Chapter Text
The first time Yunho meets Changmin, he's nine to Changmin's seven.
"Nine is a good age to be a man," his father the marquess-king of Wei proclaims. His mother the third imperial consort merely bows her head lower, full body prostrate against the stone floor, ceremonial robes spread out in a gorgeous display of midnight blue rayon and slate linen.
She knows he is not speaking to her, even though her body was the vessel that birthed the Crown Prince. Women do not have a place in hefty decisions made for future kings.
The banquet echoes with the approving murmurs of his father's courtiers.
Nine, his father decides, a mere marquess-king himself, is also a good age to be fostered by a richer state, and learn the art of war from their warrior-kings. Chu is a neighbouring state that has enjoyed a largely strife-less relationship with Yunho's beloved Wei, due in part to the relatively painless practice of Wei marrying her aristocratic women to the kings of Chu over the generations.
--
At the age of nine and a half, as summer wanes into autumn, Yunho is sent via palanquin and a large retinue of imperial guards, into Chu. The capital Ying is four days' worth of ride south from Daliang, Wei's own capital where Yunho has spent his childhood. It will take longer on foot.
Yunho clambers down from the palanquin by the first evening, to the horror of the imperial eunuchs and attendants. They're out of sight of Daliang, and his father's personal guard has escorted him as far as they dare before turning back to guard the safety of the marquess-king.
"Give me a horse," Yunho insists, voice still baby-high. "I can ride!" They will all ride. He won't have his men walking sores onto their feet, not when there are perfectly good beasts of burden with empty backs to service them.
They come into Ying at grand fanfare, the eunuchs having coaxed Yunho back into the palanquin for the last ten li. Yunho had resisted, but caved as they remind him that his presence in the palanquin will be part of the display of prosperity Wei is showing.
He is the centrepiece, and it will not do for the crown to be missing its jewels.
His aunt the queen consort of Chu is visibly pleased at his arrival. Yunho has a blurry sense-memory of her, imposing and voluptuous with jade flowers and embroidery in her hair, clad in a riotous burst of colours. The last he saw her, she was pale and gaunt from falling into imperial disfavour, fleeing to the illusion of safety in her brother's lands.
His aunt was very fond of running her hands through his unbound hair while feeding him sweets she made on the sly in Wei’s imperial kitchens.
"Because I don’t have my own little Min. He is far from me," she whispered wistfully into the curve of Yunho's ear, inhaling the sweet-sour scent of an active toddler. He was four.
She comes to visit Yunho's first night in the imperial palaces of Chu, pale no more. Her garments are a fiery waterfall of red silk and bronze embroidery, a bold display unlike the more sedate robes Yunho's mother wears. There are jade birds in her hair, done up with twisting loops that coil back into themselves and upwards to form an imposing halo. Yunho's mother wears the bulk of her hair pinned back in a twist at her nape instead, threaded through with a dull copper-and-gold pin that curves into the delicate beak of a nightingale.
Then again, he is not in Wei anymore.
She's got a pair of large round eyes peeping out from behind her rustling robes. The eyes are attached to a mop of unruly curls and a sulky flat little mouth. The rest of the child is hidden behind his aunt's extravagant train.
Yunho is charmed. He leans forward slightly, still three paces worth of respectable distance from his aunt, so he doesn't step on her hem. "Is that my Imperial Aunt's gracious new daughter? What a beautiful girl you have, my aunt."
That pulls a peal of laughter from Yunho's aunt, be-ringed hands coming up instinctively cover the lower half of her face with a fiery wide sleeve.
Around her, the eunuchs bow lower and murmur.
The moppet's already wide eyes widen, and she comes around, stepping messily onto her mother's robes without a care. In contrast to her mother’s resplendent crimson robes, she is dressed prettily in darker purple brocade with silver-and-gold embroidery. "You take that back," she pipes, voice high and indignant. "I'll have you know I'm a boy!"
Oh. Yunho blinks, and his aunt laughs again. His cousin is still glaring at him, her- his eyes narrowing into sharp slits from their earlier round-eyed shock.
"My deepest apologies," Yunho fumbles, embarrassed. He can feel his face heating up. He knows who this is, then. His aunt only has one son. The very son that turned her from banished concubine to reinstated queen when Yunho was six, and also took her from Yunho.
His aunt takes pity on him. "This is my Min," she invites, calming hands placed on the moppet's little shoulders, when the boy would have stomped off. "Changmin, that I told you about. My little prosperous alabaster jade."
Changmin sniffs, and opens his mouth but his mother smooths a hand over his head, and bends to him. His head barely comes up to her waist. He’s small for his age. Her robes swish, susurrous.
Her voice is soft, but Yunho hears her perfectly well, for all the words are for Changmin alone. "This is Yunho. This is the Yunho that took care of me when you couldn't."
Changmin quietens at that, eyes wide and round again. They find Yunho, unblinking.
Yunho bows, inclining his head with his back straight. One future king to another.
Changmin looks at his mother again, then walks over. He steps on Yunho’s travel-stained boots, the cloth of his palace slippers finding purchase on the sturdy leather. Even so, he has to tilt his head back to meet Yunho’s gaze. Pudgy little hands touch Yunho’s, making him start.
The last time someone touched him without dressing him was when his mother had given him a loose embrace in farewell, four days ago. Her robes had brushed against him, and he could barely feel the pressure of her arms through the bronze and leather of his travelling armour.
Reflexively, he flips his his own hands to hold the younger boy’s. He’s told very seriously, “I like you, then. You are on my mother the Queen’s side. So I am on your side.”
“Thank you for your support,” Yunho says gravely. Whilst his aunt smiles, and the eunuchs coo and flutter, Changmin blinks at him slowly, and tightens his hold on Yunho’s hands.
--
Changmin knows he’s blessed. He holds that knowledge with the murky understanding a child has when he takes what is, as a fact of life, and absolutely for granted.
Even sheltered as he is, with only his mother and the imperial attendants and eunuchs, palace maids for consistent company, he knows he’s different from the other boys. He knows he’s better. He knows he’s more.
It’s apparent when the eunuchs keep bringing in different boys, all young, all his age, to play with him. If they’re taller than him, if they play better than him, if they even dare to look overly long at him, or even raise their voices at him, they go away and he never sees them again. It’s clear as day during the rare occasions he meets the other children of the palace, progeny of the imperial consorts, or even the high-ranking officials. Even the sons of the favoured concubines do not look Changmin in the eye, and they bow from the waist and address him by his title of Crown Prince rather than his personal name.
Only his mother uses his personal name. It becomes almost like their bespoke little secret.
There is a period of time, far back enough in his childhood, when he didn’t have his mother.
He thinks he vaguely remembers impressions of other feminine hands, and a succession of stays at the different personal palaces of his father the king’s many imperial consorts. Or perhaps he only knows these memories because the eunuchs had whispered them to him.
But none stay for long, and Changmin remembers long, lonely nights crying again and again for his mother, for her cool fingers on his back and her jade birds in his hands. His father finally had enough, when Changmin had burst into tears in the middle of reciting his lessons, and the imperial consort who had him then pasted a fixed smile on her face.
“You’re very intelligent,” his father the king pronounces. Changmin’s managed to recite an entire essay by Mencius, from one of the Four Books, voice steady despite the tears tracking silently down his face. “And I hear you fight well for your age. But you cry too much. What will it take for you to not cry?”
“I want my mother,” Changmin says immediately. The king halts in the middle of sampling a small cup of wine, cup already brought to his lips. Next to him, the imperial consort pales, falling quickly onto her knees. The attendants follow suit.
There is a hefty pause. His father speaks, and there is a peculiar emphasis to his words Changmin doesn’t understand. “You cannot have your mother. She is not here.”
Changmin frowns. No one has ever denied him anything before. “Is my mother alive.”
Another pause from his father, then just a word. “Yes”.
Next to him, the imperial consort trembles, lowering her forehead to the lacquered wooden tiles that make up her palace floor.
“Then I will have my mother,” Changmin proclaims. He doesn’t look away from his father, mesmerised by the way his father’s red-and-gold robe reflects a warm curve against his father’s features. His father holds his gaze. “What will you give me, for your mother?”
“Everything,” Changmin promises, with all the straightforward arrogance of an audacious child. “I am your son and I will make Chu rise for you.”
His father lets a slow smile bloom across his face. The toddler, a mere four years of age, stands with a straight back before him, face round with childish fat and stern with mimicked gravitas. When the king speaks again, his voice reeks of satisfaction. “You will be held to that, my son.”
--
Yunho’s arrival is thus like a breath of fresh air. Changmin’s father the king is inordinately pleased, for all that Yunho is a foreign prince, and the smiles on his mother’s face are so large that Changmin’s only seen her smile larger once before; when he was four and she was returned to him.
Yes, Yunho is a breath of fresh air, and Changmin finds himself liking him. Worshipping him, even, for all that he had felt insulted at first his cousin had thought him a girl.
But Yunho doesn’t seem to mind.
He brings Changmin along wherever he goes if Changmin wants it to be so, patiently tailoring his strides for Changmin’s shorter pace. He’s not afraid to look at Changmin in the eye - “equal,” his mother had pronounced outside of his father the king’s hearing, “both kings.” When Changmin complains, angered by how he’s smaller and weaker than the other boys the captain of the guard offers sparring lessons to, instead of dropping to his knees in fear, Yunho merely laughs and hums, “if you’re not serious about excelling, please cease your endeavours now.”
Yes, Yunho is different.
The other children in the palace like him, drawn to his laughter and undeterred by Changmin’s scowling presence. Changmin’s father the king shakes his head in undisguised admiration as Yunho performs a set of forms with a sword whilst reciting a fifty-lined Court Hymn from the Book of Odes, and calls him “dear nephew”. The sparring masters praise him for being the fastest learner they’ve ever seen, with impeccable fighting form and an unyielding sense of honour.
Changmin should be jealous of him, but he’s not.
It more than helps that he’s very clearly Yunho’s favourite person, much to his mother the queen’s delight.
--
His hands are not wide enough for the sè yet, so Changmin’s mother had gifted him with the slightly smaller gǔzhēng the year past. The zither was Changmin’s most constant companion, but that too gradually morphs into Yunho in the ensuing years.
Yunho tries his hand at the zithers too, but even though his developing finger-span is sufficient for the sè and gǔzhēng, his natural talent is less than so.
He settles for helping Changmin press and pluck at certain lower notes, out of Changmin’s range when playing fast melodies, and helping Changmin carry the instruments until Changmin grows up enough to lug them on his own for a few heartbeats before the inevitable cloud of eunuchs and attendants descend upon them to perform such menial chores.
Changmin plays for Yunho melodies taught to him by the head court musicians, sweeping running pieces that are either war-like or mournful, depending on his mood. Sometimes, Yunho unsheathes his iron sword, a gift from his father the marquess-king and with his personal name etched on the bronze-and-cloth handle, and practices his sparring forms to the musical movements Changmin spins on the zither.
