you can't take the fallout (reign of assassins | ye zhanqing/zeng jing)

[fiachairecht]

you can't take the fallout. reign of assassins, ye zhanqing/zeng jing. ye zhanqing learns the way of the dark stone, crawls out from the rubble, and finds that there is yet more in front of her. 2.5k words, rated t. for echoslam in fandomgrowthexchange 2019.

i. Zhanqing

You are alive.

It is more than can be said for many people that you once knew; it is more indeed than can be said for yourself an hour ago.

But: you are alive. There is a sword in your hand and you have a mother and a father again and a ghost who has left her footprint in every step that you have taken out of your grave.

You are a replacement. It is not the first time you have been one, but it will be the last. Xi Yu is gone, and the memory of her that lives on in the eyes of her fellow members of the Dark Stone will be a light for you, one for you to take and consume until you're brighter than she ever was, brighter than even the Wheel King could ever deny.

The sword in your hand is heavier than the dagger that killed your betrothed and twice as sharp. You tested it against your own fingers, the side and the side and the point, and you didn't feel a single cut even though crimson ran in rivers down your palms, pooled in the hollows of the tendons in your wrists when you clenched your empty fist against the sky.

*

The night parts before your blade like a lover. All you do now is train, and though the same could be said of your life from the time before, the particulars of your training could not be more different.

If someone had thought to train your mind for marriage the way the Dark Stone trains you to kill, perhaps there would have been three fewer bodies on your floor. It's a terrifying thought.

One strike to kill. One touch of your foot to the wall to turn a full circle, surprise the enemy who thought your back turned for long enough to strike. Your blade is a living thing in your hand, spinning like a wheel and it sings against stone and flesh alike.

How beautiful, to have something so sharp. How thrilling, to be challenged by so many people you know that you will one day defeat.

And yet as you move from teacher to teacher, learn new weapons and new movements and new ways to become the blade, the environment, and never the victim, there is always something just out of reach.

Always Xi Yu and her Water-Shedding Sword technique. It is unfair, to be a replacement and not be taught the one thing necessary to take her place, to become her in more ways than the ones that everyone else think matters.

Oh, you are praised, and it lights up parts of you you had once feared were dead forever. The masters praise your quickness of hand and sharpness of eye, and if there are comments about your impulsiveness there as well, you know enough to make sure that they're never repeated.

And yet your blade remains firm. It never bends, when you pull it from a body. It meets the blades of others and notches into their sides, leaves marks and scars and dents and acquires some of its own, no matter the care you take. When it slides against its whetstones — the best whetstones in all of China — it doesn't move any further than a mountain might.

One day, when it has been covered in blood and the proof of your love for your new family, you sit with it by the river and hold it out over the rushing current. It's the work of seconds for the steel to become brushed with glimmering droplets of water, for the blood to begin to liquefy and stream down like your own personal rainstorm.

And the only ripples are those left by the blood pouring into the river. Your blade remains unmoved and unmoving, and your hunger for Xi Yu and the things she knows grows ever stronger.

Alone among the Dark Stone, you want her for what she is and knows, and not for what she has done and what she carries. You want to believe that that will be enough — want to know what you must kill in order for it to be enough.

*

Xi Yu is Zeng Jing. That is not the betrayal, or at least it is not the important one.

Xi Yu has left the Dark Stone. That is not the betrayal, or at least it is not the new one.

Xi Yu has fallen in love, and married an ugly man, and set aside her swords, and for all the unfair things that the world has thrown at you throughout your life, this may be the worst of them all. How are you supposed to fix this?

*

Jing's house is something lived in, draped in silks and lit by oil lamps. Static, even as her piled fabrics catch the edges of the breeze. You run your fingers across the red and gold cloth, and its softness catches on the callouses of your fingertips.

How sad, to reduce a life to pieces of cloth. What a small life, boxed in by the woven fibres, when once Xi Yu had flown. You've never tired of it, the acrobatics of the chase: suspending yourself from ropes, balancing on beams, twisting the sleeves of your dresses into garrotes and swirling your skirts up as you spun across a market square in order to blind an enemy.

What was it about these fabrics that held such a hold over Xi Yu, that had sewn her into her new role as a perfect housewife?

Your own clothes fall off easily, your fingers untying and unwrapping the stays that keep the gown in fighting form automatically. The red piece that first caught your eye is unfinished, the edges of the bolt ragged like perhaps Jing had yet to find a use for it. You do not dare to hope that it is some memory of Xi Yu peeking through.

The bolt is long enough to wrap several times around your body, covering an unacceptably minimal amount of skin. It's indecent, luxurious, warmed just enough by the night air and the fire that when you look down, you could almost imagine it to be warm blood, if not for the texture.

You cross the floor to Jing's bed, summoning the memory of her movement. What must it be like, to have a home and a family that demands nothing from you and gives nothing in return? How does it change a body, to walk instead of run, to lay next to another body and feel a heart pulse steady with continued life that doesn't fade into the rivers of death?

Xi Yu has grown old. That, you think, is not inextricable from how she has grown married. Age itself does not matter to a true kung fu master. But these sorts of ties — marriage ties never tested by a blade, love that's never tastes blood — no wonder Xi Yu is tired. It is disappointing; it need not be permanent.

Jing's bed, when you lay yourself down on it, is soft. Big enough for two, if the two don't mind curling close. You turn your head to bury your nose in her pillow, inhaling the wood and jasmine scent left lingering. Xi Yu's scent, or that of Jing's husband?

Your eyes fall shut, and as the scent surrounds you, you allow yourself a moment to imagine that you're her — a life behind you, an eternity of boring ahead. What had to happen to make that seem desirable?

