[quantal_goldfish]

The next time he heard the clip-clop of heavy boots on damp cobblestone floor, Suho threw himself against the cell doors, pruney fingers strangled around its bars. The prison guard paid no attention to him as his keys jangled about the keyhole - he'd seen the dancer, up close on the first night, shredded to pieces seeping into the cracks on the floor. A crooked smile slowly crawled across the boy's mottled countenance. "You came," he gasped, as though he'd had years of anticipation put behind him, day after day of unwavering patience leading to nowhere but the landfill of the mind - which, really, couldn't be far from the truth. Because all his time here he'd spent waiting for release, ruminating the tracks he'd cut through grass and flowers, the bits of fabric he'd leave on trees; and now it was there, standing before him unearthed and bare, a General without his sword.

(Of course, his armour was gone, too- but to Suho it was of no consequence, because anyone could wear an armour. The prison guard wore an armour. Even the Emperor could wear armour, too. But swords, on the other hand, were measures of a man's material. A sword chose his owner; so to test the mettle of a man, you will have to understand him through his sword.)

The door swung open, gracelessly loud, and the General stepped inside. The prison guard left. Suho took his place on his knees. The black of the man's robe complemented wholly the murky blues of the dingy cell, blending in like a bruise into gangrened skin, fire-light flaring behind him akin to an envelope of flames too trepidated by his impression to proceed and consume. Suho's smile only widened. Barely under the cover of shadow was a broad scar emblazoned across the General's face, screaming pink and raw, holding occasional beads of red, the epidermis young and tattered and not completely formed over the irritated flesh. It fit him well. It showed that he was a man of promise - he'd made one that night, when he bit that plea out between clenching teeth and dried tongue - and now he had come back, to see him again, with the promise worn unabashedly like a badge, like a crest, and every bit of violence preserved (carried over) from the day it was conceived.

The day after the Physician came, they'd given Suho a change of clothes - a baby blue hanbok of thick hemp, just enough to keep the wet out from his bones. When he shed his robes, he shed his skin too, and watched the servants as they carried it out to be thrown. All his subservience, his stuttering voice, the lilt at the end of every intonation keeping his demure act sewn together bleached into baby blue, washed into a clean slate bubbling foam dirty as mud from a riverbank, to feel relief as it is finally swept away with a new layer of cold trapped under his clothes. Where on the first night, his fellow inmates were shaken awake by a barking laughter, on the third it was replaced by giggles, tinkling like bells and flowing water. Because Suho was high on delirium, on the ecstasy of knowing what he knew, that even powerful people with land and ocean in the palm of their hands sometimes couldn't control their own lapdogs.

"Ashes to ashes, dust to dust," Suho whispered, and the shadows flickered. "What a fitful end to such a place, don't you think?" His eyes were wide, seized by a frightful zeal that curled at the corners of his upturned lips, paper-white smile piercing and so material, the only opaque presence in the translucence of his fading conscience. The four walls trapped him - constrained him, even - but he felt so removed, the rush of adrenaline burning his veins so otherworldly, that he seemed far from earth, as though his corporeal form had dissolved in throes of thrill like egg shells in vinegar solution. "That town's prestige began with a legacy tempered in fire. So it should only be natural for it to have ended in flame." A draught slipped between the bars and snatched at the candle-flame outside his cell. Far down the corridor, in the hidden right corner, someone laughed.

"Isn't that right, General?"

Song'ak, a little unassuming town to the east side of Gaegyeong - capital of pine, love of the sometime hero Son Il-Jang. They say he was born with a rebel's heart- he was a boy who had to be beaten until his knees broke before he could kneel to a palace guard. But for all the disdain he garnered he also had the love of the people - Son Il-Jang, who threw an egg at a soldier for harassing his mother, who yelled at the official who yelled at a little girl, who had to be dragged away lest he harmed their landowner for letting a young father writhe and rot in the punishment shed. But the story of Son Il-Jang only spread when he lit himself on fire at 21 in protest of the unchanging maltreatment faced by the townsfolk whom he loved. Only then did merchants come visit the unassuming town of Song'ak. Only then did newlyweds and travellers come, to appreciate the conifers that flanked the impoverished abode.

But still nothing changed, all the gold pocketed by greedy landowners and shameless imperial puppets.

(Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. )