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▇▇▇ wakes to screaming.
It takes him a handful of seconds to realize it's him, his voice, and that he can't stop.
He doesn't know where he is. Blood bubbles in his throat, spills out of his mouth and it burns. It's frothy, tinged gold, and leaves lines of irritation where it drips down his chin and throat.
There's hands on him. They grab at his arms, press the blood-soaked material of his coat to his chest. One of the hands presses against his mouth and quickly jerks away, burnt.
He chokes, quieting the screaming for a moment, and then heaves up a horrible tangle of clotted blood, like spindly branches shot through with gold. His vision blurs, obscured at the edges by golden leaves. His mouth tastes like iron, of ash, of saltwater-
The laughter, when it starts, is almost worse than the screaming.
The hands are back, multiple sets, and they try to pull him down. There's a cloth at his mouth. It doesn't stop the blood, already soaked in something chemical. It reeks. It burns the gouges around his mouth, burns his shredded nails when tries to claw it away. His hands are pulled to his sides. He feels himself start to thrash and the background clamor of shouting voices crescendos.
Fan-shaped leaves swirl across his vision and everything dissolves
into a golden
haze-
He wakes up.
He shouldn't have woken up. Now or ever again.
His mouth is clean, but the taste of iron still lingers on his tongue. So too lingers the taste of jade, the impression of the pendant pressing raw imprints into the soft skin of his mouth. He hates it.
There's a man standing at the foot of his bed, his arms outstretched like the drape of his coat could hide the bed from view. He can’t see the man’s face, only the wild mane of white hair, the way his shoulders tense, how his fingers curve in want of a weapon – a soldier, still partly stuck on the battlefield he was dragged from.
He knows those arms, the furtive twitch of his shoulders as he catalogs weak points in the room’s defense. It is the stance of a man cornered, but not one looking to flee. He stands at the end of the bed, resolute, arguing with voices beyond the door until the gold haze begins to creep back into his vision, and he succumbs to unconsciousness once more.
–
He wakes again, still in the hospital room, to a heavy weight on his chest. The same man, white-haired, familiar, sprawls across half his body, fist clenched so tightly in ▇▇▇ 's coat that the clasps have cut his hand. The blood is congealed, pooling along the line of the man's closed fingers, already drying into flakes around the edges.
Jing Yuan, he thinks, dragging the name up from the screaming, golden haze, Little lion. Always too stubborn by half.
He’s asleep. His head is pillowed on ▇▇▇ ’s collarbone and his hair is loose, the curls tickling ▇▇▇‘s jaw. He tips his head to rest his cheek on the top of Jing Yuan’s head and catches sight of their hair, mingling strands of black and white splayed across the pale sheets. The colors are familiar. They would be a comfort, if only they weren’t the wrong way around.
His hair has been white since he was young, since the borisin burned his world and their fear-toxin stole the color from his hair. He doesn’t remember the color it was before, but he supposes it must have been black. Dan Feng The Dragon had black hair. Smooth like a spill of ink over pale skin and paler sheets. He liked to listen to ▇▇▇‘s heart, too. Before it was carved out and replaced with another. Before he replaced it.
The Dragon isn’t here. He’s glad. He misses his lover, their bed, their dream of a starship headed nowhere and everywhere. But he’s glad the Dragon isn’t here. He could have been free, –he was free– until the Dragon exhumed his spirit, chained it to this body of blood and golden leaves.
He curls his unshackled arm around Jing Yuan’s waist. The motion is clumsy, unpracticed. They don’t fit together quite right. It’s enough.
He pretends to be asleep when Jing Yuan finally wakes.
—
Jing Yuan is asleep in a chair, spine bent awkwardly to lay his torso on the edge of ▇▇▇ 's bed. He curls a lock of Jing Yuan's hair around his finger and fights the urge to pull until he notices blood speckling the pale sheets. Jing Yuan's arms are bandaged to the elbow, red blood ready peeking through the white fabric.
He tugs, gently. Jing Yuan scrambles upright in a flurry, his golden eyes wide, already brightening with hope. He hasn't seen that puppyish look for nearly a quarter-century.
