Work Text:
The doctors had told him to avoid stress whilst waiting for his body to accept the new heart within him. The surgery had lasted six hours, and the three days after that had been of lying in bed, his exercise carefully monitored, his very breath analysed to the excruciating detail. They’d let him go against their own advice and instead of going to Court or to his study to do any of the thousand and one things that needed attending too, Zheng had come here. To their room.
Her things were everywhere. It should hardly have come as a surprise to him. Zetian had been living here for months while he was trapped in quarantine. When Zheng had realised the truth, he'd simply moved his things in and treated Zetian's with bare interest. Who cared what things she’d kept? He certainly didn't, or... hadn't .
Her books were ones he'd recommended to her, but he saw titles he didn’t recognise. Novels. Not complex ones, but novels all the same and it was startling to think that she had made enough progress to now find reading enjoyable. Her trinkets were few and far between, but they were there; a small vase, an small and neat calligraphy box, a small wooden carving, all gifts from her lady friends. Her clothes barely took up half of the closet. Less than half. And he wondered what drove her to her armour… his armour.
Because it was his armour, from his Yellow Dragon. The Dragon that no longer existed. Which-
Calm yourself, he breathed harshly. But he couldn’t be calm here! The room was red, it was all red. The colour of marriage, the same colour as his blood had been after she’d stabbed him. What a joke. What a cruel, sick joke. Did that mean nothing too her? Did the signing of the paper, the nights tangled in bedsheets and the knowledge of a son not mean anything too her?
He stumbled like a drunk man to the support of the bed, curled the crimson silks between his fingers. The bed hadn’t been made. Zheng could still see the vague impressions of their forms in the crumples of fabric. As if Zetian had just woken up and hadn't gotten around to straightening the covers yet. As if all it would take was a glance behind him and Zetian would be raising her eyebrows at him.
Zheng grabbed the covers and threw them into place. It wasn't neat, but the fabric was heavy and he could hardly… why hadn't she done it before they’d gone? That was what she normally did after she woke up, inevitably late and oddly adorable as she scowled at him. He wanted to pinch her cheeks and resist the urge to smirk at her.
He wanted her .
Wanted to feel her edge him into the cold silk, wanted to feel the warmth of her fingers and her mouth, wanted to drive her into the sheets where she looked so frighteningly beautiful and so beautifully frightening and make her break .
They called her a fox spirit. His desperation made him consider it. Had she-
No , Zheng told himself strictly. She was from a small farming village. He'd seen the village. She was a lonely, angry farming girl with nothing to lose. Rage ripped through him, then grief. He'd given her something to lose, and for that, she'd tried to rip his heart out of her chest.
If the gods weren't real, then neither were the spirits. She'd done all of that by her own will.
He spun towards the bathroom, looking for an escape from the red . The shining white tiles offered him no relief. The man in the mirror was a harrowing sight and he was reminded that the doctors had peeled the mask back during surgery. He had been unconcious, of course, but they hadnt seem bothered by the scars and he had been too exhausted to slot the mask back on. His eyes were so bloodshot he could have just called them pink, and a thousand tear tracks trailed from eyelid to jaw. When had he gotten those? Tears felt more like a concept to him but they were here and they were there. His skin... was several shades too pale. There were deep, deep shadows stained around his eyes. And on his cheek, he saw it now, a tear that hadn't finished falling. Slowly ripping down his skin.
At least, here, he didn’t have to see her things. At his insistence, her feminine products had been shoved into a drawer. Most of the things here were his. Her own bathing products were either simple and handmade or utilitarian and standard issue; she confessed to using his things if she needed to use something fancy. Rows of products greeted him when he opened the plain, sleek box on the shelf—most barely used. Zheng snapped the lid closed and slid it back along the shelf.
Why didn’t she use those makeup products? He’d taken so much effort into getting her all the things worthy of an Empress, yet she continued with rice-powder and ash sticks. Something within him crumpled in a hard, harsh way.
Zheng’s eyes flickered upwards, caught the sight of the only truely used thing, the jar of rouge she used for her huadian and mianye, pure, pure red-
He grabbed the jar of rouge and hurled. It smashed against the wall into a thousand pieces, glittering like stars. Red liquid and glass rained onto the floor and the noise didnt remind him of his mothers bottles but the intensity, the vividness of red on glass did was seared into his mind.
Zheng sunk to his knees and found that he couldn't breathe. Panic surged through him. This was what the doctors had warned him about. He wasn’t supposed to put his heart through stress, through any stress, and yet here he was, unable to breathe. How-
She did this to him. She tried to kill him, she left him like this, to die-
He grabbed the broken glass and crushed it until the shards were laced into the skin of his fingers. Red trickled out.
-
The staffer who’d come in to clean found him with a horrifying scream and wailed that the Emperor was dying. Zheng weakly attempted to protest that he was fine, but it was exceedingly difficult to be heard when every staffer that was allowed into the Imperial Bedchamber raced in and every staffer that wasn’t allowed in was panicking in the doorway.
The doctors, with as much insistence as they could use without offending him, ordered him back into the infirmary. He agreed despite his frustration. He did not fancy his new heart collapsing. It had not been very pleasant the first time and he doubted it would the second.
