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It is not until cool fingers brush across his cheeks and gently lift his chin that he truly realises he has a body. Knees bruised against cold stone, skin dusted in cooling ashes, throat raw with the remnants of a scream.
Eyes closed against the horror on the altar.
“Oh, little one,” says a familiar voice, gentle as the hands on his face and terrible as the screams of his god.
But when he reaches for the flames to sear that voice to ash, all he finds is his own hatred, seething beneath his skin but refusing to answer his call with the wild abandon of just moments before.
“Ah, none of that now,” the voice says again, with a chiding undercurrent of laughter, an admonishing tap of fingertips against his cheek.
He does not need fire. He learned to kill long before he died, when he held no power at all. He snaps his eyes open and his hand up, gripping the white-clad wrist as he twists to send Bai Wuxiang over his shoulders to the stone floor. But before he can even finish the throw he finds his arm twisted behind his back, a knee against his spine forcing him into a mockery of a bow.
“Such potential, such tenacity,” Bai Wuxiang continues musingly, as if he had never been interrupted. “You will be exquisite one day. But you are too new, too wild, to be left unbound.”
Bound. Somehow, this creature has not only outmatched him but bound him, bound his power, trapped the storm of his fury within his new and useless skin. The realisation flashes through him as white-hot rage, and he fights with all his strength against Bai Wuxiang’s hold, a sob of desperate anger tearing unbidden from his throat.
Bai Wuxiang only laughs and pushes him harder against the stone of the temple floor before leaning in close enough that the porcelain of his mask and the silk of his hair brush the side of the ghost’s face. His voice is cold, now. “Perhaps, once we are finished here, I will teach you the binding. You are strong, for one so young.” A hand in his hair, gentle until it tugs sharply upwards, forcing his eyes to the altar before he can avert them. “But I was jue when your ancestors were children.”
In response the ghost throws his head back with all the strength he can summon, trying to shatter that wretched mask and the face beneath. But Bai Wuxiang is faster, disengaging in a flash of white, sharp and quick as winter frost, moving instead towards—
He screams, a wild wordless cry, as the white-clad monster approaches the altar of the red-stained atrocity, and throws himself forward in a graceless and impossible attempt to reach his god before—before. But even as he reaches out, Bai Wuxiang’s hand closes lightly on that terrible black sword, giving it a leisurely twirl that freezes the ghost in his tracks as its point brushes the ruin of white robes.
“Don’t cry, little one,” Bai Wuxiang murmurs, voice gentle once more behind that cry-smiling mask, rounding the altar and bringing the point of the sword to rest just above the wreckage. “It is for your own protection as much as mine. What a pity it would be, if you destroyed yourself before you could learn. How sad it would be, if you spent yourself fighting me instead of helping him.”
He cannot reach Bai Wuxiang, cannot tear the sword from the gentle and monstrous hands before they could let it fall. He cannot fill the cave with fire, for now that he knows it is there, he can feel the suppression of his energy like a weight embedded in his newfound skin. To break it would be agony, which matters nothing against the fact that to break it would take time, and skill he has not yet learned.
What good is a body, if he is so weak? What good is power, if he is so helpless? What good is he, if all he can ever do is watch?
For a long moment, neither ghost nor monster moves, staring at one another over the stalemate of a god. Then, slowly, Bai Wuxiang removes his hand from the hilt of the nightmare-black sword, leaving it suspended in the air, trembling as if against gravity or the memory of the flesh only a breath beneath it.
And then Bai Wuxiang is at his side once more, as if the intervening distance simply ceased to exist, and as the creature’s hand closes around his wrist the pressure of the binding falls away. But the fire that rushes to the surface of his skin is stifled once more as Bai Wuxiang lets his hand fall.
“You see?” the white-clad creature says, voice whisper-close once more, “I can help you. I can teach you. And together, we can help him.” Bai Wuxiang brushes a thumb across his cheek, bringing another lessening of the binding, gone before he can harness it. “And you do want to help him, do you not?”
