#dcstinyscdgc

[adversitybloomed]

🌸  ┊@​  @dcstinyscdgc   Cheng Cheng  liked for a small starter.

        ❝  welcome, General Jiang. please have a seat and make yourself at ease... may i offer you some tea ?  ❞

[gusulanshi]

@dcstinyscdgc sent an "I need..." meme:

i need to sit down for a second to catch my breath. (ji.heng)

Hearing those words from his friend, Lan Qiren immediately stops. "Of course. Take all the time you need," he replies, sheathing his sword.

While Ji Heng sits down, he procure a jug of water. Where it had been stashed is unknown. Perhaps he always carries around jugs of water or maybe it's some kind of special Lan cultivation? Of course, it is neither, he is simply prepared.

Taking a seat next to his friend, he hands her the water. "Drink." Qiren himself seems ridiculously collected and unperturbed by the exercise or the sunny weather.

[roscvcins]

@dcstinyscdgc asked : five times cried: ( five times the receiver cried over the sender ) (hongliu) - FIVE TIMES DRABBLE PROMPTS (TEEHEE)

1) Tears, the guest says with something akin to a smile, and the tone of his voice suggests his satisfaction, are an offering.

She doesn't know much of the outside world, and so when the guest brings her to a welfare home on a night of adventure, she asks him, thinking at least in part of the prison she came from - what could be interesting about such a place?

The guest leans over her shoulder. He points into the crowd, and he says - watch.

Zhao Muchi doesn't understand, but she does as she's told, and watches the boy sitting by himself in the back of cathedral. He sits there, day after day, night after night, his face impassive. She thinks, faintly - he reminds her of someone.

It is for that thought that she finally decides to step out from the shadows, and barely notices that the boy looks up, like he can see her.

His name is Bai Liu, she finds out. She doesn't tell him her name, but he doesn't seem to mind very much. After that day, they sit together. The guest makes it so that other people ignore her presence - but she thinks, Bai Liu always knows she's there.

The guest is amused, she can tell. He takes her to different, fantastical places, to meet a rich variety of people, but he always takes her back here, every few days.

Bai Liu looks sad, most of the time, when she appears. It doesn't show on his face, or in how he talks and what he does. But she can sense it. It's present, hidden just beneath the surface, like a secret only she can tell.

So she's taken by surprise when, one day, he looks directly at her - over the shelves of dusty books, where she's sitting lazily by the window, and says, definitive and not like question, "You cry on the inside when you think people can't tell."

The guest's visit is drawing to a close. When he leaves, she'll have to go back to life...before. Just thinking of it makes her want to draw blood.

"I'm not," she says, and ignores how her voice shakes. She doesn't want to cry. She wants to claw and bite and hurt and kill. He doesn't know her. They barely know each other.

"You are," he says plainly, and pauses for a moment. "...The way I do, sometimes."

A phantom sigh that seems to come from the universe itself. The guest has told her Bai Liu is presently too young, but he has such potential. Zhao Muchi sometimes wonders - potential for what?

"So, how about we make a bargain?" Bai Liu continues.

Her brows scrunch together. "What kind of bargain?"

"I'll cry for you, if you'll cry for me." He says, like the most natural thing in the world - flat face, dry-eyed. After a pause, he adds, "It seems like the most even kind of bargain. You don't cry very often. I don't cry very often either. It's an equivalent exchange of terms."

She wants to laugh. She wants to tell him he's being ridiculous. But, looking into black, sincere eyes, all she manages to say, a whisper nearly lost to the distant chime of cathedral bells, "Would you do that?"

A fleeting, unnameable emotion roars to life - she remembers her mother, suddenly - and her hands hover over her chest at the way it suddenly aches so much she can't breathe.

It is over far too soon.

The guest returns her to her tower, and she thinks she'll never see him again.

2) She doesn't particularly like this movie.

Her manager says she's her own worst critic with a sigh and barely concealed impatience - and she swallows the surprising discomfort of seeing her face, smiling in that way and moving as it does, magnified on a screen one story high, and does her best to maintain her composure on the carpet and when she sits for the interviews. She reminds herself of what the reporters want. What the audience wants. She practices her smile in the mirror and resists the urge to smash it into pieces.

