behind him, a hand moved—he didn’t need to look to know Feng Xin raked it through his hair and found the bun still barely holding, still nearly coming loose. He hoped it didn’t fall until Feng Xin was back inside. He didn’t like the idea of leaving any warmth out in the dark.

Sun and frost, he thought, and did not try to decide which was heavier. He could carry both. He already was.

Chapter Text

The oil lamp on Mu Qing’s desk burned low, its flame wavering like a weary sentinel. The rest of the servants’ quarters had long since gone quiet, breaths steady in the dark, the small cough of one boy answered by another’s murmur in his sleep. But Mu Qing sat awake still, his back straight despite the hour, the needle moving through silk in his hand.

The fan was half-born, its bamboo ribs already carved smooth, polished until no splinter could offend the touch. Across them he had stretched a sheet of pale silk, taut as a drum, ready to carry whatever pattern his hand chose to lay upon it. Tonight he had chosen plum blossoms.

The thread he used was white, fine as spider-silk, each stitch placed so small and precise it could have been the work of a calligrapher’s brush. When he pulled the thread taut, the blossoms unfurled petal by petal, quiet and unassuming, but alive beneath the lamplight. A thread of silver hinted at the frost that lingered on early branches, and though he told himself it was practice, nothing more, there was a stillness in his chest as he watched the flowers take form, a rare peace he could not find in steel or dust.

His mother had taught him long ago that the world could be cruel, but cloth and thread would never betray. As long as the hand was steady, the work would answer. Mu Qing had learned to trust this, more than he trusted people, more than he trusted smiles that vanished when he turned his head.

He was halfway through a cluster of blossoms when a voice startled him into pricking his finger.

“Mu Qing?”

The needle slipped. A bead of red welled on his pale skin. He looked up sharply, ready to hide what he had been doing, but stopped at once.

Crown Prince Xie Lian stood at the doorway. His hair, unbound from ceremony, spilled loose over his shoulders; his white robe was simple, without ornament, falling carelessly about him. In the lamplight he seemed less an untouchable heir and more like moonlight leaning into a room.

Mu Qing rose immediately to his feet, bowing low. “Your Highness.”

Xie Lian’s gaze, gentle but intent, had already fallen upon the fan resting in Mu Qing’s lap. He stepped closer, almost reverently, and lowered himself enough to see. His breath caught faintly.

“…You made this?”

Mu Qing stiffened. His instinct was to close the fan at once, to deny or deflect, to say it was nothing but idle work. But the silk in his lap was too clearly touched by a careful hand, too clearly beloved in its detail. There was no use denying what was before His Highness’s eyes.

“Yes,” he said, quietly.

Xie Lian’s expression lit with unfeigned delight. “It is exquisite.” His hand hovered just above the silk, hesitant to touch. “The blossoms—look how the petals seem to tremble in the wind. They are more alive than the ones in the courtyard.”

Mu Qing’s ears warmed. He turned his gaze aside. “It is only practice.”

“Practice?” Xie Lian laughed softly, as though the word itself was absurd. “If this is practice, then I cannot imagine the finished work. You must teach me.”

Mu Qing blinked, caught off guard. “…Teach you?”

“Yes—embroidery,” Xie Lian said, his tone bright with sincerity. “I have tried before, but my stitches always knot, and the thread will not listen to me. If you would guide me, even a little, I would be grateful.” He paused, almost sheepish, and lowered his voice. “That is—if you are willing. I know you have little time, and perhaps no wish to instruct me in something so frivolous.”

Mu Qing’s first thought was refusal. It was not proper. He was a servant. He had no right to sit so close beside the Crown Prince, to take his hand and guide it as though they were equals. His place was behind, unseen, silent. And yet—

And yet, if he were honest, there was something in him that yearned for this. He wished, if only for once, to be more than a shadow at His Highness’s side. Perhaps, if he agreed, the Crown Prince might think of him as a companion, even a friend.

Mu Qing bowed his head. “…If it pleases Your Highness.”

Xie Lian’s smile bloomed, sudden and radiant, bright enough to eclipse the lamp. “It does.”

They sat together at the low table. Mu Qing threaded a new needle with steady fingers, though inside his chest something unsteady fluttered. He demonstrated the stitch slowly, his movements exact, each thread crossing the silk as if drawn by ruler and compass. Xie Lian leaned in, following closely, his hair brushing against Mu Qing’s sleeve.

When Xie Lian tried the stitch himself, the needle slipped, the thread knotted. He laughed at his own clumsiness, light and unashamed. “See? I warned you. The thread refuses to obey me.”

“Not the thread,” Mu Qing murmured, reaching to adjust. He showed the silk again, steady as water. “You pulled too quickly. The thread catches when you do not guide it. Slower.”

Xie Lian tried again. The stitch was crooked, but better. Mu Qing, before thinking, said, “Better.”

Xie Lian beamed at the small praise as though it were worth more than gold. “Then I shall try again.”

Again, and again, each attempt uneven, but steadier than the last. Mu Qing corrected him quietly, without sharpness, his voice soft in spite of himself. The chamber grew hushed, as though the night itself was listening, the oil lamp’s flame bowing low with the hour. Not for the first time, Mu Qing allowed himself the dangerous thought: perhaps His Highness might come to think of him as a friend.

But as this thought settled in his chest, Mu Qing glanced toward the doorway.

There, leaning casually against the frame, arms crossed, stood Feng Xin.

He said nothing. He only watched. His expression was not soft, not indulgent as it was when he looked at His Highness. His eyes were sharp, golden-brown catching what little light the lamp gave, narrowed ever so slightly when they fell on Mu Qing’s hand guiding the silk too near Xie Lian’s.

Mu Qing’s chest tightened, his breath caught. He looked away at once, back to the fan, as though the blossoms required every ounce of his attention. His ears burned.

Xie Lian had not noticed Feng Xin yet. He only tried another stitch, crooked but passable, and laughed softly. “Mu Qing, look—it almost resembles a blossom now.”

Mu Qing’s throat was tight. “…Almost.”

Behind them, Feng Xin scoffed, quiet, almost swallowed, but not quiet enough for Mu Qing to miss.

The sound struck like a blade.

And yet, when Xie Lian smiled at him with that brightness so gentle and open, Mu Qing found himself saying, low, “It will be a blossom. With practice.”

Because if His Highness wished to learn, he would teach him. Because in some hidden, shameful part of him, Mu Qing still longed for a place beside the Crown Prince.

Even if every stitch he laid that night felt like a thorn in his hand under Feng Xin’s gaze.

Chapter Text

The training yard after dusk was not the same yard as in the day.

In the daylight, the dust burned beneath bare feet, the cries of the drill master rang like iron against stone, and sweat poured until boys thought their bodies might turn to salt. By night, when the sun had vanished and the lanterns were lit one by one along the walls, the yard grew hushed. The shadows grew long and the air carried the sharp bite of coolness that slipped under clothes and into bones.

It was in these hours, when most had collapsed on their pallets or busied themselves with chores by firelight, that Mu Qing preferred to train alone.

The stone was still warm beneath his soles, holding the memory of the day’s heat. Above, the sky was deepening into indigo, stars pricking through, the moon still half-hidden behind the palace roofs. The scent of sweat and smoke lingered in the air, but fainter now, like echoes rather than presence.

Mu Qing stood in the center of the yard, spear balanced in his grip, his body already aching from a day’s worth of drills—but that was precisely why he would not stop. Precision was not a gift. It was beaten into the body, muscle by muscle, repetition by repetition, until even exhaustion could not strip it away.

He thrust, drew back, swept the blade in an arc. Every movement neat, sharp, measured. Each strike the same as the one before. He had learned that perfection was not brilliance but discipline, a steady hand, a refusal to waver.

It was then, as his arm lifted for another strike, that a voice interrupted.

“You’ll tear your shoulder if you keep at it like that.”

The spear faltered mid-swing. Mu Qing froze, his grip tightening, jaw clenching before he turned.

