Ma Xushu heard his brother and Feng Quan’s perpetual bickering in the courtyard of his family’s manor before they ever came into view. He sat beneath a small overhang of juniper carpet, an emerald umbrella made from sharp foliage attached to two gnarled trunks twisted by nature and the slow progression of time. In his lap rested an open book. Its spine was cord-bound and pages fragile, full of hand calligraphed text penned close together, a dense collection of even denser thoughts. The dark haired man looked up to see the bobbing heads of his sibling and Quan, unimpressed until he saw the addition of a truly rare face beyond the Ma family’s walls: Ren Fei.

“I wasn’t insulting him!” Quan cried, always on the defense when it came to his own mouth. “I was implying that his disability would be an asset here since he’s taken so much time to learn about how abilities and tracers and stuff like that works.”

Despite the fact that all three were walking, seemingly of their own accord, Fei struggled against every step he was forced to take, eyes darting frantic to the startled man watching their approach from beneath his roof of leaves. The entire ride back to the Ma estate, the young scholar had tried to signal his dire predicament to each traveller they passed to no avail. Now that they were well into Yixun’s home territory, why did he suppose the cloistered eldest of the Ma clan would be any different? What could a man without artifacts do against this jackal of a puppeteer and the snake who goaded him?

Fei had eyes the colour of defeat, his pallor a gradient from resignation to surrender. Ma Xushu was probably in on all this too.

As they passed the Ma family’s inner gate leading to Xushu’s sanctuary, Yixun shoved Quan toward the lowest dip of the sharp crack as the blonde connected with the architecture, red lacquered wood to distressingly hard skull.

“I don’t care why you call him retarded,” Yixun warned loudly as he walked past Quan. “Don’t call him fucking retarded!”

“FUCK,” Quan seethed through his teeth, sharp breath a tattletale for the gash left in the blond’s pride. He lifted a hand to rub his forehead, vermillion robe’s sleeve falling back to the bend in his arm. “You did that on purpos—”

“Why did you both do that to him?” Xushu motioned with his chin to the bruises casting darker shadows upon the elegance of Fei’s face. His eyebrows were furrowed already, disappointment easily replacing the dour cloud his usual expression courted. “What have you done? Why is he here?”

“Eh? What have we done?” Yixun looked visibly perplexed, greeting his elder brother with narrowed eyes. Despite their birth order, that overprotective two-toned boy always behaved as the eldest, even when he held a younger brother’s words in his mouth. “To Fei? No, Xushu. We found him like this.”

The eldest son of the Ma clan seemed to hold onto his doubts. Maybe there was something strange glimmering in Quan’s wicked eyes, a long-lived, healthy respect for the sort of trickery that existed between siblings, or perhaps he was simply suspicious of a Tian-loyal subject suddenly palling around those who were not. His gaze traveled between the three of them, lingering on Fei before moving to his brother again.

“So did you finders-keepers a whole person then?” Xushu tilted his head.

“No, Xushu,” Quan intervened, haughty like his unvocalized plan should be crystal clear. “We brought him so you could help him.”

“You never want to help anyone, though.” The firstborn Ma shook his head.

“That’s not true!” Indignant boy, so incapable at looking at any of his interactions as anything other than charity, recoiled. “Yixun, tell him!”

“But you never want to help anyone.” Yixun repeated his brother’s words before he sighed. “Look, Xushu. The whole Tian crew went up to Yunji and left him behind. We found him like this. We found him off his horse in the foothills. What do you want me to do? If we take him to the Tian estate looking like this, they’re gonna react just like you did. What can we even do?”

Fei’s brow furrowed but his lips were sealed.

Xushu narrowed his naturally somber eyes at his younger brother. “I’m not daft. You two know damn well that if you wanted to help this boy then you would have just taken him to a doctor and generously paid for their services as a means of proving your intentions and sent him on his way. What are you doing with him? What do you want him for?”

Yixun looked sidelong at Quan, carmine eyes shaded by the low canopy.

Quan sighed. Of course he would have to do the heavy lifting here, of course he would have to bargain with this man that very clearly did not like him when his own brother was right there. “Alright, look. We want him to be healed so we can ask him to help us in the upcoming arena challenge for the Jade Millipede. We just want him to get better so we can prove that we’re really genuine and don’t want to hurt him, but give him a chance to be on our team. Truthfully, we really need the help, Xushu. My ability is limited and my cousins may be mercs but they’re more used to dealing with highway robbers than artifact keepers. You wouldn’t want Yixun to get hurt in arena, would you? Ren Fei might just be the last man we need to have a great team so I can get that legendary piece and prove to my stepdad that I’m capable and worth something other than my dad’s money.”