When Changmin’s mother is able to step away from her own imperial duties, she accompanies them on her personal sè, fingers dancing on the fifty strings in a strange mirror of Changmin’s hands upon the slighter gǔzhēng. The expressions of concentration on their faces are identical.
--
Yunho comes to Chu dressed in blacks and greys and slates, the Wei people having more of an affinity for black silk and linen adorned with smooth thread, and a more straightforward style of dressing. His shenyi, whilst extremely fine and reflective of the intricate craft the Wei imperial seamstresses are capable of, pale in comparison next to the complicated finery the Chu tend to robe Changmin in.
He’s eleven and having slain his first full-grown stag with a longbow his uncle the king had gifted, made from the finest bamboo. A feast is thrown in his and Changmin’s honour, because Changmin had taken one look at his own legs, still shorter than many of the boys in the palace, and how he’s still astride a pony, before aiming his smaller horn bow at the sky. He takes out two eagles that way.
Yunho’s so fiercely proud of him, head bent towards Changmin’s and congratulating on his aim, that he almost misses his uncle the king’s gift. He looks up when Changmin turns towards his father, ears pricked because Yunho’s name is mentioned.
“A gift for my dear nephew,” the King of Chu is proclaiming, “bring it in.”
It’s a gorgeous set of ceremonial robes, a dark rich maroon silk made splendid with a slight pearlescent sheen, and hand-stitched with embossed crestings featuring the mythical creatures of old. The panelings are complicated and numerous, and Yunho espies a slight frown on his aunt’s face, quickly repressed into a neutral smile. The robes are fit for a king and very much done in Chu’s fashions, with the only deference to Yunho’s position as the Crown Prince of Wei evident in the black silk under-layers and the wide linen sash.
“May my son aspire to excel beyond such an exemplary benchmark in the near future.” The King continues, and next to Yunho, Changmin stiffens.
--
Perhaps out of spite at the slight, Changmin grows, and keeps growing. They’re fourteen and twelve respectively, almost-men, and Changmin finally towers a very visible inch over Yunho, when they are both bootless and sock-less. Together they are yet again a full head taller than most of the palace attendants and nobles, save for the very elite of the king's personal guard.
Yunho’s just thankful that Changmin has struggled and then made a very visible decision to ignore whatever mind games his father the King of Chu has apparently decided to play with the two of them. He’s still a faithful shadow dogging at Yunho’s footsteps, or perhaps Yunho is the loyal guard who clears the way.
In either case, they grow, and learn to ignore Changmin’s father, who is fond of bolstering his unremarkable acts of governance with sporadic bouts of petty creativity in the imperial palace.
It has been five years since the start of Yunho’s fostering by the Chu. He’s made annual journeys back to Daliang, when the spring flowers bloom, to visit his own people. His father the marquess-king is pleased with his efforts, and how quickly Yunho is maturing. Already there are talks of potential political marriage alliances, and of Yunho’s inevitable return to Wei.
Yunho tells Changmin this, after one such trip, and watches Changmin’s eyes darken and his mouth flatten into a thin surly line. “You can’t,” the younger prince says, voice cracking with the turn of age. “You’re needed here.”
“Am I, Highness,” Yunho says, jesting. He aims his longbow without thought and fires, the arrow flying carelessly to land slightly crooked off bullseye. Changmin offers a grunt in congratulations, and instead of aiming at his own target, comes over.
He stands but a pace from Yunho, very close. Today they’re dressed roughly in deference of exercise and exertion, and Changmin’s hair is not neatly bound as usual, but loosely caught up. The summer heat is creeping upon them, so tendrils of his hair are caught and stuck at his temples, his nape, a wet indication of the heat.
The curve of his face is sweet and familiar. Yunho looks at him and marvels inwardly again that he had mistook Changmin for a girl years ago. With those large round eyes, a high forehead, arching brows and thick lashes, Changmin’s grown to be even more beautiful than some of his half-siblings, princesses born from Chu’s many imperial consorts.
That same forehead furrows in concentration now, and Changmin aims, lets go. The arrow flies, steady in the still air, and lands exactly in the middle of Yunho’s try, splitting the earlier arrow shaft into two precise halves with a thunk.
“I need you here,” Changmin says, nonchalant, and moves back to his own target.
--
Yunho’s summoned back to Daliang abruptly when he is sixteen. It is autumn and his mother is passing.
It’s only when he’s back at his own capital that Yunho learns that she is an afterthought. His father has plotted a marriage alliance for him. The Zhao are willing to offer him their royal princess, first-born of the king and queen of Zhao, to have and to hold till death separates them.
His mother dies, stricken by pneumonia, and his father the marquess-king acknowledges her death by offering the Zhao princess’ birth characters to Yunho.
There’s something uncomfortable and cold at Yunho’s belly as he stares at the eight seal script characters laid in front of him. Before them, two of the marquess-king of Wei’s closest advisors flutter, offering positive anecdotes about the Zhao princess’ beauty, and of the natural resources the Zhao state has to offer.
“No,” Yunho decides, when his father also decides to join the cajoling. He looks up, ignoring the advisors and smiles at his father. The act itself is enough to stop the marquess-king’s complaint in his throat.
“First of all. Zhao’s position isn’t very favourable to us, relative to the Central Plains,” Yunho states, still smiling and still pleasant. “More importantly. I will not marry except for love.”
There’s utter and absolute silence, then a wail from one of the advisors. The other drops to his knees, mouth running on with tactfully-worded and obsequious objections.
The marquess-king of Wei’s face is slowly turning purple from rage. “What nonsense,” he spits. “Love! Kings do not marry for love.”
“Allow me to explain, Your Majesty,” Yunho offers, voice like placid sunshine. “I understand that the Kings of Wei will have to take consorts and concubines as a response to war, to diplomacy, and to state politics. Should my father His Majestic Excellency gift me with such an honour, I too as King will further this tradition.”
“However,” he shifts, unsmiling now. The two advisors are kneeling very still on the stone floor. “I will only marry, or take on an official wife only out of love. That is my stipulation.”
There’s rage in his father’s eyes, but there is nothing he can do. He’s poured in too much effort into Yunho, and the marquess-king of Wei is not in a similar happy situation as the King of Chu. Yunho does not have any brothers.
Long after the advisors bow and scurry out from the meeting chamber, back-first, the marquess-king says softly, venomously, “there is no room for love in our world. It will do you well to remember that.”
The potential alliance with Zhao is called off, because the Zhao are likely to declare war if Wei goes to them with the proposal of taking their first-born princess to be a mere imperial consort of Wei. Yunho makes it up to his father by going onto his first ever campaign, that autumn he spends at Daliang. The first turns into the second turns into the fifth, the sixth.
He goes out with his father’s men, battle-hardened generals, and fights with them at Wei’s borders, pushing hard against the Han to annex several of their cities. It earns him the respect of the soldiers, and also a nasty scar curving the top of his cheek and narrowly missing his eye, where a Han officer nearly took his eye out with a lucky slash with a spearhead.
Yunho disembowels him two seconds after, and the scar heals without much infection, so he considers himself lucky.
What free time he has at the imperial palace, he spends with his little sisters, daughters of his father’s imperial consorts. They find him strange and unfamiliar, Yunho having lived at Chu for too long for them to remember him. It doesn’t stop them from recognising they have his eyes, shared living remnants of their imperial father, and they come up to him, begging for stories about the lands of Chu and his campaigns out with the Wei military.
Autumn tumbles into winter, and the weather grows too chilly for proper battles.
Telling his sisters of the Chu makes Yunho miss Changmin. Both great things and little things make him miss Changmin, a phantom limb by his side. More often than not, Yunho finds himself turning to his side, a ready quip upon his lips, only to be confronted by silence and space.
The weather turns bitterly cold, and whether in sincerity or otherwise, his father forbids him to travel in such tricky weather. Yunho’s forced to remain till the ice in the rivers melt.
Paper is a precious commodity, fragile and tedious and time-consuming in production, but Yunho fills sheaves and sheaves with long letters to Changmin. He wears the rabbit hair on his brush down to a wisp, and the eunuchs exclaim in horror when he finally allows them to mend and re-hair his brush. Folding the stack, he tucks it away amongst his layer of underthings, already packed for travel to Chu.
For official correspondence, he dictates a bamboo scroll addressed to his uncle the King of Chu, with greetings to his aunt and Changmin, and declares his intention to reach Chu before the plum blossoms flower. His father’s brow creases when he hears of Yunho’s decision, but he doesn’t contest it.
Yunho turns seventeen, and the Yellow River celebrates with the first slow trickles of water gushing through rapidly melting ice. He promptly sets off for Ying the next day.
--
Changmin’s passed his fifteenth birthday in deep winter before Yunho returns to Chu.
He sees the scar on Yunho’s cheek, and his lips flatten into a thin line, but he doesn’t ask, at least not in front of his parents and the full court of Chu.
It’s later, when they’re alone in Yunho’s palace during deep dusk, sharing a carafe of yellow wine to ward off the chill, when Changmin abruptly questions, “why is there a scar on your cheek.”
“I fought,” Yunho says honestly, a hand half-coming up in remembrance. The wound has healed as best as it can; it is barely visible under candle light, and the skin is only very slightly raised.
“A brawl, Highness?” Changmin manages to suffuse the short exclamation with an ocean of disdain.
“No,” Yunho says, laughing. “I went on military campaigns.”
Changmin sits up straight, when he had previously been slouching in enjoyment of the wine, which tastes like plum blossoms and peach. He’s dressed in blood-red crimson today, a blend of textiles culminating in a lovely silk over-weave featuring a pair of silver phoenixes running from his chest along the length of his body, gold-accented plumage curving around his back and down to the hem of his outer robe, beyond his toes.
His hair is in a smooth topknot, bound in a lighter length of coloured red silk and captured in his prince’s crown, jade and gold gleaming dully in the low light. It’s only been six months since they last saw each other, but Changmin’s filled out some in a manner befitting his imposing height.
Next to him, Yunho feels like a grubby beggar. Changmin had, of course, paid no attention to the mud staining the linen and leather Yunho came back in, and they had clasped one-armed at the other’s arm earlier, before backing away to bow low at each other, a private greeting.
Yunho has since taken a bath, and his personal eunuchs have dressed him in silken blacks and a deep jade-green linen his father had gifted him in response to Yunho's victory in sacking one of the Han outposts along the Wei border. His hair is in a simple upknot, bound by fine blue cotton, but at least he's clean. Changmin has clearly taken the trouble to dress himself up for Yunho's return, and Yunho wants to acknowledge the gesture with reciprocity.
“You got that in battle?” Changmin demands, lanky limbs rigid. His sleeves have fallen back, his arms akimbo and up. His right hand is clenched white-knuckled around the cup. “You could have lost an eye!”