He clenches his fists in helpless fury, the sword above the altar pinning him in place as surely as if it were thrust through his own unbeating heart.
“Now,” Bai Wuxiang says soothingly, “do you have a name, little one?”
He has one name held in his heart and inked into his skin, never to cross his unworthy lips. It is the only name that has ever mattered and it is not his to give, nor his to hold, nor this monster’s to hear.
“Wuming, then,” Bai Wuxiang says lightly when he receives no answer. “Hei Wuming, perhaps,” he adds, voice coloured faintly with laughter.
He wants nothing from this creature, but the absence of a name is not a thing that can be either bestowed or refused, and it is no more than truth.
“Give me your hand, Wuming, and I will show you how to help him.”
Eyes still fixed on the dark sword, Wuming slowly holds out his hand. He feels a tug on his wrist and lets Bai Wuxiang pull him to his feet, and then pull him stumbling forward towards—
It is so much worse, this close. So much worse, seen through newly formed eyes instead of the blurred haze of ghost fire.
“I’m sorry,” he whispers, the last syllable half a sob.
Bai Wuxiang’s laughter echoes against the walls of the cave in cruel harmony.
“Oh little one, you did try,” he agrees, shaking his head as if sadly. “But humans can be so cruel.”
Then he tilts his masked face and lifts the hand that is not encircling Wuming’s wrist to brush Dianxia’s hair aside gently. “Look how they have hurt you.”
His last words are not spoken to Wuming but to the altar, laid upon it like offerings of fruit rotting beneath gleaming skin.
Wuming watches Bai Wuxiang’s fingers trail through Dianxia’s hair and imagines breaking them one by one. Wuming watches Bai Wuxiang’s fingers trail through Dianxia’s hair and remembers the butterfly-silk feel of it tied around his own. Wuming watches Bai Wuxiang’s fingers trail through Dianxia’s hair and imagines wrapping it around the calamity’s throat.
Wuming imagines, and hates, and does not move except to tear his eyes away from his god’s dark hair, and turn them instead to the blood-dark sword.
“His body is immortal, of course—” Bai Wuxiang gestures at the sword, and Wuming wants nothing more than to run it through his mask, his laughter, his white robes that mock what should be mourned “—but the healing will take time, and his power is…” he shakes his head in a pantomime of pity.
“Why?” Wuming whispers, the words slipping unbidden past his determination to give this calamity nothing but silence if he cannot give it annihilation. But all he can see is the blood and the wreckage, the memory of swords and screams and a faceless figure with too-gentle hands at the heart of it all.
“Because, little one,” says Bai Wuxiang, and Wuming is not sure which of them he is addressing anymore as one hand comes to rest gently on his shoulder and the other continues to stroke Dianxia’s blood-matted hair, “the world is cruel. Humans are cruel; you can save them a hundred times and they will demand a thousand. You can give them all they need, and they will tear you to pieces until you give them what they want. You can give them all they want, and they will cast you down when it is not what they need.”
There is an edge to his words, like a blade or perhaps a scar, and Wuming wants to tear it from him with bare and bloodstained hands.
“But our Xianle is so kind, so generous, and so very stubborn,” Bai Wuxiang continues, and this time all Wuming can do is suppress a shiver of anger and unease at the way he speaks that name, at the possessiveness of our.
He is, and forever will be, Taizi Dianxia’s most devoted believer. He is, and forever will be, Xie Lian’s. But Xie Lian, Xianle Taizi, Dianxia, is not his. And though he now lies bleeding beneath Bai Wuxiang’s sword and power and cruelty, nor does he belong to the calamity in white.
Wuming fixes his eyes on that sword, and holds his silence.
“You will learn this too, some day,” Bai Wuxiang says, interpreting his silence as dissent. “If you have not already,” he adds after a pause, and the hand that was holding Wuming’s shoulder brushes along his back, uncannily and unerringly coming to rest where the scar of his death would be. Or perhaps where it is; Wuming knows little yet of this form he has taken, except that it is still not enough for the only thing that matters.
