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Rin does not bury her ghosts.
Instead, she hides them. Rin takes her ghosts and tucks them underneath her skin, out of mind but not necessarily out of sight. Kitay had asked her, once, and she’d smiled at him, all teeth. A reminder, she said. For what, she didn’t say, but he’d understood all the same: she has always liked to fight an enemy she could see. And after, when he sees traces of Altan and Jiang in the shadows of her eyes each time her fire burns low, Kitay doesn’t say anything at all.
There are things she cannot hide, however. They are written in the raised scars on her arms, mapped out in a blackened handprint right over her heart. Kitay had learned this, much later: what she could not hide, she would burn. And he knows better than anyone that Rin was always better at burning things than hiding them.
This is what he learns now: Tikany is a lot harder to burn. The poppy fields have burned, that much is true, but a fire eventually puts itself out when there is nothing else left for it to consume. Tikany is earthly and enduring in a way that’s all its own, despite Rin’s best attempts at erasure.
She still walks through the main streets with her head held high, moves like she still had people to fight, things to conquer. Her steps are quick and measured; she never drags her feet, looking every bit the General she is. But Kitay sees the way she lingers in the alleyways after sundown when her steps slow, equal parts remembering and forgetting. He knows this is what haunts her the most, a home that wasn’t a home, a place that used to be hers discarded long before she’d left, vowing to never return.
He’d teased her once, on one of their early days at Sinegard. They had been sitting in the library on a summer day, sleeves rolled up to their elbows in the heat. He sat next to her when she had trouble pronouncing some words, guiding her through Jima’s Linguistic homework. He’d made some offhand joke, something about how you could take the girl out of the South but not the South out of the girl, and Rin had jerked like he’d slapped her. He’d apologized but she barely heard, looking away and pulling her sleeves down to cover up the constellation of scars that dotted her forearms, already on the defensive. Wordlessly, they switched to Strategy and the afternoon passed in silence after that.
He’d never brought it up again.
His father liked to say that a battle was won or lost before it was ever fought. The mind is a battlefield all on its own, and what is a war if not to be won? His father had been the one who taught him how to fight, long before his tutors ever did.
You learn to know a man by fighting him. You learn his strengths, his weaknesses. You learn his tells, with time, all the ways he can falter and fall. You learn his faults, you learn yours. Fighting, his father said, was a language all on its own. Kitay had taken it to heart, turned it into lessons on how to disarm, how to unmake a man.
He had never fought against Rin, even at Sinegard. Some part of him thought that he didn’t need to; he’d learned enough just by watching her. Nothing about her was deliberate: she’s a wonderful study of action and reaction. That was how he knew her, determination wrapped up in the skin of a girl, demanding something from a world that had denied her everything. Tempered and reforged, but never broken.
“They’re saying that you can’t win,” Kitay had said to her on the night before her fight with Nezha. “They’re saying that this won’t be your victory.”
Rin exhaled through her teeth, not bothering to hide her anger. She drummed her fingers on her thigh, restless, all wound up for another fight.
“What do you think?” Rin had asked him. She did not look at him but he could see the tightness in her jaw all the same.
“Nezha fights dirty and mean,” he said. “He gets desperate when he’s tired, and he’s the most dangerous when he’s tired. But if you hit him when he’s tired, that will hurt him the most.”
“It’s always a strategy with you,” she replied, half in jest. Rin crossed her arms, turning her head ever so slightly to meet his eyes. “But what do you think—will this be my victory?”
Kitay didn’t have to think twice. “Yes.” How could he not? She was very good at playing for first and he knew that in her mind she had already won.
“I knew it,” she said. Rin tossed her head back; he saw the faintest traces of a smile on her face when she looked at him. “Knew I would make a believer out of you.”
He didn’t tell her, then. That he’s always believed in her.
He’s never stopped.
Rin rises with the sun.
