Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Sometimes he cannot sleep. In the beginning, the first years after his brother’s death, he’d been tossing in his bed trying to get back to rest. Later, he'd attempt to meditate, but he’s never found the patience for just sitting around staring holes into the air. Later still, he gave up and simply got dressed to roam his clan’s halls, his old, new home, and - as if to hold a dirty finger up to memories, fate and ghosts - the sweet spots of his childhood. Until he discovered that none of them was without memories of his brother. Smiling, laughing, his brother, comforting and strong and splendid, his brother’s smile, uncomplicated and always, always so full of love, it was nauseating.

He’s walking to the pier that juts from his own rooms into the lotus lake. The night is dark and soft, no moon. He’s a shadow, briefly hailed by a pair of the guards that patrol the clan’s residence day and night since the murder of his family and nearly all of his bloodline. It was such a long time ago, yet still feels as if it had happened only yesterday. The guards bow when he tells them who’s before them. They’re used to it – he’s often about at night. He wanders to the edge of the water, links his hands behind his back, and stares into the darkness. He thinks of lotus pods and his brother falling out of a rocking boat for reaching for a pod too far out, of laughter and the cheer of a good harvest. He thinks of his sister, and asks the darkness – as always on such walks – what he can say to her, how he can explain himself. And as always, the night is silent on such matters.

It’s after he’s found his brother in one of the cheap drinking dens that it all started – him losing slowly, surely his grip on his rage, cherished and clutched tightly over almost two decades. No, perhaps earlier than that – perhaps it started when it became clear that things hadn’t been what they seemed, so long ago he couldn’t, wouldn’t, really remember. Not the details, if he could help it. He still envied his brother – this time for the least likely of things, his patchy memory. Then there was his brother’s letter that arrived after he’d left the white clan’s clouded mountain for good. A bland, non-committal scrawl on blotchy paper, like an afterthought. It annoyed him. But it was the first time ever he’d had a letter from him, so he folded it and put it in his sleeve, and he made sure to find his brother and scold him for wasting his second life¹. It was hard to believe he’d settled on the old mountain, this place of graves and ghosts, but really, where else could he have gone and stayed close to His Cut-Sleeve Lordship?

Where else could he have gone, at all, in this world?

His brother was, after all, a ghost himself.

He cannot lie to himself any longer. He’s never been good at it anyway, but he’d believed it all. He’d believed, wanted to believe, hungrily, fervently.  Believed with blind, hot determination, in his brother’s guilt. His mother had always believed it was his brother’s fault: For being rescued from living in the streets, for being effortlessly, casually brilliant at everything he did, for being bright and full of smiles and life. It had been so easy to soak up what his mother screamed about, he’d embraced it and refused to question it. Why wouldn’t he believe his mother? It had also been convenient, not nearly as frightening as the alternative: That he could never match up because he was too ordinary to try the impossible as his brother had done. He’d traded, eagerly, the assurance, the flattery and barely concealed manipulation of strangers for everything his brother was. He’d let himself be swept along by the broad, chattering current of public opinion and public hatred.

At some point before their catastrophic clash, he’d found something in his heart that looked like the shrivelled scrap of another thing. It almost, he thought, had looked like leftover love, but it had become too shrunken, too mummified to recognise. He’d ignored it. He’d let it die.

And then his brother had done the impossible yet again. He’d flaunted death – of course if anyone could do this, it had to be him – and he’d swung back into life as if he’d never died.

After almost two decades, it was just like him to get himself reborn and create another mess. He could have done without that, without his brother stirring up old stuff again. Rake over old wounds, with this cursed forgiveness he had. Oh, he hated his brother’s forgiveness. He hated every breath of him, but most of all he loathed him for the memories that came flooding back, effortless and so beautiful they nearly broke him.

Then he’d fought with His Arrogant, Stuck-Up, Cutsleeve Lordship, who behaved as if he owned his brother, and he’d nearly murdered his brother all over again².

What a monster, he thinks blankly, what a monster… because he’d never been enough of anything, is that what he himself has become?

He had let things run their course against his brother. Let them escalate and done nothing. Later he’d taken part in – no, led - the slaughter of a bunch of frail and sick people, wiping out a starving village struggling for a sliver of life. He’d jabbed a blade at his brother, at this cursed smile, the soft glimmer of light in those haunted eyes.