But new flesh remembers old wounds, and at Bai Wuxiang’s words and touch, Wuming feels for an instant the memory of a sword, the ghost of pain, the single instant of sorrow before the darkness, that he would die without—
He half-raises a hand to slap himself before halting the motion as he remembers where he is and whose hand still rests against his skin, whose power holds that black sword suspended. Instead he clenches his fists once more, nails digging deep into his palms, and there is relief in the discovery that his skin still knows how to register pain.
To let his attention be drawn away even for a moment, by the memory of a single sword, a single wound to his useless mortal body, when his god has just endured hundreds. To let himself remember his own worthless death, when his god has just lain upon that altar begging to die.
Useless. Pathetic. Selfish.
“So, Wuming,” Bai Wuxiang’s voice is light once more. “The choice is yours.”
The masked face watches him unmoving, as if waiting, and Wuming is no stranger to games of power, of humiliation. He knows what Bai Wuxiang is waiting for.
He holds out his hands unasked, this time, palms turned upwards in surrender and supplication. “Show me,” he says, voice grief-raw and ashen.
The masked face inclines just slightly, a nod of approval drawn in lines of mockery, and pale hands take one of his between cool palms. It takes all Wuming’s concentration not to flinch away. It helps, a little, that he does not need to breathe. It helps more that this draws Bai Wuxiang’s hand from Dianxia’s hair.
“First,” Bai Wuxiang says, fingers shifting to rest softly against the absence of a pulse on Wuming’s wrist, “the transfer of energy.”
This time when Bai Wuxiang’s skin meets his, there is no rush of his own power but instead a cool trickle of energy flowing into him, river water over fire, their hands an impossible bridge. It is… soothing, gentle, carrying no trace of wrongness, no stain of the monstrosity of its wielder. It eases pain within him he did not even realise he carried, and he chases the receding agony in desperation, trying to cling to it like an anchor against the unwanted balm.
After an eternity or a breath, Bai Wuxiang’s hand shifts to encircle his wrist and the flow of energy ceases. “There,” Bai Wuxiang says, “you see? Nothing to fear. Now…” he gestures towards the altar, releasing Wuming’s hand as he does so.
Bai Wuxiang’s intent—Bai Wuxiang’s unspoken instruction—is clear, but there is so much blood, and so much pain, and nowhere he can touch without fear of causing more.
And besides, he is no longer a child, to cling without shame to a kind prince’s collar.
And besides, while Bai Wuxiang’s spiritual energy has caused no damage to him, he is no longer alive. Dianxia’s body may be immortal, but Wuming is a stranger yet to the realms of ghosts and gods and the rules that govern them, and he has every reason to distrust the calamity in white.
And besides, his hands are cold.
“Did I mistake you, Hei Wuming?” asks Bai Wuxiang, the mockery in his voice this time of solicitude, “do you not wish to help after all? Perhaps you intend to keep the spiritual energy for yourself? Perhaps you would prefer to take your own revenge on him? Surely you cannot fear blood, not when you have spilled so much of it?”
But not his, Wuming does not say as he forces his mind away from another cave, another blade against his god’s skin, another darkness echoing with his god’s agony. He forces his will instead towards the slightest motion of his hand, eyes searching desperately for a safe place for it to rest. Dianxia’s face is, incongruously and terribly, unmarked but for the unmistakable signs of unendurable pain. But Wuming cannot touch Dianxia’s face, and his body is a ruin of blood and bone, ribs visible and shattered from the impact of a sword wielded again and again by untrained, frenzied hands.
His hands are little better: torn and stained with blood from the altar, from the gashes in his palms where he grabbed at the blade sometime after endurance broke but before the screaming began, from a slash across his wrist where one villager thought to try a fatal wound when it became too difficult to find anything like flesh remaining near his heart.
“Here,” Bai Wuxiang says from too close behind him, breath ghosting across his neck, hand brushing the inside of Wuming’s wrist. “Begin here.”
Wuming’s hand trembles, but he lets it come gently to rest on the skin of Dianxia’s wrist, staining his fingers against the mark of the sword.
