Work Text
Qi Xiaoheng isn't entirely certain why her brother-in-law (who had never had much love for her) insisted that he absolutely had to have her company on his illicit journey to Nightless City, but she suspects it's because he has gone back to rigidly adhering to his principles.She'd once told him that his principles would get him eaten alive (when they'd both been much younger, and when looking at him had reminded her of a schoolboy rather than a schoolteacher or a jailor) — Haozhi had been raised to be as unyielding as iron and look at what it got him in the end — but Lan Qiren had stiffly informed her that this wasn't her problem to worry about. And the years afterwards had eaten him alive as far as she can tell, so it isn't even as though she was wrong. Either way, it doesn't really matter much to her why Lan Qiren wanted her to come with him to Nightless City, or why he was taking A-Huan and A-Zhan with them or why they were leaving after curfew. (Perhaps he had fetched her because he needed someone else to hold A-Zhan as he made his escape from the Cloud Recesses and didn't feel like going so far with two small children. Perhaps something had happened after Haozhi's death that made it more practical for him to take her sons from their home to Nightless City. Qi Xiaoheng doesn't know and doesn't entirely care. She might have two sons, but they have never been hers to raise, and in a way, she feels as though they were given over to the Lan Sect before they even had the ability to think of a life spent differently.)She'd liked to travel before, she thinks. Not that she has stepped foot past the door of the house she'd been imprisoned in for nearly seven years. Whatever sort of person she used to be has been worn away. Mostly, she was just interested in where they were going, and why they were going to Nightless City of all places.Lan Qiren does not answer her when she questions him on why he had picked Nightless City as their destination, but in the cool dawn of morning after they'd traveled all night to get to the border of the Shaanxi province, he does finally answer her on the matter of why they had left the Cloud Recesses behind."They were going to bury you with Xiongzhang." He stares straight ahead, still holding A-Huan's sleeping form. "I made a decision that such a thing wouldn't stand."Qi Xiaoheng has very little she wants to say about the matter after that. The Lan Sect has always been, in her mind, cruel and merciless. That'd been at least one of the reasons she'd refused to marry Haozhi when he had asked her, years ago now. It doesn't matter, she thinks to herself. Haozhi is dead and I am still alive. The manner of Haozhi's death, however, will still conspire to eat her alive. By mid morning, they'd arrived in the city proper of the Qishan Wen's sect seat. She'd never been this far north, having spent her youth in the south and then many of the most recent years trapped in Gusu. She is here now. Nightless City, to her eye, looks just as marvelous as all the stories people told of it.Wen Ruohan is lazily fanning himself with a woman's round fan that was cleverly embroidered with beautiful double sided thread painting depicting camellia flowers — Qi Xiaoheng would know, having come from Suzhou, where embroidery was king for women — when they are shown to his balcony in the family wing of Nightless City. It would've been a surprise, except, well.(But then, Qi Xiaoheng had noticed various things in these rooms as they passed that...Well, truthfully, she had been doing a good job of not thinking about who else lived in these palatial rooms that Wen Ruohan also seemed to live in.)The woman's fan, with its tastefully elegant blushing red and pink camellia flowers was attached to the darkly lacquered handle was a delicate lover's knot atop a swishing tassel of red silk.Wen Ruohan does not set it aside when he sees them, nor does he change his position, though he does smile and it seems to brighten the whole room, "Ah," he says, "welcome to Nightless City."Lan Qiren, who seemingly found this all particularly uncomfortable says, "Do you always have to be so theatrical?"Wen Ruohan pauses for a moment, tapping the wooden frame of the fan against his hand in a way that made the elaborate red silk lovers knot swish over his wrist. "You know, Qiren," he says, brightly, as if none of this all really mattered to him. "I almost want to ask you what your note was about."At this, Lan Qiren looks even more uncomfortable than he had before. If Xiaoheng had to give it a name, she'd say he looked rather sick."I'm not going to talk about it here."When Wen Ruohan turns to her, she says, (despite her own vague feelings of disquiet given the fan he's still tapping against his open palm), "Qiren tells me that they wanted me to die with Haozhi."At this, if possible, Wen Ruohan looks even more delighted."Do you want me to eat them?" Wen Ruohan asks with such relish that she's not entirely certain he's really suggesting... "After all, they've been so terrible to you, and now that they've also wanted to bury Heng'er alive, you can't possibly think that the correct answer for all of this is for me to not eat them."Lan Qiren, because he has a stubborn streak to him that defies good sense and logic, says, "no you may not eat my family elders. They will eventually see the error of their ways.""Oh they will?" Wen Ruohan tilts his head to one side, red eyes gleaming with an idle amusement, "just like they did when—"Outside, the sound of a small child shrieking has started up in a way that makes both A-Huan and A-Zhan turn towards the noise. Wen Ruohan, who'd been previously more or less delighted suddenly looks...Tired, perhaps, is the word for it.With a sigh, he rises and heads towards the door. "Xu'er stop trying to tell people that they can't tell you what to do if they aren't your father."The shrieking and wailing stops abruptly, only for the small boy outside to say, with a distinct amount of crossness, "well they aren't."Wen Ruohan, undeterred, says, "well I am your father, and I believe that you're screaming simply because you want attention. Are you happy now that you've gotten it?"Xu'er (A-Xu?) does not deny that he'd been screaming merely to get his father's attention at mid morning, though he does frown and pout and stamp his feet about it all.The small boy is brought inside — he looks to be A-Huan's age — where he is dutifully introduced to A-Huan and A-Zhan by the beleaguered servant who was clearly tasked with caring for him as 'Da-shaoye.'Wen Ruohan returns to his seat, though he does wave a hand at his son to beckon him over. "Chao'er can't be introduced to guests," he says, sighing. "He is far too interested in biting people to be fit for polite company. Perhaps in another six months he will give up on trying to bite everyone he sees."So, Qi Xiaoheng thinks to herself, with something that feels very slow but is likely not all that slow, he has a second son.He'd never mentioned it, but then, how well does she really know him?He knew, of course, about her sons, because she'd told him, and he knew an awful lot about the situation with Haozhi (and how she had eventually caved to his suggestions about killing her husband) and—And at this, Qi Xiaoheng starts to believe that she might be making a terrible