4. Crumbling #2
Except I can’t be killed. Not permanently. And somewhere in the last few months, I’ve started to wonder if maybe survival isn’t the same thing as living.
Dangerous thought. I should strangle it before it takes root.
I let it breathe instead.
The garden holds its silence around me, broken only by birds in the plum trees and the distant sounds of palace life—servants, guards, the endless grinding machinery of empire. I close my eyes and count my heartbeats. Two rhythms now, the physicians say. Mine and another, smaller, faster.
I still don’t know what to do with that.
The crunch of gravel, quick and uneven. I open my eyes to Jing hovering at the garden entrance, books clutched to her chest like a shield, expression wavering between determined and terrified.
“I know you said come back later,” she begins, words tumbling over each other in her haste to get them out before I can stop her, “but the book says that mood swings during pregnancy are completely normal and expected, and actually there are several herbal remedies that might help with the emotional intensity, and I’ve cross-referenced three different sources that all agree on a combination of chrysanthemum and—”
“Jing.”
“—dried lotus root that could theoretically stabilize the—”
“Jing.”
She stops. Swallows. Her fingers tighten on the book spines until her knuckles go pale.
“I love you,” I say, and I mean it, even though my jaw is clenched so hard my teeth ache.
“You are the finest researcher I have ever known. You have probably saved my life with information at least twice and I don’t even know it.
But, if you do not stop talking in the next three seconds, I am going to do something we’ll both regret. ”
“The book also says irritability is a common symptom.”
“I’m going to throw that book into the pond.”
“It’s a very expensive book. I borrowed it from the imperial archive. There would be paperwork.”
“I don’t care about paperwork.”
We stare at each other across the garden path. Her chin wobbles slightly, which makes me feel monstrous, which makes me angry about feeling monstrous, which makes the whole situation worse in ways I don’t have the vocabulary to describe.
“Perhaps,” Jing says, with the careful precision of someone negotiating with an unstable explosive, “I could come back when the sun is lower.”
“Perhaps you could.”
She backs away slowly, books still clutched like armor.
The moment she disappears around the corner, the anger drains out of me like water from a cracked vessel, leaving nothing but bone-deep exhaustion and a vague sense of shame I don’t have the energy to process properly.
I shouldn’t have snapped at her. She’s trying to help. Everyone’s trying to help.
That’s the problem. I don’t know how to let them.
The garden is quiet. I still don’t know what Ren was trying to tell me yesterday. I was too busy fleeing to the nearest vase to let him finish, and then too tired to ask. The moment passed, and whatever he meant to say sits between us now like a door I forgot to open.
The light shifts. Afternoon sliding toward evening, shadows lengthening across the garden stones. I should go inside. Find Ren and apologize for being feral in the night. Track down Jing and tell her the chrysanthemum idea wasn’t terrible, actually, even if I’d rather eat glass than admit it.
I don’t move.
The jasmine smells too sweet. The light is doing that thing again—going golden, going soft—and I am not going to cry about it twice in one day, I am not—
I’m crying.
There’s no trigger I can point to. It’s just everything.
The weight of the past few weeks. The way Ren fell silent yesterday when he was trying to say something I didn’t hear.
The look on Jing’s face when I snapped at her.
The strange new heaviness in my body that wasn’t there two months ago.
The slow, grinding realization that I’m not in control of anything anymore—not my emotions, not my body, not the careful walls I’ve spent eight centuries building stone by patient stone.
They’re crumbling. I can feel them crumbling.
The sobs come hard and ugly, the kind that shake your whole chest, the kind you can’t suppress no matter how much training you have. I curl forward on the bench with my arms wrapped around my middle and I cry like I haven’t cried since—
Don’t. Don’t remember. Don’t go there.
Too late.
The last time I cried like this, I was burying someone small.
Not mine, not exactly—a girl I’d taken in during a famine winter, taught to read, kept fed and safe for a decade before the fever took her.
I held her hand at the end. Told her stories about the places I’d seen.
Buried her in a field outside a village that doesn’t exist anymore and walked away without looking back, because looking back is how you drown.
I’ve drowned so many times. In water. In grief. In the endless accumulation of loss that comes with living forever while everyone around you doesn’t.