(The worst thing about growing up is all the dreams that become reality: fairytales tainted by the grime and smoke of daily life like a dulled string of pearls, enticing mysteries revealed to contain nothing but the residual filth, her mother's wishes for her achieved and yet impossible.)

Much later, she books out the rundown little theatre in a mid-sized city out of the way of her usual haunts - without her manager's knowledge, so she doesn't ask where Zhao Muchi's got the money from. It will be easier to experience it alone, she tells herself. She will be her own audience, and maybe then she won't summon to mind the image of her mother's frail hands, her watery smile.

It is, incidentally, as is reported to her when she arrives, the third night in a row the theatre custodian has seen that boy sitting in the front row through the night. She enters from the special entrance near the projector room, and can almost immediately make out the figure illuminated by the screen from all the way in the back of the theater, and with the thunderous drum of her heartbeat in her ear, decides to keep watching. More than the fact that she recognizes that uniform - she recognizes as well the distant expression on the light-paled face, the eyes as dark and still as an arctic lake.

She finds herself curious as to what he thinks. And so all night Bai Liu spends watching the movie, she spends watching him.

He isn't as expressive as she remembers him being. He doesn't laugh very often, and even when he does it's not the same, careless thing she's heard before, which casts his whole demeanor as faefolk of the forest, fickle and other. When he cries it is silent, somber. His face doesn't change, and she can only catch the sheen of tears glistening on the side of his face when the screen lights up the theater with her own.

She wonders with faint, underlying frustration - what there is to cry for. Her character is a silly little thing of hardly any substance, relegated to the sidelines to be eye candy, comic relief, something to look at when the scene cuts away - part of why she hates it. It's her face, her manager tells her with the edge of pride - she looks too perfect, and the first thing others will remember is her beauty anyway, so it hardly matters what the role is like - like it's something to be proud of. Like beauty isn't the cage that has held her prisoner since the very start of her life.

She wants to know why he sees her face and cries the same way she wants to scream and weep when she sees it herself.

When she sends the usher, a shy girl working her first job who seems confused but willing and unlikely to give her away, he looks directly toward the back of the theater when he speaks.

Zhao Muchi holds her breath, and sinks down into the seats, peeking between them. She isn't sure if Bai Liu can see her in the backlight of the projector but she doesn't think she wants to risk it. There's no noticeable change in his expression, and she watches his mouth move. Then, he stands up, and with a final glance toward her general direction, leaves the theater.

Later, the usher returns with the answer.

"His eyes are sad," Bai Liu had said, looking into the back of the theatre, and without even finding her in the sea of seats, looked into her soul the same way he had seen it through the beautiful mask on the screen. "Nobody asked him. Nobody asked him if this is what he wants to be."

Her heart stutters an erratic rhythm in her chest, and she runs out before she has time to be sick.

Zhao Muchi runs, and she never goes back to that theatre again.

3) "I'm surprised."

Bai Liu looks up at Hearts, graceful as he sets teacup back in saucer, and tilts his head with a hum, curiosity in his eyes. "What? That I didn't cut you off entirely?"

She presses her lips together. "It seems like the reasonable thing to do."

A quiet noise, not quite a laugh nor a sigh. Bai Liu steeples his hands and she can't help but imagine the warmth of the tea lingering in his fingertips. "What do you think you are to Jiayi?"

She tries not to think about it. Tries not to think about the chilling sounds that had come from Jiayi's stream when her brother had died. Tries not to think about the way she chooses to leave with such conviction. Tries not to think, with half grief and half relief - good. Jiayi is finally getting off an island she herself will never leave.

"A necessary evil." She breathes out.

Bai Liu frowns.

Jiayi sits with Phoebe now, a few feet away, looking up now and again to glance this way from their discussion of which worms exist in the perfectly realistic garden in the peripheral area of the King's Guild to glance. Perhaps her presence has proved troublesome for Jiayi after all - a child so in tune with the conflicts of adults that she must wonder in the back of her mind when a fight might break out.

In truth, she has no intention of fighting.

