Work Text
first glimpse of gold over waking up dreams
1. comfort
He turns to look at her; He can’t imagine turning and the end result not being her.2. kiss
Her eyelashes flutter against his shoulder while she sleeps, and he feels sorry for all the time he spent not understanding that sometimes the smallest things fill the largest voids.3. soft
He pulls his head back so he can look at her, and she wonders why she was rendered so emotional by the faint brush of his jaw along hers as he went.4. pain
It is selfish (which is not unfamiliar, but that is no comfort): how he hears her behind the wall crying out through the labor and retreats his senses from her chi, because it feels like he’s back in that safehouse all those years ago, as helpless and as much to blame.
5. sweet potatoes
When the emperor’s most trusted guard leans to his ear and asks if he is hungry, he answers “starving” and they take leave of the council room—so when the kitchen staff is interrogated for peeling vegetables in the hallway, they keep quiet until they must cover the frenzied, passionate sounds behind them, which they do because their duty is to serve their lord’s appetite, and they hold fondness for him and what (who) he craves.
6. rain
She’s expelled from her seething rumination when the royal garden’s fragrant plum blossoms, magnolia petals, jasmine flowers and peonies vary between floating down to softly brush her cheeks to tumbling down her front all in some bewildering cosmic descent—which only makes sense when she turns around into his laughter and waiting arms and chirp of “It worked!” at the smile she couldn’t suppress.7. chocolate
She blinks and blushes as his mouth leaves the corner of hers, as he licks the syrup (what was her syrup) from his lips and says, “Love it so much I don’t think you could ever feed me enough” (and her mind hears those common vows of this confection’s people in their language he taught her: “what’s mine is yours”).8. happiness
They grow older and their life together builds, crescendos, rewards, and her heart brims over with the joy of watching every facet of his insatiability totally fulfilled (except, of course, his everlasting desire for her).9. telephone
“My lord, perhaps we should turn to other things on today’s agenda,” she suggests, but the Emperor of Xing just snickers like the schoolboys of the class he keeps interrupting as he dials to be connected to Professor Elric-Rockbell again.10. ears
“Her softer arm’s not for my sake, but for ‘half of me’?” Ling asks, and while he wonders if his own misheard Winry’s ears are turning pink (then she’s cursing Edward for being right— she should not have been left alone with him), but Ling doesn’t hear her begging him not to say anything; he’s out of her workshop in seconds and crouched serenely in front of Lan Fan, trying to listen to her tummy, but he keeps laughing with joy.11. name
She says his name — his name — quiet, but yearning, over and over — and it’s like both a revelation and a benediction from her lips, while to him it’s a prayer answered.12. sensual
His mouth finally relents and he makes a pleased low noise at the sight of the mark on her, nuzzles it while she whimpers at the realization he’s reveling in something she’s dreamed of him doing for so long; while she shivers at knowing exactly what color his possessiveness looks like on her skin and yet how that bruise is so different than all others her body has taken for his sake.
13. death
The topic of immortality has come up so much between them that Ed thinks nothing of it when Ling starts to ask questions about the devotion between his father and mother; yes, nothing of it… until Ed follows the man’s soft gaze across the room, where Winry tinkers with his companion’s automail.14. sex
When she sits up and the transition makes the shoulder of one of his most opulent robes glide down her bare arm his stomach flips at the satisfying fullness of her weight and her beauty atop him, and while he knows he finds her his equal no matter what she wears he feels fulfilled by this image of his heroic and noble woman — noble in a way he values more — using his lap as her throne.15. touch
After months of encouragement and flirting she initiates their first intimate touch, and she’s grateful he asks what to do next because guiding him to kiss her neck lets her hide her giggle at her mind’s half-formed joke about ‘feeling up the dragon’s pulse’ within the excuse of it tickling.16. weakness
All his courtly teachings have ensured he can recite poetry, appreciate it, but he’s never been one particularly skilled in crafting it—though when he gets to savor her through his fingertips, drink her in with his eyes, a fizzing sensation is born on his tongue that makes his mouth feel full with the potential to one day understand and put in practice what it takes to weave his longing words within the bright shell of her ear and night sky of her hair.17. tears
Though her crying has not reached her breathing he’s still surprising himself with how much it really isn’t scaring him as the tears spill over, with her face remaining still and serene and full of all her magic that steadies him (...and that is not new), so he brushes her cheek with his thumb while not aiming to wipe them away, which makes the love for her he just confessed feel in her heart all the more undeniable.18. speed
She actually startles him when her mask zooms out of the branches mere inches from his face (upside down, he realizes, when the adrenaline starts dissipating), but even still he cuts off her eager, dutiful update of what’s beyond the tree line because he has slipped her mask aside; his hands are cupping her cheeks; his lips press his delight to hers.19. wind
“Lan Fan,” he murmurs, not because there’s anything left to say, but because it’s all he wants in his mouth beside his last breath.20. freedom
She does not want to be an Empress, and when he includes with his proposal that he’d never force her into a lifetime she did not want, she can only reply: “I live with certitude that it is my place to serve our country from the shadows, but I will remain by your side, forever, as we both want, and I will tell you my marriage vows, though I already whispered them in secret years ago.”21. life
While she expected a pleasant welcome, when Lady Yao embraces her so quickly, so tightly, and sighs the forlorn, grateful cry of, “Our most loyal daughter of Yao, you’ve brought my life back to me at such great cost to your own, and I will summon the voices across our land to honor your courage and that of your grandfather’s,” Lan Fan—having never lost her balance before—clutches her lady’s gossamer sleeve.(When Ling bows to his mother’s back—to Lan Fan in her arms—she shuts her eyes, envisions the shishi-odoshi of Grandfather’s garden, and she feels her eyelids tip just like it from the side of stalwart restraint to the solace in relinquishing to water’s weight.)
