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Mo Xi realizes his misstep at the way Gu Mang’s face freezes—softly and in degrees, frost tracing over his expression until only a mask remains.
"Darling," he croons, tilting his head, walking closer with a dangerous grace. "You’re hardly worth her price.” Gu Mang's hand comes up to cup his cheek, the pad of his thumb tracing over his mouth as if to let him taste the derision that hangs in the air.
Mo Xi swallows. It would’ve worked eight years ago, sent him storming away in hurt, blind fury. He’s strangely numb instead; there’s only a pit in his stomach, left hollow by the emperor’s words and the Time Mirror’s reflection.
Gu Mang smiles at his silence, too sharp. "You should go.”
"I won't," Mo Xi says, hoarse but unshaking. The sound of it echoes strangely in this voice, so young and so long ago. “I’ll take her place.”
"Oh?" Gu Mang's thumb pauses against his mouth.
Mo Xi stares at the ornate carvings on the silk screen behind him, stubbornly unwilling to face whatever’s in Gu Mang’s eyes. Apathy, perhaps. Idle curiosity, the way a cat would slap around smaller prey.
He takes a breath to reply but Gu Mang tilts his face with one hand, nudging a thumb between his teeth and against the tip of his tongue. Mo Xi freezes, caught in the mad glint in those black—black!—eyes.
"Tell me. What did you think I was paying for?" Gu Mang's tone is light, conversational. "It's not like you know how to play the pipa, or to please." Mo Xi can't think around his touch, the hint of salt on Gu Mang’s fingertip. “It's not cheap to buy the pleasure of her company, either."
Gu Mang draws out the syllables the way honey drips, long and languorous. "Fifty silver cowries, gone just like that."
They're so close Gu Mang has to look up at him slightly, his fingers gentle on Mo Xi’s jaw. He strokes a thumb over his mouth in parody of a kiss, a fleeting touch that nevertheless seems to burn. Mo Xi’s breaths come so shallow they seem to do nothing at all, leaving him tense, claustrophobic. He doesn’t know what Gu Mang wants him to say, what he could even try to say. You were paying for—you were paying to—
No sound comes out but the words scorch themselves through his head, flickering afterimages in their wake. Shivering, Mo Xi tries to say it, to swear it if that’s what he wants him to do but suddenly Gu Mang has his index finger pressing over his lips.
“Shh. None of that.” Soft as a whisper. Gu Mang grins, but his eyes stay flat. "I know what you’ll say—how filthy. How inappropriate."
He pulls away from Mo Xi, resettling himself in the bamboo daybed with a lion’s lazy grace.
"I don't care what you think,” he dismisses, a flick of his eyes cast up at him over the rim of his cup. “Off you go."
But Mo Xi doesn't go. His fingers make a grab for Gu Mang's hand but freeze inches from touching skin, too afraid to feel him yank away. Distantly he feels that familiar ache settle behind his ribs, that deep thudding sadness like the beat of a battering ram. It feels new in this body, tender as a fresh-struck bruise.
The mirror is an illusion. None of it will be real when they leave, but because of it, in spite of it—-he kneels.
Gu Mang pauses for a second when he sees, just long enough for Mo Xi to catch a flicker of shock in his face. It’s not disgust, for which Mo Xi is pathetically glad. His voice nearly cracks when he tries to speak.
"Teach me, then." His heart pounds into the waiting silence. Call and response, a path they’d worn familiar.
Teach me, Shixiong. Teach me.
Somehow, somewhere, it started to mean please.
Gu Mang leans forward and over him, so deliberate it feels like an invasion. Mo Xi commits the sight helplessly to memory, transfixed by sharp lines and deadly grace. So different and so familiar; the edges are blurring between the blue-eyed shell and this ghost from the past—in the flesh, close enough to touch.
Mo Xi can feel the whisper of Gu Mang’s breath, sweet with the fragrance of pear blossom white. "Do you know what you’re saying?" Gu Mang asks, flat and unreadable.
"Yes.” He licks his lips almost unconsciously, too clumsy to even attempt seduction. "Just—tell me how."
