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Zetian manages to keep quiet until Yizhi starts doing her eyebrows.

She will ask herself later if things would have gone differently if she had not asked him to do this small favor for her. If he hadn’t been knowledgeable enough to help her. If he hadn’t made that comment that exposed what Zetian wants to believe are his true feelings, and pushed her to confess her plan in return.

If she had not used those exact words.

“Yizhi. I’m enlisting as a concubine-pilot.”

“For which pilot?”

“For him.”

“For Yang Guang? Zetian, he killed your sister!”

It is going exactly how she expected it to go, and she knows exactly what she needs to say to him in return. 

“That’s why I’m going. I’m going to be his beautiful, sultry concubine-” She is reaching for the wooden hairpin that she keeps up her bun, but she doesn’t get to reveal the sharp point inside to him, because something she didn’t expect happens: he pales suddenly, his chest trembling. “Yizhi, what is wrong?”

He tries to make a gesture to indicate to her not to worry or maybe to tell her she should worry, but Zetian cannot decipher anything because his hands are shaking terribly. 

“Yizhi, please!” She tries to take his hands in hers, but he holds onto his tablet and uses it to cover his face, like Zetian can not hear his laborious breathing behind it.

For a second, she considers leaving. What would happen if he were to drop dead? Someone would certainly figure out he was with her, and she would pay with her life for the misfortune of being near him at this moment.

But she stays, because the possibility of him dying gives her more grief than future troubles. After a couple of minutes, Yizhi finally lowers the tablet, and Zetian can’t help raising her newly shaped eyebrows at the sight of his clammy skin and tired eyes.

“Please, Zetian, don’t do this to yourself.” Oh, so this was all a show to convince her to drop her plan? Rage rises inside of her as fast as worry did. She is going to teach him what she thinks exactly of his opinion on this matter. “I can’t tolerate the idea of you having to, um, having to be, close to him, you know?” 

Her anger boils. Then this is nothing but him trying to impose onto her the same stupid rules her family and everyone else have been trying to make her follow for all her life. What does it matter to him if she has to fake nicety to get closer to Yang Guang? If she has to laugh at his jokes? If she has to fuck him, as his tone implies is his main issue? This is what she has chosen for herself, and she can pay for it with her body if she so damn chooses. 

No one, and certainly not he, has any right to have an opinion about it. 

She stands up as fast as she can while leaning on her cane, and when Yizhi grabs onto the edge of her tunic, she looks down at him with disdain.

It’s a mistake, because his eyes are wet and big and pleading, and they make her stumble almost as much as her bound feet.

“Please, Zetian, I know what that is like, and it can’t bring you any good.”

It is true that curiosity kills the cat, because that odd statement makes her hesitate, and that split-second changes the course of her entire life.

“What do you mean?”

“What?”

He looks bewildered, like he can’t believe that anything he said had an effect on her, and if that’s not a testament to her stubbornness, Zetian doesn’t know what it is.

“How you, Gao Yizhi, can know what it’s like to put your body on the line to get something you want, please enlighten me.”

Her tone came out more mocking than she intended, but her ire as a whole is deflating rapidly. She is coming to find out it’s hard to be mad at him for too long while looking upon his beautiful face.

Yizhi goes through three different emotions and from pale to flushed and pale again in a minute. Zetian doesn’t sit down and doesn’t back off until he finally sighs and palms the space next to his on the bamboo mat. 

Even after sitting down, she holds her cane in front of her, a clear signal that she is not willing to lean into their usual closeness and complicity.

“I can not tell you much, not without putting you at great risk.” His eyes dart around, nervous, and for the first time, Zetian considers if she is not the only one taking up risks with this friendship. That’s a sobering thought. “But believe me when I tell you, I have been in that position, giving up my body to get something, and it doesn’t come without sorrow and regrets.” He winces, and Zetian blinks. Does he mean what she thinks he means…? “And I can not let you go through that.”

Processing the first part of what he said is too hard, and she is torn between wanting to know more to understand him better and not wanting him to talk about this ever again. Focusing on the last part of what he said is much easier and comes associated with feelings that are easier to process and address.

“Let me? It’s not on you to forbid me or allow me to do anything.”

“You are right, I misspoke.” He shakes his head, and when she looks at her, it’s with the same eyes he had when he called her the most stunning girl he knew a handful of minutes ago. “Okay, masks off. Zetian, I love you, and it would kill me to see you go through that.”

The confession is a blow to her chest. She has already gone through a typhoon of emotions today, this week, the last few months. The aching for him she has felt throbbing inside since this conversation started comes back with a vengeance. They have been tiptoeing around this line since they met, she knows, but hearing him say it so openly still punches the air out of her lungs.

Of course, it can still be a ruse to get her to give up something she is pretending she doesn’t want to give him.

Of course, even if it is a lie, a deception, that doesn’t mean it doesn’t affect her.

Zetian chooses her next words carefully, making sure to never reference her own feelings; just because he exposed himself, it doesn’t mean she has to do the same.     

“Love won’t save me, Yizhi. Only vengeance can set me free.”

She stands again, using her cane as support. She knows that if she stays any longer, all her plans will be at risk.  

“And what if you don’t have to choose?” She hesitates just for a second, long enough for him to deliver his promise. “You don’t have to do it alone. I will help you kill Yang Guang.”

It is unfair because when she was huddled at night on the floor of her grandparents’ room, a miserable girl in a miserable house full of miserable people, she never wavered on her plan. But here, in the woods, with the long, impractical sleeves of Yizhi’s robes stretched towards her, his laugh and his compliments still ringing in her ears, for just a second, dying doesn’t feel like the only option she has left.   

“If you could do something, you would have done it already. You can’t touch a pilot that powerful and popular.” 

“Maybe I can’t, but we can. We can do anything together.” He grows bold by her lack of rejection, jumping to his feet and holding her cheeks with his hands. “Please, Zetian, let’s make a different plan together.” 

She doesn’t say yes, but she sits down and lets him talk.

The inside of the hovercraft is silent except for the rumbling of the wind outside. Zetian can feel Yizhi’s eyes boring holes into her head, but she can not deal with him right now, not when she has one hand clasping her seat with terror and the other holding the baby-blessing doll her mother gave her as a last gift. She is gripping it so tightly that any second now she might spill all the earth from her mother’s yard onto the floor of the ship, and she doesn’t need something that will make her look even more like a peasant. 

She is not sure what is worse: that her mother made the doll for her even when, until a couple hours ago, her life plan didn’t involve getting married at all; realizing that there was some lingering tenderness for Zetian inside of her, even if she never was able to show it in any way that mattered to her daughter; or knowing that even with her best intentions, her mother didn’t understand her at all.

“Zetian…” Yizhi starts, and she closes her eyes tighter so the tears will be less evident. 

“Please don’t.”

Both of them could have fitted in Yizhi’s hovercycle. After all, she didn't bring any belongings except for the modified hairpin that should have killed Yang Guang and the doll that will never fulfill its purpose. But Yizhi took a look at her panicked face and managed to get them into this hovercraft to Chang’an. 

Zetian is not sure she could have withstood traveling in an open vehicle when this inside experience is already a shock to her senses and her grasp on reality, but, more than anything, she is very grateful for the space between her and Yizhi. She is sure she couldn’t have endured having to hold onto him while she mourns everything she is leaving behind.

She can’t complain much, not really. Things with her family went as smoothly as they could be expected. They were terrified of Yizhi and his pristine clothes, his family name and his city accent. She can not blame them for that because, when she met him, she did try to beat him with a stick because she could not believe he was real unless she could see him bleed.

Greed ended up overcoming fear, at least in her father, when he managed to shake the shock long enough to understand that Yizhi was offering to outpay the military if they allowed him to marry her. While her mother was still trembling on her tiny feet, her father was already pretending that he could not give his blessing because he could not be sure Yizhi was going to make an honest woman out of his daughter. Zetian would like to say that it was all a ruse to swindle more money out of Yizhi, but, in a way, her father has always been unhealthily obsessed with her purity.

Zetian will never forget Yizhi’s reaction in that moment, his smile that didn’t falter for a second, and how he said, unfazed, Of course, uncle, I want to show you my interest in her is genuine, right before he offered to double the pay. 

If her father was delighted, Zetian was flabbergasted. She knew he was rich, of course, but ‘rich’ was always a vague concept in her mind, just something she wasn’t and could never be, a word to explain their differences, all the freedoms he had and she didn’t. She didn’t have a true understanding of the disparity until he parted ways with an amount of money that was barely blinking on the edge of her comprehension. 

Even now, sitting with him on a hovercraft that he procured as easily as snapping his fingers, thinking about that number makes her sick. 

And to see him being nonchalant about it, to so easily alter the course of her entire destiny on a whim, it’s both exhilarating and terrifying. That is true power, a power Zetian- used only to the kind enforced by violence- never before got to experience. And even if it was a power used to rescue her from her family, to put them on track for a future they are scripting together, it’s a power that only he wields, a power that is not hers. 

She might love him, but how can she trust him when he will always have this much leverage on her?

“Zetian, what is on your mind?”

He is looking straight at her from his seat, eyes kind but worried. It’s unsettling because, since Older Sister passed, he is the person who knows her best, and, at the same time, sometimes it feels like he doesn’t know her at all. They have met a dozen times a year for the last three years. That’s barely a month all put together, how can he know anything about her, and how can she know him at all in return?

She hides the baby-blessing doll against her side, Gods forbid he gets any wrong ideas.

“That I went through the torture of getting rid of my unibrow for nothing.”

Yizhi chuckles, and it’s a good sound, a sound that fills her up with warmth and thirst for more, a desire to always be the one to make him laugh and drink the mirth straight from his lips. She breathes a little bit easier after that. 

He focuses his eyes on her again, serious. 

“Now tell me the truth.”

She can doubt how much they know each other, but he can see straight through her. Maybe she is not giving him enough credit.

“I’m a little mad at myself because I let you buy me. But I will get over it.”

Something goes through his face before he carefully schools his expression into his typical teasing look. Zetian is not sure if she wants to understand what that was.

“Yes. But at least you were bought by the highest bidder. Remember, that’s not nothing.”

Their plan is simple. Getting married, moving to the Great Wall after Yizhi manages to bribe whoever needs to be bribed in order to slip into an ongoing Strategist class, and bring his wife with him. 

Not so simple? Going from there to finding an opportunity and a way to murder Yang Guang. 

Definitely not simple at all? Getting Gao Qiu to agree to the skeleton of the plan that they can tell without raising suspicions.  

Zetian shifts uncomfortably on the electric wheelchair Yizhi has procured for her. His father’s name and reputation were enough to make her cower before, but the overwhelming exuberance of his home has browbeaten her into silence. If the amount of money Yizhi paid her family and the trip on the hovercraft were enough to sow doubts in her mind, this is making her feel like a different class of human being altogether.

She runs her hands down the embroidered, silky tunic Yizhi has given her. She is not sure if he stole it from one of his sisters or if he bought it in such a short amount of time, and she is not sure she wants to find out. It is hard to imagine the willowy, graceful creatures that are Yizhi’s sisters in her mind, using any clothes that could fit Zetian’s generous body. Maybe he has it lying around for all the other girls he brings into his home and-

No. 

Zetian shakes her head, willing the thoughts away. There is a fine balance between keeping herself alert enough as not to be taken by surprise and obsessing over all the possible ways he could have lied to her, might still be lying to her. She can’t doubt Yizhi at every possible turn and still go on with this plan. If she wanted to rely only on herself, she should have kept on track with her original plan.      

She tries to distract herself by admiring Yizhi’s room, relishing the glimpses of him she had not known about until now- his collection of Chrysalis figures, the small things he treasures in the drawer of his reading desk- and enjoying the ones she already knew about- his delicate luxury robes, his skincare fridge, the books he devours. She tries not to pay too much attention to the enormous bed and the crystal-carved tub in the bathroom, because they make a shimmering desire float to her head and fog her mind, and she needs to keep her wits about herself.

She is running a finger over his calligraphy brushes when Yizhi returns.

“He is ready to meet us,” he says, breathless, before Zetian can tackle him with questions.

“Us?”

She was bracing herself to meet Gao Qiu, of course, but only after everything between him and Yizhi had been settled. Zetian was ready to play the meek wife for five minutes, but she is not sure she could do it if she had to hold that facade for longer, or if, at the same time, she had to try to convince him of something else.

The pale lanterns bathe Yizhi’s face in strange shadows, making it hard for her to read his expression, but his voice breaks slightly when he explains, “I would like you to be there with me, if that’s okay with you.”

She almost says that no, she is not okay with that, why does he think that her being there will make things easier, while he tries to strong-arm his father into letting him ruin his life for a plain, commoner girl instead of whoever fancy, rich, convenient girl his father had planned for his future.

But there is a vulnerability in him that she can’t possibly imagine being fake, and if she wants this to work (and she means both their plan and the looming changes in their friendship), she has to honor the trust he is bestowing upon her by letting go a little of her own vulnerability.

“Okay, let’s go.”         

He pushes her wheelchair manually through the state, and Zetian lets him because she is not sure she could do it herself with how crushingly lavish and intricate the whole place is. Yizhi peppers the trip with small anecdotes about which one of his siblings got caught doing something outrageous in that hallway, or which celebrity passed out from too much alcohol or not enough food in this courtyard. Zetian hums every once in a while to keep him talking, but she is honestly only focused on the soothing rhythm of his voice and on keeping her anxiety under control.

Yizhi stops in front of a door with a bronze plaque engraved with a chrysanthemum, and only then does Zetian take account of the way Yizhi’s hands are trembling on the back of her chair. She twists around to take a look at his face, and his expression is blank like a stone, but his eyes are glazed, like being this calm is taking all the focus he can muster. Zetian squeezes the side of his hip with her hand and that jolts him into attention.

“Sorry, I will just-”

He knocks on the door and walks them both inside before he can finish his thought. Zetian doesn’t know what she expected, maybe a studio, an office, but a big table with a golden tablecloth was definitely not on the list.

What she did expect, but still knocks the breath out of her, is for Gao Qiu, media mogul and richest man in Huaxia, to look just like an older version of Yizhi. She is so busy imagining how a beard like his would look over Yizhi’s delicate features that she almost misses her cue to bow at him at the same time as Yizhi.

“Father. Good to see you well. This is Wu Zetian.”

“Yes, yes.” It is unsettling how the inflections of his voice are similar to Yizhi’s, but the warmth and kindness that usually characterize Yizhi are nowhere to be found in him. “What is that nonsense I’m hearing about you wanting to enlist in the army and go to the Great Wall, son?”

Zetian holds her breath. Instead of immediately replying, Yizhi takes her chair to the table and sits down as close as he can to her. His hand finds hers over her lap.

Still, his voice is firm and measured when he talks again.

“Yes, I want to marry her and enlist as a Student Strategist as soon as possible.”

Gao Qiu plays with a heavy fork that was lying on the table, and Zetian is glad he has not spared a second to look at her yet, because she is pretty sure that her face must be a mix of fear and annoyance that would be hard to morph into anything close to respect and humility.

“Come on, son, it was funny for five seconds, but I won’t waste any more time-”

“I am not joking.” It is amazing how his legs are shaking violently under the table, but every part of Yizhi that is visible to his father is perfectly calm. “I have worked for your benefit… for a long time, father. I think it’s time for me to follow my own path.”

If looks could kill, Zetian is pretty sure Yizhi would drop dead right about now. She squeezes his hand harder, digging her nails into his soft flesh. Yizhi doesn’t as much as flinch.

“I think it’s better we discuss this alone then, son.”

Now, Zetian has never been in a negotiation like this in her life. Her discussions with her parents have always been about them trying to impose on her what they wanted, with zero regard for her wishes, and her fighting them back at every step. 

This feels like a business discussion between two heavily loaded parties.

"No. She is going to be my wife. Anything I know, she can know too.”

“Probably not everything, son.”

“Everything worth knowing.”

There is a different conversation going under lines, Zetian can understand as much. Without knowing more, she can only hold onto the warm realization that him choosing her in front of his father might not be much, but it also isn’t nothing.

Gao Qiu places the fork down softly on the table. His eyes are iced coals when they focus on his son. Yizhi holds his gaze.

“I think you should be smart, son.”

“I have always been smart, Father. And I have also been quiet. For too long a time. Now I want to be happy.”

Zetian has lost the sensation in her hand from how tightly he is holding onto it. She does not let go.

For a minute, nobody speaks. For a minute, Zetian thinks they are going to be murdered, both her and Yizhi, and mourns that she will never see Ruyi again, for her sister was a gentle soul, and there is no way Zetian is not going to become an angry ghost.

Until Gao Qiu sighs and rubs his forehead. He looks a decade older than when they first walked in, and his similarities with Yizhi are no longer that noticeable.

“How sharper than a serpent's tooth,” he mumbles under his breath and Yizhi’s nose flares. “Fine. Do whatever you want, son. When things go south, and they will, remember that it was your choice.”

Whether it is a threat or a warning, Yizhi doesn’t acknowledge it.

“Thank you, father.”

“One more thing,” Gao Qiu mentions when Yizhi already has his hands on the back of Zetian’s wheelchair. “I do expect to be informed about everything you can unearth about the army, understood?”

Zetian can not see Yizhi’s face, but his hands crisp so badly that the whole back of her chair shakes. 

“Understood.”     

The walk back to his room feels three times as long without Yizhi’s anecdotes. He doesn’t speak a word, and Zetian doesn’t ask any questions either.

Only when they get inside his room, his facade fully crumbles, and he falls on the bed like his legs can no longer hold him, his ribcage wrecked by rattled breathing.

Zetian tries to place a soothing hand on his knee, but he jerks away like her touch is electrified.

“Sorry, I didn’t-”

“No, it’s alright, I just-”

They look at each other. His eyes are bloodshot and swollen, but he has not cried a tear. The knot in her stomach gets tighter, and it’s not because she has not eaten since they were in the mountains together.

Formalities are worth nothing here, between them.

“What the fuck was that, Yizhi?”

He rubs his eyes, looking tired. It has been a long day for him too, even if this were only a way too elaborate prank that he is playing on her. 

“That was my father for you.”

There were plenty of things she didn’t understand in the silent conversation Yizhi had with Gao Qiu, but there is one takeaway that was clear even for her; if she is brusquely learning how much money can be power, there are times when knowledge can be more powerful than money. 