mistake. It is, rather too late to have this feeling, she thinks. Xu'er, because he clearly knows his own father better than she knew Wen Ruohan, says, rather crossly, "Diedie, you're just mad that A-Niang said she wants to go get more eels and she didn't want you to chop their heads off for her."Wen Ruohan, who now looks rather cross himself says, despondently, "She only told you that to get you out of her library. She's in the middle of working on that section about eels in her bestiary again, you see, but she's not going anywhere about it."At this, Xu'er makes a face as though he'd been horribly betrayed. "But she said—""She's still in the library." Wen Ruohan, now sprawled miserably in his seat with his wife's tuanshan thrown onto the side table to his right, says, "we might see her again for dinner sometime this year, wouldn't that be nice?""It wouldn't be nice at all." Xu'er, rubbing his eyes, says, "It would terrible, A-Niang will eat all the century eggs and fried mushrooms and then there'll be none left for us.""Oh," Wen Ruohan says, terribly dramatically (Xiaoheng is beginning to see why Lan Qiren had such problems with his dramatics now, there was a terrible edge of danger to his sort of absurdity), "whenever my wife emerges from her library to decimate the populations of century eggs in Nightless City it will be the most victorious and terrible day. My child will throw such a fit that he'll end up the ruler of Nightless City because none of us will be able to control him anymore."At this, Xu'er looks rather perturbed, but doesn't manage to get a word in edgewise as his father continues to say whatever thought had apparently appeared in his mind now. It's almost a relief for Lan Qiren to open his mouth to lecture the Chief Cultivator about something (something about how he shouldn't refer to his wife as "my wife" in front of his own children) and Xiaoheng and A-Huan and A-Zhan are ushered off to different accommodations altogether.She still has entirely no idea what to make of it all.Qi Xiaoheng is not really someone who revels in murder, he decides. If she was, she might be a little easier to control.He thinks, perhaps, it's not in his nature to like someone who would be so easy to control that they offer no possibility for him to enjoy the conquest. After all, nothing makes him lose his attention faster than boredom. He is a creature of whim and sloth and selfishness, and nothing in the world has ever been enough of a consequence to make him hold his hand.(For what it's worth, at least, he sees at least several years of interest in Qi Xiaoheng, if not for herself then for the position she now has as Dowager Madam Lan, regent to her older son until he formally comes of age at twenty.)This date is fifteen years off, and while Wen Ruohan is patient, it would be such a bother if he let his father's natal sect slip away from him so easily.Truth be told, he is almost shocked by the simplicity of it — persuade Haozhi's wife to kill him, claim Qiren for himself which brings with it Qiren's two nephews who are both so young still that Wen Ruohan can influence them easily, and now, to reel Qi Xiaoheng in once and for all, and he will have the Lan both in the current moment and in the future when Huan'er is grown.But then, he did always think that the Lan were so...shortsighted, in some regards, with their rules and their claim at morality. It doesn't matter how moral or correct a man is when he deals with an unjust man, and Wen Ruohan himself is self aware enough that he knows very well what kind of monster he is. Nevertheless, when he steps into Qi Xiaoheng's guest room that second night she is staying in Nightless City, he thinks to himself that it would be easier to like her as her own person instead of as a chess piece if she were more interested in murder. Or at least, if she felt less bad about it all. Then, he's come to learn that not everyone can. Such is the nature of people at times. He supposes that Qi Xiaoheng is comely enough to people who like that sort of thing with her round face and earth dark eyes, her wide hips and soft curves, her red lips and soft dark hair.He supposes Lan Haozhi could've liked her for how she looks, but Wen Ruohan had grown up in Nightless City, where beautiful women and beautiful men are easily found by the handful, and the girls at the Smoke and Mirror House had a flavor for every man who wanted to pay to deceive himself.It is true that Qi Xiaoheng is comely enough. It is also true that she hasn't been fucked silly in some time, so this has made her decision making process easily suggestible. When he comes to her bedroom in Nightless City under the pretext of making sure his cousin's grieving widow isn't about to do anything rash, she is half dressed and falls to her knees easily."I've done something wrong," she says, sniffling.He bends to pick her up. Evidently she'd expected his hands on her forearms, but not the way he pulls her close so that she can rest her head against his chest, or the hand that settles firmly on her hip.A tremor runs through her.He says, "does Heng'er need to be punished so her crimes can be absolved?"At hearing this, she whimpers. "No, no, I can't be absolved I—"He laughs at this. "Don't be silly, Heng'er. Of course, you can be forgiven for all your indiscretions."He has run his hands along her fault lines often enough now that he has found all the best places to press to get her to behave.He says, with some authority, "get on the bed on your hands and knees."She scrambles to obey him, turning only to look once she's also pulled up the trailing hem of her sleeping robe so the back of her thighs and her cunt is exposed.She knows what he intends.He hasn't even touched her yet, but she's already wet for him in anticipation. He sees her eagerness and her fragility, the way she is easily moved by his words even if she knows it's wrong and isn't entirely certain she wants to be moved by him.It comes so easily that it's almost laughable, he thinks."Too eager," he tells her. "Absolution must taste good for you, doesn't it?"She is not entirely crying yet, though his words do bother her, and for a moment he considers what would happen if he runs his hand down her spine and then proceeds straight to fucking her. If this would make her more guilty or if punishment would make her feel worse.In the end, he decides on punishment. If it cleared her head, it still wouldn't save her now that the deed is done, and if it gave her pleasure and then gave her guilt, then truly so much the better.He begins by slapping her buttocks and the backs of her thighs first, lazily, not taking much care to do any even distribution of slapping. It's not hard enough to bruise really, just hard enough that she feels it and for it to sting.Eventually, he grows tired of this as well, because it doesn't entirely pull the reaction he wants from her anymore.He slaps her cunt with his open palm, fingers striking her clit and then lingering there, pressed hard against her aching flesh.She begs him to fuck her, crying in earnest now. She's so wet now that he could and it wouldn't hurt except as a reminder of her betrayal of her husband.Wen Ruohan elects to sink three of his fingers into her cunt instead, though this makes her gasp and squirm, clenching around him