Xushu moved those narrowed eyes to Feng Quan. “So I will heal him, you will ask him, and if he says no then you will set him free?”

Quan hurriedly nodded. “That’s right. Isn’t that right, Yixun?”

“That is absolutely right.” Yixun corroborated his friend’s claim automatically, looking back to his brother. “I tell you what: if you agree to help us and promise to keep him here, I’ll unlock him right now. I swear.”

Whether or not Yixun intended to let Fei go was in the air: when that rich outcast got his strings in someone, it was impossible to tell when his pull faded entirely.

As the negotiations transpired, Fei himself remained still, breath shallow from lips barely parted. His distress was evident: he was a frightened captive in a body no longer his own. His chestnut gaze darted from speaker to speaker until he fixated on Xushu. It didn’t seem like the eldest Ma was anything like his brother. What choice did Fei have? He wasn’t ready to give up hope so he pinned every last scrap of faith on the good he’d seen in Xushu thus far.

Ren Fei’s heartbreak eyes begged:

Help me, please.

Just say yes.

Xushu’s agreement came reasonably quick, punctuated by a half-frown that was much more at home on his face than all this concern and suspicion. The eldest of the Ma children closed his book and stood. “Alright. Fine, I will help him. Let him go and he can come with me.”

Yixun’s hand came down gently on Fei’s shoulder but his grip was a vice, fingerprints left like shrapnel in the younger boy’s bruises. It was a warning, a reminder: Fei knew the glint of a threat’s teeth despite its bleating.

“Be good, Fei,” Yixun warned with a smile before he roughly pushed Fei into the first steps he’d taken on his own since their encounter in the woods. “We’ll be by to check on you later. Get better, okay?”

The gangly teen barely kept himself from tripping as he stumbled toward Xushu, catching himself on the older man’s arm. He cast a rage tinted glance back at his previous captors but said nothing as he righted himself at his new keeper’s side. Fei edged just behind him, as though this infamously powerless man could protect the youth from the jackals that had drug him into this juniper lined courtyard.

“Bye Fei,” Quan waved gingerly, smile sweet like antifreeze, disingenuous to his very core.

As the blond turned back toward the entryway and tugged his friend along with him, Xushu turned to Fei, wrapping a supporting arm beneath his shoulders.

“Is it better if I get something to wheel you around in or is it okay to walk with support? We don’t have too far to go, just inside and down a couple of halls.” Motioning with his chin, the eldest Ma indicated the door cast in shadow at the end of the courtyard. The house to which it was attached was plain, modest in statement when compared against a construction like the Fengs’ but still well-made. It was subtle in its wealth, made proclamations of bank sums under its breath rather than with the full force of its lungs and throat.

“I can—” Fei’s voice broke over his first words. He began too quickly, too eager to take his autonomy back. He hadn’t spoken for the duration of the trip and neither of his abductors had thought to give their ward a single drink. He cleared his throat before he tried again, a frail crackle careful in the calm of an unfamiliar space. “I can walk. Yixun was holding me up and I didn’t think he would actually release me, that’s why I fell.”

Still, Fei didn’t shirk the support. He may have been able to walk but that didn’t mean he could do it well.

Xushu let his help remain. He led the youth into the spacious house and directly to his study, a room full to the ceiling with books and pamphlets and scrolls; a room of little wallspace and a cluttered floor area. An ancient anatomical chart hung next to a construction more modern-day, one mapping the hybrid-adaptations that humans evolved into, speculating on gifts and their sources, overlaying machine onto man in simplified suggestion of where best to route tracers and inlay certain types of artifacts. There was a tall, upright table on which to lay, a chair and a desk with no more room on it. There were wax models of body parts that served as bookends, there was a glistening silver cabinet salvaged from the outer lands, bearing words that meant nothing to the man that now kept that piece of furniture.

He guided Fei to the table. “Here, sit. I’ll get you some tea and you can tell me what happened.”

Fei did as directed by guidance and reflex alone; his attention was held rapt by his surroundings. The youth’s interest in artifacts, core analysis, and the evolution of abilities through family lines was no secret but Xushu’s pursuit of knowledge dwarfed his own fledgeling research. After he sat, Fei strained to reach the closest volume he could acquire, a red silk covered volume with its title embossed in gold: The Nascent Core’s Internal Alchemy. He opened it to the first page, reverently turning each successively as he quickly scanned its contents.

