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“I’m the Emperor’s eldest son,” Jinshi blurts out when Maomao opens the door.
He stands, half slouched against the frame of her door as if he might collapse. His ragged, hurried breaths make for the only sound in the dark hallway of her dorms, which remain blessedly silent in spite of the nightly disturbance. Maomao should have gone to bed a long time ago, but she lost track of time, leafing through one of the books she borrowed from the medical office.
Would she have heard Jinshi knock on her door if she had?
Her eyes scan over his dishevelled features and she blindly reaches for his wrist, pulling him inside her room. The muted thump of the door closing behind them sounds like an ominous warning about her allowing an unmarried man inside her chambers in the middle of the night.
As Jinshi steps into the candlelight of her bedroom, she takes in just how deep the damages run. Unruly locks of hair hang messily around his face, his usually impeccable hairdo now tousled and frizzy as if he’d spent the entire evening twisting and pulling at it. His eyes are bloodshot and puffy, downright feverish in the way they desperately bore into her. She would suspect poison, but his pupils react accordingly and she can feel just how cold his skin is against her hand.
She knows why he’s here anyway.
“I’m the Emperor’s eldest son.”
She doesn't say anything. She can’t say anything.
She wishes she could shrink on herself and disappear through the floorboard, or perhaps close her eyes to simply shut away the world—but Jinshi sucks in a trembling breath. She freezes.
“Lord Hao came by tonight.” His voice can’t be any louder than a whisper, but she feels each of his words on her skin. “He believed to gain my… favor? By telling me. Maybe so that I support him when– But I… I couldn’t say– I couldn’t say anything, and I—”
Jinshi shakes his head when he fails to articulate anything more.
In spite of the old fart’s influence, tensions among the Empress’s and the Empress Dowager’s factions are still running rampant. The number of soldiers’ brawls making it to the medical office has decreased significantly but that was only ever one side of the issue. The subject of the Emperor’s successor is on everyone’s lips these days, let it be during named clans’ gatherings Lahan reports about or in the giddy rumors Maomao catches in the dining hall.
Though Lord Hao would be foolish to confront the Emperor on the base of speculations alone—which she gathers is the only proof he posseses—the sole idea that the Moon Prince could be the biological, legitimate heir to the throne would be enough for the court to plunge into chaos. Consort Lihua’s son might be as young as the Crown Prince is and just as prone to illness, but the Moon Prince is strong, healthy and enticing.
If pressed, if cornered by her own clan, would the Empress Dowager confess to the truth?
Would the Emperor, he who has been ostensibly favoring the Moon Prince for years?
“I don’t want this,” Jinshi chokes, shaking. “I don’t want this. I never wanted this. I don’t want this life, I can’t– I can’t do it. I never wanted this life.”
Hao’s revelation, no matter what comes of it, will turn every single one of Jinshi’s fears into reality. Without fail, it will make Jinshi into Gyokuyou’s enemy. It will tie Jinshi to the unbreakable chains of the Imperial line forever, and it will force Jinshi to either let her go or condemn her to a life locked in a golden cage.
Tears start to trickle down his cheeks, and without thinking, she cups his face and brushes them away. For once, she wishes she knew how to soften her touch and make the rigid, clinical movement of her hands as tender as her sisters’. She doesn’t know how to tend to the matters of the heart—she doesn’t even know any proper lullaby, safe for that stupid rhyme Pairin used to hum.
Maomao is no stranger to the injustices of life. She knows about untreatable diseases and premature deaths. She has seen her share of pain and sorrows in the Pleasure District, and she is hardly fazed by any of it anymore. And yet, looking into Jinshi’s desperate eyes, she suddenly can’t seem to swallow past the bitterness in her mouth.
This is unfair.
“You’re all I ever wanted,” he says. “Only you. There’s only been j-just you.”
Her breath hitches and she lifts herself on her toes to press her lips to his right cheek, along the faded line of his scar. He doesn’t deserve this.