“No. There was something he didn’t want you to tell, and you used that in your favor.”

“Don’t worry about it.”

The smile he is sending her way is fake, she can tell. She also knows he can lie better than that.

“I am putting my life in your hands, Gao Yizhi. You owe me the courtesy of at least a little honesty.”

His sharp intake of breath gives her a bit of a morbid satisfaction. It will do him well to not forget about how things are.

“Let’s not talk anymore about my father, okay?”

Zetian blinks, confused for a moment. His words contradict his expression and his gestures. Yizhi raises his eyebrows, nods pointedly in her direction.

“... okay?”

“Great. What do you say we do a little bit of reading practice, then?”

What the fuck.

He sits down on his desk, leaving enough space for her wheelchair by his side, and takes a fresh piece of paper and a pen from a drawer instead of the fancy brushes destined for stylized calligraphy. It takes him a moment to begin, pen suspended in the air, his expression that of a man looking down a cliff, but when he starts writing, he doesn’t stop to look at her, not even to make sure she is following him.

After writing down that in his family home one can never be sure that any conversation is truly private, he succinctly explains the way his father has been exploiting him since childhood. With simple characters he can mostly be sure she can understand, Yizhi spills ink over the paper for a story that should be told in tears, that should be told in blood.

Zetian moves away from the desk with tear tracks on her cheeks and a rage that she didn’t know could grow even bigger. He didn’t go into a lot of details- she doesn’t know if he is trying to spare her feelings with his elusiveness or if he really can’t tell her more with how basic her reading level is- but he told her enough. Maybe when they are not under the thumb of his father, he will tell her more. Does she want to know more?

She doesn’t have an answer to that question yet.  

There is shame mixed with her anger too, she realizes when she looks at him wiping off his own cheeks: she has always thought of his life- a rich, city boy’s life- as perfect, as enviable, as a life where nothing could go wrong. There is no such thing as a perfect life, not for people like them, with hunger in their souls and eyes on the sky.

Zetian is also glad he didn’t tell her before they met his dad, or she would have killed him right then and there. She doesn’t know how, but she would have managed it. Fuck any security measures, she would have crawled from her wheelchair if needed and would have crushed his throat with all her body weight until she could feel his life extinguishing under her fingers.

But no. That would have been a way too kind death for him. He needs to pay in suffering for the deep cuts of sorrow and fear he has carved on the flesh of this kind son of his. Zetian keeps Gao Qiu’s name safe under her tongue next to Yang Guang’s, coating them in venom and spite for when their time comes.

“Hey.” 

She touches his hand, lightly, wary of the way he reacted when she touched him earlier. Yizhi looks at her, tears shining on his beautiful eyelashes, and Zetian has not forgotten about her plausible doubts, but she also believes what he just told her. And she can’t help admiring his resilience, his strength to still choose kindness after knowing from a very young age the ugly face of humanity.

There are so many things she wants to say to him. There is nothing she can say to him until they are certain they are not being spied on, not about his dreadful past, not about the vengeful future that lies ahead of them.

She says the only thing that still matters.

“Yizhi, let’s get married.”

They get married the next day. It ends up being more of a legal formality than anything else, because they barely follow any of the traditions.

Her family is, of course, not here. Yizhi’s mom is dead. Gao Qiu doesn’t even bother acknowledging them again. That wipes out any of the rituals involving their parents. Zetian is glad and would never talk about the baby-blessing doll her mother gave her that she carried under her dress, close to her chest.

If she ends up getting pregnant, she is stabbing that doll back into being a puddle of yard dirt.

Still, one of Yizhi’s sisters got her a traditional red dress, and another one, fashioned in men’s clothes (which got Zetian dying to ask her a hundred questions), insisted they get a couple of pictures in their wedding attire.

It is stupid, because this is all a formality, a facade, the only way they can move on with their plan. Marriage is something Zetian stopped wanting when she was twelve, something she can not afford to want. Marriage has always been a prison for women, and she is glad that if she has to submit to it, at least it is not to a sugarcoated, romanticized version of it like they show in magazines and livestreams.

But she puts on her dress and arranges her hair as carefully as she can to not make a fool of herself, and can’t help thinking of Yang Jian and Dugu Qieluo’s match crowning, gets invaded by memories of her and Ruyi fawning for over her dress for days. Can’t help the bile that goes up her throat thinking about everything her sister wanted and didn’t get to have.

How unfair it is that Zetian is the one among them who got to have this.  

Because this is barely the shell of a wedding ceremony, but the way Yizhi looks at her is not fake, can not be fake. The disarming sensation of his hand on her waist is not fake. Her heart swelling at the sight of him is not fake. His soft, trembling lips barely grazing hers are not fake. None of that is fake, and Zetian does not know how to feel about that.

There is no point in dwelling on those feelings, but she still steals one of the recently developed pictures that features Yizhi kissing her cheek and keeps it safe next to her mom’s doll.

The rest of the day goes by on a whirlwind of activity, with Yizhi finalizing details for their trip to the Great Wall while Zetian is in charge of packing. 

The irony doesn’t escape her: she came here with not enough belongings to occupy both her hands, and now there are innumerable chests and crates and boxes to be filled. She throws the entirety of Yizhi’s skincare collection inside a box and, from his collection of model Chrysalises, she only picks the Nine-Tailed fox, because they need to have their goal front and clear in their minds. There is just so much in his room- his books, his robes, his desk- that Zetian can not handle it and just tells the servant who came to help her to throw as much as she can inside the containers while she goes to get some fresh air.

Going to the city to buy stuff for herself is a whole other issue. She considers opting out of the offer, because why would she waste any money on things she won’t need, but finally decides against it, both because it would look suspicious and because she probably won’t get another chance to see Chang’an.

She comes back to the Gao compound exhausted and conflicted, with bags full of things she barely understands, things picked by other people for a woman she is not, a woman she will never be.

The technology she came across while around the city streets was terrifying, even if she is learning to hide her fear better than she did in the hovercraft, and the differences with her mountain village made her nauseous. The overabundance, the squandering, the shameless luxuries on the streets and the people, while she knows several handfuls of kids that will go to bed hungry tonight. She was a little prepared for it all because Yizhi told her about the worst parts of the capital during their monthly meetings, but it is harder when she sees the disparity happening within arm's reach, instead of all the way at the frontier, where everything can sound like someone else’s nightmares.

Zetian will be glad once they are on their way to the Great Wall, not only because they will be closer to her objective, but because this house and this city are really wearing her down.

She is in Yizhi’s bathroom, trying to wipe off some of the grime and the grief from her body with a washcloth when she tenses at the sound of the opening front door. If it is another servant trying to make her choose another stupid dress, she might throw something at their face, even if she knows it is not their fault.

“Zetian, can I come in?”

It’s Yizhi’s voice at the other side of the bathroom door, and she relaxes and tenses again in quick succession. Better him than anyone else, but she also looks down at herself in her undergarments and hesitates.

It is hard to balance eighteen years of society and her family hammering down on what she should never do, and at the same time staying true to her intent on always doing whatever she wants, paying no heed to what she should do. 

She has met him in the woods monthly for three years, even at the risk of her own life; now is not the time to be shy with him. 

She almost recoils at the last second when she remembers that they are married now, and therefore letting him see her undressed is part of what she should do. 

“Yes.”         

Yizhi opens the door and closes it again after he walks inside. Zetian pretends it’s not a big deal and keeps on scrubbing her arms with the washcloth, but the temperature of the room rises and she is overly conscious of her wrapped breasts being almost exposed with each one of her movements. 

From the corner of her eyes, she catches him resting against the door. He looks tired, his day might not have been easier than hers, but there is also an undeniable longing in his expression. After all, underneath the fake bravado and the tragic past, underneath the sharp intelligence and the filthy amount of money, he is just a boy.

“Rough day?”

“Not now that I am here.”

It’s the first time they have been alone since the wedding, and last night they slept on the same bed, but he was too frayed for her to ever think about doing anything but holding his hand. Zetian realizes with a start that now she hopes he is not just a boy, but that he is a boy about to get naked with his wife.

“I get it, I don’t know how you bore the woods when you could be comfortable here.”

“Now that all I want is here, I wouldn’t get it either.”

It would be easy to pounce on him, to drag him down to her lap and kiss the life out of him. Rip herself open and show him all the wanting that has grown inside her with every visit, with every time they laughed together, with every memory built in unison. A desire that- she is a little ashamed to admit- has not been dimmed by his grim revelations from yesterday, or even from this new legal situation that puts her a lot more under his control.

But, she discovers with some surprise, dragging him along can be almost as fun as taking charge of what she wants.

“I was thinking about taking a bath,” she doesn’t look him in the eyes, but she knows he can see the blush going up her cheeks and down her neck. “Could you fix it for me?”

“Of course.”

He opens the faucets and once the tub starts filling up, he pours liquids and throws powders inside until the water turns into an enticing body of pink foam and a fresh, delicious scent takes over the room.

“There you go.”

“Help me get in, please.”

He moves her wheelchair right to the edge of the tub. Zetian smiles when she sees his hands going tight against the back of the chair once she starts shedding the binds on her chest and the last of her undergarments, all but her foot wrappings. Her heartbeat is going as fast as his breathing rumbling inside his chest.

She takes his hand to help support her body weight until she can sit down on the tub. To Yizhi’s credit, his eyes stay on her face until her body is fully covered by the bubbles. The water is delightful, just the right temperature, the foam velvety and light against her roughened skin, and for a second, Zetian considers abandoning her second intentions and dedicating herself to the luxury of this experience, but she has never been good at not getting all that she wants at once.

“I will wait for-”

“What are you doing? Get in.”

She was planning on a slower, teasing approach. But the water is just so nice and he looks so pretty and alone standing on the other side of the tub…

Zetian can see his face under the dim light of the bathroom, the way hesitation and desire mix in his eyes. She makes an alluring gesture with her hand and something breaks in him before he starts untying his robes. It’s hard to play it cool when all she wants to do is see every last inch of his skin, that she can imagine terse and unblemished like his neck and his forearms, so she drops her own sexy facade and relaxes to enjoy the view.

Before finally letting his robe fall, Yizhi looks her in the eyes with intention, but instead of being teasing, he finds a warning in them. He takes a finger to his lips to ask her to stay quiet. It only takes Zetian a second to understand what she is supposed to keep quiet about: where she expected to find pale, flawless skin, she is instead met with an explosion of color on his chest and biceps. Tattoos that depict a multitude of flowers and insects, outlined in gold and tied together through vines, leaves, and snakes.

It is unsettlingly chaotic.

It is beautiful.

Yizhi takes her out of her shock by untying his hair and letting it fall over his shoulders, half covering the tattoos. It is also the first time Zetian sees him with his hair fully down, and it makes him look incredibly beautiful, while his exposed chest- full of artistic marks, but marks nonetheless, hiding something he can’t talk about- gives him an aura of vulnerability that almost breaks her heart.               

Zetian can see them as clearly as if they were physical, the ghost-fingers of his father and his past, of her family and her duties, trying to steal this moment away from them. They will have to walk over her dead body for that, and not even then.

“Come closer.”

Yizhi, still in his pants, moves to the edge of the tub and Zetian sits up straight until she can run her finger down a particularly colorful poppy near his breastbone. Only when she hears his breath hitching she realizes that her breasts are no longer fully covered by the water. She takes her time running her wet fingers down his chest, following both the images and the planes and lines of his body, leaving damp trails in her wake and allowing him the time to look at her body to his own content.

“Zetian, I-”

“Shhh.” This time, she is the one shushing him, and even though his pupils are blown wide with desire, she can see a glint of amusement in his eyes at the parallelism. “Kneel down.”

He does as he was told without any argument. If she thought he looked beautiful before, it couldn’t hold a candle to how he looks now, on his knees, his lips trembling, his knuckles white against the edge of the bathtub. Zetian bends towards him until she can run a hand through his hair from his scalp to his neck, and then uses that same hand to bring him closer enough to kiss him.

In a way, it’s strange to think that they are married and have not shared a kiss worthy of its name yet, but Zetian is intent on changing that. Yizhi lets out a soft gasp at first, surprised like she is not fully naked in front of him, and Zetian drinks the sound from his soft lips, searching the warmth of his mouth like one of the dragonflies in his tattoos. It takes Yizhi a second to react, to move his own hands to hold her neck, tender like she might be just a fantasy about to dissolve into smoke. 

Zetian kisses him harder, the heat of the kiss dripping inside her bloodstream until, for a blessed second, there is nothing else in the world besides them and this moment, not Gao Qiu, not her family, not even Yang Guang.

“Come inside,” she whispers against his lips. 

She could never imagine Yizhi’s graceful, deft hands guilty of anything like clumsiness, but desperation makes people act in strange ways, his fingers tugging at his pants until he can step inside the tub naked. The tub was filled for her only; the extra body occupying space makes the foam slosh to the side and spill over to the floor, and Zetian follows the movement with her eyes as a distraction to not stare at him too much. It is not as much for his benefit as it is for hers; wanting him too much feels like a dangerous road for her to follow.

Yizhi sits on the opposite side of the tub to her, probably trying to give her space, but Zetian floats to him until she is sitting on his lap, her legs bracketing his, their chests pressed together with just a thin layer of bubbly water in between them. He opens his mouth, apparently wanting to say something, but there are no words that can express what she is feeling, so Zetian just silences him again with another kiss.

Maybe it’s the new position or her insistence, but this time Yizhi doesn’t hold back. His fingers hold onto her damp hair to tilt her head exactly how he wants it, and what comes out of his mouth next is not a kiss but a bolt of lightning, a wild arrangement of electricity and power, a desire so intense that it takes all the air out of Zetian’s lungs. 

He bites down on her lips and Zetian can’t help but smile, knowing that whether his intentions are pure or not doesn’t matter now, because he wants this as much as she does, has wanted this for probably as long as she has. His hand runs down to her waist while his mouth searches for her neck, and Zetian thinks back to all the charged moments when they were alone before this, how they both held back while pretending there was nothing between them but innocent companionship. 

Gods, how good it feels to not lie to each other anymore.      

They have taken off their clothes, yes, but this is what makes the difference, what it means that they are truly naked and exposed to each other.      

“Zetian,” he breaks apart, breathless, and she would love very few things more than to keep on hearing her name in that tone for the foreseeable future. “Zetian, I need you to know that just because we are married, that doesn’t mean anything needs to happen. And I don’t want you to feel pressured to-”

“Yizhi. Shut up.”

She laps up the rest of his qualms with her tongue, sucks away the fears at the same time that she sucks on his lips, wipes away the nerves and the worry with every lick inside of his mouth. She is glad for the water that helps her be frictionless and control her weight better when she starts rocking gently against his hips, feeling him hard against her belly.

And to think that yesterday they were in the forest, meeting for what she thought was the last time. To think that, by now, she would have gone through with her recruitment. To think that, by now, she would probably already be dead.

Instead, they have concocted a crazy plan together, and she has peeled away a lot of his layers, both physical and not, and now she is naked and grinding against him. For someone so willing to die, she sure knows how to make her time being alive count.

His hands have found her hips while his mouth is running down the column of her throat towards her chest, and the water has started to cool down, but she doesn’t notice it with how incandescent his touch makes her feel.

“Yizhi, I-”

She wishes she had the proper words to communicate what she wants, the hunger in her chest and the fire in her belly, but she doesn’t, so she just grabs onto his shoulders and pulls herself closer to him, making both of them gasp. She will learn how to communicate better what she wants, she promises to herself.

He seems to understand what she means, luckily, and there is both tenderness and desire when he tilts her chin to look her in the eyes.              

“Are you sure? I know you didn’t want to-”

“I want it to be you,” Zetian cuts him off, knowing he is thinking back to all the times she raved against the grim perspective of having to marry someone and having to be a perfect little wife for that hypothetical husband. She wasn’t lying then, but somehow things are starting to look a bit different now, because she is getting to discover that some of the things that were pushed on her, she can also want, just in her own way. “I’ll have no regrets if it’s you.”

Once again, he looks like there is something he wants to say, but instead, he just nods and stretches his arm until he can take something out of a hidden compartment on the side of the bathtub. There is an abyss of vertigo on her belly at the sight of the square foil-packet, and to try to squash it down, she turns back to teasing. 

“Gao Yizhi, so much for not wanting to pressure me.”

He does not return her taunting, only pushing the hair away from her face, his touch soft and his voice even softer. She looks at his face, lovely, delicate, that just yesterday she was trying to inscribe in her mind to relish it in the last days of her life. And here she is about to have sex with him. 

“A man can have hope.”

She thinks, for a second, that the condom can be there because he has used them in the tub with other partners before. She knows he has had enthusiastic sex with other people before, and it would make more sense for the condom to be a thing he usually has around just in case than for him to be this prepared for a night with her. 

It takes Zetian only a moment to decide she doesn’t care whether the condom was originally intended for her or someone else; the only thing that matters is that he is using it with her now. 

Yizhi is clumsier than she expected- part fault of the water, part her body being very in the way of things, part nerves, Zetian would guess- and he ends up placing her hands on the edge of the tub.

“Stay still, please.”

She watches him putting on the condom with hungry eyes, and that’s another thing that goes on her list: next time, she is going to ask him to teach her to do it so she can be the one making him put his hands away. The possibility of that future is almost as appealing as what is about to happen now.

“I will go slow, okay? I want this to be good for you.”

There is an instinct in her to tell him not to treat her with kid’s gloves, to reject anything that might make her look weak. But there is also something in his eyes, something in the way his hands are trembling slightly, that tells her that his desire to be kind to her comes from deep within him. Tells her that even if he has some type of second intention, this is as genuine a version of him as it can exist. And she can pay him in kind.

“Okay.” 

She kisses him softly, their lips butterfly’s wings against each other, and lets him move her body around until they are both comfortable, lets him hold her face gently, lets him drink the gasp out of her mouth while he pushes inside her, lets him make her believe that, with him, she can be vulnerable and she can be luminous and she can be herself.   

Now that Zetian has been to Chang’an, her criteria for impressive and breathtaking have shifted, but the Great Wall and the structures that surround it still fall squarely on the “surpass expectations” end of the spectrum.

Yizhi has managed to slip into an ongoing Student Strategist class, and has procured for them a multi-room suite in the Kaihuang watchtower, usually reserved for a high-level strategist from another province, all within two days' notice. The funniest thing is that even though the suite is bigger than any housing Zetian has ever seen before visiting the Gao residence, it is still smaller than Yizhi’s chambers in his father’s house.