His face burns when he says it but it doesn't matter, nothing matters as long as he can keep Gu Mang's eyes on him. This Gu Mang, brittle, black-eyed and bitter.
“Princess." Gu Mang murmurs, the word pitched different in a voice that remembers what it meant. "You'll be the death of me, won't you?"
He reaches out to cup Mo Xi’s face again, gently. Mo Xi leans pathetically into the touch, into the brush of callused fingers against his cheekbone. His eyes shut when Gu Mang bends to kiss him, softly and sweet. It’s so strange to have to tilt his face up, the angle new and unfamiliar.
When he pulls away Mo Xi nearly pitches forward, free-fall, afraid once again of losing Gu Mang’s interest. “I won’t leave,” his voice embarrassingly rough. “You can’t make me.”
Something hardens in Gu Mang’s face. "Xihe-jun," he says, drawing out each syllable. It's not a title, coming from him, but it never needed to be. “I did warn you.”
Gu Mang leans back and abruptly the room seems colder. Mo Xi watches him, reading the darkness of his eyes, seeing how they assess him and find him—ridiculous? Weak? Gu Mang already knew that. He waits, oddly at peace. Teach me, he’d asked. This is the lesson.
When Gu Mang reaches out Mo Xi tries to follow, a mindless swaying toward the warmth of his touch. His hand digs into Mo Xi’s hair. “Stay still.”
Flat, inflectionless, and not something to be disobeyed. There’s a glint in the candlelight, sharp and silver from the short blade in his other hand—Mo Xi hadn’t even noticed him unsheathe it. His breath catches sharply in his throat, heart rabbiting in place.
This body doesn't have the Dongting scar but his heart seems to thud in recognition, a maddened fluttering like moth wings inches from flame. He looks wide-eyed up at Gu Mang, mouth dry, lips parting around words that don’t come. There’s a crooked curve to Gu Mang’s smile and it makes Mo Xi look down, away, eyes darting to the safety of the patterned rugs on the floor.
It doesn’t help. The dagger is held just before his sternum, pointed toward his heart. Mo Xi can’t help but tense, remembering the terrible cold of bleeding out on the deck of the ship. It had been a different blade but the same man, the same mocking brilliance in his eyes. He can’t breathe, frozen like an insect caught in amber. Mo Xi can feel the ghost of copper rising in his throat.
It feels foolish in the moments after, when Gu Mang drags it upward and it cuts through the ties of his collar like barely-there strings of silk; one layer, two. The edge doesn’t even touch Mo Xi’s skin, which prickles fever-hot beneath the shifting fabrics of his clothes. He shivers. It’s a struggle to keep his hands on his thighs, his breathing halfway even. He can still hear Gu Mang’s voice, low and firm. Stay still. Did the girl need to be told, too?
Mo Xi’s high collar loosens enough for Gu Mang to push it aside, the cloth falling away from his neck like shed steel. He's being cut open and flayed, pinned beneath the blade of his stare. Mo Xi tries not to shiver the same way small animals know when not to run.
Gu Mang notices it anyway, bringing the flat of the dagger up to his jaw and making him meet his eyes. "Scared?” There’s expectation in his tone: that Mo Xi would snap, that Mo Xi would leave.
Mo Xi only grits his teeth and glares, hot all over with the push-and-pull of their wills, finally matched like clashing blades. Gu Mang huffs a quiet laugh, tracing Mo Xi’s cheek with the cold knifepoint. He won’t cut him, even if he will soon, on a ship a world away. Here, that future exists only nebulously, everything still hanging precariously in balance. It’s another piece of calming, terrible knowledge—that despite everything, and certainly not now—Gu Mang would never mar his face.
Mo Xi’s fingernails dig into the flesh of his palm, tiny breaths coming quick through his mouth. Gu Mang smiles, delighting in his uncertainty.
It’s to be a game, then. That makes it easier when his inner robes are undone and pushed away, too, until he’s half bare, still on his knees.
The dagger is gone when Gu Mang touches him next, sheathed and tucked away. Mo Xi is not reassured by its absence. The rug is plush beneath his knees as he waits, unsure. Unwilling to grope blindly for the rules, to test the bounds of Gu Mang’s forbearance.
