TAKE HIS MEMORY TO YOUR GRAVE

Anyang
Three years before the primary events of She Who Became the Sun

There’s a lamplit space just to the side of the covered walkway that winds through the pleasure house's gardens, where Ouyang always waits. He sits with his wine jar, sorting through the sounds of merriment that drift from the main wing of the house. But either he’s too far away to hear Esen's laugh, or too drunk to pick it out. Esen has been in there a very long time. He tips the jar unsteadily over his cup; has to tip it more until the last dregs rush out; then loses track of the endeavour and slumps against the wooden pillar at his back. With his remaining energy he directs baleful thoughts towards the house’s resident courtesans. Those whores, always drawing out their songs and games in order to wring every last tael out of their patrons, when they should just give them what they really came for and be done with it.

His heart lifts hopefully when a shadowy figure wends its way along the walkway. His hope is dashed nearly the same instant. Ouyang would have to be drunker than he is not to recognise the owner of that mincing stride, the fluttering fan.

Heaven is clearly ignoring his prayers tonight, because Lord Wang doesn’t pass by the hanging bamboo screen that separates Ouyang’s refuge from the walkway. His glance through the slats finds Ouyang slumped against the pillar, and his head cocks in interest. Then, to Ouyang’s monumental displeasure, he slides past the screen and comes in.

The lamplight reveals the full extent of Lord Wang’s ridiculousness. A blossom-pink confection of sheer gauze, more suitable for a dancing girl, is draped over a horrendous lettuce-coloured gown. Gold glints in his topknot. Perhaps he’s also a little bit drunk after the revelries he’s enjoyed that evening, because there’s a looseness to his usual flutter. But his smile is malicious.

The key to managing Lord Wang is to ignore him. A game takes two, and Ouyang doesn't want to play. He tries to find something profoundly interesting to look at in the garden, but is foiled when Lord Wang crouches down and occupies Ouyang’s entire field of vision. His light falsetto is loaded with silky extravagance. “Is there ever a sadder sight than a eunuch in a pleasure house? I’m surprised you aren’t in there with him, looking over his shoulder or holding his dick for him, but I suppose even my generous brother has limits to what he’s willing to share with a pet.”

His glance finds Ouyang’s discarded wine jar. “Taking his time, is he? The women here are exquisite. What a pity you’ll never get to experience their talents for yourself. Have you ever touched a woman, General? Or is your only experience getting my brother to tell you about what it’s like?” His laugh flutters as much as his hands do, which sets Ouyang’s teeth on edge even more than the needling does. “Poor eunuch, doomed to live vicariously! I don’t think of my brother as a talented storyteller, but does he do a good enough job of making you feel like you were there? Does he tell you about how good women feel when you pull them onto your lap, how soft and curved they are when you unwrap them? How when you get one of them to enjoy herself, she’ll get so wet you can just slide right in, and if you fuck her just right she’ll squeal and wriggle on your dick and make these little sounds like she can’t take anymore or she’ll die. Does he remember to tell you how the best part isn’t when her thighs start to shake as she rides you, or how tight and hot and wet she is, but when you see her lose her mind because of how good you feel inside her?”

Lord Wang is so effeminate that it’s always a surprise to remember that he fucks women. He’s looking at Ouyang with vicious anticipation, as if he’s thinking he’s twisting a knife. Thinking that Ouyang will be hurt by the idea of missing out on fucking those whores. But the image Lord Wang has so kindly forced into his head makes him feel nothing but revulsion. It’s true that Ouyang’s fellow warriors like nothing more than talking about the women they’ve fucked, and how good it feels. But Ouyang’s body wasn’t made for that feeling. It doesn’t have the capacity for it, and nothing about their or Lord Wang’s disgusting little speeches make him yearn for what he can’t have.

Esen, strangely, has never been one to talk about his exploits. Ouyang doesn’t really know why, given that Esen likes to brag or complain about everything else under the sun. But he feels a vague relief that he’s never had to endure that, too.

“Get lost, Baobao,” he says.

His response, or lack thereof, clearly wrongfoots Lord Wang. But instead of being dissuaded, the lord’s gaze sharpens. Excavates.

“Do you not like women, General?”

Ouyang says with drunken impatience, “Are you sure you’re the smart one? I’m a eunuch. I don’t like anyone.”