at the intrusion. He says, "behave" and she abruptly stills.When he stays and buries his face in her loose hair, taking care to be just gentle enough that she cannot contain her tears, she abruptly asks him, "what would your wife say?"His wife? His Ling'er?He laughs at this, fingers still buried in her cunt. "I love my Ling'er," he says, absently kissing Qi Xiaoheng's neck, dragging his teeth along that tempting skin just hard enough to break it, "excessively and without reason."He has wanted Qin Yaling from the first moment he saw her in the garden, before he'd known anything else about her. His heart had said come home with me, long before it could form any other thought. He had wanted her, wanted to hold her heart in his hands, to leave his own heart in her grasp, to have her in his home and to never be parted from her. He has wanted Qin Yaling long before he even knew her name. And he has never been more happy than these moments when he does have her heart to hold. "You're," and here Qi Xiaoheng gasps, on her hands and knees, trembling as the hand he had on her breast comes up to pinch that nipple, "betraying her."This is more for Qi Xiaoheng's sake than his, in all honesty. If he wants to kiss and be kissed, to hold and be held, to love and be loved, he'd have gone to find Yaling. He wouldn't be here in Qi Xiaoheng's guest room in Nightless City making sure he hasn't really broken such a fascinating toy before he can really use her to his best ends."No," he sighs. "I would never."A body is a body. Those are easy to demand. He wants the heart and mind of the ones he loves. For that he's willing to go so far that he could tear out his own heart and eat it.A body is a body, and he's never been unaware that his is alluring enough for other people to want to look at.He leans his weight forward, presses her tear stained face onto the mussed up sheets, and replaces his fingers with his cock.It's still enough of a stretch even with his earlier attention that she sobs at the pressure, shaking even with the settling of his weight on her. "Shhh," he says, smoothing back her hair, because it's clear she doesn't understand. She thinks this is worse than it is for her to want. She thinks she's stolen another woman's husband and that hurts her. (What an odd thing to think.) She's done nothing of the sort. "You've done very well, Heng'er. You've done nothing wrong."Evidently, Lan Haozhi must not have been much of a lover because she's unraveling at being touched with any attention.His fingers on her clit and his cock in her cunt is enough to undo her, but he fucks her through it, just slow enough that it pulls her higher.She's still trembling beneath him when he pulls himself out of her, her chest heaving at the exertion, the sudden sharp peak of her pleasure and how much it's been able to stretch.He lies down beside her, holds her, one hand splayed across the bare skin of her stomach until she stops shaking and her breathing eases."She looks at you like you hung the moon." Evidently, Qi Xiaoheng's also gotten enough of her mind back to worry about Yaling again.When will she understand?"I know," he agrees easily, considering if Xiaoheng would like to be fucked again. Maybe just the once hadn't been enough. For kindness's sake, he decides to delay it. He has no desire to break her, really, that would be such a waste. "I'll never understand how her parents ever had the fortune of having a daughter like her."Ling'er, who is perfect in every way, had been passed over in the Qin inheritance for her younger brother.(But even if she hadn't been passed over, Wen Ruohan rather thinks he would've wanted her as his wife anyway, and he is not his father, willing to throw his sect heirship away for a woman, so it's really better that Ling'er's parents never intended for her to inherit.)To be hospitable, since they're talking about spouses now, he asks, "was Lan Haozhi really that terrible in bed?"She shudders, which just confirms that his cousin has been terrible and didn't know how to show anyone a good time. Good riddance to him now that he's dead."Ruohan," she says when he doesn't move to dress and leave, "I shouldn't have killed him.""He didn't even make you come," he says, sighing at the waste of it all. "You should've killed him sooner. It would've saved us all a grand load of trouble."He will have to take care not to break Qi Xiaoheng much more, or she will cease to be useful, but like this, she is perfect in many ways, so easily pulled into his orbit, so easily suggested to do much more that she would never do without his direction.His fingers find her clit again, and because she doesn’t know that he would stop if she told him to, he pulls her against him and tips her over the edge again.She falls asleep in his arms.Her husband's latest shiny toy comes to see her about a week after Han-lang had first started fucking her. Whatever her dearest had said about it to her after the fact in between kisses, delighted at having won the Lan Sect to his hand so completely, the guilt has clearly been eating the poor thing alive.Really, Qin Yaling thinks, guilt has no place here. What could you possibly be guilty for?"Ah," she says, when it appears that the other woman is waiting for her to acknowledge that someone else has wandered into her boudoir. "Lan-tai'furen is it? What are you here for?"Her husband's Heng'er, with her bottom lip wobbling precipitously, says, "I didn't mean it."Qin Yaling blinks. "What didn't you mean?"If she says she didn't mean killing her own husband and then handing the future of the Lan to Han-lang, Qin Yaling thinks she will be rather peeved with Heng'er."It's just that I've been lonely for so long—" Heng'er says a great deal else that Yaling doesn't pay any attention to, because she is still busy updating her entry on bone demons to include a different subclass, "— I didn't realize he was married and that you love him so, I—""I do love him so," Yaling agrees absently, still trying to organize her notes into something more coherent. "He's beautiful isn't he?"Of course, one can't really tell Ruohan this, it would go straight to his head and make him patently insufferable, but Qin Yaling likes the truth of things. Her husband is a beautiful man and an even more beautiful monster.Evidently, Heng'er had not expected her to say this. "You knew? He told you?""His secrets are extraordinarily pedestrian," she says with a sigh. "I know all of them. They are not hard to guess."Her husband is a man who does not hide his own interests, especially not from her. He'd told her from the first, after he'd returned to their guest room in the Cloud Recesses after breaking into the house next to the Hanshi to ascertain how feasible her desires to remove Lan Haozhi from the equation of things, Lan Haozhi will be dying in the next year or so my dearest. And then, after a slight pause, he'd said, it would be such a pity to leave his wife here all alone.Qin Yaling, with her head on his chest, had said, Han-lang has worked hard. Maybe he should indulge himself.There'd been no need for further discussion. It's not much to her if he finds Qiren's brother's wife fuckable. Sometimes, if she is being honest with herself, she rather wishes he found more people fuckable, because his taste is picky and esoteric, and he really