Zheng lay on the soft layers of white fabric and stared at the ceiling, unable to sleep and unable to think. If he stared at the ceiling hard enough, his sight would slip through it and he'd see the heavens. The ones that he had destroyed. Maybe he’d see a godly ship on its way to rain down vengeance. Maybe he’d catch a glimpse of Zetian in- the Vermillion Bird, or whatever that had been-
The Vermillion Bird was gone. He'd ‘seen’ that with a stabbed heart, delirious from blood loss. Not good odds. But Zetian had done something and was gone. At least, she was gone for now…
I’m being delusional, Zheng thought with a slice of feverish clarity. But was he? Zetian would come back. Through force, most likely, but she’d come back. So, she was hellish and unpleasant when she stuck her heels into the ground, but she had no money and no food. Her people had been farmers, not hunters, and they were dead anyhow. She wouldn't last a week. He had her friends. He had her son.
Zhang Yizhi—he bit his tongue hard enough that he drew blood—was many things, and not a lot of them were practical. He could claim to be on the side of the working people all he wanted, but could he fend for himself in the wilderness? And that silly pretender-god… he’d already forgotten their- their name. They. How did that work? They’d never stepped foot on the planet. Zheng didn't have to worry about killing that one. They were probably dead already.
He almost laughed and had to stop himself on the account that he probably looked insane enough already. Then he decided that he didn’t exactly care. He was the Emperor. Did it matter if he were sane? Zetian certainly wasn’t. She’d led a military coup with no support or plan other than apparently not dying. Now she'd attempted an assassination of a state leader with no support or plan and had lost herself in the wilderness with only a former lover and a feeble pretender-god.
The plan to kill him, he decided, was mostly likely Zhang Yizhi’s. It had to be. Some sort of manipulation- he didn't fully understand the ins and outs of their relationship, but Zetian did, and he must have used his mind games too… subtly push her into his traitor's path? But Zheng liked to think of himself as intelligent. Surely, he would have caught something between them. Surely, his paranoia would have been rewarded.
He closed his eyes and scowled. Zhang Yizhi could only have been a part of the problem. He was starting to realise that there was a lot more wrong with Zetian than he’d thought. But perhaps it was a start, pinning the blame on him, when he inevitably had to explain where the hell his Empress was.
That was how Zheng fell asleep. Alone, near feverish with hate.
He dreamt... something.
Zetian was far away, standing with her back too him. He stretched his hands out and tried to snatch at her cape, tried to call her name. When she twisted around, it wasn't Zetian who stared back at him but General Mi. He couldn’t make out her expression. A chill ran through him. Was he forgetting her?
And then it was Zetian again.
She blurred. Her memories flickered between them, smearing against his. Zetian with Zhang Yizhi as teenagers, deep in the forest, gawking at his tablet. Zetian as a toddler, shrieking with her big sister, poking a worm. Zetian with Pilot Li, fighting for control of the Vermillion Bird. Zheng grabbed at her arm.
The chrysalis exploded.
Zheng woke up in cold, burning sweat. His hands found his chest in an instant and pressed flat against his chest. He listened to the steady thump, thump, thump of his heartbeat. Had it always sounded like that? Had it always been this strong, this insistent? He felt dizzy.
He thought of her skin. How she felt beneath him, around him, in him. The way sweat had gathered on her and the way she had tasted, salty and scaldingly hot. The way her voice broke when she came and she, at least for minutes ot moments, would slump in his arms and took his kisses softly.
And then he thought of her with Zhang Yizhi, and numbing fury overtook him.
Zetian was his and his alone. He'd made so much progress containing her away from her peversions, the lustful acts she thought were love, only for someone like that to snatch her back up. I'm the only one who loves her . If she couldn't see that then… he had to make her see that. I'm the only one who loves her , he repeated to himself, now fearful. Zhang Yizhi was going to damage her and he couldn't let that happen no matter how loudly she screamed at him.
She was his. There was no future for her without him. How could he make her see that? Desperation clawed at him until his hands had curled into unbreakable fists. He’d need to keep her still, to hold her down
He closed his eyes. "Some women spend their entire lives constricted to a handful of rooms." That was what she told him, more or less. He didn’t remember the exact phrasing, but Zheng, having experienced quarantine, knew that she was correct. It was frustrating, perhaps, but hardly difficult. And it was safe. Zhang Yizhi wouldn't be able to touch her in a situation like that. Nobody, other than Zheng, would be able to touch in a situation like that.
His mind drifted towards the design of the estate. It was defendable, but it really wasn’t suitable for holding someone against their will. That was, someone like her . He’d have to see about modifying it. And above all else, it would need to be easily navigatable for a wheelchair. He wasn’t ruling any possibilities out.
Zheng closed his eyes. He'd dreamt of the moments her feet had shattered a million times. It was unpleasant. It was reality. Reality was unpleasant. And if she used his leniency like to try and kill him, then he would have to show her the hard way what then other options were.
He knew how this game would work, knew exactly what angle to try and work this with. The Iron Widow was a facade. Wu Zetian was not a nightmare… she was an abused, disabled teenager who'd been manipulated by Zhang Yizhi. Perhaps he should start dropping implications that Zhang Yizhi had been the one to order Pilot Li’s death. He still needed to figure out what to do with his sister.
He felt for her spirit signature, found that he still couldn’t feel it. Yet. All he had to do was wait for her to resurface. She would be returned to him, any day now.