His eyes are very wide, and they track over Yunho’s face now. Yunho lets him look, because there’s fear and terror trickling into Changmin’s face like the slow-melting swells of the Yellow River. Suddenly Changmin reaches out, and he’s got too tight fingers grasping at Yunho’s chin, forcibly turning his cheek to the flame of the candle for a clearer look.
Yunho follows the movement. Changmin’s fingers are very hard against his jaw, but Yunho allows it. They don’t speak, the silence only punctuated by Changmin’s harsh breathing.
“Who did this?” Changmin questions, the fear in his voice morphing lightning fast to rage. “Which state was this?”
“I killed the bastard that did this to me,” Yunho waves the question away, but Changmin keeps at him, his badgering hard and forbidding, until Yunho confesses it was the Hans.
“If you want to question it thus, my people actually went after them first,” Yunho ponders, but Changmin clearly isn’t listening. His eyes are very dark in the dim light and they are fixed unerringly on Yunho’s cheek.
--
Changmin starts training in earnest at the military arts after Yunho’s revelation, and dogs his father until the King of Chu arranges for him to join in one of Chu’s numerous expansionist campaigns at their borders.
The only difference is that he drags Yunho along, and one campaign grows, turns into more, until more often than not they are found in the fore-guard of Chu’s major battles.
Looking back, Yunho thinks it is safe to acknowledge that the next three years make up the happiest period of his life.
Word of Changmin’s beauty reaches the different enemy states they end up facing, and because they either attack directly at Changmin’s face, or the men throw jeering commentary that drives Changmin into a berserker rage the first few times he encounters it, Changmin ends up fashioning a mask, a fearsome leather and iron thing, that he wears upon his face during campaigns.
Yunho leaves his face uncovered. He wants their enemies to know his face, and his name, and his feats. After his father, Yunho’s determined, there will be no more marquess-kings of Wei. There will only be the King of Wei.
--
Changmin feels nothing but cold gratification as he gazes across the battlefield through the eye-slits of his mask. There’s the distant shrieking of tortured horses, and the weak wails of dying men.
Another day, another successful campaign.
He turns to his side. Yunho’s still got his eyes on the horizon, intent on scouring the distance to ensure there is no impending ambush. He’s taken off his scabbard, and his gauntlets, just so that he can push the sweat-soaked hair that’s fallen out of his topknot out of his eyes. His crimson cape flutters in the strong wind, hem stained and muddy.
There’s a splatter of dried blood high up on his unscarred cheek, but his face is untouched and the blood probably belongs to one of his messier kills. Other than that, his face is remarkably clean for someone fighting with it uncovered, and the way his dark eyes are narrowed in concentration just emphasises how much like a fox he looks.
Changmin's mother had received a white snow fox as a gift from the higher lands about a year ago, when Yunho was away getting mutilated by the Hans. The expression on the vixen while she is hunting is wholly identical to the one Yunho sports now.
It's so much deliberate focus, in the tilt of his head, in the turn of his cheek. Changmin feels himself losing seconds staring, but he’s still hidden behind his mask anyway and it doesn’t matter. Yunho lets him look. Yunho lets him do a lot of things.
He feels a sudden spurt of love then, fierce and unbidden and utterly unpleasant in its desperation.
Changmin rips his mask off in an attempt to distract himself, but Yunho reaches over without a word to take it, using the edge of his under-sleeve to polish away where the blood of an enemy soldier had stained the leather cupping Changmin’s jaw.
Looking at him like this, head bent and intent on a task Changmin barely deigns to delegate to his military pages, Changmin thinks to himself, I am in love with this man.
Changmin doesn’t want to be in love. Changmin doesn’t like to be in love.
It’s a ball of cold fire in his chest, a flame that burns and burns and doesn’t go out. It eats at him daily, and feeds him visions and nightmares of a hurt Yunho, an injured Yunho, a dead Yunho.
He already knows he can kill for Yunho. He also knows if given the chance, he will burn down the world for Yunho.
Changmin takes another look around the battlefield. Dead bodies as far as the eye can see. Ten paces away, the Qin flag burns.
In a way, he already is.
--
They push on.
To avoid suspicious murmurings from Yunho’s people, that Yunho is more Chu than Wei now, they leave the Chu military for several months at length, joining up with the Wei military across the border and pushing north-ward with them, in smaller skirmishes with the Hans where Changmin feels nothing but satisfaction as he cuts them down; in an actual campaign against the Zhao military.
Yunho hasn’t been very clear about it with Changmin, when usually he tells Changmin everything and then some, but apparently there is some bad blood with Zhao.
Changmin learns about it more from the Wei generals, as he slowly gains their trust. It has been slow in coming, because as one of the more battle-scarred old guard puts it, “that boy has the devil in him, with those eyes during battle, and that face! Hard to trust them when they’re that beautiful.”
After the seventh time he cleaves a man into two for daring to sneak up to Yunho, without even blinking at the mess he makes, their attitudes soften, and they even deign to use Changmin’s title while speaking at him.
“I’m only saying this because I know you’ve got the Crown Prince’s back, Highness,” one of them now demurs, face whiskered and grimy, “but keep an eye on him for tomorrow.”
“Tomorrow” entails another march against the Zhao. They are dangerously close to Handan, the Zhao’s capital, and the very lack of distance is making the Zhao soldiers they encounter fight like they have nothing to lose.
“Explain yourself,” Changmin says to the general.
“Begging your pardon, Your Excellency,” the Wei general says, pursing his lips in thought, “I shouldn’t be saying this. But our Crown Prince, he’s too honourable.”
“That’s good in a normal battle,” he hastens to say, because of the way Changmin’s started to frown. “We have our own code of honour and whatnot. But with Zhao, it’s different. It’s personal for them.”
Only then Changmin learns of Yunho’s political rejection of the Zhao princess, and his astonishing declaration regarding marriage.
He tamps down any emotion he might be feeling. While same-sex relationships isn’t an uncommon thing for the Kings of Chu since centuries past, neither are they seen as an adequate substitute for the Confucian ideal of a traditional marriage.
Yunho’s choice is very him, and probably involves some convoluted high-brow moral concept and principles that Changmin knows will just bore him if Yunho tries to explain it to him.
On his good days, Yunho is barely enough serving as Changmin’s moral compass, even after a decade of growing together. On his bad days, Yunho just points Changmin at the most deserving scum and then does his best to try and contain the damage in the aftermath.
--
They fight and they fight and they fight, until twin summons arrive for them, to opposing directions.
Changmin is eighteen and Yunho is twenty, and they’re an unstoppable whirlwind with dual faces in those heady months of fight and win and fight and win.
But reality intrudes. Yunho’s father has fallen ill. Wei needs an active regent, and the regent cannot rule unless he is sitting securely up north in Daliang. Yunho is reading the plea from the prime minister of Wei, intent. His other hand is clenched around Changmin's leather mask, because they've just finished another sacking.
Changmin’s mother is the one that writes to him, her script neat on the bamboo scroll. Down south they are well and his father misses him, but he’s been with the Wei military for too many months now, and the fourth imperial consort’s son, who is closest in age and looks to him, is stealthily currying favour with both his father the King of Chu, and the top officials.
They look up from their individual scrolls to gaze at each other. Changmin wants to say something, like don’t go or take me with you or even I’ll kill for you let’s run I can’t be away from you.
In the end, he says nothing. The words huddle in him, sticky and tar-like and too terrified for the weak light of the day.
Yunho smiles and clasps Changmin loosely at the elbow. From the fingers in his other hand dangles the scroll, and Changmin's mask. “Be safe. I will see you soon.”
--
The day Yunho leaves is wintry yet bright.
He’s on top of his war destrier, dressed in the cleanest of his armour-and-leather gear, iron padding laced with rivets and polished to the best of his ability, which isn’t much. His iron swords are strapped to his back.
Out of deference for the capital, he's allowed the military attendants to garb him in another layer of stiff leather pieces, a clean black cape and an iron helmet that he barely uses.
The bulk of his army will follow him, and he’s set aside eighty men, the ones most loyal to him and Changmin, to escort Changmin back down south to Ying. Thereafter they will journey back to Wei, to Daliang, to him.
He looks across at Changmin, atop a similar destrier. The deep brown of the warhorse’s coat is the same shade of Changmin’s eyes, shot through with dark gold.
Changmin lifts an eyebrow at him.
“Be safe,” Yunho repeats again his words when the scrolls came for them. “It’s time to exchange dirty armour for silks again.”
“However will I live,” Changmin murmurs, and there’s a split second of something desolate and terrible in his face, but it flashes too quickly and Yunho must be mistaken. Then he smirks at Yunho, an arrogant crooked curve of his lips. “It’s just wine and proper clothing and bed and meat, how horrible that will be.”
Yunho laughs out loud. Then he sobers, inclining his head. Beneath him, his war horse snorts and stamps his front hoof, eager to be off.
“Your Highness.”
“Your Highness.” Changmin returns.
They hold each other's gazes once more, and Changmin whirls around, urging his destrier on and giving it free rein. His hair is mostly unbound today, only gathered up once at the crown of his head, a strike against propriety. It streams behind him, like black ribbons of liquid silk trailing even as their owner carries on, hunched over the back of his war steed.
He does not look back.
--
They don’t see each other for two full winters.
--
Changmin’s father dies months after he turns twenty, the eighteenth year of his father’s reign. Given the recent generations of ancestors, it is a respectable span of time, though marked by no great feats worthy of song. Much like Changmin’s father himself.
Yunho sends his official state condolences as the Crown Prince of Wei, in the form of eight-and-twenty of of the best war destriers bred on both sides of the Yellow River, a battalion’s worth of polished iron swords and beautiful sculptures wrought from bronze and copper. There is also an intricate chest made of mother-of-pearl and bamboo, delicately crafted and filled with jade pieces from the deepest emerald to a pale greenish off-white, just for Changmin’s mother, now queen dowager. Changmin expects this.
He also sends his own condolences, in the form of actually appearing in Ying on the second seventh day Changmin’s father has been interred in a cold tomb off a distant hillside, flanked for eternity with the bodies of his personal guards. Changmin does not expect this.
“Majesty,” Yunho will have bowed, had Changmin not hasten to grasp him by the arm.
Changmin’s personal eunuchs sink to their knees with murmured greetings.
Yunho’s dressed in unrelieved black out of respect, although his travelling garments are clearly made of silk and brocade. In contrast, Changmin is in rough hemp, a slightly more sophisticated version of traditional mourning robes out of deference to his own elevated station, although his advisors have already started murmuring gentle suggestions that perhaps His Majesty will find himself more suited to colours and silks.
Changmin takes a look at the wan downturn of his mother’s face, diminished, and gives his first imperial decree for Chu. He hasn’t even picked the regnal name for his era yet, so he issues it and signs off with his personal name. State mourning henceforth will entail all citizens of Chu, from the lowest beggar up to the new king, to don either hemp or unadorned black for the full seven seven-day periods of mourning. No exceptions.