“I know,” she whispers against his skin. “I know, Master Jinshi, I know.”
Again, he shakes his head, face scrunching with grief. A quiet sob breaks free from his throat, a horrible, hoarse sound that has them both shivering, and when he sinks into her arms to stifle the ones that follow against her shoulder, she slides her hands down her neck and pulls him close. She feels every wheezing intake of breath, every agonized gasp like they’re inked into her skin.
He’s heavy against her, so after a moment she maneuvers them awkwardly onto her small bed. Jinshi’s arms tighten around her waist, hands clutching the fabric of her robe as if she might vanish into thin air. As if she could decently think of pulling away now, when her fingers are stroking his hair and her heart is pounding in her ears.
Idly, she wonders where Basen is and how Jinshi managed to get rid of him. She wonders if Suiren knows he’s gone out, at least, or if Jinshi sneaked out of his own palace. She thinks she can picture him learning to climb out of the window as a child and continuing to escape the stifling air of his own home through adulthood.
As she ponders, she combs her fingers through his hair, working carefully past the knots. She has done this in the past, back when Jinshi was still only Jinshi and Maomao worked for him. He used to ask her to brush his hair when he wanted to be particularly annoying, and she used to find it particularly annoying.
These days feel like eons ago now, but she finds comfort in the repetitive movements.
Slowly, Jinshi’s breaths begin to even out and his shaking gives way to simple emotional hiccups. When he properly whines at a difficult tangle, she lets out a breath she didn’t even know she held and tries to pass it for irritation.
“Don’t be a baby,” she scolds.
“Suiren’s much softer than you are.”
She pulls back then, to throw him a withering look, and finds him flaunting a teasing smirk. His face is blotchy and wet, and his eyes are hollow in spite of his apparent mockeries. She follows the curve of his lips, thinking he looks nothing like the charming eunuch she met in the Rear Palace all those years ago, nor the childish prince she has come to know since then. For the most part, Jinshi looks exhausted—but he also stares at her with such open-heartedness that her heart lurches.
She gets up, face warm, and she deftly retrieves a brush from her dresser before sitting back behind him.
“The knots’ll worsen if you leave it that way,” she says.
Jinshi doesn’t protest, although they both know his hair is as perfect as the rest of him—silky and easy to keep. She should be offering him tea instead, as propriety dictates, or perhaps something to help him sleep but most of her water must have gone cold by now. She truly can’t be bothered to run to the kitchen to warm it up and she needs to work past the tingling in her fingers. As silly of an excuse as brushing Jinshi’s hair is, it allows her to tame the flutters in her chest.
Jinshi lets himself be petted, tilting his head whenever Maomao’s hands request.
“When I was a child,” he eventually says, so quietly Maomao nearly misses it, “some parts of the Inner Court were forbidden to me so that I would not cross paths with the Former Emperor more than necessary. He hadn’t yet fallen ill and my–” He pauses, sucking in a breath. “Lady Anshi used to attend him with matters of the court. I would spend most of my time in the Sun Prince’s quarters.”
She’s heard the title before. “Our present Emperor.”
“It didn’t matter that I called him Father there. No one cared if Ah Duo called me Yue—or Zuigetsu. No one ever said anything; until the former Emperor got sick and the Empress Regnant grew more demanding.” He spreads his hands on his lap, looking down. “After that, I was alone.”
Maomao lets his hair fall freely down his back and runs her fingers through it one last time. She thinks about how she would wait all night long for Meimei to finish with her suitors, so her sister could plait her hair before tucking her to bed.
She can’t help herself. “Did you know?”
“It didn’t matter what I knew.” Jinshi shrugs, aloof. “I don’t think my love would have changed because of a word.”
