Work Text:
Your brother is safe.
A boy you barely know has repaid kindness with magnanimity, smuggling both of you out of your ravaged home into a hot, dark little room that smells of mildewed paper. The gap under the door admits a mouthful of cool air when you press your face to it and just enough light, when you don’t, that you can watch him sleep. He’s twitchy and restless, his red face pinched in pain; anyone would think him feverish, if they didn’t look too closely at—
Well, you try not to look at it either.
He’s come in his robes at least twice already just from rutting against his hand. There’s not room for you to lie down without pressing up against him, so you huddle in a corner with your knees to your chest. When you close your eyes, you see blood pooling in the floorboards and staining the river; when you open them you see A’Cheng’s twisted red face, smeared with dirt and still more blood. You keep thinking you’re finished with blood and then finding more of it: under your fingernails, or in the creases of your boots. There’s blood on your brother’s lip, and under his eye, and in dark lines across his chest, seeping through his robes.
Jiang Cheng’s soft, reedy whine goes suddenly quiet. He freezes, then shoots up to sitting, banging and thumping against the wall like he’s trying to get both of you killed.
“Quiet!” you hiss.
He turns to you, bewildered. In the dim light, you watch his expression move from fear, to confusion, to a naked hurt that twists up something in your ribcage.
“I told you to leave me!” he whispers.
“A’Cheng—“
“No, I told you to let me die at home! With my shixiong and shidi and my…” he curls in on himself, elbows to his chest, chin to his knees, fist against his mouth to silence desperate sobbing. And then he must brush against his erection, because he stops and shudders violently, biting back a moan. His eyes roll up in his head and his cheeks burn. You think he might have just come again. You’re almost used to it by now, almost used to the way it turns your stomach, even while it makes your own cock hot and swollen.
He takes a few ragged breaths against his fist, blinking back tears. “Not here,” he says, no longer meeting your eye. “I don’t want to die here. It’s dark. I don’t even know where we are.”
“A’Cheng, you’re not going to die.”
“Of course I am!” He hisses through his teeth. “Do you…” he groans into his fist, a horrible, despairing sound. “Do you understand what they did to me?”
You do. You saw more than you ever should have: Wen Chao lounging on your uncle’s throne while his concubine poured liquor into his mouth. His men spread out on the floor, still more blood seeping into the fabric around their knees and their asses. You knew that Jiang Cheng would see you when you pushed aside the loose board behind the far wall, the one the three of you would use to spy on meetings as children; not three days ago, you hid in that same spot and pulled faces at him while his father introduced him to local merchants. How lucky for you, you thought, that they were holding him in the throne room that both of you knew so well. He would spot you right away and know you’d come to rescue him.
But then you realized what you were seeing: your brother, kneeling in the middle of them all, bleeding and sweating, naked and hard. A pit opened up in your stomach. You watched his face, because you couldn’t—you couldn’t. It occurred to you, when his eyes fell on you and his face turned scarlet with shame, that you should have hidden yourself from him. You felt shame too, itching under your skin. You knew you’d done something awful by seeing this at all.
Wen Chao laughed just then, loud and leery. “Rub one off for us, xiao-zongzhu,” he slurred. “It’ll help with the pain.” His concubine, with a laugh like broken glass, climbed up out of his lap and started walking towards Jiang Cheng.
At that point, you forced yourself to turn away. If you saw any more of it, you would barge in swinging your sword, and you would lose. As you scrambled through the too-hot passageway, fighting the urge to vomit, you heard another voice, taunting: “You know he can fix it, xiao-zongzhu. All you have to do is beg for it.”
You’ve both heard, of course, what Wen Zhuliu can do. It was a story the boys used to scare each other with, in the baths after training, or during celebrations when you all stayed out late, sitting around the fire. You were the one who told Jiang Cheng this story, back when you were eleven and found the whole ordeal lurid and scandalous. Back when the Wen wouldn’t have dared to turn a weapon like that on people like you.
Do you understand what they did to me?
“A’Cheng, it’s just a story,” you say. “Do you believe all the stories your shige tell you?” You’re the only shige left to tell them, you realize a second too late, but you don’t attempt to correct your phrasing. Instead you plaster on a smile and rummage through your memory for some stupid rumor you both heard as children: Remember when… Remember when… You know you have those stories filed away somewhere—absurd stories, reassuring stories—but you’re coming up empty.
