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Sometime, somewhere.
Days, months, years– these have no meaning to an immortal zhenren.
Of course, as Akuta Hinako, she knows what today’s date is. But as Yu Mei-ren? Time only seems to have sped up, year after year, each year bringing more change than she’s known for millennia. She can scarcely believe it’s been only three years since the Lostbelt Restoration Phenomenon, since her duty to oversee the Synchronized Intellect Nation as its Crypter began, and most importantly, since her reunion with her husband Xiang Yu.
Xiang Yu. Xiang Yu. Xiang Yu. Where to begin?
He’s still asleep there, by her side. While she goes to bed and wakes up early, even now, her precious general is all too used to keeping a late watch through the night. Ever steady, ever loyal, ever brave. Now breathing, and alive. His breath has issued death sentences and battle commands, but it now flows softly and gently onto his pillow, an almost musical rise and fall. She sees straight to the heart of his tenderness beneath that rough exterior. There’s something poetic in him, even when he’s asleep.
She remembers something she once overheard Lanling Wang– Gao– say about her. “If I were a poet instead of a general, I could write song after song about you,, and my work would never be complete.” His particular affection for her was a favored topic of gossip among the court, but there was no substance to the rumors. Gao loved her as one would love the worshiped sky– constant admiration and awe, but with no notion of possession, because such a thing would be unthought-of and impossible.
A general, but not a poet, huh. How lucky for her, then, to have fallen for a man who was both.
Ah, Yu, my Yu, what will your fate be? What was once a tragic lament has taken on a new meaning. After thousands of years of separation, when it was thought impossible for her to ever see him again, they were finally reunited. It was like that legend from ancient poetry, older than even their first meeting, about the Cowherd and the Weaver Girl.
As the legend goes, the Cowherd and the Weaver Girl were two bright stars in love, banished to distant sides of the galaxy. They could meet but once a year, on the seventh day of the seventh lunar month. This day became a holiday to celebrate their love– the Qixi festival, the “evening of sevens.” This year, it falls on August 22.
Much in the spirit of the festival, Yu has taken the week off from working at Chaldeas to be with her husband. Yes, she works at Chaldeas now. It’s been strange to say the least, being summoned to the forces of her greatest enemy, the only enemy she’s had for over two thousand years, as the condition of being with her husband. Her feelings toward the Master who summoned her, the foolhardy young mage who both killed her, destroyed her home, and these days smiles at her and calls her “Paisen,” are… complicated.
No matter. She doesn’t have to see them for a while, having temporarily returned to Lostbelt China after the Lostbelt Restoration Phenomenon– there for long enough to help get the Synchronized Intellect Nation back on its feet. Qin Shi Huang’s defeat has largely freed the people from his imperial control, and poetry and art are now flourishing where they were thought to have been extinguished. However, his absence created a power vacuum which split the nation into warring factions. The reason she so seldom gets to see her Xiang Yu is because he is so often on the front lines of this war– helping to liberate the very same people he had once been tasked to conquer. She thinks with dismay of how even after death, he is putting his cause before their life together.
The Crypter Akuta Hinako is set apart from the rest of Team A. She has no ambitions to prove herself like Kadoc, no nefarious plans like Beryl, no pretensions of greatness like Ophelia. Unlike Kirschtaria, she has no lofty ideals of building a utopian society. As Yu Mei-ren, she has seen countless societies rise and crumble, in a life too long for personal investment in any but the smallest few. All her efforts, all her life had been bound up in her one and only goal of this long-delayed reunion. She has no higher ambition now than to rest.
She looks again on Xiang Yu’s sleeping face. Sometimes she looks at him in disbelief, as if he might at any moment be torn away from her. Why not? It’s happened twice already. Three times, if she were to include the events of the Servant Summer Camp Singularity. Is it any wonder she’s deliberately memorized this new form of his, from the angles of his spikes down to the joints on his little finger?
To top this all off, in around a week, they won’t be together anymore. In around a week, a blue moon will shine bright in the sky.
Yu Mei-ren may not care for the calendar, as she sits her ever-aching body up in bed the same as every morning. Calendar systems change, but the indifferent moon has always marked the time as the seasons go by, reminding her of what she’s lost. Of someone so far away he could not “share the beauty of the moon” with her, as another poet wrote more than five dynasties later. "Why does the moon tend to be full when people are apart?"
For millennia, she missed him so much it hurt. She missed him so much she would gladly walk over hot coals, or be pierced by a thousand blades, rather than live without him.
But live without him she must.
Is it any wonder she begged Xu Fu for the means to lay that heavy burden down? Her shoulders ache again at the thought. An immortal body, but the human ability to feel pain. She remembers another conversation between her and Gao, than man who had been her first earthy comforter in centuries.
“You don’t need to pity me. I’m not human.”
“That’s where you’re wrong, Lady Yu. I think you’re more human than any of us.”
On impulse, she decides to pay him a call. Not in person, of course, but through Chaldea’s virtual communications, which he picks up fairly quickly. His hologram flickers to life. “Hello, Lady Yu! I hope you’re enjoying your time off. How are you and your husband?”
“We’re well, you know, all things considered,” she says with a visible pout.
He laughs, not unkindly. “Still as attached as ever, I see. That’s the double-edged sword of love. Don’t worry, my friend, he won’t be away for long. Besides, Xu Fu and I are always here if you need company. And your other friends as well– Team A, was it?”
Yu was not especially close with the other Crypters during her time as one, but peace has brought an opportunity for closeness that was never afforded before. She has become a regular attendee at Kadoc and Anastasia's annual Christmas ball and Peperoncino's "girl talk" tea parties with Ophelia and Mash, and plans on accepting the wedding invitations that, according to Pepe's gossip, are soon to come from Kirschtaria and Caeneus. Although it's been a short time from her perspective, she already has no objection to all of them, bar one, being called her friends. "Yes, that's right. Thank you."
“Is that Lady Yu?” she can hear a familiar voice shouting in the background. “I wanna talk to her!”
“I’m not in the mood to deal with Xu Fu right now,” Yu admits in a whisper.
He assures her he’ll keep his door closed, and as they continue to converse she feels more and more at ease. “I’m glad I could talk with you, Gao. It’s nice to know someone who just gets you, and doesn’t see you as some tragic beauty. I’m sure you can relate.”
He nods. “Well… they say beautiful things meet tragic ends– and yes, that was certainly the case in my life– but here I see a beautiful end to a tragic beginning.”
“Cheers to that,” says Yu Mei-ren. “See you soon.”
So she ends the call, and as she does, notices Xiang Yu stirring. She walks quietly over to him, softly kisses his brow. “Good morning, Xiang Yu.”
His eyes open. “Good morning, my Yu.” There is love in his gaze, in his smile, in everything. “What shall our fates be today?”