“Well done,” says Bai Wuxiang, and the praise feels like a condemnation. “And now…” through his fingers on Wuming’s wrist comes a faint thread of spiritual energy: a reminder and an instruction.
His unworthy hand rests against Dianxia’s skin, his god lies bleeding on an altar, a nightmare stands too close at his back, and the hatred within him that he cannot release burns against the fabric of his existence but he tries.
And—useless, pathetic, helpless—he fails.
It should be so simple; he has seen this done before, on the battlefield, when time stretched thin between clashes and aftermath blurred into anticipation. And now he has even felt the transfer of energy from skin to skin through Bai Wuxiang’s fingers against his own mimicry of flesh.
But his useless hand rests against Dianxia’s skin and nothing happens and his god still bleeds.
He remembers another cave, another bloodstained sword, another helplessness.
The hand on his wrist follows the line of his arm, coming to rest on his shoulder. “Breathe,” whispers the voice in his ear as Bai Wuxiang’s other hand brushes his hair aside.
He does not breathe. He does not need to breathe. He cannot breathe, with those hands on his shoulders and his hand on Dianxia’s skin. He cannot breathe in this cave, where the air tastes of blood and ash.
“Breathe, Wuming,” whispers Bai Wuxiang again, and this time his hands move slowly down Wuming’s ribs, then back up to his shoulders, mimicking the motion of a breath. “Breathe, and move the energy with your breath. Out—” his hands move down Wuming’s arms this time, to the elbow, as if to guide a line of energy “—and in—” and return to his shoulders.
The third time Bai Wuxiang’s hands follow this path, Wuming breathes.
“That’s it, little one,” says Bai Wuxiang, and Wuming can feel the smile in his voice as it stirs the hair at his neck. He shudders, as if in remembering to breathe his body has remembered how to do this as well, how to shiver against unwanted touch, how to flinch away from the hands that crafted such devastation.
He shudders and Bai Wuxiang’s hands leave his skin, and take with them the ability to touch any of the power within him at all.
He wants to scream and so instead he breathes, schools himself to stillness through force of desperation, fixing his eyes on Dianxia’s face.
This time, when Bai Wuxiang’s hands return to his shoulders and the stirring of energy returns, he does not flinch. All that matters are his fingers against Dianxia’s wrist and the path of his breath and the energy that, at last, begins to follow the path of Bai Wuxiang’s hands and more importantly the path of Wuming’s will, through his fingertips and across the barrier of Dianxia’s skin.
A sharp intake of breath, impossibly loud in the silence of the cave for all that it is barely audible. His own breathing has not changed, and the monster behind him does not draw breath except to speak, and Wuming would have felt it against the back of his neck, and so that leaves—
His hand flies from Dianxia’s wrist, his gaze flies to Dianxia’s face. His god does not move again, but he—
“Again,” says Bai Wuxiang, and Wuming bites his lip until it would have bled and sets his fingertips as gently as he can once more against Dianxia’s skin. This time Dianxia’s face remains still, even as Wuming, almost accustomed now to the sweep of Bai Wuxiang’s hands across his back and down his arms, breathes stillness in, and breathes energy out through his fingertips.
If anything, Dianxia’s face seems to relax slightly as Wuming maintains the transfer of energy, and he hates that Bai Wuxiang was right, but less than he would have hated if Bai Wuxiang had been wrong. He hates that, too, holds the hatred tight within him with the flames he cannot yet unleash.
The last of that despised gentle energy flows across the bridge of his fingers, and with Bai Wuxiang’s hands still on his shoulders, he wonders if he dares to continue with his own power, coiled within him and waiting, but no. All he knows with that is the burning; even in this, he is useless to his god. Even in this, he must turn to a monster for aid.
“Well done, Wuming, well done,” comes Bai Wuxiang’s lilting voice in his ear, “you learn quickly. But there is so much more still to do, you see how he is bleeding?” His voice drips pity like the altar drips blood, cloying and iron-edged.