Feng Xin stood by one of the wooden posts at the yard’s edge, leaning against it like the space belonged to him. His arms were crossed, his posture relaxed, but his eyes were sharp. The lantern nearest him caught the outline of his face, throwing his skin into warm bronze, his jaw strong and steady in shadow and light alike. His hair, tied in a bun that had already loosened, slipped down over one shoulder, catching the lantern’s glow like silk.

He looked like he had stepped straight from the light into Mu Qing’s path, as he always did.

Mu Qing’s voice was cold. “I am fine.”

“You’re not.” Feng Xin’s tone was firm, but not unkind. “Anyone could see it. Your shoulder’s been stiff since morning.”

“Then stop watching,” Mu Qing snapped.

That silenced Feng Xin for a moment. His brows drew together, his expression hardening as if he hadn’t expected the words to cut that way. He unfolded his arms, took a step closer. “You think I don’t notice? That I haven’t seen you wince all day?”

“I don’t care what you notice,” Mu Qing said flatly. He turned away and lifted his spear again. “It isn’t your concern.”

But it was. Always, it was.

Because somehow—always, always, always—Feng Xin was there.
When Mu Qing pushed himself too far, it was Feng Xin’s voice that barked at him to stop. When he missed a step, it was Feng Xin who corrected him without thinking. When he bled, it was Feng Xin’s hand that caught his wrist first, clumsy in its care but steady nonetheless.

And when he looked at His Highness, smiling with such warmth that even the coldest heart softened, it was always Feng Xin who stood by his side, that same smile bright as the sun, dazzling, blinding—never for Mu Qing.

Never.

Mu Qing knew this. He had known it since they were boys, trailing after His Highness like shadows. Feng Xin was light: reckless, bright, impossible to ignore. He laughed too loudly, fought too fiercely, loved too openly. And Mu Qing—cold, pale, sharp-edged—was shadow, built for stillness, for silence, for carrying burdens in the dark.

They were not the same. They could never be.

So why, why, why, did Feng Xin’s eyes always find him?

“Mu Qing,” Feng Xin said now, stepping into the yard, voice softer than before, but no less insistent. “Stop.”

Mu Qing’s hand tightened around his spear. “Do not order me.”

“I’m not ordering,” Feng Xin said. He was close now, the warmth of him carrying even through the cool air. “I’m asking. Stop before you hurt yourself worse.”

Mu Qing turned sharply, spear leveled between them, not in threat but in refusal. His chest felt too tight, his breath too quick. “Your concern is misplaced.”

Feng Xin’s gaze held his, golden-brown eyes bright even in shadow. They burned, and Mu Qing hated how much he wanted that fire to soften, just once, for him. How much he longed for the kind of smile that was so freely given to His Highness, to children, to strangers. A smile like sunlight.

But that warmth had never been his. When Feng Xin looked at him, the fire only hardened, sharpened. Scowls, furrowed brows, exasperation, a thousand tiny cuts. And Mu Qing—pathetic, wretched—took them all, because at least they belonged to him.

The spear shaft jolted in his grip as Feng Xin’s hand shot out and caught it mid-length.

“Enough,” Feng Xin said.

“Let go.”

“Not until you stop.”

“Let go!”

Their eyes clashed, breath mingling in the cool night. For a moment neither moved. The world was only lantern-light and shadow, the smell of dust, the faint ringing in Mu Qing’s ears.

Finally, with a sharp twist, Mu Qing wrenched the weapon free. He stepped back, chest heaving. “You make it sound as though I am your responsibility.”

Feng Xin’s jaw tightened. His hands curled into fists at his sides. “You think I can just ignore you? That I can watch you bleed yourself dry and do nothing?”

“You’ve always ignored me,” Mu Qing said bitterly, the words slipping before he could hold them. “Why stop now?”

That struck. Feng Xin’s face froze, then darkened. “That’s what you think?” His voice was low, rough. “That I’ve ignored you?”

“What else should I think?” Mu Qing’s voice cracked sharp as glass. “Your eyes soften for His Highness. Your smile blinds half the world. But when you look at me? It is only with scorn. So yes, Feng Xin—I think you ignore me. Except when it is to lecture, to scowl, to remind me of what I am not.”

The silence that followed was heavy, like the weight of a blade pressing against the back of his neck. Mu Qing regretted the words, and yet could not take them back. They had lived in his chest too long.

Feng Xin took a step closer. His voice was quiet now, but it carried the force of a vow.

“You’re wrong.”

Mu Qing’s heart stumbled.

“You think I ignore you?” Feng Xin’s hands trembled slightly, though his voice held steady. “I see you more than anyone. Too much. Always. Even when I don’t want to. Even when it drives me mad. I can’t not see you, Mu Qing. Do you understand? I can’t.”

The words struck like arrows. Mu Qing wanted, desperately, to believe them. But belief was dangerous, more dangerous than blades. He could not afford it.

His walls rose high, cold and unyielding. He turned his back. “Then you are a fool.”

There was silence. A silence long enough that Mu Qing thought—hoped, feared—that Feng Xin had finally gone.

But then came the words, soft, ragged:

“Maybe I am.”

Footsteps retreated across the stone, slow, reluctant, each one echoing in Mu Qing’s chest.

He stood there long after the yard had emptied, the spear heavy in his hands, his body trembling not with exhaustion but with something far more dangerous.

He thought of Feng Xin’s eyes, burning, insistent. He thought of the words that would not leave him.

I can’t not see you.

He pressed his forehead against the spear shaft, as though the cold wood could anchor him. His walls stood tall, unscalable. He told himself they would protect him. That he did not need the sun. That he could survive on shadow.

And yet—

When he closed his eyes, all he could see was a smile too bright to be his, and the ache of knowing he would always long for it.

Chapter Text

Morning came with a thin wash of mist that unrolled from the lotus pond and drifted along the flagstones like pale silk. Bells spoke twice, then fell quiet. The palace roofs kept the last of the night in their eaves, and the first swallows traced quick strokes across a sky not yet decided on blue.

Mu Qing welcomed the cool. It pared the world down to clean lines—the square of the yard, the pale steam from mouths, the faint creak of wood as spears were lifted from their racks. He wrapped his wrists in fresh cloth and entered the morning as if stepping onto an abacus: everything was in its place, everything counted.

The drill master’s voice carried, dry as old rope. Rows formed. Blades flashed at the edges of vision. Mu Qing fixed his gaze ahead and let his body fold into the form he had beaten into for years—a stance like that of a character done properly, stroke after stroke until the meaning is held. He did not look left.

He did not need to. The sun had a way of telling you where it was by how the air warmed your cheek. Feng Xin had the same quality; Mu Qing knew where he stood even without looking. A step behind the Crown Prince, a half-step to the side. Always close to light, always the first to answer it.

Today, however, the warmth kept its distance.

When the drill master barked for pairs, Mu Qing turned and found a boy he did not know well waiting in front of him, eyes anxious, elbows unsure. Across the yard, Feng Xin accepted another partner with an almost curt nod. Their lines set into motion, and the morning became a web of crossing bodies, the air scored by wood and breath.

Mu Qing corrected his partner without harshness, moving a knee with two fingers and tapping an elbow into place. He kept his own form tight, precise. However, a habit older than sense reached past the body and searched the yard for that particular cadence of Feng Xin moving. He found it, quick and certain. He waited—for the careless joke sent across a gap, for the scowl when he overreached, for the minor, infuriating interference when he pushed through pain on discipline alone.

Nothing came. No correction undercut his stubbornness; no impatient sigh found him. Feng Xin’s attention lay elsewhere, held steady like a blade rests on a whetstone. None of it slid over to Mu Qing.

A cold line drew itself along Mu Qing’s ribs inside.

He told himself it was peace. He had wanted this, had he not? To train without a shadow standing too close, to complete a form without the knowledge of those eyes pulling at the edges of his focus, to measure himself against silence instead of warmth turned to steel.

His hands did not believe him.

After drills came porridge, the kitchen steamed and scolded, and bowls moved from hand to hand like tidewater. Someone jostled the queue, and hot millet climbed the rim of Mu Qing’s bowl and kissed his knuckles. He waited for it—that reflexive trespass of a hand that was not his, the cloth pressed too roughly into his palm, the warning murmured like an insult.