He pulls at Yunho’s sleeve now, and the first words out from his mouth after two years apart is, “did all the fighting knock your brains loose? Kings bow to no one.”
He realises his own words a second later and pulls away.
There’s a gentle curve to Yunho’s lips, and his voice is light. He folds his arms behind him instead, standing with feet braced apart. “I’m not king yet.”
“Your father sent word by oral messenger the other day that he plans to abdicate given health reasons,” Changmin retorts, but there’s no heat behind it. He’s busy looking at Yunho.
Yunho’s looking back. The smile has faded into a soft frown. “You’ve grown thin,” Yunho says. He doesn’t step closer.
Changmin lets his own eyes trail across Yunho’s face, and down over his neck, and shoulders. They had parted as boys on the cusp of manhood, and now reunite as men.
Yunho’s shoulders are broad, much broader than how Changmin remembers them. His face is still largely the same, but his jaw has widened slightly with maturity, and his neck is muscled and strong and thick. The scar on his cheek is still there. His hair is bound up, and encased in a black-and-silver prince’s crown. He wears his father’s crest in a copper and blue lánggān coral pendant, secured at his waist with a braided leather cord.
He is the same, yet different.
“You’ve grown strong,” is his reply. It is barely noon yet. Yunho must have set off this morning before the first lights streak the dawning sky, if he is standing before Changmin like this, well-dressed and alert and poised so early in the day.
Yunho waves the compliment away, frown deepening. “Have you been eating, Min? You are not looking well.”
Physical fatigue and verbal sparring with his half-brothers and worry for his mother the dowager queen as well as the constant chafing of playing at being civilised has lend a waspish edge to Changmin’s tongue. “It is very bad manners to insult your host when you are deep within his territory without an invitation.”
True to form, Yunho doesn’t take the bait. Instead, he takes a slight step closer. They are but a pace apart. If Changmin shifts, the hem of his hemp overcoat will touch the edge of Yunho’s black silks.
Changmin shifts.
Yunho shakes his head. His voice is soft, and chiding. “His Majesty’s body is no longer his own. The king has to stay healthy and strong for the people of Chu.”
Changmin doesn’t give a fuck about the people of Chu. Yunho may have guessed at that, because his voice sharpens. “His Majesty has to be a firm and unyielding shelter for his mother my Aunt.”
Yes. His mother. Changmin takes a deep breath.
Yunho must see something in his face, because he turns, addressing his next comment to the eunuchs instead. “Majesty is fatigued with grief. He will see no visitors today, save for the queen dowager if she approaches. Send word to the imperial kitchens. They are to prepare a feast for His Majesty, with dishes encompassing each of the different tastes. What sort of treason is this, to starve Majesty at his hour of need?”
The words aren’t imbued with true anger, but still Changmin’s personal eunuchs quake, and fall over themselves ferrying Yunho’s orders.
Changmin doesn’t say anything, but he allows Yunho to herd him to his personal study.
He hasn’t had an appetite in precisely fourteen days.
When the cuisine from the imperial kitchens turn up, numbering a hundred-and-eighty-eight dishes in total, he samples at them, uncharacteristically patient as the palace tasters test each dish carefully. They’ve outdone themselves. There are soups and sweet breads and roasted fowl and chilled broth and fish and smoked hocks and fruits.
The entire staff of the imperial kitchens also turn up, en masse on their knees outside his personal palace, all two hundred and seventy-six of them.
Yunho watches him, accepting only five of the dishes himself and a carafe of imported rice wine, distilled into liquid clarity. He doesn’t allow Changmin to partake.
“Alcohol is dangerous for exhausted men,” is his response, and Changmin doesn’t contest it. Instead, Yunho has the palace maids make hot tea, plucked from the most tender inner leaves of the tea flowers cultivated in the imperial tea orchard of Wei, and makes Changmin drink that, in addition to filling his belly.
When the palace gong sounds in the distance, indicating the hour of sāngēng, Yunho continues to pour himself a cup of rice wine. He tilts his head at Changmin however, and then drinks a little.
Changmin sighs, and bows his head. “I believe I will retire.”
“I will see His Majesty tomorrow morning,” Yunho says. The passage to Changmin’s personal sleeping quarters is through his study, where they are now. Changmin nods, and leaves.
Yunho stays the night, slowly finishing his wine, keeping watch.
--
Yunho stays a full fifty days, to the joy of Changmin’s mother the dowager queen. She has missed Yunho.
He forces Changmin into his imperial robes the day after the full forty-nine days of mourning ends, thirty-five days after Yunho first re-appears in Ying.
Changmin had turned first to the hemp wrappings out of habit, but his senior personal eunuch squeaks and hurries forward to bundle them away, before Changmin can change his mind and extend state mourning. He casts a careless glance over the bolts of fabric laid out with utmost care by the attendants, and jerks his head at a set of deep carmine linen robes.
Yunho coughs, and observes, “scarlet and gold is a prosperous colour, for a conscientious ruler.”
He’s still dressed in lengths of black silk, but today they are coupled with navy superfine cotton over top, tailored with silver thread. The skirts of his robes depict the Yellow River in springtime, with wild peach blossoms branching out in an imaginary breeze across four panels in gorgeous exact detail. His hair is bound today in black onyx and red jade. In contrast, Changmin is still clad only in his sleeping robes, two thin layers of the softest cotton.
Changmin gazes at the set Yunho indicates. If placed next to the heap of hemp Changmin had lived in for the past month and a half, the differences are day and night.
He looks at Yunho.
Yunho looks back at him, serene.
Changmin is still, eye of the storm that is activity, as his eunuchs bustle around him, busy and chattering. He lets them dress him in long cascading bolts of violent scarlet, the red silk a fiery backdrop to a scene out of mythological folklore, edged with gold under-skirts. There’s a dragon creeping in entirely golden embroidery coiling over his chest, and down to extend around his thigh. It’s locked in furious combat with a silver male phoenix, frozen snarls entombed in silk by way of the imperial seamstresses. They have rubies and jadeite for eyes, and their tails and scales curve around his body to his back, where the glittering phoenix feathers descend down to below the backs of his knees.
His prince’s crown needs to be swapped out for something befitting a king, but Changmin is as much his mother’s son than his father’s heir, if not more so.
He has them bind his hair in beaten gold and bronze, then secures the length with pure white alabaster jade, the mouth of it carved with the profile of a fierce mountain tiger. His imperial pendants and jade seal hang at his hip. His signet ring is carved with a jade eagle. His wide over-long sleeves whisper a fall over his wrists.
Yunho smiles at him. “His Majesty is ready for his people.”
--
The court wants Changmin to take a consort. The governor of Shouchun suggests tactfully perhaps looking towards Wei will be a good choice, given how the blood of the Wei people runs in Changmin’s veins, and the dowager queen will be pleased.
Something in Changmin rebels at the thought of marrying one of Yunho’s little sisters, sweet girls with Yunho’s eyes. He ignores his courtiers, content to let them quarrel amongst each other. Instead, he reaches out boldly to the King of Qin, and is offered the hand of the reigning king’s second-born daughter in return.
It’s a barely veiled insult, insinuating that Chu is not worthy of the first-born princess of Qin, but Changmin doesn’t mind. It gives the courtiers and officials something new to squabble about.
His new wife is a good sort, mild.
After an impossibly awkward and endlessly ceremonial wedding night together, they leave each other largely alone out of unsaid mutual accord. Either Changmin sees her once a month for their marital duties, or whenever his visits to his mother’s palace actually overlap with hers, which is not too often.
They muddle along well enough together, but the second year of Changmin’s reign, a fever sweeps through the imperial palace of Chu and the queen is one of the members carried away in the quiet of the night.
Yunho sends an official state condolence in the form of a bamboo scroll and a private balm to Changmin’s bemused pain in the form of a paper letter, but the agricultural reforms he’s pushing in Wei do not allow him to walk away this time.
Be safe, Yunho writes.
--
Something in Changmin’s mother breaks after that, for all that her physical health escapes unscathed.
There are no more jade birds in her hair. Her sè sits silent. Her people-by-marriage bear an ardent love for the colour red and finery and music and wild animal motifs which she shared in for years and years, but now she begins to dress again in blues and blacks, quieter designs more reminiscent of the aristocratic women from her brother’s lands.
From Yunho’s lands, now.
The prior marquess-king of Wei had abdicated peacefully. There is only the King of Wei now. The last scroll Changmin has received bear the news, printed in the neat calligraphy of an imperial scribe. But below, in the last section, the brushstrokes change to a messier script, hastily dashed. Yunho encloses a quick greeting in his own hand, and also the knowledge that his regnal name has been chosen, and it is “瑜yú”.
The attendant stands bowed, alert for any reply his king will wish to make.
Changmin feels his treacherous heart tremble. His hands are steady.
瑜珉, yú mín, two sides of the same mineral, indistinguishable. Fine jade. But also, virtuous. A subtle yet brilliant choice.
Changmin left all hints of subtlety behind when he chose his own regnal name. The officials wouldn’t stop badgering him, and the scholars kept fighting with the war generals. The Qin were lurking restless, the Han were petulant, and the Qi were fond of pushing endless skirmishes at the coastal border.
To shut all of them up, he went for 彊qiáng, for strength, and flung a careless “none beneath the heavens will rival the strength of the Chu” at the scribe, to approving noises from the scholars and catcalls from the generals.
He traces a hand over the yú character now, fingers light over the decorative curves. To the attendant, he says only: “To record; a fine name fit for the most brilliant King of Wei yet. Tell the imperial study to send over a selection of the best Southern jades tomorrow. A jade seal will need to be readied before the scroll can be delivered.
The attendant bows low, murmuring to the floor, “does Majesty wish for the imperial sculptors to be presented as well, to select the best craftsman for the job?”
“No,” Changmin says. He brushes a finger over the hooked end of the last stroke, and turns away. “I will carve the seal myself.”
--
The Qin take umbrage at the passing of Changmin’s queen. However their ire only truly ignites when three years pass and at the age of twenty-five, Changmin turns down the King of Qin’s offer to take his fifth-born daughter as his second queen.
“Clearly the stock of their women is not in agreement with Chu’s climate,” he says offhand, to the tittering of some of his scholars, upon the presentation of the proposal by the Qin ambassador. The war generals frown at such a flippant reply.
Deep within, an animal howls inside Changmin, black rage at the thought of his dead wife’s gentle smile on the scant occasions when she spoke of her people. Scant, because Changmin did not have any interest in her, and neither she he, so they found ways to interact as little as possible.
It is an insult to her memory that the very people she was fond of will push again so brazenly.
The Qin ambassador is thin-lipped with affront, but he knows well enough not to try anything in Changmin’s court. Instead he bows low, sinking into a knee out of outward deference to a ruler that is not his.