He can see nothing else. If he closes his eyes his vision fractures into white and black and jagged-edged red. If he closes his eyes he can still smell the blood, still hear the screams. If he closes his eyes he could be nothing but a ghost fire again, so he does not close his eyes.
From Bai Wuxiang’s hands he feels once more the flow of spiritual energy that has now become familiar, and calls upon the resentment within him to clear his mind of its gentleness, but he cannot stop the wash of relief he feels, that at least in the midst of this nightmare he can ease his god’s pain.
He tries, desperately, not to think of why this white-clothed calamity even wants his god healed, wants his god alive. Tries, desperately, to force the answer that comes all too easily back down deep into the fire bound within him, tries to burn it away if he cannot yet burn away the monster behind him.
He moves to press his fingers once more against Dianxia’s wrist, but a tightening of Bai Wuxiang’s fingers around his shoulders stops him.
“That was good, when you were learning,” says the calamity, “but for injuries such as these…” he pauses long enough for Wuming to remember every one of those injuries in blood-limned clarity before continuing, “it will be faster, easier, if you can help him to circulate it as well, if you—”
This time, Bai Wuxiang’s hands travel not down his back or his arms but the sides of his torso, fingertips brushing his stomach as if tracing his meridians. He stops breathing, stands unmoving, keeps himself from flinching away through force of a will that feels untethered from himself, fixed perhaps to the blood still clinging to the sword hanging over the body of his god.
He can almost feel Bai Wuxiang’s smile through the mask that still brushes against his hair.
“Like this,” Bai Wuxiang says, voice low, fingers butterfly-light across his ribs, and a boy called Hong’er endured countless beatings before he died but never this malevolent gentleness, never a caress that threatens to scatter Wuming like the ash he should now be.
It would be easier, he thinks as he reaches out a hand that should but does not shake, to burn himself to ashes with the rest of them than to touch his god’s bare and bleeding flesh. He remembers Dianxia’s hands on the hilt of that other sword, in that other cave, remembers watching in horror as the blade turned, and wishes he could do the same, wishes he could undo Dianxia’s hurts by taking that sword into his own heart. Longs for the unrestrained violence of it, for a way to free his fury without the fear of causing hurt to the only one who matters.
Instead he is constrained on all sides by agonising gentleness. Bai Wuxiang’s hands on his skin. His own hands forbidden from trembling, lest they hurt what they must heal. The sword, always the sword, suspended by a filament of will, waiting to punish the slightest mistake.
He draws a carefully unfaltering breath, and sets his fingertips to the blood.
“And now, like this,” says Bai Wuxiang, tracing deliberate lines once more across Wuming’s torso. Wuming tries to breathe, and lets the energy of a calamity coalesce at his fingertips, and traces the same path across Dianxia’s sword-torn, blood-worn skin.
The first time Dianxia’s breath hitches, as Wuming’s fingers crest the edge of the raw and gaping ruin of his ribcage, Wuming gasps and throws himself back, all his careful control shattering as all his mind and all his will turn towards the single blazing imperative, bright and essential as the fire of his formation, to remove from Dianxia’s presence anything that causes him pain.
And then his world narrows to the point of a sword as, in a flash of white and a flicker of black and a vivid flower of ever-present red, it descends.
And then his world shatters as, in a flash of white and a cacophony of memory, Dianxia screams.
It rebounds off the walls of the cave, like an echo of the fire, and his body arches away from the stone of the altar but that only drives the sword deeper.
“STOP.”
It is only when Bai Wuxiang’s voice rings out that he realises he has moved. It is only as he finds himself frozen into unnatural and unwilled stillness that he feels the bite of the blade into the flesh of his palms, where he has grabbed it with both hands in a desperate attempt to catch it, to hold it at bay, to pull it from Dianxia’s body.
“Wuming, ah, Wuming,” says Bai Wuxiang’s voice, still soft and gently amused, as if nothing has changed. “You were doing so well. How sad, how disappointing.”
