No additional warnings for this scene.
Mei Changsu sits patiently while Lin Chen takes his pulse. It is a familiar tableau they have perfected over the course of fifteen years of treatment. The difference is that Lin Chen...Lin Chen is crying.
It’s not obvious. He’s not heaving sobs nor is his face wet with tears. But there are tears, and his eyes are red, and he’s shaking with the iron willpower he is using not to break down.
“You’re out of time.” The words are barely audible, whispered into the space between them.
“We knew this was coming,” Mei Changsu says, just as softly. “But I’m sorry all the same.”
He never meant to hurt his friends, but this is the course he has been on since Lin Shu was murdered at seventeen and Mei Changsu was born out of the ashes. There was no price too high for him to pay to reach his goals, even his own life.
Lin Chen takes a steadying breath but does not wipe his eyes or clean his face. He stares implacably at Mei Changsu, then folds his hands into his sleeves and looks away. In front of the tent, Meng Zhi is pacing restlessly, mostly on guard to keep Fei Liu out. The camp is otherwise silent, despite the fact it is only early evening.
Mei Changsu knows what a death watch sounds like.
They have won against Da Yu but there is still much to do. Things that, unfortunately, Mei Changsu will not be able to assist with. He’s damaged and dying. He knows his time is measured in hours now, not months, not weeks, not even days. Hours.
Lin Chen gets up, goes to his small portable desk, and pulls out a box tied with simple twine. Mei Changsu remembers that he received it from Langya Hall the week before but had not mentioned anything of it. Now, Lin Chen unwraps it with the air of a man opening a death shroud, revealing a small object coddled in a swath of pale blue silk. He slowly walks over and places the object in Mei Changsu’s cold, weak grasp, folding his fingers over it. It looks like, and feels like, a plain rock, yet so heavy he can barely keep hold of it.
“Next time,” Lin Chen starts, then stops. Takes a deep breath, closing his eyes before continuing. “Next time do not return this to me until the very end, until now. Do not let me see it. Keep it a secret. Promise me you will remember this.” He squeezes Mei Changsu’s hand before letting go.
It’s nonsensical and pointless, but he’s dying and this man who has become his best, closest friend will have to help him do it. “Of course I will.”
“Don’t humor me about this, you bastard. Promise me.” Lin Chen still isn’t looking at him, but he squeezes the hand holding the rock.
“I promise.”
The following hours are as wretched as he expected. His body is shutting down, organ by organ, and it is messy and painful and hopeless. Lin Chen is there for all of it.
In the end, as dawn crests and the dark miasma of death creeps over Mei Changsu’s consciousness, Lin Chen hovers above him, the only point of certainty he has before he leaves this body forever. He is grasping the hand Mei Changsu has wrapped around the ridiculous rock.
“Don’t forget your promise, Xiao Su. However long it takes. Don’t forget that I love you.”
Mei Changsu dies surprised with Lin Chen’s lips on his, kissing him, sending him away.
Mei Changsu wakes up cold and aching and coughing.
Li Gang is there quickly with a salty broth to soothe him, and Fei Liu is already trying to layer him under more blankets than any man can bear.
“How?” Mei Changsu finally coughs out.
“Auntie Ji cooked it up last night, Chief,” Li Gang says about the broth and looks at him with concern.
“I mean, how did I get here?” He looks around his familiar room, the one back in his manor in Jinling.
Li Gang frowns. “You...went to bed here?” He asks, as if worried that Mei Changsu is trying to trick him. Or is possibly losing his mind.
Fei Liu nods in agreement.
“No. I was...I was.” He stops. He was in a military tent with Lin Chen. He was dying. In fact, he is pretty sure he did die. And...
...Lin Chen kissed him.
He blinks at the memory. It was a memory, not a dream, he’s sure of that. He thinks. Now he’s not sure of anything.
“Did you have a bad dream, maybe?” Li Gang sounds like he’s treading carefully.
Mei Changsu is sure this is the bad dream. He looks around to find proof that he’s still asleep (or dead?), but it feels real and solid. More convincing is the fact that he feels like hell, but very much in a way that suggests he’s still alive to suffer. Or, maybe, alive again? He groans and lays down.
It’s only at that moment that he realizes he has the rough, heavy, beige colored rock locked in his fist. He stares at it uncomprehendingly, trying to convince himself it came from the garden, or that maybe Fei Liu snuck it into his hand.
But he knows the truth of who gave him the rock. He remembers.
The problem is that he remembers so many things that he shouldn’t even know. He woke up from death a few days before the spring hunt, yet he remembers it.
He remembers Consort Jing’s cunning and Jingyan’s frustrations. He remembers Prince Yu’s rebellion. The battle, the deaths, the aftermath — he remembers it.
He’s half convinced he’s just hallucinating until it all does happen again, just like it did before.
He doesn’t remember everything, not every detail. He woke up a year before he died; some things are just hazy recollections, the way life in general is remembered by anyone. There are events that stand out more than others. It makes the whole experience an ongoing, frustrating exercise in deja vu, or perhaps, mere insanity. He is not laying odds either way yet.
It is not until he is well and truly dying after the battle with Da Yu at the border that Mei Changsu finally realizes with shock what was done to him. He’s pondered and researched but he does not figure it out until he faces his death once more.
He should have known from the start that it was Lin Chen’s fault.
Unlike the first time, this Lin Chen is nearly frantic, sorting through everything in the tent looking for something. He finds it in one of Mei Changsu’s small travel trunks and stands there, mesmerized, pulling the blue silk loose to reveal the plain little rock.
“How did you get this? I asked that it be sent it to me.”
Mei Changsu shakes his head, too exhausted to lie. “You gave it to me. Last time. I...I was supposed to give it to you now. I’m sorry I forgot.”
Lin Chen recoils in horror and clutches the box with white knuckled hands. He places it carefully in one of his own trunks with the air of a man burying a child. Later, he asks no deathbed promises of Mei Changsu, who is too busy dying to ask him about it anyway.
Nothing has changed, although he suspects it was supposed to. He’s dying (again), and Lin Chen is crying (again). He waits for Lin Chen to call him Xiao Su and kiss him (again). He wants that kiss most of all, and it seems a shame to have to face death to get it.
Mei Changsu dies with Lin Chen’s lips on his, kissing him, sending him away.
He wakes up.
After the spring hunt and Prince Yu’s rebellion, he writes to Lin Chen about Nie Feng. He does not mention the rock.
On his deathbed, he pulls out the small box and hands it to Lin Chen. “You asked me to return this to you,” he says, his voice weak.
Lin Chen unwraps the box and starts crying when he sees the plain rock in blue silk.
Nothing changes.
By the sixth time he lives through the spring hunt, Mei Changsu is mostly bored. It’s all happened before, and it will all happen again, apparently. He keeps fiddling with small things — saves a valuable minor minister’s son from gambling debt, sends Gong Yu back to Langzhou (there is nothing she can discover that he does not already know, and it’s a mercy for both of them to put her far away from him), calls Lin Chen to the capital before he leaves on the spring hunt instead of waiting until Nei Feng is discovered.
Nothing changes though. He still dies on the border of Da Yu and he still wakes up a year in the past, coughing in his bed in Jinling, clutching the damn rock that he returns to Lin Chen every time.
This is not what he expected out of the wheel of reincarnation, and he’s very miffed at all the very many spiritual texts he has read that suggested something better. Or, at least, different.
The eighth time, Mei Changsu is so bored that he decides to do radically change the plot, because why not? Will it really make a difference? He doesn’t know and that curiosity, more than anything, drives him.
He warns Jingyan ahead of the spring hunt that Prince Yu will stage a rebellion while they are there. He tells Zhen Peng where Tong Lu is so they can rescue him. He takes up the guqin for the first time since he was ten.
