Work Text:
They come for him in the night, as they always do.
First comes trembling; second comes pleas and third come screams.
Tonight, he screams loud enough to wake the dead.
Ao Bing’s eyes snap open to twisted sheets being flung off their bed.
As he does every night, Ao Bing clutches Nezha’s shoulder. He shakes him as roughly as he dares. And calls to him, lips already shaping the words,
“Nezha, wake up!”
In the moonlight, Nezha’s body, aglow with divine fire by day, is dim and drenched in darkness; Nezha, scourge of the heavens, is watched over by an exiled dragon prince who watches cords of muscle stand out in his best friend’s neck as he grits his teeth; Nezha, the demon orb, sightlessly claws at empty air, bound by the invisible strength of foes - jailers - who keep him from straying too far from the realm of dream;
A dream of Samadhi fire, flaying and forging his flesh into being.
A dream where Samadhi fire devours his mother whole.
In Ao Bing's heart, as it does every time a strangled sob escapes his friend’s trembling lips, something cuts him deep.
That something thrashes in his chest - a fish flailing in a too-small bowl of water- growing with every shake, harder and harder.
“Wake up” he begs.
Please.
And then his hands are suddenly free; left to hover uncertainly over the spot where his friend’s twitching shoulder had just been.
Wake.
Then his friend crouches before him with eyes wide and hunted. One knee planted firmly on the ground, the other holding his weight - a stance borrowed from coiled snakes ready to jut out and lunge. In the place where neck and shoulder meet, a bowstring of taut muscle tenses and throbs, wriggling beneath Nezha’s skin like a worm twitching on a fisherman’s hook. Inhale. Exhale. Inhale. Exhale - his chest collapses inward and pushes painfully outwards and his lips are drawn back over his teeth as he hoarsely sucks in more and more air, gripping his knees so tightly that there’ll be bruises blooming green and purple come morning.
Ao Bing knows - this is the ragged tremor of a body that has yet to forget the ghosts of remembered horror; A body which has yet to - but will - remember the shame following the realisation that it has made an admission of - no, admissions- of fear.
Difficult it is to remember how exactly he arrived at those dark depths but he remembers - voices chasing him through the valleys and overhangs of the ocean’s trenches, their long shadows grown menacing and toothed. Third Prince of the Eastern sea. Your Highness. That those bodiless voices called him, high and undulating, their cries sickly sweet with false courtesy. Little dragon…Play. That they commanded him. A common dragon, no less a royal one, was deferred to across the seven seas. They were the conquerors of uncharted waters, masters of the tides - such was what he’d been taught to expect as his inheritance, such was what he was owed.
But he’d known then the face of raw hunger. Title or not, he was food.
They knew it.
He knew it.
And when they finally came for him, yellow eyes winking in the yawning deep, he’d screamed, curled in upon himself as his heart turned to stone in his chest and the very water seemed to weigh as millstones upon his shoulders. And he’d waited for the crunch, for that burst of breathtaking pain as starving jaws closed upon him…
But enough.
Ao Bing retracts his hand, keeping his voice light and unthreatening, subtly softened with an offer of service.
“Wait here.”
Resisting the urge to touch Nezha’s shoulder, he places a foot over the threshold of their doorway into the next room. He roots through the linen closet, sniffing sheets and spare clothing. Three short months they’ve lived here. But that’s long enough for everything in the house to smell of them - of sweet hair oil, of greasy smoke and winter seas. If he inhales more deeply, beneath the surface scents, there lies a hint of damp parchment and mildew. Cobwebs from a previous tenant gather in the corner of the room, beneath the brass nightstand, gleaming silver in the moon’s waning light. On the slats of the wicker windowsill, a fine film of dust rests.
This house has three rooms - one for sleeping, another for cooking and eating; this one for storing and keeping. Of late, it has become where his excuses are stored and dignity and concessions are retrieved.
At the sound of Ao Bing’s voice, he’d let go of himself. Flapped his hands ineffectually to say I am alright; tried to rearrange his features into something resembling a grin - I really am. He’d succeeded with a grimace, tendrils of hair plastered to his forehead with sweat and saltwater.
