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I.
He's very little when he first understands how people say things and mean another. Auntie Ni told him it's not good to lie, but Auntie Ni said she'd sing for him always.
Outside the window, paulownia petals drift down to brush against the ground with every errant breeze. They don't fall the way tears do, hot and ugly down a grime-streaked face. Lu-gege holds him while he cries, shaking, but Auntie Ni will never hold him again.
It hurts, it hurts so bad but it doesn’t feel like a beating, where at least he knew what he did wrong. This is the stomachache of being locked up alone after being promised he could have food. Like something he'd thought was his being taken away, an absence cut out of him, a void in the shape of loss.
Gu Mang thought he knew what it meant to be hungry.
It sits cold and hard in the pit of his stomach, like stones eaten by a dying bird, skin and bones and the ugly curl of claw. Heavy and cold, pinning him down to the ground and into the dirt from where he came.
He’d believed her, when she promised him forever.
Did she mean to lie to him?
A better question, then.
Does it matter?
Wind strokes gentle fingers through his hair, as if being no one’s son meant that he could belong to the sky. Gu Mang wonders, crouched low in a forgotten corner where slave-boys are allowed to sit if they’re quiet, collecting his thoughts like beads on a string as he watches them take Auntie Ni’s corpse away. Slowly, he understands. He learns better.
A lie is just a promise that gets broken, somewhere down the line.
It doesn't matter if it used to be true.
II.
There’s a boy at the Academy, a boy with eyes like dawn. That’s not how he first knows him. His master bites the syllables of his name like shattering glass, haunted by a spectre created out of the cracks between what Murong Xuan had been and what Murong Lian should be—which is why the first hazy glimpse he catches of Mo Xi's silhouette makes him think, Oh. Smaller than I thought. No bogeyman, just a boy.
He doesn’t realize until later how much of that smallness was isolation. Loneliness wrapped around him in the shape of his family's crest, their stains a shadow looming over his unbowed back. It's a long time before they ever talk, face to face. He builds an understanding out of stolen glimpses and shrapnel pieces, a patchwork piecework silhouette of a person. Gu Mang is busy with his chores and his own studies, so what little he learns is what’s spread around the academy on whispers given wings.
The first one, most common—the story of his aptitude test, the little boy that had burnt down all ten testing pillars. One of those pithy little anecdotes set to haunting generations of Chonghua’s children, any achievement of their own defanged by the snide whisper of Mo-gongzi did it at age seven.
Little shidi Mo Xi, crowned jewel of the pureblood nobles, master of flames so terrifying they melted stone. Little shidi Mo Xi, who talks to no one and sits alone.
He’s not scared, though. Mo Xi might be powerful but so is he.
The second is whispered by forked tongues flecked with even more bitterness than the first—Mo Xi is beautiful. Like a princess, walked right out of the storybooks he had to sneak into the Wangshu library to read. When he sees him at the archery field the waning sunlight limns his features in gold and paints divinity over his face, lashes so long they seem to tangle when he blinks. They call him meiren in mockery but all it does is make the sound ring in his head like the resounding knoll of a temple bell, the truth of it resonating through his bones. Gu Mang has eyes and an appreciation for the exquisitely lovely. It is a simple truth to acknowledge, a truth that means very little.
Mo Xi is beautiful, but there is no shortage of beauty in Chonghua.
III.
The village he passes through is tired, as if its head bent once beneath the weight of the poison fog and never dared to rise again. The thought of it hurts like hunger, like how the expressions of the townspeople do. Bowed and bent, pushed down by rank and wealth and kept there flat. It twists something inside of him like a warped mirror, like the hunched shape of something you'd look away from in the dark. There’s a moment where he does, a slanted glance away. The shame of it stings like an open-handed slap. Gu Mang forces himself to look.
What happens is the picking of a scab—a compulsion, a necessity, knowing that it’d expose tender skin and yet digging a fingertip beneath the edge of it anyways—scraping away the shell grown too deep over who he could have been, the unmolded doll of stone and clay.
The medicine's not cheap, but he manages.
The face and the height and the clothes are all wrong, but he makes do.
He calls himself Murong-gongzi, swaggers into the apothecary in stolen robes and a golden sneer. When the name passes his lips it doesn’t taste like anything at all, as if it had been living in him all along like a creature laying dormant beneath his skin. A silkworm trapped in the cocoon of its own threads.
The doctor calls him Murong-gongzi and the elderly villagers call him that sweet boy, that nice xianjun, good young man, and his classmates call him Gu Mang, Gu-shixiong.
Name after name that binds him to identity, invisible until they’re caught stark in the light like holes worn into clothing. The borrowed shell he wears is not his, but it should have been. Could have been, if fate were any kinder to him than the bruised and broken village, empty homes standing jagged like missing teeth.
What right do you have? The young master rages at him, whispers in fury that cuts like the lashes lining his back. How dare you use that name? The servants are dismissed and it's just the two of them left alone in a room that reeks of his own blood. Murong Lian grabs him by the jaw, hissing. Filthy slave, dirty liar. Gu Mang's mouth tastes like blood, the same fishy bitterness trickling down his cheek by the metal of Murong Lian’s rings. The scratches sting and pulse with his own helplessness.
It wasn’t a lie. He can see in the reflection of his brother's eyes that they both know it's not a lie. But the words sit unspoken on his tongue, empty as the protests of the condemned and thrice as useless. Gu Mang looks down, away.
He closes his eyes.