He moves to stand once more behind Wuming, reaches up to take the sword by its hilt, lifts it leisurely through Wuming’s frozen grip and from Dianxia’s agonised body until its point once more rests a breath above catastrophe. Only then do his hands come to enclose Wuming’s own, slowly prying his fingers from the sword’s blade. Only then does he release Wuming from whatever new binding he has wrought and catches him before he can steady himself, white sleeves still unstained by blood wrapping around him, masked face brushing against his hair.
“You lost your focus,” he says with a shake of his head, moving his hands to once more take Wuming’s own bloody ones and settle them without sympathy against Dianxia’s skin. “You must not let him distract you.”
The white-masked monster draws Wuming’s hands down Dianxia’s chest, tracing the lines of his meridians, heedless of the blood and the bone and the agony, heedless of the way Dianxia’s breath catches or the quiet sob of pain as Wuming’s hands under Bai Wuxiang’s grip brush across splinters of bone.
Dianxia’s eyes remain closed and Wuming wishes he could believe it a mercy.
“Focus, little one,” says Bai Wuxiang in his ear, voice barely more than a whisper, a murmur that matches the cadence of the spiritual energy he sends into Wuming’s hands, “but not on pity.”
The words echo an unspoken name and yet are meaningless without it; there is nothing in this world deserving of his focus or his existence but the one who lies on the altar bleeding.
Bai Wuxiang’s voice continues, river-soft and relentless. “Close your eyes, Wuming, and concentrate on your breath. Listen to me, Wuming, and focus on the energy. Shhh, little one, don’t cry.”
He does not know how long Bai Wuxiang’s hands drag his across Dianxia’s chest, does not know how long Bai Wuxiang continues to murmur into his ear; he breathes through his hatred and his horror and tries to think of nothing but pouring life into the only living being in this cave. Tries not to think of its source or its passage through his unworthy hands. Tries, tries not to falter each time those hands in their passage of healing catch on a tripwire of pain, tries but there are so many, still, and—
Thrice more the sword trembles; thrice more he steadies himself before it can fall. If his hands are unworthy then that blade is abhorrent; if his hands snag on pain then that sword renders agony.
“Better, better” Bai Wuxiang whispers in his ear, and then the pressure of his hands on Wuming’s eases.
For a moment Wuming is afraid the monster means to let go completely, taking with him Wuming’s pretence of power to help at all. For a moment, when Bai Wuxiang’s hands merely return to his shoulders and the flood of spiritual energy continues unabated, it feels like relief. And on the heels of that relief comes an overwhelming wave of revulsion, that he would have clung to those hands rather than let them go.
He steadies himself in time, this time, and the sword remains motionless as the flow of energy continues unabated, unfaltering.
“So you can learn control,” says Bai Wuxiang musingly, “but still you are so tentative. So fierce in your fighting but now...” he clicks his tongue and Wuming hates that he cannot argue. “Keep going, little one, and I will help you.”
Bai Wuxiang’s hands begin their now-familiar path from his shoulders down across his chest, but this time instead of tracing a gentle line back up, they slide lower, flattening from fingertips to palms across his stomach, his hips, the outsides of his thighs.
Then one of those too-gentle hands slips between his legs and he knows a moment of blood-red panic, tinged with the acrid scent of burning flowers and the brittle edges of memory.
He does not care what Bai Wuxiang’s hands do with this body. In the moments since its making he has not even mapped it himself, has not looked or touched or cared. In the moments since its making its only useful function has been as a vessel of spiritual energy to offer to his god, and that is purpose enough. That, and to stand between his god and that sword; the rest is mere bone and skin and ash.
He does not care where Bai Wuxiang’s hands fall, except that his own hands still trace paths of what he hopes is healing across Dianxia’s ravaged chest, and Bai Wuxiang’s hands had shown him those lines to trace, and he will not—cannot—follow Bai Wuxiang’s hands now.
The soft laughter in his ears tells him he has hesitated too long and hidden it too poorly, and his eyes flit to the sword, waiting for Dianxia to feel the agony of his own indecision, caught between two impossibilities and too helpless, useless, pathetic, to find a third path.