It is all mesmerizing, the stupidly big dining table, the windows that lead to the beautiful kitchen, but the feature that she both loves and detests is that from their outside windows, they have a ringside seat to the White Tiger’s dormant form. Zetian never imagined a Chrysalis could give her so many mixed feelings, bringing back memories from her childhood and the excitement for pilots and Chrysalises’ tales, and the stark reminder that she has yet to fulfill her revenge.

“Zetian.” Yizhi’s voice comes to her like something from underwater, and when she looks at him and all the half-opened boxes around him, she realizes it probably hasn’t been the first time he called her name while she looked at the neck of the White Tiger. “What is on your mind?”

The first thing Yizhi did when they arrived was check the suite for any surveillance method he knew of, just in case Gao Qiu felt like they were hiding something from him- which they are. He didn’t find anything, but it will probably take them a couple of days to get used to speaking freely.

That’s one of the reasons, but not the only one, why, instead of saying what she was actually thinking, Zetian says, “I didn’t know Student Strategists could bring family with them.” 

“Zetian, when you have money you can do anything you want.” 

It’s not the first time he has expressed a sentiment like this one, but now Zetian can hear the bitterness and the hurt behind his words. She wonders if she is getting better at understanding him or if he is daring to show more of his true self to her. She wasn’t wrong in not fully trusting him when they were in the woods, not because he wished her ill, but because he was showing only a mask of himself. Now she can see the pain behind his charming exterior, the blindingly white fury that boils under the calm surface. 

In full honesty, she likes him better like this. 

“Do you think your father will let us be here?” She changes the topic and makes sure to use a breezy tone, like they are a pair of dumb teenagers in love- which they are- that decided to rebel against his father on a whim, instead of planning the murder of one of the top pilots in Huaxia… which they also are doing. 

Yizhi shrugs.

“As long as we are more useful here to him than I was in Chang’an, yes.”

There is a lot unsaid in his answer, all they can’t talk about yet, and a lot he still refuses to tell her. Zetian strokes her thumb against his wrist.

“It sounds exhausting, to always be calculating that,” she says, fully aware that it is exactly what they are doing now.

Yizhi shrugs a second time and goes back to his boxes.

“I don't know any other way to live.”

That night they lie in bed, legs tangled together under the covers. Yizhi has fallen asleep on her in the middle of a conversation, exhausted with the trip, the arrival formalities, the setup of their new home. Zetian should be tired too, even if she did less of the grunt of the physical work than him, but she is restless lying by his side.

She has plenty of reasons to be enthusiastic, from her first few nights of sleeping on a bed to sleeping next to him in particular, but it is not the good kind of excitement that is keeping her awake. She thinks about tomorrow, about Yizhi going to classes and leaving her behind to do… what, exactly? She has no intention of being a prim, proper wife, nor is Yizhi expecting that from her (not if he knows what is best for him). 

What is she going to do all day? Feel guilty because she has failed to fulfill the promise she made over Older Sister’s ashes?

The longer she stays alive past the point she expected to be dead for sure, the harder it is to make sense of what she should do with this borrowed life she never asked for, never planned on having.

Yizhi pulls her closer to his chest and Zetian swears she is suffocating.

“Mmm, Zetian, go to sleep,” he murmurs, barely conscious, and she grasps his night shirt with tight fingers and holds onto him for dear life.

“Yizhi, what am I supposed to do with my life now?” she whispers back, more a musing to the universe than an actual question for him.

And yet, he whispers back, “Find something that makes you happy?”

He immediately falls back asleep, nuzzling his nose against her cheek, and Zetian stays awake for a long time, with him cuddled against her side, watching shadows on the ceiling and forming the word over and over in her head.

Happy? 

Her, happy? 

The word tastes almost strange in her tongue, like a concept she didn’t know could exist. 

It takes three days until Yizhi can ditch his classes and other responsibilities long enough to show her around communal spaces. By that time, Zetian is almost climbing the walls from boredom. It would be improper for her to wander alone without a purpose, and even difficult because not all places are wheelchair-friendly, and she does not want to be tottering around anyone here. It is exactly the type of restriction that enrages her, but she needs not to call attention to herself until they are a little more established. 

If she thinks about it, the role she is playing now is not much different from the one she was planning to play when she enlisted as a concubine-pilot.

She tries not to think about it too much because regretting the past is the path where madness lies.

Yizhi brings her to several communal places, showing her around and dropping a comment any time he can about her going there to do one thing or the other. Zetian appreciates the effort, but no amount of his good intentions will change what the world is like to her. It makes her wonder what her life would look like if she didn’t have this particular goal in mind, if she would be capable of going through life torching up everything around her.

She is sitting at the mess hall, waiting for Yizhi to bring them two trays of food and watching in awe all the pilots of different ranks around her, showing off their varied amounts and colors of spirit armor. She is too busy daydreaming not about the plan she abandoned, but about being those pilots- which should be her right because she does have a high enough spirit pressure- about piloting her own Chrysalys, about having true, raw power at her disposal when her fantasy breaks like an egg thrown down on the floor.

Because Yang Guang just entered the mess hall.

Zetian recognizes him from a distance, could recognize him anywhere, but the sight of him is still paralyzing, with his astonishing solid suit of armor in glittering greens, his fox-fur coat and his double-circlet crown. He is walking with two other pilots of clearly lower rank, talking and joking. The energy of the room has shifted, his presence alone commanding attention, and Zetian can see the people around her sitting straighter. He is by far the highest-ranked pilot in the room, and it shows.

And they don’t even know that he is a murderer.

She lowers her eyes, pretending she doesn’t care about him, unlike everyone else, trying her hardest to suppress both of her gut reactions, to neither stare at him in horrified fascination nor to roll up to him and stab him in the eye with her fork.

The same fork that has decided to hurl itself out of her trembling hand and onto the floor with what might as well be an ear-shattering clank.

Her impression must be a bit biased because no one around her has seemed to notice, but then the worst (the best?) possible thing that could happen, happens: Yang Guang walks to her, picks up her fork, and gives it back to her with a dimpled smile that sets off a deafening ring in her ears. 

“Here you go. You are new, right?”

“Yes.” Her voice doesn’t come out as caustic as she feels, but she also doesn’t sound aloof. Fuck, what is wrong with her, this boy killed her sister, why should it matter that he has dazzling eyes? “Yes, I moved here with my husband.”

His smile doesn’t falter.

“Oh, but you are so young.” He points at Yizhi, who is walking back to the table at a brisk pace, trays of food clearly left behind in his rush. “I assume this is the lucky husband.”

Zetian feels a renewed bitter desire to stab him, but she also can’t help but blush.

“Prince-Colonel Yang, what an honor.”

Yizhi is so much better than her at these things, slipping seamlessly into a role, while Zetian is still struggling to form basic words. Yang Guang dismisses the pleasantries with a gesture of his hand, but he can’t hide the pleased glint in his eyes.

“Newlyweds, I assume? Congratulations.” He places an armored hand on top of Yizhi’s shoulder, who has put his hand on her own shoulder a moment earlier, and this is ridiculous, she should just drag Yang Guang down and punch him in the face and- “I have recently got a new litter of concubines myself, and it’s good to know that I won’t be the only one having some fun here, you know?”

And then he winks. The asshole actually winks at Yizhi and Zetian has to conjure up every last ounce of her willpower to not pounce on him.

She is not sure what the men say to each other for the next two minutes; her ears are ringing too loudly and the fantasy about draining Yang Guan’s body of the last drop of his blood through a million tiny punctures of her modified hairpin is too vivid. But she is vaguely aware that Yizhi turned up his own charm to match Yang Guang’s and that they exchanged a few saucy jokes before parting ways.   

Yizhi’s smile drops the moment Yang Guan turns away and goes back to his buddies.

“Let’s go back,” Yizhi whispers, voice tight.

They have not eaten but Zetian is not hungry anymore. All her body needs is the taste of blood, and the fact that she can see in Yizhi's eyes a rage close to hers, tells her that they both better go back to the suite if they don’t want to commit a blunder that would ruin any plan they could make.

Neither of them says a word on the way back and by the time they step inside the suite, her heart feels ready to leap out of her chest.

Yizhi lets go of her chair and Zetian wheels away from him, she feels trapped, a beast inside a cage too small and maybe she should just throw herself out of the window. Maybe a fall from thirteen floors will be exactly what she needs.

Yizhi is leaning his back against the closed door, his face hidden in shadows, while Zetian ponders about scratching her own skin with her nails, and his voice is trembling with rage when he speaks.

“Sorry about that.”

It is surprising enough that it takes her out of her bloodlust fantasies.

“Not your fault.”

“I know, but still.”

She wheels back to him and away from the enticing windows. Zetian stretches an arm towards him until he bends to her level and she draws with her fingers over every sign of worry and fury on his features. It looks different on him than how she knows it looks on herself.

“Do you want to talk about it?” he murmurs, two of her fingertips paused over his lips.

“About the asshole? No.”

“No, about your sister.”

They have talked about Ruyi before. In some ways, it feels like Yizhi knows more about her sister while never having met her than her own family.

It feels like an dishonor to her memory to talk about her here, the metallic smell of her murderer still etched on her nostrils, while she has done nothing yet to make him pay for it. 

“No, I can’t do that.”

Yizhi kisses her fingertips and nods.

“Then what do you need?”

It is not a question she has been asked many times in her life, and it’s a shame she can not be honest, because what she really needs is to scratch at her skin until she bleeds, what she needs is for the world to be fair.

She needs to forget, just for one minute, that men like Yang Guang exist. 

And then be reminded that they have to be taken down.

“I need to not think about him,” she says instead, and it’s as close to the truth as she can put into words.

Yizhi considers her and then, slowly, deliberately, sucks one of the fingers Zetian still has on his lips inside his mouth, his warm, soft tongue lapping at her skin. Heat rises from her belly to her mouth, and the mood of the room shifts.

Yizhi lets go of her finger with a plop, but Zetian doesn’t take it away, keeps it hooked on his lower lip, stretching it slightly. 

He looks good from this angle, looking up at her instead of the other way around.

“Come on, I have an idea.”

He stands up but lets her handle her wheelchair so she can follow him to their bedroom. Once she rolls inside, he crowds her against the door and kisses her until the heat that ignited inside her body in the other room turns into a blazing sun.

“Was this your idea?” she teases him, and her voice comes out darker than she expected. “I do like sex, but I was expecting something else.”

Yizhi pushes her away and sways his hips to their dresser- and, well, the movement makes it kinda hard to think about anything else but his ass, Zettian gotta give him that.

“Just you wait.”

Zetian moves closer to the bed while he rummages around until he pulls out what looks like two scarves in dark silk. Yizhi helps her onto the bed and then, once she is comfortably settled, takes off his clothes.

“What is this?” she asks while fingering one of the silky pieces.

For all replies, Yizhi lies on the bed by her side and places his arms over his head, near the headboard.

“Tie me up.”        

Zetian might be inexperienced by all standards and especially compared to him, but she is not naive enough to not be able to imagine what he means. She drapes the rich material around one of her fists and runs it against his exposed ribs until he shivers.

“Why?”

“Because you need it.” He sits up again to hold her hand and Zetian gets an instantaneous pang of regret about what feels like a wasted opportunity. “I brought you here, where you have to deal with your sister’s murderer without ripping his throat out. It must be frustrating and awful, and you need to let those emotions out before they choke you.”

Zetian wonders if he is speaking from experience, if the years of abuse and manipulation made him bitter and furious the way she feels. It is hard to believe, with how kind and caring she knows he can be.

It is also easy to believe, given how she knows his blood boils inside.

“And how will this help me let them out?”

He smiles and brings her chin closer to kiss her gently, so gently that it feels almost capable of placating her anger. Almost.

“I am certain you will figure it out soon enough.”

He is not wrong; a handful of half-formed ideas spring out in her mind while he lies down again, and she stares down the curve of his jaw, his elegant collarbones, how his abdomen rises and lowers with his impatient breathing.    

“I don't want to break you,” she says even while she loops one of the scarves around one of his wrists. 

“I will let you know if anything is too much,” he promises. “I look delicate, but I am tough, Zetian. I have not broken before and I won’t break now.”

She runs a finger down his chest, feather-light until his whole body breaks into goosebumps, and thinks about the many things she has been told about what makes a marriage work. A responsible husband disciplines his wife when she missteps, and a noble wife guides her husband when he wanders astray. That’s what people used to say to her. And yet here she is with Yizhi, subverting all the expectations people would put on a couple like them. 

And loving it.

She leans over him and runs her tongue over one of her favorite tattoos of his, an iridescent snake that goes from his left shoulder to his nipple. Yizhi hisses like he just bit him, so she does just that, her teeth nibbling at the hard nub until he starts gasping.

It’s exhilarating to have this sort of control over him. When she sits astride on his lap, rubbing against his naked erection, it does feel good, in a physical way, but it feels even better to see the way he writhes under her. 

Such a kind, smart, brave man, and all hers.  

She cradles his jaw and makes him look at her face, her other hand digging red half-moons on his pale, unmarred forearm. “You love this, don’t you?”

“With you, for you? Yes. Yes.”

Zetian swings her weight forward and back, pausing every time he starts coming apart under her, until a layer of sweat forms on his skin, until he is a babbling mess begging for her to move faster, harder, anything, Zetian, please, please, please.

Zetian puts down the book and rubs her eyes in frustration the moment she hears the door of the suite opening and closing.

Yizhi brought from Chang’an some books with reading lessons and meant to improve vocabulary. With nothing better to do while he is away except torture herself about the lack of a plan, she has been trying to chip away at them, but without any help besides his tablet, her progress has been slow and incredibly unsatisfactory.

“Hey, you are back early. Wanna help me cook dinner?”

Yizhi doesn’t reply, and Zetian peers at him lying on the couch, looking at the ceiling with a concentrated face. He doesn’t look at her even when she wheels up to his side.

She feels a tiny sliver of panic; maybe she went too far the previous night, maybe he regrets giving up control to her, maybe he went out to the world today in a way she can’t and realized he doesn’t have to give her any power either when it’s just the two of them.

It runs bitter down her throat, the reminder of how dependent on him she is. Is this trap worth the chance- and just the chance- of staying alive?

“Yizhi.”

She places her hand on his shoulder, and only then does he snap out of his daydream state.

“Sorry, Zetian. Were you talking to me?”

She dismisses the question with a gesture and he stands up to place a kiss on top of her head.

“What is on your mind?” It’s a question they ask each other often, and Zetian likes to believe they are honest with each other about their answers.

“Oh, just things.” 

He is rummaging around the kitchen, pulling out the ingredients for dinner, and Zetian wheels to him until she becomes an obstacle to his- obviously guilty- frenzy. She doesn’t say anything, only stares him down with displeasure until he cracks.

Yizhi sighs, leaves their kitchen a mess, and pushes her back to the couch.

“I had an idea and you are not gonna like it,” he finally admits when they are sitting face to face.

The fears from earlier come back in full force, but Zetian kicks them down with determination. For better or for worse, she allowed him to whisk her away on this plan instead of hers, and going back on her decision would only make her feel worse.

“Try me.”

“You know the minor attack that happened this morning?” 

Zetian nods, thinking about the alarms and the obvious chaos that made panic swirl around in her belly, how her mind went immediately to thinking about how many pilot-concubines might have died, and no one but their families will ever know it. Gods, it had taken her all day to block those thoughts out. No wonder she was unable to study. 

“I saw Li Shimin after they brought him back from the Vermillion Bird.”

Her entire body goes cold. So Li Shimin, the Iron Demon, was in battle today. That means at least a girl has died today, all while she was cozying up in this suite, choosing not to look down her windows because she knew she would feel awful if the Nine-Tailed Fox were in battle, pretending nothing was happening. 

Having the privilege to pretend nothing was happening.

“There is something wrong with him, Zetian.”

“Of course there is,” she says, and the tone of her voice comes out so venomous it should be able to kill on its own.

Yizhi blinks at her.

“Why would you say that?”

“He is a murderer, and I am not talking about his family. How many pilot-concubines has he killed now, counting the one from today? I am guessing at least a dozen.”

Yizhi shifts in his seat, avoiding her eyes. 

“Sorry, I did not think about that.”

How lucky must it be, to have the privilege to forget about that. He has his own demons, true, but that doesn’t mean he understands hers. This is another of the hardest parts of this arrangement, of this marriage, to have to try to understand him when she knows how unlikely it is that he can understand her.

She can only try. 

“What do you mean, then, saying that there is something wrong with him?”

He scratches his cheek and looks to the windows. It almost makes her feel jealous to see that spark of interest in his eyes about someone else. Especially this someone else.

“There are a few things one already knows about him from the media, but they don’t prepare you for how he looks in person. He is so tall, Zetian. Handsome, in a rugged, exhausted way. Very imposing.” She doesn’t know how any of that is supposed to change her mind about him being to blame for a long string of dead girls, but Zetian lets him continue. “But at the same time… I don’t know, Zetian, he looks so lost.”

That’s… not at all what she expected him to say.

“Lost? What do you mean by lost?”

Yizhi opens his arms in an encompassing gesture. Zetian hates that she feels a little sliver of joy when, after lowering his arms, he leaves one of his hands over her knee.

“Disheveled, sunken eyes… I know qì exhaustion can do that to you, but it seemed too extreme to be only that. And-” he hesitates, and Zetian wonders what point he is trying to make. “He was drinking. Heavily. I know he is technically a prisoner, but it doesn’t look like he is in control of his life in any way.”

Bitter bile rises in her throat, memories of her angry, drunk grandfather rushing into her mind, her hands burning with the reminder of cuts done by smashed bottles, ears ringing with insults being thrown around. Whatever Yizhi saw in Li Shimin today that made him so interesting to him, it only makes her hate him more.

“That sucks,” she says, and she is not lying, because maybe she couldn’t care less about him, but she does feel sorry for the poor girls who have to deal with him right before their deaths. At least he doesn’t have proper concubine rights, small blessings. But whatever her feelings about Li Shimin are, there is no reason for them to be talking about him, there is no reason she should think about him at all except to spite him. “But I don’t understand why we should care. I don't understand why we should help him. Let alone how.”

Yizhi squeezes her knee and that alone is enough to put Zetian’s senses on high alert, considering that he did say she wasn’t going to like it.

