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The brat pins her against the wall, towering over her and breathing heavily when all she can do is laugh at his insolence; she hates him, she despises him, she wants to be him; she — is him.
She — is his future; he — is her past.
She — had lost, and she — had won; he had not yet experienced any of it.
A boy, that's all.
A boy who has lost before; she can see it in his eyes, she can feel it in his chi, not quite controlled and not quite clear; she remembers the date — Tang Bo died less than three days ago.
Tang Bo is dead, and she's wearing too much green and black for his eyes when she can't figure out where she is or how she got here. (She remembers the battle, last and hard, she remembers Cheonma, no longer as exalted as he was a hundred years ago; time seemed to have power over him too, to drive him mad; the demon said strange things; she cut off his head; she won, and she fell through the darkness of someone else's blood as if it were a passageway to another world; her children are fine, they should be fine).
"You won't even ask my name?" she laughs when her past, her younger version, the Plum Blossom Saint Sword, is drunker than ever and has no intention of sobering up. He bites her exposed neck, painfully and tangibly, causing her to draw in air sharply.
Part of her mind remembers this: he came to the brothel to drink, to distract himself, to forget, when that was impossible. She wants to tell him that this wound will never heal, that there will only be more of these wounds to come, that they still fester inside herself— instead she lets these familiar hands undress her; it's a strange feeling, knowing someone else's (someone else's?) calluses better than her own current ones.
He smells stronger of alcohol than she ever recognized when she was abusing it herself, being him, being herself, and she must have more important things to do than all that, and she pulls his teeth away from her already bitten bare shoulder to pounce on him herself.
It's easy: change their position, press just as hard against the wall, make him fall down, sit on top of her, and press, press, press, without disturbing his hands in the slightest, opening her clothes, touching her skin, crumpling her breasts, squeezing her sides until they're bruised — she knows how he thinks; it's her thoughts, it's their mind.
She doesn't know if Cho Sam's body is virgin, but she unhappily suspects that it isn't (she feels sorry for the girl; she wants to comfort her and protect her from anything that might happen to her), and she herself has never had to do anything like that in her life: too busy raising children, the cult, and the war. Still, the thought of doing something like that to herself feels foreign.
Saint Sword groans as she presses her knee against his hardening cock; it makes her chuckle; she knows they like a little pain.
"Have you been told you're handsome?" it was true, she could appreciate it better now than through any bronze mirrors in the past; sure, Cho Sam's face was more delicate and neat, but her first face, no less attractive. And no, he wasn't told he was handsome. More often than not, he was called a monster.
The blush from the alcohol only grows even redder as she masterfully disentangles his Elder Huashan clothes, they're familiar garments, a familiar order that she could do it with her eyes closed, and nearly shrieks when this arbitrary brat flips them over again, pinning her to the floor, biting her again, this time on her breasts, around her nipple, with a force that she's sure will leave marks, as if he's an animal and not a human. She wraps her slender legs around his body, only to slap her heels against his lower back; trashy brat.
He nuzzles his nose into her, into the hollow between her breasts, and breathes the excessively hot air against her skin.
"Delicious..." remarks Saint Sword quietly, and she realizes that she probably still smells like plum blossoms from the divine art.
She pauses for a moment, burying her fingers in hair so similar to her own black hair, pulling him closer.
The plums are home.
It's mean of her, but she uses it again to flip them over, riding his torso, otherwise at this rate her breasts won't heal even with qi. She pauses for a moment, savoring what she was — amazing and perfect body, she can recognize that in hindsight. No wonder so many women and men have fallen (or rather: are falling, since she is in the past?) at his feet.
"Now be obedient, lie there and don't move", because she remembers her size, and she realizes her other body is miniature, dammit; she plans to leave here at night, not crawl away.
But, ah, where are they and obedience?
Is it to feel sahyeong all the time? This saje samae realized everything and realized how wrong I was, sahyeong!
Saint Sword rips her pants, and goddamn it, she's going to walk out in his whites now, leaving him with nothing and not caring how big they are for her to slip two fingers into her at once.
Shit, fuck, she hadn't done that in a long time.
She never did that as a woman.
That's different from being a man, whether you're down or up; damn. She clamps her mouth shut because she refuses to make any more humiliating noises than she already has; the brat sits up, pushing her back so that her buttocks rest against his hard cock; his hand pushes her own away from her mouth, he again, biting rather than kissing, but it's mutual, it's shareable between them.
She's being stretched, and she should be grateful for that, that he just didn't pounce on her (it's weird to think of him that way when she herself would never do that to anyone in her second or first life), and it's harder than she thought it would be when she considers that those two fingers are a lot.
This body is too small, childhood and starvation on the streets be damned; no wonder Soso was worried about her while she was just standing next to some of the men (brats, all of them).