But the sword does not fall.
The laughter fades but lingers in the amusement of Bai Wuxiang’s voice. “Ah, how interesting that would be. Such a shame…” he trails off, though Wuming can feel the mask still pressed against his cheek. Can feel Bai Wuxiang’s hand still moving in slow lazy strokes. The other hand moves to his hair; he wonders if it is meant to be soothing or admonishing, decides it doesn’t matter.
“No, little one,” Bai Wuxiang continues after a moment, as if there has been some conversation in the interim that Wuming is not privy to. “Continue as you are; you are doing so well.” His hands continue to move, through his hair, on his cock. It doesn’t matter; it can’t matter, because if it matters—
Shoving the memory of poison flowers and a scream-soaked voice from his mind he breathes, steadying himself against past and present, steading his mind and the flow of spiritual energy against the movement of Bai Wuxiang’s hands and the skin beneath his own.
For a breath, two, three, he endures.
And then as he draws a fourth shaking breath his body, this useless body that could not stand against a calamity and cannot now save a god, betrays him.
It is no more than the first stirrings of arousal, his body responding even as his will rebels, but even that is unforgivable. There is no desire here, there can be no desire here, there must be no desire here, but his hands are soaked with the blood of his god, and useless, pathetic, selfish and wretched, his body responds to a calamity’s touch.
He wrenches his hands away, grips the blood-slick stone of the altar and curls into himself, looking for some reprieve from Bai Wuxiang’s hand and the abhorrent animal response from his disgusting fucking traitor of a body.
The moment his hands leave Dianxia’s skin a wave of dread crashes through him as he looks to the sword, but he cannot be touching Dianxia like this, but if the sword falls then it was all for nothing, but—
The sword trembles and he reaches for it in desperation, but Bai Wuxiang is faster. The sword does not fall. Instead, Bai Wuxiang’s hand that was in his hair seizes Wuming’s hand that sought the sword, and with all the force of his calamitous strength and none of his terrible gentleness brings Wuming’s fingers down, hard, into the bloody and bone-splintered ruin of Dianxia’s chest.
He does not know which of them screams.
“I told you,” says Bai Wuxiang, voice stripped of all softness, leaving nothing but ice in lethal counterpoint to the ash of the cry in Wuming’s throat, “to keep going.”
He punctuates the command with another sharp press against Wuming’s hand against Dianxia’s wound, and with another swift stroke of his cock, and Wuming chokes on a sob as his body responds to Bai Wuxiang’s touch in impossible harmony with Dianxia’s pain. He remembers again the demons amongst the flowers, remembers standing in the mouth of a cave as his desire was revealed to him in malice with the inexorable clarity of a lightning strike, as his god first lay bleeding.
Another stroke of Bai Wuxiang’s hand, another press of his fingers, another flood of his power. There is a terrible inevitability building somewhere behind Wuming’s eyes and somewhere beyond his reach. He lifts his other hand from the altar and lays it bloody on Dianxia’s chest and does the only thing left to him, willing spiritual energy into his god as fast as Bai Wuxiang can give it to him with every pleasure-rancid stroke of his hand.
With every pass of Wuming’s fingers across still-open wounds Bai Wuxiang’s hand works him faster; with every pain-sharpened hitch of Dianxia’s breath Bai Wuxiang floods him with power, and that sense of calamitous inevitability builds with the building of an unwanted arousal he would trade in an instant for the bite of the sword.
He wars with himself against that inevitability as he tries to pour power into his god and close the wounds the world has demanded, as he tries to will his own body into the stillness of the death that once claimed it, as he tries to drown memory and present of a cave reeking with the blood and screams of a god in determination to destroy all who have wrought this.
But as that determination rises he feels the resentment of it pressing against the ice-bright spiritual energy he must control. And as he wills himself still he feels his hands on Dianxia’s chest falter, feels Bai Wuxiang’s hand on his cock continue unrelenting, feels his fraying focus split.