He doesn’t have to wait long. Gu Mang takes hold of his jaw again, deceptively gentle. “Open,” he says, fingers brushing his lips. Mo Xi does with a graze of teeth, the tiniest of protestations. Gu Mang watches him through half-lidded eyes, observing almost lazily.
Indignant, Mo Xi licks at his fingers, sucking more of them into his mouth. Tracing their shape on his tongue, tasting the salt on his skin. He’s dizzy with so much want he couldn’t say anything even if he tried, all words reduced to the fingers pressing down on his tongue, not enough to make him choke but enough for his head to go blank with the threat.
Gu Mang laughs and Mo Xi tenses, recognizing the lilt in his voice as a prelude. “She cost fifty cowries but you, you’d do it for free, won’t you?”
Mo Xi makes a noise and flushes harder, the words hitting him with all the cruel tenderness of a lash. It’s awful—it’s true, as much as it’s blatantly wrong—if it had been that girl, any of the maidens Gu Mang flirts with for a day, he would’ve been sweet about it, laughing and teasing no matter how little of it he meant.
Won’t you? It wasn’t really a question but he’d answered it anyway, the proof of it shining wet and slick on Gu Mang’s fingers when he finally takes them out of Mo Xi’s mouth.
He would, anything, and Gu Mang must know it.
Mo Xi shivers. There’s a tantrum boiling low in his throat, a ceaseless whine of Shixiong, don’t, don’t make me. He wants to turn away and bury his face in his hands. Mo Xi wonders, madly, if he’d simply spent the well of kindness Gu Mang had for him, taken too much too fast. It’s not fair; he hadn’t known, all the empty protestations of a child. It’s a thought that spins him out into a wave of despair only interrupted by a tug on his scalp—-Gu Mang pulling out the pin of his guan, then the rest of it, to be abandoned somewhere to the side, a soft thud of metal on the woolen rug.
Mo Xi’s hair falls heavy around his bare shoulders, like a veil. Gu Mang brushes a lock of it away from his face, letting him hide like he knows what Mo Xi was thinking. It’s a cold sort of mercy, to be known so well.
Shame crawls heavy up Mo Xi’s face and he wants to rebel at the nakedness of it; he’s kneeling with his clothes left open to the waist but it’s the hair that makes him shift, uneasy. He hasn’t felt like this in eight years, likely longer: cracked open to some soft molten core. Gu Mang’s fingers cup the back of Mo Xi’s neck and his thumb brushes idle circles against his nape, over where he’d placed the lotus tattoo. It’s as if Mo Xi can feel every ridge of callus, heat pulsing through him in a slow throb.
No one has touched him for so long—barring that kiss on the ship, that blue-eyed Gu Mang’s clumsy confirmation that Mo Xi never could’ve stayed away—it feels almost like mercy to be allowed this, even if for the last time. Goosebumps rising in grateful wake. Gu Mang’s hand curls around his neck and smoothes its way down his bare shoulder, slow and proprietary, tracing old scars faded flat and almost unnoticeable. Mo Xi doesn’t even remember what they’re from; he heals clean. Gu Mang had always marveled at it, fascinated by the contrast between his own roughened hands and Mo Xi’s pale skin.
Gu Mang had liked many things, once upon a time. Mo Xi lowers his lashes, looks away. The wait is a drawn out silence, Gu Mang’s attention heavy on his skin. Saliva pools in his mouth; he swallows. Gu Mang hadn’t let him before but he might now, and the knowledge of why curdles in his stomach alongside the heat of arousal. It doesn’t matter, after all. The Mirror isn’t real.
When Gu Mang gathers up his hair in one twist, tight enough to be a threat, Mo Xi shivers like a full-body sob. He’s held so that he has no choice but to meet Gu Mang’s gaze, the cutting darkness of his eyes at odds with the ghostly brush of his fingers against Mo Xi’s cheek. “What’s that, baby?”
Mo Xi’s entire body is one strained bow of yearning. Under the weight of Gu Mang’s gaze, the words slip out like an arrow loosed.
“Gege,” he whispers. “Please.”