"▇▇▇ ?"
He smiles, but it has too many teeth to be a happy one.
"He's dead."
“You’re alive. ▇▇▇ , you're alive."
"Hah! He died on that battlefield. He should have… I should be…”
He thrashes, gold leaves flitting across his vision and Jing Yuan catches one of his hands, presses the palm to his ribs and covers it with both of his own to hold it there.
"Your heart," Jing Yuan says. "Your heart still beats-"
"It's not mine," he gasps, "I don't want it. I don't want this!"
Jing Yuan flinches like he's been stabbed and ▇▇▇ takes the opportunity to sink his nails into his own skin, as though he could reach through muscle and bone and pluck free the abomination in his chest. Be free of this ruin, body and mind, be free of this farce, the memories, the golden haze–
His fingertips meet bandages, padded with gauze and tied with such great care that he hesitates. Jing Yuan uses the lapse in concentration to catch his hands and pull them away. He thrashes, his nails sinking into Jing Yuan’s bandaged wrists, but Jing Yuan never lets go. Blood spills over his fingertips and he realizes with a sickening sort of clarity why Jing Yuan’s arms are bandaged.
“I’m sorry,” he says, shocked still.
Jing Yuan says nothing. He doesn't let go, only slides his hands down until he can run his thumbs over ▇▇▇‘s knuckles. He sighs, and rests his head against ▇▇▇‘s temple.
—
▇▇▇ wakes. It still takes him by surprise, waking up, when all his dreams are full of splattered blood and hair and teeth, and the terrible gape of his chest, pale ribs shining like teeth, and the Dragon. Always, the Dragon. Scales like sunlight rippling over shallow water, and the heavy tears that wash the blood from his mouth and leave only saltwater.
Jing Yuan’s chair is empty. It has been for a while.
—
He runs his thumb over the chain of his shackle. He can't feel it, not really, not anymore, but he knows this metal. Knows it like an old friend, or a lover. It's strong, designed to be unbending in the face of wild strength, near inescapable… but the forging process can leave it brittle. And if he twists his wrist just right, tangles the links until they catch, then the stress should break the metal before his wrist.
It takes two tries. His wrist does break, just a fracture, but his fingers still work and the bone will be healed soon enough even if the pain persists. He finds the key by the door and peels the rest of the metal from his wrist. The window is unlocked. It opens just barely wide enough for him to squeeze through, but he manages.
Jing Yuan finds him at the artisanship commission. Sooner than he would have expected, but he's unsurprised. He's dressed in armor, heavy, ornate, worthy of a general. The glaive that ▇▇▇ made for him rests on his back, as it has since the moment it had cooled enough to touch. He carries a sword, peace-tied with a familiar tassel. He walks slowly, as though a heavy weight is fixed upon his broad shoulders.
He wonders, for the first time, how long he spent in that sickbed. He doesn't ask.
"I cannot stay. Not here," he says.
"I know," says Jing Yuan, stepping closer. “I’ll call it exile.”
"I didn’t… I didn’t do anything wrong.”
“I know,” says Jing Yuan.
"I didn't ask for this. I just wanted him to… we were supposed to be happy.”
Jing Yuan says nothing and curls his fingers in ▇▇▇’s coat. He rests their foreheads together. His hair is silver in the starlight, soft as flower petals.
“I know,” he says, finally. “I wanted you to be happy. I wanted you both to be happy.”
Yingxing would kiss him. Yingxing is dead.
So instead he untangles Jing Yuan's fingers from his coat and steps back.
Jing Yuan catches his wrist, the unbroken one. His grip is only a gentle loop of fingers. It would be trivial to break away. Instead, he hesitates. Jing Yuan presses the sword into his arms and then curls his fingers around a little token, heartbreakingly familiar. He almost can’t bear to look but he does.
The jade pendant sits heavy in his palm.
"He should have… I think I should have loved you instead," he says, and regrets it immediately. Here, after blood and death and divine judgment, the words are cruelty, not comfort.
Jing Yuan is silent, face impassive, but his hands tremble like a man dealt a mortal wound. His eyes, lion's eyes, spark with a raw sort of pain. An old wound, clawed open anew.