He has killed people because they reminded him of his brother.

oOo

He hasn’t slept in ages. His eyelids feel heavy and sore. He feels haunted when he roams the quiet halls of his own clan’s home at night, when his nightmares overwhelm him and rob im of the few hours of of rest he can snatch sometimes. Those dreams torment him with fits of clarity he doesn’t care for. His brother. His parents. His sister. The woman he loved and let die along with her village, his brother’s people.  They slop like stinking waste through cracks in the crust on his soul.  He wants to paper those cracks over.

He holds out until he no longer sleeps at all. Until he sees the shock in his nephew’s eyes when the young man visits before joining some friends for a hunt.

This is how he finds himself in this place: Climbing a nearly vanished path onto the old mountain. He has no plans, he only walks. He wants to be rid of the dreams disturbing his rest. He wonders whether his mind’s just blowing things out of proportion, whether everything has been just a blip. Sometimes he wonders how it would be if none of it had happened. Wrong – if he had not done things. If he’d decided differently. But regretting the past, he thinks, is pointless for who can change it?

He thinks of a woman’s dark, questioning eyes, way too clear, the way his brother’s eyes are clear, and she’s looking at him as if waiting for something, for an answer he’s too afraid to give.  For all his bluster, he's never been very courageous.  His brother's core inside him has, somehow, not changed this.

The path is getting steeper, and he has to focus to not lose his footing on the slippery, lichen-covered rocks where the thin, ashy soil has been washed away. Here and there, rivulets of black-tainted water cross the worn stones. It looks like ink.  Thick tufts of grass spill over the barely visible track, and he realises that it’s getting dark even though it’s only late morning. Dried-up trees lean in, growing denser as he keeps scrambling up and up and up. The trees look as if covered in soot. They form a dense forest, with clumps of undergrowth, shrivelled brambles, a single wild apple tree in fruit.

oOo

Chapter Text

It’s been raining for days now – a fine, misty spray – and freezing over in the small hours of the night. In the mornings, the mountain wakes to the furry shimmer of hoar frost on every surface before it thaws into dark, damp patches. The ground beneath is muddy on the surface, soil washed down by rivulets of water streaming across the narrow, overgrown path up the old mountain. Autumn stands on the brink of winter, and the world is soft and grey and cold.

He’s stomping up the last few yards of the steep path leading to the outcrop, his eyes firmly on the treacherous ground. He slips a couple of times but catches himself in time on his sword, avoiding a fall that would have ruined his fine clothes and dignity. He thinks that his brother, ever smart, and mostly perceptive, must have half-expected him to show up at some point. He’s here now, where his brother’s holed up.

There's a small bend in the path, a large rock on the right where it branches off, a well springing from a crack in the mountainside on the left, a thin trickle down the stone.  He pauses just before rounding the bend.  He can see his brother, and for a few heartbeats, he just stands looking on: His brother’s thin figure, kneeling between a couple of rows of measly cabbages, bent to his taks of harvesting the small, pale green heads from a thin strip of soil near the hut. There are other baskets lined up on the edge of the miserable field with a stubble of millet, the straw bundled into loose sheaves on the side. He works fast, evenly, humming a light tune to himself. He’s got his hair in a loose topknot, strands coming out and falling around his face. He’s wearing what looks like one of his old black gowns, cut off at the knees to make it practical for work, with the cut-off fabric serving as a frayed sash. He’s filled a basket and pauses to straighten his back; he rolls his shoulders until his neck cracks a bit and some of the tension in his limbs disperses, and then he catches sight of him.

He steps off the path and closer. He knows his own habitual scowl is firmly in place as he surveys the patchwork of small fields, the meagre harvest of turnips and millet in the baskets. His gaze lingers on the hut they’ve made their home, his brother and His Cutsleeve Lordship, then returns to his brother. “Won’t you offer me tea? Are you too busy?”

His brother never used to think about what ifs, but now he looks at him with large eyes, as if he’s surprised. Perhaps it’s not about him visiting, but that his tone doesn't sound snarky but like a real question. Into this odd break, he follows up, “Are you alone? Up here?” A frown pulls at his brows as he casts around again.

