When they dragged the prisoner into the firelight, the first thing Shan Yu noticed wasn't the weakness in a torn blanket or the mottled ellipse of rope-burn on his neck. His eyes ran over the stain in the armor, then the corresponding smears on his own men, and he rubbed Hayabusa's claws while the wounded men grew nervous under his stare. Captive excepted; that one didn't look up. That one knelt, quiet.
"Well, gentlemen." Good to draw the theater out. "Why isn't this dead yet?"
"He fired the cannon." It took a true carrier of Hun bravery to respond when Shan Yu had leashed enough rage to loosen every stone of the Great Wall himself, although the wind threw the man's words into the snow.
Shan Yu stepped closer. The prisoner's arm moved, a little aborted movement like he was reaching for a dagger, and Shan Yu let his own gloved hand shudder as if to show how barely in control he was of the scimitar under the falcon. "Something to say for yourself?" With a tilt of his head he motioned back his soldiers. Here he owned the weapon and the field, and a view of a face handsome even with shadows under the cheekbones and a throat broken by bruises. He was curious what some boy who had taken Imperial training, several beatings, and the loss of sword, horse, lizard, cricket, and freedom would do.
"This is all I have," the prisoner said. His hands undid one clasp then another under his chestplate, still not meeting Shan Yu's gaze, then everyone could see the blood crusting over stomach and breast like a parley flag. The woman had not a hint of terror as she finally looked straight at him, the expression of someone with nothing left to lose.
(Mulan had never been ice-white. She was the daughter of two fighters and had skin dark as the mountain, and there were Huns more lovely but none who could burn themselves into their khan so, with one shake of the arm. In that movement Shan Yu already knew how he would be defeated.)
He cupped her chin in his gloved hand. Or he tried, as she kicked him high in the gut then collapsed.
+
The next time he saw her, she was murmuring to herself and sullen under her furs, good meat to fill out her ribs having apparently no effect on her mood. "How are we?"
Her fingers were creeping out from under the covers. He hadn't imagined her starting with feminine wiles already, since she knew nothing of him but his reputation. There was no doubt it was ugly in China, that they wouldn't understand the principles of his khanate, that she would be repulsed-
"I'm not yours," she hissed, and punched him.
"Archer," he said, once the pain wasn't pulsing inside him like an open heart. "Could you restrain our willful child."
He could see the tendons bulging in her hands as Archer tied her wrists to the posts, but once the other man bowed out of the tent she subsided. "You can kill me or let me go."
"Or try something else," he said.
"I'm not afraid." He appreciated the twist of her face as she realized that that, in itself, revealed her terror and how tenuous her ride of it was. "Do your best."
"Why don't I tell you a story, Mulan? Mulan, isn't it? I've been in your capital before. Some of my men you slaughtered-" and at that her fists tightened on the furs, "were once your comrades. I've seen what happens to good soldiers who don't do what their Emperor say..."
FILL: the melting point of borders [2/8?]
anonymous
June 4 2012, 09:16:53 UTC
Her cheeks flushed, plum-dark under her eyes, and she was swallowing convulsively by the time he finished. He guessed well: she believed in honor, in veneration of good, and somehow he was the first to shatter this notion that the Huns beat out of their children at eight or before. Clearly she had never had a husband to slap her after she overdid the tea, or whatever other prissy art the Chinese were now displaying as an example of cultural superiority.
(Every one of his aunts had killed a man before she turned eighteen. They'd fought well when he finally had to end their lives, their hair in the steppe dirt as desolate as summer-dried asters, and he had let them be buried with their own swords.)
"Your Li Shang. Maybe you saved his life, but he won't come for you. If he doesn't want a reprimand and demotion, he won't even claim to remember you. He'll say you died by his hand for daring to be a woman with a blade."
"So you want to run, self-righteous girl? Or you think I want to fuck you?" he asked. God, he could cover her flat breasts with one hand.
He left before she could string together anything articulate, to give her time to stop shouting and move her goalposts for evil out of Mongolia.
+
"I want to fight you," Mulan said.