Men’s interest in women has always mystified him. When he’d been young, and the boys around him had sprouted upwards and started chasing girls, he’d wondered if there might be a point at which he’d feel the same urges despite his lack of the relevant parts with which to carry them out. But it had never happened that way. His body has been broken, and he’s never felt any warmth or pull that he could even distantly classify as wanting.

He supposes he should be grateful. He tries to imagine going through life filled with impossible wanting. How it would feel to fall in love with some pretty girl who would have desires that he could never satisfy. He can’t make his mind do it. It feels as silly as trying to imagine he has wings. But it seems reasonable to assume that such a life would be even more miserable than the one he has now.

To his irritation, Lord Wang doesn’t go away. Ouyang recognises his look: the amusement of a cat with a mouse. But Ouyang isn’t bothered by whatever Lord Wang could do to him. Lord Wang only causes trouble because he wants attention. He subjects everyone to his petty bureaucratic annoyances because he has none of the authority of a real man. He might be grown now, become this knife-edged swishing scholar, but in Ouyang’s mind Lord Wang’s image is always overlaid by the memory of the weeping small boy who trailed after Esen until he was too afraid to go as far, or as high, or as fast. Even thinking about it now, Ouyang is scornful. If Lord Wang hadn’t wanted to be left behind, he should have kept up.

“Not any kind of person? I can’t help but wonder.”

“Wonder while you wander,” Ouyang suggests. “Away.”

Lord Wang can hold whatever bizzare suppositions he likes about Ouyang. His opinion isn’t one that Ouyang, or anyone else who matters, cares about.

After a moment Lord Wang says musingly, “It’s a testable hypothesis.”

To Ouyang’s surprise, he leans in. It brings him uncomfortably close. Ouyang has never liked people in his personal space unless he’s about to hit them. He’s had his fill of being loomed over. Of men parading themselves in front of him, as if their larger bodies makes them inherently better; more deserving of the world’s respect.

He’s startled by the discovery that even Lord Wang is bigger than him. After subjecting his drink-tangled mind to a moment’s struggle, he realises it makes sense. All men are bigger than him, and apparently even prancing, simpering Lord Wang qualifies by virtue of his nature. Familiar resentment rises like a snarl. He didn’t have the choice of throwing away his manhood.

He shoves Lord Wang’s chest with the hand that doesn’t have a cup in it. “Fuck off.”

To his surprise, Lord Wang grabs his wrist as if he were expecting exactly that reaction. Ouyang could shake him off in an instant. But for some reason he’s arrested by the sight of Lord Wang holding him. Lord Wang has bigger hands than Ouyang would have expected from their limpness. His fingers overlap around Ouyang’s wrist. They’re not a warrior’s hands, but they have a casual breadth, the knuckles and veins more prominent than Ouyang’s own, that fills him with a curious awareness: that they’re a man’s hands.

He hasn’t thought about it in years, but for some reason he thinks about it now. Up until Esen was about fourteen, Ouyang had always been able to best him in grappling despite the two year difference in their ages. Then, almost overnight, Esen had grown. He remembers the puzzlement in Esen’s face as he caught Ouyang’s wrist, and held him fast by nothing more than brute strength. How Esen had looked at him and registered, for the first time, not who he was, but what. Not a boy like himself, but a eunuch. Someone who would stay behind in that too-slender, too-pretty shape that all boys outgrew. But even as Ouyang was horrified by the sudden rift that had opened between them, his awareness had been drawn strangely to Esen’s touch in a way it had never been before. But of course Esen’s touch had become fraught, Ouyang had thought savagely. It was no longer between equals, but between one who would be a prince and one who would always be a thing. He’d felt obscurely guilty at Esen’s hurt as he’d wrenched himself free. But that hurt wasn’t Ouyang’s fault. He had stayed the same. It was Esen who had betrayed them, by beginning to see the world as men did.

Lord Wang is looking at him with sharp knowing, as if Ouyang’s response makes some kind of sense. Which is ridiculous. Ouyang noticing Lord Wang’s hands doesn’t even make sense to himself.

“Poor confused eunuch,” Lord Wang says softly.