Maomao has always known about her origins—the old madam ordered everyone to stay silent about the circumstances of her birth, but it wasn’t a tough riddle to crack. Overall, she hardly suffered from her biological parents being who they were. She received affection from the people she cared most about—her old man and her sisters. Blood or names had no say in this.
“After some time, I hoped I’d never know.” Jinshi’s fists tighten and he snorts, bitterly, “In the end, no one ever told me anything for my sake. I was always just a political pawn.”
Jinshi never wanted to play this game. For all his diligence and his loyalty, Jinshi has always been terrible at playing this game. His ambitions are too low for the place he holds in the food chain—all he wishes for is a name and a quiet life serving the Emperor and his nephews. Had his heart been harsher, greedier, it wouldn’t have been so easy to break.
All those years, Jinshi has only ever thought about love.
What she finds most infuriating is that heartbreak, no matter how painful, will never be enough to crush the kindness of his soul. He’ll suffer and grow miserable, but he will never learn.
“You knew, didn’t you?” He asks.
For a moment, she says nothing and focuses on the steady rhythm of his breaths. She clenches her jaw and considers her options, but in the end, she can only abide with one.
“Yes.”
Jinshi tilts his head, curiously. “What? No warning about speculations, this time?”
She sighs wearily, although she expected the remark. When she goes silent for too long, he properly turns around and whatever tease he had ready dies on his lips at the somber expression he sees on her face.
“I suspected for a long while.” She draws in a breath and is surprised to feel her chest aching and tight. “And then, Lady Ah Duo told me.”
She knows him well enough by now to notice all the ways his face shifts as he takes a little too long to process the information. Jinshi is far from stupid and rarely does he let himself be so transparent, so Maomao can only imagine the emotional toll the night has taken on him already.
“She... told you,” he says, visibly swallowing down the words.
She begins to doubt her choice and, not for the first time, regrets having nothing but bluntness to offer him. And yet, whatever emotional toll the night has taken on him already, she can't bring herself to lie to him.
“When we returned from our year in the Western Capital,” she explains. “Lady Ah Duo summoned me to the Southern Villa. She wanted me to know the truth, so that I was fully aware of the… implications that came with it.”
“The implications,” Jinshi repeats before he understands, “So you could have a choice.”
“She never had one.”
Maomao hated to be put in this position, but she can’t say she resents Ah Duo’s honesty. Women aren’t offered many choices in their life, regardless of their upbringing. On that account, she feels nothing but the utmost gratitude toward Lady Ah Duo for allowing her to have something this priceless.
Jinshi’s eyes glaze over, seemingly lost to the world around him which he arguably can’t be blamed for. Perhaps she should prepare him some sleeping draught to help ease his mind now—sleep might be the only remedy to the series of cataclysms that have befallen him tonight.
“But you…” He blinks confusedly, voice hoarse. “You stayed.”
She frown. His eyes meet hers and he steals the breath away from her lungs.
An Imperial prince—least of all the legitimate heir—has no right looking as awe-struck as he does. It certainly isn’t fair for such an expression to be aimed at someone like her.
Throat drying up, she is immediately seized by the urge to bolt from the bed and out through the door, but her legs are so stiff with anxiety she’d probably sprawl on the floor if she were to get up.
“I told you.”
“Ah Duo would have helped you out of the country.”
“Yes, she offered it.”
“And you stayed,” he concludes, circling back to his original thought. Evidently he isn’t any less confused because what he says next is, “Why?”
She can’t believe this is what he asks. She can’t believe this is his reaction, that he doesn’t get angry even for a second—at Ah Duo for telling her and not him, at her for keeping it a secret.
Instead, that stupid molten heat of his flares up, practically oozing out of him. From the brightness of his eyes to the way he shifts closer to her on the bed, everything in him blazes on, and Maomao has no choice but to believe in the scorching heat that chafes her skin.
“I told you before,” she says, parched. “I accepted your feelings, and I accept what comes with them.”
