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Chu Wanning hadn’t known his own body before Mo Ran had gotten to know it. Even now, most of it is still a shameful mystery, so when Mo Ran finds him heaving, takes the time to examine him, Chu Wanning doesn’t realize it's anything other than illness. Mo Ran still takes him often, leaves him sore, but he’s not quite as rough.
Sometimes Chu Wanning can pretend Mo Ran actually cares for him, like he still cares for Mo Ran despite all he’s done.
Sitting next to the haitang tree, watching blossoms float away on the breeze, he can almost feel at peace.
Mo Ran’s harsh voice cuts through the illusion. “Wanning!” He grabs Chu Wanning and drags him inside, furious even as he wraps him up in blankets. “You’re so careless!”
Chu Wanning isn’t surprised. Mo Ran often scolds him for sitting out in the cold. He had thought maybe his sickly body would release him from his imprisonment, freedom in death, but Mo Ran had never allowed it, had forced medicine down his throat, had held him down.
“I can’t believe Shizun is so cruel as to risk the child.”
The words catch in Chu Wanning’s mind, phoenix eyes sharp. “What the hell are you talking about?”
Mo Ran’s expression is unreadable—or, at least, Chu Wanning can’t quite decipher it—until he smiles. His hands travel over Chu Wanning’s body and Chu Wanning expects Mo Ran to strip him but Mo Ran’s touch pauses over his abdomen instead. “Shizun must hate the child he carries as much as he hates me.”
“Mo Weiyu!” Chu Wanning scolds, scandalized, but slowly he realizes Mo Ran doesn’t appear to be joking. He pushes Mo Ran away and Mo Ran lets himself fall back, laughter spilling from that handsome, youthful face.
“Of course Shizun doesn’t believe me, but this venerable one has no reason to lie when the truth is better than anything I could have imagined.” He lets Chu Wanning’s phoenix eyes glare at him, reddening, before he lunges back up, tearing away Chu Wanning’s robes and then fumbling with his own.
He breaches Chu Wanning with little warning and Chu Wanning clutches his back—but only because he has no other choice if he doesn’t want to hurt himself more. And perhaps, if...if there is a child, he should…
Chu Wanning tries not to think, biting into Mo Ran’s shoulder to prevent anything else from bubbling up.
Mo Ran’s tongue finds the shell of Chu Wanning’s ear, finds that little birthmark that’s so sensitive to his touch, makes Chu Wanning moan despite how hard he tries to muffle the sound. He starts to fuck him harder, lifting Chu Wanning’s leg to get himself deeper. The trembling of Chu Wanning’s body, the noises he can’t suppress, the scent of haitang blossoms that still clings to him… Taxian-Dijun nearly loses it before he remembers that he can’t be so rough with his Shizun now, not when it will be all the better to see the high and mighty Yuheng Elder suffer the humiliation of bearing the child of his most hated disciple.
This is what Chu Wanning deserves.
Mo Ran holds himself back, returns the bite Chu Wanning had given him before mouthing the mark on Chu Wanning’s chest, forces his Shizun to come before he follows him over.
After this, Mo Ran is a little more gentle and Chu Wanning knows the care isn’t for him but the thing inside of him, the thing that’s made of him and made of Mo Ran and maybe...maybe under different circumstances would’ve made him happy. Some small part of him can’t help treasuring it even as the rest of him is disgusted, horrified, as humiliated as Mo Ran wants him to be.
One night, as Mo Ran holds him deep in slumber, he even lets himself pretend for just a moment that they are together, that Mo Ran could love him—impossible—and that he could want this. The idea that Mo Ran does, even for his ulterior motives, can almost give him the illusion of warmth in his heart.
With no one else to talk to while Mo Ran is away, Chu Wanning talks to the child growing inside him.
He’s not much of a conversationalist, but neither is the baby, and even Yuheng Elder can’t reprimand an unborn child, so his words come out softer than he’s used to.
A haitang blossom lands perfectly on Chu Wanning’s protruding belly and he smiles for the first time in a very long time.
It is too soon when he goes to stop Mo Ran, too late for his own salvation, but he does his best to save the child from sharing his fate, endures a little more pain.
It’s what he’s best at.
~
Taxian-Dijun cradles the body of Chu Wanning in his arms as if it’s something precious—not that Chu Wanning was precious to him. He merely wishes to preserve him a little longer, torture him a little more, take away this choice of death Chu Wanning had made without his permission.
Chu Wanning is pale as snow with the stark contrast of red splattered here and there. He had shown up no longer with child and Mo Ran hates him all the more for destroying what evidence there would be of this last humiliation, scolding Chu Wanning as he carries his unmoving form into Red Lotus Pavilion, but then he smells more of that rich, coppery blood before he sees it.