22. jealousy
He realizes too late the flaw in asking her to perform espionage as one of Mei’s ladies-in-waiting, in his silver cheongsam commissioned of the softest silk that she dutifully wears to the banquet, which hosts hungry eyes that aren't his and bear no right to devour her so-enticing silhouette — it was an underestimation of their appetites, and his avarice, which might never forgive him for it.23. hands
The titillating brush of his fingertips on the back of her neck is so indecent and perilous, and her reactions so incriminating, she realizes in hindsight she should have deduced way sooner that Edward teaching the young lord how to braid did not bode well for her grip on her composure.24. taste
His tongue slips between and gives a long lick up before his fingers spread her lips wider, and after he grazes his teeth over her sensitive bud, tugging it, making it tingle like sugar, he murmurs “kept it so sweet for me,” and she is lost and never wants to be found by anyone but him.25. devotion
He vows there is not one inch of her body he will resent or neglect, and he upholds this in the way he gingerly kisses the divot run through her misshapen breast (its side cleaved to accommodate the stature of her automail because she could not stand to prolong cleaving to his side), and how he makes her laugh, and love it alongside him, when he murmurs to it how precious he finds his “little dropped dumpling.”26. forever
“What’ch’ya up to, Scamp?” Ling asks his son when he finds him behind some ruins yet to be remodeled, who peers up at him from his drawing in the sand to answer, “It’s my door of truth and it’s got our family tree’s future on it, because I know my kids will be as great as you and mommy and Uncle Ed and Al and Aunt Mei and— it’s the first time Ling considers maybe immortality is not outwitting your fate of passing out of the world, but rather passing on a legacy of souls who will ensure it stays as kind and gentle as they are.27. blood
It is a heartbreak to not be sure they can ever share the secrets of their past, of leaving beloved lands they might never show them, but they have not lost so much that their pride will not run through their children’s veins, and they have gained homes in many places; they course through many hearts.28. sickness
If souls were left in him they’d feel resonant with her anguish, so obvious as it is, but he’s alone in his head, and fulfilling his desires is all in his hands, now.
29. melody
Their qi pulses, radiates, makes each other’s quake in the already negligible rift between their auras that’s been whittled into the string of a qin, and it reverberates so strongly with every brush and every glance she has to worry: how shall I hold my soul in me so that it does not touch yours?
30. star
He asks whose counsel she thinks he values most, but in the middle of a practiced answer she’s kept under the paperweight of propriety she trails off into the labyrinth of his gaze, with his expression calm and contemplative (though tinged with slight humor, given away by the faintly curving corners of his mouth, like he knows something she doesn’t), and as if charmed by hypnosis she vaguely hears herself murmur “Mine…” before the word even means anything to her.31. home
She startles awake at the presence in her tiny room just before he slides into bed behind her, and as he draws her closer against his firm bare chest she chastises that his disappearance from his own bed will cause a meltdown amongst the guards, until: “I told them,” he murmurs behind her ear, “I told them where their emperor’s heart lies.”32. confusion
As the motion of their commotion intensifies, with his warm hand gliding up the back of her neck and his other fondling higher up her thigh, his tongue seeking her permission, suddenly she senses— shoves Ling away, and he topples backward off the short roadside stone ledge, dizzy until the anchor-weight familiarity of her grandfather’s approaching chi explains for her.
When she audaciously simpers “Young Lord! Have you fainted again?” he has to hurry to change his scandalized (enamored) look to conspire with her, and when Fu demands Lan Fan sticks close by as his support Ling presses the literality out of it like sweet sticky lemonade, affectionately pressing his side to hers, wrapping his arm around her with the frivolous joy of real teenagers under the sunny Amestrian sky.33. fear
Her sleep-bleary eyes glance out from the crook between her mother’s armor strap and cradling arm until she blinks into realizing they’ve passed through the young prince’s large ornate bedroom door, whose creaking woke her, and she sees him hop up to stand on his mattress waving his hand flamboyantly with all six-year-old-four-feet of him bouncing, explaining, “I got scared, Lan Fan, so I sent for you; yay for sleepovers!”
