4. Crumbling #3
I watch from the doorway, making no move to intervene. This is better than anything the court has offered me all week.
“The creature has learned strategy,” Tianlong announces when he finally extracts himself, scales askew and pride in shambles. “This is concerning.”
“You got sat on by a cat,” I observe.
“I was ambushed. There is a tactical distinction.”
“He weighs seventeen pounds.”
“Weight is irrelevant when facing an opponent who possesses no concept of civilized conduct.” Tianlong shakes himself, attempting to restore some dignity to his disheveled scales.
It doesn’t work. “This household has become entirely uncivilized. A cat with delusions of grandeur. An assassin who weeps at sunlight. An emperor who cannot complete a single romantic gesture. And now a hatchling is coming into this chaos.”
He sounds furious. He sounds like he’s memorizing every indignity he’s been forced to endure, like the entire situation is beneath him, like he’d rather be literally anywhere else dealing with literally anything else.
But I catch it. The word he used.
Household.
Not palace. Not court. Not “Ren’s domain” or “the imperial residence” or any of the dozen formal terms he could have chosen.
Household. Like it’s his. Like we’re his.
I’m smiling. I can feel it pulling at my face, and I don’t try to stop it.
“What,” Tianlong demands, eyes narrowing to suspicious slits.
“Nothing.”
“You are smiling. Cease immediately. It is suspicious.”
“I’m not smiling.”
“You are smiling. It does not suit you.”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“You absolutely know what I am talking about. I am going to—” He stops. Collects himself with visible effort. “I refuse to dignify this with further response. I have better things to do than be perceived by people who do not respect the gravity of ancient beings.”
He retreats to the windowsill to repair what remains of his dignity. Dumpling, victorious, claims the center of the desk and begins purring at a volume that suggests he knows exactly what he’s accomplished.
Ren appears in the doorway behind me, takes in the scene—scattered documents, spilled ink, sulking dragon, triumphant cat—and something shifts in his expression. Something soft. Something warm.
“The grain allocation reports,” he observes mildly.
“Have been conquered.”
“I can see that.”
“Dumpling won.”
“He usually does.”
He moves to stand beside me, shoulder to shoulder in the doorway, watching a dragon pretend to ignore a cat who is pretending to sleep on what might be the future of imperial grain policy. The papers flutter slightly with each exhale. Somewhere in the distance, a bell marks the hour.
“The Minister of Works can wait until tomorrow,” Ren says.
I laugh. It doesn’t hurt this time.
Night settles over the palace like a held breath.
We’re in our chambers—mine and his, ours, a word I’m still learning the shape of—and I’m so tired that my bones ache with it. The kind of exhaustion that comes from crying all day, from emotions that won’t stay where I put them, from the slow unraveling of everything I thought I knew about myself.
It’s not bad, though. That’s the strange thing. The exhaustion isn’t bad.
“Tianlong said something,” Ren says quietly, settling onto the bed beside me. “Earlier. About the baby.”
I turn my head to look at him. His face is all angles and shadows in the lamplight, and there’s something careful in his expression. Something he’s considering whether to share.
“He called it a hatchling,” I say.
“He always calls it that. But—” A pause. His fingers find mine in the dark, interlace, hold. “He said he never thought I would have this. That he’d made his peace with watching me live alone.”
My chest tightens around something I can’t name.
“And then,” Ren continues, a thread of amusement entering his voice, “he threatened to set my favorite robe on fire if I told anyone he’d said something sincere.”
“The blue one?”
“The blue one.”
I laugh, soft and tired and real. “I’ll keep his secret.”
“He knows you won’t.”
“He knows I won’t.”
We lie there in the quiet, hands linked, the darkness gentle around us. Dumpling appears from somewhere and claims the foot of the bed.
I should sleep. My body is begging for it, heavy and worn in ways I’m not used to.
Instead I say: “I don’t know how to do this.”
I don’t specify what this means. I don’t have to.
“Neither do I,” Ren admits. “I’ve read about it. Tianlong has opinions—they mostly relate to creatures which hatch rather than humans. Neither helps as much as I’d like.”
“You’ve read about it?”
“There are books.”
“I know there are books. Jing has brought me forty of them.”
“I’ve read most of those as well. And several on early childhood development. The imperial archive is extensive.”
I turn onto my side to stare at him properly. His face is serious, but there’s a glint in his eye that might be humor. Might be something else entirely.
“You’ve been reading parenting books,” I say flatly.
“Among other things.”
“You’re the emperor. You have an empire to run.”
“I have ministers to run the empire. I have one chance to figure out how to—” He stops. Swallows. “I don’t want to do this badly.”
The words land in my chest like something with weight.
“You won’t,” I say, and I’m surprised by how much I mean it.
“You don’t know that.”
“I’ve watched you for months. The way you treat people. The way you listen even when you don’t agree. The way you’ve been with me, through all of—” I gesture vaguely at myself, encompassing the crying and the cravings and the volatility. “This.”
I squeeze his hand.
The silence that follows is heavy with things neither of us says. Eight hundred years of loss. Twenty-two years of isolation. All the ways we’re both terrified of wanting something we might not get to keep.
But we’re here. That’s something.
We’re here, and I’m holding his hand in the dark, and I don’t want to run.
The thought should terrify me. It does terrify me.
I hold on anyway.
Sleep comes eventually—deep and dreamless, the kind that stitches you back together—and when I drift awake in the gray light before dawn, Ren is still beside me. Still breathing. Still warm against my side.
Still here.
I close my eyes and let myself sink back into the warmth of it, and somewhere in the palace grounds a dragon pretends to be asleep while a cat dreams of conquest, a general prepares security protocol for a nursery that does not exist, a spymaster is compiling lists of potential threats to something the size of an overripe plum, and an archivist is researching literature on parenting, and for now—just for now—this is enough.
It’s enough.