Work Text:
Xue Yang steps through air and emerges into the secret heart of Koi Tower to find the unthinkable. Jin Guangyao, chief cultivator, actor without peer, self-made master of Koi Tower, is wearing an outfit that strikes fear into Xue Yang’s heart. He’s wearing a cleaning apron.
“Good morning, Xiao Yang,” Jin Guangyao says brightly.
“Good morning,” Xue Yang says warily. “What are you doing with that?”
“It’s getting kind of dusty in here,” Jin Guangyao says, sweeping his little broom. He looks like a housewife, the kind who would find Xue Yang sleeping in her backyard and dump cold water on him to wake him up. Xue Yang hates housewives.
“Why don’t you have a maid do it and then, you know?” Xue Yang asks, making a throat slitting motion.
“That is just asking for trouble,” Jin Guangyao says reproachfully. “Besides, I like cleaning.”
“You like cleaning?” Xue Yang repeats, sure that he’s heard wrong.
“Cleaning up after other people is terrible,” Jin Guangyao says, and then he pokes Xue Yang in the belly with his broom. Xue Yang knew he was right to hate that thing. “Like when little brother here brings home a mess. But cleaning your own space is fun, because it’s your space. Everything goes where you want it to go.”
“Is that exciting?” Xue Yang asks.
“It’s not exciting, no. But I like it. It’s tiring, living in other people’s houses, knowing that you’re only there because of someone else’s permission. But here- no one can tell me what to put here. No public opinion to weigh in, no one to impress. It’s mine, and it’s for me.”
“I don’t get it,” Xue Yang says grumpily, and bats the broom away.
“Do you have a space that you care about?” Jin Guangyao says. Xue Yang shrugs. As a child he got used to living his life on the road, moving from town to town when the local people grew to hate him too much, looking for the mythical place where he would want to stay. It never happened. People are cruel everywhere.
“What’s the point?” Xue Yang asks, and Jin Guangyao laughs. He laughs and pats Xue Yang on the head affectionately.
“You’re just like a cat,” he says cheerfully.
“I’m not,” Xue Yang says sulkily.
“You’re at home everywhere. No one can catch you, and you’re fast and dangerous and like to sleep in the sun. Cat.”
“No,” Xue Yang says, puffing out his cheeks. Jin Guangyao accuses Xue Yang of being childish, but if he doesn’t want Xue Yang to be childish, he shouldn’t baby him. “I don’t want to be a cat.”
“What do you want to be?” Jin Guangyao asks teasingly.
“I want a kiss,” Xue Yang says, sticking his face near Jin Guangyao’s. Jin Guangyao laughs again, and gives him a kiss on the cheek. “No, a real kiss!”
“Is that why you came here?” Jin Guangyao asks.
A little bit. Xue Yang was bored, and he thought he’d spend a little more time looking at Wei Wuxian’s notes. Wei Wuxian’s notes are sometimes indecipherable, sometimes strange, sometimes brilliantly enlightening, but they’re never boring. Xue Yang bets that Wei Wuxian hated cleaning.
“I’m gonna study,” he announces, and flounces off. Jin Guangyao laughs and keeps sweeping. Xue Yang has a little room in the back-end of Koi Tower, a laboratory stacked high with books and notes and demonic talismans. There’s a low table covered with his notes and a messy bookshelf creaking with random objects. The ceiling is high and dark, and the whole place smells faintly of blood. Normally he enjoys it there but today- today he keeps getting distracted. He can’t think.
This is his space, isn’t it? It’s the only place he can think of that he’s come back to over and over, the only place where he picked out everything. Or did he? Jin Guangyao gave him most of the things in this room. He stole some of Wei Wuxian’s old papers, and these knives and ink, those are his. But that futon, the one stuffed up against the wall, wasn’t that a gift from Jin Guangyao? Xue Yang remembers falling asleep and waking up with a blanket over him. He doesn’t remember the futon appearing; has it always been here? Has he ever bought anything for himself?
The familiar confines of his room are starting to feel oddly sinister, every book and every paper a reminder of someone else in his space. Who bought these chairs? Who bought this table? Who decided to put him here? He stands. The mess of his table feels like it’s mocking him. He lifts the lamp and smashes it against the wall, plunging the little inner room into darkness. His breath catches in his throat.