“Wipe it,” someone said, not to him. Feng Xin had passed without pausing, his voice even, addressed to the jostler. “Watch your elbows.”

The cloth on the wall served. Mu Qing used it and returned it to its nail. The skin on his hand had reddened already, but less than pride. He stood beneath the shadow of a pillar to eat alone, as he preferred, and pretended the porridge had always been this tasteless.

Midday took them on errands. He cleaned fixtures until the gold returned itself to the light, rewound prayer ribbons that had curled with humidity, and counted incense sticks out of habit, though no one asked. He kept finding spaces where Feng Xin had been and moved on, the faint scent of sweat and soap trailing in a line a moment behind him, always vanishing just as Mu Qing reached for it.

He would not have admitted, even to himself, that the absence of a scowl could bruise more cleanly than a careless word. The sight of Feng Xin’s brow unfurrowed in his direction could land like a dismissal. But by the time the shadow of noon had thinned to almost nothing, Mu Qing was keeping a second count under his breath, measuring a day without that particular attention that cut and—by cutting—claimed.

At the shrine of a laborer dead of a winter cough, His Highness placed a modest offering and bowed as though he had been given a treasure. A child tried to light a stick and fumbled. Feng Xin crouched, hands steady, and guided flame to wood without making the moment about his own competence. The boy grinned, a gap where a tooth had been, and Feng Xin returned it—sun-broad and unguarded.

Mu Qing turned his face away from the brightness and counted the knots in the balustrade. He had endured this light for years, and still it could throw his balance if he looked too long.

The afternoon drills were worse. He felt the missing furrow in his periphery like the absence of a familiar weight. His shoulder complained in a low tongue; he ignored it as always. The drill master called for turns running the wall. Boys thumped to the top and dropped to the dust, laughing or swearing by habit. When Mu Qing came down, his landing was neat. His breath threaded out fine. He shamelessly waited for a scowl to stitch itself between golden-brown eyes and for a muttered, “Don’t pretend that didn’t hurt,” pitched low enough to belong only to him.

Silence. Feng Xin was three stations away, briskly checking a strap on another boy’s armor. He did not look over.

By dusk, the yard had emptied of noise. The light tilted warmer, and the lotus pond caught the sky’s slow bleeding as if to keep it safe. Mu Qing coiled a length of practice rope for no reason other than to keep his hands from remembering what they had lacked all day. It did not help.

He did not intend to seek Feng Xin. He would have said, if asked, that his feet turned toward the pond because the air there was kinder on the throat and the stone kept its heat longer. Even to himself, he would not have claimed hunger.

He found him by the water.

Feng Xin had thrown his outer robe over a bench and knelt by the basin. His hair, which had held like a soldier all day out of sheer will or better binding, had finally abandoned its post. It fell in a broad spill across his back and over one shoulder, dark at the crown where it clung damp to his scalp, warmer at the ends where it had begun to dry. He ran his fingers through it in sharp combing strokes, impatient with snarls. The movement bared the strong line of his neck, the long sweep from jaw to shoulder that the day usually kept hidden under discipline.

He was beautiful. He did not know it; if he did, he carried the knowledge without vanity. Mu Qing’s mouth tightened, not to deny the fact, but to stop admitting what it did to him.

Feng Xin did not see him at first. He tipped his head and shook the loosened length like a dog escaping rain. A few drops went to the paving stones and shivered. He reached for the sash he had used earlier to bind it and found it soaked, its grip no better than a wet leaf.

“Impractical,” Mu Qing said, and the word was out before discretion could recall it.

Feng Xin started. He looked up. Surprise eased at once into something wary, then into the barest inclination of his head, neither invitation nor refusal. “I lost the spare.” He turned the sodden sash in his hands and made it behave by intimacy: twisting, wringing, wrangling. It would hold for a moment and then simply slip away again.

It would have been simple to turn on his heel and leave. Letting another day finish without a scowl or a furrow would have been prudent. It would have been properly cold.

Mu Qing crossed the last yards of stone and stopped at arm’s length. “Give it here,” he said.

Feng Xin blinked. The expressions that ran through him were small and quick: relief not yet permitted to show, suspicion too well-rehearsed to drop, a flare of something glad that had learned to hide under roughness. He held out the sash.

Mu Qing did not take it. He tapped two fingers against his own palm. “Turn.”

Feng Xin obeyed as if the word had been rank. He turned his back and bowed his head without comment. The movement laid his neck bare and offered the difficult weight of hair forward. Mu Qing stepped in and let the mass of it gather into his hands. It was heavier than it looked, as it had been that day of rain; familiar in a way his body remembered even if he refused the memory. Half-dry, half-damp, it slipped under his fingers like silk with its own will.

He did not hurry. He sorted out the strands that had tangled themselves and untied small knots with deliberate patience, the way he unpicked mistakes in stitching. The work called for a closeness that altered the air; his breath lifted a few stray hairs at the nape of Feng Xin’s neck. He felt, absurdly, the sturdy thrum of a pulse under the skin there, fast with recent exertion or something else.

The sash passed to his hand. He wound it smoothly, the way a craftsman wraps a handle so it will not slip when wet. Twice around, a tuck, a firm pull, the knot built for strength and peace, not show. His knuckles brushed the curve of an ear as he settled a rebellious strand into line.

The contact was nothing less than a blowfly, less than a dust mote—yet it jolted across Mu Qing’s nerves like he had touched fire. He heard his own voice before he had weighed it.

“You ought to pierce it.”

Feng Xin went very still. “What?”

Mu Qing’s ears warmed at once, a betrayal of blood he could not command. He forced the knot tidy and kept his tone offhand. “Your ear,” he said, sharper to hide the softness. “You would wear a ring well. It would suit the…shape.” He wondered why he had given them breath the instant the words existed. He had no habit of advising adornment. He had no business imagining how that small flash of metal would sit against sun-warm skin, how it would catch light when Feng Xin turned his head, how it would—absurdly—look like a promise visible from across a yard.

Silence hung, taut as a bowstring.

Then Feng Xin said, with a care that was not his usual, “Would I?”

It was not a question that asked for reassurance or display. It sounded more like a man checking the grip of a tool before he trusted it. Mu Qing swallowed annoyance at himself and made the knot firm. “It would keep the hair out of your eyes,” he said, too practical by half.

Feng Xin huffed. It might have been a laugh if it had not carried the sound of relief. “That is not how earrings work.”

“Then consider it a warning,” Mu Qing said. “A ring to remind your hair to obey.”

“That is not how hair works.”

Mu Qing felt something in his chest, tight since dawn, loosen by a small margin. A scowl wanted to climb onto his own face for the sheer comfort of its shape. He tugged the last tail of the knot flat and stepped away. “Hold still,” he said, as if he had not finished. He ran his hands once over the bun’s perimeter, checking for weaknesses. It would not slip unless bent on betrayal.

Feng Xin did not move. He stood very straight, as one does when a hand rests near one’s neck. Another heartbeat, and Mu Qing removed his hands and returned the distance between them.

“Done,” he said.

Feng Xin turned and lifted a palm to the knot, testing what Mu Qing had made the way a soldier tests a bridge before putting weight across it. Something in his face—tension gathered there like a muscle—eased. “Thank you,” he said, and the words were simple, not aimed for the yard, not meant as show.

Mu Qing looked aside. “Tie it properly next time and we will both be spared the trouble.”

Feng Xin’s mouth tilted. His brow found its furrow without effort. “You are impossible.”

It should not have pleased him. It did. The room inside his ribs, empty all day, found furniture where it belonged. “And you are careless,” Mu Qing said, as if the exchange restored a law of the world. “Do not splash the corridor the way you did at noon.”

“The corridor was already wet.”

“Of course it was. Because you had passed through it.”

A servant passing with a stack of bowls glanced between them, baffled by the tone that read like an argument and sat like relief. Feng Xin’s eyes, too bright in this light, softened at the edges only for a breath before schooling themselves back into their usual exasperation when they faced Mu Qing. “Eat,” he said, pointing with his chin toward the kitchens. “Before the cook decides you have offended the porridge by ignoring it and punishes you with a second bowl.”

