SĪSHĒNGZǏ || with teeth like glass. break.
you're just some kid running away from his shitty family. shenanigans and heartbreak ensue.
(SECOND PERSON; MALE READER INSERT.)
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He is born of holy blood.
This is how thinks for children such as he.
How pitiful one must be, to be sold like cattle, bred like cattle. A family legacy born to trade politics with each other other. He hates it, really, he does. Watching the way the world keens under his fist is something that he can never seem to forget, an ancient art dipped in the blood of his mother before him. He's hard edges, one must be to be a woman born to a clan. Especially one so intertwined with the Kuàng as his; they go hand in hand, limb to limb. He hates it, really.
His best friend is a set up. Jiérú is a set up.
He is to marry the eldest of the neighborhood family, like his great-aunt did far before him. This is a legacy build in his blood. This is what it means to be a woman but he is not, this—this—
This is the sin of being born in the wrong body. The sin of being born without the proper bits and bobs. He thought it was strange, how he was sat away from everyone else, with the woman when he's wasn't one— but. Ah, he was, in the end. That's all that matters, the mirror cracked in front of him. Gnarled and cracked.
His wedding dress is perfect but he isn't.
Time moves by in a haze, and he will find that it is a reoccurring pattern.
Jiérú is his husband, he is Jiérú's wife. There is a counter space, between them, a truth he cannot accept. That there is something wrong with him—something strained against the part of his brain that screams at him horribly when he's lying awake. Stomach swollen with a child he does not want to bear but must—these are the issues of being born wrong in a family such as his. Jiérú is angry. Always is, because Jiérú is the eldest, he knows. That is a fate beyond cruel, to be the snake that swallows it's own tail. Something horrid.
His first child is a boy. A butchering of his name, said right, spelled wrong . Something that he wanted. Different characters—they say it differently with the characters, but privately, he says it, looks at this little boy he pushed out and thinks, this is what I could have been— honor, bright. Something bitter comes up when he thinks of the way his name is spelled— bud, phoenix. How pitiful he must be—to be like his forefathers. To be like his mother. To put an expectation his child could never reach on it's head.
How sour of him, to think like this. To zip up his skin like a sweater and choke up about the way it's too tight.
Ah, the world is turning to sand around him.
He wasn't given a name like everyone else, because this was his doom, everyone else got the names fit for the place they lived, something to behold the last name he was born to.
Does that make him wrong? To feel like glass when they look at him and think what a pretty girl — it makes him want to scream. Should it? He's been wanting to scream for over a decade. Since His husband was sixteen and he was fifteen and life gets so blurry around the edges— the best he can do is smile and slip away from everyone's hands.
