Chapter 23 - 3#

Mingyu answered readily: “You’re not wrong — Nanny Ming has been making everyone’s lives difficult lately. One day she’s ordering us to sweep every room in the compound, the next she won’t let us go back to our quarters and keeps us waiting on the masters outside. All sorts of nonsense. Even Grandpa De got dragged into it.”

Jingzhe asked, “Has she been targeting anyone in particular?”

Mingyu shook her head. “Not singling anyone out, exactly. But I heard that the current Heye has switched places with Handan and is now attending to Nanny Ming directly.”

Jingzhe’s brow furrowed. “Be careful. Don’t let her notice you.”

Mingyu nodded. Nanny Ming had been erratic lately — they all knew it, and none of them were about to walk into the line of fire.

*

In Chen Mingde’s room, the doors and windows were kept shut year-round.

The air never circulated properly, and the smell inside left something to be desired.

Nanny Ming had always despised it, and rarely visited.

Today, however, she had deigned to come. She sat to Chen Mingde’s right, pressing a handkerchief over her nose — ostensibly out of disgust, though the cloth also conveniently covered the stiff side of her face.

That half of Nanny Ming’s face had never recovered since she’d worked herself into such a rage that it triggered a serious illness. It was perpetually numb and rigid now, a stark contrast to the other half — and it had effectively ended any aspirations she’d ever harbored. In the inner palace, you didn’t need to be beautiful to rise, but you couldn’t afford to have something obviously wrong with your face. Nanny Ming’s affliction was plain for all to see. Any hope of advancement was long gone.

Chen Mingde let out a muffled, raspy cough. “It’s rare for you to cross my threshold, Nanny Ming. Don’t tell me you plan to just sit there in silence?”

Nanny Ming lowered the handkerchief just long enough to say, with open disdain, “This room of yours still reeks.”

Chen Mingde gave a thin smile and took a leisurely draw from his snuff bottle, exhaling slowly, as though her words hadn’t touched him at all.

After a long silence, Nanny Ming’s patience gave out, and she spoke first. “Chen Mingde. Are you truly content to rot away in this North Wing for the rest of your days?”

“Hasn’t Nanny Ming always known that I have no ambitions?” Chen Mingde replied calmly. “I’m here, I’m waited on, I want for nothing, and I have no worries. Why would I stir up trouble?”

Nanny Ming said archly, “I had no idea you were such a magnanimous person.”

Chen Mingde caught the edge in her words immediately, and laughed.

“So. You came about Jingzhe.”

He set the snuff bottle down and looked up at her. Those cloudy eyes of his were unsettling in their stillness.

“You may know I bear grudges — but don’t you also know I repay debts?”

Jingzhe had, in some sense, saved his life once.

“What debt?” Nanny Ming scoffed. “With his skills back then, if he’d actually finished the job and killed you—”

“But I’m still very much alive,” Chen Mingde interrupted. Now that he understood her motive, he had no interest in prolonging the conversation. “I don’t know what Jingzhe did to offend you. But he’s no longer part of the North Wing. He’s none of your business.”

Nanny Ming’s face twitched with fury. “Obstinate old fool,” she snapped. “No wonder Chen An became Chief Eunuch while you’ve wasted half your life trapped in this North Wing. Utterly useless!”

The insult only made Chen Mingde laugh harder.

“Nanny Ming,” he said, with a hint of satisfaction as he raised a hand, “aren’t you also in the North Wing now? Also looking at a future with no surprises?”

Nanny Ming stormed out in a fury.

The moment she was gone, Chen Mingde’s expression darkened. He turned the snuff bottle over and over in his fingers.

After a long while, he murmured to himself.

“The business between me and Chen An — that’s ancient history. How did Chai Suming find out about it?”

Chai Suming was Nanny Ming’s real name.

Chen Mingde frowned. Ever since the incidents involving Noble Lady Liu and Qian Qin in quick succession, Chai Suming had seemed utterly broken. And then there was Heye’s death — she certainly had a hand in that too.

He’d never bothered to look into it. Heye had been her creature, helping her with any number of things in both the open and the shadows. The two of them were birds of a feather.

But still… someone who had seemingly resigned herself to her fate was on the move again.

Had someone made contact with her?

Her attempt to provoke Chen Mingde into going after Jingzhe had been far too obvious — so obvious that it might well be a decoy, hiding something deeper. And whatever that was wouldn’t be easy to uncover.

Chen Mingde sighed.

As he’d said, he truly had no more ambitions. But when people started showing up at his door like this, these old bones of his had no choice but to stir again.

He wasn’t motivated. But he wasn’t dead either.

*

By the time the ninth month rolled around in a flurry of activity, the Empress Dowager had recovered from her illness, and a rare peace settled over the inner palace and the outer court alike.