Niceties must always be performed, in diplomacy.
“If the King of Qin is so eager to settle his daughters’ happy fates,” Changmin continues, a razor-sharp smile on his face, leaning forward from his raised dais, “His Majesty the King of Chu will like to invite him to look towards Zhao. I hear they are eager for matrimony, too.”
He pauses, and even the most outspoken of his scholars hush. Another swell of terrible fury prompts Changmin to continue. “But perhaps it is my mistake. I believe they only breed daughters, too. Pity.”
Pandemonium erupts at court. Changmin sits back, too many of his teeth showing through his grin.
--
Changmin’s anger is a terrible thing. Changmin is a terrible thing, when he’s angry, and sometimes even when he is not.
His taunt at the Qin backfires, but not quite how he envisions it. They go after Yunho, instead.
Changmin is unaware at first, away battling at the Yue capital of Kuaji. After Chu's sack of the kingdom, where Changmin himself personally slits the throat of the Yue-king from ear to ear in front of his weeping harem and captured generals, the Chu army returns to Ying.
Their borders have successfully expand to encompass the lands Yue brings to their overall territory. Changmin returns to his imperial palace, stopping only to greet his mother at hers, since it has been months.
He doesn’t expect his mother the dowager queen to look as though she is not yet done weeping. Her hands are clenched around a square of white cotton, and a jade bird. Changmin had thought to walk slowly in, to not startle her, but he finds his strides quickening.
“Oh- Your Majesty,” His mother rises to fall into a bow of greeting, but Changmin hurries forward to stop her.
His hands closes tight around her upper arms and he bends his head close to hers. “What is it, Mother? What is wrong? Do you hurt? Are you ill?”
“Not I- not-” she lets out a sob, and then visibly pulls herself together. Her eyes are red but her voice is steady.
“It is not I, Majesty. I had received word a week prior that the King of Wei,” here her breath hitches, and steadies, “was injured in battle.”
“Injured?” Changmin doesn’t understand.
In his last missive, Yunho had described to him a series of larger-scale irrigation projects he and his government are pushing on the banks of the Yellow River. Yunho is confident they will help the Wei people increase the yield of the yearly agricultural harvest. That was a month ago. “Yun- the King of Wei is well in Daliang.”
“He is back in Daliang, yes,” his mother says haltingly, and then the entire story tumbles out in fits and snatches. How the Qin have launched a series of coordinated attacks at the border they share with Wei. How they had nearly captured Anyi, a mid-sized Wei city. How the King of Wei, in addition to sending his best generals, also sent himself. How the pushback against the Qin is successful, but also at a cost. How when Changmin himself had his war mask on and was spilling Yue blood down south, the King of Qin and the King of Wei had met at a battlefield up north, and the battle only ended when the King of Qin was slain. How the King of Qin had, with his last vestiges of strength, grabbed a longsword with a hooked blade he had hidden on his person, and ran the King of Wei through with it.
How all that had happened a week ago.
His mother looks up at him, eyes wet. “The Wei had sent a messenger over as an update, two days ago. So far, he is still alive. I’ve ordered two of our best imperial physicians to them, and also your fastest outriders to ferry the message to us if… if anything.”
“You have done well,” Changmin soothes, and he takes leave of her, mind racing with all possible scenarios and plans.
Along the way to his personal palace, if Changmin unsheathes his iron longsword with a howl of rage and sliced three saplings into half in the imperial garden, there is no one around to see it but two of his most senior eunuchs, who are too loyal to breathe a word.
If anything happens to Yunho, he will set fire to the entire Qin kingdom and murder every single living soul in it to present as burial offerings.
--
Changmin charges into his personal study to better news. There is a bamboo scroll on his study desk, amongst other bamboo scrolls, that offers a clearer picture to the health of the King of Wei. There is also a messenger, but Changmin scans through the scroll first.
Injured, but the wound shows no sign of visible infection. No fever nor delirium. Resting, in Daliang. A call for a cessation of worries.
Taking a deep breath, Changmin holds it, and blows it out in measured counts. He takes a seat at his desk. The attendants hurry forward with plum blossom wine, and picks up the heavier pieces of Changmin’s travelling armour.
He looks at the messenger. The man is dressed in the garments of the Wei. His head is bowed.
Changmin pours himself a cup of wine. He turns the cup in his hand. Then he looks at the messenger. “Speak.”
The messenger does, but his head is inclined too low, towards the ground. Changmin gives an annoyed click with his tongue. The report halts immediately.
“Look up.” The messenger does, his gaze drifting to the gorgeous length of silk painting running the span of the wall behind Changmin. Yunho had sent this to him two years ago, for his twenty-fourth birthday, a fantastical tapestry detailing the legend of Hou Yi, with nine ravens and one sole, shining sun. “No. Look at me.”
The messenger does. His face is a rictus of barely suppressed terror. Changmin turns back to his cup. “Now report.”
The messenger does. He’s more audible, and coherent. Changmin listens in silence, fingers tightening slightly about the wine cup, and relaxing. The King of Wei is not at death’s door, as his beloved aunt the dowager queen of Chu might think. He is weak from blood loss, and also the difficult removal of the blade from his body, but Daliang shares to the King of Chu that the King of Wei is recovering, and resting. The Chu imperial physicians currently at the Wei palace report that the King of Wei should likely be back on his feet in a fortnight, if not one if he rested now.
Changmin indicates for the eunuchs to reward the messenger with ample bronze coins for his trouble. Then he sinks into brooding silence.
He calls for them again, as the timekeeping gong sounds. They come forth, maids and eunuchs clucking over the state of his dress and soliciting his opinion for refreshments.
Changmin ignores them all. “Send me my generals,” he says, then gives leave to his eunuchs to draw him a bath.
--
He orders his most vicious and battle-hardened generals to target a mid-sized city close to the Chu-Qin border. This doesn’t surprise them, but Changmin’s additional directive does.
“This is a sacking,” he states. “You are to take no prisoners. Drive them back to their city walls, and cut off any and all outside access they have to food and water."
One of the more outspoken generals hesitate. “Yes, Your Majesty. Although… even the women and children?”
Changmin meets his gaze. The older man drops his eyes to the ground immediately.
“Especially the women and children,” he says coldly. “Have someone sneak into their walls and set fire to their grain storage buildings.”
His generals bow immediately in tandem, bodies folded low from waist to thigh.
“This is not war,” Changmin lets himself smile. “This is punishment.”
--
“Saddle my fastest horse,” he orders, and directs another set of attendants to inform his mother the dowager queen of his impending departure from Chu.
Changmin vaults himself up on the back of his most prized two-thousand li war destrier and rides hard for the capital of Wei.
He makes good time to Daliang; only two days in journey. He brings no guards.
The city gates open to admit him, just another weary traveller. He's in linen and cotton, hair only bound once with a length of plain hemp. The guards do a double take at the sight of his horse, monstrous and obviously expensive, but something in Changmin's face makes them sink back to their ennui, and wave him through.
He heads directly to the palace, to one of the numerous side-entrances where he knows he will know the faces of the guards on duty. He leaps down from his destrier, to a bored query from one of them.
The guard rounds the side of Changmin's war horse, and comes face to face with Changmin. There's a split second of blank incomprehension, then he recognises Changmin and pales.
"Your-" he starts, already halfway sinking to his knees, but Changmin slashes a hand through the air. The guard gulps and presses his lips together.
"Don't announce me," Changmin says. The guard clutches at his spear and nods. "I will enter by myself."
"This- Your- sire," the guard gives up and stammers. "Does sire need- quarters or rest or-"
Changmin takes pity on him. "Don't worry about me. The King?"
The guard bows low. "This slave heard this morning His Majesty is well and resting in his personal palace."
"I'll make my way. Don't announce me," Changmin says, and turns on his heel.
He makes for Yunho's personal palace. Here deep within the bowels of Wei's aristocratic elite, his simple garments do not make a difference for his identity. His plan to go unannounced fail. He passes groups of palace attendants attending to their duties, who take a look at his face and fling themselves on the ground, in shock, "Your Majesty!"
Going by memory, he ends up taking a circuitous route to Yunho's personal palace. The last time he was here, it was the summer before Yunho's mother passing, and the then-marquess-king of Wei had hosted his sister's son for the rest of the months that make up the year.
Exiting the gardens surrounding the palace lakes, he comes to the open courtyard before the King of Wei's imperial quarters. It's here Changmin gets an inkling that something is wrong. The King of Wei's scant stable of concubines, all war prizes and sacrifices at the altar of wartime diplomacy, are kneeling in tremulous silence in ruler-straight rows.
None of them raise their heads to him, but the clusters of senior attendants and maids to the sides take notice. A look at his face makes them flutter, and fall to their knees.
"Your Majesty!"
"His Exalted Grace the King of Chu!"
"Chǔqiángwáng!"
He takes another look at the lines of concubines, and a spear of cold fear lances through him. The eunuchs kneeling closest to him quiver at the expression on his face, and bows down till their foreheads are also plastered to the rough stone.
He ignores all of them, striding past and jaw tense. The inner foyer is cluttered with medical attendants and palace maids, and he shoves through all of them to Yunho's personal study.
Yunho's not dead, nor dying. Changmin falters just inside the threshold, and the King of Wei's personal senior eunuch bows low and trains his eyes very hard on the lacquered floor while the King of Wei himself is seated upright in his pine-and-oak study chair. There is a physician bending to look at his bandaged wound.
Their gazes meet. Yunho's eyebrow rises, very slightly, and settles back down.
Changmin lets out a breath he doesn't realise he was holding. There are lines of pain, carved onto Yunho's face, and pale purplish skin under his eyes. He's haggard, with bandages peeking out from his robes. But at least his back is straight and he directs his very bright gaze back to a bamboo scroll in his hands even as Changmin comes to a stop in front of him, expression hard.
The physician actually belongs to Changmin, he realises, one of the two that his mother has likely sent. The man in question dips his head in deference to his own king, but what is at hand is more at stake, so his hands barely pauses in unravelling the bandage from the King of Wei's shoulder.
"Majesty's wounds are healing well," he chides, as he tries to work unaffected by the tower of cold rage before them. "With more rest, and proper nutrition in the Wei palace, it can be predicted that the King of Wei will be back to normal in a little more than a fortnight."
Yunho's voice is mild as he switches his gaze to the Chu imperial physician, who merely bows lower. "I always take care of myself, Physician Lee. You know this."
“That is a thrice-damned lie," Changmin enunciates, gaze fixed on the ugly mess that is Yunho's shoulder and side. Even cleaned up and devoid of blood, covered in healing ointments, the spite borne by the previous King of Qin is evident. Changmin is a little angry that Yunho has already slain him.
His imperial physician and Yunho's personal eunuch fall prostrate on the floor, their foreheads knocking against the wood with audible thuds.