“It’s real,” Jiang Cheng says, so quietly you almost don’t hear him. “They did it to—it doesn’t matter who. He died. I watched.”
“No.” You shake your head. He’s wrong, you’re certain of it. “A’Cheng, no—“
“So I’m going to die—“ he says.
“No—“
”And it’s going to hurt the whole time.”
”Stop!” You say, and then you have to throw your hand over your own mouth and force yourself to breathe through your nose. The breaths come hot and not fast enough, and you’re sure you’re going to suffocate, breathing the scent of blood through your sweaty palm in this stuffy little closet in a corner of god-knows-where. “You won’t die,” you hiss when you think you can speak again, “Do you really think I’d let you die?” It comes out angry, angrier than you mean it to; your brother’s eyes widen as if he’s afraid of you.
“Do you even know what you’re saying?” He says. He’s biting his lip so hard that a drop of blood bubbles up under his teeth. There’s terror in his eyes you’ve never seen before, and you’d kill to soothe it out of him. “I will die, because dying is the best choice I have!”
“No,” you say. “No. I can lift the curse.”
“How?”
“I’ll figure it out. I’m good with talismans, you know I am.”
He snorts. “Fuck off.”
”What?”
“You have a day from when he casts it. A day. It happened a little before noon. What time is it now?”
You’re not certain, but it was night when you left Lotus Pier, and the light coming under the door now is too steady and strong to be anything but sunlight. You force yourself not to look at the crack at the bottom of the door; Jiang Cheng’s gaze goes there anyway. It lingers for a horribly long moment.
When his eyes meet yours again they widen, and he scrambles back into the corner, wincing as he moves.
”No. No, no, you can’t,” he says. “Please, you can’t.”
“A’Cheng, listen to me.” You move to lay your hand on his shoulder, bit he slaps it away.
“Don’t touch me!” he screams—really screams—and you clap a hand over his mouth before he can pull away from you.
“Don’t let them hear us!” you hiss.
He wrenches your hand away, but lowers his voice. “Who? Don’t let who hear us? Where did you fucking take me?”
“It doesn’t matter,” you say. “It doesn’t matter, please, just keep quiet and let me fix this and it will all be—“
“There’s no fixing it!” he says, a loud, raspy whisper that tears up his throat. “I won't let you touch me. Is it not enough, what they did to me back there?”
“Of course not!” you say. “Fuck, what does that even mean? If it was enough, we wouldn’t be—“
He pushes you against a stack of old furniture, hard enough that pain blooms across your shoulder and a few loose rods and planks come clattering to the floor. You freeze, or you try to freeze, but as soon as you do he’s on top of you, scratching dirty fingernails across your face like a cat, and you feel the hot oily feeling of more fucking blood. You shove back against him, pushing him to the floor, and now you're the one on top, pressed shoulder to shoulder and chest to chest, just trying to hold him still long enough for him to get his wits back, but he’s squirming and—
Your hips push against his hot, hard cock, and he makes a noise you’ve never imagined coming out of his mouth.
You don’t—you’re not doing this because you want him, of course not, but you grind against him again before you can stop yourself. You feel his heat and wetness move against your own, and A’Cheng shudders and moans underneath you and for a second you just want more—
He brings his knee to your groin, hard, and you swallow a grunt and roll off of him, clutching yourself.
“What the fuck was that?” he says. His voice is thick with tears.
You blink and shake your head until you stop seeing spots. You feel dizzy: with pain or want or fear or disgust, you can’t be sure. Looming over you like a shadow, like one of the swimming black spots in your vision grown to swallow it up, is a sense of how easily you could do it again. It would be so simple to save him. You’re already half hard, and you could stay hard long enough to come in his ass, and you think you’d come quickly. It’s right in front of you, real as your trembling hands.
“It wasn’t that bad, was it?” you hear yourself say.
“It was! It’s not me, it’s not what I want!”
You’re torn between the urge to move closer and farther away. You push yourself back against the opposite corner, though in the cramped room you could still stretch out your foot and touch his. You take three shaking breaths through your nose before you let yourself speak.
“What does it feel like?” you ask.
“Like dying,” Jiang Cheng says. “My whole body’s dying, and the only thing left is this…it’s not what I want. It’s not what I want and it’s taking me over. I don’t know if I can—if I can resist it.”