In the end, though, he dies on the border of Da Yu with Lin Chen’s kiss on his lips.
By the twelfth cycle, he realizes that Prince Yu’s rebellion, while costly in lives, is what seals Jingyan’s place as crown prince. Mei Changsu hates letting the deadly, blood-soaked battles happen when he knows how to circumvent them, but to do otherwise is to risk Jingyan’s claim to the throne.
He’s getting much better at the guqin, though. His mother would be proud.
Every time he wakes up to a new cycle, he replays in his mind the promise Lin Chen forced out of him on his deathbed. He stares at the rock before wrapping it up and hiding it away. He never asks about it either, no matter how much he is tempted to do so, and he always has it ready to give Lin Chen when he is on his deathbed.
It is an odd and obscure thing, both the rock and the promise, and part of him hates it since a silly, ugly rock is the only proof he has that this is all real. He dies giving the rock away and he wakes up with the rock in his hand, exactly where Lin Chen originally (years ago, now) put it...somehow, Lin Chen has tied it to him.
He has no idea why but cannot think of a way to ask. He’s honestly terrified that Lin Chen would then ask him about the importance of the rock, and that way lies madness.
He watches the way Lin Chen watches him, though, now that he knows what he does about him. Lin Chen is as abrasive and disrespectful as always, acting as if he’s a stranger to the rules and standards of civilized society despite being well versed in all of them. Amidst that act he caters to Mei Changsu’s every whim and follows him around like a devoted dog. He only makes himself scarce when Jingyan shows up to discuss politics, but Lin Chen hates the politics of Jinling so that doesn’t surprise Mei Changsu at all.
What does surprise him are all the times he catches Lin Chen looking at him wistfully, as if watching a delicate flower wilting. It is not merely love, he thinks, but a longing for something he thinks he will never have.
The problem, although it’s not really a problem, is that Mei Changsu has never before looked at Lin Chen as a possible lover. It is not that he does not appreciate men, because he does — he thinks the only one who did not know Lin Shu was infatuated with Jingyan in their youth was Jingyan. (Nihuang was his betrothed but she mocked him mercilessly (if privately) about his crush.)
It is different with Lin Chen, who is definitely beautiful enough and smart enough to capture Mei Changsu’s interests, because of their shared history as doctor and patient. No one else has seen Lin Shu at his most bloody and broken, vomiting grief and pain along with bile. No one else has chastised him as much as Lin Chen has, not even Lin Shu’s parents (and he was disciplined a lot, as a boy). No one else has as much right to curse Mei Changsu’s complex machinations as the man he relies on to feed him so much information for little to no return.
After fifteen years of watching, Mei Changsu thinks that is perhaps why he is starting to fall in love with Lin Chen.
The twentieth time, he wonders what he’s supposed to change or whom he is supposed to save to break this fucked up cycle. By now he’s saved the life of everyone at least once, including Prince Yu and, to his eternal fury (and only out of pure desperation), Xia Jiang.
He has tried everything to break the cycle but nothing stops it, and it rarely changes the overall outcome — Jingyan as crown prince, the Chiyan case overthrown, war on four borders, a final kiss from Lin Chen, and his very unpleasant death .
One cycle he did not give Lin Chen the rock. He had brought it with him as he always does, but made no mention of it. Lin Chen tore their tent apart looking for it again, but once it was certain he wouldn’t find it, he sat down and accepted Mei Changsu’s death with a deep fatalism, but also did not kiss him.
Yet, Mei Changsu woke up in the next cycle with the rock in his hand. Clearly, whatever he does with the rock, it returns to him when he wakes.
He continues to improve with the guqin, and takes to asking Gong Yu to instruct him, even knowing that it only feeds her desire for him. He’s going to die anyway, so what does it matter?
During the twenty-second cycle,he looks at Lin Chen — newly arrived in Jinling and who is holding his wrist to check his pulse with a very grumpy expression on his face — and says, “Will you kiss me?”
Lin Chen does.
The twenty-third time, he watches Lin Chen arrive in Jinling knowing what he looks like naked and disheveled, writhing in pleasure. He knows the sounds Lin Chen makes when Mei Changsu deepens their kiss, and he knows exactly the weight and shape of Lin Chen’s arousal in his hand. It is odd to be someone’s lover when they don’t even know it.
It is not as if it is something that Lin Chen forgot and might remember, with prompting. It is something that, for Lin Chen, hasn’t happened yet. Might not happen at all, if Mei Changsu decides it shouldn’t. It is an unwieldy amount of power that Mei Changsu holds in this situation, and he’s not sure he’s comfortable with it.
He would change their story, if he could.
“I don’t understand your desire for me,” he admits, surfacing from his thoughts.
Lin Chen freezes with his tea cup halfway to his lips like a man abruptly accused of murder.
“I’m sorry, that was improper,” he says, cringing inwardly, only now remembering that so far in this cycle he has not propositioned Lin Chen.
“Why would you think—”
“Spare me, A-Chen. I know you would be my lover, if I asked.” Mei Changsu rolls his eyes.
“Would I?” Lin Chen smirks at him as if this is a game.
Maybe for him it is.
Lin Chen is always surprised when Mei Changsu propositions him. It does not matter if he does it when Lin Chen first appears in Jinling, or halfway through the year, or while they are on their way to fight the Da Yu. Despite his surprise he gives in every time, his eyes lighting up with passion and, depending on how romantic Mei Changsu contrived the seduction to be, delight.
Mei Changsu can tell by the way Lin Chen devours his kisses and worships his body that he’s craved this for a long time. He wonders exactly when Lin Chen started lusting after him, but Lin Chen is hard to read when it comes to personal matters such as this and refuses to share much of his feelings even when falling-down drunk.
But Mei Changsu knows well enough that lust is not the same as love.
So, while he knows that Lin Chen does fall in love with him at some point before he dies, he is unable to pin that exact point down. Given Lin Chen’s reluctance to admit anything beyond mere physical desire, Mei Changsu endeavors to keep their affair on a friendly level. Neither of them is willing to invest in more than that and in any case his own life has a short time limit. He can’t control Lin Chen’s feelings, but he can at least control how deeply his death might affect him (should the cycle ever break), and control how much his own feelings color their interactions.
It is a very reasonable and mature decision, he thinks with confidence.
It is the forty-fifth cycle — forty-five years of this endless and pointless repetition — when he realizes that he’s desperately, mindlessly in love with Lin Chen.
He loves the way he talks, and how he moves, and how he makes love, and the way he thinks. There is something timeless and powerful about Lin Chen that sometimes makes Mei Changsu think of thunderclouds and old, weary mountains. He wakes up from dying desperate to hear his voice, to feel his hands on him. It’s almost like being a young man all over again, addled by lust and distracted by love.
He doesn’t tell him, at first. Then, one time while they are curled around each other in bed, he does.
Lin Chen smiles but does not reply.
Nothing changes, anyway.
“Why on earth are you out here laying on the ground?” Lin Chen asks, lording over him, his folded fan slapping against his palm in a very threatening manner.
He would like to say, “I’m tired of dying” or “reliving this year over and over again is very boring” or “what the hell is the purpose of that damn rock anyway?” or “why did you do this to me?” but every single one of those statements will get him in trouble. He almost wants to grab Lin Chen and run back to Langya Hall and forget about revenge and justice, but he simply cannot. What if this is the last cycle? He can’t know for sure and so he can’t risk it. He cannot risk Jingyan, and he cannot risk getting justice for his family and the Chiyan army.
He thinks about it for a second, then answers as honestly as he can. “I am tired, and the sky is beautiful.”