It’s automatic, like clockwork. Rin tries to pass it off as habit, but he’s the only one that knows it was because she never slept long enough to dream. He wakes up and she’s the first thing he sees, awake and alert in the cot right next to his.
"Walk with me," Rin says one morning. It's not so much a request or a demand; she says it like she knows he'd follow either way.
Tikany is quiet, streets empty. He can see his breath in the air as Rin leads him through the center of town. It’s not until they pass by the remains of what used to be a library does Rin stop. It’s half-collapsed, charred wood scattered in all directions, but Kitay knows without asking that he’s seen this once before, in a candlelit memory from what felt like lifetimes ago.
“He told me that he never wanted to see me back here again,” she says, almost absentmindedly. “I don’t know what’s sadder—that he’s not here to see me or that I came back, in the end. I tried so hard to move on, tried so hard to forget about this place. But the thing is, they always remember.”
“Remember what?”
“Who I am.” Rin toes the ground with the tip of her boot, sweeping dirt in an arc around her. “The things you leave behind will remember who you are, even when the rest of the world doesn’t.”
He has never asked her about her scars. Kitay knew better than to push her for something she didn’t want to give, at least not easily, not without a fight. But he’s not so absolved to say that he hasn’t wondered about the clusters of white and irregular raised bumps that marked her skin amidst healing bruises.
She’d noticed, of course. It was hard for her not to, with the way they were always up in each other’s orbits.
“My first experience with fire,” she had said. Rin rolled her sleeves up, picking at the scabs. Kitay caught the tail end of a sad, secret smile on the edge of her lips when she turned away. “It taught me everything I needed to know about pain.”
He didn't find out about the rest of the story until he stood across from her in the spirit plane, all secrets laid bare between the two of them. Kitay heard every thought and saw every struggle; all the hidden layers of rage were laid bare before him. He felt the rush of power she'd gotten when she reached the Pantheon for the first time, the thirst for vengeance seconds before she'd wiped a country off the map. He saw Rin the soldier, the murderer, the goddess, the monster.
Kitay waded through those memories until he saw her, a slip of a girl at fourteen, hunched over a table lit by candlelight. He watched as she burned herself with candle wax every time she started to nod off, earning her scars one by one. He hadn’t known, then, of the desperation that had plagued her for the entirety of her life, up until she traded pain for power, violence for vengeance.
He was not afraid when he met her eyes across the circle. He saw himself reflected in her eyes; if they are bonded now, then they are one and the same.
His sleep had been restless that night. Kitay woke just before dawn, anxious and tense. That was how he had found her already awake, sitting directly beneath the circle of the roof.
Her grin was a quick flash of teeth when he took a seat next to her, closing the distance between them with a step. The floor was cold and he instinctively inched closer to her; she’s warm, warmer than anyone had the right to be. He didn’t say anything, not just yet; he let himself sit next to her just for a moment, pretended he was sitting underneath the sun.
“Do you,” she had asked, low, breath stirring the hairs of his neck, “think any less of me?”
“No,” he replied, raw honesty in his voice. “I never did.” And that was the truth; he has never lied to her. He didn’t intend to start now.
Rin had looked at him, piercing gaze trained on his. He read the question there, of what she did not want to voice, not because she was scared—he has never known her to be—but because she didn’t know if she wanted to hear the answer.
But he knew, of course. His father liked to say that morality was not absolute. He would not judge her, not now, not ever; he had seen her, felt her pain, worn her scars like they were his own. If he has learned to know someone by how they fought, then he has learned to love someone for who they were not. That was the thing about love—you loved someone despite the things they didn’t do, those fallible parts, their flaws, all that negative space, the in-between.
So Kitay reached for her instead, letting her know his answer with an action that did not need to be put into words. He intertwined his fingers with hers and it felt like the first time, the last time. Kitay let the heat from her sink into his bones, his soul, more than acutely aware of how she lingered like the warmth of a fire long after it's been put out. He closed his eyes and burned this into memory, the feeling of her hand in his and how it felt to wake up every morning by her side.