-
He doesn’t notice when the umbrella falls over him and doesn’t care particularly much when Mo-gongzi leaves, but when Xiao-Qian summons him to the young master’s presence, he doesn’t expect Mo-gongzi to be there. His legs ache to hold him up and it’s almost a relief when Murong Lian makes him kneel again, shame sliding off his shoulders the way rainwater seeps from soaking hair.
He only registers the young master’s voice going up, and down, a meandering snakeskin trail of malice. Gu Mang wants to tell Mo-gongzi not to bother. The young master gets vicious about Mo Xi, around Mo Xi, as if cruelty was another lavish robe he wore to show off. It made sense, in a way. None of his glittering gold-edged magnificence caught Mo Xi’s attention the way shedding Gu Mang’s blood did.
Look at me, Murong Lian had once hissed, hand fisted tight in Gu Mang’s hair. Look at me.
It was the same play, different actors. But what he uses to force Mo Xi’s hand is the collar clamped heavy around his neck.
Gu Mang understands. He obeys, abides, bends his knees and then his back. Gu Mang has long since grown out of the word unfair.
Pride, ego, vanity—all children’s things, worn thin and more useful as a rag for scrubbing the floors. Gu Mang wears practicality where his brother wears brocade.
IV.
His thoughts keep snagging on the scab across Mo Xi’s cheek. It wouldn’t stay—he knew whip lashes well enough to know when they’d scar, and the Academy wouldn’t dare to do it to Mo-gongzi anyway. He doesn’t know why he comes back to it, again and again, that ethereal face and those eyes like black jade.
(He does.)
“He’s going to notice you staring,” Lu Zhanxing chides. “Mang’er, haven’t you had enough trouble? Shaozhu’s temper is bad enough as it is.”
Gu Mang slings an arm around his shoulder and chuckles, making himself as much of a nuisance as possible. “He’s much quieter than Shaozhu, don’t you think?”
Chonghua had plenty of beauty, wealth, and spoiled young masters who really did believe they were descended from gods.
But Mo Xi was true, and it caught his eye like the glitter of sun on burbling water.
V.
There's a memory Gu Mang has, worn soft-edged like the letters he’ll write but never send, one he will lose and regain and lose again. In it, he sits beside a firepit, accompanied by the smell of roasting meat and the wide-eyed awe in Mo Xi’s eyes.
“Where’d you find the goose?” he asks, a smear of soot on his cheek.
Gu Mang wants to pat his head, to ask him a question that was only an answer to starveling boys who knew the taste of mud. Where else do you think I’d get one, in this snow?
He would’ve paid them, if he had any money, but he had to. Mo Xi isn’t used to going hungry, not the way he is.
He eats with a fastidiousness that does nothing to conceal desperation, not to Gu Mang’s eyes. It makes him want to shake him, to grab those skinny shoulders and demand he protect himself better because one day Shixiong won’t be able to walk with you further. But in the night, in the world made hushed by the blanketing snow, the future seems distant enough for him to let it be.
Gu Mang grins at him across the flickering firelight and offers him the rest of it. “Aiya, I’m full.”
It’s the first time he lied to Mo Xi, but it wouldn’t be the last.
VI.
The truth is this: Mo Xi isn’t his to keep. He knows better than that.
The truth is the morning chill as he rises from a bed he’s forever doomed to leave, away from the embrace that would keep him there. The truth is cold like steel pressed against his skin, a reminder that one day, he will attend Mo Xi's wedding to some faceless nameless noblewoman and he will smile as he congratulates his beautiful shidi and his beautiful bride. He will toast to them and drink himself insensate, because he cannot stomach the thought of playing Fengbo in celebration. They say the suona only plays for the greatest joy or the greatest sorrow—there would be too much irony in it, to perform both at the same time.
Mo Xi whispers promises of a future into his hair, the crook of his neck, so gently he knows they're true, just as true as the chill rising in his bones. Gu Mang closes his eyes and curls up against the warmth of his side, willing the tears not to fall. Wishing, almost delusionally, that he dared to believe. In the dark, beneath the covers, he almost could. A secret accompanied only by the inky fall of night and Mo Xi’s hair. Gu Mang murmurs in the dark and makes him a promise, knowing that when it breaks, it will take his heart with it.
Morning always comes, cold and grey.
VII.
I love you, I love you, I love you.
It's his dirtiest, filthiest, secret.
Without one word of a lie.
VIII.
They call him General, and the weight of it settles on his shoulders and around his neck. Armour and noose. There's a light in the eyes of his men when they look at him, as they swear and shout they’ll die for him, and it’s a morningstar glow that glints like worship.
He’s not little anymore. Gu Mang says many things, each of them true—every ounce of willpower he has goes into making it true, so it must be true, it has to be true. He loves Chonghua like he loves his brother, like a debt of grace he was born to owe. Chonghua loves him back in her own twisted way, granting him victories, titles, and celebrations that translate to the simplest of affection: food for his men.
Gu Mang cuts his teeth on battles that never seem to end, cracking jokes that seem less bleak when set against the endless dark of blackened blood. He says so much, and in the end, it means so little.
He says, We’ll win. He says, I’ll take you home. He says that on the command platform and he swears it in battle, shouting and cursing his way through the unending waves of sword and spear.
He whispers it to the soldiers who die in his arms. I'll take you home, he says. It won't hurt anymore .
Later, Gu Mang will cry, in his nightmares in his torture in his bed, alone and destroyed by the awareness of it. I'm sorry. I miss you. I love you. I'll see you again.
Please.
(Believe me.)
(Won't you…?)
-
Truth, lie, promise.
Sometimes they were one and the same.