She doesn’t think she can make it any clearer than this, but still Jinshi stares dumbly with his mouth half-opened. His face flushes gradually, as it often does when he experiences his usual lovesickness. Irritation has her ready to take back her earlier assumption that Jinshi is far from stupid, when it suddenly dawns on her that so many strong emotions might induce a medical shock and kill him.
“I still think it’s idiotic you’d waste your affections on someone like me,” she says to cool him off. “But there doesn’t seem to be any changing your mind, so if—“
He lunges at her, gripping her shoulders with a somewhat crazed frenzy. Obviously a wrong choice, then.
“Waste my affections,” he hisses but still doesn’t sound angry. “Do you only realize what you do to me?”
She looks away, in a pointless attempt to escape the searing intensity of his gaze, of his hands on her and his breath on her lips.
Once again, Jinshi burns too fiercely and it blinds her—and then how can that flickering flame of hers ever compare?
“Do you?” She seethes when she fails to push him away. “It seems to me you often fail to see what’s in front of your nose, sir.”
He huffs in utter disbelief. “Perhaps you could stand to be a little clearer!”
She knows, she knows, alright? She can’t even entirely blame it all on Jinshi’s status or propriety anymore. She simply isn’t good at any of this. How long has she spent, pushing him away, refusing to be a part of his life, giving him an out? How much energy has he put in filling the gaps, in making sure there’d be no barrier left?
Maomao isn’t good at this, not like he is. She can never return something so monumental as this.
She is terrified she might never manage to light anything on her own.
“You wish me to be clearer?” She lifts her chin, stubborn. “Ask me.”
Jinshi searches her face, lost, until he figures it out. His throat bob. He shakes his head, eyes wide.
A hysterical brand of anger wells up in her chest and she channels that boiling energy into finally shoving him off. He falls backward and his head bumps the wooden frame of her small bed. Jinshi doesn’t protest. Mouth agape, he simply gapes as she moves to tower over him, one of her hands pushing hard on his chest to keep him there.
Is he finally appalled by the lines she crosses with him?
Knowing his masochist streak, he most likely finds her wrath charming.
With his hair splayed out on her bedsheets, and with the way his chest heaves with each panting breath, Jinshi is a heavenly sight—one that would send entire nations to war but finds itself sprawled on her bed in the middle of the night. Maomao’s heart races so fast she can’t hear anything else but the frantic lub-dub. Even when his eyes start to blur with tears again, she watches, all the more enthralled as the first ones roll down to stain the sheets.
“Ask me,” she hisses, leaning so close their noses brush. “For once in your life, just take what you want.”
He has vowed to make her his wife, in spite of the obstacles or her protests. He has made a show of branding his own skin in front of the Son of Heaven himself, for the sole purpose of making her the only woman ever allowed to lay her eyes on his body. It’s far too late for his righteousness now.
Her left hand strokes the side of his face, brushes away a couple of tears and follows the line of his scar before grabbing onto his chin without any hint of softness. She grits her teeth, chest achingly tight.
Maomao has warned him, time and time again, but it’s too late now. He has made her watch him agonize under the crushing weight of his duties for years and he had her arms receive all his misery and heartbreak.
Not once did he ask her.
“Jinshi. Ask me.”
He screws up his face and, all things considered, he puts up a decent fight. Ultimately though, he can’t stop the strangled sobs rising in his throat.
She’s quick to swallow it down, pressing her lips to his.
Not once did he ask her—and she’s not brave enough to tell him on her own.
If Jinshi asks now, she’ll give him her whole. If he asks her now, whatever he may ask of her now, she knows she’ll bend and yield and follow. She wants to.
As far as kisses go, this isn’t a great one by any standards she’s been taught. She’s all too rough and a little too stiff to live up to her sisters’ ideals; her lips are dry and his are salty with the taste of his tears. She kisses him through the tremors and messily crafts a rhythm of her own, slowly mapping out all the details of him. She feels Jinshi’s hands shake as they travel along the line of her back to pull her close. He whimpers when her tongue brushes against his, so she does it again. She revels in the maddening knowledge that every sound, every gasp she gets out of him are hers and hers alone.