The poppy field is located on the outskirts of town, opposite the entrance, or what the entrance used to be, anyway. That is where Kitay finds her one afternoon, crouched down in the middle of it. She looks up when he approaches, squinting at his face, silhouetted by the sun.
“I had to reinvent every part of myself just to be somebody,” Rin says as she scoops up a fistful of soil, sifting it through her fingers. She looks like she’s searching for something to pull out, like she’s trying to raise something up from the ashes. “But what does it say when I've been through all of that to just find myself back at the beginning?"
He steps closer, crouches down next to her. “Not a beginning,” he says softly, “and not an end, either.”
“He tried to burn this place. He tried to burn me.” Her voice has taken an edge to it, an all-too-familiar undercurrent of anger coloring her words. “Only I can do that, and he forced my hand.”
“It’s not over yet,” he tries. “Cooperation isn’t—”
"Surrender. I know,” she finishes for him. He doesn’t comment on the way she’d said it like she was still trying to convince herself. “But Nezha still holds all the cards, even now." Rin turns and studies his face before understanding dawns on hers. "He told you, didn't he. That I don't know a thing about duty."
"Nezha only says that because that’s all he has," he says. He can't burn himself down to build something better, he thinks. He can't rise from his ashes. Not like you. "He only has duty because he doesn't know anything else."
"But he was right, in a way. I was willing to pay any price because it was all the same when you didn’t have anything to lose.” Rin tosses her head back, laughs. The sound comes to him as a bitter, half-formed thing. It rings hollow in his ears long after she tums back to him, meeting his gaze. “Duty doesn’t mean a thing if you confuse it with purpose.”
Kitay has lost a game of wikki exactly once.
The match had been against his father, the first and only time they had played together. He was on edge since the start, a boy grasping at anything, for a chance to impress. The game had started out as it normally did; he thought he had a fighting chance up until the point where he began to miss more pieces than he could afford to.
“You are on the defensive,” his father had noted in the middle of the game. His tone was neutral, but Kitay heard what he didn’t say: the best defense was offense, and he was rapidly losing both.
It hadn’t been a quick game; his father had given him some outs—purposeful ones, Kitay knew, everything his father did was deliberate—for him to take, to re-calculate his strategies, recoup his losses.
In the end, his pieces were stacked on his father’s end of the board, black mixed in with the white. There was something disconcerting about the way his side of the board only had some leftover pieces, nothing noteworthy, the black stark against the bamboo board. Take a battle and break it down, he thought, and this was what happened when you counted the cost.
He had looked away, slightly in shame, but the only thing his father had done was to reach over and tilt his face up to meet his.
“There is a difference,” his father said, gentle, “between playing to win and playing not to lose.”
Kitay blew out a breath, wiping the pieces off the board. “Same difference.”
Defense Minister Chen’s smile was patient. “Not quite.”
“I never wanted this.”
He heard Nezha’s voice before he saw him. The cell amplified all sounds and Nezha’s footsteps—Kitay had learned to distinguish between Nezha’s footsteps and the Hesperians, the latter never dragged their feet—echoed on stone, followed by the telltale click of a lock, metal clinking against metal.
“And yet, here we are.” Kitay opened his eyes, turned his head to face Nezha. He was leaning against the door, the furthest point away from Kitay. Nezha had visited him each day, looking worse each time. There were bags underneath his eyes and fresh bruises on his arms, purple blossoming on white.
“My father gave Rin a choice,” Nezha said. “All she had to do was keep fighting for us—”
“And what a choice it was. She would’ve lost everything in the process.” Kitay pushed himself up on his elbows, meeting Nezha’s eyes. “You let them experiment on you. Imagine how that would’ve gone for her.”
“They had my permission,” Nezha said stiffly, and he knew that he had hit a nerve. He was close enough to see Nezha swallow whatever excuse he was going to say next.
“Under what pretense? I wouldn’t mistake a demand for a choice,” Kitay bit back, mostly because he could.
