Chapter Text
Yue liked nothing more about the new year than its passing. The end of a year came with all manner of ceremony and formality; that he was required to attend, even as a child. He didn’t like to be told how to be, act, and think on a normal day, but on something as important as the new year, it was worse and in front of a bunch of strangers.
The worst of it though, that was how alone he was. Basen wasn’t with him most of the winter really, busy with his own education as a member of the Ma clan while Yue sat alone inside with nothing but his own study too. He was deemed too precious to be allowed to play in the snow like he had seen children of a few servants do before, like Basen had told him he did with Maamei.
Now that the new year had passed and spring had warmed the air and stopped snow from falling, he not only got Basen back but he also got to play outside again.
The smile could not be forced off his face. He was of half a mind to think not even the empress regnant could steal the smile from him.
He was chasing after Basen with a blunted wooden sword, they were told in a year or two they’d be allowed to use more realistic swords. They would still be entirely wooden until the people who decided such a thing thought they had enough training that they could use more real swords. He couldn’t wait for the day that they could truly spar as they had once seen Gaoshun and the Sun Prince, his brother, Suiren had been so upset with them when she found them ‘spying’ but it was so amazing to watch.
It made him and Basen both want for actual swords as soon as possible.
Running after Basen now, sword brandished, cheeks red and raw from the smiling that came with seeing his only friend once more, as well as the very welcome break from his lessons.
It was simply all easier when he was not alone. Yue never did well alone…
Running along, he felt something warm dot his skin, like a spilt drop of tea. Then a second, then a third, in what felt like a line. It stopped him in his tracks. He looked down at his wrist and yelped, the sound causing his mother’s lady’s maids to descend like harpies, grabbing at him in horror before he could even conceive of what those three strange marks were.
He was dragged inside, and after much yelling and threats to Basen and various ladies, all trading blame and trying to figure out what had caused three small burn wounds to bloom on the underside of his wrist. A few of the women were even dragged away crying. He didn’t want to think about why or what for.
“You didn’t feel anything?” Taomei, Basen’s mother, asked. He shook his head as Basen’s own lowered under the intensity of his mother’s words, “Nothing at all?” she prompted again.
“It felt warm,” his voice was small, he didn’t mean for it to be, but they were all staring at him and it made him second guess his own feelings, memories, “soft, like Lady Shiya’s pet,” he recalled the moment the best he could.
It was perhaps more accurate to say it felt like fireworks he watched go up in the distance, too far from the palace to hear. He had liked how it felt greatly, something he didn’t think he should say. He wanted to feel it again, something he knew* he shouldn’t say.
“Heavens forgive me,” Taomei muttered the half hearted prayer as she knelt in front of him.
“I need you to tell me if this feels the same, Moon Prince,” she explained, taking his hand, he nodded his agreement.
She scratched a small, sharp flick of a nail on his skin. He hissed a short breath, but then that feeling like a warm hug came back.
“How did you do that?” he asked with bright, earnest cheer.
“I didn’t,” she said, with worry too clear on her face.
He remained in the dark for some days, just another thing about himself he suspected was wrong, even when everyone around him seemed resolute to pretend everything was fine. The way whispering stopped when made himself seen, it wasn’t odd, he had learnt it was part of the life of an imperial, but this was different. This was more than speculative, this was plain enough that a six year old knew better. It was like the way they spoke of his birth, the way they all said it made little sense.
Until his mother sat him down.
The Empress spent little time with him, it only ever made him think those rumours were right. Most of the time they spent together it was when she was showing him off, or teaching him something imperial.
She encouraged him up on the same couch she sat on, and for the first time in a long time he didn’t feel all that small next to her soft yellow dress or shining gold jewels. He felt wanted and loved by those eyes that seemed so sad, her brow creasing and lips tight as she was about to reveal what had been so obscured.
“Yue, my sweet prince, can I see your wrist,” she didn’t actually ask. It was a command.
He knew what she wanted to see and revealed those mystery burns to her. They had only gotten more strange. He revealed them and saw her think through the same confusion that he had battled; they were healing and completely different rates despite him receiving them all at the same time.