Even bent against the tiled lacquer, Changmin's imperial physician contributes a low, "it will be more preferable for His Majesty the King of Wei's recovery if the King of Wei will agree to adjourn for bedrest."
"Stop scaring the subjects, Changmin," Yunho's voice is still mild. He's ignoring the suggestion from the Chu imperial physician, and his attention is back on the scroll. Changmin wants to take his sword and run the infuriating man through himself.
"Why are you out of bed," it is not a question. It's barely said with coherence. He's forgone the flowery words of court, and how two kings should speak to each other. Yunho's personal eunuch stifles a scandalised gasp.
"It has been a week and Physician Lee agrees I am healing well," Yunho replies, voice still soft and pleasant like they're talking about the weather. The Chu imperial physician twitches, but even though Yunho is not his ruler, he still does not dare to defy him by issuing a verbal pushback.
Changmin has no such qualms. "My physician says you need to go back to bed." From the floor comes a low murmur of grateful agreement.
Yunho finally looks up from the scroll. The jade seal that Changmin had carved him upon his ascension seasons past sits next to his left hand. "What is this about you denying Qin citizens their war rations? Bad form. That's not like you."
"Their barbarian whoreson of a king ran you through with a hooked blade," Changmin returns. He feels like running Yunho with that same blade himself. He really should be in bed.
Yunho frowns, head going back a little. He actually looks distressed. "That's war, Changmin. I killed him, in any case. And not the civilians."
He gets up, robes crumpling. He hasn't re-tied nor re-tucked layers back in, the linen and cotton still in disarray since the physician was interrupted at his work. Changmin feels his eyes track involuntarily over the thick gnarls of mangled flesh around Yunho's shoulder and ribs. He feels another pulse of cold rage that maybe makes him sound more curt than usual. "Fuck the civilians. They hurt you and now I've hurt them back."
The profanity, typically only used by commoners, drives both eunuch and physician to practically plaster themselves back to the floor, bodies quaking at the barely-restrained violence in Changmin's voice.
Yunho is unfazed. He comes around his desk and up directly to Changmin. This close, with Changmin in his travelling garments and sturdy war boots, and Yunho barely dressed with bare feet, Changmin's even taller than Yunho. Yunho meets his gaze on regardless, direct and straightforward. His face is set.
"Call your men off." It is not a request. "It isn't a fair fight."
Changmin holds his gaze for a beat more, two. And then he snarls, looking away. "Yin-he."
His physician jolts, likely not expecting his sovereign to know his given name. On his knees, he makes his way closer. "Your Majesty my King."
"Tell Gui-xian to have his war dogs back the fuck off," Changmin growls, glaring at the floor, then the physician, then the eunuch. "Because this fucking flat-lander with a death wish insists on something as fucking hypocritical as honour."
He rips his eyes away from the patterned lacquer and pins Yunho with his gaze. The next statement is said ostensibly to the physician, but they all know who it is directed at. "There is no honour in war."
Yunho doesn't smile, but he inclines his head and the hardness flees his face. "Thank you."
Then he winces, abruptly paling, a hand coming up, movement truncated, to the side of his abdomen. His personal eunuch hurries to him, voice raised in horror.
Changmin whirls around, kicking at the imperial physician, who is half crawling and half clambering towards Yunho, his eyes wide in alarm. "What is- Fix him! Why is he even up and about, you useless piece of scum! You should have forced him back into bed!"
The Chu physician has reached Yunho, and he's urging the King of Wei back into his original recline, but Changmin's not finished.
He comes close and bends to his own imperial physician, nostrils flared, voice cold and low. "Fix him. Otherwise, I'll have you flayed alive strip by strip, and I'll carve off silvers of your flesh myself to feed to wild dogs, and you won't be allowed to die until I'm through with you."
--
Yunho doesn't back-slide. It turns out he's only strained himself getting up, and with Changmin here, he gets bullied back into bedrest, which was what his harem was kneeling in concern about.
They are in Yunho's personal sleeping quarters. Yunho turns, but this brings him up against Changmin, who's crowding him from behind.
A part of him still thinks he's dreaming. Changmin isn't here. He's far away in Ying, safe and in Chu.
"I just want to take a few scrolls to look at. I've neglected Wei enough," Yunho tries, but Changmin puts his hands on Yunho's shoulders, still bare. There's something complicated and terrible in his face that Yunho doesn't know how to read. Changmin's two years younger than him, but now he looks old. Travelling incognito is not a good look on him.
"You need to be in bed," Changmin says. He casts a look around. "Where are your attendants? You also need a change in robes. Shoddy service. You should execute a few of them to teach the others some manners."
"Please don't kill my eunuchs just to teach them a lesson," Yunho drifts towards his dressing chamber, but Changmin makes an irritated noise deep in his throat and then Yunho is on his silk bed pallet, and Changmin is seated next to him.
Yunho blinks. Changmin's made sure his nape is securely on his neck-rest. He's unfolding the silk-and-linen throw. The lower bed covers are already about Yunho's legs. "The scrolls."
"If you don't fucking hold your tongue and rest, I will depose you and take over your kingdom," Changmin says, but his hands are very gentle against Yunho's side. Yunho makes a noise, and sinks against the down beneath his back. He does feel a little dizzy. Still, "you are being very rude to me, Min. You haven't sworn at me since you were a boy."
Changmin pauses, and tweaks a fold of the throw to cover Yunho's arm. He doesn't look at Yunho. Yunho can't remember if he's seen Changmin this plain and disheveled off the battlefield, before. Changmin's not suited for muted colours like this, bound in plain linen stained with road dust, hair only secured loosely by dirty hemp. The cold beauty of his face deserves to be celebrated in jade and copper and gold. The length of him, tall and long and lean, needs to be displayed in silks and rare textiles and colourful embroidery.
He pats at the space near Changmin's hand. He cannot believe Changmin is here.
Changmin lets the tips of their fingers touch, but only just. His voice is low. "I'll speak to you like you're the King of Wei after you are well."
--
Yunho does get better, although too slow for his liking.
Changmin's retinue follows their king, arriving in Daliang two days after the King of Chu settles into the King of Wei's personal palace. They bring with them some of the more urgent matters from the Chu court, and also countless rare healing ointments and herbs, courtesy of the dowager queen of Chu.
With that, at least Changmin can be garbed in some semblance of finery. Yunho's amused to realise that out of deference to him, Changmin doesn't drape himself in his customary vermillions. Instead, because the King of Chu is guest in the King of Wei's palace, and because it's spring, he has his attendants dress him in designs closer to Wei culture.
Today Changmin has on endlessly long lengths of glimmering black silk that trail in a whispering train five paces behind him as he walks. His personal eunuchs have adorned him in slate blue superfine cotton, the sides and sleeve cuffs embroidered with a shimmering silver thread. The blue of his outer-robe is a sedate sky to a beautiful flowering cherry tree, cherry blossom petals stitched out in yards of stunning detail across the lower skirts and around the back pleats, a delicate blush pink in velvety embroidery. There is also a suggestion of birds, and perhaps a mountainous plain in the distance. His hair is inky black and bound in blue coral and white jade; his travelling crown a polished silver decorated with jade beads shaped in the form of miniature swallows. A larger jade swallow, alabaster-white, sits higher at the crown of his head.
Yunho looks sideways at the design. It seems familiar somehow. “Did I gift you this bolt?”
“The King of Wei has an excellent memory,” Changmin murmurs. They are seated in Wei’s imperial gardens today, in a little shaded pavilion overlooking the central lake.
Yunho’s recovery has a proportional effect on Changmin’s mood, and public displays of diplomatic courtesy. Changmin is pouring them plum blossom wine, freshly made by Wei’s imperial kitchens during the winter past.
The cherry trees are blossoming this morning, shy pink-and-white buds barely open and peeping. Soon, in a week, they will achieve the firefly radiance captured in Changmin’s robes - and then fade. Yunho looks at the robe’s detailing again, “I could have sworn I have a robe just like this.”
“His Majesty owns one that is navy, and features wild peach blossoms,” Changmin reminds, then pauses. Yunho smiles at him. His own robes are black-and-gold today, almost plain but for the fact that his over-robe is a peculiar shade of gold that turns an iridescent green under the spring sunlight. It is a gift of diplomacy, from the mountainous peoples down south-west, beyond Qin.
Caught out, Changmin surrenders. “Majesty wore it on my official ascension to the seat of Chu six years ago.”
“Ah.” Now Yunho does remember. He looks at the blue-and-blush-and-black of Changmin’s robes, considering. Then, “Changmin looks best in red, I feel. Especially in red and gold. Like the sun.”
Changmin hides the curve of his smile with the wine cup. “The King of Wei should not declare the ruler of another state to be an object associated with divine ruling right.”
“It’s all right,” Yunho takes a drink from his own cup. The wine is salty-sweet, with a tart aftertaste and the smell of flowers in his nose. “The King of Wei knows he is the King of Chu’s sun, too.”
Changmin puts down his cup with nary a sound. The blue of the superfine falls back down, over his wrist, his fingers.
Already some of the cherry blossoms are falling, drifting around the two of them in the spring breeze and into the pavilion. Soon it will be summer, when the fireflies come.
He stretches out a hand, fingers catching onto a bloom that falls almost fully intact. Then he withdraws, and lays the cherry blossom beside Yunho’s cup.
--
Yunho doesn’t know what he was expecting. He had thought Changmin would make haste for his own lands after Yunho stops needing to wear bandages, and can walk around on his own.
Instead Changmin stays, and stays.
No one else seems to find anything untoward with this, although here and there Yunho does hear from his eunuchs some palace gossip. But the gossip is of a more admiring bent than anything else, about how the King of Chu still manages to rule his kingdom with ruthless efficiency from what is rightfully the seat of Wei power.
It’s not that Changmin doesn’t leave. He does, to go on short campaigns with his army, or to larger skirmishes that requires his attention. But it’s a week or two at most, and Yunho receives reports in the form of bamboo scrolls or human messengers about Changmin beheading or disemboweling his enemies, and annexing land after successful battles.
After that, he always returns to Daliang. To Yunho. All other matters pertaining to Chu of a more mundane bent, like agriculture and finance and governance, he seems to be perfectly content dictating directives and signing off bamboo scrolls from Yunho’s imperial palace, even through the summer heat.
It’s been months and months of this, and the year is slipping into the days right before the end. They’re in deep autumn, and the air is cooling. The two of them are relatively more bundled, and Changmin is in thin layers of white fur and brocade, rather than his usual sheaves of silk. His hair is held up by black leather and jade swallows.
Yunho himself is garbed in black bear fur, a gift from Changmin after he returned from absorbing the minor-state of Zou, and had managed to get in a hunt along the way where he felled a giant black bear. It’s been made into a sleeveless overcoat with a high collar, layered over white linen ending in wide sleeves tailored with thick black embroidery.