Lin Chen looks perplexed at that, but then folds down to lay next to him. They are not lovers, yet, in this cycle. The only true amusement Mei Changsu gets is varying the point at which he kisses Lin Chen and kicks off their affair, and this time, he’s been playing with being coy and flirty and driving Lin Chen insane with desire.
Some people play xiangqi. Mei Changsu plays Lin Chen.
Lin Chen is a worthy challenge. For all their affairs, in every cycle Lin Chen is careful with his words and with his affections, never admitting anything until Mei Changsu is one breath away from death. Someone hurt him, once, long ago and Mei Changsu would kill that person gladly if he could. But Lin Chen has only hinted at his heartbreak and always laughs it off. He never says “I love you” to Mei Changsu until the bitter end. He never admits that weakness unless forced. Mei Changsu does not expect that to change this time around.
“Why are you so moody? More depressed than usual, anyway,” Lin Chen says with a sigh, snapping his fan open and flicking it around as if he doesn’t care.
Mei Changsu thinks of things he’s never done, of things he’d never even considered doing in his ‘original’ lifetime. He thinks of Lin Chen’s reluctance to embrace him after they fuck and the way he is always so careful to wait until Mei Changsu is asleep before sneaking out of his bed like a thief. He thinks of all the times he’s told Lin Chen he loves him and the sad smile Lin Chen gives him when he does.
“Let’s go to a brothel and fuck prostitutes all night,” Mei Changsu says in lieu of an honest answer.
They do.
The one-hundredth cycle is his breaking point.
He’s had a century to do everything, try everything, break everything. He dies and dies and dies again.
But he cannot truly die, not for good, and he’s even committed suicide a few times to prove it. There is no version of his life that he hasn’t fucked up beyond all recognition, and despite his determination to see Jingyan on the throne and the Chiyan case overturned, he has marched into Xuan Jing Bureau at least three times and just flat out assassinated Xia Jiang in person (he dies quickly in those cycles, cut down by Bureau guards).
He once accidentally got Jingyan killed, and that...well, the less said about that particular cycle, the better.
Often he becomes Lin Chen’s lover. Sometimes he doesn’t. He has, shamefully, even fucked Gong Yu a few times (she is delightful in bed, but he hates breaking her heart, and it never changes how he feels about Lin Chen).
This time, though, he is over it.
He’s over dying, and over being hopelessly in love with a man who will not or cannot admit to loving him in return and will only ever watch him die. He has no future. They have no future. If Mei Changsu does what is right, then maybe Jingyan and Da Liang have a future, as do Fei Liu and Lin Chen and Nihuang and Meng Zhi.
Everyone but him.
He’s saved his enemies and let his loved ones die, one after another, sometimes by accident and sometimes by execution. He’s seen it all happen, in every combination of horror, in every flavor of triumph.
Nothing matters.
One bright and cheerful day, as Mei Changsu is listing bitterly in his favorite pavilion while Fei Liu collects flowers, it occurs to him that maybe he’s overlooked the obvious. The one person he’s never saved is the emperor, because that is the one man under heaven who doesn’t need saving. He honestly has not thought very much about him, outside of his original plans. Yet for all that Lin Shu hates his uncle with a burning passion and has for decades (a century) now, he has never felt the need to kill him, either. The emperor is possibly the only person he has not seen die, so he begins to wonder if maybe that is the key to this farce. The one point in the constellation of possibilities he’s never tried to move. Maybe, he thinks, this is his purpose.
He has to kill the emperor.
It takes a few cycles for him to succeed. The emperor is closely guarded against assassination and Mei Changsu, weakened scholar, is definitely not the first to try. Often, he is literally cut down by the emperor’s guard before he can get too close. Once, memorably, by Meng Zhi. (That is not something he wants to repeat if only because Meng Zhi’s horrified expression as he killed Mei Changsu was guilt inducing to the extreme.)
But he is Lin Shu, greatest mind of his generation, and with endless opportunities to figure out a way to kill someone, he knows he will succeed. Ironically, when he does, it is the one time he’s not executed instantly.
He has the worst damn luck.
Lin Chen manages to bribe who-knows-how-many people and visits him in prison the night before his public execution by torture. Mei Changsu is not sure why — in these cycles of assassination, he purposely kept Lin Chen at arm’s length. They are not lovers and at this point, barely friends. Lin Chen is risking his own life just by being here, breathing the same air as the murderer of the Son of Heaven.
He glares at Mei Changsu from as far away as possible. “Tomorrow you will be executed. It will be a spectacle. Don’t expect me to watch.”
“Please don’t. Instead take Fei Liu out of the city tonight. Please take care of him.”
Lin Chen closes his eyes, opens them again. “Why?” He asks plaintively as he stands by the door, taut with tension.
“I was bored.” It is shockingly true.
“What the fuck? Bored?” Lin Chen looks at him as if he’s never seen him before.
“Bored!” Mei Changsu snaps back. “I also hope this one time, it would change things!”
“Change what? What would change by this action? You spent twelve years plotting this revenge only to casually walk in and slit his throat?”
“There was nothing casual about it. I have tried this over a dozen times but I’m usually slaughtered before I can get within reach.” Mei Changsu sighs and slumps over, pulling his blanket around him.
Lin Chen goes completely still. “What?”
“You heard me.”
“I did, but that doesn’t mean it makes sense.”
“A-Chen, as much as I love you, this is something I can’t explain.”
“You...you! How dare you say that to me! Now? Now you say that you love me?”
“I have said it to you many times, in many lifetimes. I have re-lived this terrible year for over a century. I’ve lived it over and over and over! When will it end? I don’t know! Maybe now that I have killed him, I’ll get my own release. I...I don’t even care anymore.”
Lin Chen shakes his head, visibly rattled. “Lived this year over?”
“Yes. Don’t tell me you don’t understand what I mean. I know you did it!” He points an accusing finger and Lin Chen recoils.
“No. I wouldn’t. I wouldn’t do that.”
“You did. I’m sure of it.”
Lin Chen shakes his head. “I wouldn’t.”
“You did.”
He stays quiet for a long time before taking a deep breath. “If I did that...if I did this to you, I had a reason.”
“If so, I don’t know what it is. You hand me a rock and tell me to give it to you when I die yet again, nothing more,” he says, weary to the bone.
Lin Chen goes even paler in the dank light of the cell. “A rock? You never gave me a rock.”
“Not this time, no.” Not since he started the assassination attempts, but he doesn’t bother with that explanation. He looks up. “You have never once told me why.”
Lin Chin shakes his head, only once, and it is a tightly controlled motion. His lips are pursed to whiteness, his eyes almost wild. “It...but no, it can’t—” He stops and turns his back to him, hunched over.
It is a silence Mei Changsu desperately wants to break. He wants to tell him how much he loves him, how much he thinks (hopes) Lin Chen could love him back, without the threat of imminent death.
“Next time, don’t kill the damn emperor, Mei Changsu,” Lin Chen hisses at him. He taps the wall and is let out, saying nothing more than that.
The door closes on their fate. For the first time, Mei Changsu hopes it’s not the last time.
The following day, Mei Changsu dies, painfully and publicly and shamefully under the bitter gaze of Jingyan and the entire court.
He wakes up, cold and aching and coughing…and still feeling the ghostly pains of his agonizingly slow execution by torture.
An unknown number of cycles come and go in a haze of frenzied self-destruction. His previous excesses pale in comparison to wrathful demi-god Mei Changsu set loose on Jinling. He drinks too much. He yells at Jingyan. He spends a week at a brothel while Lin Chen threatens him through a locked door. He burns down his family’s old manor. He burns down the palace. He burns down everything.
He’s not only died over 150 times, he’s been publicly tortured to death, and he accepts the fact that it has changed him. He is pretty sure it is not for the better.