The room is a mess, as if great pain has been endured here, and Mo Ran’s grip tightens on the body. “Wanning, all this just to spite me?” He trembles with rage, but suddenly there’s a sigh and Mo Ran whips his head around, ready to destroy whoever dare come into this place.
There’s a robe bundled up suspiciously and Mo Ran goes to investigate, surprised that something that small could make such a sound, and then it moves. Ever-so-slightly.
It’s so unbelievably tiny, but there it is: a baby.
Chu Wanning’s baby.
His baby.
Their—
The thought has him almost sentimental over Chu Wanning and he cuts it off before it can finish. He sneers as he places Chu Wanning on the bed, lifting the child into his arms instead. “I guess Shizun abandoned you, too. I can almost forgive you for being part of him.”
He turns to face Chu Wanning, presenting the child.
“It’s so small, Wanning...” And it really is. Far too small to be living and breathing on its own. Mo Ran doesn’t have much experience with newborns, but if he survived on the street, this child can last a little longer, too. Mo Ran thinks of calling for the gonggong to come assist him before he steels himself. “Why must this venerable one do everything?” he asks and Chu Wanning does not answer. He starts to walk off, but stops in his tracks. He puts down the child a moment, adjusts Chu Wanning into a more comfortable-looking position with a hmph, then scoops the baby back up. The baby begins to cry and Mo Ran rocks it gently in his arms, humming a song his mother used to sing, although he doesn’t remember what it is.
Mo Ran tries to feed the child, wonders briefly if he should name it as his successor in a moment of sentimentality, but it’s mostly because Song Qiutong suggests that she could kill the thing for him. He doesn’t hate the child as he did Chu Wanning, after all they were both betrayed by the same person. He knows that although it is related to Chu Wanning, it is also related to him. He has the guards lock the empress up for her impudence.
After a day, the baby stops eating, stops crying. It’s still breathing, but only just.
Angry, Mo Ran calls on the best doctors he can find. “You dare abandon this venerable one, too?” he questions the little bundle in his arms.
Something in him hurts, like it does when he thinks of Chu Wanning, and Mo Ran thinks it must be hatred. It must be Chu Wanning punishing him again, pain worse than that of any strike he’d endured from Tianwen.
“You have to be like him.” Mo Ran glares at the tiny thing, watching the nearly-imperceptible rise and fall of its chest. “Live. This venerable one orders you to live until I allow you to die.”
When its chest no longer moves and its heart no longer beats, skin pale white like Chu Wanning’s, Mo Ran takes the child to the Red Lotus Pavilion and places it in the crook of Chu Wanning’s arm.
“Take care of it like you never did your disciples,” he says. He watches the two and the awful feeling that lurches up in his chest, in his stomach, the pain of all his hatred nearly bringing tears to his eyes.
Days later, Mo Ran leaves the Red Lotus Pavilion.
Song Qiutong, having been released, having tried her hardest to please him, to suggest that she could bear him a worthy successor, tells him that Chu Wanning is dead. That the child is dead.
When Mo Ran allows for the idea that Red Lotus Pavilion be closed off, he orders her death.
After he sees Xue Meng again, having consumed the poison that still doesn’t hurt him as badly as Chu Wanning had, he lays down beneath the haitang tree and closes his eyes.
~
After Xue Meng informs him of Chu Wanning’s death, Mo Ran doesn’t know what to think.
Chu Wanning had thought well of him? Had carried him over three thousand steps? Had died for him?
Mo Ran’s head spins. The world no longer makes any sense, his two lives have crashed down on him in icy waves.
He sits before Chu Wanning’s body and remembers how he’d looked back in the Red Lotus Pavilion, preserved. This time, however, he’s younger and Mo Ran’s feelings are so very different he doesn’t know what to think.
There’s something else, too.
Shizun back then, he’d…
The baby.
The thought hits Mo Ran so hard he can’t breathe, but the image is clear in his mind of Chu Wanning’s cold, pale body lying prone but still as beautiful as he was in life, an infant tucked carefully into his arms.
The child had only lived a couple of days so Mo Ran had not bothered to name it, but looking back…
They’d had a daughter together. If Chu Wanning hadn’t—
If he hadn’t forced Shizun to come stop him…
Perhaps she would’ve lived.
He had chosen his final resting place to be beneath the haitang tree where he had first seen Chu Wanning, had immediately chosen him, called to him, become attached to him.
He had sent Xue Meng to see Chu Wanning in his final moments in the last life and had thought it funny that Xue Meng should see the child and not know of its origins, allow him to assume whatever he wants.
For some reason, the poison had made him feel particularly sick as he’d considered it.
He feels sick again now.
Then Master Huaizui tells them of the chance to save Chu Wanning, and Mo Ran realizes there’s a small chance he can change Chu Wanning’s fate, can give Shizun the respect he deserves.
There’s nothing he can do for the child who did nothing wrong, but surely it must be better that she never comes to exist at all.
Right?