"I'm sorry," ▇▇▇ says. "Let me be but a memory."
He realizes, as Jing Yuan's eyes shine under the dim lamp with an old sort of grief, deep as the sea, that he has never seen him cry. Not under the flat of Jing Liu's blade, not on the battlefield drenched in gore and hair, not at his sickbed. He also realizes, very quickly, that he never wants to.
So he flees.
—
He slumps down in the cargo hold, sword heavy on his lap. He's panting, that detestable heart fluttering like a bird against his ribs. The golden haze drags at the edges of his vision and he leans his head against his knees until he can't hear the rhythm of that heart in his chest.
He unfolds; first his body and then his aching fingers, clenched tight around the sword sheath. The hilt is familiar in his hand as he draws it, sickeningly so, and the blade–
He can't remember what his sword is called. He can't remember if he even named it. He runs his fingers along the cracks, looks at the broken reflection of his own face. He looks like a doll, skin smooth and untouched by the decades he's lived, his hair is blue-black like an oil-slick, like ocean depths, and his eyes burn technicolor bright. He wonders how Jing Yuan recognized him, how he saw anything of the man he was before.
He wonders if the Dragon would recognize him. If he could face the monster he made and still call him–
He presses the pendant to his forehead and screams until he can't anymore, until the golden haze and the whirling leaves threaten to whisk away his mind.
—
It starts with a delicate snow. He stops to stare at the little flakes, an impossibility given the technology on this ship–
not like the xianzhou, with snow covered gardens and frozen ponds and little winter lilies every ten years, a rare treat for short life species
– and then there's a blade through the meat of his shoulder. He watches the gold-tinged blood drip from that wound, and then a second, just below it. He's gored a third time, a quick wound that opens a vein on his thigh, when he finally remembers the sword on his hip.
It's still peace-tied.
His leg gives way. He crashes to the ground in a tangled sort of sprawl and stares at the tassel and the pretty red ribbon keep the sword firmly sheathed until his vision begins to blur.
A sword-point tips his chin up, and he looks into the face of a ghost. Jing Liu stares down at him, mouth impassive, eyes covered with a tattered blindfold. She speaks to him, he watches her lips move, but he can’t hear her. Black fills the corners of his vision, shot through with golden branches. For the second time, he dies in a pool of his own blood.
—
He wakes up.
He wasn't supposed to wake up.
“I thought Jing Yuan killed you,” he says, after the fifth or sixth she kills him.
“Jing Yuan couldn’t kill me,” she says, her sword buried somewhere between his ribs, “He couldn’t even kill Dang Feng.”
He goes very, very still.
Jing Liu puts her mouth to the shell of his ear, and whispers: “Jing Yuan let him go.”
Golden leaves sweep across his vision and he falls backward into the haze. He doesn't surface for a very long time.
—
She leaves him with naught but the shattered blade and his shattered mind and hands full of sword calluses. The golden haze has eaten him from the inside out. He's sure it would have eaten his body too, if not for the traitorous heart caged in his chest.
His memories are scattered, lost in blood and ginkgo leaves. Only shards remain, sharp, like bits of a broken mirror that show someone else's face. They burrow deeper into his skin when he tries to pluck them free, deep enough that his skin would heal long before he could carve them out entirely. This, he knows.
Jing Liu tried.
She would have succeeded, but the Dragon's heart beats in his chest. This, he can never forget. Not while the golden haze runs screaming through his empty mind, not while he can pull out his ribs and wake up in a pool of his own gore, and not while he dreams of nothing but blood and saltwater and jade under his tongue.
(And a man, white-haired, golden-eyed, asleep at his sickbed. Little lion.)
—
Out of five people, three must pay a price.
The jade pendant hangs heavy on his belt. It's warm. It drags him onward, in time with the heart that beats in his chest, forever drawn to the matching piece. He wished, once, too late, that he'd given that piece to someone else. A useless dream.
Blade sheaths his sword with a click, and goes to find the nearest IPC transport. He has a Dragon to hunt.