westwhere | sa-hareth | arrival (mingle log)

Fortunately for them both, or perhaps just for Lee Chang, he wasn't a man that took to pretending very well, and his excuse had been just that - an excuse to talk privately to Mingyu. So he steeled himself and stepped in, his brow furrowing as he saw the bottle.

"... I owe you an apology," He said as he stepped to the edge of the bed, not looking at the cupboard, not yet.

"In my haste I was thoughtless and careless. I should not have asked you."

"Do you think it killed him?" Mingyu asked abruptly, making no outward response to Lee Chang's apology. He took another long drink from one of the several bottles strewn around his bed before going on. "I ask myself a lot. If it killed him. I don't think they would've severed it there if they meant to kill him. If it was to dispose of the body, they would've done the dismemberment post-mortem, surely. But it feels like it should have killed him, doesn't it? The pain, the despair."

He paused, the look in his eyes hollow as he caressed the unmoving fox tattoo.

"...you don't need to be sorry that you brought it up. It's never far from my mind."

Edited 2021-04-17 22:46 (UTC)

"... It is a wound men can survive," He offered after a moment, before stepping over and carefully picking up one of the bottles off the bed to put it on the table instead.

"It was a clean cut." He, too, would forever have Fox's arm burned into his mind. "So it was removed for a purpose. And with the kind of magics your world has - It seems unlikely to cause death."

He picked up another bottle, not looking at Mingyu, just cleaning slowly. He wasn't sure if Mingyu would even register the enormity of the task, but then, did it really mean anything any more?

He was no one.

"If pain and despair were enough to kill, Mingyu, we both know men who would never have survived."

Mingyu smiled grimly at that, as sharp and foreboding as a headman's axe.

"We are the men who would not have survived," he agreed, listening to Lee Chang tidy his space for a few seconds longer before he caught the man by the wrist when he reached too close to Mingyu's face.

Gripping it tight, he shifted his gaze to meet Lee Chang's eyes, his gaze dark and empty but, at least, present.

"Have you fallen so low, my king?" he whispered roughly, echoing words recently overheard.

He didn't reply to the first part. He was not prone to despair, at least, or if he was he covered it swiftly with a driven need for action. He did not linger in his despair. To do so was to die.

So, perhaps, Mingyu was right.

He froze when Mingyu caught his wrist, and turned his gaze down to him.

"I am no king, Mingyu," he replied quietly. He couldn't even consider himself ever having been one, though he had, for a short time. No. He thought of himself as the traitorous Crown Prince. And that man was dead. "Here or anywhere."

"Say that all you like, your noble bearing struck me from the moment we met," Mingyu remarked, smiling in that venomous way of his when his moods turned dark. He yanked Lee Chang forward to pitch him off balance, meaning to make him fall atop Mingyu where he was sprawled.

"What are you here for? What soured your mood so when we spoke earlier, to make you so careless with your tongue?"

He caught himself before he fell fully onto the other man, one hand braced hard into the sheets next to Mingyu's face. His brow was furrowed, and he caught the man's eye and sighed, before looking away and trying to push himself back up.

"I simply dislike being reminded of how little I am actually capable of doing, here."

It was a half truth, but.

"I have a theory, and I wanted to hear any other one but it. You were not the person I should have looked to. That's all."

That and the whoring, Mingyu, he's prickly about the whoring.

Mingyu could not even begin to grasp that Lee Chang had any particular qualms about his whoring. He figured he just caught Lee Chang at a bad time, or he was fussy about the undead having all but followed him here and was taking his mood out on the nearest pretty face. He wouldn't be the first man to do so, and would prove to be far from the last.

"You're perfectly capable when you aren't busy sulking about feeling sorry for yourself," Mingyu retorted, grip unrelenting. He used his knee to knock Lee Chang's legs out from under him, to prevent the man from getting away.

"What's your theory?" he asked, as though they were having a normal discussion from a normal position.

He had been thoughtless, not intentionally cruel, and his lips parted to retort the first statement when suddenly Mingyu had him completely off balance again. He still managed to stay half braced, but he was now half sitting on the man, sighing heavily.

The question made his heart sink, despite him having been the one to set it up.