“I am going to propose they put me in charge of helping him detox.”     

Sometimes she forgets how isolated they are here, at the Great Wall, compared with the crushing, continuous chaos of Chang’an or the background sounds of nature and labor at her village. A silence like the one that follows his words makes it impossible to forget.

“You are joking.”

His grip gets even tighter. Zetian moves away from him, forcing him to take off his hand. The need not to have him touching her is overwhelming.

“Zetian…”

“No, no, I’m not letting you act like I’m the one out of my mind here.” She wheels further away, expecting him to stand up again and chase her. He doesn’t, and that is somehow worse. “Gao Yizhi, you made me a promise. We have one goal here, and you are losing sight of it.”

Yizhi rubs his forehead. Zetian hadn’t noticed before how tired he looks, but it doesn’t matter, doesn't he think she is exhausted from being on edge all the time? Getting married to him and moving here without a plan has not been a bed of roses for her either.

“Plans are not straightforward like that, Zetian.” His voice is dripping condescension and he is lucky there are no small objects near her, otherwise, she would throw one at his face. She might not be as educated as him, but that doesn’t give him the right to treat her like a child. “That would give me access to the medical database, and I think getting our hands on Yang Guang’s medical record will help us.”

“How about you come up with an actual plan before branching out on additional fucking stupid quests that stroke your ego, hmm?”

His eyes flash with anger and instead of making her afraid, it gives her a deep, twisted satisfaction. It is good to know that she can hurt him.

When he speaks again, his voice is ice cold and makes her even angrier.

“Forgive me for thinking that we need to do whatever we can to compensate for the damage we are going to do. Yang Guang has it coming, but we can’t just thrash the war effort against the hunduns on a whim.”

What business does he have, trying to make her feel like a bad person, judging her for choosing her own personal vendetta over a collective effort, when he has been at her side, egging her on since the beginning? 

The worst part is, as always, that she can’t control him. She can spit reproaches his way all she wants, but he will always have a freedom she just doesn’t. She had a feeling this plan of marrying him would come back to bite her in the ass, but she didn’t expect it to happen this soon.

“I shouldn’t have married you.”

She could have added something to explain that statement.

I shouldn’t have married you, if you were going to be unwilling to help me. 

I shouldn’t have married you, if you were going to feel guilt about this. 

I shouldn’t have married you, if you were going to betray my trust. 

But it came up like that, naked, raw, and in this moment, she feels it is true.

Yizhi doesn’t lash out, doesn’t hurt her back, doesn’t hit her. He just stays there, sitting on the couch, knuckles going white with how tight he is gripping his own knees, eyes shiny with unshed tears.   

Zetian goes to their bedroom, throws his pillow out in the hallway, and locks the door so he doesn’t see her cry.   

She is too hungry to go to bed and too angry to go out of the bedroom. She ends up deciding to soak her feet in a feeble attempt to calm herself down.

It’s the first time since they moved that she uses the bucket she keeps in their bathroom, and the smell of the medical leaves and roots poured over the steaming water brings back memories she would rather leave buried. 

Her feet are doing better now that she has full-time access to a wheelchair and doesn’t put constant weight on them, but they will always be an indelible reminder of her limitations, of what lengths of pain her family was willing to put her through to marry her well. 

Well for them, of course, not for herself. She thought she had managed to fool that destiny, that she had managed to appease them and at the same time do what she wanted.

Look how well that is working for her.

Her feet feel better steeping in the maroon, warm water, but Zetian can not take it for longer than a couple of minutes, she has enough problems as it is in the present without allowing the past to haunt her through sharp-scented hands made out of billowing steam.

She dries out her feet and ankles but her hands are trembling too much while she tries to work on the bindings. The flashes of her grandmother breaking her bones mix with the memories of her drunk grandfather from earlier, and her anger at her family poisons and feeds her anger at Yizhi.  

She curses out loud and throws the binddings down to the floor in frustration just at the same time that he knocks.

“Go away!” She yells at the door and regrets not having the bindings handy to throw them at him.

He pushes the door open nonetheless and Zetian considers for a second if certain pain and the risk of infection for using her bare feet would be worth the satisfaction of walking to him and pushing him out.

“Be mad at me all you want, Zetian, but you need to eat.” He leaves a tray with a teapot and a bowl on top of their dresser before turning to look at her. Zetian hopes her scornful eyes burn through him like torches when he dares point at her feet. “Do you need help with that?”

Her first, instinctual response is to say no, obviously, because she is mad at him. But her answer was always going to be no, regardless, because hiding her feet is ingrained in her. Even through getting married, having sex, sleeping together, taking baths together, he has yet to see her feet unwrapped. 

She has been raised under a strong mandate that establishes that naked feet are the most indecent part of a woman’s body, always to be hidden away in perfumed, embroidered shoes, not to be shown to anyone in their rotten, useless glory. Especially not to her husband.

And because she was taught not to show them, this time Zetian doesn’t say anything, but scoots back on the bed and leaves only her feet hanging from the edge.

She hates them, but they are more real than plenty of other things he has shown her during the last few weeks. They are her reality, a reality many times done for men like him- maybe it will serve him well to be confronted with it. To be confronted with the knowledge that, for better or for worse, she is the way she is not despite her feet, but because of them. 

Yizhi nods, acknowledging her acceptance, and the tiniest smile blooms at his lips from the sight of the bindings on the floor. He has the good sense to not say anything about them and instead goes to the bathroom to grab a set of clean ones.

They are both silent while he works on wrapping her feet. He is notably good at it, not needing any instruction on her part, perhaps because of his medical training, perhaps because all his sisters that Zetian has met so far have bound feet. She doesn’t ask. Having to pretend that she is not affected by him touching her naked skin while they are mad at each other is hard enough.

Once he is done, they stay unmoving for one moment too long, both of them wary of breaking this bubble that has allowed them to get close while ignoring the argument that broke them right in the middle just a little while ago.

Zetian can not have that. She is starting to suspect that she was too harsh to him, that she said something she didn’t fully mean. But what happened, happened. It would do them no good to pretend otherwise.

She kicks her legs, wiggling her feet at him even while his hand is still grabbing her ankle with a delicate hold.

“Don't you hate them?” 

“Your feet? No. Why would I hate them?”

She was trying to be incendiary, to stir up a fight with him again, maybe to get him to hurt her. The fact that he doesn’t say something awful about the most hated part of her hits her harder than if he had insulted her.  

“Yizhi, they are disgusting. Don’t tell me you are the kind of man who thinks they are beautiful.” She fake-heaves at him but his eyes remain focused on her, serious, almost sad, and he doesn’t laugh at her mock behavior.    

“No. I hate that you went through that process. I hate that you have to live with the consequences. I hate that you are in constant pain, that you can’t move around freely.” His hand has moved from her ankle to hover over the bindings. Zetian is glad that he is not directly touching her anymore, because she is not sure she could withstand it. “I hate that they put you through this to benefit someone else. But I can not hate them because they are a piece of you, Zetian. They are a part of what made you who you are, and I can't hate any part of that.”

She knows- has always known- that he is good at spinning words, that not everything he says should always be taken at face value. It is harder to remember that when he is kneeling at her feet, saying the right words, looking at her with tender eyes. 

The worst part is not that he might be lying: the worst part is that she believes him.

She hasn’t moved her legs away, and Yizhi understands that as the only type of white flag Zetian would ever be able to hoist, his hand traveling up her ankle in a soft, stroking motion.

“I have started looking into corrective surgeries,” he whispers, an offering to a fickle god. “In case you want to consider them after we are done with the… plan.”

The anger from the fight has deflated, and now Zetian feels so tired. What he is offering is, of course, something that has made her stay up at night burning with desire ever since she found out it was a possibility. 

A possibility that was cut short when Yang Guang murdered Older Sister, just like any other possibility in her life.

“Don’t talk about that,” she whispers back, and Yizhi inhales sharply at hearing her voice. “I can’t think about life after he is dead.”

This is the closest she can get to explaining to him how she feels inside, how marrying him, and moving here, and everything that has happened in the last few weeks is nothing but an artificial respite, a dream she can not afford to get swept in. It is nice, but none of it is real, none of it is her life.

Her life is just the means to the end of making Yang Guang pay.

Yizhi takes the rebuttal surprisingly well. Or maybe he still doesn’t get it. Zetian can not offer him anything else to help him understand: these are her naked feet, this is her naked soul.

“I know it is hard,” he says, careful, delicate like she might break if he talks any louder. Zetian wonders if her eyes show the same shadows she can see in his. “But living life is like that, Zetian, a conscious effort to feel alive.” His nimble fingers draw characters on her skin. She can’t recognize them, not with how light his touch is. “That's why I want to help Li Shimin. I know you can’t care about anything but the pain from your sister’s fate, but I can not close my eyes and pretend other people don’t also need help.” His hands are now on her thighs, not a sexual touch but an affirming one, strokes that map her body, build her again from her feet up. “I am always going to be on your side, Zetian. But I want to do more. I want to help bring good to this world, too.”

Oh, she knows. She can’t share his sentiment, but she loves that he feels that way, that he can have a wider perspective on life in a way she can’t. She loves that when they talked about this plan and she pointed out that it meant him abandoning his dreams of being a doctor, he said he didn’t care without hesitation, and yet he still longs for that kind of connection. That’s why this partnership, this marriage is so dangerous for her. Just like with their secret meetings, she is the one who has more to lose if things go south, because her revenge is all she has, the only thing that makes the fact that she is alive and Older Sister is not make any sliver of sense.

Her eyes are burning, the tension of hours, days and weeks piling up on her. She doesn’t want to cry in front of him. She wouldn’t cry in front of anyone else.

Because that’s the point, isn’t it?

She loves him, but that is not everything. So far, he has been for her a tool, a different way to achieve her goals, not much different from enlisting and hiding her lethal hairpin. 

But Yizhi is not that, he is not only that. The fact that he is human, that he is flawed, that they don’t agree about everything, doesn’t make things worse; it makes them better. 

He is not only her husband, not only an imposition on her, not only a tool for her to use: he is her ally, her best friend, her home.

They are a team, and Zetian didn’t think she could have that again ever since Ruyi passed.

Yizhi kisses her knee and begins to stand up. Zetian stops him by holding onto his robe.

“Stay.”

His eyes soften, her heart flutters. The initial issue is not resolved. Zetian is still not sold on his Li Shimin idea, both for its impracticality and for the man himself. But she has unveiled something deeper, something that will help her approach that with more care, and that matters too. 

Not everything is a battle, and not everything needs to be.  

“I am going to warm up your tea and your food, okay? I will be back.” He picks up her hand and kisses her knuckles, softly. “And if you want, I will stay.”

Zetian watches him leave and thinks that the problem is not that she married him, the problem is that she loves him enough to make her weak.

There are a lot of girls and women on the Great Wall, more than she knew, more than she ever imagined.

Zetian has decided to take a stroll alone through the communal spaces, too worked up to stay in the suite while Yizhi pitches his plan to General Command. She has given him the green light of her acceptance and she knows he is going to pull on some strings, put on a performance, insinuate that this will please his father. She has all her faith in his ability to pull a bluff and get what he wants, but she doesn’t want to know any more details, doesn’t want to be sitting on her hands waiting for an answer.

This is his pet project, and only his. It has been hard enough for her to accept it, unwilling to parse if she was doing it because it could further her own plans or just to make Yizhi happy. She is starting to make peace with loving him, but learning to consider someone else’s feelings- when all her life she had to fight tooth and nail to make sure her own were heard- is still a work in progress.

That’s why she decided to go out and leave the wheelchair behind. Fresh air, forced slowness, and a little pain while she people-watches will help her work through all those feelings.

There are concubines, of course, murmuring in little groups and leaving behind them a trail of oversweet perfumes and giggles edged with panic. But there are also aunties cleaning and working the kitchens, little children on their laps, lowering their heads and only talking in the softest voices, but also laughing among themselves and singing softly while they work.

She even catches the shortest glimpse of Dugu Qieuluo going out of the showers in all her white spirit-armor glory, and for a secon,d Zetian feels like she can’t breathe, too in awe to do anything but stare at her back while she leaves.

Maybe it shouldn’t, but everything makes her think of Ruyi.

Because the pilot-concubines could have been her, but Older Sister definitely was one of them. Did she walk these same hallways, on her own pair of unsteady feet? Did she feel amazement at the same things that amaze Zetian?

Did she get to experience any amount of happiness here, despite her untimely death?

Did she feel relieved, because giving herself up for this role meant her little sister wouldn’t have to?

Maybe Yizhi is right, and revenge is not the only way to honor the sacrifices her sister made for her.   

A week later, when she comes back from her now routine stroll around the base, she finds Pilot Li sitting awkwardly on the edge of their couch, spine so straight that Zetian’s first thought is that she is worried he might break in half if a breeze so much as hits him.

Yizhi had told her that he might be getting a final answer today, but she never thought the answer was going to be quite this… on the nose. She knew this would require Yizhi’s time and attention, but she didn’t quite process that it would happen here, in what she had come to consider a safe space, the first true place where she could be free after the woods.

She stops in her tracks after seeing him, in shock. She has heard stories about him, of course. 

Everyone has heard stories about him. 

Li Shimin, half-rongdi, murderer, pilot extraordinaire. 

Li Shimin, the Iron Demon.    

He is just as imposing and strange on the flesh as the gossip implied, tall even while sitting, rugged but handsome, with his orange jumpsuit, his ‘prisoner’ tattoo, his metal collar, his shameful short hair.

And at the same time, he looks like a fish out of water, shocked even while he scowls at her. Gods, at least his eyes are black and not fire-qì red.

Yizhi returns from the bedroom with his hands full of gadgets and both Zetian and Li Shimin turn to look at him like he just switched on the lights.

“Oh, Zetian, you are back. Shimin, this is my wife, Wu Zetian.”

The familiarity between them slides down her spine like ice-cold water. When Yizhi moves closer to help her back to her wheelchair, she holds onto his wrist like he is at risk of being spirited away at any second.

Her heart is running rampant inside her chest while she wheels closer to the couch, thinking about shaking Li Shimin’s hand. This would be easier if she hated him instantly, absolutely, like she expected, like she did when Yizhi talked to her about him.

But now the way Yizhi sees him has poisoned her perspective. She can’t forget about the girls he killed, but she also feels a pang in her lungs at how obviously shy he is. He reeks so strongly of alcohol that it makes her wanna gag, but at the same time she can’t shake Yizhi’s words out of her head, he needs help, Zetian.

She ends up folding back her hand in her lap before she fully offers it to him, and she could swear Li Shimin looks relieved at that.

“Well, have fun, boys,” she says in a cheerful voice that is not hers, and goes to lock herself in their bedroom until she manages to stop hyperventilating.

It takes Yizhi a moment to come into the bedroom looking for her, and Zetian tells herself that annoyance is not the reason why she fires at him as soon as he steps inside.

“Aren’t you scared that a murderer is going to be sleeping next door?”

Yizhi tilts his head, considers her. Sometimes it makes her terribly mad, to know that he has anger inside him akin to hers, but that, for some reason, he is much better at disguising it, at pretending he is a perfectly pleasing and pleased person. He says that it is a virtue in her, that she can not subdue her feelings to convenience. She can’t imagine living any other way, but she also doesn’t know how he sees it as a virtue and not a flaw.

“Zetian, we are planning a murder.” It is an olive branch, she knows. I have not forgotten about our own plan. “Besides, I didn’t know you had a bone capable of feeling fear in your body.”

Oh, he couldn’t be more wrong. There is so much she fears.

She fears Yang Guang will keep on getting away with killing girls like Older Sister. 

She fears Gao Qiu and what he could do to interfere with their plans, what he could do to Yizhi once Yang Guang is dead. 

She fears for him, always. 

But she understands his point. She is not hiding out of fear. She is hiding because what she actually wants to do is go out and scream at Li Shimin until she makes him cry, but she promised Yizhi she would try her best. 

Besides, Li Shimin looks like he would actually cry, and she doesn't know how to process that.

She is using fear as a tool in a way she despises, to punish Yizhi for doing something she still doesn’t fully believe in. But she also has to confront herself with the knowledge that, maybe for the first time, she is starting to see the risks involved in whatever they do. She feels different, now that it’s not only her who can suffer consequences, but also him.  

But then, why is she scared, while Yizhi is not?

If Li Shimin, murderer, Iron Demon, were to decide to attack either of them in their sleep, Yizhi would have an advantage over her because of his mobile feet, but barely. 

For a second, she thinks yes, but he is not a girl. 

Hot, blinding shame follows that thought immediately, because being a girl is not an inherently faulty weakness. 

And because being male has not protected Yizhi from being abused before.

“I just want us to be safe,” is what finally comes out from the knot in her stomach, and Yizhi nods and kisses the top of her head and tells her that she doesn’t need to worry, and Zetian doesn’t explain that she is not only talking about Li Shimin.

She wakes up in the middle of the night, not because of the usual nightmares but because she is cold. It takes her a moment to realize Yizhi is not in bed with her, and the absence of his body warmth seeped through the bed and the entire room until it appeared in her dreams like an aching loss.

Any other night, she might have thrown another blanket on top of herself and be done with it, but not this night. Tonight, she puts on a house robe and goes looking for him with her cane, because she is not familiar enough around the suite yet to maneuver her wheelchair in the dark.

Yizhi is at the kitchen table, reading on his tablet, the soft blue light making strange shadows over his delicate features. She doesn’t realize Li Shimin is sleeping restlessly on the couch until she walks past him, and him murmuring something in his sleep scares the hell out of her. Yizhi watches her walk slowly to him, and points the tablet at her feet to put a little light on her path.

“What are you doing here?”

Her voice comes out in a whisper. Zetian tells herself it’s because it is night and to speak in a low voice comes naturally at night, and not because she cares about disturbing Li Shimin, who should be sleeping in his own bedroom, if she is being truthful. 

“He is starting to get withdrawal symptoms, and it’s better I keep an eye on him, just in case.”

Yizhi opens his arms to welcome her, his tablet forgotten on the table. Zetian sits on his lap. His arms hold her around her belly while he kisses her temple. When did this start to be so natural to them, to carve space for each other, to twist and shift until they can accept each other instead of maintaining any semblance of personal space? It makes her feel incredibly older, and it makes him look older too. 

Is that a good or a bad thing, the burdens they have to carry from so young, how they have changed them? 

