Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

The sun is rising in the bus when the backdoor creaks open. Hong Lu’s eyes flicker with dim recognition as he turns his gaze from the window to the individual who’d just slammed the door shut behind her. 

“Ah, Ryoshu. You’re going to wake someone up like that~” he chuckles, tucking his legs underneath him until they ache and sting with the force of pulling them towards him. She stares at him, red eyes unreadable and an unlit cigarette in her hand. 

“N.M.B.” she says. Not my business , Hong Lu helpfully translates in his head, but he does catch Ryoshu casting an inscrutable expression at the door, as if afraid someone is going to waltz out of it and start beating her with a slipper. Hong Lu remembers when he’d accidentally slammed the door to his quarters; Xiren hadn’t stopped with her gentle remarks until lunchtime, and he’d given her the big baby eyes. 

“What are you doing, up so early?” he asks. Ryoshu sits down on the seat opposite him, hand clasped around the odachi she never unsheathes. Hong Lu’s fingers remember the feeling of the sheath on his own, a seemingly unbearable weight tied to the hilt of the blade that refused to unsheathe itself. 

Resting her chin on her hand, Ryoshu stares out the window, her cigarette now lit and blowing a gentle cloud of smoke into the early-morning light. “Couldn’t sleep anymore,” she says, then clicks her tongue. “Forgot to close the blinds.” 

Hong Lu swallows hard, a hand at his throat as he thinks about the feeling of smoke in his lungs and nicotine in his veins. or whatever Ryoshu has in her cigarettes - stronger than a regular narcotic; they made him feel like he was back outside the ruins of the old H corp, smoke in his throat and ringing in his ears and one hand covering his eye as he shakily ran outside. 

“How about you?” she asks. And god, this is the first time the two of them are having a conversation. A proper conversation where Ryoshu isn’t threatening to S.Y.N.C. and where Hong Lu isn’t busy staring at something uninteresting; a wall or a floor or the back of Ishmael's very impressive mane of hair. 

“I…” he trails off, finds he can’t explain why he’s out here. Can’t explain why last night, he’d woken up in a cold sweat with panic stifling his screams and feathers smothering his airway. It's been years since he’s had that nightmare. The chugging of the bus usually keeps it far, far away from him, and he’s usually too tired to even dream, let alone dream of such things that he has buried in the far corners of his mind. 

“The sun is nice, isn’t it?” he settles for answering, and lays his head on top of his hands, staring outside the bus as it slowly drives along roads he recognises towards a place he has very much hoped never to return to. His eye is sore and stinging. He hopes it’s not because of the tears. 

Ryoshu sits down beside him, her sword placed neatly against the back of the seats as they drive over a pothole in the road. He hears her swear under her breath, Japanese as harsh as the sharpness of her blade, and Charon looks back with the same deadpan expression on her face as always.

“The road is wobbly,” she says as a precaution, as if to warn them. Hong Lu wants to tell her it’s too late, that they’ve already driven over the pothole, but something in his throat stops him from opening his mouth. Too late. There are a lot of things that are too late for him to vocalise. 

“Last week,” Ryoshu grunts, exhaling smoke between the two of them. Hong Lu watches the vague image of his face screwed up in fearful, thunderous anger in his mind’s eye shatter. “How do you feel?” 

( “Ah-“ Hong Lu brushes the bangs back from his forehead, watching them sweep back in front of his eyes. 

Red. These are not his eyes. 

Blue. There is so much anger in his own. 

It’s like looking into a mirror.) 

“Mmh,” he hums with the same intonation he’s always used. “I was hoping you wouldn’t ask, actually,” he says lightly. 

Ryoshu exhales, flicks her cigarette to the floor of the bus where it joins the smoking remains of a growing pile of cigarette butts. “Why?” she asks, lighting another one. The flame flickers weakly before lighting the cigarette. 

Ryoshu sucks air in through her teeth, avoiding the actual cigarette. Hong Lu wonders if she's doing it to be polite to him. He doesn’t mind it when she smokes. 