“I can get it over with,” you say. “Banish it and bring you back.”
“No.”
”I can make it fast. Just count backwards from one hundred—“
”No! Stop asking!”
”Your parents told me to keep you safe.”
”Well, it’s too late for that!” He says, and it squeaks above a whisper with a horrible grating sound, like metal scraping against metal.
You lift a hand toward his mouth, but when you see him flinch away, you let it fall.
”A-Cheng,” you say, “A’Cheng, it’s not too late.”
He scrubs at his eyes, making tracks on his face through the blood and grime. There’s snot dripping down his nose. Your sleeves are too filthy to offer him, but you rummage in your pockets and come up with a greasy wax-paper wrapper from the dinner you bought two days ago. He takes it and wipes his nose, or tries to; it mostly just smears the snot around.
“They wouldn’t want me now,” he chokes out, and you frown.
“Who, your parents?”
“It doesn’t matter, they wouldn’t want me safe.”
“What?”
“If the saw me in the—in the throne room—-if they saw—-“
All the shame that’s been collecting in your gut hot and thick rises up in a wave of molten anger. Your face is hot, blood-hot or tears-hot you can’t tell. You want to vomit. You want to unhinge your jaw and let a shriek erupt out of your mouth.
“Is that what this is about?” you say.
”Excuse me?”
“You think they wouldn’t want you? Just for that?”
“You—what?”
“Do you think we wouldn’t want you either? Me and shijie? Or do you not care?”
“You don’t know what you’re—“
”Should I tell her that? ‘Hey, shijie, I got him out of there, risked my own neck to do it, but he told me he didn’t want to live anymore, and you know, I can’t argue with that—“
”Stop,” Jiang Cheng hisses. “Just—please shut up. You’re fucking horrible. You don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about.”
”I know we’re all that’s left.”
Jiang Cheng stuffs his dirty knuckles in his dirty mouth and wails into his fist. All of your anger evaporates like steam, just rises up off your skin and leaves you cold. Empty. The realization slides down your throat like ice: your brother is not safe, because he’s already been hurt, and any choice you make will hurt him worse.
“A’Cheng,” you say, feeling your voice grow thick. “A’Cheng, we’re going to figure something out. Just don’t give up, okay?”
He moves toward you across the dirty floor, and you meet in the middle. You take care not to touch anything below the waist, but you pull his chest close against yours, and he buries his wet face in your neck, sobbing against your skin. This close, you can still smell a trace of the camellia oil he combed into his hair three or four mornings ago, a lifetime ago. It’s gone in the next breath, swallowed by the stench of sweat and blood.
You cradle his head and run your arm up and down his back. “I’ve got you,” you murmur. “I’ve got you. It’s all right. It’s almost over.” It’s not a lie; you know that one way or another, this will have to end soon.
Jiang Cheng’s lips move against your skin, but you can’t make out what he’s mumbling.
“Shhh,” you soothe, feeling his hot breath condense on your neck. “Shh, it’s all right.”
“I need you,” he says.
Your hand on his back pauses. “A’Cheng?”
“I need you, I need you,” he whines, pulling his hips into yours. “Please. Make it end.”
You freeze, but he doesn’t. His lips slide wetly along the side of the neck, on your jaw, on your cheek.
“A’Cheng,” you say again, not sure how you’re going to follow it, but then his mouth is on your mouth, hot and needy, and when your tongue pushes against his, he opens up for you and moans, the sound vibrating through your jaw.
You’re pretty sure it’s both of your first kiss.
“Didi,” you mumble into his mouth, suddenly unsure. Your stomach feels tight; against your better judgement, you think you want to stop.
“It hurts so bad,” he whines, his lips fat and slick over yours. You swallow a moan when he grinds against you. “I want, I want—“ He hooks his leg around your waist and pulls you in, all of your heat and your want and your wetness moving against his, and you need to make it end, too. You need to get through this and onto the other side of it.
At least it feels good, you tell yourself. It feels even better than all the times you touched yourself, alone in your bed. If it feels this good for him, you could almost forgive yourself.
You swallow down fear and thrust your hips against his.
Jiang Cheng doesn’t protest when you undo his belt and shove your hand roughly down his pants. He bucks up into your fist, and you gasp. When you’ve played with your own cock, you’re sure it was never this hot and this hard. You tighten your fingers around it, just to see if it will give, and he cries out. Quickly, you pull his face into your shoulder to muffle the sound; his breath is hot, too, hot and wet, condensing on the fabric of your clothes.
