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Xie Lian stumbles, chest an acid blaze. He needs to get back, to fix this latest fumbling failure. The poison burns. He can fix this. When this is gone, he'll make his vengeance for Xianle, for the spoiled child of a prince who thought he could save anyone, for his parents.
The ghost is there, dutifully on watch over a burned temple. The building is as ruined as the god. A moment. Air still and dead. Broken devotion. Disobedient worship.
The ghost will listen to him enough for this. It must. If the spectre insists on serving him, then it is as low a thing as he. It will suffice to clear this poison from him.
He orders the ghost to remove its pants.
The ghost is confused, it questions him. Once. "Your Highness?"
"Need I repeat myself?" He snaps.
The ghost doesn't reply, bursting into action, fingers fumbling with speed. It goes to unbind its cuffs.
"No. Don't strip." The only thing he needs is its cock, the rest is irrelevant.
The ghost pauses.
If he must to do this, the act will be low and quick, dirty enough to rival the blood staining his hands. Xie Lian will only allow it bare practicality.
Only slowly does the ghost resume its movement, this time reaching for its waist. Bloodless skin is revealed, gaunt hips bony.
He raises a hand, command silent. The ghost stops, pants dropped, pooling at its knees. He can see the ghost's cock, soft and useless for his purposes.
The poison burns in his gut, in his heart.
From everything he's heard, forcing the thing to hardness will not be difficult.
Xie Lian approaches the ghost.
Its fingers clench in fabric, hunched and frozen where Xie Lian stopped it. The ghost, with its usual faltering obedience, doesn't move until it would inconvenience him. He comes within arm's length and reaches out for the thing he needs to cure himself.
The ghost scrambles back a step, hands down to cover the thing.
"Your Highness?" The ghost's, Wuming's, tone is alarmed, filled with more emotion than he has heard before. He does care what those feelings are. He doesn't care. He doesn't. They're not the right ones for what he's doing to it.
"Stop." He says.
It freezes.
"Is that a contradiction?" He lets his voice fill with ice. The ghost is sure to question him though, thinking it knows what he wants. He drops to his knees before it can defy him. Falling isn't gentle, never is. He lands on debris, sharp and cutting through cloth and skin, something cold soaking in. He doesn't care. Nothing can break him even if he wants. At least the pain is real.
The ghost shakes its head, denial mocked by its smiling mask.
There's no resistance this time, when he reaches out. He bats its hands aside like paper ripped to reveal the lantern's candle. The thing is limp, dead and cold.
Can the poison really be cured if the remedy requires bodily liveliness from a ghost?
"Your Highness requires this. Will I be denied?" He tries to make the mockery sharp enough to cut his tongue. All he does is ache.
"No. Your Highness—" His fist tightens at the empty title and the words hitch. "—this one would do anything."
Too much. Especially for a broken thing like him.
"Then give it to me." This time, the squeeze is intentional, perhaps the merest increment gentler.
The ghost bites its lip, looks down at where his hand wraps around it. The thing in front of him twitches. He needs to consume the cure, he knows that. His nose wrinkles in anticipation of the taste. It jerks, kicks at the air. It looks too big for his mouth, even half soft like this. Delay is weak. He has nothing left to lose.
Xie Lian swallows, saliva thick.
He pulls the skin back, this at least, is flushing redder the longer he looks at it. He takes the head of the thing in his mouth.
The ghost moans, the sound quickly pinched off.
The feel is strange in his mouth. Smooth and hard. He traces the shape, the ridges joining to the center. Above and around him, the ghost shudders, hips the only piece of its body stock still. Something leaks onto his tongue. The taste is... not a deterrent. What a useless kindness of the world. He licks harder into the slit that fed him, sucks to draw more out.
His hand, still around the base of the thing, draws it forward. Lips catch, dry. Deeper in his mouth, more spills. His tongue is clumsy, jaw strained.
The crown prince of the kingdom of beauty sucking cock as if he needs its seed to live. He could just let the poison take course, he can't die. Xie Lian almost pulls all the way off to laugh. He keeps his lips sealed around the head of the thing as he does. More fluid spills, and more, filling his mouth and trying to escape his lips. He holds it there for a moment, tongue saturated.
The ghost really did come.
He holds it in his mouth, cock and chill seed both. He needs to swallow, to cure this affliction and be done with his vengeance. He wants to swallow, carry within him this small evidence he can still be good at something, one more 'fuck you' to the cultivation that took him to godhood. He needs it, but he wants it. His desires don't matter, human distraction from righteous fury. The poison burns brighter.
He swallows it. He has to.
Xie Lian doesn't know if the cool relief in his chest is satisfaction or the lessening of the acid pain blazing through him. The feeling is irrelevant either way.
Such a simple physical pleasure open to the lowest of trash is too good for how low he has fallen. He shouldn't enjoy it. And neither should the ghost dragging itself down to his level, the ghost that insists he is still himself, still that spoiled child of a prince who thought he could save anyone.
"Was that all? Pathetic." A squeeze, sharp and sudden to the thing still in his hand. He wants to slap it, watch it sway just like when it jerked in arousal.
The ghost gasps. Unnecessary mimicry, mockery of life. Quick panting gasps like anything deeper hurts. Like breathing around a stab wound. The words are barely managed. "Your Highness?"