"...I took advantage of a lost little girl and made her into a weapon." She looks into the bottom of her cup through amber liquid. She thinks about the man - the god - that had made her into a weapon, and how as much as she perhaps should have hated him, she had been thankful for him instead. "I severed her only tie to a different life when I got her brother killed. For my own - selfish desires, I hurt her. I made her...like this."

Monstrous, like me, she doesn't say. She's sure he heard anyway. Bai Liu has an uncanny ability to hear the things she doesn't say.

"Is that what you think of yourself?" His voice is soft.

She looks up. There is no longer anything she can discern from his eyes.

He must be displeased. There's a rigidity in his posture that indicates coldness. She doesn't answer.

Hearts looks away, hurriedly - like she's been burned. Her gaze scans the side of the garden where Jiayi and Phoebe are hunched over now watching snails crawl over the leaves of the rainbow tulips, over the rose bushes, and to the small pond with the waterlilies that had just come in in time for the summer.

"...It's a rare beauty, isn't it?" She clears her throat, saying the first thing that comes to mind. "Flowers that grow out of mud."

Bai Liu's tone is pressed low as he stares out of the window glass. If she had looked at him, she might have noticed a damning glimmer at his slightly reddened eyeline. "I think," when he starts again, he has regained control over his voice. "It would have been beautiful no matter what it grew from." 4) The rain is coming down even harder.

His hair is beginning to frizz, the wet fabric of his shirt clinging to his skin, accentuating the lines of this body in an unflattering way that he's thankfully too numb to think about - the disguise has washed off, his hand revealed entirely, the ace of hearts crumpled and waterlogged on the floor - and the game is long over.

He lost.

(So - and his brow furrows incrementally - why is Bai Liu the one who's crying?)

Even through the downpour, he can clearly see into those deep, dark eyes - not the same as the god's, he knows, and by now he's practiced in determining the difference - and they're singed red, droplets clinging to dark lashes like beads of glass, but perhaps still more importantly - they're still looking at him. It should be hard to differentiate from the rain on Bai Liu's face, and the expression he's wearing cannot be read - but Zhao Muchi feels, with a certainty that startles him and still resonates deep in his very soul, that the tracks on his face has to be tears.

Tears are an offering, he remembers suddenly, faint and frenzied and with a mild thread of instinctive panic as Bai Liu tugs him over.

Oh, he thinks in the next moment - dazed and off balance when an arm wraps around his waist, when the curl that has relentlessly tickled his cheek is finally brushed out of his face by gentle fingers, when in the time it takes to exhale the space between them disappears and their lips slant together and he tastes the salt on the tip of his tongue - and then his eyes close and his fingers curl into the collar of familiar button up shirt and he understands.

(Some kinds of suffering have nothing to do with the gods.)

He gasps when he pulls away and feels the ephemeral weightlessness of someone else holding his soul between careful hands, and his body wobbles, steadied by the arms that hold him, and his gaze does not leave Bai Liu's face.

In the horizon the sun is sinking into the sea, and the clouds are beginning to clear. He can hear the cheer and laughter of female voices, knows that beneath the island their families are celebrating their victory, standing by each other for their losses, turning their eyes to the sky.

"...This is a horrible bargain." And he says, after a long moment, his own voice hoarse and small - unconvincing, he knows, because despite what he says he knows he yearns for it deep in his chest, and it brings him shame. "Everyone knows - nothing good will come of this."

You'll suffer, he doesn't say.

His mother built herself a cage hoping he would take flight. Jiayi has always known a flower with thorns is no prettier than a dagger, and yet he had been her only option. Phoebe looks at him with cool eyes and her hands and voice are steadier than his. All the love he has ever known has been pressed into his hands, bloodied and tearstained, voiceless and oppressive with what must be, has to be regret.

Bai Liu nods to indicate he understood, but he doesn't step away, doesn't let go - and there's a particular gleam in his eyes, a soft curve of lips. "I think - and if I'm bold enough to guess one more time tonight, I believe on this we agree - " He hums, gently and meticulously brushing the rain off of Zhao Muchi's cheeks. serious and musing.

"...Some people are worth suffering for."