does enjoy the physicality of it more often than she does. She's happy that he found something more interesting to occupy his time with rather than endlessly boring and stupid parties with increasing numbers of boring and stupid people who won't even provide the poisonings and intrigue he longs for in the depths of his heart.And when these parties (which are dreadful and distracting from the proper business of her work) do not manage to provide him the excitement he is seeking, he gets dreadfully depressed and cross, and even if Qin Yaling doesn't mind whatever he wants to be doing in the Fire Palace, she really wishes he'd stop reeking of blood eventually. Sometimes, when she talks to Cangye about this, he looks at her like she's grown a second head. At one point, her beloved little brother had told her that she was the one who had married the man, and she'd said, with something of a pout in her voice, "and I adore him really, but does he have to act like he wants to crawl into my skin all the time?"The look Cangye had made had been enough, but he'd added a pained Jie, to the look and she'd reluctantly concluded that he would never understand her. Very few people did, and they mostly went by the name of Han-lang, so the point is entirely moot.Regardless, her husband's newest prized possession is looking at her with that same incredulous expression that Cangye uses, so she is rather inclined to be more forgiving than she would otherwise.She pats Heng'er on the cheek as she rises to go fetch more reading materials. There'd been a fascinating case study published in the last century about stuffing various gourds with meat to attract demonic spirits that'd died in war, and while she was hardly going to start stuffing pumpkins herself, there were plenty of servants in Nightless City to do her bidding. That was one of the redeeming qualities of living in a place where there are so many people all the time. "Come along, Heng'er," she says as she runs her hand along the shelf. "We have work to do." When Heng'er does obey her, she says, "do you think Qiren will help us carry gourds out to the test site or should I find someone else to do it?""Perhaps," Heng'er says without any real confidence, "you should explain to me what exactly your husband said to you."Yaling, because she's in a good mood now that Qiren is also in Nightless City and away from all of his pesky responsibilities that were so cumbersome and difficult when he was still the acting sect leader and had to stay in the Cloud Recesses, smiles at Heng'er with far too many teeth and says, "oh, but where would be the fun in that?"He is lying there, in their marriage bed, waiting for her, stretched out in that boneless sprawl that means he really wants to meld with the sheets and think of nothing more complex than the physicality of being hers, and she has just finished a series of crucial identifications that had been plaguing her for weeks now, so she has time to indulge him.He doesn't open his eyes when she sits down on the edge of the bed, though his eyelids flutter when she runs her fingers down his breastbone. Evidently, she'd done it hard enough that he can feel it through the embroidered brocade of his dachang. "Yaling," he says, so softly it might as well be a sigh. "My Ling'er."Wen Ruohan is not a religious man. He has never bent his knee for any god, and he prays to none of them.Qin Yaling suspects that the closest he's ever gotten to it is when he is like this, bonelessly waiting for her to touch him, when he sighs her name so reverentially she might be a god to him.She loves him so."Is Han-lang patient today?" she asks, tracing the curve of his jaw, pressing her fingertips into his pulse just hard enough that he feels it. She feels his life under her fingertips.He shifts slightly, to allow her better access to it, his lips falling open.A single spark of her qi, fashioned into a spike would be enough to end his life before he can think to move.She is strong enough a cultivator to do it, and he knows this.He lets her press her fingers into his pulse, lips open, panting, eyes still closed as if she'd just done something divine.He doesn't move when she draws up a spark of qi and runs her hand down his neck. He is so openly trusting of her, really. This monster of a man who is so suspicious of everyone else. She watches as the first blush of a bruise starts to form where she's pressed and then vanishes again, ushered away by his own cultivation."Ling'er," he says. "Won't you?"This is how he prays, with his hair undone and loose beneath him, with his eyes closed and lips turned up to her, waiting for her to kiss him.She loves him for his excesses, for his arrogance, for his indulgences, but she loves him for his devotion most of all. No one else has ever seen him like this, felt the rush of his life under their fingertips and known with perfect assurance that he would let them kill him without a single regret or word of protest. He wouldn't mind it if she killed him. Sometimes, she thinks he might thank her if she does press and press and hurt him more than she ever has before. But she does not want to kill him, and she doesn't want to really do him lasting harm. Whatever his newest toy has thought she'd taken, she'd taken nothing out of him at all. Qin Yaling leans over his pale white throat, and puts her mouth over his pulse so she can raise a better bruise then the one her fingers had left. When that does not satisfy her completely, she sinks her teeth into him hard enough to taste his blood in her mouth.The sound he makes at that is exquisite, his hands scrambling for purchase on the sheets.When she pulls away, she tells him, "I want to see it in the morning."He moans at this, breathing already ragged though she has done very little. "As Ling'er wishes."She does wish it.He is bleeding freely there now, having done nothing to heal himself.He opens his eyes and smiles when he sees his blood on her mouth.Thus satisfied, she considers what to do with the rest of him.He'd removed his belt before he settled to wait for her, and nothing else, just to make it easier for her to open the front of his dachang when she wanted to. She does so now, running a finger under that silk brocade hem from his collar until her hand is at his waist, and flicks it open, first one side, then the other.He really is beautiful, the raw canvas of his skin begging to be bruised, to be broken, to be soothed, begging for the mark of her mouth and of her hands and anything else she might want to use."You're lovely," she tells him, fingers on the crescent scar that he's had for as long as they'd known each other. Sometimes, she thinks, the only person she could paint from memory — the only person in the whole world — is her Han-lang, who sometimes seemed to exist so wholly within her own mind sometimes that she almost suspects he was born of her wishes instead of his mother.He makes a pleased sound in the back of his throat, his lips curling upwards in a faint smile.His half closed eyes are still watching her, though he doesn't ask her questions such as, does my Ling'er find me lovely in spite or because of all the scars that I have on me? and do you love me more as a man or a monster? though she can hear his voice if she thinks of it, so it's just the same as if