Something about his voice makes Ouyang’s stomach lurch. It takes him a moment to realise that Lord Wang is speaking normally. His mincing falsetto has disappeared as if it had never been. His voice, lower than Ouyang’s, seems all at once familiar. He sounds like—a man.

Lord Wang traces his thumb along the inside of Ouyang’s wrist. Brightness flares in its wake. Ouyang watches the touch without comprehension. The bloom that spreads from it seems to be wiping his slowed-down mind completely blank. He has no idea what’s happening. With great effort he thinks: I’ve never been this drunk.

A cup rolls away. Ouyang realises, belatedly, that it’s his.

“Perhaps,” Lord Wang murmurs in that new voice, “it just takes a man to make you feel something.”

The shame that rushes through Ouyang is a familiar landmark in his emotional landscape. But his normal kneejerk reaction, of violence as answer to insult, has gone astray. He feels vaguely unclear as to why he’s even bothering to feel ashamed. After all, Lord Wang is wrong. Ouyang has spent his whole life around men—men who are the epitome of what men should be, unlike Lord Wang—so if his body pulled in that direction, he would know.

At least his honesty will end this stupid game Lord Wang is playing. He hisses, “Even if that were the case, which it isn’t, I can’t have those feelings.”

He’s relieved that Lord Wang understands. But when he tugs to free himself, the lord doesn’t let go. His smile is manifestly unkind. “Are you sure?” Then to Ouyang’s confusion he pins Ouyang’s captured wrist to the pillar above his head. The motion brings their faces into disturbing proximity. Ouyang should knock him aside, but somehow he fails to gather himself before Lord Wang whispers against his ear, “Given how you look right now, I find it hard to believe you don’t feel something. You’ve never been touched properly, have you? By someone you desire. You can’t even tell what your body wants.”

Out of nowhere, Ouyang gets a flash of the curved bracket around Esen’s smile. Of the soft patch there where beard doesn’t grow, just large enough for a fingertip touch, that’s always drawn his eye. But everyone looks a little longer at Esen than normal. That’s just the power of his handsomeness.

“I look this way because I’m drunk.” He can’t tell if Lord Wang is genuinely mistaken, or whether this is his way of cruelly highlighting Ouyang’s physical incapacities. But either way, what’s he going to do about it? Ouyang knows he’s right, and Lord Wang is wrong, whatever Ouyang might look like at this particular moment. Everyone has always been wrong about Ouyang based on how he looks. He manages to summon some distant relative of his favourite scathing expression. “Don’t tell me you thought you were actually man enough to make it a—” he hopes he’s remembering the phrase correctly, “—testable hypothesis.”

Lord Wang still has him pinned to the pillar. If Ouyang were to turn his head, their faces would collide. Ouyang can smell his perfume. It’s feminine, but not female. There’s something that changes it from that: some smell of his skin beneath it. The knot in his throat is very sharp. At this hour his smooth-shaven cheek shows a faint grain. Somehow Ouyang can imagine the texture of it under his fingertips: that almost imperceptible roughness of beard, constantly growing, that can’t be suppressed even if its owner were to prefer it gone.

This time Lord Wang’s lips actually brush Ouyang’s ear. It sends a hot jolt through him. “If I’m not, then—”  He spreads his other hand at Ouyang’s waist. The jolt that started at Ouyang’s ear finds its ground there. The space between the two points of contact blooms with a spreading, softening warmth that Ouyang has never felt before: an alien ache that wants to be pressed against, so that it might melt. “—then tell me to stop.”

This strange pliability is just the wine, Ouyang reminds himself. Lord Wang hasn’t seen any kind of truth about him. He isn’t provoking any kind of reaction out of this ruined body that can’t desire the way other people desire. Ouyang is suddenly tired of fighting. If Lord Wang needs further persuasion of the facts, he can go ahead and waste his time.

He doesn’t resist as Baoxiang reaches under his gown and loosens the tie of his trousers. Desire is for whole people, unbroken people, ordinary people. Even if that strange softening ache makes Ouyang part his legs; even if he lets Lord Wang slip a hand between his thighs; even if he hears himself make a soft shocked sound as Lord Wang brushes a fingertip over his asshole; even if that bizzare caress causes a sparkling pulse to course through his lower body—

—even then it wouldn’t be desire, because it couldn’t be.