A hundred nights of incomplete slumber have since passed in the room next to this one.
Nezha no longer apologises for waking him.
Ao Bing wets a towel with lukewarm water.
Through the thin wall, his friend coughs a dry cough.
He folds a dry sleeping robe over his arm.
When he’d first arrived ashore, he’d named the birds thus: creatures which made noise with the changing of the light.
With wonder, he’d learned the names of light:
Twilight.
Dusk.
Dawn.
Under the sea, time was marked by the steady march of routine. His master decided the progress of his days - he alone knew, guided by an unknowable instinct, when it was time to train, eat or play. Singleminded, his teacher was devoted to educating his charge in the hallowed ways of immortal warriors and scholars. After all, no man could successfully ascend to godhood without discipline - if the steel in Ao Bing was not tempered with both trial and tribulation, he might well admit defeat before even attempting to cultivate the path to immortality.
Better men had failed in this endeavour.
No dragon had succeeded.
But Ao Bing would.
His master had promised he’d make it so.
Because one: His master was a man, born and bred on land. Two: Ao Bing would obey him in all things. The second order followed the first fact - for who better was there to steal a dragon the path of honour? Who better than one born to it?
For in the great hierarchy of creation, gods came first, men second and women and children third. On the last rung of living creatures, beneath even mindless livestock, crouched demons and monsters - blessed with the knowledge of men, cursed with the ungovernable temperaments of beasts.
Yet, though his pride was fearsome in most other things, his master never spoke of his home above the waves.
And indifferent he seemed to be to Ao Bing’s stories of discoveries made ashore: of re-enactments of animal songs in tall grass, of fumbling descriptions of curious sensations which ruffled his robes and tangled his hair. But patient he would be when answering Ao Bing’s torrent of questions - Crickets. The wind. You’ll feel it more strongly in high places. It’s the strongest at Heaven’s gates - With that last sentence, his even voice had cracked.
Only in defeat did Ao Bing realise that his master was as human as he was. Which was to say - as human as sand or saltwater; human as hunger and disgrace.
This is how the saga of Chentang Pass ends on the lips of travellers -
- when Shen Gongbao dove into his final battle, he’d discarded his face. And his true face - one fanged with shards of ice-cold wrath- was that of a monster wronged.
Ao Bing brushes his fingers against the splintered doorframe and purposefully presses his foot a little harder on the creaky floorboard joining both rooms. The squeak is good. Loud.
They’re alone now, the demon orb and the spirit pearl.
When he returns, Nezha’s hair has risen slightly - not in full defiance of the laws of nature, but still it is good - a good, comforting sight. The white-knuckled grip on his own knees has slackened - that pleases him. With a damp towel, he approaches Nezha.
The sweat pooling at his temples and the base of his throat is cleaned by practiced hands. Patting his friend’s skin, it’s easy to ignore Nezha’s sleepy protests -he can do it himself, he’s old enough.
Ao Bing, I’m alright. Really. Go back to sleep.
If he sees the slight flinch of his eyelids every time he glances at creeping shadows, he ignores it.
Mostly.
“What?” Nezha asks, his brows coming together. As he does so, he shrugs off his damp robe, tossing it onto the floor.
“Put this on.”
Grumbling, Nezha proceeds to fit his head into an armhole, yanking the robe over his body with ill grace and iller humour. A murmur of irritation escapes through the cloth. “Stupid.”
Just like him, to scold an object without a mouth. If the robe could talk back, he’s sure he’d argue with it. Perhaps a smack would be given for good measure. Quick to act, slow to well-considered action- that was his friend.
At the thought, Ao Bing smiles to himself, warmth spreading beneath his ribs. He watches Nezha transform into a clothbound lump, four other arms springing to his rescue.