he'd asked. She, tracing the line of one of his ribs, says, "you would not be who you are without the scars."He hums in quiet agreement. Her hand trails lower, though she draws it up so that the lower it goes the lighter the touch is, and watches as he watches her, lips parted waiting for her to decide on a course for the rest of the night.As for his second question... "You are lovely to me as both." If he wants to hear more he will have to work for it.He doesn't yet, but this is typical between them. He would give her anything in the world if she asks for it, his devotion wide as any sea, but they like to play. She will not ask and he will wait, she will withhold and he will lean forward. There is always a push and a pull between them, two sides of the same coin, the same sort of people.She'd known that she would go home with him, from that very first moment she saw him coming towards her in the garden. She'd thought that man is mine the very first moment she'd laid eyes on him during that night hunt in the Qinling Mountains, had known it from the first breath she'd drawn after seeing him. Abruptly, Qin Yaling decides that today, she won't be using the scalpel that he had laid out on the bedside table, or the other things that she could probably fetch from the jewelry box. Hasn't he always wanted to be consumed? She will consume him today.There is an intimacy, she thinks, to using her mouth for this purpose that is unable to be replicated by a scalpel blade or the end of one of those exquisitely expensive hair pins he likes to buy her. But where she will start...She considers it.Having decided to leave his chest alone for the moment, she sets her hand on the inside of his knee and pulls it up so that he rests the foot further away from her flat on the bed. He lets her rearrange him to her liking, still faintly smiling.She leans, just a little, because she knows that the scent of her hair oil drives him wild, and grazes her teeth against the crease of soft skin there, just at the base of his thigh, and is rewarded with a sigh of relief.She loves him so, his patience when she has yet to pay any attention to his cock. But then, he is not a man who truly needs that kind of attention. She knows what he needs, why he is laid out here in their marriage bed, why he waits for her, why he returns to her when he could wander off. Why he does not lose interest in her when he so easily loses interest in most things and most people. She knows that she drives him mad with hunger. She knows he is not easily satisfied. Sitting there, with all the patience in the world, she lavishes her attention on the inside of his thighs. Each time she tells him that she wants to see the bruises in the morning, he obliges, letting her bruise and mark and break his skin as she desires.She isn't done, though she pauses for a moment to look at him, laid out like this, he's a marvel, droplets of blood glittering like those rubies he loves so much across his stomach and thighs. She picks up one of his hands, brings the inside of his wrist to her lips, and kisses rather than using her teeth.He is still watching her, and she watches him, the way his chest rises and falls, the way he is bonelessly pleased with this. "My Han-lang is so spoiled," she says, still holding his hand against her face.He smiles faintly, and opens his hand so that he can cup her face, thumb lingering on her bottom lip, where his blood has gathered, "My Ling'er gives me so much credit."When she finally does put her mouth on his cock it feels almost like an afterthought to everything else she'd done to him already, though she tastes the salt of his arousal, holding him there in this hazy bliss that does not yet spill over. She could make quick work of him if she uses her tongue, because she knows him well enough to undo him quickly, if that is what he wants. He doesn't really want that though.Good things come to those who wait for it, and she wants only to give him good things.His hands are fisted in the sheets as he forces his breathing to even. He is watching her now, just as she is watching him, his red eyes soft with affection. He will finish if she lets him finish, and he is content with that.She is not so cruel. She pulls a spark of her qi up through her throat, and finishes what she started. Afterwards, she waits for him to settle and then to soften before she lets the connection part.She loves him so, she thinks, the way he is endlessly devoted, the way he comes apart for her, the way that in these moments he is both monster and man.He reaches for her, when he comes back to himself, all softness in his boneless, languid sprawl, "Ling'er," he says, "let me—""You don't need to do anything for me."He is a vision, really, like this, and really so wrung out she doesn't think he can unless he forces himself to. He could force himself, and has done so before in the past, but she's gotten better at discouraging him from tearing himself to pieces to please her. She does not want to be cruel to him really. It distresses her to see him in pieces on the floor. "I want to," he says, still all softness and something too sweet."You want to?" she asks him, hand on the curve of his jaw. "Han-lang, you still want things after all this work I've done for you?""I'm insatiable," he says, and this is soft as well, like the tide pulling out to sea.She agrees that it is.She, however, has more on her mind than just how much of him is bound up in physical desire. "Your Heng'er," she says, "came to apologize to me earlier." It was a very silly apology and a very silly thing to be apologetic about, and she'd said as much to the poor thing when she'd realized what it was, but that hadn't helped anything. "I think I may have made it worse.""My Heng'er?" he asks her, still entirely languid, though he, with great effort, pushes himself away from the bed so he can lay his head in her lap instead. "When did Qi Xiaoheng become my Heng'er to you?"So that is what his latest conquest's full name is. Qin Yaling is sure she will forget soon anyway, having no use for this particular piece of information."Han-lang is being silly," she says, running her fingers through his loose hair when it's clear that he won't be moving any time soon. "What else would I call her if I didn't call her yours?"He sighs at this, deeply, somehow no longer content at all. "I don't care if you make her worse." When she doesn't respond to this, he says, "I love you most, in all the world."She already knows. Sometimes she thinks he says it because he thinks she'd forget, (she forgets things often, she's aware.) But she cannot forget how much and how deeply she is loved."I know," she tells him, gently smoothing his hair back from his face, because it's true that all their earlier playacting has made him tired. "I know," she says again, when the first time isn't enough. "I haven't forgotten.""I still want you," he says, reaching for her hand. She lets him have it, because in many ways, she returns his devotion with indulgence, (endlessly, she marvels at how she can turn aside from what she wants for him.)She has been selfish since she was a child. There'd largely only been room in her life for her own wants, her wishes, her dreams. That had changed when she married him. Now, there is space for what he wants in her