He never minded much about what went on in the bus, but he does remember Ishmael complaining about the near ever-present scent of smoke in the bus. The use of the word would set both Outis and Gregor on edge, but Ryoshu would just smile sardonically and light another to Ishmael’s chagrin. In fact, whatever Ryoshu was smoking often reminded him of the incense they used in Daguanyuan, young Baoyu kneeling over a sand-covered pit with sticks of incense stuck inside the pot, Xichun beside him pretending to pray with only one eye closed and the other not-so-stealthily looking up at him. 

It also reminds him of the underground laboratory where grandmother had put a blindfold over his eyes, the scent of herbs and musty, rotting flesh filling his lungs and tying knots in his windpipe, retching on the ground, staring at the tile while roots grew from spinal cords reaching desperately for the sun. 

“Hahaha… it always feels weird staring at yourself in someone else’s body, doesn’t it?” he responds. “But wow, Ryoshu~ you wielded my weapon so well.” 

(Seeing himself in Ryoshu’s body is perhaps a shock only eclipsed by seeing Ryoshu in his body. or to be more specific, seeing himself from an outsider’s point of view. 

Ah, he’s gotten skinnier since he’d left Daguanyuan, and there are scars on his wrists and fingers and face that weren’t there before his departure. His eyes trace the thin pale tissue criss-crossing his knuckles and the calluses on his hands, find the sharp scar on his face that begins from his jaw and traces upwards. He doesn’t quite fill out his uniform as much as he did. 

Hong Lu has a habit of keeping mirrors away from him, away from his room so he doesn’t have to look in them and see the elders looking back through his eye. He supposes this is like looking in a mirror, seeing himself in front of him. He wishes he could ask Ryoshu to kindly close her left eye, but when he opens his mouth, the only thing that comes out is a laugh in a voice that isn’t his own.

He wonders if the xianren realise that it’s not him in his own body right now. Whether the red of Ryoshu’s wrath is tinting the usually tranquil blue of his jade eye, whether they’re seeing sharper and more in detail now due to the anger present in Ryoshu’s gaze. He wonders if they can see him, in Ryoshu’s body, whether they still see Jia Baoyu, the precious jade of Hongyuan, or if they see Hong Lu, the name he took when boarding Mephistopheles. He wonders if they can see what he’s done to his own body. 

He opens his mouth again, to say something, anything, but the only thing that comes out is the trembling of his hand on the sheath of Ryoshu’s sword. Her eyes narrow at him. “Ahaha~ this sword is kind of hard to unsheathe, isn’t it?” he asks cheerfully. 

He watches his eyes darken, and a snarl stretches across his face. Ryoshu’s smoke envelops him in a hazy mist of incense and nicotine. “If you’re going to unsheathe it, prepare for the consequences,” she hisses. 

“Wow,” Meursault - Rodion - says, whistling. He's not used to seeing that cheerful expression on her- his face. He wonders if the xianren are enjoying themselves, whether they enjoy seeing him in a panic looking at his own body, at his own eye that no doubt is currently reflecting his distress back to the pool of memories in Tiekan Temple. “I’ve never seen that face on Hong Lu before, Ryoshu~”

He imagines the xianren rejoicing over getting to see little Baoyu’s expressions again.

<<How are you so comfortable chain-smoking in someone else’s body?>> Dante asks. Ryoshu puffs out smoke, and it looks incredibly strange coming from his lips. When he was young, he wasn’t allowed exposure to any substance that might otherwise harm his body.

So he laughs instead. “I don't mind,” he says. Ryoshu narrows her eyes at him. 

He wonders if, of all the people on this bus, upon the shaking and swaying of Mephistopheles, she is the one person who can see through his absurdism to the crying, terrified child underneath. 

He wonders if, inside of his body right now, she can feel him clawing for breath from his own lungs.) 

Of course, he has gotten plenty hurt since embarking on his journey, from the sting of that man’s weapon in the forest where they found Dante, to the beatdown they experienced in K. Corp to the endless waves of the wild hunt in the basement of Heathcliff’s childhood home.