His brother brushes the earth from his knees and lays the knife down by the baskets. “He’s gone to get some thatch, and bamboo poles for building a pipeline from the spring. To water the fields.”

“One of your… of your inventions,” he acknowledges.

“It’ll make things easier. I’ll make tea.” His brother turns and starts walking, and he realises that his brother’s feet are bare in flimsy straw-rope sandals, that his skin is caked with earth and splotchy blue with chill.

He’s never quite noticed poverty like this. He isn’t sure what to feel about it – perhaps his brother is used to it from his childhood days. Or he doesn’t care. He doesn’t look as if he cared.  And he's refused his offer of help before, sending his gift of a few bales of winter stores - beans, millet, oil - to a bunch of commoners somewhere in the valley.

He follows his brother, two steps behind, to the hut. He ducks under the low lintel of the flimsy door and steps into the smells and dankness, the gloom inside. It’s too dark to see his brother’s expression now.

But he can see him nod at a straw cushion by the firepit that casts feeble warmth. “There. Place of honour.” His brother lights a lantern made of coarsely woven hemp cloth stretched over a boxy bamboo frame. He puts a guttering oil-light inside, and places it by the fire, between the two of them. It’s not much but they can see each other’s faces.

He sits down, carefully arranging his silk robes. His eyes wander. He wears his old frown but his expression is without disapproval.

His brother has thin hands. He always had thin hands. He watches his brother put the iron kettle on the teastove and set out the pot, the box with tea leaves, and three cups. His brother's movements are quick, practiced. There is no ceremony, just working hands making a pot of tea. His brother isn’t embarrassed at the poverty that sits in every corner of their dwelling: evident in the tamped earth floor, the wicker walls that would need hangings to keep the draft out, the wooden cooking tools and plain earthenware bowls. It's stark and grim, and his brother doesn't seem to care; he never cared for such things for himself.  The only items that stand out are the two swords on the wall above the platform bed, and a silken quilt that looks like something from the white clan. There are a few more signs that this isn’t the home of an ordinary farmer but they’re hidden unless one has eagle eyes: The zither, their triple gowns, a precious lacquer writing box, all stashed away in baskets by the far wall of the hut.

He twitches his nose: The place smells strongly of damp earth, pickled vegetables, and dank clothes. It pongs of smoke and the fish drying in the rafters, of barely cured rabbit skins and stale millet porridge.

His brother pours simmering water over the tealeaves and sits down, crosslegged, opposite. “Why are you here?” His voice is bright, perhaps a little hoarse.

The cold, he thinks, those sandals. The smoke in this miserable hovel.  He watches the steam rising from the spout of the coarse clay pot, before glancing up to meet his brother’s eyes. “I’ve been here before.”

His brother’s mouth shapes into a lopsided half-smile. He doesn’t seem at all surprised. Of course he'd know - perhaps his ghosts have tattled.  “But why are you here now?” he asks, oddly neutral.

“I can leave again.”

“You will leave again,” his brother points out, blandly, kindly, without malice. “But you are here now.”

He cannot quite bring himself to answer yet. He nods at the teapot. “Is it ready?” He doesn’t wait but leans forward and pours tea for both of them, first his brother’s, then for himself. It’s rude because he’s a guest and behaves like he’s lording it here, but in a way he’s just being himself. Almost like a younger brother.  He sets the pot down with a firm clonk. The tea smells strong and good of smoke and fermented bitterness. In the small clay cups, by the light of the hemp lantern, it looks like liquid amber.

His brother cannot laugh or make light. He can no longer pretend. He can barely smile, and it looks stiff on his lips.

He turns the hot cup between his fingers. “I didn’t mean to… I didn’t want to kill you.”

Again, hangs unspoken between them. He lets it. He drains his cup and for a moment closes his eyes, savouring the bitter burn in the back of his throat, the cloying, pungent-sweet aroma bathing the sides of his tongue, before setting the cup down softly. It is strange to do this with care. Then he curls his fingers against his palms. His face is free of his usual anger. There are traces, he knows: Creases grooved into his skin, to carven to even out again; muscles bunched for so long they’ve set into their anger-shape. But his eyes are quiet when he finally answers: “I tried to go there.” To the other side of the dead mountain. To the grave of hope. Where under the thin, poor soil lie the ghosts of innocents. “I couldn’t.”