There is a warm weight against his side, and he looks down. They were chatting idly, and poring over their own scrolls of reports from their separate courts. Clearly there’s nothing exciting on Changmin’s own set of scrolls, no tales of impending battles, because he’s fallen asleep.
Yunho gazes at him quietly, something tender and unnamed in his chest as he looks at the younger man. Changmin’s face is relaxed in repose, and his lashes are ink-black fans against his cheek. White fur frames his jaw.
The sulky spoilt child he had met so many years ago has grown up into a fine man. Flawed, and ruthless; but they all are, because of life.
He frequently forgets, now that they are grown men, but Changmin is his family, and they’ve grown up together. Perhaps that is why Yunho treats him different from everyone else in his life. Sees him different from everyone else in his life.
Or perhaps it’s because only Changmin is his equal. Man to man. King to King.
Yunho traces a finger around the edge of his teacup, head bent to his scrolls. He’s cleared them all save one, when a light cough attracts his attention. He looks up.
It’s his senior personal eunuch, bowed low to the ground. His voice is a low whisper, out of deference to the sleeping King of Chu. “Your Majesty, a thousand apologies to the disturbance. The governor of Luoyang has urgent matters to discuss and is begging for an audience.”
Yunho frowns. But Changmin is sleeping, and his head is pillowed on the side of Yunho’s arm. He’s got a hand curled around the edge of Yunho’s right sleeve. “This cannot wait?”
The eunuch bows even lower. “The governor of Luoyang begs Majesty’s pardon, sire. He is kneeling at the steps outside Majesty’s personal palace. He begs Majesty’s indulgence and shares that he would not have dreamt to interrupt His Majesty outside of court, if not for the urgency.”
Now Yunho’s interest is piqued. He knows the current governor of Luoyang. Dong-hai is not one to exaggerate; a dreamy, hardworking sort. But Changmin is sleeping.
His eyes alight on the scabbard containing his longsword, and an idea occurs to him. He lifts his chin at the eunuch. “Bring my sword to me.”
It’s brought over, and Yunho unsheathes it. It slides free with nary a sound, well-oiled, and Yunho nods again for the eunuch to step back.
He twists, and slices the sharp edge at the white linen of his sleeve, high on the upper arm. He’s careful to not move too much, lest he wakes Changmin up. It takes but three slices before his sleeve is cut off, and then it’s just his arm that’s still trapped as Changmin’s headrest.
Yunho holds the sword out, hilt first, and turns back to Changmin when it’s taken. It takes a bit of creative movement, and slight wriggling, but in a short while his arm is free, and Changmin’s got both hands curled around the cut sleeve. He is still sleeping.
Yunho stands slowly, one hand curved around the back of Changmin’s head, and then gently tilts him so he is resting reclined against the low divan they were sharing. He sheds his overcoat, flinging it lightly over Changmin to act as an impromptu fur throw, and pulls on his fur cape instead.
Pulling his hand free slow, he looks at the eunuch, who’s got his eyes trained steadfastly off to the side. “Show the governor to the anterior sitting chamber. I will be there.”
--
The year fades into the new one. When winter turns into spring, Changmin’s mother the dowager queen of Chu sends an official bamboo scroll instead of a paper letter.
In it, she tells of tension and undercurrents with the Qin, who’ve embarked on an alliance with the Han, and also enquires explicitly for the first time, on the date of Changmin’s official return to Ying, and to Chu.
Yunho suggests it to be a week hence. Changmin ignores him, and instead readies himself for a short campaign.
There has also been rumblings from the Qin on Wei’s end. The new king doesn’t take too kindly to the fact that Yunho was the one who had slain his predecessor, even though it was done properly in battle. He likes the fact that the husband to his now dead cousin, and the ruler who snubbed his other living cousin with regard to marriage, is publicly aligned with the kingdom of Wei, even less.
Thus, Changmin goes on another campaign that is only marginally Chu’s business, and more of his personal revenge against the Qin. He still hasn’t forgiven them for what they did to Yunho.
His army captures the new king of Qin, and Changmin executes him right there on the battlefield for both armies to witness, lops his head clean off with his iron longsword. It’s a clean death, at least. He instructs his generals to pike the head through with a bronze spear, and leave it at the battlefield, as a public reminder.
This drives the Qin into a frenzy, and then Changmin has a definite answer for his mother’s letter.
Changmin isn’t coming back to Ying, because Chu is going to war.
--
Yunho turns thirty years of age on the battlefield, and then Changmin does, too.
It’s a throwback to their teenage years, where battle had shaped them into the men they are today, but also not.
For one, they are no longer princes playacting at war. For another, both the Chu and Wei armies are out at full force, battling the Qin and the Han, as well as occasional opportunistic clashes with the Qi.
It means that they don’t get to fight side-by-side as much as they wish, and more often than not Changmin’s out west cutting down Qin armies whilst Yunho is up north pushing back against the combined forces of the Han and the Qin. They speak more over paper and bamboo than face-to-face.
Sometimes, because the attacks come fast and relentless, they let their armies do the talking to each other - when Yunho curves his forces in the higher plains to offer safe passage to Changmin’s scouting teams; when Changmin pushes the enemies with a firestorm of hail and projectiles from across the river banks, just so that Yunho’s rear guard can pass relatively unscathed.
They win some, and they lose some. Their state borders shift, blurry with how every few weeks brings about eddying changes. Back at home, Yunho’s governors and Changmin’s mother has the political situation well at hand, and at least they bring enough victories that their individual peoples still believe in both of them.
Miraculously, they both keep hale and hearty during the battles, relatively uninjured save for a scrape here, or a flesh wound there. Until they don’t.
--
Changmin is one-and-thirty and he first receives the rumours when he’s near the Han-Wei border where the Huai River flows, after a long and tiring day of stabbing soldiers through the throat and ripping his sword up to open their ribs.
He’s in full armour. His crimson cape has since been stained redder with the blood of his enemies, and the leather-and-iron armour both protects and weighs him down. He’s got his bronze mask up and fully covering his face. This is a new mask he’s had made years ago, because his original leather-and-iron mask was lost when he and Yunho first parted on the battlefield as young men.
The outriders come first, and their news of Yunho’s injuries are both confusing and contradicting, so Changmin shoves away the fearful voice in his head to concentrate on decimating the final vestiges of the Han army.
A definite report comes, after he looks at the Han general in the eye and then drives his longsword out and up, cleaving through the other man’s waist with a sickening wet crack of his spine. Changmin still has his mask on. The body at his feet is still twitching in its death throes.
The messenger is pale and both his voice and knees are shaking, as he reports that the King of Wei has been injured barely two li north from Changmin’s location, in a surprise ambush from the Qin. It’s grave.
Changmin listens to the entirety of the report without expression on his masked face, and turns to leap on the back of his brave destrier. The animal’s sides are heaving, mouth flecked with foam because of a hard day’s work. But it loves Changmin, so the war horse lowers his head and charges on northwards.
It’s both too fast yet not fast enough. Changmin arrives at the hastily erected camp of the Wei, to chaotic shouts and barely coherent efforts.
He’s too late.
Yunho is gone.
--
Changmin kills the eunuch who has the bad luck of bringing the news to him, when he asks for the tent that Yunho is in. He bends his head to listen to the trembling voice share that the King of Wei was no more, and then drops his hand to his scabbard to pull out his longsword.
He doesn’t feel anything when he raises it in a quick upward curve, and the eunuch's head rolls off his shoulders. The body crumples. There isn’t anything to feel.
Another eunuch approaches, but this one Changmin actually knows. It’s Yunho’s personal eunuch, the one Changmin has known since he was a mere boy of seven to Yunho’s nine.
There’s nothing but white noise in his head.
The eunuch drops to his knees silently, and does a properly correct bow, uncaring that his forehead met the dirty mud of the campground. His face is very pale and his mouth is trembling.
“Bring me to him,” Changmin tells him.
He does, to the tent where Changmin enters by himself. It’s all quiet inside.
Changmin stands just after the tent flap for a very, very long time, staring at the shape laid out on the raised pallet, hastily constructed out of a war room table, silk and furs. The silk looks like it was originally yellow. It’s now stained with reds and browns and other things.
It hurts to move. Changmin takes a step, then another. Then another. The iron armour is impossibly heavy on him.
It’s another long while before he arrives next to the pallet. He focuses on straightening out the silks first, and the rumpled furs. Disgraceful, for them to treat their king like that. Changmin will execute all of them himself, at dawn.
The silk is smooth and straight, but somehow it just makes the unsightly rust on it obscene.
Changmin slides another hand over it, then pauses when the momentum bumps his hand up gently against Yunho’s gauntlet.
He traces a finger over the beaten bronze, feeling the shape beneath it.
Then finally, finally, he lifts his eyes to Yunho’s face.
Changmin staggers back a little, a wounded whimper punching out from his chest.
Yunho looks like he’s sleeping. Someone, or even Yunho himself, has made sure Yunho’s eyes are closed. His face is clean, although Changmin can see the edges of hastily wiped off grime from his temples. He was fighting with his face uncovered again, till the end.
His lips are red, with a blue tinge to the edges. There are tendrils of hair stuck to the side of his nape, and the edge of his jaw, proof of his exertion. The bulk of it is still neatly up-bound. He’s wound a length of black cotton around his topknot, but holding it secure, cotton clasped securely in its beak, is a little jade swallow.
Changmin whirls around and hurls his longsword into the ground. The force of his throw drives it in six inches deep.
He stands there thus, fists clenching unclenching. Takes a deep breath, and another. Forces himself to turn back again, to look, to understand.
There’s nothing to understand. He comes back up again, standing at the front of the table, near Yunho’s head. Forces himself to look. Feels a spike of rage so deep that for a moment, Changmin worries his sanity will snap. It’s hanging by a thread. There’s a shrieking beast trapped deep within his breast.
The cracked armour guarding Yunho’s torso tells a coherent story, at least. There’s broken off arrow shafts, piercing the crevices where the edges of armour pieces overlap at his neck and shoulders and arm joints. Changmin counts eight. There’s a stab at the side where Yunho was injured years previous, the force behind it so great that the incision site has incurred spiderweb cracks fanning outward in the leather. Slightly above it, something else, probably a blunt instrument has resulted in a large crack in his iron chest piece.
By the looks of it, Yunho went down fighting. Changmin had heard earlier vaguely of a Wei victory despite the attack being an ambush, but it’s all still disconnected in his head.
The victory came at too high a cost.
Changmin finally remembers to remove his own mask, and sets the bronze down on the dirtied silk.
He smooths a hand over the side of Yunho’s cheek, unsticking the matted tendrils of hair one by one. His death isn’t a good one. It looks like it took long.
He must have been in a lot of pain.
Changmin traces his fingers in the air, just above the line of Yunho’s nose, down to the sharp tip. He follows them down, till they’re above Yunho’s lips. Pauses.