“More,” he whines, “More, quickly. Need you inside.”
You catch yourself before you ask him if he’s sure.
He grabs your hand and yanks it towards his—towards his asshole—and you’ve heard this was the cure but you’re not sure you ever believed it, and you don’t even have time to be shocked before he takes hold of your index finger and shoves it inside of him, screaming into your shoulder.
The sound he makes opens up a pit in your stomach. “Does it hurt? A’Cheng?”
”Yes,” he hisses through his teeth. He angles his hips to push you further in. “More.”
You move your finger carefully in and out, willing the tight muscle to loosen around you. You’re not quite sure how any of this works, but you know you’ll have to fit more than this inside of him.
“More,” he groans, “please.” and you muscle another finger in but it’s tough, he’s so tight. He moans, his face pressed close against your shoulder, and you’re not sure if it’s pleasure or pain, until you feel something hot and wet drip down your finger.
“Take it out,” he says, but he’s clinging to you still, desperately grinding his erection against you. “Too much. Too much.”
If you don’t take your fingers out, he’s going to scream louder, and you’re both going to get caught, and all of this will have been for nothing.
“Shh, didi, shh,” you say, pulling your fingers out as cautiously as you can. “We have to be quiet. Can you be quiet for me?”
He nods, whimpering, while you wipe blood off your fingers and rummage for a bottle of sword oil that may or may not be in your qiankun sleeve.
“I’ll make it feel good for you,” you say, releasing a breath when your fingers close around the bottle.You turn away from him to hide your shaking hands. While you pour the oil over your fingers, he kicks off his boots and wrestles his way out of his clothes. You can’t help but stare at his erection, deep red and dripping with spend. He takes hold of himself and starts stroking.
“Stop that,” you say gently. “You don’t need to. I’ve got you.”
He shakes his head but obeys you, moving his hands to his sides to brace himself against the floor. “I don’t want you to,” he says, tears pouring down his cheeks. “I don’t want this.”
In one quick motion, you pull him into your lap.
“This is going to feel better than before,” you say, pushing two slick fingers into him. He throws a filthy hand over his mouth and swallows a yell.
“Good,” you say, “good boy. No noise. We’ll get this done.”
Your fingers glide in and out of him more easily, but he doesn’t seem to be getting any looser. You school yourself not to look at the sunlight under the door, but it’s bright; will noon arrive before you can finish this? Will your brother, here in your arms—
No.
“This is going to hurt,” you say, and you push a third finger inside.
He lets out a horrible strangled cry, muffled against your shoulder. His skin is slick with sweat.
“Shhh, it’s okay,” you murmur, planting a row of kisses along his ear and his cheek, rubbing your free hand up and down his back. “It’s okay, baobei, I’ve got you. I’m proud of you. You’re doing so well.”
“Gege,” he whines, wriggling on your fingers. “Gege, it’s so much.”
“I know.”
“It feels good.”
“It does?”
“Mm.”
“Do you want my cock now?”
“Yes.”
You kiss him wetly on the mouth. You could cry with relief. He likes this, it feels good for him. You made it feel good for him.
With your free hand, you make an opening in your robes and pull out your cock. Then you lift him off your fingers and onto you in one swift motion. His eyes widen, but he bites his lip hard and doesn’t make a noise.
You mean to say “almost there,” but he feels so good around you, feels like home, hot and slick and god, so tight. “A’Cheng,” you say, too loud, losing yourself, and you roll him onto his back and fuck him in hard, quick strokes. It’s over before you can get your bearings, too fast, too fast. You come, shuddering, before noon can get its hands on him.
You look at the sunlight under the door, and at your brother, his muscles loose now, his face slack, breathing underneath you, and you burst into hysterical laughter. “A’Cheng,” you say, “A’Cheng, it’s over.” You kiss him jubilantly on the mouth, across his cheeks. “We made it. You’re safe now, we made it, and Wen Ning will come to let us out in a few more hours and—“ You catch your breath. You feel a wave of fresh tears streaming down your face. “It’s done. We’re home free.”
Your brother stares blankly at the door, his mouth slightly open, breathing heavily.
“A’Cheng,” you say again, but he won’t look at you.