She clapped him on the shoulder, feeling the tension building, she needed air and she needed words:
"I'm ready", even though it wasn't quite true, but if he continued she would lose control; are all women this sensitive or is it just this body?
It's a couple of awkward movements as his fingers disappear, and it's a slightly more familiar feeling: she wants them back, she wants something in herself other than the emptiness of dissatisfaction — apparently men and women aren't too different in that.
She realized she'd lost the very control she'd lost when the crackpot snot lifted her with all too obvious ease, and she had a second to thank the few gods (or curse later) who hear her that this body wasn't pristine.
The insolent evil arrogant brat just lowers her all the way down, and she has to grasp his hips until they're bruised so he doesn't dare lift her back up; he hisses, and she thinks: good, because that was so damn spontaneous, painful and delightful.
She needs one fucking second; more respect for your elders, asshole.
He moves his hips, just a little, because she still hasn't let go of him, and her breathing isn't as even as she'd like it to be. She looks up at him, and he dares her to look hurt. Part of her is pleased with that expression, but the other part of her, the part that's soft on her children, wants to comfort him and make things right. Damn it.
"You..." she takes the breath she needs, "you do it slower, understand?" because she'll fall apart if he does it again.
Saint Sword nods with his face still red from alcohol, his hands stroking her waist, he leans towards her, bumping his nose against her cheek as if apologizing; she knows that's how he apologizes — she does as well, and so she relaxes her hands, preferring to hold onto someone else's shoulders.
Slowly, just as she'd instructed, his hands slide down her waist, down under her hips as his lips kiss her cheek, her jaw, her ear, no biting; he lifts her up, and, fuck, she thinks, she'd literally felt her uterus before. Shit, shit, shit, she definitely overestimated herself.
He lowers her down and the tension runs through her body with a discharge; it's still something between pain and pleasure. If this is what all her (his) past women and men have felt, she feels obliged to apologize to them.
"Warm", Saint Sword exhales into her ear with an equally hot breath, and she would laugh if she could; funny, most of the time she feels like a cold dead person.
She's being lifted up and she's being lowered, up and down, still as ruthlessly stretching and obediently slow.
She thinks she's going to go crazy just a little more.
She kicks his heels into her lower back again.
"Hurry up", she orders, knowing she'll regret it, and the second she does, that cocky brat lowers her just as sharply as he did the first time, wrenching a frank moan out of her.
She hates him.
"You have a beautiful voice", he says in her ear, and she clutches vengefully at his hair, pulling back painfully, nuzzling into his mouth the same way he nuzzled into her neck earlier. It's best if he shuts up.
His movements don't waver for a moment.
She lacks air, she lacks patience, she lacks... everything he has.
He makes her cum first; and she feels like she's falling apart as he keeps thrusting her on top of him, over and over, for long, long moments as her body struggles to get over the overexcitement, and she can't help but whimper before he stops, pressing his fingers into her flesh, thrusting into her so deep that it really hurts, and so-so good that she almost forgets to breathe.
Their heavy breathing — is one for two, and it seems to her that for one moment, they were one again.
It's not what she expected.
Not just dying and being resurrected, not just going back in time, not just letting a younger version of herself fuck herself, but getting pregnant.
She realizes this on a date when it's too late to change anything, and when time is flowing around her in a reverse order that makes no sense.
One month to ten years back, and now she can already see the Saint of Swords with the Dark Saint, drinking one pitcher for two in broad daylight; and now she can already see the young face of the sahyeong, not even a sect leader yet, without wrinkles or gray hair, from afar, afraid to approach him.
Winter is followed by fall, fall by summer, and summer by spring.
Her life has become even more wrong than she realized, and it's harder for her to find someone for anything because people forget her, because their meetings haven't happened yet, because she's erased from existence, hurtling backwards until eventually it's fall again, right after winter, and she has to give birth.
It's the wrong time that takes her life; it's not quite the right place because she didn't make it to Huashan, whatever that time was; it... takes her life.
And it starts her life.
Suddenly it's all so clear. So very-very far away from here. So long ago that realization comes with the cry of the child who will have their soft pink eyes.
Once upon a time, a very-very long time ago, Cheong Myeong, the Divine Dragon, male, had found a technique, old, shabby, and forbidden, which had been sealed in three different ways, though it probably should have been destroyed — it was the knowledge of a trap that even a deity could be imprisoned in; and he had read it, and he had learned it, and he had kept it as his last resort if he couldn't defeat the Heavenly Demon; and he was losing, and he had applied it.
When Cheong Myeong, the Divine Dragon, female, remembers this, she only has a little time to say a single word to the midwife:
"Huashan", before the life was gone from her eyes and her son was carried to the gates of the majestic sect, leaving him there.
And the wheel began to turn again.