It was in this tranquil, quietly cooling ninth month that Jingzhe caught a cold.

It started with a few sneezes — nothing serious. It dragged on for days. When Rong Jiu came by, he pinched Jingzhe’s nose, looked him over, and told him to wear more layers.

Jingzhe agreed. But he still had work to do.

He’d finish a task drenched in sweat, and sometimes he’d take off a layer for the relief of it, forgetting to put it back on. A small thing, carelessly repeated — and what had been minor symptoms steadily worsened.

By today, he had woken with a low fever.

Yunkui, seeing this, went and arranged for Jingzhe to take sick leave on his behalf.

With Yunkui vouching for him, it was easily done. Jingzhe stayed in his room.

His roommate was Huiping.

Worried that Jingzhe might slip into delirium without anyone nearby, Huiping left hot water at his bedside and promised to check on him regularly before reluctantly heading off.

Neither Yunkui nor Huiping had made a great fuss over Jingzhe’s illness.

Jingzhe took note of this.

Because in the inner palace, everyone feared getting sick.

No matter who you were, you could only weather it on your own. If you didn’t pull through — well, there was no good outcome waiting for you.

And so even those close to you kept their distance from the ill. If Jingzhe’s condition worsened, he might be moved out.

“Moved out” meant removed from the palace entirely, sent to the inner city.

Once you went out that way, coming back was no sure thing. You might die. You might be forgotten. You might never return.

Jingzhe’s throat ached. He coughed dully a few times, pulled the blanket tighter, and breathed through the heat of his own breath. The fever made his head swim. Hot one moment, cold the next — as if a fire had taken up residence inside his body.

He rarely got sick.

Genuinely rarely.

Though in Yunkui’s eyes he’d fallen ill a handful of times, the truth was that Jingzhe had always had a robust constitution. He’d been sick once when he first entered the palace, and had gone without a serious illness ever since.

And so when illness finally came for him, it came with a vengeance.

Half-conscious, Jingzhe pressed a hand to his forehead… In a couple of days… Rong Jiu was supposed to come… by then, would he be…

He didn’t finish the thought. He fell asleep.

He drifted in and out, not knowing how much time passed. He finally surfaced because his throat was unbearably dry.

Parched, he ran his tongue over his lips — and was surprised to find them faintly damp, as if someone had moistened them. The hint of moisture only made his thirst worse.

Something cool and wet rested on his forehead. A damp cloth.

Had Huiping come back?

He was still wondering when a pair of arms reached from beside him and pulled him upright in one smooth motion. The unexpected movement, and the unmistakably familiar strength behind it, drew the name from his lips before he could think: “Rong Jiu?”

He thought he’d spoken at full volume. In reality it was barely a whisper, a faint rasp that could only just be heard.

Rong Jiu said nothing. He simply held out the white ceramic bowl sitting at the bedside.

It was exactly what Jingzhe had been desperate for — water.

Except it was pitch-black medicine.

Jingzhe hesitated for a moment, then, operating on the logic that medicine was technically still a liquid, gathered the bowl in both hands and tipped it back, gulping it down.

With the attitude of a man marching to his own execution.

Ugh. Almost gagged.

It tasted absolutely awful.

Jingzhe had barely finished when his stomach turned, but Rong Jiu was already pressing a sweet into his mouth — soft and yielding, dissolving the instant it touched his tongue.

The sweetness swept away the bitterness coating his mouth.

Rong Jiu took back the bowl. Jingzhe’s voice, at least, had partly returned — still hoarse, but functional. “How did you know to come?”

He always seemed to ask Rong Jiu something like this.

There was always this sense that Rong Jiu had some inexplicable ability to appear wherever and whenever he was needed.

…Which was, honestly, reassuring.

“Your pulse,” Rong Jiu said, his tone carrying a particular quality — the stillness of a calm sea that is anything but calm beneath the surface. “They say it’s someone who has overextended themselves in worry and overthinking. Too much wearing on the mind. That’s what made you sick.”

Devastating delivery. As if he were announcing a sentence.

Jingzhe probably should have been at least a little afraid.

Instead, he hunched his shoulders, and through the flush of fever a small, sweet kind of happiness spread across his face. “When I was sick in the palace before, I had to lie in a corner alone. I used to think — if only someone would come see me, how wonderful that would be.”

And here he’d opened his eyes to find Rong Jiu right beside him.

Rong Jiu found himself with the rare sensation of throwing a punch that landed in cotton — and let out a laugh despite himself before reaching a hand through the loose front of Jingzhe’s collar and giving the skin over his chest a sharp pinch.

Jingzhe yelped. If he’d been a cat, every hair on his body would have been standing straight up.