"The ones I freed. They each had a tattoo'd arm. Are known to fight Unhalad's troops--" He paused, let out a breath. "I'm worried that I caused it, Mingyu. I wasn't thinking farther than that. I'm sorry."

"As self-important as is befitting of your station, my king," Mingyu whispered low, a knife's edge in his voice. He didn't know why it was so hard to forgive Lee Chang for what was not even, by his own account, a real transgression. The man drew venom from him, made it pool like bile in his throat. He could neither tolerate Lee Chang's closeness, nor could he let him go.

"You did not cause the problems here. You did not wake the dead, you did not command them to war. You released one small contingent of undead, by mistake, and they have now slain another contingent of enemy undead. That would happen here regardless of your presence. Perhaps not that specific contingent of undead and that specific group of unfortunates, but this world is a living, moving thing. It is bigger than you, and it could care less whether or not you exist. You are just a man, as you keep saying," Mingyu reminded, voice soft so that Lee Chang would have to lean in to hear it.

"We don't even have a side in this war, just a benefactor. Or have you picked your side already?"

Lee Chang gave Mingyu a sharp look at the mockery, the title making his expression grow darker.

"I stand against letting the infected - the deathless - be used as a tool by the powerful to oppress their people," he said tightly. "Here, or at home. It is not a side. So yes, despite it being bigger than me, despite it being older than me, I take responsibility for my actions and the consequences they wreak."

He did lean in, even though he felt it was half a trap - the quiet speech meant to get him closer so that he would have an even harder time detangling himself. And yet he fell for it. Allowed it. He wasn't sure if it was for the novelty of having someone treat him this way, or...

... Well. Or.

"I don't think it's wrong of me to be concerned."

"Your sense of responsibility towards our jailers is overblown," Mingyu reminded sharply, tilting his head back in a look of defiance that also, incidentally, bared his pale neck towards Lee Chang.

"We sat in those same cells you freed those monsters from. How could you have known what they were? Perhaps if we had not all been drugged and jailed alike, none of this would have happened. Very little fault lies in you," he went on, reaching out with one hand to cup Lee Chang's cheek.

"Don't let your feelings of inadequacy from home follow you here."

"Our jailers are the same who raised the dead," He said bluntly, seeing that pale stipe of flesh. Teasing him. He shoved it out of mind, though he did lean in so that he only really had to speak in a low rumbling murmur.

"The responsibility I feel towards them extends only to their deaths." He let out a hard breath. "I simply--" He cut off, breathing hard as he tried to push himself away from the man again. He was still frustrated, still unwilling to really thinking about what was frustrating him.

"I did my duty," he replied a little crisply. "It isn't inadequacy, Mingyu. It is necessary. Does it not bother you? Seeing the way the people here are cowed under the will of deathless masters?"

Blinking slowly, Mingyu mulled over how he felt about the situation. He hadn't let himself feel much since arriving. He remembered the sleep deprivation, the disorientation, the homesickness and longing. Being possessed of the notion that there were more doors opened by this land than closed, that the fact of him being here allowed for the possibility of Fox being here as well.

His feelings for their actual situation beyond wariness and discontent...

"There's always something. Someone with their heel on the throats of their lessers. I do not have the luxury of being bothered, Lee Chang. I have to survive."

But of course he was bothered. Had always been. Home, here. He had just never been strong enough to shoulder the problem as his own. That was Fox.

That was Fox, and just look where it got the two of them.

"And I do not have the luxury of ignoring it," He replied. He took the small lapse in Mingyu's tactics to sit back up, finally out of the gravitational pull that the other man exerted on him so seemingly easily.

"There are some things more important than my survival, Mingyu."

As the man well knew. After all, Lee Chang had already made that sacrifice. The fact that he was living to tell of it was an accident.

"How exactly do you expect me to turn a blind eye to it?"

"I suppose I might've known," Mingyu murmured, sitting up himself as Lee Chang tried to pull away. He adjusted his robe, feeling a strange sort of chill overtake him. Probably just a draft.

"A man always tells you who he is upfront in his actions, and you've been trying to leave me behind since I met you."