Perhaps he’d meant to ask, but it is a knife too sharp to touch. It hangs between them, with its cold, hostile gleam, its blood-sticky heft.

“I wish,” he says, in his hard, dry voice, “I wish...” He cannot say it. There are no words that fit the monstrosities he has been part of. His rage had been so much lighter than this weight he knows is guilt. He wants unsee what he’s seen, in those last few months, in those last few hours before climbing up his brother’s mountain and seeking him out.  For what, he thinks , what was the point?  He just wants to be able to sleep again, unbothered by dreams, his mind scrubbed blank and clean.

His brother refills the tea cups. “I know,” he says. It sounds cautious and a bit flat. But he’s refilled the cups, and he refills the pot, pours fresh hot water onto the soaked tea leaves.

He, as a guest in this small, dark hut, on a ghost-ridden mountain, may stay a little - if he is brave enough, if he can match his brother’s brittle strength in this, whatever it is they’re having, in this smelly hovel where they live, his brother and His Cutsleeve Lordship.

He and his brother, they don’t really talk. They drink tea. The day is muted. Fog starts choking the light.

His brother stirs the millet porridge in the iron pot half-sunk into the embers in the fireplace. He refills the cups until the second pot of tea is emptied. He chucks a handful of lumpy charcoal into the fire, around the millet pan. It sputters and smokes, black and knotty against the deep red glow.

He pats down his robes as if to assure himself he’s still in one piece, unblemished by curses. He meets his brother’s dark eyes. “Thank you,” he says, feeling oddly quiet. “For the tea.” He rises, his movements hard and angular like all of him.

His brother gets to his feet too. They step outside; he remembers to duck, to avoid banging his head on the beam above the door.  The weather is changing, gusts of wind driving the fog into wet, roiling clouds.  He'll need to hurry to get back before nightfall.

“I need to get water for washing,” his brother says as he falls into step and they walk to the spring on the edge of the path down into the valley.

He pauses long enough to watch his brother fill the wooden pail, and when his brother hoists it up with both hands, he tells him, “I am glad.”

That his brother is alive. That even if they can’t fix the past, they’re both here, in the gusting wind atop a dead mountain, in the thinning light that’s blotting out time until there’s just this moment. His brother smiles, and this time it’s less guarded. “Me too.”

He stares at his brother and makes to turn onto the path down the mountain, back to where life is pulsing in the streets of towns and villages. He pauses, and over his shoulder he says, heavily, “I’ll try again.” To visit the ghosts living on the mountain with his brother. To beg forgiveness. Or, perhaps just sit there for a while and let them read his soul.

oOo

Chapter Text

He keeps the smile on his lips as he watches Former Brother start walking away, and then he catches sight of his love, frozen on the other side of the path, his back piled high with bundled thatch for mending their roof, and dragging a couple of long, green bamboo poles behind him by a rope slung over his shoulders. His love, who has the face of a prince and the body and soul of a god, looks like a peasant dressed in rags.  A beast of burden.

He sighs, then waves. “My love. You’re back. We can eat now.”

That night, his love, his prince, his god, turns towards him and lays his hand on his upper arm. In the vague half-light of the hemp lamp, they look at each other for a few heartbeats, a small eternity. The other’s chest is heaving, and his face pallid. His throat is bobbing a few times before he speaks, barely above a shaky whisper, “Do you know…”

He slides his hand up the other’s flank and into his hair. He cards through it, softly, gently, soothing. “What, my love? Was it a bad dream?”

The other’s eyes are wide and ocean-deep. Night sails in their swimming depths, black and starless. “A dream...”

“A dream,” he says firmly.

The fingers on his bicep clench, pushing into his flesh, as if to test, assuring themselves of his reality, the texture of skin and flesh and bones. “Do you know what you looked like,” his other tries again, “when he came to see you today?”