But in the end, nothing he does matters. Nothing. The destruction he leaves in his wake, the dead bodies, the smoking ruins of the city itself are wiped clean every time. He could topple entire mountains but wake up to splendor.
He does not want to give a damn about anything anymore, not even Jingyan and Nihuang, as distant as they have become to him.
The only two people who matter to him (on days when he’s not ripping the world around him apart) are Lin Chen and Fei Liu. He almost can’t help hurting them, though, just by existing.
It is another reason why he would like to stop existing.
Even in the midst of his breakdown Mei Changsu takes care that he doesn’t lead Lin Chen into figuring out his secret again. It hurts too much to hear his regret, to know that Lin Chen is horrified by what he did but is also unable to stop it.
Mei Changsu thought he knew what despair was when Lin Shu woke up at Langya Hall to the news of the deaths of his family, his friends, his fellow soldiers, his entire world.
It is nothing compared to the yawning void of hopelessness that is his life now.
He decides to take a fucking vacation.
It lasts for 253 years.
Lately when he wakes up, tired and coughing and sore, he notices that through the centuries the rock has become smoother to the touch. The jagged edges are worn down, and the surface is polished and prettily mottled. Now, if Lin Chen is there when he dies to give it to him, it is quickly, carefully re-wrapped up in blue silk and hidden away, his expression haunted. For all that he never reveals anything to Lin Chen, the man understands something about the rock that Mei Changsu has yet to discover.
Which is a feat in and of itself, as by now there is almost nothing left in this world that Mei Changsu has not studied or seen. When he decided to let himself unspool from Jinling, revenge, and despair, he traveled. He left Jinling to sink into the crazed paranoia of the emperor with only minor regrets. Knowing that in time he will see all of them again, it doesn’t hurt as much anymore to hear of Jingyan’s occasional assassination, or Meng Zhi dying in battle. A few times Prince Yu makes it to the throne and while he’s a bloody-minded snake, he does instill stability and prosperity for the short term, which surprises Mei Changsu but doesn’t change his opinion of the man overall.
His respect and admiration for Nihuang becomes boundless as she almost always, short of being executed for treason, ends up back in Yunnan by the end of the year as a hero and (still) a general (sometimes married, oftentimes not, but invariably with Xia Dong and Nie Feng at her side). He begins to understand, though, how dangerous it would have been for her to marry Lin Shu — together they would have been a formidable (if unwitting) threat to the emperor. Perhaps there is nothing anyone could have done to save his life or the lives of his family, given the emperor’s paranoia and Xia Jiang’s ruthless self-preservation. It is a sobering but useless thought and he sets it aside.
In the meantime, Mei Changsu travels and studies. He goes as far out from Jinling as he can reasonably get in a year, dies, and starts over again. He shows up on the doorstep of the famous academies in a dozen empires and kingdoms and connives his way in, studying math and philosophy and medicine and music for years on end. He travels to exotic locales with remote, barbarian tribes, who sometimes kill him but oftentimes don’t. He is conversant in seven languages and can read in five on top of that. He spent one whole year in hard, taxing, dangerous travel just to visit the monks at the fabled Ajanta Caves in the far west. Dying there, surrounded by the magnificent art and 1000 chanting monks, had been exquisite.
But the rock remains a mystery, as does Lin Chen.
“What the fuck is the matter with you?” Lin Chen puts a hand on his chest, holding him in place.
“I do not appreciate that tone,” Mei Changsu says, grabbing Lin Chen’s wrist. He’s not strong enough to move Lin Chen an inch either way, but he’s tired and aching, which always makes him cranky.
They do not get along well when he is cranky.
“Mei Changsu,” Lin Chen says through clenched teeth. “It has taken me two months to catch up with you. Your entire staff is panicking and the Jiangzuo Alliance is in shambles.”
Mei Changsu notices both Li Gang and Zhen Ping off to the side, cringing. They have been complaining, if politely and respectfully, about the same things since they left Jinling. He’s heard those complaints for, literally, hundreds of years so he is very immune to them. He always offers for them to turn back and they always refuse, so he doesn’t have much sympathy for them in regards to those concerns.
This confrontation is not unusual either. Lin Chen manages to catch up with him about half the time, depending on which direction Mei Changsu travels and who he runs into along the way. This time he has gone south, straight through Yunnan like a spear until he was at the coast, where Lin Chen has found him.
“Answer me!” Lin Chen shouts.
“And say what? What do you want to know?” Mei Changsu turns his back on him, pointing at his trunks for the crew to carry aboard the ship he has hired.
“Where are you going? What is the matter with you?”
Mei Changsu stares at him for a long moment. He has diffused this argument in so many ways, it is just a matter of remembering the one that suits his mood. He shakes his head.
“You have given up? On everything you believe in, on everything that kept you alive these long years? I don’t understand.” His expression is one of worry and fear.
Lin Chen is in fact Mei Changsu’s number one critic, the one who argued extensively at first that trying to get justice for the Chiyan Army was pointless. It is always amusing to Mei Changsu the way Lin Chen’s opinions turn on needle point when Mei Changsu himself decides to abdicate. It is always because he thinks Mei Changsu has a death wish, which he does, but not in exactly the way Lin Chen assumes.
“I’m not asking you to understand,” Mei Changsu says with a shrug.
“Have you gone mad?” Lin Chen waves his hands over his head.
“Stop chastising me and get on board.” He turns and makes his way to the gangplank.
Lin Chen grabs his arm, spinning him around. “Mei Changsu!”
He puts both hands on Lin Chen’s chest, and the other man goes completely still. The kingdom he is traveling to is openly accepting of men being lovers, which he knows as this is his fourth trip to visit the queen there. She is brilliant and weathered and wise in her old age, fully aware that her small realm is on the verge of being overtaken and erased, despite the shining star that is her great granddaughter. Once she gets to know him, she asks for advice on what to do with her dynasty, but so far Mei Changsu has not had a suitable answer for her. He does now, having spent another cycle to the west, and wants to get to her before she dies so he can leverage that knowledge to preserve her bloodline. If it works this time, he will in future cycles just send her a letter telling her what to do. Her monarchy cannot be saved, but there is much to her rule and descendents to recommend salvaging what traditions and children they can.
(He sends out a lot of letters, these days. A few are ignored, but often his ability to include very specific details in his advice, things he sometimes has spent years learning about, tends to convince rulers to take his words seriously.)
In any case, it is the perfect place to take Lin Chen and lay about in the humid tropics half naked being served the most delicious fruit pastries he’s ever eaten.
Mei Changsu twists the material of Lin Chen’s robes in his hands. “Come with me, A-Chen,” he says softly, leaning in close. He watches Lin Chen’s eyes dilate. “Come with me, and let me have you on a bed of silk and gold.”
Lin Chen’s mouth drops open. “Mei Changsu—”
“Come with me, Lin Chen.”
He does.
Mei Changsu has been in love with Lin Chen for nearly 300 years and has fallen more in love with him than he thought he could ever love anyone.
In his youth he fancied Jingyan and pledged his heart to Nihuang. They were all children then. What he feels for Lin Chen is far deeper and richer — less like a simple clear stream and more like a wide river running a strong current filled with life, death, and debris. Their love is beautiful, complex, and overpowering, for all that Lin Chen shies away from acknowledging it.
So while Mei Changsu believes that they love each other, Lin Chen himself never seems to become aware of that fact in any of the cycles they have spent together, or maybe purposely avoids it, until the very end. They are lovers and there is a bone-deep affection that ties Mei Changsu to Lin Chen like a barnacle but there is, always and possibly forever, the divide that Lin Chen puts in place.
He wakes up cold and aching and coughing.