“Do you remember that story about the stars, the princess of heaven?” She asked, and he nodded. He loved that story, it made his chest swell with joys he wasn’t allowed to feel. “They were soulmates, and that’s why the royal mother had to allow them to see each other, if they didn’t see each other a few days of the year they die,” she explained, the part of the story he didn’t like. It made him worry about what happened when one died…
“Because they were soulmates,” he filled in, almost a question.
“Yes,” his mother smiled at him, “but that is not the only type of soulmate, there are many, and the heavens will always drive them together when the time is right, when heaven has decreed it.”
He had forgotten all about his wrist that still lay in his mother’s soft hands.
“One such soul bond is skin staining,” she said, each word heavy with meaning he didn’t yet understand.
“These burns were never on your body,” she said, what seemed like a contradiction, “it only stained your skin.”
There was something in her words that he knew mattered, but he still didn’t quite understand. Not that he would say as much, that was an early lesson he had learnt, a prince did not ever seem weak or unknowing.
“This was done to your soulmate.”
There was a lot more explained to him than that, but all Yue could focus on was that it meant his soulmate, the person the heavens had deemed he would never be whole without, had been burned like this. So that night in the darkness and stillness of his bedroom, he left his bed in want of ink.
Something to ask, not what mattered to everyone else, ‘who are you,’ but the only thing that mattered at all.
‘Are you okay?’
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Maomao woke and went about her day as any other, excited to keep working on her burn creams, so long as the old lady didn’t force her to sit through more erhu lessons. She was the worst of all the girls. She didn’t get why she couldn’t just learn medicine and keep helping her dad forever.
Her arm felt itchy for some reason. Worse than the process of healing ought to have irritated her. It didn’t make sense, her dad had explained burns to her before, and it shouldn’t feel… soft?
Pulling up her sleeve and looking when she shouldn’t have, it would only make her want to work on medicine more than she already did.
‘Are you okay?’* written in expensive ink, blacker than the night sky, nicer than even Joka used.
She heard the lopsided walk of her dad and his cane and quickly pulled down her sleeve. He wasn’t exactly happy with her for burning herself with candle flame to test burn medicines, and she didn’t want to see that pinched, sad look on his face again. She’d also need to keep it covered at the brothel if she was needed today, she didn’t want anyone to think she had stolen ink again. She had to make a bunch of the courtesan’s ink from grass like Luomen had taught her to prove she wasn’t a thief, and now she had to regularly make more for them. The only good part of it was that it chipped away at the debt of her existence.
“Did you want to help me in the apothecary today,” she lit up under the sweet question of her dad. She nodded her head and muttered about his mad scientist.
She, at all of her five years, did not realise this meant hiding the ink burning her arm without heat as she tried to hide it. In waiting to figure out how that question ended up on her arm, why it did? Who cared whether she was okay? The main problem to her sisters was that she had ‘ruined’ her skin. Even at her little age, she didn’t see much at all wrong with ruining her appeal before she even had any. If no one would spend their coin on her, then she’d surely be allowed to just stay working with her dad instead of having another lesson with Pairin.
It wasn’t until late into the day, when customers started arriving and the sun started setting, that she was at last able to pull up her sleeve. The ink was gone, but she was sure it was there, it wasn’t like she’d imagined it. Then, right before her eyes, it appeared again.
The same strokes Joka had taught her ran on her arm in pitch black, ink that ran smooth as water and dark as night. It was beautiful to watch the question rematerialise. It settled like weight on her heart, it wasn’t stifling or suffocating, it almost reminded her of the stories she half overheard the courtesans sharing.
Dipping a brush into the green tinted brown grass ink, she replied.
‘Yes.’
The black ink returned next to hers again, like a real conversation being had through her arm. She did not know how, but it was, and it was strange, but it wasn’t unwelcome.
‘Someone burned you.’
‘I did.’
‘Why?’
‘To test burn medicine.’
The black ink circled ‘medicine’ with a question mark.
‘I’m the daughter of an apothecary.’ She answered.
‘Who are you?’ they asked.
She considered how she was supposed to answer that question. On the one hand, she was told never to give her name away, especially not to strangers, but on the other, this was some she was speaking to on her arm. She was also running out of space on her arm…
She found a compromise in drawing a cat on her arm. Followed by adding an underline to their last question, asking the same in retort.
The response she got was a crescent moon.
Regardless of whether or not it was right, this marked the moment that she began to call whoever was on the spiritual side of this arm, Yue.