Ah, he thinks, and smiles softly – the kind of smile he has only for the other. Tears trail soundlessly, silvery shimmering paths on the other's unmoving features carved from ivory and jade. He leans in to kiss them, quietly, reverently.  “I love you so much,” he says, “So very much. I want to stay with you in every life I have. Who knows, there might be a few more yet, am I not like a fox? I live, I die, I come back. They don’t want me in the underworld.”  He draws back enough to meet the other’s eyes again. They blink slowly, once.

“You had the same smile,” the other says barely breathing, and he cannot even begin to imagine, “when you fell.” When I let go. When you died.

He dies every time he sees his former brother.

He isn’t particularly fond of lying, but he excels at masking – what good is the stark truth if it holds no consolation, no reprieve? What good is it if it rakes over an unchangeable past until they choke on clouds of bitter ash? There’s a time for that kind of burden, and a time for relief.

“Ah, my love, my beautiful love, it was the light. It was a bit of smoke. It was nothing at all.” He leans in to kiss once more, lips to lips, until the other’s eyes close, brows drawing tight, grip soft on his arm, and his blood warms with so much tenderness it flows from his mouth with every breath, from his fingertips with every butterfly touch. “There,” he whispers, his voice a bit scratchy and bright with pain and smiles and too much love to contain, so it cracks a bit like clear new ice on a black lake, and it shimmers and glitters until it dazzles the haunting from the other’s shroud-pale features and his poor grieving heart.

oOo

Chapter Text

It takes him a while to get used to this. To live without his rage that’s been his shell, his crutch, his friend for most of his life. There had been a boy once, a young boy who threw himself over his elder brother when his mother lashed out with her whip. There had been a youth on the brink of manhood who would challenge his mother for his elder brother’s sake. There had always been the rage inside him, the fire he’d inherited, observed, burn his mother’s jealous soul. There had been his elder sister who’d given herself to save his elder brother’s life; and then he’d gone and killed him and his smile and laugher, he’d killed him many times over since, and he’d nearly killed him twice more since he showed up again in a new body, with his old, old soul, his shining soul and way too clear eyes.

He kneels in the clan’s ancestral hall and gazes at the memorial tablets of his father, mother, sister. He leans forward to light incense for them. He bows deeply, slowly, closing his eyes, but closing his eyes makes things worse, so he opens them and stares at the polished bamboo floor planks, still bright and pale golden since the reconstruction of his clan’s home, when the old ones had been dark with centuries. But all he sees, as if he was there, is a narrow path, rarely walked, up a fog-choked mountain, a small hut, and a figure bending towards stony earth to cut a few cabbages. It could be anywhere: A peasant harvesting cabbage from a poor field by a poor hovel.

He straightens his back and gives them another gaze, unclenching his fingers and settling them flat on his silk-clad thighs. His sister had died to protect his elder brother, this hateful smile that was so hatefully forgiving. So… indulgent. As if he’d seen everything there was to see and didn’t expect anything, nothing at all, from him. Af if he was ready to accept anything, ready to deal with it as it might happen.

He saw a figure walking a shaded path among trees. It could have been idyllic, but the trees were black and the ground was ashes. There was no sky. It could be a man or a woman; he could not see them clearly enough; they were walking away, back turned to him, distant yet their distance neither shrank nor increased.

His sister had died, and he’d taken her life again by killing his brother regardless. He felt cold sweat sheen his brow and palms, his chest burned, and his skin prickled painfully. It was silent in the ancestral hall. He could hear his own breathing, laboured in the stillness of the place with its lamps and smell of incense and newness. He thought of the woman he’d once loved, and whose eyes were so much like his elder brother’s – clear, unexpectant. Wise. As if they’d seen his soul, and written him off.

It still hurt. It hurt more with his rage stripped off him like a tattered old cloak. That, too, was his brother’s doing. But he had hardened his soul and his mind, he no longer was the angry, fragile youth. He’d killed his brother, he’d trampled over his sister’s soul, he’d murdered a village. Since then, he’d learned to live with his ghosts. Now he needed to learn to live with himself. He rose and straightened his robes. From his sleeve, he took a small tablet with a woman's name on it and placed it there, next to his sister’s. His brother, irrational as he tended to be with his clear eyes and soft smile, might have approved – perhaps their souls would meet and find sisterly companionship with each other in the afterlife. Talk about women’s business. He adjusted the tablet so it stood facing him. He didn’t ask forgiveness. Not here.