It was sometime after snowmelt. Shan Yu had ordered his men to keep themselves away from her entirely until her chest had knitted itself together like meadows in spring, then to keep themselves away from her unless they planned to train her in real fighting, the kind of pragmatic fighting that would use the latent cunning of a woman who could trigger an avalanche in ten seconds of battle, and even though he hadn't quite obeyed his own edict the sight of her lodged in his throat as much as it did when he first saw her and choked. She had been passing her trial with the Huns with flying colors: pink in her cheeks, wrapped in the brown wool of favored trainees, her green gauntlets returned to her. It had been two months and a week since she last tried to run.
Her voice had taken on a lower timber, hoarse with exertion, one sign of her assimilation of camp habits. She wore nothing over her waist and her limbs bore the grease of a shared kill over a spit, shiny on her wrists and thighs, and she was fierce as a horse but if he touched her, she would go the way of his most beautiful aunt.
He took her outstretched hand. Only warm skin for her today, old callused over new. Before his control fell apart like campfires in a storm. "You presume," he said.
She bit her lip and went to find Archer.
+
His men brought him a shivering convict, her back striped with the bright pink aftermath of a whip. "Show Mulan. Tell our lady the border regiment did it," he said. "For, hmm. Stealing grain for her starving mother. That sounds good, hmm?"
"We found her digging through our rubbish heap."
"Well," he said, and when he stroked his chin the lead scout's mouth curved up with his, for he was the pupil of Shan Yu and he understood, "we weren't responsible."
FILL: the melting point of borders [3/8?]
anonymous
June 4 2012, 09:18:19 UTC
+
"I want to fight you, khan," Mulan said. From her the honorific was strange.
The tent flap bent easily in her fingers, but she hesitated at the threshold, morning light splitting over her face. He leaned back in his seat and waved at his scout to continue for a few minutes more, to see if she could be baited, before shoving the man to the exit and allowing her to see his smile. "Do you? Come here."
Her skin had steadily darkened under weeks and weeks spent in the sun, which was far more suited to her than some minor lord's house, even if the tapestries on his walls set a good contrast for her. She came through the old khans and appliques, not kneeling when she reached him, as she never had. Her eyes narrowed. "Why wouldn't I?"
She did not lie quiescent across his lap, but for all her restless twitching she did not try to throw herself off. He shifted her with his knees and upturned foot until their bodies aligned. Her head sat in the crook of his arm so, if his underlings had taught her well, she could reach his throat with ease.
His favorite knife still loomed too big in her hands. Most of his recreated army had at least a head on her height, and he could barrel over anyone he ruled with no weapons at all- a khan held his position because he could hold it- but she didn't need the reminder of his strength, any more than she needed to know why he hadn't chopped her feet off in the winter and let his ravaged men at her. "Cut me, then."
"Excuse me?"
"Here I am." He pressed his hand to her shoulder and brushed slowly down to be sure she was aware of him in all his power laying there for her, felt her tremble like a child in the cold. "Take my blood."
Her hand wavered on the blade. He relaxed. She had, he thought, a burned-deep sense of honor and even were he the royal advisers he had demonized for her she would not flay him open in his own tent at his own invitation. And more, more and more, she wouldn't learn how to damage people she admired, and there it was, that burned-deep right and wrong where inexorably he came closer to the boundary with every day he worked with her.
When she put the knife down and kissed him instead, he filed away another correct guess for future use before slipping his tongue next to hers. She made a surprised noise, as if she were not expecting him to reciprocate, and fled.
One of his men brought her in an hour later. She stood shoulders back and knees straight but at an eighth-circle to him, and it was vulnerability he saw in her there. "That wasn't fair."
He grinned. "Has everyone always been fair to you? Was your captain?"
That earned him a whirl before she paused and shuffled forward. A step and he could smell the sweat of work on her, work in his camp and not the camp of Li Shang or whatever other officials thought they owned her duty. A step and she was practically on him. A step and she steadied her hands on his hips and licked again at his mouth, slower this time and driven by a long simmering of terms inside her, not a momentary excitement by the knife.
FILL: the melting point of borders [4/8?]
anonymous
June 4 2012, 09:19:46 UTC
"Kill me or let me go," she whispered, scattering the words with kisses along his jaw.
"I'll fuck you," he said, so sure of it in the trembling of her lips, her legs around his- Shan Yu prided himself on understanding movements, it was what made him khan, and for the first time he was hard, he had her thighs open around him and her back crushed against a tent pole and her mouth coming inexorable down his jugular-
It was wrong. This time she avoided him for days training her knife-throwing.
