Work Text:
I.
There is a garden in Xuan Zhen Palace that nobody likes to tend to. Unlike the many other green places in Heaven, there isn’t a single tree in it - only flowers in warm colors, small and deceptively delicate.
Almost every person that enters the garden has to leave immediately. They feel like their chest is being torn open, like their every secret is being dragged into the light, like there’s a hand squeezing their throat. They find themselves crying and they don’t understand why.
Ling Wen walked into it once. She stood there for a dozen heartbeats before turning on her heel and leaving without a word. Her cheeks were wet.
“Heartbreak,” she wrote in her private notes describing the place.
II.
“Somebody has to tell him,” the deputies said. They drew lots. To this day, the loser thinks the others rigged it against her.
“We can’t do it,” she said to General Xuan Zhen. “It hurts too much.”
She prepared herself for anger. For insults. For exile. She hadn't been there for long and she was sure that she was about to lose everything.
“Then I’ll do it,” General Xuan Zhen said. And that was that.
From that day on, that garden was under his care. He was the only one who could walk through it without being affected in any way.
III.
The first time General Nan Yang entered the garden, he lasted the same as everybody else. General Xuan Zhen’s deputies saw him run out like he had every calamity chasing him, and maybe every other martial god as well. The only reason nobody in Heaven heard about it was that the garden was the palace’s secret, and so General Nan Yang’s pitiful retreat couldn’t be shared without revealing its existence.
For a few days, the deputies in Xuan Zhen Palace thought they’d finally found what was needed to keep their rival General away.
But then he came back and not even the garden could stop him. He and General Xuan Zhen even moved many of their fights to it.
IV.
This is what the deputies don’t know: when Feng Xin chased Mu Qing to that secret garden of his, he forgot why he was fighting.
The moment he stood in front of the flowers, his rage melted out of him, all his wounds from their recent brawling stopped hurting, and all his regrets and burdens left his mind and heart alone for a moment.
It felt like a summer day. It felt like a perfect shot. It felt like victory.
When the moment ended, he remembered his bruised ribs, his hatred for Mu Qing, and everything neither of them had done for His Highness.
But the strange spell still lingered in the air, and Feng Xin couldn’t focus. He ran.
Once in the safety of his own palace, he broke down crying.
Because that fucking garden had made him feel loved, and leaving it had felt like rejection.
V.
Love and hate can coexist.
No matter how Feng Xin might feel in Mu Qing’s garden, it’s never enough to drown the anger that brings him there every time to try to leave a permanent mark on Mu Qing's obnoxious, pretty face.
VI.
Every time Generals Xuan Zhen and Nan Yang fight in the garden, it ends up destroyed. Not a single flower survives, to the relief of the former’s deputies. It’d be impossible to clean up the place if all of them were crying through the process, and none of them would dare suggest that their General should do the job.
They all always hope that the latest fight will be the end of the garden. That General Xuan Zhen won’t see any reason to rebuild it, or that whatever curse it is that he’s containing there will finally break and they’ll all be able to enjoy the flowers.
Because it’s a beautiful place. Their General tends to it with so much care that it’s hard to imagine that he is half the reason it ends up destroyed as often as it does.
The flowers - red, orange, pink, but mostly yellow - make you smile the moment you see them, right before they crush you under their spell.
“It’s always the same,” one of the deputies said once, wiping his cheeks after coming out of the garden. “For a heartbeat, I see them and I think they’re lovely, and then the pain comes. Like someone told me a beautiful secret and then I understood what it meant.”
VII.
It doesn’t take long for Feng Xin to realize that Mu Qing wants to fight him in that fucking garden. Like he wants it to end up destroyed.
Every single time Feng Xin follows Mu Qing to his palace to continue their arguing, Mu Qing leads him there.
As soon as they reach the garden, Mu Qing makes sure that the fight gets physical, and then his attacks land on the flower beds as often as they land on Feng Xin.
It always pains Feng Xin when the flowers die. Literally. The less of them there are around, the lesser their effect on him is. The love that surrounds him disappears, and rejection is a stab wound in his heart.
He turns that pain into viciousness as he fights Mu Qing.
VIII.
“Where does he get them?” a deputy asks in a whisper, watching their General walk into the garden with a new flower safely cradled in his hands.
Their General is the only one that brings flowers to this place, and the only one who can plant them. Nobody knows where they come from.
Days can pass without him planting anything, and then he’ll bring over a dozen flowers. He plants a single one the next day. Then he might have a new one every day, or maybe there won’t be anything for weeks. It’s impossible to predict when the garden will grow, just as it’s impossible to guess what color the flowers will be.