“Are these all your books?” Fei suddenly cared a little less about a quick and immediate escape.

“They are.” Xushu nodded, picking up a kettle gone cold and placing it in the hallway. He returned with a new one, steam streaming upwards in long, dizzying swirls. “You’re welcome to go through them when you’re feeling better. I get a lot of strange ones from outside the city. The Gui brothers—er, Feng Quan’s cousins, if you were unaware—know that I will typically buy whatever they have, so they usually bring me something from their travels.” He poured two cups of tea, sitting one next to Fei and keeping the other in his hands. “I take it you like to read?”

Fei froze at the movement in his periphery, pausing his perusal of the volume to observe Xushu placing the cup of tea at his side, then followed Xushu’s hands till they ceased their movements, assuming him to be occupied with his own teacup. Fei was a little jumpy, a little suspicious—behaviours he learned at home had been further reinforced by Quan and Yixun’s treatment. When Xushu stopped moving, Fei resumed turning pages.

“I do,” the boy replied softly.

“Great.” Xushu’s smile was brief but transparent in its lack of animosity. He stood a few steps away from the youth, cognizant of distance in the chill of Fei’s wariness. “You’re going to have to tell me about your injuries if I’m to help you. I can’t do anything if I don’t know where to start or where to go.”

The Ren boy was silent for a few more moments. His page turning slowed till he stopped entirely, hand resting upon the crease that separated the pages. Without looking up, the boy asked a simple question:

“Are you a doctor?”

“I don’t have a license but I have studied with various doctors in the city,” Xushu answered. “If what happened to you is bad enough to require a doctor, I will send for one.”

Closing the book, Fei nodded his assent. He placed it to his side, took up the now-cooled tea for a brief sip, then replaced it, looking down to watch his own clumsy hands work the tie of his belt borrowed from Yuhui. Always quite a modest thing, the boy was slow to undress, pushing his robes from his shoulders to reveal the bandages wrapped around his torso, obscuring his gold scarred chest and his deeply wounded back.

“You’ll have to unwrap the bandages,” Fei advised in a monotone detached from the promise of pain on the horizon, not looking forward to the sound and feel of blood crusted cloth ripping up his flesh anew. “My primary artifact, my tidestone, is between my shoulderblades and it’s disconnected. I don’t know much else.”

Xushu’s lips pulled themselves into a disappointed line, not looking forward to removing the bandages. At least, however, he had the warm kettle nearby—warmth and water would help loosen the blood caked to gauze, fresh blood from his fall may have been a blessing in painful disguise. The older man grabbed the kettle and moved to stand behind the young noble, pulling the top so the water could cool quicker. He grabbed a pair of scissors in the meantime and began to carefully cut the bandages up the boy’s side. He wasn’t quite ready to attempt the area of angry red threatening war from the safety of tightly wrapped white.

“Didn’t break anything in your fall did you? Lingering bone pains that won’t go away, anything other than the bruises on your face?” Xushu spoke while he worked, stepping away to his desk to dig for a fresh rag to soak.

“It is difficult to distinguish one pain from the next. Ribs blend into muscle; muscle into skin,” Fei said, strained and quiet with his eyes trained on the floor. At any moment, he expected to grit his teeth around his willowbark pride so he might save some small amount of face in front of this man he was only just acquainted with.

“Alright,” Xushu nodded, returning to the boy’s back, equipped with a salve in addition to his rag. With the kettle calmed to a soothing lukewarm, steam barely making wisps from its yawning gullet, he plunged the rag into the water, wrung it only slightly, and applied it to the bandages holding firmly to Fei’s back. The movement came with a warning, gentle from behind: “Deep breath.”

The youth began to cave with the bowing of his head. He was a slow tumble, shoulders bowed, sickle spine a knobby mimic of the moon’s silver lip. He was a stoic thing, muted waterfall of a boy pouring himself all over his own jagged kneecaps.

Fei breathed deep when he came to rest with his elbows tucked between his chest and his legs, staring hard at a single pinprick divot on the scholar’s woodgrain floor.

“I’m sorry,” Xushu stated, repeating himself when his fingers came to curl at Fei’s side, upon the split in the bandages he made moments earlier. The youth steeled himself to endure the hardship now synonymous with his very existence.

“It’s okay,” Fei replied on a tremble that barely betrayed the pain of his collapse. “Go on—i-it’s okay.”

The boy took a deep breath, closed his chestnut eyes, and wondered:

would Yuhui even notice he failed to arrive?