Chapter Text
The next few months seemed to pass in a haze.
The Red Turbans, at least the ones under Zhu’s command, started to resemble something approaching an army. Barracks were constructed, so that Ouyang was finally awarded a room of his own, with a ceiling that didn’t leak. He slept badly the first two nights: it was too quiet without Xu Da’s snoring, and then on the third night Zhu and Xu Da arrived and dragged him away from the barracks to have dinner in one of the many overpriced restaurants of Anfeng. Zhu was paying, so he ate a great deal, and drank more and slept undisturbed until the morning. After that, he had no more trouble sleeping, but Zhu and Xu Da continued to take him out to dinner with astonishing regularity, and when they didn’t they were forever pressing food upon him: steamed buns filled with meat, or candied hawthorns, or fresh pancakes. It got to the point where he also felt obliged to go out and purchase food for them on occasion. They would press wine upon him as well with regularity, until he took to purchasing that also, since growing up in a monastery had left both Zhu and Xu Da with extremely dubious taste when it came to alcohol, in that they did not seem to care how it tasted at all, as long as it got them drunk.
Third Sister continued to visit him at the barracks, and after a while she began to drag him to her house on the nights that Zhu and Xu Da left him alone. She had a child. A girl, old enough that she could walk, young enough that she did not know how to do so properly. She fell over so often that she seemed constantly covered in cuts and bruises, but she never seemed to care. She didn’t even cry, she just got up and toddled again in the direction of whatever had caught her attention, eyes bright. She talked a little, though not very coherently, and she would put anything in her mouth as long as she could reach it.
Ouyang did not know what he felt, when he looked at her. Only that when she had smiled at him for the first time and called him Uncle the warmth of it had remained in his chest for an entire day.
Third Sister’s husband was a weedy young man. Ouyang did not see the appeal of him, and he told her as much. She just laughed and tucked her arm in his and said, “That’s just as well. I wouldn’t want you to steal him away.”
“He’s not even a soldier,” he said. He was a scholar, which in Anfeng meant that he was destitute. He made some money taking dictated letters for the rebels, and Third Sister supplemented their income by taking in mending and sewing jobs.
“Nevertheless, he knows how to handle his weapon,” Third Sister said, smirking, and then cackled at the expression on his face. “Are you shocked? You’re a soldier! You must have heard worse.”
“Not from my sister,” Ouyang said. Not from any woman, in truth. He hadn’t really thought they enjoyed themselves during the act, regardless of what the men around him boasted of. But then, he hadn’t thought he would enjoy it either.
“How do you think Xiao Yao came to be?” she asked, still laughing. “Or this new one, for that matter?” she added, patting her stomach.
It took a few moments for her meaning to sink in. “You’re…”
She nodded. “The fetus isn’t stable yet, so we haven’t told anyone else. But you’re family. And we were thinking… would you like to be the one to name them?”
There was a lump in Ouyang’s throat. He had to swallow around it in order to speak. “Are you sure your husband won’t mind? Whatever I come up with will not be up to his literary standards.”
“I have faith in you,” she said, and squeezed his arm.
***
More time passed. They took Jiankang, and Zhu kept Little Guo from committing suicide by way of irate noblewoman, which was a pity on several counts. Luckily, Little Guo proceeded to immediately commit suicide by way of the Prime Minister.
Ma did not seem overly grieved by the loss of her fiancé, which signaled that she might be possessed of at least some small measure of common sense. This was counterbalanced by her decision to marry Zhu. Their marriage was marked first by Chen taking Xu Da hostage, and immediately thereafter by the spreading of a plague in their camp, which did not seem particularly auspicious.
Ouyang fell sick about ten days after the start of the epidemic. It came upon him suddenly. One moment he was walking to the barracks, and the next he was in the dirt, retching.
After, he managed to drag himself a few paces from his own vomit, but no further. He lay on his back, panting. The sunlight was oddly dappled on the dust of the yard, as though he was underwater, or in a forest, and the world spun around him, a whirl of yellow earth and blue sky. He wasn’t sure how much time passed until he was found, only that he retched twice more, and that his sweat was starting to grow icy on his skin.
Someone knelt next to him, casting a shadow over his face, and hands reached out to touch him. They felt warm against his skin. The fever hadn’t started yet. His vision was blurry. The man’s face, above him, was an indecipherable splotch. It was only when he spoke that he recognized his voice. “Comfortable?” Xu Da asked.
“Very,” Ouyang said, or tried to. The word came out oddly garbled.
“Can you stand?”