It doesn’t matter if it’s good or bad; it just is.  

“Explain to me again why you decided to help him.” 

“Because he needed help.” 

“He is a violent murderer who is also a drunkard. Why do you think he is worth helping?” She is not trying to be combative; she is trying to be sincere.  

“Aren’t you worth helping, love?” 

“Are you comparing me to a drunkard, violent murderer?” 

She is trying to be funny, but the words fall flat. 

“You can draw certain similarities.” She punches him lightly on the arm, and she can feel him smiling against her hair. “I’m not saying everyone deserves help to be a better version of themselves. There are decidedly awful people out there, and I wouldn’t offer them a glass of water in the desert.” His voice is dark at the end. Zetian immediately thinks of Yang Guang, of course, but she wonders if he is thinking of his father, or someone else. “But most people? They deserve help. And I think Li Shimin is one of those. There is depth in him, Zetian, I can see it.” She makes a non-committal sound and Yizhi picks up his tablet again. “Let me show you.”

She watches with half-lidded eyes as he swipes around until he finds a photo of a poem written on paper. She is still a little sleepy, but she is sure she wouldn’t be able to read it even fully awake and focused, not with how stylized the characters are, but she still gets shocked by how intense it feels. Whoever wrote this (it’s hard for her to believe it was Li Shimin) knew what they were doing: there is meaning packed on every stroke, grace and power being told beyond the actual characters, beyond what she has the skills to actually comprehend.

“Wow.”

“I know.” Yizhi’s voice is so airy that it makes something tingle inside of her. “He is an incredible artist.” 

She pokes his ribs until he starts shifting on his seat and their position is at risk of turning into a completely different situation very fast.

“But you love to make fun of art students.”

“I know,” he whines. “What can I say? I can be a bit of a petty bitch, Zetian.” 

They laugh, softly. Sometimes it feels unfair that they can laugh, while Older Sister can’t. Will never be able to laugh again. But isn’t that the point? Life is not only about revenge. Or at least that’s what she is trying to make herself believe, what he is helping to make her believe.  

She cuddles against his chest, not pushing that thought away, but letting it curl and find its own place in her mind. Yizhi tells her everything he found out about Shimin’s life before the event that catapulted him to infamy, how he was top of his high school class and how he ruined his eyes studying in the dark in between the matches in a fight ring that paid for his schooling. 

In the dark, lulled against Yizhi’s body, the story peppered by Li Shimin’s own murmuring, it all sounds like a tale she can not connect to the real man, a folk story Yizhi is weaving to help put her to sleep.

“You sure did your research,” she whispers against his skin, her nose having pushed his nightclothes down to expose a sliver of his collarbone.

Yizhi rubs her back and she could fall asleep like this, Li Shimin being five steps away be damned.   

“I always do. I never jump into a plan with my eyes closed.” 

“But you did when you asked me to marry you.”

There is a moment of silence and Zetian would hold her breath for his answer if she weren’t so comfortable.

“Zetian, I would jump into Mount Zhurong tied and blindfolded for you.” 

It is too much. She thinks back to their earlier conversation, how he has no idea of the fears that live and fester inside of her, and how this is one of them. Not that he won’t love her anymore, but that someday his love would be a burden too heavy for her to carry. She says nothing, face pressed tight against his chest, and with his usual grace, Yizhi drives the conversation away to something easier to swallow without his voice as much as wavering. 

“You know, I used to daydream about being like this with you.”

“Watching over the sleep of a convicted murderer?” She makes the joke because what else is she supposed to say? Accept all that love he has to give her that sometimes feels like it might drown her?

He doesn’t even chuckle at her comment, and that’s as terrifying as the concept of Li Shimin.

“No. Just getting to have you close, every day. Coming home to you every night and waking up beside you every morning in a, a fucking cabin in the untamed mountains. Leading a quiet life together.”

She can not focus on the fantasy too much, because how terrible it is that it sounds appealing?

How terrible it is that she wants something else than settling the debt she hasn’t paid yet?

“Do you regret not having that?”

She is not sure what would be worse: if he says yes, or if he says no. 

“No.” His voice is certain, unwavering, and Zetian grips his clothes in a tight fist like the whole floor just shook under her. “Fuck the cabin in the mountains. Getting to make them pay with you, Zetian, that’s way more fun.”

She opens her mouth, afraid that something she won’t be able to take back might come out, but too overwhelmed about her own feelings to keep herself quiet. But before she can actually say anything, Yizhi’s wrist starts beeping like crazy, making them both jump so much she almost falls out of his lap.

“Sorry, I need to-”

She doesn’t get to find out what he needs to do, but she doesn’t need him to explain himself. She sits down on the chair by herself and watches Yizhi rushing to Li Shimin’s side, placing two fingers on his neck and murmuring something to him too softly for Zetian to hear.

What she definitely hears is Li Shimin whispering Wende while he holds onto Yizhi’s face with both hands, eyes barely open.

“Don’t… no… get away from me, Wende… don’t go into the cockpit…”

He is pushing at Yizhi’s chest, and it doesn’t make her feel unsafe or worried for him. It makes her feel sad. There is a desperation there she can sympathize with, even if she can’t understand what he is saying.

“Shhh, shhh, Shimin, you are okay.”

Why is Yizhi's comforting voice more startling than Li Shimin’s nightmares? She knows how caring he can be, this side of him existing is not a surprise, even if she can’t fully understand yet how he can project it onto someone he barely knows, someone who checks every box to make him wary.

Yizhi makes Li Shimin drink a glass of something he had on the side of the couch and then gently pushes on his chest until he lies down. Zetian takes that as her cue to go back to sleep. Watching them is too hard.

She expected to feel a little jealous, or scared, or uncomfortable. But she ended up feeling guilty, both because Yizhi is right and it couldn’t be clearer than Li Shimin needs help, and because she looked inside herself and believes she would never be able to look after someone the way Yizhi is doing, and what does that say about her and her capacity for compassion?  

Only when she passes by their side on her way to the bedroom does she notice that Yizhi and Li Shimin are holding hands.

It takes a week for her to want to rip her hair off.

It’s not that Yizhi has focused almost all of his free time on Li Shimin.

It’s not that Li Shimin wanders around the suite like a haunted spirit, dark circles under his eyes, shoulders quivering, body torn in between withdrawal and emotions Zetian can not- does not want to- decipher.

It’s not that him being constantly around makes the planning harder, because they weren’t doing much planning at all before him.

It’s not that Zetian feels overconscious at all times, that she is hyperaware of him being around whenever she wants to do anything, whether it is just having an angry meltdown or having sex with Yizhi.  

It’s none of those things and yet all of them at the same time.

It’s, also, that whenever she lashes out at him, he apologizes in a low voice that almost breaks her heart. When he first moved in, she was very conscious of the possibility of him overpowering any of them physically, but now it makes her feel worse that he just bows his head and takes anything she throws his way without defending himself.

It’s so hard to reconcile the image she had of him and her resentment over sacrificial concubines with this soft-spoken, handsome boy in glasses who used to be an artist, wrecked by withdrawal.

She has gotten used to both going to bed and waking up without Yizhi by her side, but when it happens for three nights in a row, she decides she has had enough and that she is going to drag her husband back to cuddle with her, Li Shimin’s vitals be damned.

It has been a rough night for them all. Li Shimin was called to pilot during an attack, and Yizhi’s protest fell on deaf ears. He got told that he should consider himself lucky that he has been allowed to do this much, and he went back to the suite with fists clenched so tight his palms were bleeding.

It could not have been more than an hour all put together, since they tore Li Shimin away and they brought him back a shivering mess, but for Zetian, it could have been days. She spent almost as much time worrying about him as she spent mourning the dead girl, and when she came back she couldn’t look him in the eyes, because relief and anger had her heart in a chokehold, and she could not let him see her work through that mess.    

After all that, she expected Yizhi to be looking over a fretful Li Shimin, but when she goes to the living room, Yizhi is not reading while Li Shimin sleeps; they are both awake, and Yizhi is… serving food?

Now, Li Shimin is hunched down on a chair, shoulders high enough to cover his ears, while Yizhi pushes a plate of steaming food towards him. The smell alone makes Zetian’s mouth water. Yizhi has cooked for her before, but on the day to day he usually brings food from the communal kitchens or she takes over the cooking just because she has more free time than him.

To watch him take the time and effort to cook something from scratch, when she knows he is constantly overworked and underrested, makes something in her gut twist.

She is about to walk in and steal for herself one of the buns that Li Shimin is picking with little enthusiasm when Yizhi says something that gives her pause.

“I know your nausea is bad right now, but these buns can cure anything. Or, well,” he chuckles, “that’s what my mother used to tell me when I was a kid and she made them for me.”

He has told her a little about his mother, especially about her dreadful end, but he doesn’t talk about her much, definitely not in a casual manner, and Zetian has never pushed to know more. Her parents were awful and yet they are still very much a wound in the middle of her chest. She can only imagine that a mother who was good to him but is not around anymore is painful to remember, the same way memories about Ruyi feel sometimes like she is swallowing embers.

Something ruffles inside her chest, and she puts a hand over her ribs, trying to understand what is going on with her heart. There could be resentment, especially paired with the fact that she feels a little neglected by Yizhi, but it’s not that, and it’s not jealousy either. 

It’s relief.

She is glad that he feels safe enough to open up with someone, even if that someone is not her.

Shimin murmurs something back about his own mother, and Zetian decides to go back to bed, because this is between them, and she has no right to intrude. 

And because, for some reason, she is also glad that Shimin has someone he can talk to, and she'd rather not dwell on that too much.

The next morning, Zetian makes a point to do two things.

First, she wakes up before Yizhi leaves and surprises him with a long, heated kiss that makes him stumble in his Student Strategist robes.

“Don’t be a stranger, okay?” she says, and she shoos him away when realization dawns in his eyes and he tries to cobble together an apology. “Make it up to me tonight.”

She never expected to be kneeling on a bed with a man’s clothes tight in her fists, batting her eyelashes at him, but why should it be in itself a bad thing? She is teasing him because she wants to, not because someone expects her to do it. 

She is learning to make peace with loving him because it makes her happy, and not because she doesn’t have another choice.

After Yizhi has already left, she wheels to Shimin’s door- he did go to sleep there after he and Yizhi were done with their impromptu nocturnal cooking, apparently- and knocks a lot less hard than she would have done a couple of weeks ago.

“Hmmm,” is all he says when he opens the door to find her pushing a cup towards him. Herbal, just like Yizhi makes it for him. He looks disheveled and tired, sunken eyes like he had when they first brought him in and the withdrawal was at its worst, but mostly he looks baffled.

“This is a truce,” Zetian explains, and he opens his mouth like he is about to say he didn’t even know they were at war, but he ends up saying nothing. “I don’t approve of what Yizhi is doing with you, but I will try harder to accept it, for his sake.”

Shimin blushes slightly at hearing Yizhi’s name. Huh. Zetian never imagined he could look smitten. And yet.

“I don’t understand why he wants to help me either,” he mumbles, eyes downward. “No one has cared about me like he does in a long time”. 

And that’s something she can work with, because Zetian can relate to that.

Things get easier from that moment. Her anxiety about the plan being on pause until Yizhi can get a hold of Yang Guang’s medical file is escalating. The fear about losing sight of what really matters, drowned by day-to-day life, is still ever-present.

But life as a whole is… better.

That very same morning she promised him a truce, Shimin offers sheepishly to help her to the wheelchair and, surprising even herself, Zetian says yes. She hates feeling dependent on anyone, but depriving herself of help just out of pride is only going to hurt her in the long run. 

They develop some sort of a routine after that, with Shimin trailing after her as her muscled helping hand while they do chores, and Zetian watching him keep up with his physical exercises with something close to envy. She doesn’t want to be Shimin and his dark trail of dead girls, but she does wish she were some version of him that could be free.

Because, ginormous Chrysalis and dizzying spirit pressure put aside, it would be hard to miss that he is as much of a prisoner here as she is. And sure, he did something to merit this situation, but the fact that he is not the owner of his own time or even his own body hits too close to home for her comfort.

Besides, the more she treats him and the more the alcohol effects start drifting away to be replaced with his sweet, shy personality, the less that story about him murdering his entire family in cold blood makes sense.

She considers asking him about it more than once, but this closeness still feels dangerous, like something that still could stab her in the back. She can not expect honesty from him, because she is in no position to offer any back to him. So they dance around each other, and see the eyes of the other light up every time Yizhi comes back, and they both pretend nothing weird is going on there.               

One morning, he is pacing the living room and Zetian is trying really hard not to throw something at his head. She is almost sold on turning her afternoon stroll to a right-this-very-second stroll and blocking the guilty feeling of knowing that he can’t be blamed for his nerves since he can’t leave the suite unless he is called into duty, when Shimin interrupts her train of thought.

“Zetian, would you happen to have any books?” She blinks at him. “I hate to bother you when you and Yizhi have already done so much for me, but...” he trails off, and Zetian already knows enough about him, both from Yizhi and from his own mouth, to understand what he needs.

He looks like he has never gone through a more embarrassing moment in his life, and that’s a difference between them: they both have nothing, but she is aware that she deserves more.    

“Oh, sure. Yizhi uses his tablet mostly, but I can ask him if he has any around.” 

She remembers the books he brought to help improve her reading, but she is not sure what Yizhi did with his own. It doesn’t matter much: she knows Yizhi will buy books for him at the first opportunity he has, the same way he did with the prescription glasses Shimin uses, but she doesn’t say it because she doesn't want him to feel self-conscious.

Fuck, that is such a Yizhi way of seeing life, of being kind to people. What is wrong with her.

Shimin has his head tilted, looking at her with perplexity. 

“You don't read?” 

Zetian doesn’t like to be put on the spot, especially not with something that makes her feel inferior, with something that is not her fault, because she is not a beefy, half-rongdi man that can go out and beat other people up to get an education.  

“My reading level is not great,” she finally admits with a grumble. “Yizhi was teaching me before we got married, but I’m awful at doing it alone and he is so busy now… the little time he has, I’d rather do other things with him.” 

It surprises even herself; she didn’t mean to be cheeky or make him feel uncomfortable, the truth just blurted out of her. But what surprises her more is that Shimin doesn't sputter, scandalized, or look offended by her indiscretion. He just blushes and lets out a little chuckle. Zetian tightens her fingers on her lap, getting warm all over at the unexpected sound. 

“I can help you with that if you want…” She bites on the inside of her cheek to not say, you wanna help me have sex with my husband? “With the reading, I mean.”

She tells herself that it’s the usefulness of the knowledge that drives her to say yes, and not the admittedly cute mix of bashfulness and hope on his face. 

“Okay.”

They get so absorbed by the reading lesson that they lose track of time and when Yizhi comes back, they pull apart like they got caught committing a crime.

Shimin retreats to his room mumbling a weak excuse, and Yizhi, who would usually beg him to stay and share a normal moment with them, promising that he is not intruding, just nods and reminds him to come back in an hour for his medicine.

The second Yizhi gets near her and she can see his face clearly, Zetian understands what is going on and a thrill of anticipation makes every hair in her body stand on end.

“Did you finally get it?”

Yizhi has been trying to get into Yang Guang’s medical file ever since they got here, especially now that Shimin’s care gives him a believable excuse to get in the Pilots’ database. Zetian thought it was good enough to get him alone, whatever the excuse, and stab him in the fucking eye, but well, that was her rough plan all along. Yizhi insisted that since they had agreed to change plans, they could work towards an option that had at least a little chance of not ending with her- and her entire family, and possibly him too- on death row. 

“Yeah. And I have great news.” He is smiling so big that someone would think it was his birthday. “Deadly allergic to pistachios. Bad enough they are banned from the kitchens altogether to prevent any mishaps."

The earlier thrill materializes into electricity, zapping through her body from her toes to her scalp. There was a big chance that Yang Guang didn’t have a medical weakness they could exploit, what with being a nineteen-year-old babied by the military. Zetian had even started to wonder if the delay in Yizhi acquiring his file wasn’t him already knowing there was nothing useful there and scrambling to put together a different plan before upsetting her with the news.

But no. He did what he promised her he would do, and now the excitement of finally being able to cobble together a plan mixes with the affection she can’t help feeling for him.

She pulls him down by his robe and kisses him hard, teeth clinking together because neither of them can stop smiling.

“What now?”

The weeks of waiting dragged on for her; now that this is starting to finally happen, her blood is burning like she would die if she had to wait without a proper plan for another minute.

Yizhi sits down without letting go of her hand.

“We get the pistachios, we cook them into something he usually eats and we pay someone to bring it to him.”

Her brain, which was already running with ideas in three different directions, screeches to a halt. This is a difference that has been there since the beginning, one that she had, foolishly, decided to table implicitly, focusing instead on bigger gaps in their plan. 

“What.”

It is obvious in her tone that it isn’t a question, that she heard him perfectly. Yizhi pinches his eyebrows together, the dimples that appear when he smiles vanishing.

“Zetian-”

She doesn’t let him go further than just her name. His tone is already condescending enough. Gods, how does she hate it when he uses that tone on her. Where did the camaraderie, the excitement, the sheer love from two minutes ago go?

“We are not getting someone else involved. This should be on me and no one else.”

She pushes down the thought that anything she does will surely ricochet on him. He knew the risks. He knows the risks. 

“I am not letting you put yourself at risk like that.”

And just like that, they circle back to that first conversation in the woods. How dumb of her, to think that things have changed between them.

“That’s not on you to decide,” she grits out. “You made a promise to me. That you would help me kill him, whatever it takes. And what it takes is putting myself at risk.”

She expects him to bring back the condescension. To point out the weak spots in her barely-there plan. Instead, Yizhi just rubs his eyes and Zetian is almost sure he did it to hide the obvious telltale of imminent tears.

When he speaks again, he doesn’t sound angry anymore. “Is that all this marriage is to you, Zetian? A way to achieve that goal?”

Does she wish that weren’t the truth? Yes.

But isn’t that the truth? She is not completely sure.

She skids around the issue. “If you understood me at all, you would know why I need it to be this way.” 

She doesn’t want to hurt him. She doesn’t know how to do anything but hurt him.

She wishes he would get angry again. Anger she knows how to deal with, but instead, Yizhi exhales and it’s like every drop of air leaving his lungs breaks his ribs on its wake.