You cannot imagine that the former Xi Yu wants this man she has married as much as you want her. And yet when he walks through the door and sees you in her bed, you entertain, briefly, the thought of seducing him. Of becoming her, taking Zeng Jing's place so that Xi Yu had no choice but to return to her old self.

You would be strong enough to kill him and bring Xi Yu home.

But then he laughs, and the moment is gone. The red and gold fabric clings to you like a second skin as you retrieve your sword and return to the night.

*

The Wheel King buried you once, and it was good enough to convince everyone who mattered that you had died. You cannot really blame him for that: he was a man, and a short-sighted one at that despite the mental strength of his swordplay. Every body of every monk and martial artist in China could not have fixed his flaws.

So: you climb out of the rubble. It's an easier thing, the second time around. Rocks in their breaking are not so different from the breaking of bodies, and that you have always been good at. As long as you have air in hidden pockets, as long as you have space to curl your fingers about the ruins, you can move. And as long as you can move, you can climb, like the droplets of mist rising from the pool at the end of a waterfall.

And outside, there is Xi Yu, who is still too comfortable in her life as Zeng Jing, who has forgotten how to want to be Xi Yu. Outside is a woman abandoned, a woman you have grown, over the time of your confinement underground, to pity.

A woman you must save.

Strange, how your mind turned so quickly to her, and how your plans for her had changed, like wine under the magician's hands. But it is no matter. Your instinct for things regarding Xi Yu has not yet been wrong, and now, there are far fewer people around to complicate things.

But first, you need a sword. There is no such thing as safe, around the woman who needs to once more be Xi Yu, but there is such a thing as prepared. And this time, you will be.

 

ii. Jing

It is later — it is much later, after the man who you cannot stop thinking of as Jiang Ah-Sheng has gone. Though your lives have diverged, you think of him fondly, even after everything passed between you. There is no denying that the shop without him is a little smaller, suddenly unfit to contain the whole of yourself that you had so carefully wrapped away under a new face.

Your blade sleeps under your bed, now, its old home in the rafters gathering dust. Once you had thought that by hiding it away you could forget the hold that kung fu held over you, now, you know that you must accept it as part of you to truly leave the life behind.

Auntie Cai brings you tea, sits across from you at the long dining room table. She reminisces fondly about Ah-Sheng, prays to the gods that the rains will once more return him to you: she cannot fathom why someone might ever want to leave you. You smile at her. Ignore the deep groves scored into the wood and cannot shake the ones scored across your heart. Still, the new ritual is something soothing, in a way.

Ah-Sheng has not been gone for long. He has been gone long enough that shifting to find another body in your bed has you to full wakefulness within an imperceptible fraction of a second.

Ye Zhanqing watches you from the other side of the mattress, paler than a ghost. Even her hair has been washed out to grey by the night and the passing of the months. Her sword is the most solid thing about her, but there's no mistaking the challenge in her eyes.

"I bring you Xi Yu's memory again," she says, smiling as she waits for you to gather your sword and pin back your hair. It is automatic, after all this time, even though you had never dreamed you would meet the woman again. The body remembers what your heart would rather have buried. "So fight me for her and the Water-Shedding sword."

It is so much less than she deserves, and yet, to deny her would be to die, and perhaps to leave her to death as well. So you let the current of her swordplay carry you both into the courtyard, watching all the while to see which of her desires the kung fu will bring to light.

Her first attacks are straightforward: you are not the only one relying on your muscles' memories tonight. You block them easily, one at a time, and it feels like something that shouldn't be a fight.

You have never been sure whether Ye Zhanqing wanted you, or wanted something from you. Her blade flutters in the dust kicked up from the movement of your feet, and you think that now, that is becoming clearer.

"This is not the Xi Yu I thought I would see," she says, and the words move with a life of their own through the air as Zhanqing flips herself one-handed over the top of a tea-merchant's stall. "You're boring still, even after the man is gone."

"And you have yet to see the value in stillness. I thought you wanted a life." Against each other the blades howl, steel against steel under the moonlight. You've lost the taste of death and still Zhanqing cannot come close to touching you. Her blade is fluid and yet her body lags behind, and even as you use the leverage from her strike to flip yourself against the wall, you cannot help but wonder what happened to her to break the bond between woman and sword.

To forge it imperfectly in the first place?

But someone has taught her. She spins away from where you'll land, reaches for your wrist with her left hand. The flat of your blade catches her under her forearm and lifts it high, until you're staring up at her.

Perhaps you had been her teacher, the last time you fought. What else would you teach her, if she let you?

Zhanqing leaps with the motion of her arm, and now it's her sword drifting behind, a second too late to take full advantage of the air as two kicks take her to the rooftop.

"Is that what the Dark Stone promised, a life?" You press forward even though she's waiting now, whether for your words to distract you or for someone to help, you don't know. Her eyes are glinting in the rising mist.

"I had a life. I didn't need their help."

She's bold in her lies, enough that someone who had never spent time with the Dark Stone would believe her. But she should have known better than to try such a line on you, and the flash of disappointment surprises you. "Try again."

It's one jump, for you, to meet her on the rooftop. To her credit, she doesn't flinch back.

"It's what they gave me. It wasn't what they promised me."

Closer. The Wheel King was always good at knowing what each recruit needed. "He lied. Whatever he said."

"You're here," Zhanqing says. "He didn't lie. He just didn't know the truth of you."

The edge of your blade rests against her throat. She still hasn't moved.

Ye Zhanqing's face is in your hands.

The first window has opened.