(He was khan, he could have had her on the tent floor, on the back of his stallion, in the middle of the field with his men a tight black circle around her, but he rallied against the Imperial Throne because he liked the challenge. Shan Yu enjoyed nothing in burning by stealth. It was not performance.)
+
"I want to fight you," Mulan said. No khan again.
"Come here," he said.
She took a deep breath, and he took one, smelling on her grass and sweat and the note that none of the fair young horsegirls on the steppe could emulate, wanting her with the suddenness of summer rain. "But I won't kiss you," she said, almost blushing, "until you consider me your equal."
He told himself to turn away. "That's your loss, darling."
+
"Come fight with me," he said to her, when the summer had taken the last scraps of clothing off his men and the sharp scent of readiness in the camp almost drove him to the Great Wall that very afternoon. Should he be more oblique? "You're a good rider."
There was a vestige of her old demure smile at that, mostly the unflinching confidence that had taken her since she wrestled Archer into a long stay in the medic's tent. "I think you could give me better work than that, Shan Yu. Do you remember when we met? What I can do?"
He remembered the calculation of resources and angles under fire. He thought of the curlicues of the Forbidden City, of the politics of concubines and feathered beds, and how everything she was would be buried under silk had his men had not found her on a mountainside. He considered taking the gargoyles off the golden roofs and then removing all the roofs, popping them off buildings like lids on jars, to see how she would survive under that bare sky. "I have a General's helmet for you."
A few seconds before she understood which General, then she threw her head back. She laughed. Her throaty, rich laugh and her frame, spare and hard, were the product of smoking and whooping with all his cannon fodder even while they knew she would never be one of them and yes, it hurt to see her standing.
(He had to remember not to eat her alive. She had the kind of heart that, shredded in raw soup and fed to pregnant women, was said to birth warrior khans.)
FILL: the melting point of borders [5/8?]
anonymous
June 4 2012, 09:22:24 UTC
( Hoping to have the rest of this done tomorrow, but can't guarantee it .-. Sorry, just checked my schedule again. )
"You've never fought me."
Layers of parchment were spread on his floor. He pretended to be studying the maps of the mountain passes, the peaks surrounded by Mulan's energetic, unreadable characters, until she touched his shoulder. Her face was unusually guarded; she usually allowed whatever emotion she felt to unfurl across her body so he knew the moment she forgave him for the time he tried to slip between her legs. "Yes?"
"Fight me, or when the roast goes out tonight I'll go with it and tell every recruit you were too craven to fight a woman."
They weren't words, he thought, a girl wearing only a sword-belt and loose skirt should say. He stood, strode over to her, and put his elbow around her throat. He hadn't been this angry with her since she punched him with bandages still wrapped around her chest. "Do you want to die today?"
Her shrug went through her entire figure, enough for him to feel the stretch of it in her neck and then all her muscles, loose. "Aren't you curious, Shan Yu, about whether I can fight on the field? You would never let me run a maneuver I couldn't lead with my own horse and bow and sword."
He said absentmindedly, "Don't play with me."
Her hand came up faster than he expected it, fingers unerring and dirty for the nerves of his elbow. He dropped to his knees as her other hand moved fluidly, dagger flipping out of her belt and ripping a handsbreath of flesh from his leg. He kicked back at her with his other heel, but she slipped out of his loosened hold and dove out of the tent while he hadn't quite comprehended the blood slicking his feet.
"Kill me," she said, the only thing in his eyes her grin fierce and distended, as he rolled swearing out of the tent with the entire encampment gaping. Half of them were holding rice and skewers in their hands and all of them had their eyes on their khan, weaponless by a woman. "For China, kill me."
He ran at her, barely hearing his own obscenities, and she made one little aborted move.
He had never been shot before. The arrow shoved into him and bowled him into the ground before he could get his fingers to it, felt without thought his entire thumb dig into his chest. The pain, then, took him like a stampede and left him puzzled and unconscious in its wake, before he could see Mulan claw the arrow out of him and press it to his mouth.
+
Khan Mulan's first order was to make Shan Yu her second in command.
Her second order was to have Archer executed.
Her third, given in the radiant afternoon sun, was to march for the Wall the next day. She always had the plans, he realized, nursing a yogurt with a bridle tied around his wrists; all she needed was her army.
