Work Text:
Art by Jikimo-world, who graciously gave me permission to use their art as cover for the fic
China sits by the window of his apartment, his fingers curled loosely around a porcelain cup. In front of him, Beijing pulses with the colorful neon of the lights of the buildings and with the noises from the traffic and from being populated by millions of people; above him, the evening sky bruises gold and fades into deep crimson, like old tea leaves.
Everything blurs into the same quiet hum, though. It happens when he thinks too much about time, when he feels all the weight of the millennia he has lived deep into his own bones.
He takes a slow sip and sighs.
The tea has gone cold. Again.
He places the cup on the railing and gets lost into the horizon.
He should go to sleep: he has to accompany his boss in Europe tomorrow, he needs to rest to better deal with the flights and the jet lag and his boss and his assistants and the ambassadors and his peers. The deal they are going to sign is pretty important after all.
He's just not in the mood to care.
He's never in the mood to go to Rome, after all. Too many ifs and wondering about what could have been if history had gone in another way. Ancient Rome had been gone for almost two millennia, yet China can still hear that loud, golden sound that had been his voice, echoing in the halls of his palaces and home.
He had been too much of everything, that empire. Too bright, too loud; maybe too mortal for a nation. And China, so composed and old even then, had found that both irritating and almost comforting. Charming even, like one could find charming a young, blathering kid dreaming of big adventures.
Night falls on Beijing. China still doesn't move, lazily moving around the cold tea in the cup.
The flight from Beijing to Rome takes eleven hours.
He doesn't sleep. He never sleeps well when Rome is waiting at the other end.
He reads instead, a book about the Han dynasty he has already read four times, watching the words blur in the dim cabin light. Outside the small oval window, the clouds are white and flat and indifferent, hiding everything below. Somewhere under that ceiling of white must be the Alps, then the Po Valley, then the city.
"Come see my Rome," Roman Empire had made him promise centuries ago, after vising what at the time had been his capital, Luoyang. China kept that promise only a few decades ago, and he had not expected Italy to feel so familiar. At the time, he had come for trade talks, for papers and signatures and tight European smiles; but the moment he stepped onto Roman soil, something in the air had shifted. The sun struck the marble in a way he hadn’t seen in centuries, and every young official who greeted him, every waiter pouring coffee, every laughing passerby in the street had carried a flicker of someone he had lost long ago. A tilt of the head, a confident stride, a golden warmth in the eyes - echoes of an empire that once spoke to him like a brother.
He closes the book.
Rome is younger and smaller than Beijing, yet manages to be just as chaotic and breathtaking, old and new blending and creating such a distinct landscape it's impossible to mistake it for another city.
It is the 21st of April. Rome would have been 2778 years old if he were still alive.
He watches in silence the Urbe pass beyond the window - the umbrella pines, the aqueduct ruins standing in fields between apartment buildings, the sudden appearance of a column where there shouldn't be a column. His boss is reviewing documents beside him. An assistant is checking her phone. Neither of them knows what day it is, not really. Not the way he knows it.
The city is already celebrating. There are banners, people in costume, men in centurion armor waving to tourists near the Colosseum, children dragging their parents toward gelato shops. Someone has hung a laurel wreath over a traffic sign, and no one has taken it down.
The dinner is in a private room of the Quirinale. The table is long, the lighting warm. There are flowers China doesn't recognize arranged in tall vases, and a seating plan someone has labored over, and the buzzing energy of a room full of people who are important in suits pretending this is casual.
He is placed near the center. To his left, after two Italian officials and the German ambassador, sits France. Across from him, on the other side of a floral arrangement, Romano and Veneziano are already bickering in undertones, their boss obliviously chatting beside them.
Spain arrives late as usual, sliding into his chair with the unruffled confidence that is somehow not arrogant, and immediately apologizes to everyone within a radius of three seats. Portugal arrives at the same moment, quiet and unhurried, and sits beside Spain. Romania appears last, from a direction that doesn't quite correspond to any of the doors, and finds his place without explanation.
The bosses make small talk, the other European and Asian nations chat between themselves, the wine is poured.
China folds his hands in his lap and observes.
The first time they met, Rome had dust in his hair and gold in his eyes.
They stood in the desert, a place between worlds, surrounded by traders shouting, camels braying, silk gleaming under a ruthless sun.
Rome had laughed as he reached out to China, his accent strange and his smile infectious: “So you’re the one behind this magic cloth,” he had said, running his fingers through the silk. “Feels like the skin of a goddess.”
China had raised an eyebrow: “You speak boldly for someone who doesn’t even know how to hold chopsticks.”
Rome had grinned wider: “Then teach me. I’ll trade you wine for wisdom.”