Ouyang tried it. He got himself to an upright position, and then he took a step, and then his feet went out from under him again. Xu Da’s hands closed on his arms, their grip unyielding, holding him upright.
“I’ll take that as an answer,” Xu Da said. With gentle movements, he maneuvered Ouyang into his arms, and lifted him up against his chest, as though he weighed nothing.
“You’re very strong,” Ouyang said. The words were clearer this time. He was faintly aware that this was not the kind of thing he would ordinarily have said, but the reason why seemed very far away in that moment. The world was spinning even faster, and he pressed his face to the hollow of Xu Da’s shoulder, squeezing his eyes closed. It didn’t help. Somehow, it was even worse in the darkness: the sensation of spinning without any of the visual impulses that accompanied it. He had to fight the urge to laugh. He had never considered that he might die like this. That he would be killed by plague, having survived countless battles, having survived death.
Would he wake again, if he died?
He hoped he wouldn’t. He couldn’t bear to go through it again. The executions. The castration.
And yet.
He didn’t -
He didn’t want this to be all there would be, either.
He hadn’t earned this second chance. He hadn’t wanted it. It still seemed horribly unfair for it to end like this, for his life to have made no mark upon the world. He wanted more. He wanted to drink the horrible swill Xu Da called wine, chatting in low voices as the sun set. He wanted to spar with Zhu, her form improving by inches. He wanted to spend time with his sister, and come up with a name for the child in her belly, and hold them when they were born. He wanted to play with his niece.
He didn’t want to die.
“Thank you,” Xu Da said. Ouyang could feel him speak more than he could hear him, the reverberations of it through his chest, pressed to Ouyang’s ear. “High praise, coming from you.” They were no longer in the yard. They were somewhere shadowed and cool, and then they were ascending through stairs. The journey seemed interminable. Ouyang’s stomach roiled, and bile filled his throat, but he swallowed it. The plague would not kill him soon enough if he vomited on Xu Da.
Eventually, he was lowered onto a pallet. Not the sickroom, where the afflicted men were thrown together like animals to sweat and die. This was his own room, and his own bed. Xu Da left him along for a moment, and then he was back. He set something down next to Ouyang with a small thumping sound, and he had just enough presence of mind to recognize it as a large bowl before he was grabbing it and retching into it. There wasn’t much in his stomach by this point. It was mostly bile, and the sour smell of it made his gorge rise again and again. Xu Da stayed close, making soft shushing sounds and rubbing his back with one hand, holding his hair back with the other.
Ten days had been enough for Ouyang to learn the course of the disease. He was vomiting, which meant that he had a few hours until the fever started, and when it did he would be insensible. “I need to speak to Zhu Chongba.”
“You need to rest,” Xu Da said sternly. He still had one arm around Ouyang, and with the other he was pressing something to his lips. “Drink. Try to keep it down.”
Ouyang drank the water. His stomach roiled unpleasantly, but he didn’t retch again. “I’m dying.”
“You’re not dying,” Xu Da said. “I survived, didn’t I? And Yuchun. And dozens of others. Are you saying you’re weaker than us, Big Brother Ouyang?”
“Are you trying to goad me into not being sick?”
“If it could work on anyone, it would work on you,” Xu Da said. His tone was very fond. He pressed his lips to Ouyang’s forehead, along his hairline, lingering. “You don’t have a fever yet.”
“Which is why I have to speak to Zhu Chongba now.”
“Which is why you should take it easy.”
“You can get her for me or I can wander around the base looking for her. Your choice.”
Xu Da sighed. “You’re insufferable. Has anyone ever told you that?”
“Many people.”
“If you die, I’ll turn into a ghost and haunt you.”
“That’s not how it works,” Ouyang said. Despite himself, he laughed. This was a mistake. It made him nauseous again, and he found himself bent over the bowl, dry heaving and trying desperately to keep down the water he’d drunk. He failed and afterwards he retreated, shivering, to Xu Da’s embrace. Part of him was ashamed of how he was acting; weak and pathetic, like a child or a woman, but it was only a small part. Mostly, he was too glad to have someone there, stroking his hair and murmuring reassuring things to him.
Eventually, he found his eyelids growing heavy, and Xu Da gently laid him down onto the mattress. He grabbed onto his arm. “Get-“
“Yes, yes,” Xu Da said, “I’ll go get Ah-Ba.” He kissed him on the forehead again, briefly, before he went.