Re: FILL: the melting point of borders [5/8?]afterandalasiaJune 4 2012, 10:43:38 UTC
Anon. Anon anonanonanon.
How is this so perfect? Your characters are marvellous, dark and sexy, and your way with words is magnificent.
I love the way that he thinks he's manipulating her, only to realise that she's far more than he thought. One too many underestimations! The characterisation here is just wonderful, through and through. I can't wait to see the end!
Mulan/Shan Yu. Warnings/content notes: dark themes, amoral characters, rough sex, some violence
-------------------------------------------------------------------
When they dragged the prisoner into the firelight, the first thing Shan Yu noticed wasn't the weakness in a torn blanket or the mottled ellipse of rope-burn on his neck. His eyes ran over the stain in the armor, then the corresponding smears on his own men, and he rubbed Hayabusa's claws while the wounded men grew nervous under his stare. Captive excepted; that one didn't look up. That one knelt, quiet.
"Well, gentlemen." Good to draw the theater out. "Why isn't this dead yet?"
"He fired the cannon." It took a true carrier of Hun bravery to respond when Shan Yu had leashed enough rage to loosen every stone of the Great Wall himself, although the wind threw the man's words into the snow.
Shan Yu stepped closer. The prisoner's arm moved, a little aborted movement like he was reaching for a dagger, and Shan Yu let his own gloved hand shudder as if to show how barely in control he was of the scimitar under the falcon. "Something to say for yourself?" With a tilt of his head he motioned back his soldiers. Here he owned the weapon and the field, and a view of a face handsome even with shadows under the cheekbones and a throat broken by bruises. He was curious what some boy who had taken Imperial training, several beatings, and the loss of sword, horse, lizard, cricket, and freedom would do.
"This is all I have," the prisoner said. His hands undid one clasp then another under his chestplate, still not meeting Shan Yu's gaze, then everyone could see the blood crusting over stomach and breast like a parley flag. The woman had not a hint of terror as she finally looked straight at him, the expression of someone with nothing left to lose.
(Mulan had never been ice-white. She was the daughter of two fighters and had skin dark as the mountain, and there were Huns more lovely but none who could burn themselves into their khan so, with one shake of the arm. In that movement Shan Yu already knew how he would be defeated.)
He cupped her chin in his gloved hand. Or he tried, as she kicked him high in the gut then collapsed.
+
The next time he saw her, she was murmuring to herself and sullen under her furs, good meat to fill out her ribs having apparently no effect on her mood. "How are we?"
Her fingers were creeping out from under the covers. He hadn't imagined her starting with feminine wiles already, since she knew nothing of him but his reputation. There was no doubt it was ugly in China, that they wouldn't understand the principles of his khanate, that she would be repulsed-
"I'm not yours," she hissed, and punched him.
"Archer," he said, once the pain wasn't pulsing inside him like an open heart. "Could you restrain our willful child."
He could see the tendons bulging in her hands as Archer tied her wrists to the posts, but once the other man bowed out of the tent she subsided. "You can kill me or let me go."
"Or try something else," he said.
"I'm not afraid." He appreciated the twist of her face as she realized that that, in itself, revealed her terror and how tenuous her ride of it was. "Do your best."
"Why don't I tell you a story, Mulan? Mulan, isn't it? I've been in your capital before. Some of my men you slaughtered-" and at that her fists tightened on the furs, "were once your comrades. I've seen what happens to good soldiers who don't do what their Emperor say..."
Reply
(Every one of his aunts had killed a man before she turned eighteen. They'd fought well when he finally had to end their lives, their hair in the steppe dirt as desolate as summer-dried asters, and he had let them be buried with their own swords.)
"Your Li Shang. Maybe you saved his life, but he won't come for you. If he doesn't want a reprimand and demotion, he won't even claim to remember you. He'll say you died by his hand for daring to be a woman with a blade."
"So you want to run, self-righteous girl? Or you think I want to fuck you?" he asked. God, he could cover her flat breasts with one hand.
He left before she could string together anything articulate, to give her time to stop shouting and move her goalposts for evil out of Mongolia.
+
"I want to fight you," Mulan said.