world. This is the oldest sort of devotion she can think to give him. There is very little room for other people in her life, but he occupies nine-tenths of that space, and in most ways, he does not mind it, even if he cannot entirely settle with it. "You can wait until tomorrow." It won't be fun for her tonight. He's in a languid, tired mood, still bound up in the pleasure she'd inflicted on him."You'll still be here in the morning?" he asks, as if already resigned to the possibility that she will have returned to her own interests by the time he wakes at somewhere close to noon.She is in a good mood, so she will indulge him further. She moves him off her lap so she can swing her feet onto the bed, and carelessly sheds her hairpins on the floor so she can lay her head on his chest. Instinctively, his arms move to cradle her. "I will still be here in the morning," she says, because he likes to hear her say such things. Even if it is how she feels, he has to hear it from her lips to trust that it exists. "And I will be entirely at my Han-lang's disposal."He hums at this, raising a hand to douse the lanterns with a quick burst of qi. "What luck I've got," he says to her softly in the darkness. "To be yours."Qin Yaling thinks to herself, in the dark, with her head on his chest and his heartbeat steady beneath her cheek, that she is also lucky to have him.She'd never wanted anything more than she'd wanted him, she knows. The first time that she'd seen him had been during a night hunt in the Qinling Mountains.There'd been no terrifying beasts or fantastical monsters, or even particularly terrible ghosts. And even if there had been, she wouldn't've needed to be saved by them. There'd been no chance encounter at that night hunt, or particularly charming conversation, and she'd never mentioned the first time she saw him to keep his ego where it belonged, but she remembers how he'd looked with his head thrown back laughing in the light of the torches, and she'd had the faint sense that—Her first thought, standing there somewhere on the edge of the crowd had been, that man is mine. Her second thought had been to determine how to make him hers.She is lucky, she thinks, because he adores her. That he always will.True to her word, Yaling is still in bed with him when he wakes just slightly before the dawn.He takes a moment to admire her in the weak light, the way she's still wearing the ink splattered robes she'd come to see him the night before, the way her hair is mussed and tangled, her slightly parted lips and the ink stains on her hands, the way that her breathing is even and deep and perfectly content.She has never feared him. She'd never been disgusted at any part of him. Neither how he looks nor how he acts nor how he feels. The darkest of his thoughts are delightful to her. The most annoying of his tendencies can still be stomached. For a moment, he's content to admire her there in the weak light of morning. He will have to paint this later, when he is more settled. (Some part of him thinks that he himself had never come home before he met her. That some part of him had always been wandering until she said she would come to live in Nightless City with him.) He buries his face in her hair, breathes in the scent of her hair oil, and though she's asleep still, he tells her, "I love you so much I think I might drive myself quite mad." It's a confession as much as anything. His Ling'er isn't much for declarations, but he is, and he thinks he might bleed with the intensity of his feelings for her.If the wounds she'd given him the night before ache, he doesn't pay them any mind.She doesn't respond, but she doesn't need to. He had told her this as well before when she was awake, and she had laughed and asked if he really believed it.Instead, he turns her so she's on her back. The front of her robes fall open just enough to reveal the delicate line of her collarbone, the collar just loose enough to suggest fantasies to him of her breasts. He's seen them plenty of times before — has painted them before, during, and after they'd had two children — but that hardly stops him from fantasizing. (It has only given him more to fantasize about.)He kisses her then, kneeling there on the bed over her, with one knee between her thighs, first her forehead, then her eyelids, then her lips and then the dip of her collarbone. He lingers, because he knows that it will take more than this to wake her, and he has plenty of time to linger.He considers whether or not to fully open the front of her robes, though as he deliberates, he raises one of her hands to his mouth and kisses it, first the back and then the palm and then each ink-stained knuckle in turn.In the end, he decides not to, and puts his mouth on the silk directly to suck at her nipple.She sighs as he does this, careful to keep his teeth from breaking her skin, though he turns to the other breast and does the same, fingers still laced in hers as he braces his other hand against the bed.As he does so, he flicks the front of her robe open, at least on one side, so he can properly admire her.Ling'er shifts, still half asleep, and her hand falls over her bare stomach. "Han-lang," she says, still not entirely awake. "It's so early.""I love you," he says, still mostly content to admire her, the way light falls through the open curtains of their wedding bed over her. How her other hand has moved to cover her eyes so the light doesn't wake her completely.He pulls the curtains closed with a hand, though due to his lack of concentration on the subject, he does a bad job of it.She grumbles, so he spends some time actually ascertaining that the curtains are closed and will not wake her before he returns to kissing her."I know," she says between kisses, sighing all the while. Like this, with her face flushed, there's something especially sacred about her that makes him forget that he is still meant to show her the places she'd broken his skin the night before. She's likely still too tired to have remembered that she asked for such a thing, though he turns his face just a bit so that he can show her the scabbed over bruise on his neck."Does it please my Ling'er?"She doesn't answer him with words, though her fingertips linger there for longer than they would've otherwise, pressing until one of his hands comes up to hold her wrist. "Han-lang," she says, soft enough that it shudders through the core of him. "You have me until noon."At noon, then, she will leave to return to her own pursuits.He has these hours with her. It might even be enough. (He knows it will never be enough, but mornings like these kept the edge off of his hunger. He will always be hungry. Some part of him will always long to consume her. He's told her this before, and she'd only laughed, her lips against his mouth.)He leans down to kiss her, first her forehead and then the tip of her nose, her mouth, presses a light kiss to the curve of her jaw and then the dip of her collarbone. It feels, under his lips, just as light and thin and delicate as the bones of any bird.But she is not so easily breakable.He kisses an almost straight line down her breastbone, lazily, because with several hours, he can take his time, and then her stomach as she watches him, half amused as if to say, is this all you wanted to have me for for the morning? If he wants to please her, he has to work at it, if only because pleasure is not a need for her the way it is for him.