And now I’m growing something new. Something I’ll watch grow and change and become a person who will, eventually, inevitably, die. Because everyone dies. Everyone except me.
How am I supposed to do this?
Footsteps on the garden path. I should straighten up. Should wipe my face and compose myself and reassemble the armor I’ve worn so long it feels like skin.
I don’t.
Ren settles onto the bench beside me. He doesn’t ask what’s wrong.
Doesn’t offer platitudes or solutions or any of the things people offer when they don’t know what to do with someone else’s tears.
Just sits there, present and solid and close enough that I can feel the warmth of him without quite touching.
The sobs keep coming. I keep letting them.
And then his arm comes around my shoulders—careful, unhurried, giving me every opportunity to pull away—and I don’t pull away.
I turn into his chest and cry harder, and he holds me like this is allowed, like I’m permitted to fall apart, like he’s planning to stay no matter how long it takes or how thoroughly I ruin his robes.
The jasmine. The evening light. His heartbeat against my cheek, steady and patient.
“I don’t know what’s happening to me,” I manage eventually, the words muffled against his chest. Barely audible even to me.
“You’re growing a person.” His voice is low and even. No judgment in it. “That seems like a difficult thing.”
A sound escapes me that might be a laugh. Might be another sob. Hard to tell the difference anymore. “I’ve done difficult. Difficult I can handle. This is—”
Terrifying, I don’t say. Needing you is terrifying. Letting you see me like this is terrifying. Everything is terrifying and I don’t know how to stop.
“—a lot,” I finish instead.
“Yes,” he agrees. “It is.”
We stay like that while the light changes around us, going from gold to amber to the deep blue of approaching dusk.
His hand moves in slow circles against my back—not fixing anything, not solving anything, just present—and something in my chest unclenches by degrees.
When I finally pull back, he doesn’t comment on the state of my face or the wet patch I’ve left on his robe.
Just produces a cloth from his sleeve and hands it to me with the air of someone who’s been carrying it for exactly this purpose.
He probably has. That’s somehow worse and better at the same time.
“Thank you,” I say, which is inadequate for what I actually mean.
He inclines his head slightly. Doesn’t need more. That’s the thing about Ren—he never seems to need more than I can give.
The thought settles somewhere soft and dangerous, and I file it away to examine never.
Dumpling finds us after dinner.
More accurately, Dumpling finds Ren’s paperwork, which someone has left on the desk in the study adjoining our chambers, which means it is now contested territory and will be treated accordingly.
He positions himself in the exact center of the most important documents—something about grain allocations, something about northern border disputes, something that looks like a letter from a provincial governor—and settles with the satisfied air of a conqueror claiming new lands.
His tail twitches once. Twice.
His eyes track something I can’t see.
And then, from the windowsill, a glitter of gold in the lamplight.
Tianlong—in small form, scaled and serpentine and radiating the particular dignity of an ancient being forced to squeeze himself into a shape meant for lesser creatures. His head tilts. His jeweled eyes fix on the documents pinned beneath the cat’s considerable weight.
“Remove yourself, creature.” His voice resonates like distant bronze bells. “That is imperial correspondence.”
Dumpling doesn’t move. Doesn’t blink. The absolute stillness of a predator who has learned the value of patience.
I lean against the doorframe. This is going to be good.
Tianlong approaches the desk with the careful precision of something that has witnessed the fall of empires and refuses to be intimidated by a slightly overweight cat.
His wings fold tight against his serpentine body, scales catching lamplight in fractured rainbows.
He is magnificent and ancient and currently being outmaneuvered by an orange idiot with a single brain cell devoted entirely to chaos.
“You are planning something,” he says flatly.
Dumpling doesn’t blink.
“I see you planning it. I am aware of your intentions. I am choosing to retrieve this document regardless, because I refuse to be governed by the whims of a creature with a brain the size of a walnut.”
He reaches for the paper.
Dumpling executes a pounce so fast I barely track it.
The chaos that follows is brief and decisive. When it ends, Tianlong is pinned under seventeen pounds of orange fur, and his dignity is in worse shape than the grain reports.
“I knew,” he hisses from beneath the cat. “I knew and I engaged anyway. This is not a defeat.”
Dumpling begins to groom.