It was sometime after snowmelt. Shan Yu had ordered his men to keep themselves away from her entirely until her chest had knitted itself together like meadows in spring, then to keep themselves away from her unless they planned to train her in real fighting, the kind of pragmatic fighting that would use the latent cunning of a woman who could trigger an avalanche in ten seconds of battle, and even though he hadn't quite obeyed his own edict the sight of her lodged in his throat as much as it did when he first saw her and choked. She had been passing her trial with the Huns with flying colors: pink in her cheeks, wrapped in the brown wool of favored trainees, her green gauntlets returned to her. It had been two months and a week since she last tried to run.
Her voice had taken on a lower timber, hoarse with exertion, one sign of her assimilation of camp habits. She wore nothing over her waist and her limbs bore the grease of a shared kill over a spit, shiny on her wrists and thighs, and she was fierce as a horse but if he touched her, she would go the way of his most beautiful aunt.
He took her outstretched hand. Only warm skin for her today, old callused over new. Before his control fell apart like campfires in a storm. "You presume," he said.
She bit her lip and went to find Archer.
+
His men brought him a shivering convict, her back striped with the bright pink aftermath of a whip. "Show Mulan. Tell our lady the border regiment did it," he said. "For, hmm. Stealing grain for her starving mother. That sounds good, hmm?"
"We found her digging through our rubbish heap."
"Well," he said, and when he stroked his chin the lead scout's mouth curved up with his, for he was the pupil of Shan Yu and he understood, "we weren't responsible."
Reply
+
"I want to fight you, khan," Mulan said. From her the honorific was strange.
The tent flap bent easily in her fingers, but she hesitated at the threshold, morning light splitting over her face. He leaned back in his seat and waved at his scout to continue for a few minutes more, to see if she could be baited, before shoving the man to the exit and allowing her to see his smile. "Do you? Come here."
Her skin had steadily darkened under weeks and weeks spent in the sun, which was far more suited to her than some minor lord's house, even if the tapestries on his walls set a good contrast for her. She came through the old khans and appliques, not kneeling when she reached him, as she never had. Her eyes narrowed. "Why wouldn't I?"
She did not lie quiescent across his lap, but for all her restless twitching she did not try to throw herself off. He shifted her with his knees and upturned foot until their bodies aligned. Her head sat in the crook of his arm so, if his underlings had taught her well, she could reach his throat with ease.
His favorite knife still loomed too big in her hands. Most of his recreated army had at least a head on her height, and he could barrel over anyone he ruled with no weapons at all- a khan held his position because he could hold it- but she didn't need the reminder of his strength, any more than she needed to know why he hadn't chopped her feet off in the winter and let his ravaged men at her. "Cut me, then."
"Excuse me?"
"Here I am." He pressed his hand to her shoulder and brushed slowly down to be sure she was aware of him in all his power laying there for her, felt her tremble like a child in the cold. "Take my blood."
Her hand wavered on the blade. He relaxed. She had, he thought, a burned-deep sense of honor and even were he the royal advisers he had demonized for her she would not flay him open in his own tent at his own invitation. And more, more and more, she wouldn't learn how to damage people she admired, and there it was, that burned-deep right and wrong where inexorably he came closer to the boundary with every day he worked with her.
When she put the knife down and kissed him instead, he filed away another correct guess for future use before slipping his tongue next to hers. She made a surprised noise, as if she were not expecting him to reciprocate, and fled.
One of his men brought her in an hour later. She stood shoulders back and knees straight but at an eighth-circle to him, and it was vulnerability he saw in her there. "That wasn't fair."
He grinned. "Has everyone always been fair to you? Was your captain?"
That earned him a whirl before she paused and shuffled forward. A step and he could smell the sweat of work on her, work in his camp and not the camp of Li Shang or whatever other officials thought they owned her duty. A step and she was practically on him. A step and she steadied her hands on his hips and licked again at his mouth, slower this time and driven by a long simmering of terms inside her, not a momentary excitement by the knife.
Reply
"I'll fuck you," he said, so sure of it in the trembling of her lips, her legs around his- Shan Yu prided himself on understanding movements, it was what made him khan, and for the first time he was hard, he had her thighs open around him and her back crushed against a tent pole and her mouth coming inexorable down his jugular-
It was wrong. This time she avoided him for days training her knife-throwing.