5) On a bright and cloudless day with clear and endless skies, they make it to the island, now nestled in the glimmering waves of the calm blue sea. The tour begins in the room where he had once worn Bai Liu's uniform and sat pretending to read and a god had stood over his shoulder - but he doesn't linger here the way he used to, wanting more to show Bai Liu the room he had lived in now for at least a decade. Bai Liu follows slowly as Zhao Muchi takes him out through the shadow of the courtyard, and then to his mother's garden, where she had rested for a short while beneath the roses.

(Bai Liu will leave a lily and a silent promise for her gravestone elsewhere on a different, equally sunny day. He will close his eyes and be still and the soul will say enough for what the voice does not put to sound.)

They drop in briefly on Phoebe, who barely looks up and waves them away with an eyeroll, and at sunset they head down, hand in hand, to the beach. Zhao Muchi swings their joined hands lazily, his voice low and soft and barely above the crash of the tide as he talks - not of Salome, but of himself, of the past, the idyllic dreams of a childhood long forgotten and the depth of blood and pain that forced him to grow up, far too fast. Bai Liu listens, and speaks softly in the silence of his own experiences at the welfare home, and the sunset in his eyes refracts into a vibrant kaleidoscope of colors.

The sand beneath them stretches into the coastline on the horizon, and as they continue forward to the sound of their voices, it seems like the owners of parallel footprints have walked through the past and into the present, onward now, side by side, into the future.

Zhao Muchi emerges from the bathroom hours later, ends of hair free of sand and still dripping with condensed moisture, to find him standing by the window, and when he sees the reflection of stars in those very same eyes, glassy and blurred now at the edges like the ocean, he steps into Bai Liu's periphery, and cups his face.

You love me, he thinks in the space of that sigh, quiet and momentous, tracing the glistening streaks like the tails of twin comets with the pad of his thumb. You love me, he thinks, tender in a way he never imagined himself capable, fond and satisfied and sure. You love me.

(They kiss in the dark, and through the night they hold each other beneath the blankets the way they wished someone would have in their isolated youth, and in the morning the little square of the courtyard they can see from their window is washed anew by daylight, and in the distance the sea crashes gently against the sand, and the gulls call as they circle the rocks. He thought he trapped his mother here, so he trapped himself here, for day after day and year after year, but now the shackles he used to chain himself to this place dissolve and wash away like the foam on the waves, and for the first time he feels free.) +1) Zhao Muchi cries at odd moments in his life. It takes him by surprise every time, because he doesn't seem to himself to be the type. He thinks - he must have a harder heart. Another thing that he inexplicably says he "just knows" about himself.

His mother worries. Even long after he's grown, she'll talk about his fourteenth birthday. He laid eyes on her emerging from the kitchen with lit candles on a birthday cake and the tears began to pour, and he buried himself into her arms and the tears didn't stop for hours as she held him. When she asked why he cried, he couldn't remember a reason.

He never knows why, when it happens.

He's in high school and a broken down welfare home is torn down. The tears blot the page of the newspaper before he registers he's crying. He's eighteen when he overhears someone on the phone with his mother, half fond and half exasperated and sighing about how her stubborn daughter had gotten into a fistfight with her half brother. Inexplicably he remembers steely eyes and courage beyond the years in them and his own eyes sting. He's twenty four when on the way to set, he sees a little girl giving an interview on television, and he's so proud of her he cries his makeup off.

He's twenty five when he's attacked by memories of a life he didn't live. An island in the sky, blood on the cobblestones, his mother sleeping beneath her favorite flowers. A smiling god with leather gloves and the universe in his eyes, a game of comforting horrors from which he built a fortress, a family he forged out of wayward souls.

A man who loves him.

(The same man who opens the door, hours later, to find him still sitting where he'd first fallen in the hallway.)

Has it been a lifetime or ten years? Bai Liu looks as he remembers him the last time they met, but he knows there's a difference. He suddenly understands, like uncovering the truth that has always been hidden beneath another answer, WHY it is that he's always crying.

Once, he had promised his tears would be sacrifice only to a god. Then, Bai Liu took his hand and said, if your tears can't be for yourself, I will cry for you.