Lord Wang’s touch is slick, which confuses Ouyang until he distantly recalls a rattling as Lord Wang reached into the drawer of a nearby table. He guesses it makes sense that every space in a courtesan house would be equipped to enable its occupants to do this, whatever this is. This peculiar sparkling slide over a part of himself that he’d never had any idea existed as a locus of potential sensitivity. He flops back against the pillar, surrendering to the strangeness. After a while he realises that he’s lost the ability to match each touch to its bodily response. It feels like he’s hearing sounds from so many directions that they’ve blended into a single overwhelming sound that’s slowly consuming him.

“Does it still feel,” Lord Wang inquires pleasantly, “like nothing?” His fingertips press in where Ouyang wants to yield, and keep pressing, then slip slickly inside. Ouyang gasps in astonishment. He has no point of comparison for how this feels. How it feels to be penetrated, he thinks, with a throb of humiliation that only serves to make him gasp again and yield further. The sparkling sensation intensifies into a solid white flare as Lord Wang’s fingers sink to their full depth. He’s distantly aware that he’s squirming as his clutching body softens around the intrusion. Lord Wang withdraws his fingers slightly, then presses them back in a way that makes Ouyang pant. He rubs him on the inside the same way he’d rubbed on the outside, and the white flare in Ouyang’s body is dissolving his mind along with it. He feels possessed. The sensation of having something inside him that had been so alien is abruptly insufficient. He’s gripped by the incomprehensible need to soften more. He knows without having the words for it, or even an image of what it would look like, that he wants to be given so much—to be made to yield so much—that it devastates him.

“If you’re going to make me feel,” he grits out, “then make me feel it more.” As he says it, he suddenly feels a shocking wave of sadness. Because he finally knows what this feeling is. What this incomprehensible sensation is; this unbearable bodily loveliness that makes him shiver and pant and melt; this desperate need to soften that fills him with a feeling that’s so exquisitely vulnerable that it seems like a kind of anguish:

Pleasure.

He’d been so wrong. His body does have the capacity for desire and its fulfillment. It’s had that capacity all along, even while he raged at it and hated it for its brokenness, and broke it further to forge it into the one thing it could be: a weapon. He can’t breathe with the enormity of it. He’d never known.

Knowing it, now, changes everything. And it changes nothing.

Lord Wang is braced over Ouyang. His shoulders aren’t broad, but they’re angular enough to be masculine, and Ouyang realises he’s gripping them for dear life. He hopes, viciously, that he’s leaving bruises as he grinds down on Lord Wang’s fingers as hard as he can. He isn’t exerting himself hard, but his breathing is all askew: a breathy, desperate panting that under ordinary circumstances would make him curl in horror to hear. It’s a gift to be so overwhelmed that he can devote himself to the pleasure, and ignore all his usual emotions outside of it. A gift, not to have to think about what it all means.

“Here’s a tip,” Lord Wang says sardonically, as he shifts onto his heels so he can rummage in the table again. “If you do this with anyone else, it’s best to flatter your partner to spur him on to greater heights of enthusiasm, rather than implying that he’s failing to satisfy you.”

His fingers vanish, and in their place Ouyang feels a cool press at his entrance. The touch of slick wood makes him realise that up until this point, he’d been assuming Lord Wang would fuck him with his own dick. The thought sends a rush of exhilarating humiliation through him. That he’d dared desire such shameful thing—had dared want the pleasure of being fucked; of hearing a man’s breath hitch as he drove into him again and again. He’d actually wanted to be diminished, by his wanting.

Lord Wang pushes at the object, and Ouyang’s thoughts dissolve. He hears his cry ringing out after the fact, like an echo.

Lord Wang stops, apparently in response to whatever Ouyang had actually cried out. Ouyang takes a shuddering breath. The width of whatever Lord Wang is using feels infinitely bigger than fingers. He can feel a singing sharpness: pleasure edged with pain. But when he focuses, he realises that the coolness is lodged only a little way inside. That little, and it’s already this tight, this intense? The idea of taking the rest of it seems impossible.

He’s never wanted anything more.

Lord Wang says mockingly, in that new masculine voice that makes Ouyang shudder uncontrollably for being half-penetrated while hearing it, “A little girl can take my dick easily, but a warrior like you is defeated by a simple toy?”

