Chapter Text
Su Nan isn’t quite sure when it happens.
One moment, she’s relishing in the satisfaction of a job well done, how she’ll get to rub it into everyone else’s face that she was the one who got to kill Wu Xie. How after all their trying, the Wu family heir fell at her hands.
The next thing she knows, she’s sobbing in the snow, trying not to look at the still body less than three feet from her. There’s no blood, but she can almost smell it in the air, mingling with the overwhelming stench of the flowers and turning her stomach.
She’s still crying when she crawls over to check his pulse. His skin’s still warm, but he’s absolutely still.
She sits with him for too long, much longer than is necessary for her to make sure that he’s really dead.
Wu Xie had said he’d remember her.
His eyes are already closed, but she brushes her fingers over his face anyway. He’s cold.
Su Nan lets herself cry until she reaches the foot of the mountain, then she wipes her eyes, reapplies her lipstick, and doesn’t shed a single tear over Wu Xie ever again.
Li Cu and Shen Qiong are aggravating beyond belief, and when they start their puppy-love bullshit, Su Nan almost wishes she’d stayed behind to be killed instead.
Better quick than slow. She’s cursed; she can smell it as it takes root, like rotting fruit. It’s slow acting and already painful, meant to cripple her so they can take her back and deal with her however they please. It'll kill her eventually, but for now she has time.
Maybe she can go back to the mountains.
It hadn’t seemed so bad.
She supposes the flowers were quite beautiful.
“Would you still have liked me if we were normal?” Shen Qiong asks Li Cu.
Su Nan wants to tell her not to be fucking stupid.
The fact of the matter is that they’re not normal. That even if by some miracle the three of them make it out of this alive, none of them will ever be normal.
Not when she and Shen Qiong know what it feels like to squeeze someone’s throat, nails scratching the backs of their hands as they struggled, until their bodies went limp and they never struggled again. Not when they both know that blood of a fenghuang burned like fine wine going down. Not when they’ve both been caught up so deeply in what they’ve always been told they are, who they’ve been told they were, that neither of them knows where the tool ends and the woman begins.
Not when Li Cu's seen the things that he's seen, not when he has a world-ending key carved into his back. Especially not if Li Cu stays with Shen Qiong.
“Of course I would still like you,” Li Cu says.
Su Nan doesn’t have to tell Shen Qinog that it’s a lie.
(Shen Qiong doesn’t have to tell her that, regardless, she loves him anyway.)
“Tell me about him,” Su Nan says, moving one of her pieces on the board. She plays black, Wu Xie plays white.
“Tell you about who?” Wu Xie places one of his stones, keeping her trapped in the ladder.
“Your friend who has a statue in the courtyard,” she says. “The one you said you remember as though he never left.”
It’s meant to be mocking, but comes out genuinely curious instead.
They play a couple more moves in silence before he says, “He liked to eat spicy things. It made his nose run like crazy, but he always powered through anyway. He never complained and would eat just about anything, but he didn’t like bitter things. He always ate those things first and shoved the next thing into his mouth as fast as he could.
“He liked puzzles and he was really good at them. We used to spend entire days making up increasingly difficult ones to try and stump each other. Usually he’d win, but he’d always teach me the trick in the end.”
He glances up at her through his long lashes, rubs the smooth stone between his thumb and index finger. There’s a rueful grin on his boyish face. “Or maybe he was just humoring me. Our mutual friends always said that he spoiled me.”
Su Nan can understand, then immediately wishes she could punch herself in the face for even thinking it. There’s already poison running through his veins, he doesn’t feel it yet, but she’s been counting down the days. It’s good that she’d made her move early.
There had been speculation back headquarters that Wu Xie was using some kind of magic or charm to draw people close to him, and Su Nan desperately wishes that it were true, but from the moment she met him, she’s never smelled anything close to the kind of sickly saccharine scent that always clings to people who use that kind of magic like second hand smoke.
He’s always just smelled like a man. Sweaty in the desert – when they were hydrated enough to sweat – and, now, like the cold air in the mountains.
He places down another stone and the clack against the board finally pulls her focus back to their game.
She curses so furiously that it sends Wu Xie into a rare burst of laughter. He throws his head back, eyes crinkling at the corners, wheezing unattractively.
Everywhere she looks, she’s caught in his net.
Shen Qiong dies, and Su Nan feels nothing. They’re tools. You don’t weep over a broken knife.
But Li Cu cries and cries and cries, even as she drags the fool boy along after her.
Li Cu’s stupid for not leaving when he had the chance, and Su Nan’s even dumber for following him, but she can’t get Shen Qiong’s face out of her head. She’d been resigned and triumphant expression all at once as Li Cu had screamed that he’d been using her all along, that he’d never loved her.
The boy really was a terrible liar.
Li Cu would remember her for as long as he lived. She would die Shen Qiong, and not just Wang Xiaoyuan who no one would mourn.
