Work Text:
The fierce corpse of Wen Qing thinks, It’s strange. Today it feels like the entire world is on fire, even when she knows it isn’t. Even when her body is cold and stiff, its various pulses hollow and absent. Everything wavers, slightly unreal, as if in a heat haze. It must be that her body doesn’t make sense to her anymore. She can make the clinical observation that it doesn’t, and that’s as far as she can get.
So she breaks the promise she made to herself to never speak with Jiang Yanli again, and goes out looking for her.
She knows where she is. Even amidst the flare of living yang signatures varying in intensity (her family), she could find Jiang Yanli with her eyes closed. With all her senses sealed. Even in pieces, she would still know to look for her.
Jiang Yanli is in their communal kitchen, cooking. Wen Qing can’t tell what it is by the smell. Not that she was especially good at it before she died; A-Ning was always the better of the two of them. But now everything smells like ashes, something stronger—saltpetre, maybe. Distilled baijiu. Black powder.
Jiang Yanli looks up at her. Despite the steam in the air, she looks pale. “Qing-jie!”
“Yanli-mei. I came to see how you are.”
She doesn’t look well; she still spends far too many hours cooped up in her library, writing, researching, consulting with A-Ning and his companion. Her cheeks are thin, her hair and clothes dishevelled; her eyes are always rimmed in red, now.
Before Wen Qing surrendered herself to the Jin clan, she’d tried to affix Jiang Yanli’s image in her mind. Smiling, her cheeks round with good health and flushed with happiness. Her makeup and delicate golden jewellery perfect. Her sumptuous gold brocade dress. One shining vision, proof that even after asking Wen Qing to cut into her and take her golden core, released from her care, she could still live and thrive. She would’ve gotten into a red-draped palanquin the very next day, and married into the Jin clan.
But the two images refuse to match now that she’s back from the dead. She imagines herself staring into the made-up eyes and round, powdered face of the Jiang Yanli then, and it’s like looking at a mask in a play. Recognizing a stranger on the street, by mistake.
“I’m fine.”
“Don’t lie to me.”
Jiang Yanli breathes in shakily and says nothing. The tendons on her neck flare as she stirs something on the stove.
“I’m no longer your doctor, is that it? I can no longer care for my sworn sister’s health, now that I’m—”
“I’d like Qing-jie to rest, and not worry.”
“That’s impossible,” she says flatly. “Unless you somehow learn to take care of yourself. But you never do. So I guess I’m stuck following you around like your ghost.”
“You don’t have to be my doctor. There are plenty of others who can take over.”
“Just because I can’t, you mean. Is that it. Speak plainly if you’re going to speak to me.”
“Stop lecturing me like I’m a child just because I’ve messed up! I know, I know I’ve ruined everything! I can do the calculus as well as you, Qing-jie, I know how stupid I’ve been! I know how useless everything I tried was—”
“Then stop trying to bargain your way into my forgiveness,” Wen Qing snarls. “You are behaving like a guilty child. Worse, by mincing around me, trying to spare my feelings instead of addressing the root cause, you just look like a little girl. Am I a toy to you, then? Your pet doctor, who must be pitied now that she’s broken and can’t work anymore—”
Jiang Yanli winds up her arm and slaps her. Wen Qing’s head turns to the side with the force of the blow, but it’s always been easy for her not to show any reaction.
For a moment she sees what’s going to happen next: she is going to give Yanli-mei a level, unimpressed stare; Yanli-mei is going to shake apart and apologize; Wen Qing is going to enfold her hands in hers, put the pieces back together, as though the only thing she’s good for is being strong.
“I’m… so tired, Yanli-mei,” she says quietly. “I don’t know why I came here.”
This, at last, makes Jiang Yanli’s face go blotchy, feverish next to her white lips. She raises an arm and shoves; the largest pot topples to the floor. Steaming soup runs across the dirt, pieces of daikon and potato and lotus root flying everywhere.
“I think—we’re both fools,” Jiang Yanli says into the silence.
Fine, then. They’re both useless fools. Both failures. For a moment, Wen Qing imagines taking her by the hand. The two of them walking into the dark, twisting trees.
Ghosts. Monsters. Not-women.
But her family is here with her, and she can’t leave them. And Jiang Yanli won’t thrive for long if she leaves her bereft of any family. Even after everything she chose to do with her own hands.
She sways and sinks to her knees. Jiang Yanli rushes to catch her by the shoulders.
“Qing-jie? Wen Qing?”
Jiang Yanli leans in to inspect her pupils, her colour—such that it is—and Wen Qing remembers too late. Jiang Yanli catches a whiff of something from her lips, and nearly collides their faces together as she jerks in alarm. “Poison—?”
“Strong medicine,” slurs Wen Qing. “Measurements, my hand slipped. Couldn’t smell… the difference.”
“So you drank it,” says Jiang Yanli, despairing, angry. “No one here needs this kind of treatment right now—you were clearly just—”
She lunges in and kisses Wen Qing so hard their teeth clash, strong fingers gripping and pressing her jaw open, tongue sweeping the inside of Wen Qing’s mouth. Wen Qing doesn’t know how to push her away without hurting her—she plants a hand on her chest but freezes before she can follow through.
She doesn’t need to do anything, because something in Jiang Yanli pulls at something she doesn’t know what to name inside her new body. It pushes itself out of her mouth like many small fingers or tongues made of black grime, which run with perverse affection across Jiang Yanli’s face, and dissipates.
Jiang Yanli doesn’t seem poisoned, aside from a slight shortness of breath. She relaxes her grip, but stays with her damp forehead pressed against Wen Qing’s cold, unfeeling skin.
“You can’t go,” she whispers at length. “Not again. We just got you… I’m so tired of seeing the people I love die, Wen Qing. I won’t allow it to happen again. Alright?”
You hate me, Wen Qing thinks tiredly. That’s why you keep coming back. Because our oath keeps tightening around us each time we fail to live up to each other’s standards of goodness. Jiang Yanli, I know you. Of course you would cherish the proof of your worst failure yet.
“I will not die,” she says aloud. You’re the one responsible for that, after all. “I won’t stop hating you today. But yes, Yanli-mei. I’ll stay.”