“You can eat for both of us,” Mu Qing answered, but he turned. Feng Xin fell into step one pace behind his left shoulder, where he had always belonged when they were not circling His Highness. The rhythm of their feet on stone fell into the old count that had lived a long time under their arguments. It felt like a sort of truce—uneasy as all true ones are, but nonetheless real.

They parted at the kitchen door with no ceremony. Mu Qing ate under the same pillar’s shadow, and the spoon found his mouth without the taste of ash. Across the yard, Feng Xin made half of a boy’s problem vanish with three words and a steady hand. He looked over once, as if called by habit or command. Mu Qing, already watching, had time to arrange his face into cool disinterest. The glance passed; the knot in Feng Xin’s hair held.

Night came down. The lamps in the corridors threw their limited circles; the rest of the palace lay in their small eclipses. Mu Qing took his needlework from under his pallet and considered the fan he had half-finished. He tied off one blossom and began the next. His hands had found a steadiness easier than breath.

Voices passed the dormitory door. A whisper, a hissed oath, laughter that cut itself short. Mu Qing did not listen; he did not make a practice of collecting other people’s stories. And yet the words reached for him anyway:

“Hold still, you ox—”

“I am holding still—”

“No, you are breathing like a bellows. Give me the wine. Moon above, you are sure about this?”

A silence, long enough to be an answer. The memory of a palm warming under his own hand; a brush of skin against cartilage; the fool sentence he had let go in the dusk.

Mu Qing put his needle in and out of the silk with the same measured patience he gave to forms. A breath. Then another. He made a petal without looking up. His heart, unhelpful, counted in time with the thread.

A soft intake of breath, clipped halfway: the sound a man makes when pain finds him and he refuses to entertain it with a voice. Then the sharper hiss of someone else on his behalf, and a muttered, “Idiot—use more wine.” The smell of strong rice liquor laced itself to the oil smoke for a moment and slipped out the window into the night.

Mu Qing’s fingers did not falter. The flower took shape. He tied it off. He began another.

He did not turn his head when the door slid open a narrow span later and a shadow crossed the threshold. He did not look when the shadow paused, as if searching for a place to set a breathed-out thank-you, found none that would not wake sleeping boys, and went on. He did not watch the shadow’s hand lift briefly to the side of its head as if the newness of something there pulled like a stitch.

He did not look, and thus could not learn what it would have taught him: that a man can hang on a word someone else dismisses, and make of it a small, sharp jewel.

The next morning broke clean. The yard steamed. Rows formed. Mu Qing’s eyes stayed ahead, where they belonged, but curiosity has roots that grow toward water even when the plant is trained the other way. In a gap between forms, the line turned. The sun found Feng Xin’s profile and drew a narrow fire at the edge of his ear.

A ring—plain, unassuming—sat there. It had the look of something done with a needle twelve hours ago and made meet for daylight by a steadier hand. It suited him more than Mu Qing had had any right to guess. When Feng Xin pivoted, it flashed once and then hid itself in the lock of hair that fell over it, a private glint that would only show to someone standing at particular angles.

Mu Qing’s throat tightened. He told himself, automatically, that the ring had likely been some kitchen dare, some boyhood whim pursued too late, some offering pressed on him by one of the laughing girls who had rinsed out his blood with wine. He told himself that His Highness might have admired some old story from the court and that Feng Xin, shameless when it came to pleasing him, had obeyed the idea with a grin.

He told himself many things and believed none, because he did not try to.

What mattered, against his better judgment, was this: when the form demanded a pass so close their sleeves brushed, Feng Xin’s brow bent into its old furrow without effort, and he muttered, too low for the drill master but exactly clear enough for Mu Qing, “Watch your shoulder.”

Mu Qing did not smile. He did not allow his mouth to forget its place. But for the first time in twenty-four hours, the balance of the day fell back onto the fulcrum he knew how to stand upon. He adjusted a fraction, because the advice was sound. He stepped through the next measure and drew breath that reached his lungs all the way.

After drills, when the lines flowed apart and boys chased the promise of breakfast with badly hidden greed, Feng Xin came to stand within a polite distance that had never felt so impolite. He lifted his chin a fraction, a question and a challenge in the angle. “It holds,” he said.

“The knot?” Mu Qing asked, though he knew.

“The knot,” Feng Xin answered, and then, as if he could not help it, “and the other thing.”

Mu Qing’s gaze flicked once to the flash at the curve of ear and away again like a man grazing his fingers over a brazier to test heat. He made a small, noncommittal sound that, in a better world, might have been approval.

“Impractical,” he said, because he needed a word between them that did not confess anything.

“Then it will suit me,” Feng Xin returned, and there it was—the shape of conversation that had always fit best, the one that said more than it bothered to say.

The Crown Prince’s bell rang somewhere near the east colonnade. Feng Xin’s attention went as it always did: entire, immediate, glad. He half-turned, then looked back long enough to give Mu Qing the ghost of a scowl for being slow with a water bucket he had not been asked to fetch. It was undeserved. It belonged to Mu Qing. He took it as his due.

He watched Feng Xin cross the yard, sunlight catching on the small ring so briefly that a man who did not know might think he had imagined it. He adjusted the wrap on his wrist and went to work, the day setting itself in motion around him. His walls stood where he had built them, high and white; the sun found what edges it could and warmed them, which was an insult to walls, but a kindness to men.

He would not think of the sentence he had tossed into the dusk like a pebble and how some fool had made a gem of it. He would not notice when the glint appeared and vanished over and over in the days to come, each time at angles that happened to be the ones where Mu Qing stood.

He would not, and so he did not.

He only breathed easier when the scowl returned to its rightful place between those golden-brown eyes, and the furrow—a line written for him—deepened whenever he overreached. If this was all the light he would have, then let him learn the shape of it. He could live by that narrow fire, and call it enough.

Chapter Text

The kingdom was dead.

Once, the walls of Xianle had glowed with banners and song, its gates wide and welcoming, its temples filled with light. The Crown Prince had been worshiped as a god made flesh, the people carrying his name like prayer on their lips.

Now the city was ruin. The streets stank of rot, the temples gutted, the people scattered like frightened birds. Those who remained spat at the mention of the Crown Prince. They hurled stones instead of flowers. They offered curses instead of incense.

And still, Mu Qing stayed.

He stayed when the palace burned. He stayed when Heaven itself turned its face away. He stayed when there was nothing left but hunger and madness. He stayed at His Highness’s side as a shadow, even when that shadow led into ruin.

But even still, he could not abandon his mother.

She was frail, her body wasting away, illness clinging to her like damp cloth. Her coughs rattled through the nights, and the food he brought her was never enough. Each day she grew thinner, weaker, her hands trembling when she tried to lift a bowl. He could not let her starve.

So Mu Qing bent his back. He lowered his eyes. He begged.

He begged for rice, for scraps, for anything at all. His hands, trained for spear and sword, now cupped humiliation instead. He endured the laughter, the sneers, the spittle, the cruel amusement of strangers who saw in him not a servant of the Crown Prince but a beggar below themselves.

He endured it all, for all of them.

But when he placed that rice before His Highness—precious, hard-won, each grain gathered with the weight of shame—
His Highness flung it back into his face.

The grains struck like stones. They slid down his cheek, caught in his lashes, fell into the dirt at his feet.

Mu Qing stood there, rigid, hands trembling at his sides. The pain was not the sting of rice on skin. It was the echo of every moment that had brought him here: every drop of blood shed, every wound borne without complaint, every hour spent in training, every stitch sewn by lamplight beside His Highness, every humiliation swallowed for loyalty’s sake.

All of it, ground into the dirt with the rice.

Something broke.

He drew a breath, steady and sharp. He bowed low, the motion precise, flawless, as though his body still remembered dignity when his heart did not.

“Your Highness,” Mu Qing said, voice even, though it tore at his throat, “I will take my leave. My mother is ill. She has no one else. I must care for her.”