(She'd forgive him, if he doesn't, of course. She has said that she is at his disposal today, but he wouldn't forgive himself.)He puts his mouth on her clit and works for it....He wants to tangle his hands in her thick hair, so he does so, if only because she has said that she is at his disposal for the morning and he—"Ling'er," he whispers when he is fully buried inside her. (It's the closest he's ever gotten to truly crawling into her skin so they can never be parted.) "Ling'er, Ling'er, Ling'er."He cannot explain what it is that he wants to her. It's not the physical sensation sometimes, though it often is. Nor is it that he believes that she doesn't love him. He knows that she loves him. She is not half so patient with anyone else as she is with him. But there is a want in him that always hungers, and does not take well to being told no.It's gotten better since they were married, if only because he'd learned to rein it in and leash it so as to not upset her, but sometimes he thinks he could go mad with it.He cannot explain what it is that he wants, so he lets his hands do the talking, leans down to kiss her, to show her all the bruises she'd left on him the night before, the way that she can still taste his blood if she breaks his skin there again, the proof that she had wanted him, or that she loves him enough to indulge him in this.He lets himself get swept away by this. Wen Ruohan is reading to A-Huan on one of Nightless City's many sprawling balconies that had a lovely view of the city proper below when Lan Qiren finally finds them. They are sitting together on a chair made for encouraging terrible posture — and indeed, Wen Ruohan is sprawled across its leaning back with his hair loose and in a state of indecent disarray and A-Huan is leaning against his shoulder to look at the pages.After a moment, Lan Qiren recognizes the text to be Ligujing, The Book of Rites, specifically, a section based on the Three Obediences and Virtues, sandwiched with commentary on Ban Zhao's Lessons for Women. Why the two of them are perusing moral texts (and how Wen Ruohan knew what these texts were since he hadn't learnt any morals when he was young and was excessively proud of the fact) that don't apply to them is something that Lan Qiren has yet to discover."See, here," Wen Ruohan is saying, to a wide-eyed A-Huan, "it says that widows aren't allowed to remarry, just think of that."A-Huan, who has seemingly been considering the choice of text, says, "but why would you want to remarry?"Wen Ruohan considers this for the space of two seconds, and then goes, "but there are no moral texts for men on not getting remarried are there? Why should there be for women?"Lan Qiren, briefly, considers that of course Wen Ruohan would have too many unorthodox thoughts on the position of women in society (which is, for many cultivation sects, much more lax than literati society, though it is still not as egalitarian as joining a monastic order). Of course, he is now spending time reading with A-Huan specifically for the purpose of spreading his unorthodox ideas about the role of women in society and men in society and society in general."Aren't men and women different though?" A-Huan asks, now slightly frowning. "Wen-bofu, I don't understand.""A rich man is allowed a wife and as many concubines as he can want, Huan'er, why can't it be the same for women?"Lan Qiren, because he really doubts that Wen Ruohan would be so thrilled if his own wife decided to take four or five concubines to divide her time and attention, snorts. "Stop trying to teach A-Huan to be debauched."Wen Ruohan, because he seems to be in an indulgent mood after filling A-Huan's head with blasphemous ideas, sighs and lets A-Huan go with a "remember you still do have to go to the schoolhouse to take lessons with your teacher. I'm told your uncle frowns heavily on my pedagogy because it's apparently not very effective.""It isn't." Lan Qiren gives up on arguing his point however, because...Well, for one, A-Huan, who has always been so obedient of his elders, especially when they gave the barest reasonable justification, goes. For another....They are all in Nightless City at the current moment on Wen Ruohan's sufferance. The family elders have not yet asked for their return because no one dares to offend Wen Ruohan for anything.And they couldn't confess to why they sought the return of Lan Qiren, who had ostensibly merely brought his nephews north to pay a visit to his closest blood related paternal cousin, and of course, given that his sister-in-law had recovered from her years long illness, she had to go with him. After all, she is the mother of his nephews.What could be incorrect about that? Wen Ruohan had visited them recently hadn't he? It is only polite to return the favor.When Wen Ruohan had been young, and his excesses and immorality not yet so noticeable, the family elders had spent quite a deal of time lamenting that he was not surnamed Lan, because surely he would've been the shining light of an age. (Xiongzhang had always seethed whenever this line of conversation was brought up.) By the time Wen Ruohan had been a teenager, none of the family elders had wanted anything to do with him, but it remained true nonetheless that his father had once been the Lan Sect heir, and that left a connection that the Lan Sect couldn't repudiate or shake."What is Qiren thinking of so intently?" Wen Ruohan sets his book of "morals" aside and folds his hands over his crossed knees. "Has something in my Nightless City bothered him?" I could go get rid of it if you want me to, hangs, unsaid in the air between them."No, nothing has bothered me." He rather hopes that Wen Ruohan does not start again on the idea of going to eat the family elders (he meant kill, but he will say 'eat' regardless of whether or not it's true because that is how Wen Ruohan is). He's not sure he can keep distracting Wen Ruohan long enough for declaring war on the Lan Sect, and he's not sure he wants to start thinking about his feelings regarding his brother's death.Lan Qiren studiously ignores how Wen Ruohan and his sister-in-law seem to have met before, and that Wen Ruohan is overly familiar with her and how that does bother him because... And this is uncharitable. Qi Xiaoheng had not been the cause of his brother's madness. She'd merely been the object of it. Xiongzhang's choices were his own. But Qi Xiaoheng had killed a teacher that he did not like but still had respect for, and she had been more or less unrepentant of all the grief that had come from it, and that bothered him about her.Wen Ruohan's sudden forwardness and interest when it came to Qi Xiaoheng is...well, Wen Ruohan likes to play games like these, and he is rude and absurdly familiar with everyone. He's overly familiar with his elders, with his peers, especially when he didn't care for them, and even his servants, even if he couldn't properly remember their names. (Not the same way that Jin Guangshan is familiar with his servants, but nevertheless, despite having servants, Wen Ruohan did not choose to treat them as servants more than half the time, and he talked and laughed and got angry according