It hangs in the air between them; one beat, then two. There’s a sharp inhale—Gu Mang takes pity on him enough to push down his pants and get his cock out, wet beading on the tip when he strokes himself. “Okay,” he breathes, hushed and hoarse. His hand cradles Mo Xi’s jaw, calluses rough on his face. “Okay.”
Mo Xi melts into the touch. He’s so clumsy, tongue-tied with want, hesitant and unsure. Gu Mang’s momentary mercy has passed; he sits back in his chair, legs spread with his hand still lazily moving. “Do you need me to help you? Hm?”
It’s too much. Mo Xi leans forward, too anxious to look up, and—just careful enough with his teeth—gets his mouth around Gu Mang’s cock.
“Good boy,” comes the croon, warm with approval, a familiar hand brushing a wisp of sweat-sticky hair from the nape of his neck. Mo Xi’s head spins. He’s being good. He wants to be better.
Gu Mang keeps touching him, thumb caressing little circles into the skin of his throat, just under jaw. It’s like he’s testing the give of it, feeling the way Mo Xi’s pulse jumps, thundering in his ears. He looks hrough his lashes, sneaking a glance—Gu Mang laughs, a quiet sound, warm and easy.
Mo Xi’s hopeless, wanting to hear it again so badly his hands twist and tighten in his lap. He takes more of it into his mouth, struggling until he feels the hand tighten in his hair. "Easy, shh, not so fast. Swallow," Gu Mang murmurs, still so gentle.
Mo Xi obeys without thinking, throat working convulsively. His hair is still gathered up in one of Gu Mang’s hands, twisted in his fist and held to keep his head still. Gu Mang exhales. “There you go.”
Mo Xi can’t even think, breathing slow and careful. Gu Mang could force him down and make him choke if he wanted. Gu Mang isn't hurting him, even when he deserves it.
His voice is sandpaper rough, gravelly. It sends a shiver through Mo Xi’s bones—he remembers the sound of that, of making it good for him. The thrill remains the same, despite his clumsiness, despite the wreck of his clothes and composure.
There’s tears in his eyes when he looks up, hollowing his cheeks as best he can. Gu Mang curses, filthy familiarity.
“So fucking good, Mo Xi, lemme see—“ and he tilts his head by the hair, Mo Xi blinking dazedly as he’s pulled off. It is, part of him whispers. So fucking good. He’s drunk in it, unmoored. Mo Xi takes a ragged inhale, shoulders shaking. His mouth is sore and tender like an overripe fruit.
“Baby,” Gu Mang whispers, soft like he’s sharing a secret. “You’re drooling so much.” He reaches out and thumbs it away.
Mo Xi shivers, lightheaded with shame and the thrill of pleasure both. He must be a mess and he knows it, in the glinting fascination of Gu Mang’s eyes as much as his own flaming cheeks.
When Gu Mang lets go he pushes himself as far as he can, trying to breathe around the hot weight in his mouth, drunk on the sounds Gu Mang makes when he swallows, messy and clumsy. Everything—every hidden secret from eight years ago—all of it’s insignificant, his world narrowed down to this and Gu Mang’s ragged breathing . Mo Xi licks at the head, working his mouth around the tip to get at the taste. Salt on his tongue.
“You’re so good, princess, so good for me.“ Gu Mang is touching his hair again, hand tangling into the mess he’s made. Mo Xi melts, leaning forward, further. Chasing the touch like a moth to flame.
“What,” Gu Mang croons, voice sticky. “You want more?” He cups the back of Mo Xi’s head, not quite pushing. “Can you?”
Mo Xi doesn’t need to think, or perhaps doesn’t dare to think; he squeezes closer, pulling off to breathe before gamely going back down, deeper every time until his lips almost reach the base. His eyes are tearing up more now, brimming with tears but it’s a good pain, a bodily response—he understands what Gu Mang means. I’m just crying. It doesn’t hurt. He bobs his head, rhythmic; Gu Mang’s pushing somewhere in his throat, so deep he feels airless, dizzy. It’s so good.
“Fuck, what the fuck,” Gu Mang swears like he can’t help himself. “Mo Xi, you, I,” he cuts off with a sharp inhale as Mo Xi swallows, wet and messy.