Alone, Ouyang drifted. He was only half-aware of it, when Zhu entered the room, when she took his hand. It was her right hand, and it was warm, calloused on the palm from holding a sword, and on the fingertips from holding a brush. “Subcommander,” she said, softly, in the same tone in which she’d once said General, and then, even softer, “Big Brother.”
It seemed wrong, that her hand was only warm. That it was calloused like his own was and that it was made of flesh. It ought to have been searing, and smooth and made of pure, blinding light. “We don’t have much time,” he said.
“For what?”
“If I die,” he began, and had to pause to cough, “if I die, you should know what I know. That might be useful.”
She was silent for a moment, but only for a moment. “You could have told me what you know at any moment.”
He smiled. He laughed a little, as well, which made him cough again. “I needed to give you a reason to keep me around.”
Zhu’s hand tightened on his. He struggled to open his eyes, and met hers. She was looking at him keenly, her expression unreadable. She didn’t say that he hadn’t needed to, even if it might have been a kindness. For all that she was a liar, she had never lied to him. Not when it mattered.
He had been right: they did not have much time. He did not tell her so much, all things considered, but then, it likely wouldn’t matter. The future would be different from the one he remembered, with Esen alive and in control of his army. Without Baoxiang plotting in the shadows.
As he spoke, the room drifted in and out of focus around him, rearranging itself. One moment he was in his bed, in Anfeng, the sun shining outside the window, and then he was in a shadowed throne room, and there was a sword in his chest. There was a sword in his hand, broken. He was cold, so horribly cold, and when hands brushed him he flinched away from them because they were scalding and they felt so good and if he allowed them to touch him he would drain the life from them. He wouldn’t be able to help it.
There was a blade in his chest. One of his own men had put it there.
Esen had put it there.
No. That wasn’t right.
Esen was dead. Ouyang had put the sword in his chest, and now that same sword had been broken upon a throne. He still held it. Even if he was dead.
He was cold. He was so cold.
And he was hungry.
Hands touched him. He tried to flinch away, but he couldn’t. He was too weak.
Something cool was pressed to his forehead, and the edge of a bowl was pressed to his lips. It was food and he was hungry, ravenous, his entire body a gnawing pit of need, but when he tried to eat his stomach rebelled.
The dead didn’t eat.
“You’re not dead,” someone said. A man. He had big hands, comforting, and Ouyang thought that he must have known him, once.
“Esen,” he said, even if it did not seem quite right.
“Sure,” the man said, “let’s go with that.”
“You’re dead,” Ouyang said. Maybe that was why it hadn’t seemed right. But Ouyang was dead, too. It ought have made sense if Esen was there. Only he wasn’t. He hadn’t been. He hadn’t haunted either one of them.
“I’m not.”
“You are,” Ouyang insisted. “I killed you. I couldn’t save you.”
The man who wasn’t Esen laughed. “I think I would remember that. Try to sleep now.”
More time passed. Ouyang couldn’t have said how much. The room kept changing around him: a bedroom, a throne room. There was the same person either way, looking at him, pressing his cheek. A man. A woman. Ouyang couldn’t tell. Neither one seemed to fit. The person was ugly. Bug-faced. Somehow, Ouyang knew, beloved.
“He’s like ice,” a voice said. The man from before, the one that wasn’t Esen. He was touching Ouyang, too, his hand pressed to his forehead.
“At least the fever has broken.”
“We need to warm him up.”
Ouyang laughed. It tore at his throat. “Ghosts are cold,” he said.
He was aware, dimly, of blankets being piled on him as he shivered, and then of being moved, of arms wrapped around him. And then he was aware of nothing else.
***
When he came to, he was first aware of lying on a hard surface, and of being warm. His face was pressed to a man’s bare chest, and there were arms around him, and soft flesh against his naked back. He was still wearing a pair of thin trousers, but nothing else. He shifted a little, trying to catch a glimpse of the people he was lying with, and the arms holding him tightened for a moment, as though on reflex, before releasing him.
“Awake?” Xu Da asked.
“Why are we on the floor?” Ouyang said, because it was easier than any of the other questions that thronged in his mind.
“We didn’t fit on the bed,” Zhu said. Cold air rushed in against his back as she rolled away from him. He turned his head a little to follow her movements, and saw her grab a roll of bandages and start wrapping them around her chest. With a rush of disorientation, he realized that the softness he had felt against his back had been her breasts.
Xu Da didn’t seem in as much of a rush to get dressed. He moved away from Ouyang only a little, and stroked his hand through his hair. “We couldn’t get you warm. You scared us.”
“Why?”