His words had the intended effect. Wrung out or not, Nezha jerked away from the door in one fluid movement, rattling the bars.
“What if they’re right? What if people—shamans—weren’t meant to exist? You’ve seen Feylin sink an entire squadron,” Nezha said. He began to pace the cell, visibly flustered. “And then there’s Rin with her fire. All destruction, all devastation. Burns everything she touches, and worse.”
The silence in the cell was deafening. They were locked in a staring contest, neither wanting to back down. Kitay barely managed to hold back an argument, knowing that fighting Nezha like this would be a losing battle.
“I don’t want you or Rin dead.” Nezha was the first to speak, resignation coloring his words. “I never did.”
Kitay decided to humor him. “Then why? Duty?”
“Yes,” Nezha said, and Kitay immediately regretted asking. “You of all people should know about duty—”
“You have no right to lecture me about duty.” Kitay could hear his heart pounding, staccato beats. “My father died in the name of duty. And guess who knew and didn’t have the decency to tell me?”
“I don’t know how many more times you want me to apologize,” Nezha said, but Kitay was already turning over in his cot, giving Nezha his back. He took the dismissal, footsteps echoing back to the door.
“Just tell me you’ll think about it,” Nezha said just as the lock clicked back into place.
Kitay thought of the city above, all stone and twisted metal. He thought of the Hesperians, always taking, building, conquering.
He thought of Rin. Wild, reckless, free. He thought of the sky, the blue swallowed up by gray within the walls of Arabak.
“You’ve picked your cage,” Kitay said to Nezha. “I’ve picked mine.”
She had asked him, once, to tell her if it ever got painful.
He didn’t know how to explain it, then. If he tried hard enough, he could push it to the back of his mind. It was rather difficult to quantify; the pain lasted seconds before he felt fine again. It was a cycle, he thought, of continuous hurt and healing.
“We’re all hurting every day,” he had said. “Why should it be different for me?”
“Because it was for me,” she replied, agitated. “I don’t like knowing that you’re burning for me.”
Kitay reached for her, pulled her close. “I know you,” he said. “And I trust you.”
Rin didn’t look convinced, but let him pull her into a hug all the same. “But it hasn’t hurt yet.”
“No,” he said. “Not yet.”
In some ways, it had felt inevitable: him on his knees before her, ash between his fingers, heart in his throat. He might've been the anchor, but she was the rest of the ship.
The first blow to the back of his head was sudden, swift, dealt by someone who knew where to hurt him the most. The second turned his vision white and he found himself across from her in the circle. He met her eyes and saw nothing of the Rin he knew before. It was a battle of wills now, unstoppable force meets immovable object.
Something tells him that he should’ve seen this coming. How did he miss all the signs? He knows her like he knows himself. But then, he remembers, signs were easy to miss when you weren’t looking, when you weren’t expecting them at all.
Break him, Rin tells the Phoenix. Break him, break him, break him.
He lunges for her but she holds him down, white-knuckled grip tight around his throat. I have known you, her body might’ve said to his, in the way you have moved, in the way you have broken.
“This won’t be your victory,” he whispers, more breath than sound.
“It won’t be my surrender,” she returns just as softly.
You learn to know a man by fighting him. At this point, he has fought Nezha and Venka so many times that it became a dance, offense and defense mixed in together so smoothly like it was second nature. Nezha fought with brute force. He was pure, unrestrained aggression in the way he held himself in a fight. Venka was agile and precise; she knew exactly where to hit to make it hurt the most. Kitay knew their bodies, the patterns that emerged from repetition.
Kitay had not been as strong and Nezha nor as fast as Venka. But he was good at strategizing; if he could make his mind remember all their tells then his body could too. It became muscle memory, everything instinctive, reflexive.
He had watched Rin fight in the ring. He never saw her fight before, but he was eternally glad he had been on the other bracket in the tournament. She fought with vengeance, made every fight personal. There was something mesmerizing about the way Rin fought, all fluid grace with an undertone of ruthlessness. He didn’t treat her any differently when she emerged as champion; no deferential looks, placating words. She didn’t need to fight to prove herself to him—she has already earned it.