Mo Xi pulls back to look at him, locking eyes. Gu Mang looks like he’s swearing again, even more so when Mo Xi rasps, the sound coming out hoarse and pitiful. “Teach me,” he says, not quite a plea.
Gu Mang’s hand fists in his hair, just for a moment—Mo Xi gasps like he’s been struck, heart racing. He doesn’t dare ask for anything more.
“Okay, okay.” Gu Mang even sounds flustered, guiding him gentle back down, stroking his hair without bringing it together and yanking the way Mo Xi wishes he would. “Look at you, beautiful.”
His mouth feels bruised; Mo Xi swallows him back down, trying harder to get it in his throat. Gu Mang’s hand is warm in his hair, firm and unyielding. Mo Xi obeys.
He’s bonelessly good for him, taking him deep into his throat and not even gagging. Mo Xi moans, low and helpless; Gu Mang’s hips jolt up and he neatly comes, the breathlessness too much and too fast.
Mo Xi shivers, heat pooling in his stomach at the thought. It would hurt, if Gu Mang really held him down and forced him to take it; he’d choke and struggle so much he’d have to be dragged by the hair—no less than he deserved, no less than what Mo Xi had offered. I’ll take her place, he’d said. I belong to you, he thought.
Spit drips down his chin, obscene and depraved the way Xihe-jun of Chonghua could never be. Eight years he’d lived as that empty statue, so many more to bear—but in the Mirror, in the illusion where the shackles hadn’t yet clicked shut and his shixiong’s eyes were still blue, he could still do as he wanted. Mo Xi rests for a moment, head against Gu Mang’s thigh.
“You’re perfect,” Gu Mang murmurs, hand cradling his head. “So wet inside, so tight.” He’s talking like—like he’s fucking him for real, as if Mo Xi were splayed on his back against the cheap bedding behind them, earning his silver by being a good whore.
It’s too much. Mo Xi takes him deeper, sucking him down and staying until he gets lightheaded enough to stop. He whines, eyes hazy with lust.
"Aww, sweetheart. You want it that bad?" Gu Mang asks, stroking through his hair, petting him like he's something precious, something treasured. He pulls Mo Xi back and pushes him back down, slow and merciful.
“Should’ve fucked your mouth sooner if I knew how good you’d be for it, hmm, Mo Xi? Kept you in my tent like a treat after a long fight, give you everything you want,” Gu Mang bites out, harsh as he picks up the pace. “That’s it, baby, take it deep.”
It’s good. Mo Xi loses time like that, all attention focused on keeping his mouth slack and loose, a good toy for General Gu. His entire body thrums with it, drunk on the absolute praise Gu Mang heaps on him—as if they were still in Academy, in the barracks, as if Mo Xi were still his.
“Where do you want it? All over your face or down your throat?” Gu Mang’s relentless, the slick slide of Mo Xi’s mouth so loud in the small room. “Here, I’ll let you choose,” and he lets go, breathing rough.
Mo Xi barely feels lucid; he chases it himself, working his tongue around the head and hollowing his cheeks. He’s frantic, desperate, a creature of lusts so base he’s leaking wet inside his pants.
"Look at you," Gu Mang bites out, "such a mess, just from this, just for me–"
Mo Xi tenses, so wound up he knows he’d come if Gu Mang so much as touched him, but this isn’t about him—he whines, taking him deep until he nearly chokes; and he tries to breathe and stay there and be good as Gu Mang swears and comes in spurts down his throat.
Mo Xi barely registers what happens after, when he’s tugged to his feet and into Gu Mang’s lap.
“Shh, baby, come here,“ Gu Mang whispers, hands warm around his waist, his back. “So good, xiao-shidi, you did so well.” He kisses Mo Xi, uncaring of his messy mouth, tucking him safe into the harbour of his arms.
Mo Xi shivers. He shakes apart.
-
Later, much later—when Mo Xi wakes in the cave with the rest of them, just barely alive from the Mirror’s backlash—he looks to Gu Mang, hoping for something; anything, anything but apathy.
Gu Mang looks back.