IX.
Feng Xin discovers everything by accident. He’s the only one that could have done it.
He stormed into Xuan Zhen Palace, looking for Mu Qing, ignoring all the deputies that insisted that he wasn’t there. They probably believed it. The sneaky bastard hadn’t announced his return to Heaven, but Feng Xin had happened to glance outside just in time to see him walk into his own palace like an intruder, looking every which way before disappearing into it.
Feng Xin went after him because such behavior was suspicious and annoying, and he wanted to know what Mu Qing was up to.
The deputies that follow him in a futile effort to stop him leave him alone halfway through the path to Mu Qing’s private chambers. Like somebody told them not to go on.
And so, the only person that sees Mu Qing on his knees, bent over himself, coughing and hacking into a basin, is Feng Xin.
Only Feng Xin sees Mu Qing reach into his own mouth to pull out a red flower, gagging while he keeps pulling until its stem and roots have also come out, his free hand twitching where it claws into the floor.
Mu Qing throws the flower into the basin, where there are already some petals and a couple of half-destroyed flowers, and leans against the foot of his bed, trembling.
With a start, Feng Xin realizes that the flower isn’t red. Mu Qing spits some blood into the basin and leans back again.
“What the fuck,” Feng Xin says.
“Why are you here?” Mu Qing asks, annoyed.
“Is this why you were acting weird?” Feng Xin says, ignoring him. He walks over to the basin to examine the flowers, the petals, and the blood. It’s disgusting.
“What are you talking about?”
“You snuck into your own palace. I saw you!”
“And didn’t you think I might have had my reasons for that?” Mu Qing asks indignantly.
“Yes, that’s why I had to see what you were doing!”
Mu Qing looks ready to yell at him for that, but a coughing fit comes over him and he has to reach for the basin. A few more petals come out.
Despite how revolting the display is, a part of Feng Xin feels the same watching it as he feels when he stands in Mu Qing’s garden.
“This is where your flowers come from?” he asks, making his disgust evident in his voice.
“Get out of here, Feng Xin,” Mu Qing says, sounding exhausted.
It gets Feng Xin to look at him properly. He's pale, there’s blood on the corner of his mouth, his eyes are red and his hands are shaking. It’s pathetic.
Feng Xin has seen how big Mu Qing’s garden is. He doesn’t want to think about how often this little spectacle happens.
“Is this some sort of curse?” Feng Xin asks.
“I know you’re stupid,” Mu Qing says, baring his teeth, “but ‘Get out’ is an easy instruction.”
“Answer the fucking question, Mu Qing!” Feng Xin says, wanting to throttle him. “I want to help!”
Mu Qing scoffs, but at least he answers: “Yes. It’s a curse.”
Feng Xin waits for him to elaborate. He doesn’t know why he bothers.
“Tell me more or I’ll go ask Ling Wen what she knows about it.”
Mu Qing gives him a disdainful look. “You won’t believe me. Go ask her. I don’t care.”
He spits one last petal into the basin and gets up.
Feng Xin, against his better instincts, tries to steady him.
“I don’t need your help,” Mu Qing says. “Now get the fuck out of here.”
Feng Xin doesn’t want to listen to him. He wants to argue, to yell, to add more blood to Mu Qing’s face.
He leaves because he has a feeling that the ensuing fight would hurt in a different way from all the others they’ve had.
X.
Ling Wen barely has anything on the curse, but she has enough.
The text she gives him speaks of a curse that makes flowers grow inside the body of a person whose romantic feelings aren’t returned.
If the text is to be believed, Mu Qing is in love with someone, and that person doesn’t love him back. Unsurprisingly.
If the text is to be believed, the curse won’t kill Mu Qing. Pity.
If the text is to be believed… every now and then, Mu Qing starts coughing because the flowers are clogging up his airway. Those flowers have taken root in his lungs, in his throat, and in everything that’s between them. The ones in Mu Qing’s garden are the ones he has managed to uproot, and said uprooting is the reason they come out covered in blood.
Feng Xin pushes away the scroll and thinks of Mu Qing’s garden, that monument to Mu Qing's failure to get somebody's love. What a masochistic fucker.
Feng Xin grabs the scroll again and skims the text. It says that the flowers are Mu Qing’s feelings. The greater the love, the more the flowers grow, and the more of them there are.
Mu Qing loves someone enough to fill a garden several times, for hundreds of years.
No wonder he said that Feng Xin wouldn’t believe him about the curse.
XI.
It feels wrong to fight Mu Qing in the garden afterwards.
He does it anyway.