His fingers trace over his heart — the patch of scar tissue he shares with the rest of the people on the bus, a pale reminder every time he looks at himself that his time is not his anymore. Ryoshu’s eyes follow his movements, but if she notices, she doesn’t say anything. 

“Then… how did Ryoshu feel in my body~?” he asks cheerfully, trying to change the subject. “I heard you thought my guandao was too long for you?” He gestures to the blade next to him, propped against the wall and dangerously close to slamming down on his fingers if Mephistopheles were to rock just a little too hard. 

Ryoshu makes a face that he hasn’t seen her make before, something a mix of discomfort and curiosity. He wonders what Ryoshu would think if she knew the full extent of what the elders had done to him. Would she consider it ‘ art ’, or would she turn her nose up at it? Hong Lu finds, also uncomfortably to himself, that he doesn’t know which one he’d prefer. He decides he doesn’t care; Ryoshu can think what she wants of his role in Hongyuan’s slithering, miasmic cycle. At the end of the day, it’s all the same to him. 

“Your eye,” she says, and Hong Lu knows he can’t hide it when she points at it, narrowing her gaze at the fathoms of Tiekan Temple within his vision. “What's wrong with it?”

He closes his eye, winking at Ryoshu. Panic bubbles underneath him somewhere so far away that he’s nearly forgotten what it feels like, but he shoves it away, forces jia Baoyu to carry more than he can bear, and it’s Hong Lu that smiles at Ryoshu, winking at her and saying with a cheery laugh- “Ahaha… we all have our secrets to keep, don’t we~? If I told you everything, that wouldn’t be fun.” 

Ryoshu’s eyes narrow even more, impossibly, nearly glaring at him as she exhales a plume of smoke from her cigarette. Hong Lu thinks she looks rather like a demon right now, smoke wreathing her features, red eyes nearly glowing the same way Vergillius’s do. “Being in your body hurt, Hong Lu,” she says. 

Oh, this is the first time she’s said his name , he thinks to himself. Ryoshu is rarely this forthcoming with her emotions or thoughts or words — she is rarely this forthcoming in general. He wonders what exactly being in his body feels like. He wishes he could experience his own body outside of it. He wonders if it hurts the same way the reindeer horns do. 

( “A new identity was extracted from Mephistopheles today,” Faust announces near the close of the day. 

“I wonder who it’s for?” Ishmael asks curiously, not looking at Faust from where she sits by the window. 

Outis snaps to attention. Hong Lu has always wondered what had happened to her to make her that way. “Executive Manager! I shall test the ID if you desire!” 

Yi Sang looks at Hong Lu with an inscrutable expression on his face. His wings flicker in and out of existence in the dim light of dusk. “Perhaps this one will belong to Hong Lu?” Outis sits down, and Ishmael nods thoughtfully. No one really argues with Yi Sang about matters concerning the mirror. 

Dante looks a little more uncomfortable than they usually do, Hong Lu notes, folding his hands over the back of Faust's seat and looking at her where she stands at the front of the bus. Their hands are holding an ID with a recognisable symbol on the back of the card. It’s sparking and flickering like it doesn’t want to be held by the manager. As if, if they let go, the ID would simply pop back into the mirror. An existence that didn’t want to be extracted. 

<< It’s an R. corp ID…>> they say, and Ishmael looks at Gregor unsubtly. <<it’s for Hong Lu.>> Hong Lu smiles placidly, having already spied his symbol on the back of the card. 

“Another rabbit?” Heathcliff asks from the back of the car where he’s been training Sinclair to be more aggressive with his halberd. Hong Lu remembers when Heathcliff had cornered him shortly before their stint at La Manchaland to ask him if he was doing alright with his weapon. They had done a few rounds outside of the bus when it had stopped, and it was only after Hong Lu disarmed Heathcliff a little too literally that they had stopped, and Heathcliff had admitted that perhaps Hong Lu’s weaponry skills did not need honing the same way Sinclair’s did. 

<< Uhm…>> Dante’s hand shifts on the card as they open their PDA. <<It’s a reindeer identity.>> 

Something relieving washes over Hong Lu. 