Xie Lian frowns. He still burns "I need more. Do it again." He takes the thing back into his mouth, flagging soft.
The ghost ceases breathing entirely, doesn't deny the capability, doesn't deny him. Its hands clutch at the air, unmoored.
Xie Lian sucks and the ghost bows, buckles, hips twitching like its trying to keep from ripping itself away from him.
"Your Highness!"
A hand brushes past his face. Bypassing its cock entirely, the ghost's hand cups around its balls. Rubbing and rolling and rocking against something that's his. He growls around the thing in his mouth and rips its hand away. He will be the one to do this.
The ghost is irrelevant to this process. It has to be. Otherwise...
Xie Lian pushes the unfinished thought aside. He can't afford distractions. If he wavers, then all of this, the captured spirits, the black sword, himself, his parents, the night in his temple, all of it will be pointless if he fails now.
He tugs, strokes, explores with his fingers. The thing in his mouth hardens faster. Prodding below, behind the soft sack causes a twitch.
He has two hands. One holds the balls, fingers ringed around. The other wanders back, presses into the skin.
A gasp startles out of the ghost, and a hand lands on his shoulder, fingers like claws. The very same moment it lands it leaves and he nearly floats away with it.
He pulls back and damn near growls, breath hissed out past a throat full of spit and more. He pulls the ghost's hand back to his shoulder, brings the other one down for good measure. It feels more real than he has since being poisoned. The sharp grip a pinch of reminder he isn't here for pleasure.
He watches, this time is taking longer. More than any jerk or drip of the thing, the rest of the ghost reacts. The gross product of his actions might show in the thing, always impossibly harder. The subtleties he looks to the rest of Wuming for. He finds himself listening, watching the body, unconscious tension and release brutally honest. He starts to press in rhythm with his tongue and fingers, cock and perineum.
Wuming gasps with every wave of pressure, louder and harsher with every cycle.
What a joke, he can't keep himself from trying to do this well.
He wants to know what it looks like. Not the features of its face, but the expressions. The shape of Wuming's mouth, rounding a silent cry as he works his tongue. The lips he cannot see, parted around each breath. Eyes shut tight to feel his touch bettter, or open to watch him?
Wuming is a man, and it can be pleased just as any person can be pleased, just as Xie Lian never before chose.
Did he ever choose? Stay a spoiled child of a prince or cleave to chaste cultivation. That wasn't a choice any more than falling to help his failure. Both doomed fates of course. If there was another path, another way, another dao, that didn't hinge on sexual abstinence, would he have chosen it? This is so simple, so clean and direct. Each step on the path a new soaring height closer to his goal.
He presses harder, the knuckles of his fingers digging in to Wuming's perineum, soft and cold under his fingers. It does gasp now, hands clenching on his shoulders as if he would pull away when this is what he needs. It gives him the quenching rush, extinguishing the last burn in his chest. He swallows it all.
He can't help but look up.
Wuming's face still hidden.
The poison is gone. All that burns in him are the fires he himself set. Xie Lian leans back, lips twisting to snarl after he licks them.
"Take it off."
He can't see its face. Wuming choses to hide itself just like it chose to be nameless. It's all he's worth, the service of a thing that isn't a person. The ghost isn't just a thing though. A thing doesn't have a will, wouldn't call him a title he failed to live up to. A thing couldn't have faith. Wuming remembers what he used to be and won't let him fucking forget.
For a moment, he doesn't know if he wants it to remember.
Wuming doesn't answer, panting, curled forward like it could fall and place its arms around him in less than a moment.
"Take it off." Cold and sharp, a command.
"Your Highness?" A waver, easily heard.
Xie Lian grits his teeth, lets them creak against each other with the force of it. He won't ask again. Under the mask is a person whose name he doesn't even know, a person with a beloved, a person he doesn't deserve to know.
"Ignore that." He says.
He doesn't get to know it as a person. Here and now and so physically close, he reaches. Too easy, taking more of what he's already stolen. His chest is clear now, easier to feel the weight of his heart sinking to rest cold and sick in the center of him. Strange. He didn't feel that when his mouth was full.
He lets go, lets everything else go.
It, he keeps. Fingers digging into hips, cock against his lips. One more. As long as he keeps going he can pretend he's still a person, a someone who exists in the context of relationships, instead of a thing that has lost all connections. One more time. He can ignore that Wuming follows him for vengeance, let the knowledge it can love so deeply slip from his head, even his own goal will wait. Just one more time.
He takes it in, strokes and pets and touches. Time slides away without noticing them. He suckles, gently now, until he's dizzy with want, until he cannot bear to breathe. His Wuming's gasps are wet now, like it's crying under that happy mask.
Xie Lian reaches up with one hand, runs his thumb over the woodgrain corner of that smile.
Wuming comes again, weaker and thinner than before.
Wuming gives him so much, gives him everything. There's no challenge to keeping all of it inside his mouth, drinking it down to hide the cool relief inside him.
He doesn't pull back. Hands on Wuming's hips, he doesn't let it leave him. Xie Lian closes his eyes and tilts his head to rest on its thigh. The cock on his tongue is heavy and softening and his mind is quiet.