"...Don't cry," Bai Liu says, cupping his face, his thumbs gliding with familiar but now unpracticed gentleness to brush away the wet streaks on his cheek. Because Bai Liu, at every point in time, has never wanted him to hurt. But life without pain is impossible, and he will cry because his heart aches for this person he loves who has been sealed away far away in the cosmic distance for years, forgotten. He will cry, because someone will be there to hold him. Zhao Muchi laughs wetly and grabs onto his wrists, pulling him down, pulling him close.

"Tears," he says, like it's his secret to tell, burying his tear-stained face into Bai Liu's neck, because it finally is - and his voice is hoarse in spite of his smile, in spite of the way his eyes glisten, "Are the price I choose to pay for love."

[yearnstarved]

✧. IT SHOULD'VE BEEN A BLESSING to be invited to the heavenly realm even if it was for a birthday of some deity Chang'e never met. She stopped caring about who ascended and who never returned after being sent to the mortal realm. Gods were always coming and going like falling stars. To her surprise, she spotted a familiar side profile when she assumed she was the sole representative from the moon palace.

As soon as their eyes met, there was an off feeling about the whole encounter. Nonetheless, she continued to approach him—her Yu Tu, who she'd known since she escaped her mortal life.

( PEI MING | @dcstinyscdgc )

[moonetherial]

@dcstinyscdgc for Ji Heng

Soring from the heavens into the air above the Heavenly realm his body twined and flowed through the winds and natural power of the heavens. Easily carrying his goddess from their Kingdom on the Moon to meet with Donghua Dijun upon his request. A rare occurrence and one of the only times she was allowed to leave her Kingdom. The light of the sun shimmering on scales of white and ivory bathed in moonlight as he finally landed before the Dijun's palace. Shifting into his mortal form once his goddess had climbed down from between his horns.

Bowing at her request for him to wait in the courtyard as she spoke to Dijun he turned towards one of the sitting tables set out for guests or lounging in the elegant front yard. Settling upon a chair as he turned his attention to the ponds that decorated the area. Gaze easily taking in the area around him before flicking towards a sound to his right and landing upon a female he'd never seen during his previous visits.

[moonetherial]

@dcstinyscdgc for Lian Song

It wasn't often that members of the Royal Family came to the Moon. His goddess and her kingdom had a complicated relationship with the heavenly emperor and the other realms. Though, over the years, his weariness had eased slightly when it came to the third prince. Enough so that an amused smile pulled slightly at the corners of his lips as he bowed to the other in greeting. "We weren't expecting a visit from your Royal Highness. Currently, our goddess is in seclusion."

Rising from his greeting, he then arched one brow. "Or is it not here that you've come to see this time and instead our white peach wine?"

[roscvcins]

@dcstinyscdgc asked : “This morning seems like a month ago.” (d.ongfeng) - TALES FROM THE BAD YEARS (ACCEPTING)

She reaches out to feel his forehead with a SERIOUS furrow in her brow, lips pressed together as she draws out the hum. "...Maybe you should go back to bed." Decides, after a moment of ascertaining that his temperature wasn't too far from hers. "You've been going to a great many morning discussions recently." The ancient gods awakening was SERIOUS business for the Four Seas and Eight Wildernesses - especially since it usually means some calamity or other. "...I ALSO feel like this morning seems like a month ago." She makes a face - that's just the standard fare with attending a lecture on scripture though.

[roscvcins]

@dcstinyscdgc asked : ❝ he is not worthy of you. he never has been. ❞ (r.iver.s.ong @ jiu ~~she's a hypocrite~~)

"...Well, it's not really as simple as that though, is it?" She smiles a little ABSENTLY - elbow bending as she pours the woman another cup of wine. And - she wagers, if it was that simple, probably NEITHER of them would be here, her in her apron with a spell concealing the mark between her brows that she might fit in better with the mortals here - and the woman visibly far from home. "...But I guess it doesn't really matter now anyhow." Leans her cheek into her hand, watching the candle flicker with a tinge of idle - relief. Every time she finds herself able to speak about it, she gives herself a pat. How good, that she can talk about it nonchalantly. "He'll live his life - and I'll live mine. I have - all the time in the world, to get over him."