A sudden image of the object inside him—a wooden phallus, as sleek as satin—makes Ouyang clench involuntarily. It wrenches a truly mortifying sound out of him, which makes him clench again, which makes him groan. Whatever wretched spectacle he’s presenting makes Lord Wang smile in mean-spirited delight. “Oh, how much you’d hate me for telling you how you look right now. Should I? Do you want to hear what those strong thighs of yours look like, spread open around this thick—”

Ouyang does not, and will never, want to hear someone tell him what they see when they look at him. “Shut up and fuck me.”

Lord Wang smirks. “But can you take it?”

He presses the toy deeper. Ouyang writhes. He’d asked for more, and now his body is screaming at him: screaming that what he’s receiving is gloriously, exactly what he’d wanted, and at the same time far too much. The coolness is sliding into the core of him, reaching sweetly towards an internal throb that feels like an itch that needs soothing, even as he burns with the bright, beautiful pain of being split in two. He feels like he’s being erased by the sheer brightness of it. He’s never felt anything like this in his life.

“I’ve never seen the appeal, personally,” Lord Wang muses. He withdraws the phallus and presses it back in in a smooth glide that nearly makes Ouyang’s eyes cross. “But you seem to enjoy it to a surprising degree.” He does it again, and it takes all Ouyang’s willpower to bite down on a noise of utter humiliation: at how good it feels, and how much he wants it again. “If I kept going just like this, sweet and slow, you could keep going for days, couldn’t you?” He says consideringly, “If it weren’t that someone’s going to come looking for you, I would be tempted to try, just to see how far we can push that celebrated warrior endurance of yours.”

“I don’t want—sweet—” Ouyang pants hatefully. It takes all his effort to form words. He can feel his sweat dripping down his back inside his clothes. He doesn’t think he could last for days. He’s not sure he can survive this moment. “Do it harder.”

Lord Wang gives him a pitying look. “Do you even know what you want it harder for?”

Ouyang says doggedly, “If you do it right—something’s supposed to—happen—” What had felt before like an internal softening seems to be winding back the other way, now that he’s at full stretch. There’s a strange pressure building inside the stretch that seems to anticipate something. What the something is, Ouyang isn’t fully sure. He has the vague understanding that men come, but he’s not sure if it applies to him, or if it applies to him being fucked in this particular way. The thought that whatever he’s anticipating might not eventuate—that all this intensity will simply ebb away until he’s back to normal—makes him feel crazy.

“You really don’t know anything, do you? Trust me,” Lord Wang says, “I’m doing it right. But as far as finishing is concerned, I’m not the one who makes it happen. It has to be you.”

But the sensations inside him are like a foreign language. Ouyang feels wretched with desperation. He doesn’t want them to go away, but if they build forever he’s going to die. He seizes Lord Wang by his infuriating head and shouts, “How, tell me how, I don’t know what I’m supposed to do!”

Lord Wang doesn’t seem bothered by being clutched. He says scathingly, “Stop trying so hard. Everyone can do it. It comes naturally to even the stupidest amongst us. And you have competition on that front, believe it or not.”

But then, as if taking pity on Ouyang, he crowds in. Ouyang has the disconcerting idea that he might kiss him, and isn’t sure how he feels about that, but then Lord Wang’s lips are against his ear again. And this time when he speaks, Ouyang recognises with horror why his new low voice sounds so familiar. In order for Lord Wang to make himself sound like a man, he’d reached for the example he knew best, which is also the one Ouyang knows best—

When Lord Wang murmurs in his ear, it’s with Esen’s voice that he says, “Oh, my General. Always so brave, so willing. So good. Look at you taking everything I give you—”

Lord Wang vanishes, along with everything else in the world, as Ouyang’s tightness snaps. A series of violent convulsions crash through him. The convulsions are pure pleasure; they’re the distilled sensation of everything he’s felt up until that moment released all at once; they’re everything he’s suppressed throughout his entire life, when he didn’t even know he could feel. He doesn’t cry out, which would have been unbearable, but his stream of escalating gasps is somehow even more embarrassing. A gush of warmth spurts onto his thigh. A stab of horror tries to break through everything else that’s happening—has he lost so much control that he’s wet himself—until Lord Wang says curiously, “I thought you needed balls for that. But it seems you work like a real boy, after all.” He shoves the phallus in one more time, making Ouyang shiver like he’s dying from a fever, his entire body somehow turned into a single hypersensitive nerve. It pushes another, smaller, wetness out of him, then Lord Wang pulls the toy out. It’s a vaguely terrible sensation, as if his body has already made the toy a part of itself and is protesting its removal.

