mqm 2 years: july 19th, 2026
she remembers nothing from that day. moze and jiaoqiu do, though. they remember it. they remember everything.
it was meant to be a routine scouting.
ājust monitoring this new camp,ā feixiao says, pointing to a tiny spot on the map. āiāll send four of you, just to see how much power weāll need. shouldnāt be too hard.ā
minnie instantly volunteers, already antsy after weeks of inactivity.
moze and jiaoqiu only smile fondly at her. had they known what would take place in the near future, they would have never let minnie go. they would have made her stay in the base, where she would be safe and unharmed and whole, like she should be. but this is not that story.
an hour after she leaves with the group, an unknown signal blinks on the radar, one kilometer from theirs. the unknown signal grows in size, doubling, tripling.
feixiao inhales sharply. āitās-ā
static cuts in at that moment, minnieās voice tight with something horrible through the communication line. ājiejie, the camp is empty.ā
jiaoqiu grabs mozeās hand shakily, icy dread creeping down his spine.
āitās a trap, we need to evacuate them, now!ā feixiao cries. all at once, the base explodes into chaos.
the āstrike teamā assembles quickly, consisting of about half of the remaining troops, feixiao, moze, and jiaoqiu.
when they get to the location, it is just before the borisin ambush.
the forest is quickly permeated with the stench of blood and death. moze weaves in and out of the shadows, dispatching one borisin after another, leaving their limp bodies on the ground behind him in a trail of carnage. any borisin who dares attempt a sneak attack on moze is instantly immolated by jiaoqiu, who swiftly follows his lover.
suddenly, moze and jiaoqiu both feel a surging wave of horror as an all-too-familiar scent permeates the air, the cloying sweetness of flowers and decay spreading through the battlefield. they stare at each other for an agonizingly long moment, simultaneously moving towards that saccharine scent.
at the center of that scent, they find a horrible sight.
blood and borisin remains surround minnie as she desperately tries to heal a fellow soldier. ginkgo leaves sprout from the blood seeping from her wounds and the tears running down her cheeks. the scent grows stronger. almost as if in slow-motion, they see the fading lifeforce of minnie pass into the soldier.
snap. just like that, minnie crumples as the soldier rises and joins the battle. moze and jiaoqiu donāt see them though. all they see is minnie lying there, motionless on the floor.
from a distance, they could almost think she is sleeping peacefully. as they race to her limp body, the saccharine scent transforms, an underlying current of rot and decay seeping into the already sickly sweet smell.
moze and jiaoqiu cannot speak. they cannot even think. their minds are consumed with the image of minnie, ginkgo sprouting from her wounds and tears, curling around her still-warm corpse possessively. suddenly, her corpse is cocooned in vines and ginkgo leaves. the syrupy thickness of abundance surrounds them, and before they know it, the cocoon disappears, leaving her body intact and completely unscathed.
the rest of the ordeal passes in a blur. they rush her body back to the base. as soon as feixiao sees the looks on their faces, she knows the worst has happened, and she instantly contacts the garden of recollection (for everyone on the xianzhou knows that when an child of yaoshi is killed and resurrected, their memory of the resurrection must be obliterated, else it fester and turn into mara upon waking).
her memory of that moment is quickly removed and erased, but moze and jiaoqiu are not so lucky. for the first year after her ārebirthā, every time they look at her, they see her body, ginkgo leaves growing from her wounds and her tears, vines curling around her corpse as if to claim it.
time passes, and minnie heals slowly from a life-shattering event she does not remember. but she dreams sometimes: flashes of light, of pain, of THEIR voice, THEIR syrupy essence surrounding her. she never remembers when she wakes. in the back of her mind, a voice whispers to her about an emptiness, a missing memory. she ignores it.
fin.
~~~
explanation and farewell after this. cw for descriptions of depression.
this is my very final farewell to the tumblr yume community. if you want to contact me, my discord is shay.minnie (with the period there). donāt dm me here because i'm not going to log into this account. discord is the only way to contact me. tumblr but especially the yume community here has given me so much trauma that iām still recovering from (i had a depressive episode about 5 months ago [thanks in part to tumblr] leading to an extremely impulsive and bad decision on my part in real life. iām thankfully doing much better now). the experience of giving so much of myself to people and getting nothing in return has hurt me before in the past, and tumblr only worsened that pain. putting in weeks to months of work on fics only for them to not even get 10 notes is the best way to cancel a ship (speaking from experience: minlyn and mqm were both nearly shut down).
after everything, i honestly donāt expect any interactions on this fic anymore as i've been let down so many times in the past by having that expectation of people. iām only posting this here so i can save myself the effort of copying and pasting this in dms to my friends.
goodbye tumblr.