Xie Lian’s eyes were wild, haunted by shadows and phantoms. His lips moved, muttering words Mu Qing could not follow, thoughts tangled in ruin. He turned away.

Whatever bond had existed between them—whatever fragile hope Mu Qing had nursed of being more than a shadow—was severed.

Mu Qing turned as well. His steps should have carried him away then, clean and final. But his feet faltered.

Because Feng Xin was there.

He was always there. Always, always, always.

Feng Xin stood near the courtyard’s edge, his sword at his hip, his posture still strong even amid the wreckage. His hair had slipped from its bun, falling across his shoulder in the wind. His golden eyes burned, his brow furrowed deep, his jaw set. He was staring at the ruin of the Crown Prince, the collapse of the world they had given everything to protect.

Mu Qing’s chest ached.

He waited.

He waited for the scowl. For the furrowed brow. For the sharp voice that had always cut him down, even as it tethered him. He waited for the ridicule, the anger, the reprimand. Anything that would anchor him here, anything that would make leaving impossible.

He waited for Feng Xin to call him back.

The silence stretched.

Feng Xin’s brows tightened further, his hand curling into a fist at his side. His throat worked, as though words pressed there, aching to be spoken. But none came. His mouth remained closed. His eyes did not meet Mu Qing’s.

The silence was heavier than any blade.

Mu Qing’s pride screamed at him to move. His heart screamed at him to stay.

“Take care of yourself,” he said finally, his voice clipped, hard, sharper than the ache in his chest. “Do not be careless.”

It was nothing. It was everything. The closest he could come to I love you. The farthest he had ever been from it.

Then he turned. His steps were steady, his back straight, though each one felt like it cracked bone. He walked through the ruined courtyard, the rice still clinging to his skin. He did not look back. He could not.

Behind him, Feng Xin did not call out.

The silence followed him. It followed him as he went to his mother’s side, as he gave her the last of his strength, as he buried her with his own hands when her body finally yielded. It followed him as he hardened his heart, brick by brick, wall by wall, building himself into something untouchable.

And when eight hundred years passed, when he stood once more in Heaven’s light as the Martial God of the Southwest, the silence still lived inside him, unbroken.

Because Feng Xin had not called him back.

And Mu Qing had been waiting for it ever since.

Chapter Text

His palace was quiet. Too quiet.

In the centuries Mu Qing had spent within its gilded walls, there had never been silence like this. Not the silence of discipline, of rows of Deputy Generals standing in formation with breath drawn sharp and held. Not the silence of courtyards at night, where cicadas hummed and distant voices carried from the gardens. This silence was heavy, strange, the silence that follows after thunder, when the storm has stripped the trees bare and left the ground raw.

The Emperor was gone. The great battle finished. The betrayals untangled, the wounds laid open and seen for what they were.

And yet, for Mu Qing, the storm did not end.

He stood in his lantern-lit hall, hand against the carved pillar, staring into the emptiness of the floor. So much of his life had been given to shadows—training in them, living in them, hardening himself into them. But shadows, even the deepest ones, depended on light to cast them. And now, with the dust settled and the weight of centuries dragged out into the open, he did not know what to do with the light that was left.

For eight hundred years he had stood in this dance. Eight hundred years of scowls, sharp words, misread silences. Eight hundred years of walls built stone by stone, layer by layer, until even the possibility of warmth had been sealed away. And Feng Xin—always Feng Xin—standing at his side, shouting, scolding, furious, loyal, burning like a sun Mu Qing refused to let himself touch.

And now the truths had been spoken, whether aloud or in action. Now there was no hiding what had always lived between them.

It should have been easier, Mu Qing thought. With everything bared open, it should have been easy to step forward. Instead it was harder. His pride, his habits, his fear—they did not vanish simply because the lies had fallen away.

So he began with small things.

The first was silence. Not the silence of hostility, but of not denying.

When Feng Xin pressed water into his hands after a mission, he did not push it back, lips curled in disdain. He drank it. Quietly, but he drank.

When Feng Xin’s hand, rough and broad, caught his wrist to stop him from pulling at an old scar, Mu Qing did not jerk away as he always had. He left the hand there, for a breath. Two.

When their sleeves brushed in the narrow corridors of Heaven’s palaces, he did not shift aside as though burned. He let the brush linger, almost unnoticed. Almost.

Little things. Fragile things. Barely visible, except to someone who had spent centuries watching for cracks.

Feng Xin noticed them all.

He noticed with the desperate hunger of a man who had starved for so long he had forgotten what bread was, and suddenly found crumbs placed in his hand.

It drove him half mad.

Because now that he knew—now that Mu Qing’s scowls and silences had been unmasked for what they truly were, not hatred but a shield too heavy to put down—Feng Xin wanted more. He wanted to pull every stone down from those walls and step inside. He wanted Mu Qing’s sharp tongue turned soft for him. He wanted his cold hands warm in his own. He wanted the weight of Mu Qing’s body pressed against his, not in battle, not in fury, but in trust.

But he did not dare.

Eight hundred years had taught him this: Mu Qing’s walls were fragile and strong both. Push too hard, and they would rise higher than ever. So Feng Xin clenched his teeth and curled his fists and let Mu Qing come forward, little by little, as much as he could bear.

It was agony. But it was also hope.

And Mu Qing—though he would never admit it, not even to himself—was trying.

—

One evening, when heaven had grown dim and the air cool with the onset of night, Mu Qing found Feng Xin in the heavenly garden.

Feng Xin sat on the steps with his outer robe thrown carelessly beside him, his long hair loosened, strands falling in waves. He raked his hands through it, impatient, tugging at snarls without care. His bun had long since given up. His head tipped back as he sighed, frustrated, the movement baring the strong line of his throat.

The sight caught Mu Qing unprepared.

For centuries he had told himself not to look. That Feng Xin was too bright, too alive, too much. But now, when the truth lay bare, he could not help himself. He looked. He remembered a thousand moments, small and buried: rain-slick hair slipping through his fingers, the brush of warmth at the base of his skull, a voice saying, Don’t be stupid with your body.

And before he could stop himself, he spoke.

“Your hair is a mess,” Mu Qing said. His voice was sharper than the words deserved, covering the tremor in them. “Sit. I’ll fix it.”

Feng Xin froze. His head snapped toward him, eyes wide, then narrowing as though he had misheard. “…What?”

Mu Qing crossed the garden, each step measured, as though he were not betraying himself with every one. His ears burned. “Do not make me repeat myself.”

Something shifted in Feng Xin’s face. Slowly—almost reverently—he turned, set aside the sash in his hands, and sat straight-backed, obedient as a boy awaiting discipline.

Mu Qing’s fingers brushed his hair.

It was heavy, as it had always been. Warm from the day’s exertion, silky even when tangled. He gathered it carefully, combing it through with long, steady motions. The scent of sun and sweat clung faintly to it, achingly familiar. His hands moved as they always had—precise, methodical, sure—even though his chest was a storm.

Feng Xin held still, though Mu Qing could feel the tension humming through him, every muscle taut as a bowstring. His breath was slow, controlled, but too deep, as though fighting to stay even.

Mu Qing wound the sash. He worked quickly, not because he wished to be finished, but because he feared what he might say if he lingered. His knuckles brushed the curve of Feng Xin’s ear. A jolt shot up his arm.

And then, before he thought better of it, he murmured: “You should pierce your other ear. It suits you.”

The silence that followed was sharp as steel.

Feng Xin’s breath caught. His eyes closed. When he opened them again, he turned his head slightly, catching Mu Qing’s gaze over his shoulder. His voice was low, steady, burning with something that made Mu Qing’s stomach clench.

“If you say so,” he said, “I will.”

Mu Qing blinked, startled. Heat rushed to his face. He turned away at once, tightening the knot with unnecessary force. “Fool,” he muttered.

Feng Xin laughed softly, the sound more tender than Mu Qing had ever heard it. “Then I’ll be your fool.”

Mu Qing’s hands stilled. The words landed like a blade slipped between his ribs, not wounding but laying him bare. For a moment—only a moment—he let himself believe them.