Nezha’s initial transformations had escaped his notice the same way breathing and beating hearts in bodies escaped notice - they were only change; natural as the deepening gray of skies in an approaching storm, ordinary as day dissolving into night. His extra arms made an appearance whenever he decided he needed more hands to hold spoons; they sprouted when two punches at a time were insufficient; they grew when Ao Bing needed onions from the top shelf and Nezha was already wrapping pork in leaves. But the way the villagers in the valley below stared at Nezha’s extra arms, one would believe that their dead parents had climbed out of their graves, greeted them and invited them for dinner in hell.
“Why did you?” Ao Bing explodes.
“I wanted to.”
Nezha shuts the door; settles onto the wooden bench at their dining table, carefree as anything.
He wants to shake him.
Ao Bing likes being liked. Being liked made sure that children were duly admonished when they tried to pull your hood up because they just wanted to see. Being liked meant that you could sit in teahouses, that gazes slid off you as raindrops off leaves. Being liked guaranteed that any knocks at the door were deliveries and not invitations to settle scores with steel.
To be liked was to be safe.
Newcomers were tested by young and old alike - how many times had he had caught stones aimed at his horns? How many times had he smiled against his own black moods? Common knowledge determined that acceptance be something hard-earned and reluctantly given.
So he didn’t dislike people. He just knew them - they were kind when they could be, cruelly watchful when they would not be.
Which is also how he knows - whatever thoughts he’s thinking they’ve had, those people at the marketplace have had them tenfold, no a hundredfold -
That Nezha’s hair, floating around his temples like a live flame, is uncanny, but not unbecoming. That untrimmed nails and permanently smoke-stained fingertips make him look like he’s been rummaging through the ashes like a starving ghost - but that again, untidiness is not ugliness. That the gold at his wrists and ankles would eventually render any uncanniness or untidiness invisible.
All that - it was what Ao Bing saw in their eyes. It was judgement, tolerable and ordinary - that was all it was.
Till Nezha took it upon himself to level any possibility of friendship. With one fell, thoughtless, stroke. With a transformation Ao Bing knows his friend could’ve controlled.
When four arms erupted from his back, the children dropped their stones. The women dropped their gazes; shut their doors. When Nezha accepted the oranges from the feeble shopkeeper with his third arm, the one closest to his shoulder, the man had trembled, turned and tumbled onto the dirt ground. Apologising all the while, Ao Bing left the money they owed next to the piles of unsold fruit - the man would not rise to let him put it in his hand.
Blissfully, or perhaps, deliberately ignorant of Ao Bing’s irritation, Nezha crosses one leg over the other and leans back, resting his forearms on the side of the dining table.
“They wanted to see.”
“So I showed them.”
He smiles.
It looks almost right.
Almost.
When he emerges, head finally through the right opening, his eyes are tired. Anger and terror stripped away, taunts toothless and silent, Nezha is only tired - a far cry from the obstinate child who swore to challenge and crush the immortal gods. So often then did vengeful rage hack away at his childish features, turning him into a shrill, bloodshot horror of sweeping limbs and screeching roars - a waking nightmare his enemies called him. But now it is night -nightmares have pulled him from slumber- and unwilling wakefulness blurs his features.
Small and weary, he rests his forehead against his clasped hands.
Nezha’s feelings flit across his face like the unfurling of a scroll tossed onto a tabletop. Lies are impossible. They would be so even if he wanted to tell them. So in his eyes, Ao Bing observes him observing his demon mark in their little looking glass. Fancies developed into true wonder when he remembered he could sit still. On his lips, he reads Nezha’s names for himself. He has so many of them. But more often than any other, is -
Thief.
Like earthquakes beneath the sea, bone-rattling tremors which tore great gashes in the seabed, his severe joys and sadnesses were as sand pouring inward, swallowed by the earth’s centre. And these moments, where he laughed to make fires dance and sorrowed to make wolves weep - they fled as if they had never been.
They left when he’d been sure that his father would be well. Find himself; find adulthood - that was what he told his father in the careless carefree manner he’d learnt to expect of his son.
All manner of excuses Nezha gave. But even as those words passed his lips, it was clear that he was home beneath the shaded trees of his childhood; home on the riverbanks where he’d laughed and fished, heels kicking in the cool waters; home near the grave of Lady Yin, where she was as near as she could be now.
