I'm very bitter over the absence of If I can't love her.

i’m still here like he died offscreen. BUT WOULD I HAVE BEEN ABLE TO HANDLE IT IF HE DIED ON SCREEN?

MY CRYING ASS WANTED TO KNOW WHAT IT SAID. I AM IN S H A M B L E S, ANNA

SHAMBLES I SAY. DISTRAUGHT. 

Prompt: 33. “Something about you makes me want to commit extreme violence.” Qin Banruo and Prince Yu

He holds both of her small hands in his, tracing her perfect oval nails with his fingertips.  She lets him, because he is, for all his power, relatively harmless.

Qin Banruo is fond of Prince Yu in the way that other people might be fond of the household tomcat.  He’s egotistical and loud, thinks the whole world is his to claim, and gets under her feet screaming for attention, but he’s sweet in his own way.  (Thankfully, he doesn’t bring her headless rats.)  He’s even competent within his strengths.  Qin Banruo honestly admires the way he can play a room.  She heard from her older sisters that when his father was a young man he could take men’s hearts by the handful.  How else could the emperor have kept men like Yan Que and Lin Xie by his side for so long?  Prince Yu has a glint of that charisma, enough to charm.  He needs her help to keep the ones he snares, though.

Qin Banruo appreciates charm and allure.  They are two of her greatest weapons.  She is the tigress to his housecat.

She is Hua, and to be Hua means throwing spikes into the smooth machinations of Da Liang’s politics.  Qin Banruo is Prince Yu’s strategist, ostensibly to aid him in his quest for the throne.  When it comes right down to it, she’s skeptical about whether he will ever succeed whether she helps him or not.

He touches the pale skin of her wrist where it is encircled by a bruise.  A client dared to get handsy.

“I have not heard anything about my assailant in several weeks, Your Highness.  He has not returned to Red Sleeves.  You need not fear for me.  See?  The bruise already fades from my wrist,” she says, deftly sliding his hands back to her fingers and exposing the narrow bones of her wrist at the same time.

“I know he hasn’t,” says Prince Yu.

She lifts her killer doe’s eyes to his.

“Your Highness?”

“I had him dealt with,” he says.  “Something about you makes me want to commit extreme violence.”

Qin Banruo is a consummate professional, and as such she does not blink or startle or even still.  She will have to pick his words apart very carefully later.  “This feeble woman is grateful for your protection, Your Highness.  You are noble indeed to go to such lengths for a mere strategist.”

For the prompt: “I don’t want your pity, I want your absence.”

Mei Changsu returns to the prison late at night.  He is gaunt in the torchlight, the fire throwing the planes of his face into shifting light and dark.  Only his eyes are steady in their gleam.  Prince Yu, resting on soiled straw instead of sweet-scented laurel, does not move towards the bars of his cell.  He wonders how he ever sat across from this man in a cool, pale room and laughed.  Qin Banruo has the decency to look like the predator she is.  Mei Changsu is a smile under the sun and a garrotte in the night.

“I hear the Princess Consort is pregnant.”  Still, that mild voice.  Perhaps he cannot raise it to shout.  Perhaps if he does, the walls will shake down around him.  Prince Yu - Xiao Jinghuan - merely lifts his eyes.  Changsu is crouched at the bars.  Jinghuan knows how weak the strategist’s legs are, how much it must cost him to feign comfort balanced on his haunches like that.  Nevertheless, he cannot shake the feeling that Mei Changsu is poised coiled to leap for his throat.

“When you brought the poison to him, did you still think of him as your brother?”

Jinghuan turns his head away and screws his eyes up tight, the angle exposing a livid bruise on his cheek.

“Did you spare any thought for his wife?  Did you know there was an unborn child?”

Jinghuan grits his teeth.  The only pride he has left is in not giving this demon the answers to these obviously rhetorical questions.

“…Well.  Someone in your family did.  And for the smallest mercy then, you will have mercy now.  I don’t believe a child should suffer for the crimes of its father.  You might not have suffered either for your Imperial Father’s sins.  What a shame you committed so many of your own.”

Mei Changsu tosses Jinghuan a pin, the back broken from a cloak clasp.  Jinghuan laughs, because it is not enough of a blade to take his own life, only enough to draw blood.

“Who were you?” asks Xiao Jinghuan, not caring but strung out on loathing and exhaustion.  “You poor wretched freak, you’re not even human any longer, are you?”

Mossy is a paranoid, hypocritical, grudge-holding mess.  Lurks in the woods like some kind of cryptid.  Owns a cat despite being a disaster who arguably can’t take care of himself.  Substance dependence/abuse.  Does not pay his taxes.  Trespasses regularly on private property.  Alarming and indeterminate accent.  Assumes the worst of everyone.  Hides ineffectively behind potted plants.  Occasional stabbing.

Everything about Lucas is a problem.  He’s not morally bankrupt, but he’s taken some loans that came back to bite him.  Can and will betray you for the chance to nap.  Summons demons.  Death-seeking apathetic nerd who will outlive you even though he doesn’t want to.  Jealous and resigned at the same time.  Culturally appropriated rituals.

Taniel’s bff belongs to what is essentially a militarized death cult, and he’s cool with this.  Can and will eat your dreams.  Might well have had his sense of decorum surgically removed, and as a result he has neither taste nor class.  Collects shoes but does not have human feet to wear them.  Black market aficionado.  Unrepentant mime apologist.  You can summon him with the right pentagram, so make of that what you will.  Was an empire once and has the sense of entitlement to match.

oh okay i was like wait is nif going that hard