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The Mistress of Koi Tower is forty now, though she wears the age well, despite the circumstances several years ago where it was very certain that she would die. People whispered that something about the cursed blade she'd plunged into her abdomen several years ago must've been a blessing in disguise. She'd still been alive when her nephew came to weep over her body as it lay in state, and if she had not stabbed herself in her husband -- her brother's -- treasure room, who knew what Jin Guangyao would've done to shut her mouth.
By now, she no longer believes in certainties. It had been a certainty that her husband had loved her. It had been a certainty that she was her father's daughter. It had been a certainty her name was Qin Su, and it had been a certainty that her son had been murdered by someone and it had been a certainty that she had never done anything truly wrong in her life.
Now, in these days, she does not hold to certainties. Now, in these days, she thinks it would be best to keep her cards to herself rather than laying them on the table. After all, other people did so seem to think that they knew best for her. Why should she continue to listen?
As it is however, time passes. Qin Su, who is the aunt of her nephew twice over now, retains her position as the Mistress of Koi Tower in the absence of any other more prominent woman. She is not a regent exactly, though her nephew is young. Neither is Jiang Wanyin a regent -- the Jin Clan would never stand for such a thing. They'd barely stood for Qin Su remaining in Lanling, though Jin Ling had argued that she had as much right to live in Koi Tower as any of them, and this had shut their mouths for some time. As it is, however, she and Jiang Wanyin knew each other well, from all the long years that Jin Ling had traveled between Koi Tower and Lotus Pier, and they still worked together well now, in these days when discussion conferences and night hunts and banquets still needed to be held and attended.
It is one of those discussion conferences now when one of her serving maids comes to tell her, in the middle of a banquet, that Zewu-jun is in the east garden, and that he would like to see her. (He cannot wait to see her.) Though A-Yue does not say so loudly enough for anyone else to hear, when Qin Su sets down her wine cup and rises to make her excuses, the empty chair where Lan Xichen would've sat were Qin Su merely just indisposed mocks the gathered crowd.
One of the women in attendance covers her mouth, but the tittering can easily be heard.
Qin Su, with the practiced uncaring nature of someone who has already gone through the worst hell she could ever possibly imagine, says, "Does Song-furen find something particularly funny?"
The silence as she sweeps out of the banquet hall towards the east hall is deafening.
Zewu-jun is standing in the garden amidst the sweep of at least a thousand white peonies, each of their petals tipped with a striking scarlet-purple because Qin Su rather liked the blood dipped innocence that such a scene provoked. He is, still, in all ways, perhaps, the most beautiful man in the world.
Beauty must not mean much these days. She knows exactly how much he isn't wearing underneath those fastidiously clean robes. They'll be dirty by the time she's done with him. Neither the cleanliness nor the grime he's going to get on them will have any real implications about the state of his soul. That had suffered calamities long before Qin Su ever got to him.
"I heard you couldn't wait to see me," she says, when she comes to a stop behind him, and with something like practiced indifference, raises her hand so she can grab the ends of his forehead ribbon and tug his head back. He lets her do it, though the snap backwards could not have been anything other than painful.
He does not try to turn to look at her, entirely aware of who had breached propriety so. Instead, his eyes are still downcast, lashes long and dark and thick against his continuously pale face. It's been years. He had never really recovered any hint of health after Guanyin Temple and Qin Su is not someone who could give him health.
Zewu-jun does not beg. Not yet at least. Instead, he says, entirely too quietly, "I only come here to see you."
Were she another person, Qin Su would've been flattered by this. Instead, she laughs, too sharp (too mean) and lets go of the ends of his forehead ribbon.
Obligingly, Lan Xichen returns to a normal posture.
He still does not turn around.
"Well?" Qin Su asks him, when he doesn't move. "Are you waiting for me to fuck you in the dirt, or do you want to be able to preserve your dignity?"
There's no real dignity to preserve, but she doubts he's brought more than one change of robes to this discussion conference that largely served as an excuse for him to come see her.
He steps onto the walkway, comes to a stop leaning against the railing.
They are practiced enough at this now that Qin Su takes her time coming up those two steps and turning to face him. "Well," she says, "You were Yao-ge's before you were mine. Tell me, what did he meet you in the gardens for? To drink tea and talk politics and whisper sweet nothings in your ear?"
Lan Xichen shuts his eyes at that. "A-Su," he says, though he'd never called her that when her husband was alive. He'd called her Jin-furen and his gaze had slid past her, as is only natural. "Must you keep digging?"
"If the husband and wife are one flesh," she remarks to Lan Xichen, who, because he had the same sickness in him that was so deeply rooted in her as well, "then truly Yao-ge and I were closer than most. It's not so unusual that you want me just as much as you wanted him, is it, Er-ge."
Those last particular words knock the breath out of him as though she'd punched his stomach, and he almost reflexively curls forward, hands scrambling for some purchase against the railing where he's leaning, just behind a profusion of swaying white peonies. She hadn't even touched him.
Some part of her finds it fascinating, really, that he would act like this with her.
He would pretend not to want it, even if she knew, she knew he felt some kind of high with her that he couldn't get elsewhere. Otherwise, a man who's fully in control of his own actions like Zewu-jun would've long since stopped trying to crawl into her bed. (Or, since she never let him into her bed, maybe what he was after was just the touch of her hands on his cock and the vague satisfaction he got from being eaten alive by his own guilty conscience.)
But then, maybe he also had an uncommon hunger. Maybe he couldn't help himself really. After all, Jin Guangyao's death had left holes in them both, and though perhaps she could feel some righteous anger over it all -- was she to be saved and used and discarded like a damsel when all she'd ever wanted was someone who could see her as an equal? -- she suspects it is not so clean an outrage for this man who is still hunched over himself in the garden, almost begging for an absolution only his lover's widow could give.