“Zetian, it’s hard to understand you when nothing moves you except wanting to be dead.” It’s a low blow, as all the ones that are close to the truth are, and just when she is getting ready to pay him in kind, he finally lets the tears flow down his face freely. “Help me understand, please.”

Her own anger wanes and drifts away. She just feels inexplicably tired, the desire to curl around him and be lulled to sleep by his body warmth, to wake up rested and tangled in sheets that smell like him, growing by the second.   

“It needs to be me. I need to do it. He is this big boulder weighing me down, and his death alone won’t take it off my shoulders. I need to know it was done right, and I need him to know it was me.”

There is a long stretch of silence after her declaration and for a moment, Zetian thinks they are about to break into a full-blown fight. Maybe they should, if he still thinks she sees him as only a means to an end, if she is not even sure she can feel anything but her thirst for revenge. 

Yizhi swallows laboriously and Zetian wants to follow the bobbing of his Adam’s apple with her mouth, feel the feebleness of life trembling under her tongue. They have not stopped holding hands even while they almost jumped to each other’s throats.

“I get that,” he whispers, and it’s so easy, with how raw her pain is, how loud the absence of Older Sister feels, to forget about his own demons.

To forget that no matter how well he can hide it, he is just as angry and broken as she is, wants to tear the world apart just as much as she does.

His nails are sharp on the back of her hand when he speaks again.

“Okay, then we find an excuse for you to give him the pistachios.” 

“I think I know how you can get them to him.” 

Her blood freezes inside her veins. Yizhi’s hand goes rigid on hers. When they both raise their heads, Shimin is standing in the doorway, shifting his weight nervously, eyes fixed on the floor.

Shit.

Shit.

They have gotten used to his presence enough to… forget about him not being on the know as they are, too engrossed in the new developments of their plan. And now they have been busted and what can they do?

Zetian looks around for any emergency escape plan, finds nothing, wonders if she would be able to topple him over if he crashed into him with her wheelchair. 

And then… what? They run into the wilds? Go back to Chang’an and hide under the shadow of fucking Gao Qiu?

But Shimin is not yelling, is not giving them any signs that he is about to go snitching on them, even if he could leave the suite. He is all twitchy hands and a creeping blush. For a dark second, Zetian wonders if someone would even believe him if he were to rat them out.

As usual, Yizhi reacts faster and better than her.

“Shimin, what did you say?”

He takes a stumbling step towards them and Zetian can’t help flinching, a flash of the alcohol-drenched version of him of the first few days coming back to her mind. How could it be possible that just a half hour ago he was the softest tutor she could ask for, and now there is this chiasm between them?

“I said that I know how you can get food to Yang Guang. He has a, um.” Shimin is stuttering but it is not from disbelief or shock; he is embarrassed. Zetian could not be more amazed by him if he grew a second head just about now. “A reputation for trying to sleep with everyone's wife. Sorry,” he adds at the end, quietly, like he, and not they, was the one who got caught in the middle of a murder plot.

Like he was the one trying to sleep with someone else’s wife.

Yizhi looks at her. The disbelief she sees on his features is identical to the blubbering mess that has exploded inside her stomach. 

There is also a question in his eyes. Every rational part of her mind tells her that this is a mistake, that trusting Yizhi was too much of a risk in itself, that she can not afford anyone else to know.

And yet.

She gives him a tiny nod. Yizhi stands up and brings Shimin closer, until their three pairs of feet form a small triangle, heads bent toward each other.   

“Shimin, we are talking about murdering him.”

“I know.”

Zetian watches closely for Shimin’s reaction. She does not want to hash the topic of Ruyi again, but she will if she needs to. Shimin is not looking at either of them, his eyes still fixed on his shifting feet.     

“But you don’t know why.”

Only then does he raise his head. No matter how uncomfortable he looks in his own body, he towers over them, and his eyes are flashing with fire-red qì.

Still, somehow, Zetian doesn’t feel threatened by him in any way. 

“I imagine you must have your reasons.” He steals a glance at Yizhi, his cheeks reddening in the process. Zetian would find it endearing if her entire future wasn’t hanging by a thread right now. “I trust you. Both of you.”

It is… something else, being on the receiving end of someone’s trust. He is not someone she would have chosen, she is not even sure how she feels about him, but he is someone making a choice with his gut, and she can respect that.

“You don’t care that we are planning to kill one of your fellow pilots?” Yizhi presses. His face is closed, not hard but unreadable. Despite the recent argument, despite their differences, Zetian can’t help feeling a surge of deep affection for him and the way he is protecting her interests against someone she knows for a fact he likes.

Shimin scratches his cheek, just under his tattoo.

“As I said, he has a… reputation, in more ways than one. I don’t like what he does to his concubines.”

The air around her freezes. Yizhi looks at her, but Zetian can not meet his eyes. They suspected more victims from some rumors Yizhi had heard about Yang Guang and because Ruyi being the only one didn’t make any sense. But to hear the closest thing to a confirmation they could get still feels like a punch to the throat.

But this is too much. She still can not make this about Older Sister, not in front of Shimin, not yet. She can not bare her soul to him, both the hurt parts and the twisted ones, until they settle the issue that has been breaching them since the beginning. 

“And how about you? You go into battle every time knowing that a girl will die.”

Yizhi gasps. He is kind enough to choose to treat people with kid gloves when possible, but blunt and straight to the point works better for her, and she has a feeling the same is true with Shimin. She does not look at Yizhi, her eyes fixed on Shimin’s, who have now gone back to their natural black. To his merit, he holds her gaze even though his lips are trembling.

“Do you know that we can feel them die?” His voice is even lower than usual, bordering on a whisper. “We can feel their fears at the end. We see their memories. We dream their dreams.”

Zetian is not sure if the admission that the experience is excruciating for him is supposed to make things better or worse. 

“And yet.”

His eyes are shining with tears. Yizhi is crying too, his own tears pit-a-patting against her shoulder.  

“And yet, I end up choosing myself every time. I value my own life too much to let them kill me. You can hate me for that, believe me, I hate myself for it too.” Yizhi stretches a soothing hand towards him, but Shimin rejects the offer with a shake of his head. “But to kill another human being just because? I can not even stand the thought.”

His words sit heavy on top of her ribcage. She would like to scream at him that she doesn’t have any sympathy for his pain, that he should have given his life to give any of those girls even one more minute of life. 

But she finds out she can’t.

Because she aches for those girls, the ones forced into this by their families against their will, and the ones who went into it willingly because they grew up thinking it was all they could aspire to be. The ones who think this is the best they can be.

But she also aches for Shimin and the haunted memories that sink his eyes, the broken hands that are not fit to hold a writing brush anymore. Because he too had big dreams and- maybe deserved, maybe not, she doesn’t yet know the story of the murders for which he got convicted- his spirit also got crushed under the legs of his big-ass Chrysalis.

Because he also wants to be free, and can’t.

Because he is not- she can feel it in her blood- the same as Yang Guang.

This time, she is the one to stretch a hand towards him, and unlike how he did when it was Yizhi, this time Shimin takes it. His skin is warm and rough under hers, the hand of someone who knows what it is like to work, what it is like to lose.

She squeezes his hand once and then uses her other one to point to the couch. Shimin sits down without letting go of her hand.

“Why did you kill your family?” She asks, point-blank. Yizhi sucks in a sharp breath. Poor Yizhi, raised like a prince, choosing to be kind when the world sucks, caught in between the fire of her tactlessness. 

But the question is not an accusation; it is a request, an invitation. Just like Yizhi did with her before. Help me understand, please.

Shimin seems to take her at face value, because he doesn’t let go of her hand, and doesn’t flinch when Yizhi sits next to him and places his hand on top of his thigh.

He inhales deeply and begins his story.

“There was this girl.”

A little because of the certainty of the plan taking form, a little because of the freedom of having Shimin on the loop, but Zetian feels that things start looking up for her.

The next day, she turns her daily stroll into a longer trip around the base in her wheelchair. Her efforts are rewarded; she runs into Yang Guang in one of the terrifying elevators, with him coming out when she was wheeling in. She waves at him, aiming for friendly if not over the top, and when he winks back at her, she pinches her leg until color starts rushing to her cheeks.

She will seduce him no matter what it takes.

Her days start having structure and purpose. Mornings spent working with Shimin on her reading and writing. Late afternoons trying to plant the seed of desire in Yang Guang’s mind. Nights tangled in bed with Yizhi.

It is a good life, and she refuses to consider what it says about her that her concept of a good life includes the necessary preludes to murder.

There are also highlights to that existence.  

There is that time Yizhi buys a big crate of different nuts, and the three of them spend an entire weekend trying recipes, Shimin’s and hers simple and pragmatic styles mixing with Yizhi’s outlandish one. Shimin and Yizhi talk about their mothers, and Zetian counters with stories about Ruyi and the few, almost painful, good memories featuring her mother and grandmother. They even manage to tear out of Shimin the story about the girl he sometimes names in his dreams, and to cheer him up, Yizhi tells stories about his Chag'an’s dalliances until Shimin blushes crimson and Zetian is bent with laughter on the couch.  

It ends with the three of them sprawled on the couch, bellies full of food and laughter, the kitchen a mess from the flour playfighting that Yizhi started and that not even the food-related guilt both her and Shimin feel was strong enough to stop.

The glowing sunset light hits just right on Yizhi’s face, making his eyelashes look golden, and Shimin blushes furiously when he leans closer to whisper something in his ear. Zetian just watches them from her corner of the couch, two boys playing bashful with each other, looking for the first time in a long while the age they have- murder sentences and abusive fathers, fate of the world and a charade bigger than all of them, lifted momentarily from their shoulders.

No matter how they look, no matter what they can do and what they will do, they are all still children. Yizhi and Shimin are not even old enough to wear their hair fully up yet. This is the hand they have been dealt, burdened with a lot more than they should have to bear, and Zetian faces it with clenched teeth, but that doesn’t mean she has made peace with it.      

Because as much as she was willing to die to kill Yang Guang a couple of months ago, she is glad she is getting to experience this softer side of life, and that she gets to do it with them both.

After two weeks of her small game of chasing after him, one day Yang Guang goes out of his way to accompany her to an elevator, chatting stupidly all the way, and Zetian laughs at all the appropriate times and bats her eyelashes at him at every opportunity. 

It is surprising how much she doesn’t hate this part of the build-up. Sure, she has to laugh at jokes she doesn’t find funny, has to keep quiet about what she really thinks about almost everything, has to sometimes conjure up Yizhi’s deft fingers or Shimin’s sheepish smiles to force her body to showcase attraction to him.

(No, she does not have the time to think about the Shimin part.) 

But it doesn’t feel like a position she has been forced into; it is a role, a part she is playing, the chase a spider does before eating its prey.

So far, her encounters with him have been peppered with nothing more than banalities and small talk, but this time, while he calls the elevator for her, Yang Guang leans against the wall and gives her the perfect opportunity to strike.

“What is wrong with your husband? You are wandering around all the time. Doesn’t he take care of you?”

The actual reply she would like to give to him lodges in her throat, which means she doesn’t have to make an effort to make her voice come out raspy, tantalizing.

“Well, he is too busy with his pet project to care.” Yang Guang nods. He obviously knows about the Shimin thing. Damn, even at war on the frontier, people are going to be people, and people are going to gossip. “Sometimes I think he likes Li Shimin more than he likes me.”

It is not exactly a real fear, but a tiny lie wrapped around an extrapolation of a real fear. She is not scared that Yizhi will love Shimin more, but that maybe his contact with him will make him see clearly all of her flaws. She pushes that sentiment down, forcing a flirty half smile on her lips.

The elevator comes and goes. She doesn’t get in. 

“Well, if that’s the case…” Yang Guang leans over her with a chuckle and his low voice raises goosebumps on her arms. She is not sure if it’s a reaction to fear, anticipation or desire, and she doesn’t know which one she would loathe more. “Next time he is too busy to take care of you, come to my place. I promise I will not lose my time with a drunkard asshole when I could be losing it with you.”

Zetian doesn’t breathe again until she is going up to their suite.

Zetian can barely keep her energy under control until Yizhi comes back to the suite. Shimin could probably feel her state of mind and decided to steer clear of her, but comes out of his room the moment Yizhi walks back inside the suite, only to witness Zetian straight up laying the request on him.

“After the next hundun attack, you need to make yourself scarce.”

The post-attack timing was Shimin’s suggestion, since right after an attack is a pilot’s most vulnerable moment. The concept is solid- there is both less chance to be interrupted if Yang Guang is off duty and he will be slightly less dangerous while depleted of qì.

Yizhi takes off his hat and lets his hair fall over his shoulders. Zetian vows not to let herself be distracted.

“Okay. Care to explain?”

“Yang Guang invited me over to his tower.”

Yizhi takes a moment to reply, his throat pulsating with unsaid words. She can imagine what he is feeling, but she can not be distracted by that. The back of her knees is already burning with the promise of action after this long while of doing nothing. She feels like she is just now waking up from a dream; a pleasant one, but a dream nonetheless.

“Shit, Shimin, you were not lying about him stealing everyone’s wife.”

Shimin makes a sound half between a chuckle and a sob.

“To be fair, I may or may not have implied that you and Shimin were sleeping together.”

Of course, she didn’t say it to justify Yang Guang- scum of the world- being an asshole; she said it to dissipate the tension coiling around them like snakes. The comment has the desired effect: Yizhi’s lips start trembling and a second later, he cracks up into a fit of laughter that makes him collapse on the couch. Zetian wheels to him with a smirk while Shimin stands frozen in his place, absolute bewilderment painted on his face at her cheek.

“You are a menace,” Yizhi mock-chastizes her, and they have not talked about this explicitly, but it feels good to know that even if Yizhi is not sleeping with Shimin- and she knows he isn’t, only because when would he even have the time- her instincts are not wrong about where his desires lie.

Knowing him feels better than owning him.

She feigns nonchalance; Shimin’s reaction makes it obvious that he is not ready to broach this topic. Still, it makes her happy to know that even if this plan goes south for her, they will have each other, in whatever capacity that might look like. 

“I had a bout of inspiration.” She winks at Shimin and he looks like he might combust spontaneously any second, still without having said a single word. Luckily, he still takes the invitation on her gesture at face value and sits down on the other side of the couch, very careful about not touching either of them. “Anyway, remember, Yizhi, you need to figure out something to do after the next attack.”

His face shifts, but at least he doesn’t take his hand away from her knee.

“Zetian, you are not serious.”

“Serious as a heart attack.”

Dead serious, like Yang Guang will be after she is done with him.

Yizhi furrows his nose in a clear sign of distaste. Zetian looks at Shimin, who is watching one of them and then the other alternatively, to brush off Yizhi’s reaction.

“I’m not leaving you alone.”

“You are not coming with me to seduce him.”

“No, but I will be here in case you need me.”

Truth is, Zetian is pretty sure that they can make up a lie to tell Yang Guang about where Yizhi is. He wouldn’t have to actually leave.

Truth is, Zetian is not sure she could do what needs to be done if she knows he is at home waiting for her.

Home. What a weird concept to attach to this place.

“Shimin will be here.”

“Shimin won’t be able to help you.”

Yizhi is… not wrong. Shimin has gotten so interwoven in their daily life that sometimes it’s easy to forget that the collar he wears around his neck is not a fashion choice. They both turn to look at him and Shimin blinks furiously, caught in the crossfire.

“He is right. If anything were to happen to you, Zetian, I won’t be able to help.”

There is pain in his voice, a sorrow deeper than the impracticality of not being able to lend a hand when she might need him.

In a way, Zetian loves that they are both desperate to be there for her, to help her in whatever way they can. But in a different, more urgent, way, she needs them both to understand that this is not about what is best for her; this is about what she needs to do on her own terms. She has bargained enough by ditching her original plan to follow Yizhi’s. 

This time, he- they- needs to follow her own instincts.

They have fought enough about every part of this process, she needs to save her energy for the main event. She doesn’t want to jump into danger while being at odds with Yizhi. So she leans closer to him, slips her hand under the sleeve of his robe until she can touch the tender skin on the inside of his elbow. She doesn’t need to see them to know exactly the shape and the color of the tattoos she is grazing.

“You promised me this,” she reminds him, and he lets out a long exhale because he can tell this argument has been exhausted already.

“Why are you so difficult,” he grits out but there is no bite in his voice. They both know he won’t fight her on this. This is almost an I love you coming from him.

“You love that I am difficult,” she teases back, thumb running on the sensitive skin of his arm until she makes him shiver. 

“... yes, yes I do.”

How did it happen that they went from talking about murdering Yang Guang, joking about him fucking Shimin, to his eyes being molten lava that makes her boil from the inside out. 

And, speaking of Shimin, he is sitting completely still on his end of the couch, but when Zetian steals a glance his way, he is not sitting on his hands, looking uncomfortable. He holds her gaze, chest going up and down quickly with ragged breathing, his eyes light up with fire-qì red. His attention makes her skin prickle as much as Yizhi’s does. 

Gods, what is even happening here.

Zetian can not believe the level of excitement that floods her when the alarms go crazy in the middle of the night. When she leans out of the windows of their living room to see the Nine-Tailed Fox springing into action, she gets shivers of anticipation running all over her body.

Yizhi has to leave soon for the post-day battle recon mission he signed up for, but not before he picks up her outfit.

Zetian watches him take a robe off the closet, murmur something under his breath, discard it. Rinse and repeat. He did not ask her if she needed help, but Zetian said nothing when he took the reins, both because she understands nothing about these clothes, and because she understands his need for control and to feel her closer. She understands because she feels the same way.

Most of these robes have never been worn- she didn’t have many opportunities so far to put on the fancy ones she got goaded into buying before they got here, and even if she is not above ruining something just out of desire to use it, they always seemed impractical for her day-to-day life.

Yizhi ends up picking a deep burgundy robe with golden accents that has reminiscences of both her wedding dress and the Vermillion Bird. She says nothing about it, but the slight blush on his cheeks tells her that he might be thinking the same thing.

“Do you want me to do your make-up?”

Zetian hesitates. She hates that Yang Guang is on the receiving end of all this work, all this intricate net of lies, but she has put enough time and effort and blood into this whole plan to walk away now. And, if her make-up needs to be done, she is too nervous to do it herself.

“Yes, please.”