He doesn’t want to be here. His body is crawling with repulsion, desperate for- what? Where else could he possibly go? There’s a wild howl imprisoned in his throat, and he wants to just tilt back his head and scream. But if he screams, then what? The sound would echo from the high walls and surround him, and he’d still be alone. Here in the dark, the lamps extinguished, his room is a prison of scattered notes and knives and shapes he doesn’t recognize. He fumbles his way to the door and slams his shin into something. The pain sends a shock through his body, and he kicks out in blind frustrated rage. His foot hits something, and he hears a crunch. He starts to kick, caught up in the desperate urge to feel something crack under his foot, to move-
He stumbles out into the hall of Koi Tower and heads back to the main hall. He comes around the corner with his breath coming fast and draws his sword- and Jin Guangyao isn’t there. The absurdity of the moment only makes him feel worse, as if the room is mocking him by having him draw his room on empty air. He stalks through until he hears the sound of water running, and heads back to the dungeons to find Jin Guangyao doing dishes, only those aren’t dishes in the bucket, they’re scalpels.
Xue Yang had a lot of fun with those and some dude who unwisely pissed off Jin Guangyao enough to find himself tied to a table. The memory cheers Xue Yang up a little, but not enough to make him lower his sword.
Jin Guangyao’s back is to him, so Xue Yang taps him on the shoulder with Jiangzai’s blade.
“Why are you washing those?” he asks, and Jin Guangyao turns around to find the sword in his face. To his credit, he doesn’t really react, other than a slow blink.
“I don’t want anyone to get sick from rusty instruments,” he says.
“Those are for killing people, though,” Xue yang points out.
“When I kill someone, I want them to die when it’s convenient for me, not for them,” Jin Guangyao says sharply. He steps past Jiangzai and stands close to Xue Yang. “What is it?”
Xue Yang doesn’t know. He feels sick, and his heart is beating too fast, and he wants to break something, but it’s just Jin Guangyao here, and that would be a stupid fight to pick. He feels embarrassed, and that’s the thing he hates the most of all. He feels stupid.
Jin Guangyao is looking at him, and it’s so gentle. It kind of makes Xue Yang want to slap him across the face, but it also feels like maybe Jin Guangyao would understand.
“I smashed a lamp in my room,” he says at last.
“Do you want a new one?” Jin Guangyao asks. Xue Yang doesn’t know what to say. His face is hot, and his breath is coming fast. Jin Guangyao steps in a little closer, and he pushes the sword aside, and Xue Yang lets him. Xue Yang lets Jin Guangyao put Xue Yang’s head on his shoulder and pet his hair until Xue Yang feels settled enough to speak.
“I don’t like my room,” he says at last.
“What about it don’t you like?” Jin Guangyao asks gently.
“I DON’T KNOW!” Xue Yang shouts. He takes a step back. “Stop asking me things, okay? I don’t know.”
“Come and help me wash these,” Jin Guangyao says after a long moment.
“What? No.”
“I’ll bet you it will help,” Jin Guangyao says, a glint in his eye. “I’ll bet you a whole chest full of candy.”
“It won’t,” Xue Yang says sulkily, and starts to wash. When he was younger, he worked for a little while at an inn washing clothes, but he hasn’t done any washing since then. The water was always too hot, and he would burn his hands, but it was an easy way to get money. Sometimes when no one was staying in a room. Xue Yang would sneak into a place and lie down on the bed and pretend that it was his.
He nicks himself slightly on one of the razors, and Jin Guangyao tsks at him. He lifts the little cut to inspect it and then seals it with a little burst of golden light. Then he goes back to washing. How are there this many scalpels and handcuffs and towels and blankets and knives and things? This is ridiculous. There’s too much stuff in the world.
“I don’t really need more than just my sword and some money,” Xue Yang says abruptly. “What’s the point of a house? Who needs all this shit? Torture instruments and stuff. You can just use a knife.”
“You’re better with knives than I am, A-Yang,” Jin Guangyao says. “Better than almost anyone, I’d say.”
“I have a lot of practice,” Xue Yang mutters. They keep washing. Jin Guangyao has cast a warming charm on a surface, and Xue Yang lays out everything to dry. The metal things need to be oiled; Jin Guangyao hands him a vial and he starts to work on the hinges of some stubborn old handcuffs.