“Still happy?”

The voice was cold enough to belong to something from the underworld — the sort of voice that could pull your soul right out of you.

Jingzhe, already weakened, was even more undone after that shock. He went limp against Rong Jiu’s chest with a wounded sound. “I’m sick — and you’re still — you can’t just—”

Jingzhe’s voice broke, aggrieved and pitiful.

The vein at Rong Jiu’s temple pulsed. He stared down at Jingzhe with the expression of someone who was very seriously considering the merits of just strangling him on the spot.

Jingzhe quietly tried to crawl away. He was pulled back.

“You’re soaked through. Where do you think you’re going?”

Rong Jiu’s expression settled back into blankness. He kept Jingzhe firmly in place and began wiping down his back.

Under his hands, Jingzhe stilled.

Rong Jiu was plainly inexperienced — it was obvious this was his first time doing anything like this. His movements were a bit rough, occasionally hurting Jingzhe, at which point his face would darken and he’d seem to rage silently at something for a moment before reining himself in and continuing to turn Jingzhe this way and that.

When he finished, he tossed the cloth aside and flipped Jingzhe over — only to find him crying silently.

Rong Jiu seemed to arrive, in a very short span of time, at an understanding of the way emotions run low and grief comes easily in illness. He exhaled, reining himself in. “What are you crying for?”

Jingzhe sniffled. He pressed his face against Rong Jiu’s chest. “I miss my family.”

Rong Jiu’s clumsy hands had reminded him of his father.

When he was young and prone to illness, his father had refused to let his mother watch over him alone — worried she would wear herself out too. His father would work through the day and then sit with Jingzhe through the night, wiping his sweat, changing his clothes, giving him medicine… Just as rough-handed as this. But under that blundering there had been so much care.

Jingzhe realized, with a vague pang, that he was starting to forget what his family looked like.

Rong Jiu was quiet for a long time.

When Jingzhe finally looked up, Rong Jiu’s expression was strange — something that looked like the early warning signs of an explosion, held in check by sheer force of will. The only outward sign was the tight, flat line of his mouth.

“You’re comparing me… to your father?”

Jingzhe: “…” What is wrong with your comprehension?

Do you want to be my father? Did you think to ask me how I feel about that?!

Jingzhe sputtered indignantly, flailing, desperately wanting to clap a hand over Rong Jiu’s mouth. “I do not want another dad!”

Who goes around making their companion into their father figure?

Rong Jiu’s expression had been dark — as if this touched something he wouldn’t tolerate. But watching Jingzhe transform, suddenly, into a flustered and bristling mess, the illness apparently forgotten — he couldn’t help raising an eyebrow.

A father, hm… Well. The word did have more than one meaning…

“If you want to call me that,” Rong Jiu said, his tone edged with implication, “I wouldn’t necessarily refuse… But a filial son would need to be very devoted to his father…”

Jingzhe didn’t quite catch the meaning, but some instinct kicked in. He gathered his blanket around himself, rolled silently off Rong Jiu, and curled his back to him, tucking himself into a ball.

His mother always said — when your ears start burning, it means something unclean is nearby.

Don’t listen.

Rong Jiu let him curl up.

Cool, unhurried eyes settled on the curve of Jingzhe’s back.

When Jingzhe wasn’t watching, Rong Jiu’s expression changed entirely. The blankness became something frightening — lips pressed together, motionless. In an instant he seemed less like a person and more like something else: a cruel, brooding tyrant, eyes dark as ink, lit from within by some twisted intent.

And beneath it, a desire — self-serving, unsettling, undeniable.

When he had stepped through the door and seen Jingzhe lying there, feverish and half-delirious, his first feeling had not been pity.

It had been a strange, quiet satisfaction.

If Jingzhe could just stay like this — fragile, easy to pity, drifting within arm’s reach, small and helpless, breathing shallowly, leaning against his body the way a vine clings to a tree…

To snuff him out.

The thought came with something that felt almost like sweetness.

Rong Jiu laid a hand lightly on the back of Jingzhe’s neck. The cold under his fingers made him pause.

Then he reached over with a controlled violence and dragged Jingzhe close.

The clammy body pressed against his chest — and somehow, despite Jingzhe’s fluctuating fever, Rong Jiu’s warmth was greater. He held the back of Jingzhe’s head still and pressed down, quieting the token struggle.

“Sleep.”

Jingzhe heard the cold, subdued tone, and thought he could make out the faint sound of teeth grinding.

Bad habit… Jingzhe thought fuzzily as his eyes fell shut… So warm…

He sank.

A sense of safety he hadn’t felt in a long, long time.

*

Author’s note: Rong Jiu: I should just kill you. Also Rong Jiu: Why are you so cold. (Furiously drags him over)