He finished the knot. Pulled back. The walls rebuilt themselves, but thinner now, weaker.

Feng Xin reached up, touched the bun, and smiled—small, real. His eyes lingered on Mu Qing as though he had been waiting eight hundred years to see him like this.

And for once, Mu Qing did not look away.

—

Later, in the quiet of his quarters, Mu Qing sat with needle and thread, silk stretched over bamboo. His hands moved with practiced steadiness, blossoms unfolding under his touch. But his mind was not on the fan.

He thought of a hand reaching to steady his wrist. Of a scowl that had never truly been scorn. Of a smile that had blinded him for centuries, and of the unbearable thought that it might finally, one day, be his.

For eight hundred years, he had waited for silence to break. For eight hundred years, he had told himself that the walls would protect him.

But tonight, for the first time, he thought: perhaps walls were meant to be climbed.

Perhaps, after all this time, he could learn how to let light in.

And perhaps Feng Xin—patient, stubborn, relentless—would be there, as he always had been.

As he always would be.

Chapter Text

Peace did not arrive like a banner raised and a bell struck. It came as a series of small silences in which nothing terrible happened. The courtyards of Heaven breathed again. The bronze bells sounded the hours and meant only time, not warning. In the wake of ruin, life resumed its old shape, but its edges had changed. People greeted each other more gently. Lanterns were trimmed a little lower in the evenings, as if light had learned caution.

Mu Qing learned caution long ago. What he did not know—what he had to learn now—was how to lower his own guard without lowering himself.

It did not happen in a day. It did not happen in a week. It happened as onions are unmade: layer by careful layer, each cut stinging, each peel exposing a surface he would rather have kept hidden.

Feng Xin found him after drills with a cup in each hand. He had the look he often wore when he brought anything to Mu Qing—a look that braced for resistance and pretended it was a joke.

“Drink,” he said, as if the command could disguise the softness

Mu Qing had parried gifts from him all his life. It was safer to refuse. To accept was to admit a place at a table he had never believed was set for him. But tonight the cup steamed, and his throat ached with dust, and a new thought—tender, defiant—whispered that he could allow himself small mercies that did not invite debt.

He took the cup. The heat ran into his hands, then down his throat. He did not thank Feng Xin; gratitude felt like a rope around the neck when spoken aloud. But he did not hand the cup back untouched, either. When he finished, he turned it once in both palms, considering the glaze, the tiny flaw near the base where the clay had bubbled in the kiln. “The kitchen is careless,” he said, because he needed a word that was not thank you.

Feng Xin’s mouth tipped. Not the sun-split grin that belonged to the world; something smaller, kept for short distances. “Then the kitchen should hire you.”

“They wouldn’t survive a day.”

“And yet I have,” Feng Xin said, too lightly to be safe, “for years.”

Mu Qing returned the empty cup. Their fingers touched. A brief, plain contact. He did not flinch. That was the first layer.

The next peeled away without fanfare. It was an evening of paperwork, nothing glorious: tallies from the armory, names of novices, a list of frayed wraps to be replaced. Mu Qing wrote in small, exact characters that pleased him by their obedience. Feng Xin wrote as he did everything—quickly, decisively, as if the ink’s only purpose were to keep up.

A quill spluttered. Feng Xin shook it. Ink spattered his sleeve.

“Incompetent,” Mu Qing said, and reached for the rag at his elbow. He leaned across to blot the stain from Feng Xin’s wrist. The pulse there beat against the cloth, steady, strong. It would be a simple matter to finish, to sit back, to keep the world aligned as it had always been. Instead, he followed the ink up where it had burred into the edge of a callus earned from a sword hilt. The rag rasped over it. A small thing: to tend without being asked. To touch without the excuse of injury.

Feng Xin did not move. He watched Mu Qing’s hand as if it were a bird that might spook. “I can—”

“I know,” Mu Qing said, and did not give the rag back until he was done. Another layer, thin as skin.

Days turned. The palace kept its slow clock. Xie Lian came and went, lighter in step than Mu Qing had ever seen him, the weight of a ghost king’s presence at his back. It changed the air around them all. Feng Xin’s attention—once divided between prince and task and the trouble he insisted on calling Mu Qing—settled. He still guarded His Highness by reflex, but not with the old ferocity that left no room for anything else. He began, at last, to spend the hours that were his on Mu Qing without apology.

He did not say as much. He did not need to. He was there—at the edge of a practice yard, at the table with two cups, in the corridor where the floor was slick and someone might fall. He became a fact of Mu Qing’s days. Perhaps he had always been that fact; perhaps Mu Qing had merely refused to admit it. Now he let the truth stand.

On a morning washed clean by rain, the third layer gave.

The rain had ended at dawn. The eaves still dripped. The courtyard tiles were slick enough to make even careful boys cautious. Mu Qing crossed the square with the measured steps of a man who has decided to treat the world as treacherous until it proves otherwise. Feng Xin cut across at an angle, hair damp from the weather, bun holding out of sheer stubbornness. A drop gathered at the rim of his ear and waited.

It fell when he looked up. It landed at the line of his jaw. Mu Qing watched it track to the corner of his mouth. He reached out before he thought, caught it with the pad of his thumb, and wiped it away. His hand lingered the smallest fraction of a breath too long, as if it needed to explain itself.

Feng Xin went very still.

“Water,” Mu Qing said, as if naming the thing made it sensible.

“So I gathered,” Feng Xin said. His voice had lowered, no longer ready to run. “Mu Qing.”

It was not a question. It was his name, and the saying of it shaped the space between them into something his body recognized and his mind refused. Mu Qing withdrew his hand and, because he could not afford to retreat entirely, lifted an eyebrow at the ruined knot of Feng Xin’s sash. “Impractical.”

“My tie or this weather?”

“You.”

“Fair,” Feng Xin said, and did not press.

A week later, the fourth layer peeled under the weight of injury—the smallest sort, the kind that once would have been excused with a barked, I’ve had worse.

They had been sent to put down a nest of pests along a border village—nothing glorious, nothing that would be sung over wine, but the kind of work that keeps the world from unraveling between songs. One of the creatures had a barb like a fishhook. It grazed Feng Xin across the forearm when he reached to drag a boy out of its path. The cut was narrow and deep and would heal badly if left to its own devices.

Back in the barracks, Feng Xin made as if to tie his sleeve over it and be done.

“Sit,” Mu Qing said.

Feng Xin sat. He always had when it mattered.

Mu Qing unwound the sleeve with the sure movements of a man who has always taken care of what he owns, even when the thing is unaware it is his. The skin around the cut was already inflamed. He cleaned it, slow and methodical. The salve stung; he knew the way bodies flinch when hurt and do not admit it, so he braced the other man’s wrist with his free hand and anchored him through the pull.

“Does it hurt?” he asked.

“It’s nothing,” Feng Xin said, then winced when the salve found a deeper line. He tried again, honest this time. “A little.”

“Good,” Mu Qing said, because it meant nothing dangerous had gone numb. He wrapped the arm and tied the knot with the same economy of movement he used on fans, on sashes, on hair. When he finished, he did not let go immediately. He pressed his thumb, deliberately, along the line of the underlying tendon, checking that the fingers answered. They did. He let the hand go and only then permitted a scowl. “Idiot.”

Feng Xin’s mouth curled. “Yours,” he said, as if this had been established.

Mu Qing set the salve aside and had no answer that did not concede too much. He settled for, “Change the bandage in a day.”

“You’ll do it,” Feng Xin said, with such unexamined certainty that something in Mu Qing expanded and hated him for making it so simple.

“I might,” Mu Qing said, which in his language was as loud as a vow.

The bandage was changed in a day. And in another. The wound closed neatly. When the scab itched; when Feng Xin’s hand went to worry it; Mu Qing’s palm landed over the urge with a small, decisive slap. “No.”

Feng Xin, impossibly, obeyed. He curled his fingers into the hollow of Mu Qing’s hand instead and left them there for a count of three before the world came to its senses and pulled apart.