It had begun like that, somehow: a friendship that spanned empires.
They’d talk through interpreters and shared meals, each teaching the other how the world looked from his side.
Rome spoke of conquest and law, of roads that would last forever.
China spoke of harmony, of dynasties that rose like the moon and fell like the tide.
Rome laughed at fate; China respected it.
But they understood each other all the same.
He notices Veneziano first. He is talking to a Chinese official about something to do with cultural exchange, leaning forward with genuine eagerness, his eyes closed as usual. He gestures as he speaks, broad and theatrical like only he can be, hands tracing shapes in the air as if the words alone aren't quite enough to contain what he means. His face, when he is animated like this, carries a glow that has nothing to do with the candlelight.
China has known him way before the unification with his older brother, when he walked in his grandfather's footsteps to reach him and trade with him. He has always been fond of him, in the vague, careful way one is fond of things that cause a complicated kind of pain: Veneziano has Rome's warmth, not his ambition, or the bright, ruthless heat of him at his peak, but the warmth. Rome'd walk into a room full of senators who hated him and within an hour they'd all be laughing at his stories. He had an ease with people, an ease with joy, that China had found inexplicable and, privately, a little enviable.
Veneziano laughs at something the official says, light and unguarded. China has to look down at his wine glass for a moment.
France catches him watching and raises his glass across the table.
"You look pensive, mon cher," he says, clearly performing ignorance.
"I am always pensive. One has to between youngsters like you all."
"Oui, but tonight more so than usual," France tilts his head. The candlelight catches the angle of his elegant cheekbone, and for a moment - just a moment.... There's something older beneath the tailoring and the refinement, a pride that is less cultivated and more bone-deep. The pride of something that was once genuinely great and has never quite recovered from the knowledge of its own greatness.
Rome had been proud too, but his pride had been louder, bright like the sun. France had learned to wear it differently, more beautifully, perhaps. He remembers a day, a few years ago, when a drunk France had confessed to him, between a glass of wine and a sob, how much he resented the fact that he could hear Rome in his own voice sometimes, that he remembered so little of Gallia but so much of the man who conquered his land, to whom he owed his existence and yet resembled so little.
"It's his birthday," China says. France will know what he means. His expression doesn't change much, but his eyes do. He looks down at his glass.
"I know," he murmurs, "I always know."
Across the table, Romano is arguing with Veneziano about something involving tomatoes, which is both extremely typical - and, he suspects, not really about tomatoes at all.
"You can't just put them in like that," Romano is saying, in that voice he uses that sounds like anger and means something considerably more tender, "You have to- no, Veneziano, listen to me, you have to let them- would you stop nodding and actually listen!"
"I'm listening, I'm listening-"
"You have the same face you have when you're not listening."
"This is just my face-"
"It's your not-listening face-"
Their boss intercedes, placidly, and the argument subsides into mutual grumbling. Veneziano pats Romano's arm. Romano removes the arm and looks in the other direction and then, two seconds later, pats Veneziano back.
China watches all of this with mild amusement. Then Romano reaches for his wine glass and tips it back, and the candlelight falls across his face at exactly the angle-
China's breath stops.
It is not a subtle thing, the resemblance. He doesn't know why it always surprises him, except that the mind protects itself where it can, and this is one of the places where it does not quite succeed. The structure of Romano's face - the nose, the jaw, the angle of the brow - is old in a way certain things carry their origins so completely that one cannot look at them without seeing backwards.
He had seen it in marble first, in the Forum, centuries after Rome was gone, and had stood there longer than was dignified. He had walked away before anyone could ask him why he was standing still.
Romano sets down his glass and turns, with that particular sixth sense of the perpetually irritable, and finds China looking at him.
"What?" he says. Not rudely, just directly.
He doesn't answer immediately.
"Nothing," he says, at last, "You simply remind me of someone."
Romano frowns - and the frown, too, is Rome's, something between displeasure and the desire to argue: "Who?"
"Someone I knew a long time ago."
"Did you like them?"
The question is so blunt and so honest that China almost smiles.
"Yes. Very much."
Romano considers this for a moment, as if deciding whether to pursue it. Then he makes the face that means he has decided not to - which is a face China also recognizes - and turns back to his plate.
He is not untroubled; China has known Romano long enough to know the turbulence underneath, the old wounds, the complicated grief of someone who was raised in a shadow he loved, and has never quite stopped mourning even while pretending he has. But at this moment, eating bread at a state dinner with his brother beside him…
Spain, two seats down from Romano, is telling a story about something that happened in Valencia that no one can quite follow but everyone is laughing at anyway, including Spain himself, which is part of what makes it work. He is easy, Spain, in the way that people from warm climates are easy. China has never entirely trusted people who are that comfortable in their own skin, and yet he has never been able to hold it against the Iberian nation.