<<Hong Lu?>> Dante ticks. They look at him, a little apologetic. <<Would you mind coming to test it with me? Just a quick run in the luxcavations.>> 

Hong Lu smiles, “Ah, of course, Dante. Lead the way~” Their manager opens the backdoor.

Afterwards, Hong Lu finds Dante apologising profusely again and again and again as he sits on the ground with vomit on the floor in front of him, a nosebleed, and a pounding headache worming its way through his skull towards his eye, like it wants to pop the jade out and replace it with another antler. He feels the sting and clawing feeling of living material tearing through his flesh and bone long after Dante slots the ID card away and promises quietly that they will use this ID as sparingly as possible.)

“Ahaha~” he laughs. “I’m sorry, Ryoshu, I really am.” 

It doesn't sound genuine. He can hear it from the light laugh and the flippant tone, but there is a knot in his stomach and a choking feeling in his lungs and he can’t make it sound any more genuine than it already is. 

He hums softly. “if i may ask, was the experience… what was it… was there anything comparable to it?” He’s not really sure why he’s asking. Maybe he wants assurance that he isn’t alone in his pain. Maybe he’s just morbidly curious of a life without constant fear. 

Maybe you’re just like your grandmother, an insidious voice says in his head. Maybe you just want to see someone else in pain. 

Hong Lu jerks frantically, searching for phantoms that don’t exist the same way he did when he was a child. It’s been so long since he heard a voice like that, not since his words had sent Daiyu reeling with confusion and cold horror and had caused the first signs of a sneer to cross Xichun’s face whenever she saw him afterwards. 

He remembers with horrible clarity looking into the mirrors in his room, a room full of them from floor to ceiling, looking at himself in the mirrors and laughing so loudly it was a wonder no one had heard him. Xiren found him hours later with bloody fists and broken mirrors curled into himself, hoping to hide himself from the Jia Baoyus in the mirrors who all clapped tinnily like a repeating heartbeat, like gunshots loud and clear in his ears- congratulations , they mouthed at him; you are just like us . 

Tears streaming down his face, blindfold soaked with sorrow- was he laughing because he’d kept them safe, or because misery loves company, and his soul was drenched in it? 

(Baoyu, with branches growing from his skin and flowers spilling from his eyes and throat, vines and roots digging into flesh and nurturing themselves on his blood, says- blessed.

Baoyu, with broken bones and severed tendons, the victim of a restructuring day he has never had to feel in his life, trampled underfoot by the more fortunate, says- lucky. 

Baoyu, with a bloody, eviscerated body and a torn-open abdomen, intestines and entrails spilling across the floor, places a hand against the glass and smears it crimson and says- a parasite.

There’s a savage grin on Baoyu’s face that Hong Lu has never seen on his own. 

He had dreamt once, after it had happened, about a summons from grandmother with no other word than Come, Baoyu, jade of the family , and in the smoking ruins of the Kong family’s laboratory Baoyu had seen Daiyu, Jia huan, Xichun; there is so much blood- 

The cuckoobird man turns, and Hong Lu is bathed in the pale glow of a colour he recognises too well. It illuminates the blood on his robes and sticks to his hair. Suddenly, he is just a child again, blindfold across his right eye, headphones over his ears. 

The cuckoobird man presses Baoyu towards it in an embrace, caring, gentle, maternal, and underneath its blood-slick feathers and too-rough hands and the scent of grandmother’s incense, he can hear it— 

A faint, quiet heartbeat. The sound of laughter dying in a slaughtered womb- 

Hong Lu screams.) 

Ryoshu shoves a lit cigarette into his mouth, pulling him back to the present. “Too tense,” she mutters, gesturing to his hands. They’ve curled into fists around his legs, pressing nails into his palms that are clenched hard enough to break through the skin. Hong Lu inhales deeply, watching the cigarette flicker at the end of its life. He takes it out of his mouth and feels the residual heat burn into his skin as he smothers it in his hand. 

“Feel better?” Ryoshu asks him. 