The big heroic gestures. Mingyu should've trusted his instincts on that one, kept to idle teasing.

"Do as you like," he dismissed softly, sighing out his breath. He didn't look at Lee Chang again.

"I wouldn't be me if I wasn't alone."

He hadn't seen it coming, though he should have. Ever since Mingyu had taken Lee Chang's memories - had shared his own in return -- he'd had a strange understanding of Mingyu that he hadn't really had for anyone. Not even himself.

And yet he still had his blind spots.

He let out a hard breath, before reaching out while Mingyu was looking away, sliding a hand around the back of the man's neck and dragging him in abruptly to steal a hard kiss.

"Don't be a fool," He chastised, his voice quiet and rough.

Edited 2021-04-22 03:22 (UTC)

The kiss took Mingyu off guard, stole the very breath from him in short order. He blinked, uncomprehending, finding something in Lee Chang's voice just then made him shiver.

"How am I the fool?" he asked, though his voice came tight and strained, almost fragile. "You're the one who won't stop looking for a cause to die for."

“I’m looking for a purpose to live for,” he corrected quietly.

He only pulled back far enough to meet Mingyu’s gaze with a steely one of his own.

“You know better than anyone that I was raised for only two things.” To survive. To take the crown.

“Is it so incomprehensible that I need to put something of what I am - what it made me - to good use?”

Something to live for.

There was something indescribably tight in Mingyu's chest at that, though he couldn't (or perhaps more accurately, refused to) identify it. Instead he swallowed hard, gave Lee Chang's shoulder a hard shove, and then wrapped both arms around the man's middle to pull him in tight.

"It's not what you are. It's just what you know. You can learn new things. I did." Mingyu lifted his arm, the one with the lotus tattoo. "You can be different. For better or worse. Don't let it be worse."

'Don't be like me.'

The shove pushed him off balance enough to have no recourse when Mingyu pulled him in, other than to half catch himself with one arm planted on Mingyu’s knee.

“I don’t think protecting people is letting it be worse,” he murmured quietly. “Haven’t you wondered why I was brought here? I have no magic, no power. All I have is what I know. And that happens to be how to fight the thing here that hurts the people the most. Don’t you think that means something?”

Meaning. Mingyu wanted to laugh. He was so far past looking to anything for meaning. If life had taught him anything, it was that there was no meaning to anything, no rhyme or reason to the tragedies that befell some while others lived unfettered and free.

There was only human nature. Human heartlessness. Human greed.

"Things don't happen for a reason, they just do. They just happen, Highness," Mingyu whispered low, face half hidden in Lee Chang's shoulder. "I heard once, read somewhere—"

Mingyu swallowed hard against a too-tight throat, forcing the rest of his words out.

"...that life is just a series of rooms. And who you end up in those rooms with determines the entire course of your life. I think about that more and more lately. It's just... where you are and who you meet. That's all. There's no greater meaning. If it wasn't for me—"

He knew, somehow, in that moment, that they were no longer talking about him anymore. They were talking about a ghost - a man Lee Chang had only met through Mingyu’s memories.

“We are the ones who forge our legacies, Mingyu.” A pause, and then quietly: “As he forged his.”

It was a gamble, talking about Mingyu’s paramour that way. But he didn’t believe that it was Mingyu’s fault.

“Your existence is not a curse you give to others.”

"Some legacy," Mingyu replied bitterly, sounding hoarse. People didn't even realize he was gone, speculation of his absence tapering to disinterest. Fox had been a ghost long before he disappeared, and now...

"If anyone was meant for more, it was him, but I—" he choked out, then shook his head, clutching to Lee Chang painfully tight. "...this isn't about me, anyway. It's about you."

“Maybe he still is,” Lee Chang replied, quiet but firm. There was still a chance that Mingyu would find the man. Regardless of the mixed feelings it gave him.

“You’re the one who decided that me wanting to do something about the problem I caused meant that I was abandoning you,” he remained quietly, threading fingers into Mingyu’s hair and then tugging him up to force the man to look at him.

“Who told me it didn’t matter, because you always ended up alone. This has been about you from the start.”

Edited 2021-04-22 04:18 (UTC)

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