Chapter Text
When Mo Xuanyu was little he would have nightmares that left him waking up with sobbing. No matter what his Mama did he'd cry, huge unending hiccuping sobs until he made himself sick. He would beg for "him" to come back. Mama had always thought it was his Father he was asking for. Mo Xuanyu, despite never clearly remembering his dreams, knew that wasn't it but couldn't explain. He wanted someone else.
A strange unnamed figure who was warmth and safety and love. Like Mama in a way but different.
It hurt and he didn't have words. So he cried and cried in her lap as Mama's hands petted his hair and tried to soothe him with useless promises of his father returning soon. Because he loved them she assured him and he'd promised to take care of them. These words hadn't comforted Mo Xuanyu even then, before father stopped appearing and left Mama to wait anxiously at the door as the former praise turned to venomous whispers.
The figure was the first of Mo Xuanyu's ghosts and, in his heart, he knew to be the most important one.
They only got worse as Mo Xuanyu grew older. He was strange, undeniably so. Sometimes it was hard for him to remember things. He'd forget to respond to his own name, not recognizing it as his. It was only after someone forced his attention that he'd remember "Oh, I'm Xuanyu.". His name fit uneasily, like a too tight shirt, and something else clung to the edge of his mind like the sound of ice screaming in winter not quite there but threatening to overwhelm the instant it broke.
It wasn't just that other things, people and memories, that didn't make sense lingered along his waking mind. Sometimes he'd mix them up.
Mama would no longer be the Second Lady of Mo, young, so young, and pretty in her silks. Instead she was still Mama, but older, worn, with thin robes and wrinkles and rough aching hands that he would massage as they warmed by the cooking fire. Most of the time he could blink it away to see Mama's pretty face so like his own. Other times though, it would linger for days, the other Mama hovering like a ghost image over Mama or in the corner of his eye.
Ghosts haunted other people too.
Lady Mo, never Aunt, once overlapped with the hazy image of an untouchable figure in green and white hissing Beast over her own insults and whipping him as his aunt's palm hit his face knocking him to the ground. Mo Xuanyu was shaking and terrified, in a way his aunt never made him feel. He warred with wanting to do nothing but curl into a ball and grabbing the hem of those robes and begging to know what he did wrong. It was at odds with his carefully hidden hatred for his aunt and it left him winded and unable to move from the sudden intense emotion all while his aunt shrieked until his Mama found them and dragged him to a doctor terrified by his silence. He had avoided Lady Mo for weeks afterwards, even more stringently than before.
His cousin would sometimes grow taller and older, wearing the same disdainful look but on a different face. This usually wasn't too disorienting because the ghost acted so similarly to Ziyuan. It was only the name that Mo Xuanyu wanted to say that changed. He once had slipped. The absolute befuddlement on his cousin's face at being called "Ming Fan" had been enough to stop him in his tirade and allow Mo Xuanyu to slip away lest he risk losing his temper. It had become a source of amusement for a good while until Ziyuan used it as ammunition to add to the "Mo Xuanyu is crazy" rumors his mother encouraged.
Mo Xuanyu only cared because of how it hurt his mother. And he did his best to focus on the present and ignore the ghosts. He was able to succeed, for the most part, until Grandfather died and Lady Mo took over as head of the family. Then an occasional slap turned into being tossed into a shed without food. A hissed insult turned into his mother being dragged by her hair and called a whore. They were banished from their courtyard and their things taken. Mama refused to give up though clinging to the few treasures her sister had left her.
Father would return, she said like a prayer and a vow, desperate in her belief. He would come back and take Mo Xuanyu away to a glittering tower of gold to make him an immortal cultivator. Their fortunes would change and no one would hurt them again.
Mo Xuanyu would murmur reassuringly, completing whatever task was needed in their small home. There were no servants anymore so he cooked and cleaned, offering to take over others chores in exchange for things they needed like food or charcoal. His hands grew callused and his clothes worn as his Mama sewed them together over and over, occasionally sacrificing a bit of her own clothing in order to make something for him. Mo Xuanyu learned to swallow down the anger that burned in his veins, a familiar dark edged thing, and sometimes as he drifted through his life head down and working until his hands cracked and bleed he would forget.
His ghosts became more prevalent overlapping with the figures who never talked to them and spending time with his poor unmoving Mama, in their little home. He would go days consumed in them not even realizing anything was wrong only to be shocked out of them by answering someone who vanished like morning mist.
It would make his heart ache sometimes. Not all the ghosts were bad.
While doing chores, alone in the quiet he'd hear girlish laughter that made him smile and see the edge of a sweet face with hair pinned up in loops calling after him or keeping him company. Once he'd called out without a thought and the name lingered on his tongue for days.
"Ning-shijie." He has called her and received a happy bell-like laughter and an answering name he couldn't decipher.
" A-***. " The phantom had said back like a chirping bird swinging her feet from where she sat on the wood pile. "Come play with me!"
She was playful, this bright phantom. Kind and a little spoiled and thrilled to see him. Like a happy kitten demanding attention. He'd assume she would be unchanging, forever a girl until one day in the winter he found himself curled up outside and felt her phantom hands brush him to look up and find a woman, still sweet faced and kind but with a mature air and something serious as she sat beside him offering a reassuring, "He'll be back A-***. Shijie will stay with you in the meantime though."
Mo Xuanyu had cried at the loss he felt when she faded away when he leaned closer.
There were others too.
A darkly dressed man with a strange blue mark who was mostly silent, a comforting presence always following him, calling him "My Lord", and occasionally offering brief serious remarks. Hidden in his shadow was a nervous man with quick hands and bright brown eyes that always seemed to hint at knowing something he shouldn't. When they were together the tall man softened. He would keep the small man at his side or hold his quick hands gently in his own. Alone the quick man was always darting around and talking, muttering under his breath and occasionally looking at Mo Xuanyu with a slightly quirked smile and an odd expression of pride and guilt.
There was the man with the ponytail, who was always scowling and wanting to fight. A man as beautiful as a fairy and with the savage grace of a storm. Mo Xuanyu loved to watch him fight invisible opponents, admiring the form and feeling his hands burn with the unfamiliar and bewildering desire to hold a blade and dance with him. When the man would look over and his eyes would flash, mouth twisting into an insult Mo Xuanyu wanted to fight him instead. Prove who was better.
A woman who had the same inhuman air of the tall man existed as well. A flame in human form, accompanied by bells and wrapped in blood red silk. She would dance around him, following his unspoken orders, and curse him under her breath. But she would light up turning into a star when the veiled woman in purple would appear, serious and with the same brows as the man with the ponytail. She and the red woman would often fight but other times the red woman would throw herself joyfully into her arms and Mo Xuanyu would need to look away to give the ghosts privacy.
The last ghost he could never fully see, only know the after image. A hand drifting away from patting his head, the sound of a fan opening itself with a snap, a glimpse of emerald silk and long black hair in the corner of his eye, and most telling the quiet, intimate whisper of "Husband" that left something inside Mo Xuanyu wailing and broken.
They kept Mo Xuanyu floating through his half-life barely remembering his name some days as he searched for a way to escape and improve his and his Mama's life.
They could not wait for false promises.
Then the Wen Clan took Mo Village.
And Mo Xuanyu remembered Luo Binghe.