“I feel the same as I always do,” he says cheerfully. The taste of nicotine and incense stay on his tongue as he passes it over his lips, wetting them before dropping the cigarette butt on the floor. Charon looks back at them but doesn’t comment on Hong Lu’s littering. The sun rises higher against the backdrop of the city as the bus races on. “Ryoshu, if you don’t mind, would you lend me another cigarette?” he asks. Ryoshu raises an eyebrow. 

“Why?” Yet she produces another one from her seemingly unending supply from her pocket, handing it to Hong Lu. She lights it on her own cigarette before handing it to him, and the scent of whatever is in Ryoshu’s cigarettes crawls into his lungs, a long drag of loneliness and something much more bitter in the taste of the smoke on his tongue. 

“A habit someone built up in my body that it doesn’t want to forget?” He jokes, and takes a long, long drag from the cigarette. He exhales, then laughs, loud and sharp, without mirth. Smoke settles like a serpent in the pit of his lungs and stays there until sated, until Hong Lu draws breath and the incense from the sandpits in Hongyuan fills his throat and creates something new he can’t bear to breathe out. Ah, if he keeps his mouth shut, if he continues only to watch and listen and wait, the smoke in his lungs will fester to poison. 

His airways are starting to burn. 

She tsks, tapping the butt of her odachi against Hong Lu’s skull with considerable force. He exhales, a pained whine escaping his lips. “Breathe out,” she says. Something nestles into his hands, but when he looks back, Ryoshu is looking away, perching her hand on an arm that rests on her crossed legs. Wisps of smoke drift from her cigarette, and it reminds Hong Lu again of the incense drifting from the shrines to the elders back in Hongyuan. 

Looking down, there is a package of cigarettes in his hands, along with a lighter. Ryoshu takes a drag from her cigarette before looking at him. “If you need more, come and ask.” Hong Lu inhales, taking in the scent of Ryoshu’s cigarettes as she blows smoke out into the empty bus. This time, they only smell like nicotine, only of what he has come to associate with Ryoshu , and not the incense he was crowned with. “Aha, Ryoshu…” 

He leaves it unsaid, but she looks at him knowingly— you know what I am, don’t you? 

“What did that man call you again?” Ryoshu asks suddenly. “The man with your sister.” 

“Oh-“This is out of nowhere. Hong Lu thinks of Xichun’s spiteful, hurt expression, full of scorn and disbelief, the one she directs at him every time. Then he thinks of Wei. At least someone has protected Xichun while he couldn’t. “You mean Wei?” 

Ryoshu shrugs like she couldn’t care less. “Baoyu,” Hong Lu responds. “My full name is Jia Baoyu.” 

( Baoyu, the precious jade. Baoyu, the precious jade of the Jia family. Fragile as a flower, delicate as a blossom. 

“Baoyu-gege,” her voice is tranquil like water.

He wonders, silently, keeping his thoughts away from the xianren — how is Daiyu doing?)  

Exhale. A cloud of smoke makes the sunlight shatter into fractals through the mist. Hong Lu exhales as well, adding his cloud of smoke to Ryoshu’s. It cracks into splinters on the nametag on his chest, and Hong Lu watches the kaleidoscope of rainbow colours flash across Mephistopheles’s grey interior. 

“Baoyu. Hogyoku.” It feels foreign coming from Ryoshu’s heavily accented pronunciation, then again in her natural Japanese. Then she scoffs, blinking slowly. “Hong Lu is better.” She gets up, gripping her odachi tight, stalking towards her seat as if she can’t bear to be seen with him, if something he’s said has reminded her of a painful past she wants to forget. 

The back door opens, and a familiar head of dark hair emerges, tired eyes meeting Hong Lu’s from across the corridor. Yi Sang is silent but knowing, and he doesn’t say anything as he sits down next to Hong Lu, gently taking Hong Lu’s hand in his. 

“Thank you,” he says quietly, quiet enough that even Yi Sang can’t hear. Something lifts off of his chest, and his eyes flutter shut. The sunlight beating upon his face no longer feels harsh and angry anymore.