(He was khan, he could have had her on the tent floor, on the back of his stallion, in the middle of the field with his men a tight black circle around her, but he rallied against the Imperial Throne because he liked the challenge. Shan Yu enjoyed nothing in burning by stealth. It was not performance.)
+
"I want to fight you," Mulan said. No khan again.
"Come here," he said.
She took a deep breath, and he took one, smelling on her grass and sweat and the note that none of the fair young horsegirls on the steppe could emulate, wanting her with the suddenness of summer rain. "But I won't kiss you," she said, almost blushing, "until you consider me your equal."
He told himself to turn away. "That's your loss, darling."
+
"Come fight with me," he said to her, when the summer had taken the last scraps of clothing off his men and the sharp scent of readiness in the camp almost drove him to the Great Wall that very afternoon. Should he be more oblique? "You're a good rider."
There was a vestige of her old demure smile at that, mostly the unflinching confidence that had taken her since she wrestled Archer into a long stay in the medic's tent. "I think you could give me better work than that, Shan Yu. Do you remember when we met? What I can do?"
He remembered the calculation of resources and angles under fire. He thought of the curlicues of the Forbidden City, of the politics of concubines and feathered beds, and how everything she was would be buried under silk had his men had not found her on a mountainside. He considered taking the gargoyles off the golden roofs and then removing all the roofs, popping them off buildings like lids on jars, to see how she would survive under that bare sky. "I have a General's helmet for you."
A few seconds before she understood which General, then she threw her head back. She laughed. Her throaty, rich laugh and her frame, spare and hard, were the product of smoking and whooping with all his cannon fodder even while they knew she would never be one of them and yes, it hurt to see her standing.
(He had to remember not to eat her alive. She had the kind of heart that, shredded in raw soup and fed to pregnant women, was said to birth warrior khans.)
+
Reply
"You've never fought me."
Layers of parchment were spread on his floor. He pretended to be studying the maps of the mountain passes, the peaks surrounded by Mulan's energetic, unreadable characters, until she touched his shoulder. Her face was unusually guarded; she usually allowed whatever emotion she felt to unfurl across her body so he knew the moment she forgave him for the time he tried to slip between her legs. "Yes?"
"Fight me, or when the roast goes out tonight I'll go with it and tell every recruit you were too craven to fight a woman."
They weren't words, he thought, a girl wearing only a sword-belt and loose skirt should say. He stood, strode over to her, and put his elbow around her throat. He hadn't been this angry with her since she punched him with bandages still wrapped around her chest. "Do you want to die today?"
Her shrug went through her entire figure, enough for him to feel the stretch of it in her neck and then all her muscles, loose. "Aren't you curious, Shan Yu, about whether I can fight on the field? You would never let me run a maneuver I couldn't lead with my own horse and bow and sword."
He said absentmindedly, "Don't play with me."
Her hand came up faster than he expected it, fingers unerring and dirty for the nerves of his elbow. He dropped to his knees as her other hand moved fluidly, dagger flipping out of her belt and ripping a handsbreath of flesh from his leg. He kicked back at her with his other heel, but she slipped out of his loosened hold and dove out of the tent while he hadn't quite comprehended the blood slicking his feet.
"Kill me," she said, the only thing in his eyes her grin fierce and distended, as he rolled swearing out of the tent with the entire encampment gaping. Half of them were holding rice and skewers in their hands and all of them had their eyes on their khan, weaponless by a woman. "For China, kill me."
He ran at her, barely hearing his own obscenities, and she made one little aborted move.
He had never been shot before. The arrow shoved into him and bowled him into the ground before he could get his fingers to it, felt without thought his entire thumb dig into his chest. The pain, then, took him like a stampede and left him puzzled and unconscious in its wake, before he could see Mulan claw the arrow out of him and press it to his mouth.
+
Khan Mulan's first order was to make Shan Yu her second in command.
Her second order was to have Archer executed.
Her third, given in the radiant afternoon sun, was to march for the Wall the next day. She always had the plans, he realized, nursing a yogurt with a bridle tied around his wrists; all she needed was her army.
+
Reply
How is this so perfect? Your characters are marvellous, dark and sexy, and your way with words is magnificent.
I love the way that he thinks he's manipulating her, only to realise that she's far more than he thought. One too many underestimations! The characterisation here is just wonderful, through and through. I can't wait to see the end!
Reply
Reply
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