Archive of Our Own

For Jinshi, the garden party began like they usually did—with a crush of people clamouring to speak with him, the Emperor's quietly watching gaze, and the sinking feel that he was only being wound tighter into the political webs the spiders in the court were always weaving.

If only, he realized too soon, it could have stayed that way. If only Jinshi had been the only one to be caught in those webs.

There was a long, endless minute during the second course in which Maomao froze where she stood behind Gyokuyou, a look of concentration on her face that quickly morphed into rapture. Jinshi felt his blood run cold.

He had long yearned to see such a look on her face. With a bitter twist in his stomach, more biting than any poison, he thought: I didn't mean like this.

He was out of his chair before he even knew what he was doing. The Emperor shot him a look of surprise, but Gyokuyou seemed to catch on instantly. The way his eyes were fixed on Maomao's face, the way his mouth parted as if to call out a warning that could only come too late—she would know exactly what those meant.

As if the world had slowed down to nothing more than a crawl, Jinshi saw the spoon fall from Maomao's hand, the small bite of lemon garnished fish falling to the floor. Maomao swayed for an instant before her body began to follow it, her knees buckling beneath her like paper. Jinshi managed to get there just in time. He staggered a little beneath the collision of their two moving bodies, then let it guide them down to the ground.

Her body felt too small, too light, too fragile as his arms tightened around her. Jinshi was afraid he might break her, but he couldn't seem to loosen his grip.

"Maomao," he said sharply, as if somehow just the sound of his voice could tether her here. His hand reached into her robes, where he knew she always carried an emetic, but her hand came up sharply to catch his wrist.

Her grip was faltering, and yet it brought his hand to a stumbling halt.

Maomao shook her head, though Jinshi wasn't entirely certain if she did so beneath her own power or if it was just a spasm of her muscles.

"No," she managed, her voice already beginning to slur into unconsciousness. "I've…never tasted this one before."

For a long, terrible moment, he misunderstood her. Surely she couldn't be stopping him just so that she could revel in the taste of this unknown poison a moment longer. But then her grip tightened just a little bit before her muscles gave way and her hand fell, loose, to the ground.

"I don't…know how it…will react."

And then her eyes were rolling back into her head and Jinshi was left folded around her like a thin leaf of crumpled gold.

"Master Jinshi," Gyokuyou said. Her voice came as if from very far away, and Jinshi ignored it. "Master Jinshi, you have to let her go. The doctor needs to get through."

Jinshi refused—letting his arms fall from where they were tight around her felt like letting her go in too many other ways—but he did let the doctor in close.

The doctor performed his assessment—checked her pulse, peered beneath the lids of her eyes, listened to the slow sound of her breathing. He looked a little anxious to have Jinshi breathing down his neck, but in the end, he rendered his verdict.

"In small doses it appears to be primarily a paralytic sleep agent," he said, standing with a bow. "She hasn't ingested enough to cause permanent harm, though she might experience some fever."

Rest was all he could prescribe.

Jinshi wouldn't allow anyone else to carry her from the hall. Maomao fit into his arms like a doll, or like the tiny kitten of Princess Lingli's that had fallen into her care. He was almost afraid to touch her.

He was more afraid not to.

It felt like the longest walk he'd ever experienced. Longer than the one when she'd saved him at the ceremony. Longer than the one where he'd watched her walk away from the Rear Palace after being dismissed. Somehow, in the end, it still wound up being too short. He set her down in his own bed before he was ready to, her body limp, limbs sprawling every which way.

He'd never seen her look so small. He'd never felt so small himself, even as he loomed over her, watching the struggling rise and fall of her chest like it was the only lifeline in a storm.

"Master Jinshi, there's nothing you can do," Suiren told him the next morning, when daybreak found him with dark circles beneath his eyes. Her voice was consoling but firm in the way only an old attendant's could ever quite manage to be.

He knew it was the truth. There was nothing he could do right now, while Maomao burned with fever, then froze with sweat, and then burned with fever some more. There was only what he could have done and hadn't, back when it could have made a difference.

She's only here because of me, he thought. Maomao had only ever become Gyokuyou's food taster in the first place on his meddling recommendation. She'd only returned to life at the Palace because he'd allowed himself to want her close.

Because he hadn't been strong enough to let her be.

Except the truth was worse than that, and he made himself face now what he'd realized in a daze at the garden party: the poison hadn't been meant for Gyokuyou. It had acted too fast, striking like a bolt of lightning from a clear sky. Anything truly meant for the Consort would need to work slowly, creeping through the body unannounced.

This poison had been meant to take out the first person who tasted it. This poison had been meant to kill Maomao.

"Have them send my papers," Jinshi told Suiren by way of answer. The reports, the petitions, the weight of duties that he'd always carried but now threatened to smother him whole. "I'll take care of them here."

He should have made himself stay away from Maomao long ago. But now—now—

He wasn't about to leave her side now.

When Maomao finally opened her eyes, late that afternoon, he was still sitting beside the bed. She looked up at him in confusion, as if she couldn't seem to figure out why he was there.

With her face wan and pale, her hair sticking to her forehead with sweat, her eyes hazy and full of unfocus, she was the most beautiful think he thought he'd ever seen.

"Master Jinshi," she managed to croak out, and he felt his shoulders slump with the relief of it as the petition in his hand tumbled to the floor—the relief of her voice, and the fact that she recognized him, and the simple truth that she was here.

She looked like she wanted to say something else. Jinshi wanted to smooth out the hair along her brow. He wanted to trail his fingers down the pale curve of her cheek. He wanted to cradle her close and never let her out of his sight, out of his arms, again.

Instead, he simply leaned in closer so that she didn't have to try so hard to speak loudly enough for him to hear.

"Please tell me you took notes on everything," she whispered, and it took him a moment to realize that she meant on her symptoms, her reactions, her treatments. Then she added:"Do you think you can procure me more of that poison? I'd like to build up a tolerance," and it turned out Jinshi hadn't misunderstood at all when she'd stopped him at the garden party.

He supposed, in the end, that it was Maomao, and there was no possibility she could have ever meant anything else.

Burying his face into his hands, Jinshi was sure that to anyone else, it must look like he was about to burst into tears.

Instead, he just began to laugh.