Yizhi helps her sit on top of their dresser, the spot with the best lighting in the whole bedroom, and takes out powders and brushes and creams. He holds her jaw, considers her face for a second with an artist’s eyes, and after a brief moment, starts covering her cheeks with confident strokes. She tilts her face upwards and lets him work, fingers delicate as brushes, brushes delicate as butterfly wings. 

Zetian tries to move as little as possible to not mess up his hard work, but while he has his eyes fixed on wherever part he is working on, she keeps hers on his face. He is incredibly attractive like this, cool, with a clear objective, focused. This would work for her even if she weren’t already in love with him.

“Done. Take a look.”

She knows how the make-up feels: sticky, thick, warm on her skin. Yizhi helps her do a half turn to be able to watch herself in the mirror placed above their dresser. Everything is perfectly meticulous, from the eyeliner to the crimson flower and dimple adornments he added. 

Her reflection is a different woman. No, not a different woman; she is a spirit; ethereal, menacing, slightly terrifying. She could not have imagined a better look to go settle a vengeance score.

“It is unbelievable how much better at this you are than I,” she whispers, entranced. She can not take her eyes away from the mirror, from her eyes turned otherworldly by his magic, from the reflection of Yizhi mouthing at her jaw, charmed by his own talent. Good thing he has already put setting spray on her.

“I have a lot of sisters,” he murmurs, his lips never fully leaving her skin. “And I have done my own plenty of times when going to clubs in Chang’an.”

Her lungs ache when she breathes, and she refuses to think it’s because of her body reacting to the imminence of a life-or-death situation. No, it is a longing to know every bit possible about him, a bitterness for not having been there to share these experiences with him, an itch to have him closer than these useless human bodies allow them.

Her desire to cry doesn’t come from the fear mixed with anticipation of meeting Yang Guang, but from the image she is conjuring of his flawless skin iridescent under the lights of a dancing club.    

“One day you are going to tell me all your club stories.”

She is teasing him about his dissolute past, but she is also making a promise to him: we will have a future together. I will do everything I can to make sure we have a future together.

Maybe she is being delusional, but the only thing she can do is try.

“Oh, you want to know?” He taps her on the nose with the tip of one of the brushes with a half smirk. Zetian squeaks, tries to push him apart playfully. “How very naughty of you, Wu Zetian.”

She knows that his flirtiness is a shield, that he is using it to not show her how afraid he is. She chooses to still treat it like a gift, sneaking her hand to hold onto his hip and pull him close.

It has been several months since the years of build-up in the woods collapsed into reality, but his touch on her skin still leaves thrilling goosebumps in its wake.

Maybe they shouldn’t be doing this, in the prelude of such a life-changing occurrence.

Yizhi is anxious and afraid. Zetian is worked up and impatient. 

That is exactly why they should be doing this.

They have not talked about the possibility that she might sleep with Yang Guang, but she has said by any means necessary and she will stuff the adulterated pastry down his throat even if she has to drown him in her cleavage to do it. 

They have not discussed it because Yizhi doesn’t own her body, but she needs to leave with the reminder of him on her skin, knowing that she doesn’t belong to him, but that they do belong together.

It’s so easy to let themselves get carried away, and only when Yizhi has already lost his robe and her hand is down his trousers, does he pull away from her, panting.

“We should not-”

“Oh, I think we should.”

He looks at her, his teeth digging into only half of his lower lip, making the other half jut out. Zetian wants to rip it out and swallow it whole.

“We are going to mess up your killing look,” he says, feebly, chest quaking with his rapid breathing.

“Then I am gonna be messed up.”

Yizhi doesn’t say anything, but lets her pull him closer, her knees hooked just under his ass. When she starts touching him again, he is still hard and his eyes flutter closed when she wraps her hand around him.

“Shimin could hear us,” he adds, and instead of a reason why they should not be doing this, it comes out as a prayer.

Zetian has gotten over the embarrassment of being exposed, has gotten over the apprehension of feeling surveilled by someone like him. Now, that Shimin might hear them fucking sounds like a perk.

She moves her hand to his ass and pushes him forward, until he is flush against the wood of the dresser. It might be a little uncomfortable but he enjoys walking on the thin border that separates pain and pleasure, and Zetian has learned to walk it with him. 

It also means she can grind against his naked abdomen and that simple friction makes her overheated, blind with desire.

“Yes,” she says, and watches with delight how his eyes refocus while he tries to decipher what she is agreeing to. “Yes, Shimin could hear us.” She makes a pause, lets him hum without stopping their movements. “Bet you would like that, no?”

It is a high-stakes wager to put into clear words this thing they have been dancing around for weeks. Things could go terribly wrong.

They could also go terribly right.

Either way, she can’t leave today without being completely honest with him.

Yizhi freezes, glassy eyes enormous with shock, but before Zetian has enough time to panic, his expression collapses into a full-body shiver that comes out of his mouth as a moan. 

“Fuck, Zetian.” 

She can feel the change in him, his muscles tauter, his breathing quicker, his skin warmer. His body is a map to all the ways desire can be felt, and maybe she should be jealous that he can feel this way about someone else, but somehow it only makes her want him more. 

“Bet he would like that, too.”

So far, he has been desperate, but playful. Now he is ravenous, his fingers feverish on her skin, opening her up, wrecking her. He is not tall or strong enough to make this position work, but urgency fuels them, and after they are done Zetian will wonder how he managed to keep her suspended in the air for that long.

He is leaving marks everywhere, his nails on the fleshy part of her hips, his teeth on her shoulders, her chest. It is both a show of his passion and, she believes, a need to project himself into her future. If she gets naked with Yang Guang, there will be undeniable proof that he was there before to make her squirm, to pull her apart like the wedges of an overripe fruit.     

“And you, Zetian? What about you?” 

So far, it has been an afterthought, her focus has been on what Yizhi feels for Shimin, what she is certain Shimin feels for Yizhi. There is a storm inside of her, emotions swirling around like a whirlwind in her stomach. Loving Yizhi has been easy- as easy as emotions and vulnerability can be for her- because it was something older than this vengeance, older than this particular shade of rage. How is she supposed to focus on anything else but the need for revenge that makes her blood boil?

How is she supposed to focus on anything else right now, with Yizhi inside her and around her and dripping into her veins?

She kisses him to avoid the question, all teeth and force and Yizhi lets himself be dragged into the bruising hurricane of her passion.  

The transition back to calmness could be awkward, but they are good at that part, at being able to uphold the tenderness once the lust has been settled for now. Yizhi tuts at the state of her undergarments, which he twisted and tore himself not ten minutes before, and once he has wiped her off and helped her put on fresh clothes, he picks up his brushes to freshen up her make-up.

The final touch is the hairpin that was the core of her original plan. If everything goes south, she will have it as a last resort. 

His face is serious when he offers her a hand to help her down from the dresser once he is done.

“Zetian…”, he begins.

“Don’t.” They have talked enough about what is about to happen. She can’t talk anymore about it with him. She needs it to be done, to be back in his arms with the suffocating weight of her debt lifted from her chest.

Yizhi shakes his head, traces the side of her jaw with fingers light as a feather. Her heartbeat follows the path of his touch. 

“Does it bother you? That I like Shimin?”

She didn’t expect him to broach this topic again after it came out in an impulse of pure want. It is almost a relief after expecting him to talk about Yang Guang, to advise her caution that she can’t promise him, to kiss her goodbye when she can’t fathom with dry eyes the idea of not seeing him again.  

“I don’t know, are you going to leave me for him? I have never heard of a Pilot marrying outside of a balanced match, but there is a first time for everything.”

She is teasing him, trying to put a lightweight spin on this momentous exchange, but he does not smile, strange in that laconic expression that doesn’t suit him at all, doesn’t go with his chaffed lips or with his lovely skin shining with sweat. 

“Zetian, there will always be space in my heart for you.” Why does this feel more disruptive, more troubling, more dangerous than talking about someone else during sex? “And every time you look at me, I know that there’s a place for me in your heart too.”

There is a lot she could say, about how he saw her when everyone else refused to open their eyes, how he dropped his dreams and plans to mold himself to her needs, how he made her feel alive and, more importantly, want to stay alive.

What can she ask for, but for a boy who would do her make-up before sending her off to kill someone else?  

There are no words that could convey all of that, not in the five minutes that they have left. Maybe not in a lifetime of being together, but she so madly wants to try. 

Because it’s true. There will always be a place for him in her heart. 

And this is why.

Once Yizhi leaves, there is not much for her to do but wait for the sun to come down. Yang Guang is nocturnal as are most pilots, except for Shimin who adapted quickly to their routine. Zetian doesn’t want to know what his life was like when he wasn’t living with them. She imagines an endless supply of alcohol and sorrows and gets flooded with an insurmountable rage.

They are both too anxious to pick up their regular lessons or to do anything besides sitting near each other in silence. It should be awkward, but it is comforting. Zetian was being dishonest when she said Shimin would be there for her in Yizhi’s absence, but she was not lying.

“I should get going.” Her voice, hoarse from disuse, makes her sound more scared than she actually is. She is not scared, just… impatient. 

Shimin nods and his hand, scarred and rough, hovers for a second over hers. She can’t decide if him touching her would make things harder or easier.

He doesn’t touch her in the end, but he stands up at the same time as her, brings her wheelchair closer, helps her load up the pretty box containing the pastry on her lap.

She knows he is tall, of course, but he looks massive right now, looking down at her with hungry eyes. For an instant, she thinks he is about to say something about her going to see another man dolled up in a way he has never seen her do for her husband.

Shimin ends up placing a hand on her forearm and even though her robe has long sleeves, she can feel the warmth from his skin seeping into her blood. He is trembling, or maybe she is, she can’t tell. Zetian is not sure it matters.

He is leaning over her so closely that she could kiss him without much effort, just stretching her spine a little. 

She can almost taste the way his skin smells, spicy and clean, can feel the tingle of his mouth warm on hers, his strong arms surrounding her body, her hands on the rough lines of his chest, unearthing the history of every scar. She imagines letting go of this grudge that has shaped the course of her life, imagines Yizhi coming back home and Shimin on his knees for him, imagines herself patting the bed and both of them following her like a beacon.

It takes a lot of willpower to talk herself down from chasing those possibilities. 

She can’t afford to even dip her toe in this potential, not a kiss, not the promise of a kiss. She needs to go away with the reminder of Yizhi crisp and raw on her skin, but she could not focus on her task with something new and delicate blooming in her lungs.          

“Please be careful, Zetian,” he whispers in earnest, voice closed and worried.       

She can only nod. She can not make any promises to him as she couldn’t give them to Yizhi. But she has something, someone, someones, to come back to, and that’s not nothing.

She leaves without looking behind.

Yang Guang’s watchtower is insane. Zetian looks around and she is playing up her amazement to feed his ego, but if she hadn’t been before in the Gao residency, she knows she would be floored.

She is listening to him talk about the Chrysalis figurines he has mid-assembled on a desk. Zetian has heard Yizhi talking about his own collection enough to be able to start a conversation about it and pretend to be interested in his ramblings while she fixes tea for them both.

She is proud of how firm her hands are while pouring the dark liquid, fully aware that it is the natural preamble to bringing up the pastries she brought.

Being here, now, in his space, watching Yang Guang be a full-rounded person, even if an obnoxious, depictable one, is even more jarring than the encounters she has sustained with him during the past few weeks. 

Here, in his home, it becomes impossible not to see that he is a boy with dreams and ambitions and fears and hobbies, a boy just like her little brother, just like Yizhi, just like Shimin.  

Once, Zetian thought one needed to be a monster to slay a monster, but Shimin has shown her that that is not always the case, and even then, she can not be sure anymore that Yang Guang is a monster.

Somehow, that makes things worse. A monster is a monster. A human being, instead, makes you wonder how they can lower themselves to such deep levels of wickedness and keep on living with themselves.

“I brought something to eat…”

“Sugar is not what I’m hungry for.”

He turns it into flirting so easily, unaware of everything that is hanging in his words. Zetian swallows, saliva going down her throat like acid.

“Oh, but I made it for you.” She makes a big effort not to wince because of how saccharine-sweet her voice comes out. 

“Cute.” Yang Guang fingers lazily the tips of the bow Yizhi tied with surgical precision to be placed on top of the box. He doesn’t open it. “I also have something for you.”

He places a hand on his armored chest and a yellow light cracks his breastplate in the middle. For a second, Zetian believes she has been made somehow, that he is going to take out a knife, or better yet, a small weapon like her hairpin, and stab her through the heart, screaming about justice. 

For a second, Zetian thinks that dying doesn’t sound as terrible as not making him pay first.

But no. Instead of any kind of weapon, Yang Guang takes out from his Earth-type armor a budding flower. 

She grabs it with both hands, too perplexed to say much, the coolness of the spirit metal seeping to her skin. They have touched before, small, clandestine touches that made her body break into hives. But this, this piece of art made with his qì and his imagination, tethered to his armor with a fine rope of spirit metal, feels too intimate, like she is touching some wounded, tender part of his flesh.

Makes her want to puke.

Instead, she brings it to her mouth and places a very slow, very deliberate kiss on one of its petals. She doesn’t know if he gets sensations through the spirit metal connected to his spine, but Yang Guang shudders nonetheless.  

She feels sick to her stomach, thinking about how many girls he might have pulled with this trick. Did he try it with Ruyi? Did Ruyi fall for it? Did Ruyi get to see this allegedly sweet side of him before the hit came, before the killing strike came?

Did that contradiction make things worse?

Yang Guang, bold, runs one of his armored thumbs over her lower lip. Zetian tries to convince herself that it feels no different than the touch of the flower. 

“I can imagine better uses for that pretty mouth.”

She kisses him. It is better to be the one in control than let him do the chasing. She sits on his lap and her feet scream in pain from the exertion of the angle, but the pain helps her stay focused on the moment instead of drifting away. Yang Guang smiles when they break apart, and Yizhi also gets dimples when he smiles. His armored fingers are cool on her face, and she imagines Shimin on the spirit armor and crown he deserves.

Zetian kisses Yang Guang and thinks of Yizhi kissing her on their bed like a devotee, thinks of the longing etched on Shimin’s lips before she left.

When this is over, when she comes back, they are settling that mess of a situation, she decides while tilting her head to kiss Yang Guang deeper. She is tired of running in circles around what she wants. The three of them deserve more than the reflection of a promise of a possibility she wields to turn Yizhi on, to tease Shimin, to keep herself with her feet down to Earth.

When she comes back, not if. That, as much as the pain, pulls her back to what is important, pushes the fantasies to a locked part of her heart.

Kissing Yang Guang is more pleasurable than she imagined, easier than it has any right to be. He places a hand on the back of her neck and her skin warms up, he bites down on her lip and she gets pinpricks behind her eyelids. This traitorous body of hers.

“We should move this to the bed,” he groans, breathless, against her skin. 

The excuse comes out of her mouth incredibly seamless. 

“Try this.” She tugs on the bow of her offering until it loosens, and does not think of her own robe skewed on her shoulder, on the bruising marks he must have left on her collarbones.

“What.” It is not even a full question, more of a half-laugh tinted with confusion and disbelief.

Zetian squeezes every drop of charisma in her entire body onto her flirty smile and delivers the final blow like a kiss instead of a punch.

“It is aphrodisiac.” She hopes he doesn’t ask why; Yizhi recited to her a list of supposedly aphrodisiac ingredients just in case, but, for the love of the gods, she can’t remember even one now.

He shakes his head, less another denial and more incredulity. Zetian keeps an iron fist around her emotions. If she lets the panic bubble up to her mouth, it will come out in the way of a fevered confession, and everything will be over. 

Instead, she takes out the pastry and gives it a bite, exaggerating the movement of her lips for his benefit. The flaky crust dissolves on her tongue, smooth and sweet; the flavor of the nuts is completely masked by the creamy filling, even to her who knows they are there. Yizhi really outdid himself with it. She can’t decide if it’s an honor or a waste that his talent is being used for this end.  

Zetian brings the half-bitten piece to his mouth, silently calculating if it will be enough to trigger a reaction. She watches him take a bite and hopes the hunger in her eyes can be interpreted as desire while she picks a second pastry, takes a tiny bite herself and pushes the rest towards him.

For a second, nothing happens. Yang Guang keeps on kissing her and pulling her robe open, and Zetian hesitates. She didn’t come here with a Plan B, which means she needs to improvise one on the run. If the original plan doesn’t work, she only has two options.

Either she looks for an excuse and leaves. 

(Would he let her leave? Would her status as someone else’s wife, someone rich, change how he does things, or does he consider himself above everyone else?)

Or, she stays. Let him take her to bed, build trust with him and wait for a new opportunity to come here with a different plan.

(Would she be able to live with herself, knowing what has happened? That she allowed him to keep on breathing, that she didn't rip his throat open with her bare teeth? Having to see him around, with his intensified flirting, winking and smirking at her, rumours following her like a ball and chain?)

She breaks the kiss, about to ask for the bathroom to take a break and settle on an option when it starts happening.

It takes her brain a second to process it; at first, she thinks his breathing is ragged because of the kissing, and her first instinct is to scoff, amateur. 

But no, one second late,r he is grasping at his throat, and the swell of his lips can not be attributed to enthusiastic kissing, and everything Yizhi told her comes rushing to her.

Anaphylactic shock, he had explained, and then proceeded to delve in excruciating detail into every symptom, not only how it would look to her, but how it would feel to him, and how she could make them worse, all while she and Shimin listened, surmised in a mix of horror and fascination.

When they planned this, she thought she would not be strong enough for the part where it would be best if she could help hurry up his symptoms. But now, with his skin breaking in hives under her palms, his face getting grossly swollen by the second, she finds inside herself a renewed bout of strength, one of her small hands pressing over his mouth and the other pinching his nose, her knees locking around his hips so his thrashing doesn’t throw her to the floor. 

It feels both like she is fighting a human-sized doll and a tsunami, with his armor, his clumsy limbs, and his desperation to breathe.

They struggle for seconds that stretch like years and when they both fall to the floor, Zetian hurries to press him down only to realize he is not moving anymore.                         

With him lying still on the floor, Zetian can understand how someone can commit murder without the reasons she had, if it feels like this kind of power.

It is anticlimactic, months of planning and anticipation and stressing over it ending like this, with a pathetic body limp on the floor. 

She has a to-do list in her mind: straighten up her clothes, pick up the remaining pastries and the box, jump on her wheelchair and leave as fast as she can.