“If I had my own place, I don’t even know what I’d do with it,” Xue Yang says.
“Whatever you want to do with it,” Jin Guangyao says. “Make it messy, or just leave it completely empty. It’s your space.”
Empty. That sounds nice. Xue Yang thinks of the shuttered mansion of the Chang members, of the way the wind blew through the open windows and stirred up the dust and the creaking sounds of the old house, the way everything had been changed and transformed by what Xue Yang did there. No one dares to go there any longer. No one but Xue Yang. That makes it his house, doesn’t it?
“Do you own the deed to the Chang estate?” he asks Jin Guangyao.
“No, but I could get it,” Jin Guangyao says.
“No,” Xue Yang says. “I’ll find it. I won’t let anyone see me steal it. And I’ll burn it. I don’t want anyone to ever live there again. I like it how it is.” He finishes wiping down the chains and starts to dry off the little knives, this time being careful of fingers. They do look better like this, all shiny and lined up.
They finish, and Jin Guangyao goes into the back and returns with some malty candy on a stick. He hands it to Xue Yang and says, smugly, “I win.”
“What?” Xue Yang mumbles through his mouthful. Jin Guangyao pats his face.
“Troublesome child,” he says fondly. “You don’t need to have your own place. It’s enough that you come back to the same places over and over.”
“I want a place though,” Xue Yang mumbles through his candy. “Not a place you made, my own place.”
“Like the mansion?” Xue Yang nods. The candy takes a long time to eat. It doesn’t melt easily, and the sweet taste fills his whole mouth.
“I don’t want to clean it though,” he says, and Jin Guangyao laughs.
“Of course not,” he says. “It wouldn’t suit you. Now, let’s go look at the mess you made of your room.”
Xue Yang’s room feels much less sinister with Jin Guangyao standing by his side. They light a torch, and Xue Yang sees that the thing he was kicking was an old chest full of bones. He doesn’t even remember whose bones they were. Jin Guangyao gets a look in his eyes.
“Let’s throw away some of this,” he says.
“Like what?” Xue Yang asks.
“Pick anything you’re not interested in, and we’ll burn it,” Jin Guangyao says. That perks Xue Yang up. He loves burning things. Jin Guangyao plops down on the futon, and Xue Yang grabs anything he can’t recognize and piles it together. He’s halfway through throwing out shit from his bookshelf when he realizes that Jin Guangyao has tricked him into cleaning.
“You betrayed me,” he says, affronted. “I’ve never cleaned in my life!”
“I’ve stolen A-Yang’s first time,” Jin Guangyao says, completely unrepentant, and Xue Yang pounces on him. He kisses Jin Guangyao’s face over and over before bullying his way into Jin Guangyao’s lap. He’s warm, and when Xue Yang can hear the little thump of Jin Guangyao’s heart when he lays his head on the other man’s chest. The sound of it dispels Xue Yang’s jittery energy. It’s comforting. It’s the closest thing he has to home.
He looks up, and Jin Guangyao kisses him on the forehead.
“Mmm,” Xue Yang says sulkily.
“Do you want to go shopping?” Jin Guangyao asks. “We can get you some new furniture.” Now that the moment has passed, Xue Yang isn’t actually dissatisfied with the room. He’s never really cared about stuff.
“Nah,” he decides. “It doesn’t matter.”
“Mmm,” Jin Guangyao says, and then he chuckles. “I envy you a little. It matters to me, maybe more than it should.” Xue Yang shrugs.
“It’s all transitory,” he says. Transitory is a word those fancy cultivator texts like a lot. They’re always going on about the fleeting world and the impermanence of all things, but when you look at their houses and their lives they cling to the material as much as anyone else. Xue Yang knows what it’s like to have nothing, to really have nothing, to build his heart around a total emptiness.
“It’s fun, though,” Jin Guangyao says. He doesn’t act shocked that Xue Yang has done his reading, or tease him about the word not being in line with his image. Xue Yang doesn’t know what love is, but it must be something like this. He likes Jin Guangyao more with every moment they spend together.
“It is fun,” Xue Yang agrees. He thinks about the little kitchen where they washed scalpels together, and about the library when Jin Guangyao likes to relax and about the sight of him in his little apron, and he finds that he’s satisfied with the picture. “I like it. Playing house.”