If only in her head. She had no intention of talking to anyone about them, and there was no need to call them by a name. Who else would she be talking to when she wrote on her arm?
It was the start of a strange relationship. She wasn’t sure if they were friends, but Yue was maybe the closest thing to one she had. She started bandaging her arm, in part to keep her experiments clean and able to heal, but also so that no one else would find out about Yue. She liked that being hers alone.
Her arm became a testament to her growing knowledge of herbs and medicine, and there were only two people in the world that never seemed to mind, dad and Yue. That said, there was still a difference. Dad never really asked about it, he simply let her be, which she was glad for. She really was, but Yue always left questions she didn’t see until she unwrapped her arm.
She didn’t learn why they were connected until she was nine, and she asked Joka about a kanji Yue used, and she was forced into showing her sister her arm. That was not a fun day.
Joka’s endless warnings about never trusting anyone, especially men, and especially Yue. Pairin’s fawning over how lucky she was to have a guaranteed grand love in this boy. Meimei at least told her how soul bonds worked.
It was something that afflicted something around 40% of the population of Li. Even then, there were countless types of presentations of the bond. Pairin had one herself, a soul mark, a symbol, a flower, that would bloom fully only when she met her match. They would have a matching mark. Maomao and Yue shared skin; anything that stained hers would stain his, and vice versa.
She should have worried about it. Joka certainly did. She was sure that the boy was of high status and would only bring her even more pain because of that, but it was hard to believe it. If soul mates were connected and destine by the mandate of heaven, they’d only meet if heaven mandated it, and she even at nine years old knew she wasn’t the type of girl heaven gave to a nobleman, certainly not one as sweet and nice as Yue.
Maomao and he wouldn’t ever met because heaven would never curse him with her, and she would never earn the blessing that was their few words exchanged a day.
She preferred a friend to a soulmate, anyway.
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Maomao’s wrists and hands had a tendency to decorate themselves, rather Yue’s wrists did, and as a result so did hers. It was nothing that made any sense to her. They were symbols she didn’t recognise, on dates that didn’t matter to her, in substances that stained her hands in what she almost worried was blood. She was sure it was more like clay, but the deep red colour was worrying sometimes.
She examined her hands. Pretty patterns like lace or bangle bracelets, and those symbols that she tried to ignore on her palms. If she were being honest, the worst part of days like these was the guilt. The feeling that she couldn’t use her hands, that she couldn’t risk ruining whatever it was for.
Maomao didn’t know why his hands were like that, but she didn’t want to be the reason that it got ruined. She ruined a lot, and it felt worse when she couldn’t experiment to take her mind off it.
She hated it.
She hated it even more than the classics lessons with Joka. She shouldn’t have been in these classes; she wasn’t pretty or talented. But as Joka and Meimei had pointed out to the old hag, that her soulmate was clearly a young man of means. He wouldn’t come to a brothel for a cheap whore, but for a proper courtesan. There were Kanji he used, and events he referenced, and the most obvious thing of the obvious quality of the ink he used; he clearly came from money, and thus she needed to be of a high quality to match.
She had sat through so many of these lessons that pieces were starting to stick, but she was still no good at poetry.
“Maomao, your hands.” Joka noted, sitting across her, and inspecting the decorations.
“It’s Yue’s,” she mumbled.
He was something of an open secret at the brothel. No one spoke of her having a soulmate, but it was tacitly understood that she had a soulmate by quite a few of the girls. Ones that had been around when that big scene was originally made.
“I figured,” she teased, “I have noticed something about these little marks, they turn up on spiritual days.” Maomao stared blankly at Joka, waiting for her to explain further.
She sighed, but eventually did.
“The people who do rituals on these days aren’t just wealthy, they are noble, very noble.” She explained it, and it made little sense to Maomao.
Well, the explanation made sense, but the situation didn’t. Yue, her soulmate being some heir to an old clan meant she was fated to end up… She didn’t want to think about it.
She was not a member of that family, and nothing was going to change that
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Jinshi wasn’t exactly surprised when the harassment and attention he received from men and women alike would stop simply because he was no longer the Moon Prince but the beautiful eunuch. Didn’t change how it hurt, didn’t change the way he barred each of the entrances — doors, windows, anything else, everything he could each night.