Li Gang is there quickly with a salty broth to soothe him, and Fei Liu is already trying to layer him under more blankets than any man can bear.
Mei Changsu lets them fuss as he always does, but then rolls over when he can breathe again and stares at the ceiling. Outside, birds are chirping in a well-worn song that is, by now, burned into his memory. He feels absolutely no desire to get out of bed. Any place he could go, he has gone. Any living person he has wanted to meet, he has met. The world is his oyster but he is buried in pearls.
What, he wonders, is the point?
He last died coddled in extravagant luxury in an open-air palace in the middle of a lake, surrounded by sensual tropical smells and sounds. The most beautiful young women and men he has ever seen washed his body and serviced him in every imaginable way while he read rare, precious texts that most people don’t even believe exist anymore. He spent the previous five cycles revisiting that kingdom every time he woke up, working to find a way to quickly gain the trust of the king whose winter palace it is in order to visit the legendary library there. Such schemes are usually quite a challenge for him, enjoyable and exciting.
But these last few cycles it was not. He could not get Jinling out of his head, could not push away the fates of everyone he knows and loves which he has risked just so he could bounce around the world like a careless ghost. He’s not sure what, specifically, brought these thoughts up again after so long, but once reborn they will not perish.
For the first time in decades, he goes on the spring hunt. He’s tired and bored and worried, so sends for Lin Chen before he departs to attend the familiar, well-worn series of events. After it all happens again as it has so many times before, Mei Changsu returns to his manor with Nie Feng in tow to find Lin Chen already there, bossing his household around.
He all but throws Nie Feng at Lin Chen, retires to his rooms, and goes to bed with every intention of staying there.
The rest of the year is, by now, something he can orchestrate from any location, in any number of ways. The key is the death of Xie Yu, which for the sake of expediency Mei Changsu has ordered too many times to count. What a little engineered landslide or two? Xia Jiang is merely a gnat to be pushed into place. Grand Princess Liyang always falls in line. It’s a complex house of cards, to be sure, but he’s built it hundreds of times, in every configuration imaginable.
One small push, and it all collapses on the emperor’s head.
He’s tired of the game and he’s tired of his life. He’s just...he’s just tired.
“You’ve been in bed for three weeks. Nothing is wrong with you. Get up.” Lin Chen lords over the bed, arms crossed and tapping his foot.
Mei Changsu has so far today been staring at the ceiling, staring at the bowl of soup next to his bed, and staring at the branches of flowers Fei Liu has carefully constructed around him like a cage. He wonders where that boy’s mind goes, sometimes.
“Everything is wrong with me, as you are so fond of pointing out.”
“Not like that! Even at your worst you’ve shown more initiative than this. Usually I have to tie you to the bed.”
“How very perverted of you,” Mei Changsu says without thinking. Centuries ago he would have called himself a worldly man who could not be surprised by the sexual excesses of others. That was before he spent hundreds of cycles of his life exploring human nature, which he has discovered possesses a profound and bottomless depth of depravity.
Lin Chen is silent, so Mei Changsu looks over at him. Lin Chen is gaping like a fish.
Mei Changsu sighs and returns to inspecting the ceiling beams.
“No! No, you can’t distract me. I have left you alone to stew for too long. Time to get up.” Lin Chen rallies and starts throwing all the branches off the bed into a pile. “Are you even bathing? Your hair!” He screeches in horror as he pulls Mei Changsu up into a sitting position.
He doesn’t care about his hair. What does it matter if he’s just lying in bed? He’s managed to comb it back enough to meet with Jingyan a couple of times, but the looks of worry and pity he got in return weren’t worth it. He’s instructed his people to put the word out that he is very sick and cannot be seen. Well wishes and gifts have flooded in but so far Lin Chen is the only one to breach the defenses, mostly because Mei Changsu’s staff is more frightened of him than their own boss.
Lin Chen stands there, holding a lock of Mei Changsu’s frizzy hair like it’s a dead rodent. Mei Changsu looks away.
“Li Gang!” Lin Chen shouts, then starts on an endless series of orders. He, Dr. Yan, and Mei Changsu’s own traitorous staff pull, prod, and poke him into bathing, getting dressed, and eating. He allows it because objectively he knows it is probably a good thing. That does not mean he allows it with good grace.
“Ow.”
“You are a childish brat. Why do I even put up with you? Hold still!” Lin Chen speaks around the utilitarian comb he has in his mouth while he gently picks apart tangles with his hands.
“Ow!” Mei Changsu says more loudly.
“You are being ridiculous. Don’t make me ask Fei Liu to hold you down. Fei Liu, hand me that hair oil.”
“All this nonsense just so I can go back to bed,” Mei Changsu grumbles.
“You are not going back to bed.” Lin Chen uses the comb to sort out the strands he’s freed.
Mei Changsu sighs.
Dr. Yan comes in holding a glass vial with a blue liquid in it, a medicine Mei Changsu does not recognize. “What now?” He asks, eyeing the vial as it is passed off to Lin Chen, who sniffs it clinically.
“You are depressed. Your liver qi is stagnant and...never mind. Never mind! Drink this. We’re going for a walk afterwards.”
“A walk? Where?” He’s too inured to Lin Chen’s nagging to protest, and swallows down the surprisingly savory medicine.
“Nowhere. We’re not going anyplace. We are walking and enjoying the spring weather. When we get back I will do acupuncture on your sorry, pathetic body, feed you some more plain vegetable soup, and then you will be allowed back in bed to rest for exactly eight hours before we go through this hell again.”
“You are such a charmer, no wonder the ladies love you,” Mei Changsu says spitefully and Lin Chen tugs at his hair in revenge.
They walk and buy treats for Fei Liu and go nowhere just as Lin Chen promised. He keeps side-eyeing Mei Changsu but has stopped berating him, at least.
This is his life now: every morning Mei Changsu is bustled out of bed by a veritable army of his staff, backed by Fei Liu and viciously overseen by Lin Chen. He’s put through the wringer of bathing, eating, dressing, and taking medicines before being walked around the city like a dog on a leash.
But it works. It works surprisingly well.
Mei Changsu slowly starts coming back to himself. He’s drifted for so long — only now, almost 300 years later, can he admit how badly his execution by torture affected his mental state. He’s grateful he’s had time to process it, and also grateful that he got the opportunity to travel and study the way he did. But he would not make the same choice now, facing down Jingyan or Nihuang again.
He also starts noticing the people around him and how worried they are. In fact, a month later and they are still worried, despite the obvious progress of both his health and mental state. He is touched by the genuine care and concern displayed by the people who work for him, as well as outsiders such as ministers of the court and several noble families who have aligned themselves with Jingyan. Not to mention, of course, Jingyan, Meng Zhi, Consort Jing, Mu Qing, Yujin and Marquis Yan. He even gets a kind letter from Jingrui, stating that he’s heard that Mei Changsu is not feeling well and sending his wishes for a speedy recovery along with a couple of books on philosophy he picked up in his travels. (He’s already read them, of course, but he enjoys Jingrui’s commentaries in the margins.)
He wonders how he’s never noticed the way people look at him, as if he is someone important to them, personally. As if he is more than a crafty strategist or chief of the Jiangzou Alliance. As if he, Mei Changsu himself, might matter.
As Lin Shu used to matter to so many people, so long ago.
His walks get longer and he starts meeting with Jingyan regularly again — who is up for the position of crown prince and whose path is set, but there is still so much to do. There are many gears in motion in order to get the Chiyan case overturned, but there are also so many more things Mei Changsu can affect lasting improvements on, now that he is looking out past the simple goals of justice and revenge. Their meetings become longer and more involved than they ever have before.
This, at least, is familiar ground, if unfamiliar paths.
