Weird-ass Edensphere (journal panfandom RP) fic under cut. Huo, Above and Kouei for those In The Know. G, no warnings? HEAVY DUTY ANGST? what is my life even
Everything that he is not is encapsulated in color and light.
When Huo first learns about fireworks from Sniper, his attraction is instinctive, primal and with neither rhyme nor clear and orderly reason. Later he puzzles it that he loves power, he loves brightness, that fire destroys but bursts of flame in the sky like brief flowers of starlight can be joyful, can be a gift. The craft is simple, too, and comes naturally so that soon he doesn't need Sniper or Stellaris anymore. He can mix his own with increasingly bold inventiveness and be confident in the absolute nature of the formulas. He eschews teaching from others and sets out to master chemistry by himself, by books and what trials he can devise. Soon it shows that he has as much talent for it as he has for reading the weather, delivering calves, growing rice, mending small injuries, playing stringed instruments and talking circles around people.
There are ten thousand things for him to learn, sometimes within the space of a single day. By the time that Edensphere breaks and blooms again, his fireworks had been put aside before fears of other fires, but they remain functionally pleasing. He makes a small show whenever they have visitors, to show frivolity and joy. He still makes small progress on them now and then, when a bit of lore from this world or another falls into place.
"Hey, this batch is really good," Above tells him one night in one of her rare visits. Compliments from her are rare. Huo humbly preens. Then she says, "you're Chinese, right?"
He blinks at her. He'd heard the term before, naturally, but it's still difficult to think of it as pertaining to him. "A man of Hàn. Yes, I am."
"You know that you guys invented fireworks?"
Huo hasn't known.
Thinking back to it, as he does in the split-second that follows as his mind races in the wake of her words, he realizes that he'd read of it. In books, before the breaking of the Sphere. Gunpowder was invented in the Middle Kingdom during the time of a dynasty called the Sòng, some eight hundred years - eight hundred years! - after the final collapse of the dynasty that he had, himself, fought to preserve. He now remembers quite clearly. Above continues, casual, or as casual as he is ever able to believe that she's being considering him and her. "It's one of the Four Great Inventions. I saw a movie about it once."
She proceeds to list them. He knows who invented paper, of course. One out of four.
One out of four.
She doesn't needle at him about it when he becomes quiet and downcast, and takes herself off for a night flight over the brilliant summer fields. He goes inside and digs through his books, but distractedly. Fireworks. The compass, the idea of which he had mastered within an hour as soon as the explanation was before him. Printing. All of his books are printed.
Kouei pokes his head into the room. He doesn't need more than that peek to know that something is wrong. "Xiándì? Are you...?"
The river, he thinks. The river has flowed on and I am far, far behind... He gives his head a minute shake, otherwise still as stone. Kouei hesitates, but then stays in the doorway in silence without pressing the matter, either. Such stillness is not natural for Huo. It means a sudden fragility, like thin ice that might shatter.
Huo appreciates it. He knows what he might say now, if moved to speak. Five hundred years, brother... eight hundred! He is glad that he is allowed silence, instead.
What else, he thinks, frantic under the thin shell. What else, in the Middle Kingdom. All Under Heaven over which Hàn no longer reigns. What colors, what light, what fires. What men, what women too, inventing who knows what marvels. His study is stuffy with books, unbearably loud with books, all of them mocking him in the rustling dust of printed pages. How long, time's vast river? How long, to paddle breathlessly until he sees, deep in the fog, the lanterns of those who had sailed on ahead with the current?
He pushes back from the table abruptly, hard, knocking over his inkstone and the brush that he still favors over any other writing implement. He scrambles to his feet. Kouei is quickly at his back, with a steadying hand on his shoulder. His breathing is ragged going on, his voice precarious in coming out.
"How much do people change?" he asks. "In five hundred years, rénxiōng, how much?"
"A lot changes." Kouei's answer comes readily. He sounds a little confused by the question, but very sure of the answer. "But people... not at all."
Huo nods. It is a snatched gesture, convulsive almost, but he makes it nonetheless. He raises his own hand and lays it across his brother's. For the first time, immortality comforts him. He feels Heaven's view, its grand perspective, brush against his smallness as a tender stroke.
"I need a book called the Wǔjīng Zǒngyào, a treatise on military devices from the Great Sòng," he says, and knows that Kouei will not question. He knows just by the way in which the moment passes, in which ice melts away, that his brother will know. The way that slowly, slowly, they unwind the tangle of a new world, and find how their own pattern is wreathed within the weave. "I have a river to sail up. But others have left me a good wind."