Zewu-jun is a vision in white silk, the barest hint of pale eggshell blue embroidery along the hems of his sleeves, and the lining of his collar. The belt that he's wearing is trimmed with deeper blue, patterned like interlocking clouds. Maybe it was supposed to symbolize his virtue as a member of the inner Lan clan just as the sparks-amidst-snow were supposed to symbolize the wisdom and benevolence of the inner Jin.
Personally, Qin Su thinks that the virtue of the inner Lan must not be all that if Zewu-jun could be reduced to this so easily.
But then, all sects lie at least a little about the manifold virtues of their inner families. Some sects, like the Jin, enjoy lying a good deal. Some sects, like the Lan, lie a little better to save face.
When he manages to straighten himself once again, she says, "Well? Are you going to keep me waiting while you undress?"
He doesn't need to. He isn't wearing anything under those robes. They both know this, but her words still make him go white anyway, with a tight anguish that carves itself deeper into his features.
With his trembling hands, he pulls up the hem of the four layers of silk he's wearing to reveal his half hard cock.
Qin Su tsks at him, but doesn't say anything. He flushes regardless, because she's looking at him. Then, at this point, could he really expect her to be an innocent maiden who'd never seen a man before?
At one point, Lan Xichen had said -- I don't know if the demon blade did this to you, or the circumstances -- but he had been trying to wound her when he said it. It wasn't very successful. Lan Xichen had spent at least thirty nine years of his life entirely unwilling to wound anyone unless it was life or death, so he was wholly unpracticed at the art of laying blame, or backhanded compliments, or even those real moments of genuine anguish.
Qin Su, who had grown up pampered and sheltered and whom everyone thought was a pretty faced fool while her husband dallied with Zewu-jun, could and has been much meaner.
"Does it give you satisfaction now?" she asks him, because she's angry, yes, but he'd let the guilt eat him alive and come back for more if only it would stop the bleeding from the hole in his chest where his heart used to live, where Yao-ge had plucked it out with his fingers and taken it with him when he went down to hell. "To know that he touched you far more than he ever touched me, and to know why?"
He shudders at this, his eyes pressed closed, the line of his mouth slack. Maybe it's the way that she'd run the tip of her finger up the underside of his cock.
She'd barely touched him. It's funny, in a way, and she leaves it like that, touch so feather light delicate that it could be absolutely cruel, especially with the way that his hands had bunched the fresh silk up for her so that she didn't need to do anything at all.
But then, he's desperate. She knows how desperate he is, how haunted, how hunted, how he felt as though nothing could wash him clean.
They're two bronze mirrors on either side of a centerpiece that'd long gone missing, two living ghosts around the hollow shell of someone they thought they knew and loved.
His thighs are trembling, though he's leaning against the railing, which should help hold him up. Qin Su herself certainly isn't going to do anything for him in that regard.
Instead, because she'd never really given much thought to his thighs before, she digs her fingers into the crease between thigh and abdomen, relishing in the noise he makes at that, the way he relishes this sort of pain. She doesn't let him have too much of it. Hurt him enough and he'll start to believe he was forced into it.
He had been the one to travel here, to get dressed that morning in Gusu and leave aside trousers, to leave aside even a pretense of modesty by asking her to come to the garden in the middle of the banquet, to let her say and do these things to him in the garden, leaning against a railing where anyone might pass by and see him like this. The utterly indecent way the silk has bunched in his hands, the way that he is not quiet when she does something particularly pleasing to him, even if he tries to keep his mouth closed.
But then, he's already bitten his bottom lip so hard it's swollen, like it'd been kissed too hard and violently. Qin Su would never kiss him. She does not love him. Sometimes, she thinks to herself that she hates him, this man that her husband had loved more than her, always more than her. Sometimes, she thinks she pities him, this man who Jin Guangyao had no compunctions lying to, who had thought the world of Jin Guangyao, the way that she did, but had much less recourse.
Qin Su has already destroyed Jin Guangyao's legacy in Koi Tower. She does not think that Lan Xichen can do the same.
"If you want to come, you're going to have to work for it," she tells him, because she'd realized some time ago that if she didn't make him work for his own release, he'd easily tell himself that he wasn't participating in anything. It'd happened to him, you see, the way that Guanyin Temple had happened to him.
It couldn't be his fault if it had just happened to him. She wants him to know it is his fault. He's just as much of a participant of this as she is.
He knows she doesn't mean his own hands. She means her hand, still loosely curled around his cock. She means that he will have to use his hips. That he has to really work for it because she won't help him.
Lan Xichen must not think he has any dignity left to lose. At these words, he'd grown still, but it doesn't take long for him to start, to try to chase the release that would bring him more guilt than absolution, but the temptation and pleasure of more guilt must be enough for him.
"A-Yao," he whispers, tears on his face like fine jewels though his eyes are still closed. It isn't for her to hear of course, and it isn't for her to care about or to know what exactly he was thinking of, though the mention of her husband from those rosebud lips incenses her.
"Open your eyes and look at me." She would've said more, but he does not, in fact, obey her.
She pulls her hand away. Abruptly, his hips stutter at the loss of friction.
His eyes are still closed.
Instead, he says, "I wasn't trying--" When he realizes this is the wrong answer, he says, "I know who you are."
"Open your eyes," she says again. "I want you to look at me when you come."
She wants him to know who he is doing this with, and where they are doing this, and exactly what responsibility he should take for it.
Because Lan Xichen very rarely disobeys, he does.