Xu Da snorted. “Because we thought you would die?” he said, in a tone of voice that implied that he thought Ouyang particularly slow.
“But I told-”
“You’re our friend,” Zhu said, circling around them and coming into view. To Ouyang’s relief, she was fully dressed, tightening her belt around her waist.
“Idiot,” Xu Da added, and punctuated the word with a kiss to the top of Ouyang’s head.
“I need to go check on my wife,” Zhu said, “She’s still weak, too. I’ll be back later. Try to get him to eat something, Ah-Da.”
“Do you think you can manage a bath?” Xu Da asked, once she’d gone.
Ouyang shook his head regretfully. His trousers were sticking to his skin with sweat, and now that the worst of the illness was past, he could smell how he reeked. But the room was still gently spinning. He had no doubt that if he tried to stand, he would fall over. And he couldn’t bear the thought of letting Xu Da lower him, naked, into a tub and then fetching him back out. “I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be. We can at least wipe you down with a damp cloth.” And then, with a small quirk of his mouth, he added, “You can handle the more… intimate parts. If it would make you more comfortable. I won’t look.”
Likely, he had already seen all there was to see. Someone had had to clean his filth from him during his illness. But it was still a comfort, to be offered some small measure of dignity.
True to his word, Xu Da didn’t look at Ouyang’s body any more than he strictly had to, and he averted his eyes fully when Ouyang undressed completely. He did feel better, once he was clean, even if he would need a real bath soon. After, Xu Da assisted him to his bed, and fetched him a bowl of thin gruel. It was tasteless, but it was warm, and likely it was all that Ouyang could stomach.
He had no recollection of falling asleep, but he must have, because when he next opened his eyes, it was dark outside, and Zhu was in the room, talking quietly to Xu Da. They both turned towards him when he stirred, and Zhu grinned brightly. She came over to him and made a spirited attempt at climbing into the bed next to him. She failed, because Ouyang’s bed was sized to fit Ouyang, and Ouyang alone. This did not seem to faze her, because she sprawled over his legs instead. “Ah-Da,” she said, “come over here.”
“I thought we didn’t all fit on the bed,” Ouyang said with what he knew was unwarranted optimism. “That was why we were on the floor.”
“We don’t fit side-by-side, certainly,” Xu Da said, coming over. He took advantage of Ouyang’s weakened state to steal his pillow and arrange himself cross-legged in its place, drawing Ouyang’s head into his lap.
The position did not leave Ouyang with much mobility. “If I vomit,” he pointed out, “it will be on one of you.”
“Are you likely to?” Zhu asked, sounding distinctly unconcerned.
“If you do, Big Brother,” Xu Da said, gently carding his fingers through his hair, “I hope you’ll remember which one of us tenderly nursed you back to health and which one cruelly abandoned us for her newly wedded bride.”
Ouyang found himself smiling. “Don’t worry. I have good aim.”
“No respect for your commander,” Zhu said indignantly, turning so her face was pressed to Ouyang’s knees and in the process jabbing what felt like an overabundance of sharp, bony elbows in several uncomfortable places. He resisted the urge to buck her off, which was, in his opinion, more respect than his commander deserved.
“My bed fits three people comfortably,” Xu Da said. He was massaging Ouyang’s temples, very gently.
It was nice.
“I did not need to know that,” Ouyang said. His tongue felt heavy. The words came out a little slurred. His eyelids felt heavy, too, even if he had just woken. He closed his eyes.
“No one needed to know that,” Zhu said, in a tone of performative disgust. And, then, jabbing another elbow into Ouyang’s thigh, “Don’t fall asleep yet, Big Brother. Ah-Da and I have been thinking.”
“I’m terrified already,” Ouyang said, forcing his eyes open.
“We want to swear an oath. With you. Sworn brotherhood, what do you say?”
It took Ouyang an embarrassingly long time to answer. His heart was in his throat. “Alright,” he managed eventually, trying to sound unaffected and failing. And then, so quietly they doubtlessly wouldn’t have heard it if they hadn’t been pressed so close to him, “I would like that.”
“Perfect,” Zhu said brightly. “It’s decided then. We’ll do it as soon as you’re well again.”
She took his hand and squeezed it, and Xu Da caressed his hair. If his eyes were over-bright, neither one of them made mention of it. Instead, they began to talk, almost idly, of the failed coup, of what Chen had planned, of what it all would mean for them. Ouyang could follow maybe half of the conversation, his mind drifting, but he couldn’t bring himself to care.
He was warm, and the warmth lulled him to sleep.