When there’s no-one left who has the right to forgive you, what is the point of asking?

He found his answer later, lying on his bed in his day clothes, his mind half adrift in an uneasy non-sleep filled with ghosts.

oOo

He took his leave from clan business for a few days. He put his nephew in charge, this kid who’d grown into a surprisingly clearheaded, forceful young man. As if he’d converted his child’s rage, his childish bitterness and lonely anger, into power. He’d also developed a frighteningly perceptive streak – those eyes, that look he knew so well by now. Clear, as if reading his soul. Compassionate, coupled with a hard edge. When had that happened? Ah, yes, that too, was somehow his brother’s influence. The kid – the young man – had cut through his pain, through his loss, examined the facts, picked apart the old stories that had been but a web of lies, and found his own truth. With it had come understanding, and understanding had brought peace and affection. His nephew liked the man he now called Elder Uncle. They liked one another.

He didn’t know what to think about that. Perhaps it was good, he reasoned with himself, since his brother – half-starved and dirt-poor and so infuriatingly unassuming – was still the most powerful man he knew. Spinning his loathsome flute, he was walking, dreamlike, along the ghostly path, a shadow among shadows, his edges dissolving into darkness, and could still smile. It was good for his nephew, their dead sister’s child, to have this kind of power hovering behind him, looming protective and black like night. His elder brother had loved their sister, and loved this child for her sake and for the child’s own. He wouldn’t hesitate if he was needed in all his black infamy. It was a strangely comforting thought, as if a burden on his back had been eased. It made his spine softer, his muscles loose some of their rictus. He slumped a little, a minute unclenching of his gut, in what he accepted as relief.

It was, he recognised, a shadow of the past, of what could have been: His elder brother shielding his back. The thought held no bitterness anymore. Instead, it had a hard, bright clarity that felt… good. Like stepping from a stormy night into a dew-lit autumn morning.

His nephew flew in from his own clan’s glittering halls to stay for a few days; He filled the tile-and-bamboo buildings on the lotus-edged pier with his energy and loud, commanding voice – much like himself, he thought with satisfaction – as if he was everywhere at the same time, and that was so very much like his Elder Uncle. They didn’t talk as much as shout at each other – what needed doing, what could wait – but this time there was no anger, no scolding. It was simply the way they spoke, and when they were done, his nephew briefly touched his wrist and pressed. What was that, he puzzled, comfort? Encouragement? How strange that the child should comfort the man. But this too felt good, sending tendrils of warmth into his cold limbs, into his blank guts. He took his leave easily. For the first time since his family perished in a storm of blood, he was unburdened. As light as a wisp of cloud.

Free to go, he went to try again. He took a room in an inn in the town at the foot of the old mountain and stayed the night. He remembered meeting his elder brother here, a lifetime ago, to take him to see their sister in her crimson wedding gown. He recalled meeting him here again, and in other drinking places, to watch him get drunk and to argue with him. He remembered another fight, and his blade piercing his brother’s stomach¹. Every image clear and coloured in his mind, yet they didn’t touch his heart. He took a bath, ate soup and drank some tea. He slept soundly, for the first time in a long time, and rose just before dawn. He washed, had some more tea, and dressed in a fresh set of robes he’d brought along, splendid silks and brocades, purple and silver shimmering like lotus blooms and endless waves.

He didn’t meditate – he’d never been patient enough, focused enough to spend his time just sitting around thinking of nothing – but stepped out into the dawn-grey streets, already busy with a constant bustle of donkeys, mules, carts and people going to set up their stalls for the daily market, early customers browsing the stalls already there, traders getting their tea and morning porridge from a few street kitchens hard at work over steaming pots and pans to catch the early custom. The smells of strong, bitter tea and millet gruel suffused the damp air. He soaked it all up and walked. Before him, he saw the path as if traced by a golden hair. He’d try again – he’d go up the old mountain, but not to see his brother and ask for help.

He’d go to seek out the ghost of the woman he’d loved. He’d go and sit among the ashes, and let the ghosts of a village come for him.

END