to his own mood instead of having any restraint for his behavior.)He refers to Yaling as "my wife" to his own sons, as though they'd sprung out of nowhere instead of being born of the woman he is married to, and had barely bothered to encourage any studying or morality in either of them. Why wouldn't Wen Ruohan also speak too familiarly to his recently deceased cousin's widow as if they were great friends and possibly even lovers just for fun? He'd already established that he had neither morals nor good sense and that his marriage wouldn't suffer just because —Oh, what had he said about it again, when he was making his propositions to Lan Qiren himself? We're the same person, she and I, so it's absurdly likely that Qin Yaling herself didn't care and had a hand in whatever is going on as well, so it's not as if he could ask for help on that quarter. But if he digs, he can likely find a great deal that's... If he really wants to, he can probably find some nefarious purpose in this, because it appeared that both the Chief Cultivator and the Chief Cultivator's wife were made up of nothing but nefarious purposes that don't ever come to an end no matter how one searches for it. Lan Qiren does not look too deeply at it, even if ‘shoulder the weight of morality,’ had been sitting on his shoulders ever since he was a child first being taught the Lan rules.The family elders have not bothered to shoulder the weight of morality, and while he would like to, he thinks that if he dies, it will be worse for A-Huan and A-Zhan, whom he loves too deeply to ever leave in a position of being raised by people he can no longer trust. (And where does that leave him if he'd rather give the care of A-Huan and A-Zhan to Yaling who mostly ignored her children in favor of her research, and Wen Ruohan who overly indulged their two boys with anything that they wanted under the sun and had failed to teach them any manners at all, instead of their own relatives?)He doesn't want to think about this terribly either.Wen Ruohan, because he's never been a fool even in his worst excesses, sighs, and says, "Qiren should sit down. After all, there's no rule that prohibits sitting, just ones that prohibit improper posture while doing so."He sits.He expects the family elders to do something about his...escape, soon. He also half expects that they will not be forgiving on the matter, but he had thought about how A-Huan and A-Zhan had been denied a father, both by Xiongzhang's continued actions (and his lack of them) and his early death, and how the family elders had decided they wouldn't have a mother either and just—He had very rarely been rebellious, even as a child, but when he had taken his nephews and his sister-in-law out of the Cloud Recesses past curfew and traveled overnight with them to Nightless City, he had finally become rebellious."I don't know what to do," he says at last, because Wen Ruohan is still watching him. "We've intruded on your hospitality for so long, and it is not a long term plan to stay here forever."He hadn't bothered to fully explain the situation to Wen Ruohan even if they'd now been in Nightless City for some weeks though they are technically still in the morning period for his brother, but he's fairly certain that Wen Ruohan had already put the pieces together and added four and four and gotten twelve because that was how his mind worked. (He hadn't allowed himself to grieve. He's not sure if he's more relieved or horrified at himself for being relieved, but there truly hadn't been any time to think that much or that deeply on Xiongzhang's death and what that meant to him.)"Why not?" Wen Ruohan asks him, and Lan Qiren has to reckon with the fact that he is entirely serious. (He hadn't suggested killing or eating the family elders this time, which Qiren will take as the stay of execution it is.) "It's not as if they can do anything."He'd always been conscious of A-Huan's inheritance. He'd always drawn such a clear dividing line between himself and the position of sect leader.If they do not return soon, he suspects that the Lan Sect, which still does need someone to run it, will pass over A-Huan entirely in favor of someone else, and that will have been his fault. (But between an inheritance and a mother, which one is he supposed to pick for A-Huan? He'd picked 'still having a mother' over 'inheriting the Lan Sect in fifteen years' but perhaps that had been a mistake? It couldn't be. It couldn't be.)"It is only some of the family elders," he says at last, because Wen Ruohan is still waiting for him to answer. "I shouldn't give up on the rest of the sect simply because some of the elders have gotten too bold from their power growing unchecked while Xiongzhang was in seclusion."And here he knows Wen Ruohan will suggest killing those particular elders to put fear into the hearts of the other dissenters. It's what Wen Ruohan had done to his own sect's elders when he came to power after all, and they've had no ability to control him ever since."You can't kill everyone who disagrees with you." Lan Qiren says to forestall starting the moral debate about whether or not it would be correct to kill people merely for dissenting, and where that crosses the line into tyranny. Wen Ruohan would not understand it, or he would choose purposefully to not understand it. He is a tyrant, and he likes being that way. He only lets people argue with him when he thought it was amusing. The instant it ceases to be, he turns his hand over and flips the whole board. Wen Ruohan shrugs, turning to look out at the city that he ruled, with his chin on his hand, and says, "then Qiren will have to find some other way to leash them if he wants to be able to return home. After all, you do acknowledge that they have entirely too much power, and not enough good sense to realize that they are crippling the future of your sect."It is not said with any particular judgment. But then Wen Ruohan had seen all the darknesses of the human heart long ago, when he was still new to the position of Chief Cultivator and Sect Leader of the Qishan Wen. He still encouraged feuding and backstabbing and killing and disputes with evident relish that time has not tamed.Perhaps he even finds the audacity of these family elders somewhat amusing. If Lan Qiren asked it of him, or was even the least bit less firm in saying no, he'd gladly start tearing the aforementioned men to pieces. "It is not for me to—""But if not you, then who?" Wen Ruohan turns back to him, red eyes both slightly amused and altogether too fond. "Qiren keeps saying that he isn't fit for these responsibilities, but he is still the only one who cares to shoulder them."Lan Qiren turns his gaze aside. "You really would prefer if we stayed in Nightless City forever."Wen Ruohan shrugs, waving an idle hand out at the city. "I can have someone fetch you any material good there is under the sun, and I can make my argument for why I would prefer that you stay, but I have no interest in romancing a prisoner."I'm not your brother, he doesn't say, but Qiren hears the rebuke anyway. "To stay or to go is your decision, but what kind of life it would be if you go is also your decision."The terms of this, Lan Qiren thinks, are about as fair as someone like Wen Ruohan is ever going to get. He can live with that.