Lin Chen does not approve of the added stress but sticks to shoving medicine down Mei Changsu’s throat and walking him every morning. Their affair in this cycle is slow moving, and Lin Chen is more cautious about it than usual for some reason, but it is at least comfortable between them.
The following cycle is still difficult for him, as the depression lingers even if it is not so acute. Lin Chen figures it out quickly again and the now-familiar regimentation is enforced upon Mei Changsu’s life again: dragged out of bed on days he doesn’t want to move, bathed, fed, dressed, and walked.
They are not lovers in this cycle yet and Mei Changsu is debating whether to go down that road or not, but the companionship is welcome and reminds him of all the years they have spent traveling together. For him it is an easy camaraderie to simply spend time with the one he loves.
But for a change, Lin Chen does not appear to be comfortable with it. He is, in fact, unhappy. Mei Changsu knows him better than he knows himself in some ways, and when Lin Chen goes quiet and agreeable, well, that is a sure sign that he is deeply, profoundly upset.
Mei Changsu has no idea why, and he dislikes that confusion. He’s good at reading people and he knows Lin Chen so well — centuries of living with him through various escapades and tragedies have shown him a lot about the man he could have never understood in one lifetime, even if some mysteries remain.
He tries to parse what is different about the latest cycles but cannot pin anything down. The only variable that has never appeared before is his own depression, but that is slowly lifting, and anyway he’s been through far worse than that.
Lin Chen’s morose attitude makes no damn sense.
During one tour through Jinling, they go into an unsavory area of town he does not ever remember visiting before. Zhen Ping is guarding them, along with Fei Liu who already has something of a reputation as a brawler. They are safe, at least, and can travel in peace to the market that is Mei Changsu’s goal.
Or so he thought.
“Chief Mei! Please! Please help!”
All four of them stop and turn as one to face the boy running at them. Zhen Ping is tense and ready — even children can be lethal, Fei Liu is proof of that. But the boy, who cannot be older than ten, is dragging an even younger child behind him. They are both dirty and unkempt, which does not speak well of their family.
The boy skids to a stop in front of him and bows deeply. His younger brother is bawling. Lin Chen takes a discrete step backwards, his fan snapping in front of his face.
“What is it?” Mei Changsu asks, hands in his sleeves and expecting a plea for money or food.
“Our dog! Someone stole our dog!” Tears well in the older boy’s eyes, although he is heroically trying not to cry. “Please save our dog, Chief Mei! I know you can!”
Zhen Ping looks at the kids like they are both insane, then over at Mei Changsu.
“Why would someone steal your dog?” He asks, trying to be gentle while also trying to figure out if this could be some kind of trap.
The boy looks around furtively. “Wang Hong has an illegal dog fighting house. They steal smaller dogs to use as bait. Please, Chief Mei, before our dog gets killed!”
The younger boy, who might be five or six, wails. Lin Chen takes another step backwards.
Mei Changsu glances around, hoping to see their parents close by, but all the adults on the busy street are very studiously ignoring the scene. Which is suspicious, he thinks. He wonders who Wang Hong really is. He wonders how this child knows who he is.
“Fei Liu, go find this child’s dog, please,” Mei Changsu sighs. There will be no extricating themselves from this gracefully.
Indeed, far, far less than gracefully. It was not a trap, but over the course of the afternoon the Jiangzou Alliance ends up shutting down an unauthorized dog fighting ring, an illegal casino, a brothel that traded in selling children, and (somewhat randomly, Mei Changsu thinks) a decrepit tea house operating without a food license.
Prince Jing and the Capital Patrol are even called in, once things start getting violent.
In the end, the boys get their (very tiny) dog back, mostly unharmed, and charm a reluctant Lin Chen into checking its torn leg.
“There. Keep it clean and don’t let the little pig roll around in the mud,” Lin Chen says, standing up.
The youngest boy laughs. “It’s a dog, not a pig!”
“That’s good, because pigs are nasty. Do not eat pigs,” Lin Chen instructs them with his fan pointing at their faces.
The little boy boggles but the older boy knows when to leave a good thing alone and runs off, holding the dog and dragging his brother. “Thank you Doctor Lin! Thank you!”
Lin Chen saunters back to where Mei Changsu is waiting for him, a sly smile on his face. “Those two singlehandedly destroyed a whole block,” he says with admiration.
“Technically I think it was their dog that was the flash point,” Mei Changsu replies, trying not to laugh.
Lin Chen’s smile drops. Mei Changsu follows his line of sight and sees Jingyan headed towards them. Along with a... pony?
“Is that a dog?” Mei Changsu exclaims in lieu of greeting, then remembers himself and bows. “Your Highness.”
Jingyan snorts. “No one wants this dog, she’s too big and ugly.”
“She suits you,” Lin Chen mumbles from behind his fan.
Jingyan gives him a side-eye glare but focuses back on Mei Changsu. “I have a dog. I don’t think they will get along, and even if they did, I don’t want them to get along and make more giant dogs.”
Mei Changsu waves a hand at the people milling around, staring at the prince, who is definitely not a regular visitor to this area of the city. “I’m sure someone will—”
Jingyan throws the end of the lead at him and Mei Changsu fumbles for it.
“Congratulations, Sir Su. I am pleased to gift you this excellent companion in recognition of all the extra work you made for us here today.” Jingyan grins at him with the lopsided smile of smug amusement that has not changed even a little since they were kids.
“Your highness! There is no need, truly, I am unworthy—”
“Good luck.” Jingyan turns his back on them and walks away, the insufferable bastard.
Lin Chen snickers and also walks away. Zhen Ping looks between Mei Changsu and the dog a few times, then runs off to secure a carriage.
Mei Changsu looks down. Not far, because she really is a big dog. Her shaggy, dirty fur is a dark mahogany color, and she has a mane around her neck that is caked with mud. She is built like a house: thick and solid, through and through. Her head comes up to his waist, and he suspects that even under all the (matted) fur, she weighs more than he does.
She is smiling but her floppy face is scarred, and her left ear is in tatters from an old injury. Her tail was broken and has healed at an odd angle. She is singularly unattractive, even for a beast bred for the fighting ring. Prancing gracefully on her bear-like paws, she lets out one happy, ringing bark that resonates down the entire street, causing people to instinctively back away.
Mei Changsu loves her.
Fei Liu and Li Gang are very unhappy about bathing the new addition to the household, because it means they get an impromptu bath as well but do as they are told. When she’s clean and mostly dry, she is led out to where Mei Changsu sits in the garden outside of his personal rooms. He is armed with a set of brushes and combs he had Zhen Ping buy for the purpose on their way home.
Lin Chen stands back and watches, wordlessly, as Mei Changsu finishes drying the dog off with some old blankets Auntie Ji scrounged up, then sets to combing her out.
She is thrilled with the attention but seems to know that Mei Changsu (unlike Li Gang and Fei Liu) is not a person she can sit on or push around. She gently stretches out on the grass and lets him detangle her fur (or, in some cases, cut away matted patches). It is a peaceful activity and he drops into a meditative state of mind as he works.
Lin Chen smirks at him from where he has, at some point during the proceedings, set himself up at a table with tea and a couple of books.
“Go ahead, I know you want to say something,” Mei Changsu sighs.
“What is her name?”
That was not the question he expected, but it is a fair one. “Mingmei.”
Lin Chen stares at him. “‘Bright and Beautiful’? You are fucking kidding me?”
Mei Changsu does not deign to answer him. After a few moments, Lin Chen leans forward again.
“Are you certain your precious prince will be willing to share your adoration with a dog? Seems an odd courting gift.”
Mei Changsu pauses, briefly, then resumes brushing as calmly as he can while his mind spins out of control.