But she doesn’t have more than ten seconds to put her plan into action when a concubine enters from an adjacent room, probably alerted by the sound of them both falling to the floor, and rushes towards Yang Guang, wailing.

When she looks back on this moment, she won’t be able to recall what she thought in this split second, how she was able to twist her plan to fit this new development. 

But she will be able to remember that she thought, if I don’t pay for this, she will. And, somehow, Ruyi’s ghost is angrier at that possibility than she ever was about Zetian letting months pass without avenging her.

The tears come to her cheeks without her having to force them.

“I- I tried to- I don’t know what-” 

It’s easy to mimic the girl’s panic and sorrow, to make her hands tremble the same way the shoulders of this girl- younger than her, gods- are quaking under her prim robes in Yang Guang’s colors.   

Zetian lets the commotion spread for a moment longer. She knows in her bones that Yang Guang is dead, but any second can make a difference when it comes to helping him.

“Call for help,” she finally mumbles, like the idea has only now fully formed in her mind. “Maybe the medics…” She lets the sentence go unfinished, like maybe putting the possibility into words might make it happen.

The girl- how old is she? Fifteen?- looks up at her with deer eyes, letting a handful more of seconds scurry away before she springs to her feet to press a button on one of the walls.

Zetian bows down her head, tries to be thankful about any second that goes on without anyone getting here, tries to focus on the satisfaction of a long-desired goal achieved, tries to not think about what’s coming next, tries to not think about Yizhi on his mission, probably worried sick about her, about Shimin on the suite walking on the walls while he waits for any news, and fails.

Everything that happens after feels like it is happening to someone else.

It is all a blur in her memory, people rushing into the Watchtower- soldiers, officers, medics, servants-, the yelling, Yang Guang’s body being taken away, the tears of the young concubine falling to the lap of her robe somehow being louder than anything else.

Zetian remembers, vaguely, telling a manicured version of her story, how he invited her here and she just brought a gift, oh, no, she didn’t know about his allergy, and he didn’t ask, what a tragedy. When she bows her head, trying to look contrived, she realizes she has tied the bow from the box to her wrist, even though she doesn’t remember doing it.

When she first started crafting her plan after finding out about Ruyi’s death, she knew there was no possible life for her after achieving this goal.

But ever since she accepted Yizhi’s proposal and they began drafting this alternative plan, she very slowly started to allow herself to believe there was a chance that she could have it all, that she could kill Yang Guang and have a life after it, maybe even a chance at happiness. 

How dumb she has been.

Instead, she is just forced to stay kneeling on the floor, while the men around her shift between getting incredibly close to becoming violent with her and not knowing what to do with her.

Zetian is trying to play her part as well as she can, hiding her delight when the hushed whispers confirm Yang Guang’s death.

But she doesn’t feel as relieved as she expected. She is still angry,  angry that men like him exist at all; angry that they are not only allowed, but encouraged to reach and stay in positions of power; angry that she needed to be the one to make the world a little more fair; angry that no one else seems to care; angry that she has to pay for doing what all these men were too corrupt or too cowardly to do.  

She is angry that she needs to play subservience, ignorance, meekness, so that they look at her and see a poor, crying thing, someone meant only to please, someone disposable, even while she is wielding their underestimation of her as a weapon. 

She is angry that the worst thing they are saying about her, since this all looks like a freaky accident, is how shameful it is that she, a married woman, was found in such a compromising position. They don’t care that she is dangerous, and she is using that in her favor, but she hates that the worst they can say about her, instead of killer, is whore. 

The concubine-pilot- the young girl, Zetian supplies in her mind- tells between sobs that Yang Guang told her he was having visitors, and to wait in the adjacent room for his signal to come out. Zetian is disgusted by the implications, feels a renewed flow of pride at having killed him, but at the same time she can not suppress a flashing image of her sharing a bed with both Shimin and Yizhi.

How very human of her, to still want things even while watching her own demise on the face. 

The army does not know what to do with her. 

She realizes now that asking Yizhi to be away for this was a big miscalculation on her part; he would know how to handle this situation much better than she. Still, she quickly gathers that because she is living at the Great Wall she is under the army jurisdiction, but since she is married, and to a rich man nonetheless, the line is thin, and no one has fully decided to step over it yet. 

She can feel the nerves, the irritated voices. No one can find anything incriminating aside from her being a cheating woman and the freaky bad luck, but the reality is that a Prince-class pilot is dead. 

Once they have taken the concubine- the girl- to the infirmary to try to calm her nervous breakdown, someone suggests they should put Zetian in prison. So far, she has tried to keep her head down and only speak when someone asks her a question, but then she fakes a cough and, in a broken voice, asks the nervous, young soldier awkwardly guarding her to help her to her wheelchair because the floor is cold. 

She does not want to count her chickens before they hatch, but she has to make a very important effort not to smile when they end up deciding to keep her locked in the suite until they can conduct a proper investigation and her husband comes back. She knows that if she hadn’t been who she is now, if she had been just a concubine or a servant, they would have shown her no mercy. But she is who she is, now, and she is gonna squeeze every last drop of usefulness from her role. 

All things considered, things could be going worse, Zetian thinks while they wheel her back to the suite, escorted by a large detail of soldiers.

“Zetian!”

Shit, it’s not that she forgot about Shimin, not really, but she did not think about how strange this could look to him, her coming back, alive, disheveled, heavily surrounded by soldiers. Things escalate quickly, with Shimin punching one of the soldiers square on the nose while two others point their guns at him, everyone screaming, Zetian trying to make her voice heard in the middle of the chaos.

“Shimin, calm down!”

It’s like a switch gets turned off on him by her voice; he looks at her with big, pained eyes behind his thick glasses, and when Zetian gives him a curt nod, he raises his arms in the air. The soldiers still hit him and restrain him with more force than actually necessary; she clenches her hands in tight fists, hidden by the long sleeves of her robe. She knows Shimin is stronger than them, and it hurts to have to tell him to keep himself under control when she would love nothing more than to watch him unleash rampant chaos.

Maybe that’s how Yizhi feels about her.

Shimin is being half-pushed, half-dragged towards one of the rooms despite trying to walk calmly on his own, and Zetian is also being pushed into another room when the sirens start blaring. 

Everything stops for a second. 

Another one already? is what everyone’s face seems to be saying. There was a hundun attack yesterday. Zetian’s day has been so long since before Yizhi left this morning that it might as well have been a week for her, but the truth is that hundun attacks usually don’t happen so closely together.

The soldiers exchange bewildered glances and for a second, Zetian wishes she were still on Yang Guan’s tower with his dead body bathed in the accusatory red of the alarm lights on the ceiling.

But after the initial shock passes and while the murmur between the soldiers grows, Shimin and Zetian look at each other from across the room and they both know exactly what the other is thinking.

Yizhi is out there.

A new group of soldiers trots through the door, yelling that they need to take Li Shimin to the Vermillion Bird. 

Someone yells back that they don’t have his equivalent of a concubine-pilot available for him, and there is a back and forth about what they should do.

Everyone is aware that when it comes to a hundun attack, every second counts.

Zetian, panic starting to boil inside of her stomach, looks at Shimin being pulled apart in twenty different directions, sees the emotions battling inside of him clearly painted on his face. He’s desperate to get out there and do everything possible to help make sure Yizhi is safe, but having to go into the Bird is always an experience of grief and pain for him.

It means another girl will certainly die.

And Zetian, palms still throbbing with Yang Guan’s life, the eyes of the young concubine still burned on her mind, realizes she can not take it anymore.

Seconds pass.

This is why she shouldn’t have gotten married to Yizhi, because he made her care- no, that’s not true, she already cared, she has always cared too much, he just gave her an space to lean into those feelings, to nurture and watch them grow, to believe that they can turn into something else than hatred and a desire to watch the world go up in flames. 

And now she can not let things go. Just like Shimin, she is being torn in two different directions, because she cares about the other girls, all of those girls, and she loves Yizhi and she would do anything to get him back.

But it can not come at the cost of another life, that much she knows.

Seconds pass.

That’s how, without Yizhi by her side to pretend to be the sensible one, she finds herself doing something stupid that will change the course of her life, the course of all of their lives. 

She frees herself and pushes through everyone’s surprise until she can get to the soldier that seems more in charge, the one that is getting barked orders through a comm, and leaves her wheelchair to stand on wobbling feet in front of him.

“Let me go pilot with him.”

She looks him in the eyes while she says it, because she needs to sell this idea to him and to whoever else above him actually makes the decisions, but she also can’t look away, because she can feel the disappointed eyes of Ruyi’s spirit on the back of her head.

It’s true that, before, she did not care if she lived or died as long as she could achieve her goals. But now it is not like that, or at least not entirely. This is another task like killing Yang Guang, something that she can not trust to anyone else, not even to Shimin alone.

And more than anything, she trusts herself. 

She can do this.

Seconds pass.

The soldier hesitates. It’s just a split second before he orders someone else to take her away, but Zetian latches onto the opportunity like a lifeline.

“I was enrolled to be a concubine-pilot before I got married. My spirit pressure is over five hundred, and that was four years ago, it might be even higher now,” she says it all in a rush, without pausing to breathe, so fast that she is unsure if all the words could be made out individually by someone who doesn’t live inside her head. “My husband is there with the assessment mission; you need to let me help him.”

She sees the soldier wavering, torn between the convenience of her request and his dismay at being told what to do by someone he clearly considers inferior.

Zetian grabs his hand, pride twisting into her lungs like a knife.

“Please.”

He looks at one side and then the other, nervous, avoiding her eyes. He tries to take his hand away but Zetian doesn’t budge.

Seconds pass. 

Every second counts when it comes to a hundun attack. Everyone knows this. She is counting on that, on not letting go, on forcing his hand, on making him remember that it’s either giving in to what she wants or risking everything.

His knuckles are white, tight against the comm he is holding on his palm. The line is not silent: screams, explosions, orders that are only half clear. No one was ready for an attack just a day after the other one.

This is on him.

“Alright,” he finally says, yanking his hand away. “Get her prepared to go in the Bird.”

Zetian can see everything he doesn’t say. That she is volunteering, which makes her no different from a concubine-pilot, all risks included, and that if she dies doing this, then good riddance. The army will have one less inconvenience to worry about. They are giving her the punishment without a trial, and without any shame, because she asked for it.  

A scream pierces the room, a low, guttural sound so strange that it takes Zetian a second to recognize the voice as Shimin’s.

“No no no no no no.”

He is thrashing against the soldiers, uncaring about the weapons they are pointing at him with trembling hands. No one is strong enough to keep him down. Zetian gets a strange surge of pride at knowing that they have not been capable of breaking him, no matter how hard they have tried.

“Shimin, Shimin, look at me!” She moves to him. The soldiers are too busy not being able to keep up with him to bother her. “It’s gonna be okay.”

He is shaking his head in a continuous, heartbreaking no. He is trembling too much, his body caught between anger and panic, to be able to form words. She knows he can’t technically say no, that one way or another, this will end with both of them on the Bird or with him dead.

She can’t allow him to die as much as she can't allow Yizhi to die, but she’d rather not do this against his will either. 

Zetian takes his hands in between hers. They are large enough to engulf hers, dark and rough against her own, pale but also rough. Both are hands that have known labour, have known pain. Zetian can’t help thinking of Yizhi and his soft, kind hands. Healing hands. She is sure Shimin is thinking of him too. 

He stops thrashing, but his chest is still wrecked by sobs.

“I will hurt you,” he says, now in a whisper, the voice she is used to hearing from his mouth, a curse that only grows stronger when pronounced.

If history remains true, he will do much more than hurt her.

But history also told her that she should stay put, mourn Ruyi, bow her head down and become another cog in the machine. And yet here she is, the dying beat from Yang Guan’s heart still pulsating on her hands.  

"Shimin, listen to me. I am too strong for you to hurt me, okay?” She squeezes his hands, doesn’t care who else hears what she needs to say. “We both love Yizhi, and he needs us to do this."

He doesn’t say yes. But he closes his eyes, tears making his eyelashes shimmer, and allows the soldiers to take him away.

After that, everything happens so fast that Zetian can barely process what is going on; being rushed to the King-class Chrysalis, escorted by armed soldiers, is a sequence out of a dream. One of them tries to pick her up to take her into the cockpit- nobody asked if she can walk, and maybe that’s for the better because she is not sure she could trust her damned feet right now- but Shimin body-checks him to take her himself, and no one dares say anything to him.

She feels a little like a bride on her wedding night, his strong arms around her, the smell of his sweat and his tears. She can not be thinking about that right now, but that doesn’t make her feelings any less true.  

She doesn't have more than a few seconds to process the view once she is inside the cockpit. Their suite is almost as tall as the White Tiger, which made the view from there already staggering- the Bird, one class higher, is even taller than the Tiger. If this goes wrong and she dies doing this, at least she would go while embodying this extraordinary being.

She can imagine many worse ways to die.

Shimin sits down first, the pieces of the Bird’s armor clasping shut around him. His eyes flare fire-red qì when the needles pierce his spine, lighting up his entire face. The tears that are still running down her cheeks reflect and multiply the shine, showering his entire face in crimson light. For the first time, Zetian gets a flash of what he truly looks like as a pilot, of this mighty entity he can become when connected to a Chrysalis.

Good. She needs him to be turned into a force of nature, into raw power that would stop at nothing to do what they need to do.

Zetian sits down on the yin seat, with the back of her robes flipped up. She knows, theoretically, everything that is about to happen, from village gossip and from what Shimin tried to rushly explain to her on their way here.

Still, she startles when the needles touch her spine. Everything is extremely cold, from the point where the needles are piercing her skin to the pieces of armor that snap shut around her limbs. Only when Shimin’s armored arms come around her, his body heat seeping through his armor to hers and then her body, does she manage to breathe again without fearing that the air is going to freeze inside her lungs.    

During the last seconds of consciousness in her own body, with Shimin’s arms trembling around her and the sound of his uninterrupted crying in the background, Zetian can’t help thinking how ironic it is that Yizhi went through so much trouble to avoid her enlisting as a concubine-pilot and yet here she is. 

Except, no, she is not a concubine, she is a wife and she is also a pilot, she is going to power up this amazing beast with Shimin to bring back the man they both love.

“Zetian-” Shimin begins, voice low and rumbling through their many points of contact.

She doesn’t get to hear the rest.

The first thing she notices is the absence of pain. 

Shimin tried to warn her, she thinks, about what she could find here, but he had a hard time explaining himself in the middle of the soldiers and the rushing and the tears, and Zetian had as much difficulty understanding him.

There was no way he could have prepared her for this. 

She is wearing the same armor that just snapped shut over her body, wings extended, and she doesn’t know how she is doing it, but she is flying. The second she starts thinking about it the movement stutters, and she scrambles to balance herself again.

She can not fall, because under her there is a boiling ocean of fire. 

The air is blisteringly hot, and Zetian feels extremely grateful for the winged armor that is covering her. Was that her own doing? Or was that Shimin?

Shimin.

The name resonates inside of her, ripples in her body like a wave. She had forgotten about him, about everything, the only real thing being the warm currents of air that allowed her to keep flying over the sea, feeling the charring heat radiating from the flames on her skin, but without touching them.

But now she remembers, she remembers Shimin, she remembers what they are supposed to be doing, remembers who they need to save.

She needs to find Shimin. 

It’s disorientating- the sky is almost as red as the sea, and just as scorching hot. Zetian is suspended between two sides of hell: if she plummets, the flames will consume her; if she soars, the sun that is everywhere will melt her.

After what feels like an eternity in this battle of staying alive, she sees an island and a boy sitting on its edge. He looks like a different person- smaller, younger, with long hair half tied up and a gray robe. But when she touches down, the dirt under her feet beats with recognition.

Shimin.

A flock of birds suddenly appears around him, blocking her path. Birds as red as the sea, the sky, the armor that sprouted from her body. They are screaming, screeching, almost crying with the horrifying human tongues that peak from inside their beaks. Zetian tries to scare them away, but they are everywhere, bursting into spontaneous flames, taking the temperature to a new level of hell. They don’t attack her, but the heat and the screams are enough to turn anyone mad.

Every time one of them touches her, she catches glimpses of memories, of dreams, of nightmares. Voices that scream at him, at her, some of them are wounds she recognizes, some of them she doesn’t, but they all embody a hurt that vibrates deep in her bones. 

She grows heavy with his pain, her feet leaving deeper and deeper footprints on the soot-covered soil.

No matter how many birds she pushes apart, there are always more and she is never any closer to getting to Shimin, his back turned to her, his head bent down.

Her arms grow heavy and she lets them fall to her side. The birds can pierce her, burn her, scream her insane. It doesn’t matter, as long as he gets to him.

Only when she stops pushing them apart and decides to walk through them, the birds fly away and finally, finally she can get to Shimin.

It is almost painful to look at him like this, younger, before his shameful haircut, without the tattoo on his face. Zetian goes to her knees and embraces him.

“Shimin,” she whispers against his skin, her voice more a stroke of air than her actual voice. “Shimin, it’s me, Zetian.”

His eyes are glazed and there is no recognition on his face when he pushes her slightly apart.

“I don’t know what to do,” he says, deep voice going through her ribcage and not her ears. “I can’t fix this.”

For the tiniest moment, Zetian looks at him and thinks, I can beat you. She imagines seizing control of the Bird, driving it into battle, using him the same way girl after girl has been used for years to power up Chrysalises.

She could do it.

She wants to do it.

But she also wants to be better than that.  

“Shimin, you need to remember.” She places her hands on his cheeks. “Remember me? Remember Yizhi?”

He only answers with a sob. Zetian, painfully aware that they need to hurry, holds him tighter.

“What are you doing here?” She is not sure if he recognizes her, or if she is an outlier to him by the mere fact of existing in this space from the hells of his mind. “I have always been alone here.”

“Well, you are not alone anymore.”  

Only when she says it she realizes how true it is. They need to save Yizhi from a very real danger, yes, but they also need to save each other.

Shimin blinks, and her heart soars when she sees the recognition in his eyes.

“Zetian?”

“Yes, yes.” She kisses both his temples, the tenderness inspired by his younger self growing stronger inside of her. This is a place of sorrow, a place of grief, and she will be damned if she lets him go on thinking that’s all life can be for him. “Come on, let’s fix this together.”

Rumor has it that when the Vermillion Bird soars into flight to go to the rescue of a small convoy of Strategists, one of its eyes is lit with fire-red qì and the other one with metal-white qì.