Suiren and Gaoshun both thought it had more to do with his dislike for the bandages and his want to speak to Maomi. He was too old to keep calling her kitty without cringing at the sound of it on his tongue, but it was also her name to him, so she stopped being little.
As soon as he was safe in his well barricaded rooms, he pulled up his sleeve and propped it on his knee. Dipping his brush into his ink, he examined his arm, finding something new that he felt bloom earlier in the day.
It was a large bloom, almost like a flower. It was kind of pretty, but it made him worry. All of the scars did. But Maomi was happy, she loved what she did. Her experiments were one of the few things that she seemed to have control over, and well, he greatly understood that.
He rejected the public persona of a prince and hid away, facing a conspiracy only he seemed to believe. He took as much solace in her experiments as she did, it would seem.
He noted a question mark near the scar.
It took her some time to reply, time he spent tracing the great many wounds with a soft finger. He was just waiting for that warm, fuzzy feeling, a feeling unlike anything else.
It was the only time he felt like enough.
‘Poison mushroom,’ of course it was.
‘What kind?’
She wrote something down he didn’t know, followed quickly by the pronunciation. It was a strange name, he was half convinced she had gotten it wrong. That felt like a sure way to have her not speak to him for a while…
She knew how he felt, that their communication was one of the few things in his life that he could genuinely say he enjoyed.
Once he had upset her and she hadn’t just not replied, but she had scrubbed the skin surrounding it raw trying to remove his ink.
He hoped that she never did that again.
‘Corpse. Mushroom.’ He questioned in simpler kanji, clarifying the name. She circled it correct.
‘Hardly touched it; it’s very poisonous.’
Later that night, he painted over it. He turned it into a rhododendron. She drew a very unimpressed face next to it.
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Jinshi loved having a soulmate, especially one like Xiaomaomi, who cared so little about beauty. It was wonderful, it gave him hope he had been losing more and more. It seemed the beauty he had been praised for his whole life had only continued to grow.
The bandage that covered his arm was the best deterrent he had. It was forced on him, he didn’t exactly mind showing off the deformities, but others found it below the standing of a prince.
They speculated about what man was abusing his daughter. They spoke as if they knew who his soulmate was, or rather what class she was. It would be an act against heaven to make anyone else his legal wife. At the time this was ignoring the fact he was twelve and far too young for that to be a serious consideration, and now ignoring that he was putting it all off in his ruse as Jinshi, the years that passed had not changed that. But he was now the Crown Prince, and a man of his standing, so close to heaven, needed an equally high wife, especially when people started talking about potential consorts in addition to Xiaomaomi.
Her disregard for beauty was the cause of much screaming today, a woman had even fainted. He couldn’t wait for a few more years, when he was given his own residence separate from his mother’s, and with his own staff. His own staff, who he didn’t have to put up with touching him in the manner he did, the way their hands lingered even worse than their eyes.
Upon Jinshi’s perfect jade skin, there now lived a smattering of imperfections. A smattering of freckles across the bridge of his nose.
He was restricted to not just the palace, but to his rooms, until the women who had seen his face had procured the necessary cosmetics to hide such scars on jade. They thought him mad, the way he hadn’t stopped smiling since he saw them.
Yet, his smile only widened when he was left alone and able to unwrap that bandage. ‘Freckles?’ he asked of her, receiving a far too prompt reply amidst their shared mangled arm. ‘A girl needs protection in as many forms as she can get.’ He didn’t like how well he understood her meaning and simply told her he was rather fond of them. Turns out he only shared some, the ones she had tattooed on, she herself wore more made of clay and dotted on with a brush.
The only bad part of the freckles was that they were not something a prince was allowed to have. They would always remain covered in a dusting of whitening powder that hid them, something that felt like an affront to heaven.
Something he would have stopped when he came of age and was free to make such choices, or so he had thought.
Jinshi wouldn’t be the perfect celestial beauty if his face were scarred. Nor would he have a bandaged arm, the wrapping changing to one that matched his skin in colour. Yue was Maomi’s soulmate, not Jinshi, or so he told himself to feel less awful about his choices.
He should have felt awful for them.
He only really at last felt as devoid and empty as he deserved when Maomi stopped writing to him when he was 18.