Yet, he was the unfortunate, overbright shadow of his mother’s warmth. His resemblance was close enough to wound, too faraway to comfort. The clumsily prepared meals he made and set before his father tasted right and conversation at the dinner table flowed as easily as it had done, Nezha sitting in his childhood chair, Ao Bing upon a borrowed stool. But his mother's empty seat no amount of words could mask and as his father’s eyes drifted from his son’s face and to the place his wife should’ve been, Nezha understood - he’d robbed his mother of a long full life with his father.
In those days, the vibration of Nezha’s thoughts permeated the surrounding air, boiling it till Ao Bing swore he could hear the hiss of steam rising from his skin. He’d always laugh then. He was a demon dumpling, he’d say. How efficient it was to neither prepare meat, wrapping nor bamboo steamer. If only that old fart had known that before he stuck them in a celestial metal steamer.
And then he’d laugh.
Ao Bing knows fire.
When his aunts and uncles descended upon Chentang Pass, the very air burned. And he knows, the people took their time dying.
This he did not say when their feet fell home to earth.
But anyone with eyes to see would have known - the people of Chentang Pass - they were fear petrified in black obsidian. Terror and pain there was in stony irises and outstretched hands, reaching for deliverance. And Nezha, righteous and aflame with Samadhi fire, held out - he held his hands out in return, reaching for an absolution that would never arrive.
But then he’d flinched away. Because living flesh should not reflect him so, because what was reflected in the deep, cold blackness that remained of his friends and family were the flickers of final moments bathed in approaching flame.
When he stood upon the great expanse of the world, Ao Bing had heard what throbbed feverishly beneath his words - rage, defiance and righteous vengeance.
Like all heroes, this would be a good place for the beginning of his story. This was the edge of the world upon which he’d make his stand - the correct place to vow his undying devotion to the repayment of the debt his friends’ lost lives had accumulated.
“Too young to know fear”, he declared as he swiped the side of his nose with habitual arrogance.
“I want to change the world!”
There had been a joyful wonder that he would remake the world. They would do that much together.
But Ao Bing is also the chill in the air, the damp mist upon skin and a part of him - parts of him- linger, settling upon the bare branches of burnt trees, in what whistles through the quiet of Chentang Pass, in the emptiness of grasping, ice- cold hands, And he knew and heard:
Hollow; hollow; hollow
Before they shared a bed, he’d thought that the corners of Nezha's mind could be flooded with light, an inferno that drove out all darkness. His own thoughts were made of the same substance of his being - ice, clouded with shadow and fear. But he knows better now - he too bears an inheritance unasked for.
I wanted to change the world
So once again, as he does every night, he pulls him into his arms and holds him as friends should.
Nezha settles into Ao Bing’s armpit, treating him like an oversized bolster. He slings an arm over his stomach, pulling him closer. Close enough to feel the damp warmth of his breath against his skin and the sweat on his forehead.
One leg rests over both of his. He will have a cramp. Along with stiff shoulders and a stiff neck. It won't matter. Not really.
Lying on his back, he observes the night through their window. A gentle breeze blows the gauzy certain aside, exposing the interior of their little room to the open night. There lies the sky, shot through with arrow points of light, with its manifold chariots manned by Heaven’s generals.
As he does every night, he recalls being unable to recall a time when the sky’s endless beauty's meant anything but the promise of persecution, from enemies above and within. And from places where the dead whisper and weep in the eaves.
In his arms, the soft rise and fall of his best friend’s chest pushes against the side of his ribs. In the moonlight, the stains of dry tears linger on his cheeks. The darkness of the circles that ring his eyes grow deeper in the white, pale light.
He recalls, not for the first time, that they are alone now - Nezha and Ao Bing.
And so, as he does every night, he holds his friend close, pulling the blankets a little tighter around them both.
All so that when they come for him again, after the trembling, pleas and screams, Ao Bing will be there to offer in silent answer -
I see you.