#delicate affection

The sky above the Luofu shimmered in soft hues of dusk, the air carrying a calmness that only the “Dozing General” seemed to know how to maintain. He had found you humming quietly in the gardens, sitting beneath a lantern tree, voice like glass dipped in moonlight. He didn’t interrupt. He watched.

“Your voice reminds me of snow falling over swords,” he said, when you finally noticed him.

You only nodded, a soft blush coloring your cheeks. You weren’t used to being heard without performing. And Jing Yuan… Jing Yuan listened with the reverence of someone who had heard too much of war.

In time, he began to ask you to sing in the evenings—nothing formal, nothing requested—just… be near him. Sit on the veranda. Sing. Speak, if you wished. Or not. Jing Yuan had a way of speaking into silences, as if your presence alone was conversation enough.

Blade found you differently.

Where Jing Yuan approached like a tide, Blade found you like a storm finds silence—abrupt, intense, overwhelming.

He heard your voice once. A song drifting from a corridor in the Luofu. A voice soft enough to lull demons. It made something inside him ache.

He hated it.

He hated how it reminded him of what it felt like to be human.

“Why do you sing?” he asked harshly one day, standing in your shadow like a ghost.

You turned to him slowly, eyes calm. “To remember I’m alive.”

Blade stared, caught between loathing and longing. You looked like something from a dream he couldn’t remember. Delicate. Too soft for this world. And yet…

You didn’t flinch from him.

You never did.

And that terrified him more than dying ever could.

There was something in you both of them needed.

Jing Yuan saw a reflection of lost time—of warmth he had quietly buried under strategy and duty.

Blade saw salvation—or perhaps, the knife that would end his suffering.

You let them both in.

To Jing Yuan, you were a lullaby.

In your arms, the weight of centuries melted. You’d sit beside him as he dozed, fingers tracing the braid of his long silver hair, your voice murmuring barely-there melodies.

“You ease me more than any peace treaty,” he once told you, eyes half-lidded as he pressed a kiss to your palm.

To Blade, you were a mirror and a wound.

He came to you in silence, raw and ragged. He never asked for songs. But when the nightmares clawed at him, you sang anyway. Not for him, but to him. As if he deserved tenderness, even if he didn’t believe it.

“You’re not afraid of me,” he whispered once, blood on his bandages, eyes wide and desperate.

“No,” you answered gently. “You’re already afraid enough for both of us.”

He kissed you then—desperate, rough, like drowning. But you didn’t push him away. You held him through the storm.

And somehow, between them, you lived like a song that never ended.

Sometimes, Jing Yuan would find you asleep against Blade’s shoulder. Other times, Blade would watch you rest in Jing Yuan’s arms, jealousy flickering like a dying flame.

But neither could ask you to choose.

Because they knew—

Your heart was big enough to hold them both.

And neither of them could bear the thought of letting go of the one soul who made the pain quiet.