34. lightning / thunder
The throne room quakes within its clashing echo: “I AM the Son of Heaven, the Phoenix King from Yao, the Dragon Incarnate from which you descend, the Emperor who journeyed West and will never make the Great One of my predecessors, and you dare strike against my patience so many times I bellow now so that you may hear? My holy word brooks no further argument, as it is by my mandates and her counsel and her sacrifices our country unites toward peace and reconciliation, so heed that I will no longer tolerate such challenges to my desires, for when I say there’s room in my court for her let it be written the value to me of her reserved place spans the depths of the earth to the expanse of everything celestial and unending in my sovereign sky.”35. bonds
“I would break if you were gone—I would break, I would break,” he whispers into her bandaged hand, the only one he can hold now, and in the remarkably crestfallen moment the sublime still reaches out to them when his hastily wrapped, halfway-abandoned bandages unfasten to twine around her wrist too.36. market
She rests on the stone ledge of the fountain she shooed him away from, twirling her fingers in the cool water and mimicking the caress on her pregnant tummy until the unsuccessfully-smothered laughter of the New Xerxian citizen he’s talking to draws her gaze—and she also fails to stifle her snort at his attempts to speak through their baby son jamming his hands in his father’s mouth.(She sympathizes with her son more than her partner, because his mouth is an easy thing to fixate on, and part of how they all even got here in the first place.)37. technology
Lan Fan fidgets beside him in the Ferris wheel passenger car with adrenaline prickling all the way through to her fingertips and heart pounding in pace with the distant sounds of rattling rails, until his warm hand encompasses hers to curve both up to his chin and kiss the back of her hand, smiling as he says, “Thank you for indulging my sappiness, and I promise we’ll get back to the faster ones right after this.”38. gift
His mother — who loved a man before she was the emperor’s and loved that same man after — told him, with a nightshade smile on her lips, “The heart wants what it wants, and for all else it does not care.”39. smile
At his look of open-mouthed astonishment when between her steps paced beside his on their path she just as easily slides into a duet with his tune, harmonizing knowingly with her honeyed humming, she flashes an equally saccharine smile and his heart just leans toward her before he just… trips. flat on his face.40. innocence
In many contexts nudity, even co-ed, between a lord and his vassal was not instantaneously or severely sexualized, and nothing contrary to that had really played out between them, but at nineteen Lan Fan feels something in their dynamic shift when she cannot tear her riveted gaze from the chiseled v-cut lines over his hips, her eye guided by the low, low way he carelessly allows his waistband to hang on them.41. completion
“Not enough,” comes her gasping request for his touch; “More,” he corrects, not for the first time urging her to think of herself as whole even while desirous, desirable, and not wanting in the sense that any part of her would be found lacking.42. clouds
She tells the young lord her grandfather won’t take her dallying well, but he only spreads out wider in the grass, spreads his fingers wider as he looks through them, grins wider, soothing, “Your grandfather doesn’t have to know” — and this is when she realizes this royal boy is different than the others; that maybe one day he could embrace every life under the sky.43. sky
She tells him a fish may love a bird but there is no place for them to live together, and the glint of his smile is like a mischievous star out in daylight as he says, “Kun becomes Peng, and when he rises from one deep blue to fly to his next we will be nestled on his back and go live in the Lake of Heaven,” and the startled luminance upon her face is, he’s sure, more brilliant than all the scales or feathers that adorn their mythic savior.44. heaven
Sometimes she dares to dream she could be reincarnated as someone who can still find him, over and over throughout his immortal life.45. hell
He scowls at the vial she fought for, bled for, to deliver to him, his heart wrenching at the memory of how proud she looked to hand over something that will one day doom him to countless ones without her.46. sun
“I like your skin when it’s sunkissed,” he says, and she bites her cheek so as not to say she likes it better when it’s Ling-kissed, which actually is one and the same to her.47. moon
During their roof picnic he watches peach dew glisten on her bottom lip while she asks if he knows the folklore that they’re the fruit of immortality, of the gods and royalty.He says “Yes, but don’t forget protection from evil,” and though she only chews thoughtfully she can’t hide from the moonlight how touched she is that he had an immediate association to her; how instantaneously he makes her devotion to safeguarding his immortal quests the pit of her metaphor, the yin to his yang.
48. waves
He feels her pulse steady within the dragon’s, lapping over him, its rhythm as rejuvenating and empowering as ever, and when the taut line of her body dissolves into one fluid beautiful gathering of silk conforming to his shape, he thanks the gods above his half-blade, half-silk warrior has become his all-encompassing lover, too.49. hair
He buries his face along the dip of her shoulder, eyelids pressing into her fanned hair on the pillow while his tongue traces her neck, over the strands plastered there by her sweet sweat, and he’s engulfed by how lusciously perfect it feels sticking to her skin and his at the same time.50. supernova
And then she smiles at him, somehow both brazen in its bright heat and soft with the down of innocence, and he would stake every heartbeat he has left on the heavenly mandate that nothing in the entire world in all its universes will ever compare to the crescent of her happiness.