He lies on the floor, panting. As the pleasure ebbs away, the sadness from before rises up to take its place. He has the feeling of having been tenderised and humiliated. Opened against his will. Not physically, but emotionally.

And that had been Lord Wang’s goal all along, he realises dully. He’d wanted to inflict a cruelty. This is it. This awakening of his wanting, of being forced to know what—who—he wants, and the cursed knowledge of how it would feel to have that impossible wanting fulfilled.

It hurts more than he could have ever thought possible.

Lord Wang helps himself to the skirt of Ouyang’s rucked-up gown and uses it to wipe his hands clean. With that single fastidious gesture, his effeminate manner is back. Ouyang is abruptly revolted. He has the horrible feeling of having been tricked; that all his worst and most painful truths have been wrenched out of him by nothing more than a performance.

He says bitterly, “Why didn’t you fuck me for real?” With your dick. “I would have—”

Let you.

His throat closes up in shame. He can’t fathom why Lord Wang hadn’t. Wouldn’t it have given him something to hold over Ouyang forever: that he’d bent him over, and made him like it—beg for it?

Lord Wang gives him a long look. It would ordinarily mean he was weighing up the exact best wounding response. But Ouyang is surprised to see bitter sadness in the downturn of his thin mouth. Eventually Lord Wang says, “Perhaps the rest of the world thinks of you as a woman, because of how you look on the outside. But you’ve never given me any option but to know you as a man. Because every quality of manhood I lacked, you had. From the first time you picked up a practice sword, he saw how you were worthy to fight next to him, and ride beside him. That was why he kept you, and threw me away.”

He rises, saying, “I didn’t fuck you, because I don’t fuck men.”

For a moment Ouyang can’t breathe. It’s a moment he’d never expected, not from this source or any other: of being seen as himself.

Lord Wang stops on his way out, his hand on the hanging screen. He doesn’t look back. “My brother is stupid, and a coward. As far as self-knowledge goes, he’s even worse than you. But if you never tell him what you feel, you’ll take nothing to your grave but the memory of watching him from afar. Why not take a chance? He might surprise you.”

The screen sways on its hooks behind him, bending reflected lamplight in a series of waves across the dark floor.

Ouyang watches him go. His sadness grows until it feels like it’s crushing him. If Lord Wang thinks a chance is possible between him and Esen, it’s only because he doesn’t know what’s buried even deeper inside Ouyang than the wanting Lord Wang had scraped out of him. A horror buried so deep, lest Ouyang ever think about it or acknowledge it, because he knows that doing so will destroy him.

The moon has set by the time Esen comes to find him. When he steps around the screen and takes in Ouyang’s unravelling hair and crumpled gown, his smile is briefly replaced by shock. Ouyang realises, distantly, that this must be the first time Esen has seen him look so disarrayed. Debauched.

Esen says incredulously, “Were you—were you with a courtesan?”

Is that jealousy on his face, or is it just wishful thinking? Ouyang can’t trust himself, in this newly awakened body with its terrible, impossible, wants. He curses Lord Wang. He doesn’t want to feel these feelings. He doesn’t want to hurt like this. Out loud he says, “How could that even happen? I just—I drank a lot.”

Esen’s face clears. And Ouyang can’t help it. Even though it hurts, even though he curses himself for his weakness, he yearns towards that familiar handsomeness like some pitiful flower that’s never seen the sun. Esen looks at him a moment longer, then suddenly laughs. “Oh, my poor lightweight general! You never did have any tolerance.” He leans down, puts an arm around Ouyang’s shoulders, and heaves him up. They sway there together for a moment. The lamps have spluttered into gloom. Esen is warm and solid; Ouyang can feel him breathing. For a moment he wonders if something else will happen. But then Esen releases him, saying heartily, “Time to go home.”

Ouyang wants to reach out, to pull Esen back to him. He wants, but he can’t have what he wants. He knows, in the same way he knows how Esen will smile every time he sees him, that it’s the kind of wanting that will kill them both.