[quantal_goldfish]

Resignation pressed heavy on his fluttering eyelids, pushing on the brink of sleep. The exhaustion of a day's pretense had, with his screams, untied itself from the knot in his throat and permeated every vein and vessel in his body, mollifying the distaste on the tip of his tongue, protest in the bone of his arms. Pain pulled his skin taut, drawn like thread on the seams of his crumpled water sleeves, pulsing with the blood flowing steady as the drip-drip-dripping of water outside the prison cells. He was fatigued, but the knife whispered against him; rest evaded him. Alas, no one would know unless they came to see him, because the guards had long retired to slumber, perhaps carrying the timbre of his rawest pleas like a talisman into their sleep.

Suho shuddered, the pull of convulsion cracking his back into an arch violently. A second wave like an aftershock started as electric through his torso and ended as his toes seized. And then another, and another, as the cold and the residual trauma along his skin and screwed his brows into a frown that might have rung loud if not for the resolute grind of molar against cheek. He writhed and writhed, tinting his mouth red with the love of his teeth, wanting to nurse but refraining, for fear that the flesh underneath his fingertips will split and bloom like spider lilies unfurling under the touch of a dead man's dream.

(Though he knew that was barely anything but irrational fear- General Do cut him bearing all the weight of his promise in mind.)

Firelight flared, swelling against the bars of the iron door's window. Suho took a long drag of it, of the warmth and the orange glow, and felt his lungs become full, filling up the bosom of his robe that had fallen open in his thrashing. The fabric singed at his skin, hissing at his coagulating blood, and he could still feel the gravity of General Do's guilt as he cut silk to ribbons, delicately, in imitation of intention crested in punishing hands. Delicate... like the dance of a painter's brush over the face of newly spun china. General Do was delicate throughout, as though he were spinning glass, but he might as well be- spinning a transparent lie between both persecuted and persecutor that went hidden only because it looked so pretty, blended so well into the context that needed it.

Suho could not comprehend it.

The guilt on the General's face clung to him as though it were borne of his own heart. He'd felt pity, fed sympathy from the hands of many who'd had to hold the end of the whip, but never guilt in such a manner that it maligned in his heart and lodged a tumour in the trajectory of his hateful mind. As though within this palace, there would be people who could see both prize and person possessed in the same body. As though within this palace, there would be people who would not think it an honour to place their mark on the Emperor's little Prima Donna. How could he forgive such a man, who compelled him to believe otherwise? How could he forgive such a man, whose sincerity baffled him and made him forget how to fight his nerves with resentment?

Before they started, General Do gave him an apology. Before he left, General Do asked Suho to scratch him. So he would have a reason to return, he said, and urged the dancer to make it bleed. Suho could comprehend none of it- just what exactly the older man had given him, what kind of liberty the General took to consider things that would go against protocol. Just who was this man, who dared make mockery of the Emperor's orders?

General Do was an enigma. He wasn't the steady thrum of a river- he was the assuring weight of a calm lake pressing on a foundation of river rock, with a surface clear as a mirror, but only so reflective because it wasn't clear water underneath the meniscus. Suho was the little bird that had accidentally dived in too deep and could no longer fly out, wings too heavy, eyes unseeing. So he threw himself straight to the core of the chaos and laughed, a loud, piercing laugh that zipped down the corridors and dispersed, like bubbles from a drowned buck's mouth.

-

The next day, the Physician came. The Emperor heard him last night, the man said as he soothed salve over the dancer's skin, and felt rather pleased. If he'd be well-behaved, he'd be released in the morning, tomorrow.

But then he remembered his fingernails peeling away with the skin of the General's nose, and seeing the bead-curtains, bright red, in the Sejabin's room.

So Suho tongued the tangerine seeds he'd kept in his mouth and spat them in the Physician's eye, sneering as the old man screamed. He received a slap for his efforts, and secured himself another week in the clink.