Chapter Text
His first awareness was of the cold, the way it seeped into his bones and made them painful and brittle. The cold itself was not a surprise–it had been snowing the last time he’d seen the sky–but his ability to feel it, well, that was another matter.
He’d lived a wasted life full of evil deeds, but somehow he hadn’t thought that the cold would follow him after his death. How much of his time had he spent running from it, hiding from it, and still it had found him in the one place he’d thought he could go to escape.
“Xie Wei?”
He groaned, the sound startling loud in his ears after the days of silence that had preceded his unfortunate end, and he felt a small hand press gently to the side of his cheek. Halfway between sleep and waking, he turned his head toward the warmth, seeking relief from the ever present chill as he tried to press his mind back into the sweet relief of oblivion.
“You are alive?”
No.
The thought was clear enough in his mind, but he found himself unable to say it, his mouth dry and his lips unusually sticky. There was a metallic taste on his tongue, the bitter scent of fresh blood in his nose. That at least made sense to him. He had felt the knife in his hand, felt the blade slide deep into the flesh of his neck, felt the slowly softening edges of his mind as his life had bled away.
If somehow he had not died from the self inflicted wound, there would be plenty of blood to color his senses. He had seen it enough times in others to know the mess it left behind. He had seen it with her , he recalled. The crimson stain that had spread out beneath her beautiful corpse had been the only thing he could see for weeks when he closed his eyes.
Yan Lin had never forgiven him.
He had never forgiven himself.
If he had failed to end his life this time, then he would simply have to try again. He owed her a life, and one way or another it would be repaid.
“Xie Wei!”
If he was truly alive, the persistent voice must belong to some passing villager, as he had brought no staff of his own to the small country house where he had planned to spend his last days. How she had learned his name, he did not know, but what did it matter? He didn’t care for village girls any more than he had for princesses or concubines. It seemed he only had eyes for an empress, and she would never speak his name again.
Yet, even now he could not shake the memory of her, because the voice sounded like her, so achingly familiar in his ears, the rising panic and annoyance so characteristic of the way she’d spoken to him in the days after the capital had fallen.
“Ning’er.” Finally, his voice had returned to him, and he called for her, though he knew she would not answer. She was gone. Lost far beyond any place he could reach. The ache of regret in his chest was sharp enough to make him wonder if he’d fallen on his knife and given himself an additional stab wound.
If he had, it would have been well deserved.
The hand on his cheek became less gentle, the warm cup of the palm disappearing only to return a second later for a series of semi painful slaps. It wasn’t shocking, but it was enough to convince him that he definitely wasn't dead. He tried to open his eyes, blinking against the dim light of the moon reflecting against a thousand swirling snowflakes.
And there, hovering so close he could see the light reflecting off her eyes, was Ning’er.
Perhaps he was dead, after all. How else could he explain the sight of her, leaning over him as he lay on the ground, her pretty face scrunched with worry? Worry for him, of all people, which made even less sense. And when he reached for her, his grip sliding over her neck, coming to rest with her jaw cradled in his palm and his thumb brushing the soft skin of her cheek, she did not flinch or try to turn away.
He didn’t know what kind of gift death had given him, that she might let him touch her without her expression twisting in fear or revulsion, and he did not pause to question it. With one smooth motion, he pulled her toward him and raised his head to meet her.
Her lips parted in shock as they met his, and he took advantage, plunging his tongue into her mouth to taste the sweetness he had always been denied, finding her as warm and inviting as she had always been in his fantasies.
For a moment, tragically brief, she allowed him the liberty of kissing her, even going so far as to kiss him back. It was artless, less experienced that he would have expected from a married woman, but enthusiastic nonetheless. It was enough to send fire racing through his veins and he twisted her beneath him, covering her with his body, the cold long forgotten.
Even as triumph blazed inside him– mine, mine, mine –she began to struggle, pushing and shoving against him, eventually biting down hard on his tongue to get him to release her.
She scrambled away from him, coming to a stop well outside of arm’s reach, her dark eyes shining with insult and arousal. Her chest was heaving, her hair mused, but those things were not what drew his attention.
The young woman before him did not wear the luxurious clothing of the palace, nor was her hair and makeup carefully tended. She wore rough, homespun cloth. Her face was bare and her nails were jagged and broken.
She was not standing in her bedroom in the palace, nor even the small house where he was meant to have died. Instead, she crouched on the rocky ground of a familiar, snow-covered mountain pass. Not far from her was a broken qin, the wood shattered and irreparable.
He knew this mountain. He knew that qin. He knew this girl, though she was not as he last remembered her. The Ning’er before him was not yet an empress, but a frightened child just trying to keep them both alive.
She was fourteen years old.
He rolled and pushed up onto his hands and knees, gravel digging into his palms and stabbing up into his legs as it bore the fullness of his weight. He could feel it with the clarity of a waking mind, as he could still feel the cold air in his lungs, as he could still taste the sweetness of a kiss he should not have stolen.
This was no dream, no conjuring of his imagination as he lay dying. He somehow closed his eyes on his life and opened them many years into his past. He had been given a second chance, and the first thing he had done with it was to cause Ning’er to look at him with a bewildered terror that he could already see was hardening to contempt on her lovely features.
He reached for her again, his intention not to grab her as before but to soothe, and she flinched away from him, shattering his heart and killing his hopes before they had even begun to rise.
What had he done?