By then a pattern had formed, a rhythm not quite music and not quite drill. It sounded like shared cups and the scrape of benches drawn closer than necessary. It felt like the brush of sleeves in doorways and fingers correcting a grip that needed no correction. It tasted like congee left covered and warm, because someone who had already eaten knew the other would forget to take care of himself when the hour ran fast.

A bowl began to appear near the pillar where Mu Qing sometimes preferred to stand out of habit. It was never empty. No one put his name on it; no one had to. Wordless things have a way of making themselves understood.

On the fourth morning, when Mu Qing found the bowl there again, steam still rising, he glanced over his shoulder without meaning to. Feng Xin was across the courtyard. He caught Mu Qing’s look and almost smiled—stopped himself, made a face instead. It was an ugly, perfect scowl. Mu Qing’s mouth did not move, but something inside him did, like a door swinging against a familiar hand.

The next week, rain returned with a memory of old storms. The clouds came down so low the roofs seemed to be holding them up. Courtyards became sheets of water. The sound on tile and wood was steady as a drumbeat. People ran between colonnades with their sleeves over their heads, shouting, laughing, cursing the sky and blessing the gutters.

Mu Qing did not run. He moved with the measured pace of a man who knows haste makes you slip. He stepped from dry stone to dry stone and still, inevitably, the rain found him. It slid down his collar. It dampened his hair. He arrived at the practice hall and shook himself once, too neatly to call it a shake.

Feng Xin was already there. Of course he was. He had undone his bun; his hair was a dark rope down his shoulders. He had thrown his outer robe over a post to dry and stood in his underlayers, steam rising faintly from his skin. He looked like a figure pulled out of a painting half-finished, all broad strokes and warmth.

“Impractical,” Mu Qing said before he could stop himself. He held out the strip of cloth he kept for tying his own hair when rain made it unruly. “You will drip everywhere.”

Feng Xin took the cloth with both hands, as if it were an offering at a temple and not a narrow, damp band that smelled faintly of Mu Qing’s soap. “Will you—”

“Yes,” Mu Qing said, already stepping behind him. He gathered the weight. He wound and tied. It was a ritual now, as familiar as a bow before a form. His fingers brushed the new small ring on Feng Xin’s other ear. The metal was warm. He touched it deliberately, a brief pressure. “It is healing well.”

“I used more wine this time,” Feng Xin said, as if he were proud to have learned.

“Of course you did,” Mu Qing said, his heart fluttering, and finished the knot. He did not release the last fold immediately. He stood with his hands in the circle of hair he had made, and the rain made a uniform sound outside that excused a longer silence within.

Feng Xin breathed. “Mu Qing,” he said, again not a question.

“Mm.”

“Stay,” Feng Xin said quietly. “After the meeting. I’ll…bring tea.”

Mu Qing made a small sound that might have been assent and might have been annoyance. When the hour came, he stayed. The tea was too strong. He drank it anyway. Feng Xin watched him too openly. He allowed it for a little while, then glared until the watching turned into a properly rough conversation about whether the new novices’ left stances were unforgivable or merely unfortunate. He argued that they were not beyond saving; Feng Xin argued that he was cruel to hope. They said harsh things with care in them and parted for the night knowing they would do it again.

So the layers came away. Not with drama, not with declarations, but with use. You wear down a wall by walking the same path beside it until the stone remembers your shoulder. You open a locked door by holding the key near it every day until the metal and the wood become used to the idea of each other.

One evening in the seventh week—Mu Qing would not have named it as such out loud, but he counted without admitting it—the sun went down late, delayed by a sky that could not decide whether to hold its clouds or let them go. The training yard steamed. Gods had finished their drills and left in a tide that carried their laughter with it. The two of them remained.

Feng Xin had taken a hit along the ribs that would bruise purple by morning. He made a show of ignoring it as he unstrapped his armor. Mu Qing watched the lines of his breath and the wince he refused to translate into sound.

“Lift your arm,” Mu Qing said.

Feng Xin obeyed too fast to be anything but relieved. He lifted both arms like a child waiting to be dressed. Mu Qing smacked one down with two fingers. “Not both. Fool.”

“Yes, General,” Feng Xin said, and his mouth would not obey his attempts at seriousness.

Mu Qing stepped close. He slid careful fingers under the edge of the linen and felt for heat and swelling. The bruise would bloom; the bone was sound. He pressed, testing what would give. Feng Xin’s breath hitched; his hands found Mu Qing’s shoulders—startled, corrective, not hugging, not grabbing, simply landing where they needed to steady him against instinct. They stayed.

Mu Qing did not shrug them off. He finished his examination. He took a small jar from his sleeve, the one he carried though he never confessed to carrying anything for anyone else. He worked the salve into skin that warmed under his touch. The ribs moved under his palm, notched and known. His hand slowed without meaning to and then remembered itself. He capped the jar. He looked up.

Feng Xin’s eyes were not the bright jests of the yard or the blaze of battle. They were the color of summer honey left in a jar on a window, warmed through and through. “Thank you,” he said simply.

Mu Qing made a sound he hoped would be mistaken for dismissal. It was not. He knew by the way Feng Xin’s breath changed—deepened, eased—that kindness had landed and stayed.

“Walk with me,” Feng Xin said, when the light fell low. It was not chained to any rank, any duty. It was a question with a leash on it.

Mu Qing walked. The colonnade was cool. The lamps were just beginning to wake. A servant ran past with a basket of peaches like moons. They passed the east wall where ivy made a map no geographer could settle. Feng Xin talked nonsense to fill the air with something that would not spook—how a sparrow had chased off a bird five times its size, how annoying Hua Cheng was. Mu Qing let the nonsense pass through him without stopping it; sometimes he added to it. He was not good at that kind of talk, but he tried. That was the work.

At the turning of the corridor, he reached out and touched Feng Xin’s sleeve. It was nothing. It was a great deal. The touch said halt more clearly than words. It said I am here without the humiliation of naming need.

Feng Xin stopped. He waited. He did not ask. He never did when he guessed the answer.

Mu Qing did not have an answer. He had a hand on a sleeve, and then a hand sliding from sleeve to wrist to palm. He had fingers that found other fingers and closed on them. He kept his eyes on the floor, because he was a coward in this one way only. “Do not be careless,” he said, which was the thing he always said when he meant Do not leave me to manage without you.

Feng Xin’s hand tightened back once, lightly, more of a promise than a grip. “I won’t,” he said, and because words were insufficient, he did the thing he could be trusted to do: he stayed.

After that, the pattern changed again. Not large changes. Not the kind others would point to and say, See. But the kind a man feels in his own body and begins to depend upon. Mu Qing stopped making detours to avoid places where they might cross paths and started walking the direct way. Feng Xin stopped arriving early to stand as if by accident where Mu Qing would pass and began arriving on time, because there was no need to pretend.

On the twelfth evening, Mu Qing fell asleep sitting up.

It happened in his archive, a room that smelled of paste and old ink and damp leather. He had never fallen asleep over work in his life. The day had taken too much. He had tried to take it back by sorting chaos into ledgers. The letters began to double. He blinked them into single again. He lost.

He woke with warmth at his shoulders and a quiet that did not belong to an empty room. He was covered with a cloak that was not his. He could tell by the weight and the smell—sun and soap and the particular dust of the practice yard. His head had tilted in sleep. It had found a place that fit, and that place was the angle of Feng Xin’s shoulder. He did not move for three breaths. On the fourth, pride reached for him, and he began to straighten.

“Don’t,” Feng Xin said softly, not as an order. As an appeal.

Mu Qing did not obey laws written by anyone else, not ever. He obeyed this. He let his head rest where it had already chosen to rest. He kept his eyes closed and felt the rise and fall of a chest not his own. If this was folly, let it be a small one; if it was mercy, let it be only for a moment. The cloak warmed his knees. The cloak stayed.

When he finally lifted his head, the room looked the same, but the world did not. He folded the cloak with exactness, as if that could make the intimacy tidy. He placed it in Feng Xin’s lap with both hands. He dared, in that private silence, one glance at the new small ring at Feng Xin’s ear. It glinted, a secret signal only some angles would catch. His fingers—traitors—brushed the edge of the metal, a touch so brief it could be denied in court.