He is close now, he knows, in some distant way, muffled like Bai Wuxiang’s laughter beneath the mask, or like a sword beneath silk, waiting behind softness to deliver the fatal strike.
And so he focuses his entire existence on the wounds beneath his hands, and tries not to let his hatred—of the ones who did this and the one behind him who is doing this and himself, himself, himself who could not stop it, his hands that cannot now stop it, his body that cannot despise it—distract from the healing.
And Dianxia’s breath is easing now, and the energy flows more smoothly and perhaps, perhaps, he thinks distantly like a soldier at sentry, perhaps he can hold out till morning.
Then Bai Wuxiang’s voice cuts through once more, cuts through the haze of power and pleasure and pain all woven together with loathing.
“You have done so well, little one,” he says and his hand does not slow but his other rises to the back of Wuming’s head, turning it towards him. “There is one last thing he needs, one last thing you can do for him, little one, if you are still willing? If you still want to help?”
It takes all his control now to breathe without breaking; if he speaks he will shatter and so he says nothing.
“You can stop this now,” Bai Wuxiang says, all gentleness once more. The hand against Wuming’s cheek traces down to his wrist, stilling his hands, and he almost sobs in relief. But Bai Wuxiang’s other hand does not still, and Wuming trembles against the rising tide, clenching his fists and wishing he could pray to his god, but this, at least, he will spare him.
“His body can finish the healing,” says Bai Wuxiang, light measured voice belying the incessant rhythm of his hand that drags Wuming closer and closer to the edge of a cliff or a wall or a shattering, “with one more gift of spiritual energy. But it will work best—” his free hand goes to his mask and Wuming flinches back despite himself, knowing in a flash of horror like a wave before the breaking what it will reveal, but he has nowhere to go, caught between Bai Wuxiang and the altar and his own body’s refusal to obey as it draws tigher in anticipation, and then the mask falls and it is Dianxia’s face beneath it and Bai Wuxiang’s hand is gentle against Wuming’s jaw as he draws him in “—like this—” and kisses him.
If he screams it is lost in the maelstrom of spiritual energy that floods into him, drowns him, burns him from within, seeks to unmake him or maybe succeeds.
It pushes him closer to the edge and yet somehow too holds him back, his body overwhelmed by the power it contains and the release it demands, of both the energy and the flesh, and he knows that with one, the other will follow.
He cannot touch his god this way. But he cannot hold this power back.
“Now,” says the voice in his ear, urgency matched by the hand on his skin.
Shaking, with a scream or a sob or a monster’s power or an unworthy disciple’s base human need, he reaches out his hand.
“No, Wuming,” comes the whisper, lips pressed against his cheek, unshielded by the mask. “Like I showed you.”
He does scream, then, against the inevitability of it all, screams his helplessness to the walls of the cave. Lowers his head and falls to his knees and sobs his apology to the altar of his god.
He feels Bai Wuxiang kneel with him, one hand on his shoulder, the other still unrelenting between his legs, drawing this game to its end.
“I’m sorry,” Wuming sobs, bracing his hands on the bloodied stone, careful even as his body demands abandon not to tangle Dianxia’s hair with his blood-sticky fingers. “I’m sorry,” he says, leaning close enough for his tears to fall onto his god’s untouched face.
“I’m sorry,” he whispers unforgiven, and closes his eyes.
His lips meet his god’s gently, and part them gently, but there is nothing gentle in the rush of power that follows his breath, flooding from him into his god.
And with the flood—with a last tightening of Bai Wuxiang’s hand, with a sobbing breath into the mouth of his god and a monster’s laughter in his ears—comes the release.
For a long moment after, the cave is silent.
For a long moment after, he does not dare move.
For a long moment after, he waits to shatter into the ash that is all he deserves.
Then a hand in his hair, a voice in his ear, a weight behind him shifting, standing, leaving.
He does not look as he hears the sword fall to the ground, does not look as he sees the white flash of the mask that follows it. He does not turn to watch Bai Wuxiang go.
He stays at the altar of his god, kneeling for the first time, and makes no prayers.