The Smugging Moon

AN: And restarting commissions too, this one was moved up the queue for immediate relevance. However, there are some spoilers for the current Story arc, please avoid if you would like to be completely unspoiled.

“Do Not.”

The damnable woman sitting on the driver's step of his chariot tilted her head, eyes twinkling. Her smile was a thing that could end lesser men, melt their idiot minds to fawning slush.

He glared, with a thousand piercing eyes from every shadow in his workshop, he glared.

Her smile widened, and she rested her hand on her cheek. Eyelashes fluttered and she let out a breathy sigh. She stretched her legs across the well of the chariot toward him, bare feet and ankles exposed under whispering cloth. A devastating attack.

“Do. Not.”

“‘Do not’ what my lord husband?” She asked coquettishly, a gleam of crimson in her eyes. “I, your lady wife, feel my heart bleed at such accusing stares.”

“You know perfectly well, your self satisfaction is like a furnace,” he said irritably, setting aside his tools. “You know very well that I felt that too.”

“Ooooooh?” Xin asked lightly. “Why, whatever do you mean. Perhaps you are speaking of things going. Just. As. Planned.”

Wicked, wicked woman, looking down at him now with her chin on her hands, pale and ruddy glow shining from her half lidded eyes, her leg stretched out, toes tracing circles on the polished wood. Sensual and mocking calculation brushed through his qi like stroking fingers and warm breath, presenting the utter absolute certainty in the outcome he had derided.

It was infuriating. It filled his belly with the indignant wrath of a man hundreds of years younger.

“You did not predict a Meng Elder steeped in tradition going mad and being gutted like a pig by that starry eyed horizon chasing thug like some pre-imperial sacrifice to good fortune,” he replied tersely, drumming his human fingers upon the wood. He shot back with the sheer unlikeliness of what she had done, shadows twisting into the shapes of the futures he had seen.

“It was within my calculations,” She whispered, softly, reaching down to cradle his chin. The words sent a shiver down through three dantians. By all of his ancestors, when had he last seen her so smug. “Come now Jiao. Isn’t this a little too childish, even for you? Give it to me.”

“There is no indication this summit is more than a passing fancy,” he replied evasively, hunching his shoulders, shadows writhed, averting from the teasing, testing equations dancing before them with such provocation.

“Jiao…”

He let out a hissing breath. “You were right.”

His wife made a delighted sound, her qi thrumming in a very particular way along the contours of their bond, tuned and tweaked by centuries of effort to be maximally distracting. The perfection of her exacting calculations unfurled itself under his gaze, proudly displaying the countless variables she had accounted for. “Say it again.”

“You were correct,” he growled back, rising to his feet, robes and shadows awhirl, he turned his back scowling, drawing himself inward, his shadow and eyes retracting into the shell of a human body he was wearing.  “I was wrong. A masterful scheme.”

She laughed, high and clear, not at all like the irritating noblewomen who he had spent his youth buttering up. It was an honest laugh, full of rightful, well earned pride. “Oh, my husband. You say the kindest things. I feel like a young maid, overseeing her first soft coup again.”

He rolled his eyes, shaking out the sleeves of his robes and stalking away. Hmph, dark dull colors, boring. He had really let himself grow dull since his injury, hadn’t he. Fabric writhed, brilliant eye searing lilac rippling across the robe. “Xin, enough. Your point is taken. …That girl is certainly going to cause trouble. Her and this new Cai”

Her arms curled around his neck, smooth and cool. Her chin rested on his shoulder and her teeth nipped at his ear. “The future is askew Jiao, I no longer can clearly see where the road we paved runs.”

…Honestly, she really was behaving as if they were young again. When the peaks were in flux, when every plot led into the next, when they had all seen so many possibilities.

“Hmph, I suppose it must be a good thing that your first plan fell through when that girl went to the Cai,” he replied gruffly, her weight on his back was little more than that of a paper lantern.

“We both know a proper mastermind arranges things such that victory is at the end of every path,” she murmured silkily, pressed against him, body and spirit as he stood over the workbench, rummaging for his tools. Searching through them like a man, with hands and fingers and only two eyes was a useful tool for ordering his thoughts.

He wanted to say this was nothing, but silver curves and beautiful brushstrokes danced in the edge of his vision, mocking the idea. Meng destabilized, a new rallying point for unity in the south, the increase in cachet for an heir he had long judged a likely failure, a solidification of the elder Cai’s own project.

His student Xiang would not fail to take advantage, whatever she had made herself. She was too sharp for that. The Cai had always been the least stable part of her plans.

Askew indeed.

“And we both know that is an impossible lie that too-smart children tell themselves,” he shot back to her. She might have been correct about this outcome, but he was not going to merely surrender the last word.

“So I was a bit disappointed back then,” She allowed. “I did so wish for a child to pamper, but… from failure can sometimes come greater success.”

“As you like,” he sighed. Things were going to be getting complicated again, bad enough that Yuan He had been badgering him so fiercely about the headship. Now this war would have more pressure, so many more eyes would be in the south. Both the great games and the obnoxious plots of little gnats. “Now…”

“Jiao,” she said slowly, fingernails dragging along his chest, words as sharp as knives gliding against his ear. “I know you cannot forget a promise.”

Hundreds of years of memory flitted by. One moment under a black and moonless sky. “...Ah.”

“That bleak vision of ours is no longer certain.”

“...It is not.”

“You. Are. Giving. Me. A. Child.”

There was, the ancient cultivator mused as their bodies unspun and sank into a twisting moonlight and deepest shadow, no arguing with one's wife when they took that tone.