☯ "would you like to stay forever?"
Send me ‘☯ + a scene from my characters canon’ and I will drabble it from my character’s POV.
Perhaps she ran away from home to save her father, but one of the worst things about the last months has been how much she has missed him.
He dries her eyes and she lifts him to his feet, a daughter supporting her father, one soldier to another, and Mulan has never been so happy. Which is why, when Baba looks away and frowns, Mulan is slow to follow his gaze. She has been trained to respond swiftly to danger, but what can trouble her when she is home and the war is won and she has made her family proud?
“Honorable Hua Zhou,” says a familiar voice, and Mulan is so shocked that she turns and moves towards it. “I—“
Then Shang sees her. He seems equally surprised, as if he hadn’t expected her to be there, as if he has come to her home by mistake.
“Mulan,” he says, and her eyebrows leap; so does her stomach. She finds that she wants to hear him say it again—not Ping, not xiǎojie. Her name.
If he said her name again it would be worlds better than You fight good.
They stare at each other, and Mulan cannot understand why he’s here. Her own journey home—the Savior of China, yes, but still a woman riding alone—was a long one, and she is tired and still has the dust of the road on her hands and face.
It does not escape her that he can’t have left the capital long after she did, not for him to arrive so soon after her. A sudden thought surfaces in her bewilderment and the color rises to her face. Why would he—
“Uh, you forgot your helmet.”
She blinks at the helmet Shang has thrust towards her, and he has the grace to look embarrassed as he turns to her father. “Oh, uh, well, actually, it’s your helmet, isn’t it? I mean—“
Shang’s expression as he scrambles to save face is as bright and eager as a boy’s, and Zhou and Mulan look at each other, because neither one recognizes the helmet in Captain Li’s hands. Mulan thinks dimly that she must have lost hers at the Pass.
Probably she should feel somewhat disappointed, as she did on the steps of the palace—that he can only speak to her of battle, that (she thought) she would never see him again. That she wants to be able to talk to Shang about more, when she can’t even explain to herself what more would be.
But it doesn’t matter that he rode here to give her someone else’s helmet, because he rode here, and the knowledge lifts her spirits. She won’t be rid of Shang that easily, and she has no objection to it.
Off her father’s look it is Mulan who steps forward and takes the helmet from Shang: a defensive weapon, one he’s so far used to protect himself from awkward questions about his presence. She almost giggles, because a shield would have been more fitting. Instead Mulan’s stomach rumbles as she smothers her amusement.
“Would you like to stay for dinner?” she asks.
“Would you like to stay forever?” Nǎinai bellows from the gate, and Mulan shakes her head quickly, before Shang can see.
Too late; he catches her eye, and he’s smiling again, and Mulan decides that if Shang—who has, of course, just endured his first military campaign at her side—can last through dinner without taking exception to her grandmother’s bawdier jokes, then maybe she, Mulan, will consider inviting him to stay a little longer.
“Dinner would be great,” says Shang fervently, and if he is thinking of forever, Mulan can’t say that she minds at just that moment.