She coaxes kisses after kisses out of him, languidly spelling a devotion she can’t even bring herself to whisper in the intimacy of their embrace. When her arms grow tired of holding herself above him, Jinshi snakes an arm around her waist and doesn’t break away for even the slightest moment as he brings her down to her side in a clamorous mess of creaks and clanks. The bed is far too small to accommodate them both, and her mattress is much too slim for Jinshi’s delicate sensibilities, and such strange commotions are bound to raise suspicions but Jinshi mouths pleading words against her throat, “I love you, I love you, Maomao, please—“ and Maomao forgets all about it.
They kiss unhurriedly until their lips turn sore. By that time, the candle on her nightstand has burned out, leaving only the one on Maomoa’s desk to light up the entire room.
The fluttering flame casts nebulous shadows on the ceiling which slowly waver when the first rays of dawn start to paint the walls. Curled up together, they watch warm oranges give way to the soft purple hues of the morning as precious minutes trickle by.
Everything is still in that sliver of eternity. Quiet and peaceful and almost gentle enough to fool them into forgetting the storm above their heads.
The bubble is doomed to burst, though. One of them is fated to move soon.
Maomao’s eyes sting when she thinks about her upcoming day at the medical office. Fingers idly playing with a strand of Jinshi’s hair, she finds herself wishing she isn’t dealt with too much stitching to do, for once.
Basen is bound to notice Jinshi’s disappearance any minute now. And if he doesn’t know where to look for him, Suiren surely will.
“Let’s run away together.”
She doesn’t need time to conjure up all the reasons this is a terrible idea: imperial treason aside, she has plenty of reasons to refuse. Her father, her work and her sisters, Yao and E’nen and Chue. Maomao never expected much out of life as a child of the brothel but surprisingly, she likes where she is. She values what she has now.
“I’ll need a few minutes to get my things,” she hears herself say in spite of her perfectly sound reasoning. “A couple of books and the rarest of my herbs.”
A beat of silence welcomes the end of her sentence and lets her fully realize the enormity of the commitment she so carelessly uttered.
Jinshi chuckles.
It starts as a breathy little sound against the crown of her head until a proper laugh bursts out of him, causing the bed to shake with him.
“So no clothes? No food?”
Her cheeks grow warm. “Those are easier to come by. An ox bezoar isn’t.”
“Right,” he smiles giddily. He would know. “And with what money?”
Now rightfully vexed, she props herself on her elbow which is as far as Jinshi’s iron hold on her waist will allow her to go. She nearly succumbs to the childish impulse to fight him anyway.
“I’d like to think you would deal with that matter, at least, sir.” She glares thunderously, and fumes at the way Jinshi’s misty eyes dances across her face. “In any case, I can very well earn a living for myself. What would you even do?”
His face goes blank and he thinks about it, staring hazily at the window behind her. Like a puffer fish, she deflates and bites her tongue, cursing herself for shattering the moment, the offer.
“I would build you a greenhouse,” he says. He looks back at her, almost shy, “I don’t reckon I’d be very good at first, but I think I could learn.”
Whatever he decides, whatever happens when the last of the night gives way to morning, Maomao knows there will never be anyone he will look so tenderly at—no one else will ever make his heart race the way that it does against her palm right now. And Maomao, she's had too much of him already to ever be able to go back and watch him agonize from afar. In spite of her best efforts, Maomao finds she wants to be with him more than she cares about the path they walk on.
There is no remedy she can provide to ease his aches. A wavering flame may never ignite a brazier on its own. But if that fragile, tepid light has ever been anyone’s, it’s his.
Whatever happens when the last of the night gives way to morning, Maomao won’t let his molten heat burn itself down.