Chapter Text

hong lu’s suicidal tendencies and self-harm: 

i plan to talk about this more at some point, but part of why i associate hong lu and yi sang is the latter’s conversation about the lowest moment of his life being dante’s resurrection. i feel like hong lu has similar thoughts to yi sang regarding the worst moment of his life. yi sang, who always wanted to die, mirrors hong lu, who has never had a moment of privacy to himself and has been forced to watch different types of suffering only for the entertainment of ElderTV HD. i always imagined his thoughts during selva oscura to resemble yi sang’s in a way. finally escaping his responsibility as the peerless jade of hongyuan only to be brought back and forced to see ever more suffering through the events of the canto, furthering the elders’ belief that his role is to witness. 

this brings me to the sometimes subtle, sometimes overt mentions to self-harm and suicide ideation throughout this fic. hong lu doesn’t treat his life as a ‘life’ the same way another person would. many of his IDs have him in the thick of danger, and his life in the LCB is no exception, but he throws himself into the most dire of circumstances and treats his body like something disposable, and is reflected in many of his IDs. in fact, the fact that dante can bring him back so easily only fits his pre canto-8 mindset of transience and absurdism. if dante can bring him back, then why does he have to care about taking care of his body? nothing will last. not the scars, the wounds, the pain; it all fades away in the end. hong lu lives on the edge between life and death and sometimes tips closer to the latter than the former mostly because he doesn’t realise - or at least doesn’t want to admit - that many people care about him. 

frequent flashbacks and the voices in his head: 

part of me wonders if hong lu ever thought that being so indecisive both prior to the events of Limbus and during it made him resemble his grandmother and the elders in a way, watching people suffer without doing anything. of course this doesn’t, but it’s very difficult sometimes to change thought patterns as soon as you’ve gotten yourself into the habit of thinking like that. 

i wanted to explore a sense of inner guilt that he might feel regarding his role as the ‘peerless jade’ of hongyuan. whether continuing to watch others suffer makes him the same as his grandmother. If he could have saved anyone if he acted faster. these are all thoughts that ‘could be’ or ‘should be’, but that ‘can’t’ be, because it’s in the past. he shouldn’t dwell on these thoughts but he does, even though the very act of thinking about his actions and what they might mean already makes him far kinder and more aware than his elders. it is less of what is ‘missing’ and rather what needs to be ‘exhumed’. he already knows what to do, he just needs someone to help him bring it to realisation. 

fine line between ‘hong lu’ and baoyu

in my eyes, baoyu and hong lu are two different people. this might seem to contradict what the canto itself says now that it’s out in its entirety, but i don’t think that it does. i see baoyu as a coping mechanism for hong lu. for individuals surviving after traumatic incidence, something commonly seen is dissociation, which i ascribe to hong lu. in order to keep smiling and watching suffering, you must deposit that suffering somewhere, lest it overflow and overtake you one day. this type of repression isn’t healthy, but hong lu does it because deep down somewhere i believe he knows that if he doesn’t, the sorrow will sweep him away. 

boarding mephistopheles is a transitional period for him, especially once he takes on the name of ‘hong lu’. one might point to jekyll and hyde as inspiration for this; just as hyde is the outlet for jekyll, baoyu is the outlet for all the suffering hong lu cannot handle all at once. it only helps that baoyu is the individual that has suffered all of this happening to him, so heaping more on him seems less of a bad act, and more a simple bearing of responsibility . in this way hong lu dissociates his two roles — baoyu, the peerless jade of hongyuan, the recorder and bearer of suffering, and hong lu, sinner #6, at times a little dense, at times wise beyond his age, and can continue with his journey in the LCB. compartmentalise; don’t let it hurt you. 

it’s especially interesting given my own thoughts regarding hong lu believing he’s similar to his grandmother. He’s very conscious of pain and the suffering of others; that’s why he tries to minimise it as much as possible when he can, and even points out yi sang’s constant cry for help amidst his own depression, but perhaps he’s too conscious of pain, and that’s why he separates it from himself as best as he can. effectively, it’s hong lu talking to the sinners, not jia baoyu . Perhaps there’s also something to be said then about how hong lu then is similar to the elders for his treatment of baoyu. 