In all the centuries they have been lovers, Lin Chen is always happiest when they are away from Jinling. Mei Changsu had assumed it was because Lin Chen hates the city.
He was wrong.
Lin Chen doesn’t give a damn about the city.
Lin Chen hates Jingyan.
Lin Chen is jealous of Jingyan.
Lin Chen thinks Mei Changsu is in love with Jingyan.
All this time he has endlessly pondered whether Lin Chen was really in love with him, or could be, and why he wouldn’t admit it until the bitter end. All this time and Mei Changsu had no fucking clue.
He feels like a damned fool.
Mei Changsu dies with Lin Chen’s lips on his, kissing him, sending him away — and he still does not know now to convince him that he loves him.
He’s said it so many times in so many cycles and meant it every time. At this point, he does not remember not being in love with Lin Chen. His own history is becoming slippery, the further back he tries to remember, and all he knows is that he has loved Lin Chen possibly forever.
But for Lin Chen, it is barely a year, and most of that time he is so convinced that Mei Changsu is in love with Jingyan that he holds himself back. And then, of course, the man he loves is doomed to die. There does not seem to be any consolation to be had, Mei Changsu thinks.
They make love, they fuck, they bicker and argue, they walk all over Jinling. And once again he hears the bitter taste of Lin Chen’s comment: “Are you certain your precious prince will be willing to share your adoration with a dog? Seems an odd courting gift.”
The only positive aspect of the situation is that now that he knows the problem, Mei Changsu has an eternity to find the solution.
It does not go as planned.
“I had no idea you were this talented,” Lin Chen says when Mei Changsu finishes playing his guqin.
Lin Chen is sprawled out sideways on the floor with too many pillows around him. Despite his protests and complaints about dog hair, he has Mingmei’s head in his lap, and she looks up at them sleepily. He has a book in hand but he is staring intently at Mei Changsu.
“Thank you,” he says, and plucks at the strings again without any real purpose.
Lin Chen sits up, dislodging the dog who plods out of the room in a huff. “That was ethereal playing. I’ve never heard the like. It’s as if you have been practicing every day since birth, yet for all the years you were at Langya Hall, I never once knew you to touch an instrument.”
Mei Changsu can’t explain that he has had approximately five hundred years (or more, he has no idea) of practice by now, so he stays quiet. At this point, his recovery in Langya Hall is barely even a memory. A myth, maybe, of something that happened to him once in his distant past.
“Xiao Su,” Lin Chen says, quietly. “When did you learn to play?”
Mei Changsu shakes his head, feeling reckless. “You don’t want to know.”
“I think I do. I really want to know, Mei Changsu,” Lin Chen, now suspicious of where the conversation is going, leans toward him, staring intently.
Mei Changsu plucks at the strings again for a moment. Tired and sad, he gets up and goes to one of his cabinets, unlocking a door and pulling out the box with the rock in it. He has re-wrapped it in plain muslin cloth, so Lin Chen does not recognize it on sight. He hands it over and sits back down at his guqin, playing another song.
When he looks up again, Lin Chen is staring at the open box as if he has been gutted.
“How did you get this?” He asks, his voice soft and tense. He looks like he is going to faint.
“You gave it to me on my deathbed, once, long ago, and you made me promise not to let you know I have it until I am on my deathbed again. Now I give it to you, over and over and over again, right before I die.”
“No,” he whispers, horrified.
“So you do know what it represents,” Mei Changsu says, returning to the music. It drifts over them for the length of two songs before Lin Chen dares to reply.
“I would not do that to you,” he says, his voice soft, disbelieving.
“You did.”
Lin Chen goes through a series of emotions, coming to a decision before sitting up straight and still, the most proper Mei Changsu has seen him in...well, years. “How many times?”
“I don’t know. I honestly don’t,” he adds, seeing Lin Chen rousing to argue. “Many centuries, possibly five, at least. Long enough for me to become an ethereal player.” He waves a hand over the instrument, knowing his expression is wry and teasing, but getting a blank look of horror in return.
“Xiao Su—”
“I don’t know why you did it, and you don’t know how to make it stop, do you?”
Lin Chen’s silence is answer enough.
“And the rock?” He adds the question, still curious.
“I assume...it was an attempt to change things. A long shot. An...an impossibility.” Lin Chen looks down at the box in his hands, the plain rock sitting in it innocuously. “I am a fool.”
“That would make two of us, then.” He gets up and moves to sit next to Lin Chen, who appears to be in shock. He gently takes the box out of his hands and sets it aside. With all the pillows strewn about them it is easy to lay him down, kiss him, make love to him. Usually their coupling is noisy and filled with teasing and rebukes, the back and forth of two bright, willful minds. Tonight it is quiet and gentle.
Mei Changsu thinks later as they doze curled up together under the blankets that it is as close to an apology as he will ever get from Lin Chen for doing this to him.
Lin Chen does not bring up the matter of the rock again, and when Mei Changsu is dying, he accepts it wordlessly.
Mei Changsu dies with Lin Chen’s lips on his, kissing him, sending him away.
After his depression finally lifts completely, which takes many cycles, Mei Changsu returns to the original script with a clean heart and a clear mind. It’s not nirvana but he has reached a certain peace with the course of events, an understanding that he has no direct control over his fate. If he is to spend eternity reliving this single year, then he must do it earnestly and with intent because he does not know which cycle might, gods willing, be his last.
He re-reads the Analycts and the Tao Te Ching at least once per cycle, meditates more faithfully, and continues practicing the guqin. Knowing that he will die regardless of what he does, he sets more time aside to play with Fei Liu and tries harder to mend bridges with Jingrui and by extension, Yujin. He tentatively sets up Gong Yu as a potential bride to Yujin, knowing how valuable such a politically savvy couple will be to Jingyan in the future. He saves Tong Lu. He continues to shut down the dog fighting operation, sometimes more viciously than others, and brings Mingmei home.
Then he starts doing more than that.
Mei Changsu is deeply ashamed of how long — how many centuries — it has taken him to realize how much good he can do in a year. Mei Changsu grew up as Lin Shu, Jinling native, and thought he knew the city as well as anyone. Saving Mingmei showed him how wrong he was, and from then on he has taken to using his idle days to wander around aimlessly, Fei Liu at his elbow while Mingmei darts around begging for scraps from soft-hearted, fearless grannies. Lin Chen often follows too, fussing like a chicken at his heels.
He discovers all the dirty, nasty secrets the city holds beyond those of the palace. He comes to understand, and loathe, poverty in a way his privileged upbringing or his worldly travels never allowed him to see before. He watches familial bonds break over the sorriest of reasons.
Sadly, he also learns that there is so much he cannot do in a year, and some lives he cannot save. Elders die of old age, sick children die of illness, and some accidents simply cannot be circumvented. Sometimes the cost of rescuing one person is the lives of five others. There are tragedies that have taken years, if not generations, to bloom and cannot be undone by Fei Liu’s fists or Mei Changsu’s money. But he tries.
Mingmei was the start of it, he thinks as he adds another name to his list. He cannot take the List of Consummate Duties with him with he dies (he tried clutching it in his hand, but it was not there when he woke up) so writing it down each cycle helps burn it into his memory. He could not remember it in full otherwise.
This name is of a three-year-old child who was crushed to death by a cart in a public market when a horse balked. Next cycle, Mei Changsu will add it to Fei Liu’s daily roster to pull the child to safety. Fei Liu’s duties have grown significantly, because Mei Changsu cannot jump into the street to drag a child out of harm’s way, or pull a violent man away from beating his wife, or skip around the city as quickly as all these rescues require.
