pcachdrunk
@kongque asked : ❛ do you remember when we first met? ❜ from kongque - HIT EM WHERE IT HURTS (ACCEPTING)
…When they first met? Peers at him from the corner of her eye - hasn’t expected him to speak first or at all when they were inevitably left alone. “…Yes, I do.” She had been barely more than a girl, barely old enough to understand why she had been woken early that morning to be sat down in front of the vanity, Madame Yu’s face cloudy now, in her memory, but her touch almost a ghost in the tingle on Yanli’s scalp as she remembers her mother tugging the way mothers do - just tight enough to pinch a little. Remembers her mother’s voice, gruff and yet cozy above the tinkling of the ornaments that had been woven into her hair, harsh next to her ear as she’s warned to behave. Remembers being curious - had garnered many questions from other girls as the only one that had been engaged at her age, questions she herself wants the answers to. She’s heard plenty, of course - but nothing can be quite the same as seeing for herself.
Marriage is important to daughters of the great clans - to daughters of the common people as well, the determinant of whole futures. She never imagines, never held particular designs - but she harbors the secret hope, even now that when she would be married - that she can have a peaceful marriage. Yanli doesn’t dream of love and hatred fierce enough to tear hearts in two - she dreams of a pond without ripples, a body of still water from which lotuses can grow. And so she had asked her mother beforehand what the young Jin Gongzi might like for refreshment - found herself keeping vigil in the kitchen the night before, the first time she had cooked for someone outside of her family as she concocts a peace offering - and stood patiently at the docks when the delegation had arrived. Her determination did not stop the blood pounding in her ears or the muscle jumping frantically in her chest with anxiety when the boat finally docks and there’s Madame Jin, stepping onto the pier with her son -
And then she does see him. And they both remember THE REST.
Smile touches her lip, unnoticed by herself, and exhale is quiet. “You know, Jin Gongzi…You might not believe me, but…I really only wanted to make friends with you then.” Fingers fiddle absently with the tassel of the pendant hanging at her waist, deep purple and comforting. “And I had hoped that…that since we no longer have that piece of paper between us, we…could try being friends NOW.” That was what he disliked, wasn’t it? That before he had even met her, before he had even known her as anything other than the plain and unaccomplished daughter of the Yunmeng Jiang, he was told he had to marry her one day? That he couldn’t choose? Spreads her hands in a moment, laugh light and soundless. “ - Since your mother seems to be so fond of putting us in rooms together ANYWAY?”
An impressible nostalgia as warm and winning as an embrace turns at once into something bitter and bile at the back of his throat. He’s the one who’d brought up the subject of their first meeting, as though it were anything delightfully memorable for the both of them. In fact, before he’d fallen irreparably in love with Jiang Yanli, he would have remembered it as it had come to pass: two young children with the ineludible burden of their family’s expectations weighing upon their shoulders, shoved at each other
Yanli had been a good girl from the start. He’d been less so. Resistant enough that his mother had taken to tricking them into meeting in quiet rooms alone before she’d begun to locking them in the heights of Koi Tower until they could find an accord. Which they had, in the unexpected result of them learning how to break out of doors with hairpins and scaling down windows while laughing like little imps.
But where Yanli had quietly acquiesced, she’d also exceeded both their mother’s expectations by actually falling for him. And just when he’d finally, belatedly realized the inexorable sweetness, kindness, goodness, wisdom in her... suddenly that girl he’d feared would be around forever seemed lost to him.
He smiles as best he can at the offer, though the effort cannot brighten the dim sadness of his eyes. “I think I’d like that,” he admits finally, lips finding the courage to lie at last. “Maybe ... maybe you could come visit sometime? And I could visit you, too. If that’s alright.”
He laughs, also soundlessly. But mirthlessly, as well. “I don’t know if I could get used to not seeing you.” His smile turns a sweet shade of melancholy. “I don’t know that I’d want to.”