the jade eye, r-corp reindeer lu, and the cuckoobird men

why exactly did i point to r-hong lu specifically in this fic? ever since the identity first came out and solidified the very widely-accepted belief in the fandom at the time that he would distort, i’d started to have thoughts about why exactly hong lu had gotten the reindeer ID over any other animal present in the 4th pack that we know of— rhino or rabbit. 

while the reindeer horns are usually associated with the pain of the usage of brainwaves through the staff, i like to think that hong lu is specifically aggressive and mentally unstable - more so than the other reindeer identity we have in ishmael - because of regret. in comparison to his other IDs, there are two that i feel have reached a state similar to how he was post canto-8. acceptance, though not moved on. those are the reindeer ID, and FSO hong lu. FSO hong lu is a discussion for another fic that will possibly include solemn lament yi sang, but as for reindeer, three specific things come to mind. 

first, i’ve always wondered since i first thought of the theory that hong lu’s eye was a camera — was how it felt to have that implanted in him. truthfully the answer is that it probably feels like a normal eye, since it was a bolus and not a mechanical implant, but i’ve always liked to think that it in some way feels alive, wrong, unnatural. that’s why i compare it to the reindeer antlers. organic matter somewhere it doesn’t belong. burrowing into his optic nerves and hijacking his neurons in some way to replay things back to the elders. 

second, the interesting thing about r-corp is its singularity of training soldiers and clones within the TT2 protocol. given what we realised about hong lu in part 2 of canto 8, i find it fitting and frankly morbid that the hatchery probably felt like that incident in the old h-corp to him. except this time it’s him digging his way through his clones and murdering them with his own hands. i've always loved ideas around symbolic representations of the self, but this takes it to a very intimate sort of violation, this entire canto revolves very much around a lack of control - obviously, but it's just especially well executed when you consider hong lu needs to kill all of his clones, and the only one that made is it the deviant who decided to be angry instead of sad. nihilistic all the same, but angry.

finally, and looping back to my first thoughts on this ID, i feel like r-corp hong lu has come to the realisation of what his life is. somewhere along the line of dying and reviving and dying again he probably realised what he truly desired, or at least what he wanted his life to be, but at that point it’s too late. trapped without an escape, he has to again reach for something that’s just out of reach for him, thus cementing the regret i previously pointed to. he is the furthest away from what post canto-8 hong lu is, and also the closest to his family. not only the imagery with the cuckoobird men, but the immortality of dying and reviving, the senseless slaughter that plagued his siblings their entire lives, and the aimless sort of wandering that he demonstrates, it’s all here. he’s the closest to his family when he’s at his most miserable, and it’s oddly fitting yet ironic. 

april fools and ryohong 

i don't remember if the sinners recall what happened but i wonder: hypothetically if the sinners did remember, whether hong lu felt weird staring at himself from a perspective outside of his own for the first time. whether the elders recognised him in ryoshu’s body. if the feeling of smoke in his lungs after whatever happened resolved itself. i like to think hong lu became a bit of a smoker after the event for the same reasons i mention previously. he can’t kill the elders, of course, but he can harm himself. whether that is for reparation for his silence or for revenge against the elders is up for debate, but given the amount of anger in him at the end of canto 8, i wouldn’t be surprised if it was the latter. angry hong lu has always interested me. 

as for ryoshu, stuck in the body of someone who has experienced so much trauma, who has never had a moment of bodily autonomy in his life— her expressions on hong lu’s face especially interested me. would hong lu have made that expression himself, if his wrath and sorrow had exploded out of him all at once, instead of being slowly drawn out by kong qiu?

my urge to write this only got stronger after canto 8 part 2 came out because the fact that ryoshu was specifically chosen to go in hong lu’s body rather than anyone else’s makes even more sense now. her, similarly chained by ‘familial’ ties, seeing hong lu’s experiences… i wonder how close the cuckoobird man massacre was to whatever she had to experience or see in the spider’s house. was the massacre something that closely resembled the hell yoshihide aspired to see when he was painting? not to mention the theme of pregnancy and birth violations, did they remind her of her daughter?