Fei Liu loves being a hero. He is creating his own legend as the “Plum Blossom Benefactor” around these acts of kindness and is developing a following. Mei Changsu thinks, as he does so rarely now, that should the cycle ever end that he will need to set Fei Liu up with his own martial arts sect in the jianghu. Likely under Lin Chen’s purview, of course, and perhaps with Meng Zhi’s input, but becoming a teacher would be something Fei Liu would enjoy and excel at with the right oversight.
Eventually, as his list grows and Fei Liu takes to the streets with his assignments on a daily basis, Mei Changsu becomes popularly known as the Bodhisattva of Jinling, or with the Taoists, the Immortal Sage of Jinling. He finds both labels pretentious and immodest, but as hard as he works to find the source, he never does. Every cycle, now, they seems to arise out of the heart of the city like mist through the mountains, natural and inevitable.
The first time Lin Chen hears it he laughs. But as the wheel turns and Mei Changsu adjusts to the warp and weft of his new role, letting it hang over his shoulders like a well-worn cape, Lin Chen laughs less each time. He eyes Mei Changsu speculatively but never says anything, which only means he is mulling on it.
The cycles keep going and Lin Chen’s suspicions arise earlier and earlier in the year. Mei Changsu has been down this particular path enough to find ways to distract him or derail him, but only to an extent. He’s learned, for one thing, to imply that his guqin playing was due to having an intense affair with Gong Yu — it’s a bit unfair to her, but Lin Chen won’t gossip, and Mei Changsu has taken to just sending her back to Langzhou before even leaving on the spring hunt, so she’s not there to argue it (he has Yujin escort her, and that tends to settle matters for the rest of the year...and their lives, should the cycle ever break).
It’s harder to explain away his ability to foretell the future. Doing so is a more complicated dance than he’s been used to doing for centuries now, but he makes it work.
More or less.
For a while.
Lin Chen, being Lin Chen, keeps poking at the issue like the sharp, cunning mind he is. If there is one single person alive that Mei Changsu would not want to go up against, directly or indirectly, it is Lin Chen. His behavior is designed to throw people off and make them underestimate him, but Lin Chen is a master of deception and secrecy. When seen in solitary isolation, Lin Chen’s countenance is craggy with thought and his brilliance arises from a depth that even Mei Changsu cannot fully fathom. Sometimes, Mei Changsu compares him to the oldest bodies of water he saw during his travels: dark, deep, cold, and deadly in the most beautiful ways, reflecting light like sharp-edged crystals.
Seducing him has always felt a little dangerous.
Finally, in one cycle, the inevitable happens. He has let too many good deeds pile up, to many “circumstantial” rescues occur. Lin Chen eyes Mei Changsu speculatively in mid-summer and says, “I would not have thought it a year ago, but you have changed in some profound ways I cannot fathom.”
Mei Changsu holds his breath for a moment, waiting for more, but Lin Chen stops there and simply stares at him for a moment before changing the topic.
Of course he should have known that was not the end of the matter, and in future cycles he will make sure it never gets this far. In the meantime, he’s standing in his study, staring at Lin Chen, who is holding the by-now very long List of Consummate Duties and looking at him with a mix of anger and deep suspicion.
“Are you psychic now? You commune with the gods? How do you know all of this?” He holds up the list, furious.
Mei Changsu sighs and shakes his head. “I can’t tell you. You don’t even want to know.”
“You have no right to decide that for me.” He slaps the pages of names and dates down on the desk.
“I have every right.” He points at the list. “Put it back where you found it.”
“Not without an explanation.” He leans over the desk and his eyes glitter in the reflected lamp light. Mei Changsu almost imagines a banked fire stirring in them.
“No.”
“Did you think I wouldn’t notice how your behavior has been incredibly out of character for you since you came back from the spring hunt? I know you better than anyone!”
“True enough,” Mei Changsu agrees. “But does it matter?”
“What?” Lin Chen looks incredulous.
“I will answer that for you: no. No, it does not matter. I am here, now, and I am Mei Changsu. In the next couple of weeks, give or take, the rumor will start spreading throughout the city that I am a bodhisattva. I cannot even dream of anything more unlike me than that. And yet.” He shrugs.
“How—” Lin Chen still looks more angry than suspicious, but it’s a close call.
“Again: It doesn’t matter.” He walks over and gently pulls the list from under Lin Chen’s hand. He looks at it briefly then looks up at Lin Chen. “Let me ask you this, instead: do you believe in magic?”
Lin Chen steps back abruptly. “Is that a threat?”
It is such an odd leap to make that it gives Mei Changsu pause. He has no doubt that Lin Chen used magic of some kind to send him on this journey, yet for him to act this defensively is surprising.
“No. No threat. But your response shows that you do believe in magic, or understand that it exists.” Mei Changsu folds up the list and puts it back in its cubbyhole, walking around the desk to do so. He then turns to face Lin Chen. They are barely a handspan apart. He leans forward, lips brushing against Lin Chen’s ear. “I won’t ask you about your secrets if you don’t ask me about mine,” Mei Changsu whispers.
Lin Chen shudders and sucks in a wet gasp of air. “Xiao Shu,” he says, and there is something to the tenor of the words that sound hesitant, at least, and possibly even scared.
And with that, Mei Changsu he knows that this is something he can use. He can shut down Lin Chen’s inconvenient and unhelpful digging for the truth, every time, every year, forever, with this simple request.
Mei Changsu hates himself sometimes, he really does.
He takes Lin Chen’s face in his and ignores how uncharacteristically raw and vulnerable the other man looks in order to kiss him instead. He cannot give him the truth any more than Lin Chen can save him, now, but this much he can do: love him, comfort him, lie to him.
On the way to Da Yu, toward the end of the year and his life, Mei Changsu starts to take time to get to know his staff. In a normal life, there is not enough time for a general to become familiar with his entire complement of officers, only the top commanders and a few helpful lieutenants. But enough cycles pass that in time, in centuries of time, he learns the names and the stories of every one of the 1,488 officers under his command.
He even gets to know a few of the leading soldiers out of the tens of thousands of troops he leads. The men share whispers full of awe about his insights to their natures and histories, his keen observations, and his wise advice. They all marvel at how much he seems to know and care about every one of them, from Meng Zhi down to the lowliest cook. They raise flags giving gratitude to the bodhisattva of Jinling for leading them to war without any sense of irony about it.
Meng Zhi himself lives in stuptified amazement that Mei Changsu knows all of their men so well in the span of just a couple of months, but unlike Lin Chen does not find reason to be suspicious about it. Lin Chen, on the other hand, is always suspicious of Mei Changsu now. He is wary and defensive even in cycles when he does not find the List of Consummate Duties, but also easily defanged when Mei Changsu simply says, “I won’t ask you about your secrets if you don’t ask me about mine.” It is a pyrrhic victory against the man he loves, but it staves off further confrontations.
And so the legend of Mei Changsu, the bodhisattva of Jinling, continues to grow, faster and faster each cycle. It changes from a whisper to a roar, and should the cycle ever break on his death, he knows that even Jingyan will be forever remembered as the Emperor blessed by the bodhisattva of Jinling, the man the “living saint” Mei Changsu put on the dragon throne. He knows one historian traveling with the army is already drafting a book of his sayings for posterity. He laughs about that, but Lin Chen does not.
Still, it is only a year. Just enough time to set Jingyan on his path to emperor, and never enough time to convince Lin Chen that Mei Changsu loves him and only him. Never enough time to keep Lin Chen from sneaking out of the bed after they have sex, never enough time to keep him close enough that they can wake to the dawn in each other’s arms.
In what he knows is the most ironic thought of his entire existence, Mei Changsu wonders what he could do if he just had more time.
Characters: Fēi Liú, Lìn Chén, Lín Shū · Méi Chángsū · Sū Zhé
Narrative mode: third-limited