Rome's joy had been expansive, imperial, the joy of a nation who believed everything was worth celebrating because everything was his. Spain's is quieter than that, more earned. He has lost a great deal, Spain, and he laughs anyway, and the laughter is not denial but something more complicated: a choice, made daily, to love the world even knowing what it can do.
Rome, too, had loved the world. That was always the thing that had made him impossible to stay angry with for long.
Portugal, beside Spain, is refilling someone's water glass without being asked. He catches China's eye and nods. He says little at these gatherings, he watches more than he speaks, and again there is something that China recognizes. Rome had not been a watcher, but there had been something in him, late in his life, a quieting toward the end, a learning to look at things rather than only conquer them. He sometimes wonders if Portugal carries that part of him. The version that had begun, barely, to understand.
Romania, at the far end of the table, is making the Chinese ambassador laugh at something that has probably made everyone else at his end of the table deeply uncomfortable. His smile is sharp, delighted, slightly feral, that way of existing and refusing to be subdued by decorum or time or the accumulated weight of a difficult history. Rome had had that until the very end. Even at the end.
Romania catches him watching and raises an eyebrow. China looks away.
The food comes in courses, the wine is replenished, the bosses talk about things that are either significant or not relevant at all and it is not always easy to tell which. China speaks when spoken to, smiles when appropriate, offers the measured pleasantness of a very old nation that has learned to be present without being entirely there.
He keeps watching.
At one point, Romano leans across Veneziano to argue with France about something culinary, and France responds with the condescension he reserves for topics he considers himself to have originated, and Romano responds to the condescension with exactly the volume and vocabulary it deserves, and the table turns to watch them with the mixture of alarm and entertainment such exchanges always produce.
In the middle of it, Romano makes a gesture, broad and emphatic, and China is returned, without warning and without mercy, to a courtyard in the Levant, sometime in the second century, Rome arguing with Persia about the correct price for lapis lazuli, gesturing exactly like that, the same motion, the same certainty, the same refusal to be misunderstood.
He had laughed, that day. He had told Rome he was impossible. Rome had agreed, cheerfully, and bought the lapis lazuli at Persia's price and then given it to China, still warm from the sun, with the casual generosity of someone for whom that was simply what one did.
"You always look at blue things the longest."
The stone had been lost centuries ago.
He blinks. His eyes are stinging.
He takes a slow sip of water and blinks again.
No one is looking at him.
Romano has sat back down, victory established, France pursuing it from a different angle now with escalating investment. Veneziano is mediating with enormous sincerity and almost no effect. Spain is watching with quiet pleasure. Portugal has his eyes on the middle distance, half-listening, the way sailors look at horizons.
Romania says something from the far end, and everyone laughs, even France, even Romano, who bites it off immediately and looks away as if he hasn't.
This is what remains, what two thousand years leaves behind: six people at a table, arguing about tomatoes and cooking times and whose culture invented what, carrying in the shapes of their faces and the patterns of their laughter and the ways they love and fight and refuse to give ground - without knowing that the loudest, most impossible, most infuriating empire in the history of the ancient world is still here, scattered across them like light through a broken vase, reassembled into something that is not him and never will be and is still, unmistakably, his.
“You'll miss me when I'm gone, frater.”
Rome had called him frater, had toasted and made him toast to “civilizations of the world” over amphorae of wine China had thought far too sweet. He had boasted about architecture and legions, gestured wildly while quoting philosophers that had little in common with the ones coming from his house.
China, at the time, had rolled his eyes and called him a fool. Rome had just laughed.
He had been right.
Damn him.
The dinner ends. Chairs are pushed back, coats are retrieved, bosses shake hands. Veneziano hugs three separate people. Romano shakes two hands and submits to a third hug with the expression of someone enduring a mild medical procedure. Spain and Portugal leave together, deep in a conversation that started at the table and will probably end sometime next week. France kisses cheeks with professional efficiency. Romania disappears in the direction he came from.
The room empties, and outside Rome is still celebrating. There are lights along the Tiber. Someone, somewhere not far away, is playing music that is too faint to identify but has the tempo of something joyful. Every year, without fail. Without needing to be asked.
He remembers the last time Rome has visited him, emaciated and smaller than usual, meeker.
I thought I'd last forever, he had drunkenly said.
China takes his phone from his pocket. Checks the date. The 21st has become the 22nd somewhere in the last hour while he wasn't watching.
Péngyǒu, shēngrì kuàilè.
He puts the phone away.