Presses the pad of his fingers down slightly. It’s cold, although they’re still soft. Yunho’s still soft. Changmin knows it won’t be that way very soon.
He lifts his fingers very, very gently. Swipes a thumb down the sharp clean line of Yunho’s jaw.
Yunho is gone, but Changmin’s still in love. The cold flame in his chest burns and burns.
Outside, white starts to fall. It’s the first snow of the year.
--
It’s a blur after.
Changmin only comes out of his head some time after and realises he is in Ying, in his own palace. He’s seated in one of his own pavilions, although this doesn’t overlook a lake.
Yes. He is not in Daliang.
Snow is falling heavily, and there are white drifts outside. It feels like deep winter. Even though the pavilion doesn’t boast walls, his attendants have ensured that it’s warm.
He’s bundled up in furs of the deepest black. In front of him sits his personal sè. It belonged to his mother the dowager queen in his childhood, but she gifted the larger zither to him years ago. Changmin’s always love the deeper sounds and more complicated melodies it’s capable of, due to the increased amount of strings compared to the smaller zithers.
He reaches out, and lays a finger on the cold jade of the board. So did Yunho. He had a jade sè made for Changmin as well, in the year Changmin had spent in Daliang.
Yunho.
Changmin runs his fingers over the strings, plucking out random notes. It sounds mournful. Lost.
“Majesty.”
Turning slightly, Changmin looks with detached disinterest at the figure prostrate on the ground. It’s Yunho’s senior personal eunuch.
Although, probably, he is Changmin’s, now. Changmin thinks he can vaguely remember the attendant’s quiet avowal to follow Changmin, now.
Everything is vague.
“Majesty,” the eunuch’s body is a perfect curve on the pavilion floor. Feet, knees, torso, head - they’re all aligned and pressed downwards to the bitterly cold stone.
“Xi-che,” he says in response.
“Majesty,” the eunuch begins again, voice soft yet steady. “This slave begs leave for his disobedience. This slave has some things for Your Majesty, from His Majesty.”
Every cell in Changmin’s body springs alert.
He stands, too fast. The sè clatters, pushed slightly by his abrupt movement. It doesn’t fall. Two strides and he’s in front of the eunuch. He hauls him up bodily. The attendant doesn’t protest, and he doesn’t struggle. His dark gaze is trained steadily away from Changmin, even as Changmin has a fist tight around his collar, even as Changmin’s got him dangling three inches off the ground.
“What did you say,” Changmin states. He shakes the eunuch, hand tight around his throat. “Explain yourself!”
He realises the foolishness of his own statement, and drops the eunuch on the floor. The other coughs once, twice, and pulls out something from his robes, curved within his hands. He keeps his head bowed, but raises his arms.
Changmin snatches at his hand, rough. He comes away with his old mask, the leather-and-iron one he had worn to his first battles and thought lost, and a little white jade swallow, small enough to be used as a hair clasp.
He staggers back, barely landing on the cold wood of the seat. He’s wearing furs, but he feels cold. The world is a ringing white. The alabaster jade is cold to his fingers. His voice is a terrible rusted thing. “What are these. Why do you have these.”
“This slave was with His Majesty in his final moments, till His Majesty ventured to join Majesty's father and father's fathers before him,” the eunuch says, hands back flat on the floor. He doesn’t look up, but his voice is perfectly audible.
“His Majesty had bade this slave to remember a message,” he continues, head bent even lower. “This disobedient slave has held it in till now, because Your Majesty has not been well.”
Changmin thinks back, and realises he can’t remember how much time has past. He looks up sharply, and around. The snowfall is so heavy that he can see naught but white, some of it landing within the pavilion, landing on the hem of his furs. There’s no one else around them. The other attendants must have been sent away.
It’s winter still, though, and the first snow fell that day. Not long. Not that long. Too long.
“Tell me,” he demands, fingers clenched around the leather and jade. “Look at me. Tell me.”
The eunuch looks up. His face is white but his eyes are clear. Kind. “His Majesty had the possessions of Your Majesty on Majesty's person that day. Majesty gave them to this disobedient slave, and told this slave to remember the below, and to ensure with full certainty that Your Majesty hears it, and understands it.” He pauses. “I was happy. Be safe.”
Changmin tightens his grip until the leather creaks. He can feel the cold jade beak of the little swallow cut into his palm. The white shows up too well against the black fur he is draped in. “Say it again. Look at me. Say it again.”
The eunuch doesn’t look away. His voice is soft and has none of Yunho’s warmth, none of Yunho’s laughter, none of Yunho’s passion. “I was happy. Be safe.”
There’s salt on Changmin’s lips. There’s ice in his lashes. There’s snow landing on his cheek, on his nose, light like a phantom touch.
He curves a fingernail around the carved wings of the swallow, forever frozen in mid-flight.
--
Changmin recovers, but not fully, and goes back to the battlefield. The cold flame of his love for Yunho still burns in his chest, but now it’s ugly and tainted with emotions like hate and envy and guilt and the thirst for revenge.
He’s still good at killing and hurting, because none of his injuries are on the outside and he’s physically fit, a man in his prime. Yunho is there.
He destroys his bronze mask and wears again the leather-and-iron version Yunho had secreted away. In his hair goes the alabaster jade swallow. The colours accentuating his armour is no longer red, but blues and greys. The blood acts as red enough.
He sacks one Han city after another, until there is no more Han. Yunho is with him every step of the way.
Changmin doesn’t want that land. He sends a messenger northwards, to the new King of Wei, to impart to him what was Han is now his for the taking. Compliments from the King of Chu.
It’s a cousin of Yunho’s from his paternal line, and there is no blood shared between him and Changmin, and Changmin lets his governors take over that line of communication.
Sometime between one battle and the next, Changmin’s mother the dowager queen passes. It’s a peaceful death, by all accounts. Changmin receives word of it via bamboo scroll, on the eve of a skirmish with the Qin. He reads the message through twice, and then tells the attendants to send back a directive for an extravagant and long state funeral for her, and to combine the motifs of both Chu and Wei for her procession.
Yunho whispers to him that it’s not enough. He sends Xi-che back to Ying too then, to ensure his mother gets a beautiful send-off before she is laid to rest in the distant valley of kings, next to his father.
He fights, and fights against the Qin, but it’s no longer for conquest, and it’s no longer for duty. There is a particular line of kings in Qin, that had hurt Yunho, and shared responsibility for the ambush that took Yunho from him on that day.
He wants them all to serve as burial offerings. They will all serve as burial offerings, every single member of that line, male, female, children, infant. Yunho’s physical body is laid to rest in the imperial tombs of Wei, too far away and awaiting these final gifts that Changmin is trying to amass for him. But Yunho’s here too, by his shoulder.
Yunho’s everywhere he turns, lingering in the empty space just around the corner. Yunho’s the phantom laughter heard in snatches in the wind. Yunho’s the falling peach blossoms scattered on the earth.
Yunho is.
The Qin grow in turns more fearful and resentful of him, because Changmin’s a dog of war slipped off of its leash. He goes after them, and makes his war generals wait if the successive kings and their family members are at the battle, because Changmin wants to kill them with his own hands, personally.
He does, and he does.
One night after a particularly bloody battle where he flayed, then had the new King of Qin, his successor and his successor’s son drawn-and-quartered by way of his destriers; Yunho sighs by his side. “I wanted you to be happy.”
Changmin looks at him, looks at his memory with dead eyes, and gives back only the words Yunho left him with. “I was happy.”
--
He succeeds one beautiful spring day, still cold, when he runs his longsword through the neck of the last child-king of Qin. Every single member of this particular line of Qin rulers are now funereal gifts for Yunho; men, women, juveniles.
His work is done.
One of his war generals shares a cautious report of there being rumours of a ward, an adopted boy passed off as a bastard for a tenuous blood claim. Their spies have checked discreetly however, and the boy is the son of commoners, though intelligent.
Changmin gives a bark of laughter and dismisses, “Qin will be led by a bastard. Appropriate, then.”
That night, he issues the directive to head back to Ying, to Chu.
By the time they are back in the Chu imperial palace, it is mid-spring. The peach and cherry blossoms are blooming.
Changmin goes out to the imperial gardens at night, gazing at the cherry trees, larger and more imposing amongst the slimmer peach trees. Together they’re swathes of white-pink in the deepening dusk.
Some of the trees are grown from cuttings from Yunho’s cherry blossom trees, by the imperial lake in Daliang. Some of them, however, were here before Changmin was born, and they’ll still be here after he’s dead.
He makes his way to the same pavilion where Xi-che had returned him that winter what Yunho had taken from him whilst he was unknowing years ago. Material possessions. Trifling things.
Yunho has taken his heart too, and he never gave that back.
Changmin settles into the curving wide seat of the pavilion, and lays gentle fingers on his personal sè. He had the attendants carry it out and set it up here, earlier.
He’s got a decanter of wine, his sè, and falling spring blossoms. It’s a beautiful night.
Today he’s allowed his eunuchs to dress him in silks of black and the deepest rust-red, richly patterned in gold-and-silver embroidery featuring the mythical qílín with its fearsome golden head thrown back, baying curling flames of glittering orange. His robes overlay each other until the slightest movement he makes invokes a whispering shush.
It sounds like Yunho’s playful exclamation, whenever he felt that Changmin was being rude to him.
Changmin’s left his hair largely unbound, and pulled up a simple half-knot, bound in gold and white jade. The little alabaster jade swallow sits at the crown of his head.
His fingers remember the sè, even though Changmin’s spent too many years away from it and had those same hands wrapped around the hilt of a sword, instead.
He plucks out the half-forgotten strains of a war dirge, and then plays the refrain of a silly little romantic hymn his mother was fond of, when he was a child. A peach blossom drifts, and lands on the strings.
His fingers halt. He leans over, and gently picks it up. The petals are still intact.
Brushing the edge of his thumb against the palest pink bisecting the petal, he gets up, and crosses over to the side table, where he’s left the decanter, and the two wine cups. Lifting his free hand, he removes the jade swallow from his head.
He sets the peach blossom next to a cup, nestling it with the swallow.
Changmin picks up the other, filling it with wine. He lifts it to his lips, savouring it. It tastes like plum blossoms and tangerines and almonds, bitter-sweet.
He drinks his fill, and pours another, tilting his head back. He downs that in one breath, too.
It’s a warm spring night, clear. The moon is very bright and very big, round against a velvet black sky.
The moon is actually a little blurry now, which pleases Changmin. The poison is working then. Xi-che has not failed him.
Reaching out a trembling hand, he draws the side of his nail around the edge of the empty wine cup, and then the petals of the peach blossom. He clasps his fingers with difficulty around the alabaster jade swallow.
His hands are losing the feeling in them. Good. He closes his eyes.
Changmin’s tired. He misses Yunho.
-- end.