Su Nan doesn’t cry for Shen Qiong because she’d won.
Li Cu's a better fighter than he was in the desert, but that’s not a particularly high bar to jump, and the curse still throbs with each of Su Nan’s heartbeats.
She’s not used to having to fight while considering someone else’s safety, and it slows them down. When Li Cu cries out in pain, her blood races and she feels… something. Uneasy. It’s incredibly inconvenient. Almost every time Su Nan pushes him out of danger, she ends up taking the hit instead.
But when she’s reeling from a blow to the head, he tackles someone rushing to catch her in her moment of weakness. The savageness with which he sinks his blunt teeth into the person’s nose and comes away with a bloodied mouth makes Su Nan feel proud.
“Thanks,” she says, accepting the steadying hand on her arm.
Li Cu’s eyes are still puffy and red. “Now I don’t owe you and you don’t owe me either.”
She’d roll her eyes if she had the time. Brat.
Su Nan sinks her knife into a man she used to fight over the red bean buns with and pulls it out in an arc of blood.
“Is Su Nan your real name?” Wu Xie asks.
He’s sitting in the snow, cross legged, back to her. She hasn’t decided if it’s a gesture of trust (I know you won’t hurt me), or a gesture of arrogance (I know you can’t hurt me).
“It’s the only name I have,” she says, exhaling after a long drag of her cigarette. Their supply is limited and it’s her turn to smoke today. “Why, doesn’t it suit me?”
“It does, I was just wondering.”
He’s so aggravating. What kind of grown man plays in the snow? She can’t remember the last time snow was anything but an annoyance to her.
It blows off the surrounding rooftops with the cold breeze and settles around them like diamond dust. Melts before it can reach the ember of her cigarette, and floats around them in a haze.
She closes her eyes, still a little sensitive after the snow blindness. The next inhale of smoke curls in her mouth and she holds it in until it feels like her lungs are fit to burst. She blows out and watches it send the suspended snowflakes scurrying around in a panic.
“No one’s ever called me anything but Su Nan,” she says.
There’s a little bit of quiet before Wu Xie says, “I’ve had lots of different names over the years. My uncles call me Xiao Xie, Pangzi calls me Tianzhen, people call me Xiao Sanye. I’ve made different names for myself that I think I’ve forgotten some of them.”
Su Nan nods. It makes sense. There needs to be a relationship in order to warrant something like a nickname, and she’s never had the kind of connection necessary to warrant one. She can’t even remember being called something all that personally insulting.
Wu Xie forms bonds as easily as shaking hands. It’s not reasonable that someone so willing to twist themselves into knots for strangers should have lived for so long. Should still be so willing to do so again and again when all it’s gotten them is hurt.
“I don’t have anything against the nicknames, they’re fond, they’re a part of the relationships that I have with those people. But the moments where I felt the most seen, the moments where I felt I was the most understood, I was always called Wu Xie.”
She doesn’t realize she’s staring at his back until she feels the heat from where the cigarette’s burned down close to her fingers. She stubs it out onto the ground and pockets the butt to throw away later.
Wu Xie hears her walking towards him and leans backwards on his hands, pushing his legs out in front of him and destroying the picture he’d been drawing in the snow. He grins up at her, snow in his hair, bangs falling in his eyes.
He needs a haircut.
She sits down in the snow next to him and traces her fingers through a clean patch of snow. It stings as the warmth from her fingers melts the ice.
Someone used to call her something different. Nothing especially insulting, but something that made her groan in irritation even when it made her smile. But she can’t even remember, so does it really count?
She doesn't really understand. How can a name be anything but a name? Even if Su Nan weren't her real name, his knowing it wouldn't give him any more or less power over her.
She writes her name in the snow. It doesn’t help.
When she looks up, Wu Xie’s watching her with his too curious eyes.
She wipes her name away.
Wang Can knows when he’s lost. Even with Su Nan so injured and Li Cu so inexperienced, two against one isn’t exactly great odds.
She smells the magic, like burning plastic, before he’s even done drawing the sigil into the puddle of his own blood on the floor.
None of them really believe in souls, the Wang family doctrine says they’re not real, but Wang Can must really be desperate if he’s willing to use his non-existent one as fuel to burn the two of them to death.
By the time she’s shoved Li Cu out the window, Wang Can is screaming in pain. The clothes are peeling off his back, the skin is peeling off his back, the flesh is peeling off his back with the flames that rise up off of him like a terrible flower in bloom. If they had souls, Wang Can's would be ugly just like her's, but right now it's almost beautiful.
Wang Can’s eyes are blinded by pain, he can’t see her staring at him in horror, in pity.
The fire over takes him, racing towards her.
Su Nan wonders how Li Cu will remember her, if Li Cu will remember her.
If anyone will remember her.
She closes her eyes. She can smell snow.