“How did you know?” Rin had asked him, later. “How were you so sure?”
Kitay looked at her, eyes flickering over her bruised cheeks, swollen eyes. Because I see you, he thought, I’ve always seen you. He had reached for her and taken her bandaged hands in his, thumb brushing over her palm.
“You have always played to win.”
The sound of the dirigibles brings Kitay back. He manages to seize Rin’s wrist, movements heavy and sluggish. The knife flashes silver in the sunlight and he swallows, knowing that he only had minutes before he would have nothing at all.
"Kitay, please—" she starts, eyes glassy but focused. Kitay grits his teeth and tries one last time to reach her through their bond. Her will had been stronger than his, but he can still find her beneath all the rage and anger and desperation. Rin tries to shake him off but he doesn't let go because she's his as much as he's hers; she might've broken his mind but he's still there in the spaces between her seconds, at the other half of her heartline.
He traces the hollow of her throat, up and around the lines of her face, all bone and shadows. Kitay thinks back to the night they were bonded, two halves of one soul right by a fire. When it’s just the two of them, he doesn’t see Rin the General or Rin the Speerly, the goddess or the monster. Just Rin the girl and it almost feels enough.
"I can't win this for you," he says. Kitay closes his eyes and brushes his forehead against hers, pressing his mouth to her temple. “I won't win this with you."
He thinks she sees it then, in the slight softening of her jaw, in the way she lets him go, eyes wet and dark with something other madness. In all the fights she’d won, in all the battles where she’d done what was necessary to emerge victorious, he hopes she knows that not everything was a surrender, in the end.
Kitay watches her as she reaches for Nezha. He’s half-conscious when she wraps his fingers around the knife, bringing it up until it rests right above her heart. Nezha says her name and Kitay sees her falter just for an instant.
"I know." Her voice is the softest he's ever heard it, colored with regret. "Properly, this time."
He meets her gaze, holds it steady as he gives her one single nod. This—he would follow her. Soulmates until the end of this life, and to whatever came after. He feels like some part of him had always known that it would come to this, that whatever chapter he'd started with her would end with her too, from the first day to the last.
Kitay doesn't look away when she drives the blade straight down into the space between her ribs and it's—
He met her in the summer he turned fifteen, on the third day of his first year at Sinegard.
Kitay’s heard of her before that, if he was being honest. Most of the information came from Nezha, who’d walked into the boys’ dormitory on the first day sporting an impressive purpling bruise over his left eye, swearing revenge against a feral, foul-mouthed little bitch.
After that, he’d watched her out of the corner of his eye in their classes, just enough to be aware without sacrificing attention. She sat with her back straight, legs crossed at the ankles. He caught the way her pen scraped paper with quick and determined strokes; it’s the tell of someone not quite out of playing catch-up but wanting to be two paces ahead. She was intriguing, impossibly so.
He found her sitting at the end of a table during lunch, empty seats scattered around her. He headed straight for the spot right in front of her, ignoring the heat of Nezha’s glare on the back of his head.
She raised an eyebrow at his hasty approach, a corner of her mouth lifting ever so slightly when he placed his tray across from hers. He realized that she was a lot more striking this close, all wild lines and untamed angles with dark eyes that seemed to stare past and right through him.
“Fang Runin,” she said in invitation before blinking and raising her chin. “Rin, for short.”
“So you’re the one Nezha hates.” The response was reflexive; Rin snorted into her soup and Kitay didn't bother to check if the boy in question was looking.
She shrugged and Kitay watched the line of her shoulders rise and fall. “It’s better than being the one he likes.”
He reached his hand out to her, the faintest trace of a smile on his lips in response to her grin.
“Chen Kitay,” he said. Her hand closed around his, warm and solid against his palm. “It’s so nice to finally meet you.”