“Impractical,” he murmured, because the tongue has old habits.

Feng Xin’s answering smile ruined him. “Then I’ll wear two,” he said, and Mu Qing, against judgment, against sense, against a lifetime of training, laughed. It was a quiet thing, surprised out of him. It sounded like a boy who had not yet learned to be careful with joy.

The laughter did not dismantle the walls. It carved a window in one.

There were failures. There were days the old pride rose and struck, days when Mu Qing answered tenderness with ice because tenderness still frightened him in ways a blade never had. There were hours when Feng Xin grew too brave and reached too far and paid for it with a door, closed with care but closed nonetheless. Each time, Feng Xin stepped back. Each time, he returned. He had learned long ago that staying is not the same as standing still.

On a night when the moon had thinned to a sickle, Mu Qing stood by the lotus pond and watched the fish disturb the stars. Feng Xin came up without noise and stood at his shoulder, also without noise. The quiet between them was not empty.

“You won’t walk away again,” Mu Qing said, as if remarking on the weather.

“No,” Feng Xin said.

“You say that easily.”

“I say it simply,” he answered. “I am finished with letting you walk out of rooms I am still in.”

“You cannot forbid me.”

“I wouldn’t dare,” Feng Xin said, with a humor that did not hide the bone under it. “But I can follow.”

Mu Qing did not say, I do not want to be followed. He put one hand on the stone rail of the pond, and when Feng Xin put his hand there as well, he did not move away. Their fingers did not entangle. They did not have to. The two hands rested on stone that remembered rain and heat and patience. It was enough.

Weeks do what days cannot. They turn gestures into habits. They turn habits into truths. At the end of those weeks, Mu Qing stood in a hall washed with late light and counted the layers still covering him. There were many. He would not pretend otherwise. But there were also places where his skin met air and did not ache.

He went to find Feng Xin. He found him where he always could, in the borderland between duty and rest, hair already beginning to lose its tie, mouth already preparing to be careless.

Mu Qing reached up. He fixed the bun without being asked. He smoothed the last fold with his palm and let his fingers settle, just for a breath, at the base of Feng Xin’s skull, where warmth and pulse and stubbornness live.

“Stay for tea,” he said.

He did not soften the words. He did not lace them with apology. He offered them as a man offers a clean cup and trusts the other to know what it means.

Feng Xin’s eyes lit with the kind of joy that made the palace seem too small to hold it. He did not leap. He did not shout. He nodded, the most disciplined he had ever been in his life. “I will.”

They walked, shoulders near enough to know the measure of each other. The layers remained. They would for a long time. But they had a knife sharp enough for careful work, and hands steady enough to use it. The work of many evenings lay before them.

Mu Qing could do the work. He had always done hard things.

This one, he admitted without saying it aloud, he wanted to do.

Chapter Text

The hall smelled faintly of sweat and oil. The day’s drills had long since ended, the Deputy Generals dismissed, their clattering laughter fading down the corridors. The lanterns had been lit, golden circles cast on polished wood, and the air was thick with the kind of quiet that belongs only to late evening, when the world has paused between exertion and rest.

Mu Qing preferred this hour. He preferred the emptiness, the silence, the wide expanse of floor that belonged to him alone.

Or, nearly alone.

Because Feng Xin was there.

Of course he was.

Always, always, always.

At the far side of the hall, he moved with casual ease, his sword flashing arcs of steel that caught the lamplight. His body was still broad, solid, as it had always been; his hair, damp with sweat, had come loose, strands falling against his cheek. His face was turned downward, expression intent, brows furrowed in that familiar way Mu Qing had come to rely on — a line between his eyes that was as constant as the edge of a blade.

Mu Qing’s throat tightened.

He told himself he wasn’t watching. That his eyes lingered only out of habit, the same way a soldier watches his comrade for weaknesses in stance. He told himself it meant nothing.

But when Feng Xin lowered his sword, exhaling heavily, when he dragged the back of his hand across his brow and left a streak of sweat shining on warm skin, Mu Qing’s chest ached with something he refused to name.

He turned his head. He raised his spear. He moved with precision, with discipline, each thrust and sweep exact. His body knew these forms so well they needed no thought.

Which was why, when his foot slid on the polished wood and his balance faltered, his body recovered before his mind did.

Except it did not recover on its own.

He collided into warmth.

A chest. Broad. Solid. Steady.

Feng Xin’s hand caught his elbow instantly, reflexively, gripping with a steadiness that had steadied him too many times before. Mu Qing’s body stiffened at once, locked taut.

The world stilled.

He could feel it: the heat of him, radiating through thin layers of cloth. The press of his body, too close, too much. The scent of steel and sweat and something unnamable that had haunted Mu Qing’s memories for eight hundred years.

His breath caught. His throat closed.

Because this was danger.

Not the danger of blades or claws or battlefields. He had survived those. This was worse. This was the danger of closeness, of warmth pressed against him, of the old, cruel echo that rose unbidden:

That courtyard. That night.

He saw it again, with cruel clarity.

The rice in his face. The grains sliding down his cheek, clinging to his lashes. His Highness turning away, eyes lost to madness. His voice, steady despite the break inside it, saying, My mother is ill. I must care for her.

The silence that followed.

And Feng Xin—standing there, sword at his side, brows furrowed, golden eyes shadowed—but saying nothing.

Mu Qing had paused. He had waited. Fool that he was, he had waited for Feng Xin to speak, to scoff, to scowl, to call him a coward, to grab his arm, to say No. Stay.

But no word had come.

The silence had been heavier than stone.

So Mu Qing had turned, back straight, steps steady, though each one cracked bone. He had walked away. He had carried that silence for eight hundred years.

Now—

Now he was against Feng Xin’s chest, caught, steadied, too close. His body remembered what came after closeness. Rejection. Distance. Silence. He braced for it. He expected the gentle push, the scolding laugh, the dismissal. He expected to be guided back, set at arm’s length, as he always had been.

But it did not come.

Feng Xin did not move.

He stood still. Not the stillness of rejection, not the stillness of that courtyard. Not the unbearable stillness that told Mu Qing to go.

This stillness was different.

This stillness held.

Mu Qing froze, heart slamming against his ribs. His body screamed at him to pull away, to preserve himself, to rebuild the wall before it cracked further. But something in that stillness—fragile, trembling, raw—stopped him.

It was not absence. It was not dismissal.

It was waiting.

Begging.

Mu Qing’s chest constricted. Against his will, his head lifted, just enough to meet his eyes.

Golden-brown, steady, burning. But not with anger. Not with scorn. With something softer. More dangerous.

Stay, those eyes pleaded. Please. Stay.

Mu Qing’s breath caught, sharp as a blade. His throat closed against the rush of memory, the weight of years.

Why did you not say it then? his heart cried. Why did you let me go?

But the answer was here, in those eyes, in this stillness that held him and did not push him away. The answer was in the plea.

His hand shifted—foolish, desperate, trembling traitor—and brushed against the cloth at Feng Xin’s chest. Just a touch. Barely anything. Enough to feel the heat of him beneath.

Feng Xin’s breath hitched. He did not flinch. He did not laugh. His hand remained steady on Mu Qing’s elbow, not holding him back, not pushing him away, only there, anchoring.

The silence stretched. The same silence as eight hundred years ago, but not the same at all.

Then Feng Xin spoke.

“Mu Qing.”

Just his name. Two syllables. Rough, low, shaking with everything unspoken.

Not an order. Not a scold. Not silence.

A plea.

Mu Qing’s body trembled. His pride screamed at him to sneer, to break the moment, to shield himself in cold words. But something deeper—a boy who had once stood in a courtyard, waiting for someone to say Stay—stilled him.

For the first time, he thought: perhaps he could.

Perhaps, after eight hundred years, the silence did not mean rejection. Perhaps, this time, it meant the opposite.

The stillness held.

And Mu Qing, stiff and trembling and terrified, did not step away.