[quantal_goldfish]

Quietude crawled into the cracks of the cold stone walls. His Majesty's authoritative footfalls echoed in the damp corridor, carrying hours and minutes, pressing time on his head, upon his lungs, on the mottled colouring of his skin. The light of the guard's torch floated away, riding on dwindling voices, and the cold settled in once more despite the warm glow peeping in through the bars of the iron door. In the silence, Suho's heartbeat stilled, and he rested.

Groaning, the dancer curled into himself, as though folding his torso would fold his stomach too and squeeze all of its complaints out. The blood on his brow had begun to crust, the hurt of the wound reduced to nary more than sporadic throbs. Scrapes and scratches never did affect him for long. Many springs ago, two years after he'd been sent (no, sold) to the palace, the Emperor locked him here for trying to climb out of the back garden. The floor of the cell had learnt not to hurt him after he exhausted himself banging his head on the tiles, until they'd dragged him out two weeks later, in a daze, cradled in the Emperor's arms.

Shin, from the mountain village, had held little Suho's hands as he stood outside the poet's prison cell. When he was seven, eomma had sent him there with wolfberry and chicken porridge, and instructed him to feed his favourite hyung. He remembered the texture of his hyung's hands as they rubbed over his. They were roughed, not from nicks of the old paintbrush he used but the bite of a whip, with fingers skinned at the knuckles and missing their nails. Those were hands that spun a thousand stories and made flowers bloom where they couldn't, that wrote letters as the ahjussis and ahjummas read to send to their sons in the army. The Suho back then had teared up at the sight of Shin-hyung shirtless with his ribs cut into his skin and his wrists tied with rope that chafed them 'til they were red, and asked, balefully: "What are poets supposed to write, if not the words that others will not say?"

Shin didn't tell him, but answered instead, as he smoothed back the little boy's hair: "In this time, these are unlucky things that an artist has to know."

Suho was sent off with a kiss on the forehead. When he went back the next day, Shin wasn't there anymore.

Suho to his back and kicked a leg up, angling it for the lamplight outside to caress his blue-black bruises. He wondered the understanding of the Emperor towards art - wondered if He read Shin's poems and saw a civilian's woe instead of his own detriment, wondered if He choked his court dancers with their muslin ribbons if they reeled it in just one second too late. He wondered if all the Emperor understood about art was the painting rolled open behind his throne or the dragons carved into the pillars. Over the years, Suho had deduced that "these unlucky things" an artist should get acquainted with were pain and the prison walls. Pain could be an art, he thought, observing the purple marks crunched into his skin. Pain, for many, was a ritualistic suffering truest to the proof of life, because it could not be fabricated. Maybe the Emperor was like the painter noona back at home, who used to lay him down on her shed as she talked and paint purple daisies onto his calves.

Perhaps the art was not the result, but the process. Perhaps the dance was a proxy, and the true art lay in Suho, or the turns and twists in the road that led to his rawest state of being - like of paint laid carefully onto canvas, carefully inching their way to morph into the likeness of a classroom or sunset.

-

Outside, the flame flickered, accompanied by a flurry of approaching feet. The iron door screamed, pulling Suho out of his reverie - and he slammed his leg down, pushing himself up into a half-decent sit, a fresh wave of tremours washing over the arc of his back.

The cell wasn't scary. The dungeon didn't - couldn't - do anything to him. But people did, especially people that came in through the iron door, and the people in this palace were all awfully unpleasant, devils dressed in white--

Leather shoes tapped against the stone. When Suho looked up, he found not a look of malevolence, nor a look of benevolence; only the steadfastness of a pulsing river, staring down at him through the impassive eyes of General Do.

Suho ducked. The man had with him a few other soldiers, backs as straight as their spears, brows furrowed, sharp like arrows ready to fire. One, two, six, ten, twelve - it must be the young guards stationed aroind this length of the underground. They crowded around the door, compacted until the black of their bodies ate into one another, and it reminded him of a murder of crows, festering in the crown of a tree. He swallowed a gulp. His arms slightly buckled; and within them he thought he might have felt wood splinter, the way charred logs did when they roasted inside a fireplace.

The stick rolled on the floor. General Do spoke.

"Leave us alone. Tell the others to exit. I'll take care of everything."

"But my lord--"

"Did you not hear me?"

And then the crowd scattered, making way for a burst of light.

Suho let his gaze meet the General's, and there it remained, a measured challenge running along the tightrope of tension. It pulled tauter with each turn of the clock hand - and Suho felt the touch leave his legs, his fingertips, as though he'd stuck them out in the cold, and only then did he realise that he forgot to breathe. The flame daren't flicker; the water drops on the ceiling daren't fall. Even the moonlight, whole as he imagined it to be outside, seemed brittle in this palpable silence, like a sheet of frost laid over the garden grass, waiting to be trampled to bits, torn to dust.

But his tummy chose that moment to let out a growl of enormous proportions, and Suho felt the world around him spin as his soul left his corporeal body.

At this point, Suho couldn't be bothered trying to imagine what could take place within these walls. What little bit left of his dignity as a human being had already gone out the window, off to join his hopes and dreams in their grave. It wouldn't matter if he walked with a limp or a crooked ankle, or wore a scar on his eye or silly tattoo on his forehead. He would never be able to face anyone without wanting to turn himself away. He held back a tiny whimper, hoping the vacuum in his chest would just his head in. General Do was coming forward. General Do was getting down on one knee, holding his hand out, offering him...

...tangerines?

Suho outwardly frowned at that, and inwardly slapped himself for so outwardly frowning like that.

He schooled himself into a kneel (the press of his weight on the bruises hurt but the cold of the stone floor felt so good on his skin- which should he value?), staring down quizzically at the tangerines in the General's hands. Was this a test? Were they laced with drugs or laxatives? Aphrodisiac? Poison? Bittergourd juice?


"This subject bears sickness in his lungs, sir," he finally said, wary, head down and hands folded in his lap. "His Majesty has advised him against citrus."

Ah, but the rumbling of his stomach compelled him otherwise. He bit his cheek and swallowed, a last ditch effort to quell its noise.