ulysses — 9, fin

[lucius branwen / 10 — fox]

There is a lion in my living room. I feed it raw meat
so it does not hurt me. It is a strange thing
to nourish what could kill you
in the hopes it does not kill you.
We have lived like this, it and I, for so many years.
Sometimes it feels like we have always lived like this.
Sometimes I think I have always been like this.

-Clementine von Radics

ulysses xie,
eighteen

“非淡泊无以明志，
非宁静无以致远”

"Without indifference, there is no clear ambition,
and without tranquility, there is no way to go far."

-Zhuge Liang, Book of Commandments

谢致远
xiè zhìyuǎn

[lucius branwen / 10 — fox]

You were gifted four nightlock pills for your eighth birthday.

"As a precaution," your father said, "Now that you're old enough."

The box was small and silver. You ran your fingers along the hexagonal edges engraved with ridges of flowers. There was a painting of a crane on the lid, feathers tangled into the delicate chrysanthemums. You opened it to four capsules in their individual pill pockets. The colour was the colour of a blackberry stain.

You touched the character beneath the bird.

壽.

For your tenth birthday, you received a suppressed pistol. Its suppressor was integrated. The barrel was long and cylindrical, gun sanitized of any markings that indicated a manufacturer, slick and black and anonymous. Elegant. Restrained.

"As a precaution," your father said.

At ten, you understood something you hadn't quite gotten at the tender age of eight. You had looked at those four pills and thought poison, to defend with, to protect yourself with.

But now presented with the gun, two years later, it dawned on you that you were now old enough to kill. At eight, you had only been merely old enough to die.

The pills weren't for enemies. Enemies didn't die a death akin to sleep.

Eleven came and went. Twelve came and went. You were showered with lavish gifts every birthday, spoiled obscenely, bought anything you ever wanted.

There was a weight you couldn't shake for two years, deep in every breath, an agitation that trembled in you each November. You were always waiting for the moment your father would pull you aside, in a lull, and give you the third marker of your growing up.

Thirteen, he took you to the opera.

//

Ignatius Xie was a sly old fox.

He watched the Capitol broadcast in the District Square, the crowds of people turned towards the screens, the president sitting, hands folded on an ivory desk, speaking of defense, disarmament, insurrection, a campaign. War had been unfolding. It could be felt in the bones of the country, rotten to the core. It was a spoiling he'd tasted during dinners with an officer that had been a family friend, cajoling a slip of the tongue with wine.

The president's address finished.

And it had him thinking, how the military industry would be seized by Thirteen, how the Capitol would need new sources of ammunitions, and how every soldier needed a gun.

And the bigger the war, the more soldiers, the more bloody, the more desperate, the more money. He wasn't overly concerned with the winners and losers of a rebellion. It was an opportunity. It was economy. It could make a man rich. In the end, industry always won the war.

So he invested his inheritance into arms manufacturing in Two, carved a backdoor out the business and made triple off the black market from resistance fighters who desperately needed weapons.

Before the borders closed, he fled to Nine with his wealth, invested in the post-war rebuilding efforts during the Dark Days with all his newly acquired riches, contractors who built Nine to be pared down to the bare minimum, low specs, taxing its citizens to have everything fixed again in a few years.

There was no limit on wartime profit margins. He had supplied the money to destroy it all – just so he could make thousands more building it back up.

And he wasn't stupid. He was restrained. He held all his shares through trust structures. He guarded what was his and never overreached the power.

Through war, he went from rich to filthy rich.

Ignatius had a son and a daughter in Nine. The daughter, he didn't care much for. But to his son, he left the assets, the namesake, and that hunger for profit.

//

Your mother almost died during your birth.

She spent one month in confinement and your father barely let anyone near her. There was one maid, one doctor, your father's watchful gaze a sharpened knife.

The maid was sent away on the sixth day. Your father had picked up a glass of water from her tray and smashed it against the wall because it contained four ice cubes in it. "Are you trying to kill her?" The shards stained the girl's fingers red.

The second maid barely lasted three days.

He was very possessive about many things – it was an obsession even. His business partners liked to joke and call him the dragon, wrapped around his hoard, his gold, the wealth, so careful with every coin that passed through his hands.

He was merciless and exacting. And he was utterly, entirely devoted to your mother because she was his too.

You learned this from a young age. Things that were yours would always be yours. Even if you despised it. Even if you had never wanted it. Even if it killed you, then you'd die for it, the possessiveness brutal and terrifying, your desire a higher power.

And family, above all.

You would do anything for them.

//

The landscape of nine was shaped by voids, craters of need and wanting. This was something your father understood.

Cassian Xie watched the topography of economy change from his grandfather's age. They settled into an imperious peace, dictated by the Capitol. The market became much more restricted after the rebellion, and even the wealthy of Nine were taxed exorbitantly by the Capitol. They had a share in everything, a hand in the bread basket.

And Nine had a distinct lack of economy. They had no natural resources like Four or Seven, no consolidated production like Eight. Nine was a scattering of factories that produced the dregs of what the country needed, spare parts, plastics, gels. In the basins of lacking, he watched them fill with people with their hunger, then their loose amalgamations, then organized gangs created from the desire to survive, and then a new commerce.

All that money, unspoiled by government.

He became an accountant.

In the beginning, he was contracted to work with some of the larger businesses of Nine, families who had owned their factories for decades, sitting on a sprawl of poorly kept books. He built a reputation of being meticulous and careful and followed the rules of reporting to the very last cent.

Because a syndicate didn't hire some idiot to make up numbers and lie bold-faced to the Capitol when running a business like that. A syndicate hired someone good at their job. And he was very good with numbers.

//

Your hands shake, on and off. It's psychogenic, a doctor said. You wanted to kill him then.

You do, three days later when the tremor has stopped, when your aim is perfect again.

You cut out the bullet from his chest with a knife, his body slumped over the couch and bleeding extravagantly onto the pleather. Your patient file burns on the stove. The fire curls up the fragile lace curtains, fluttering in puffs of heat like wings of a moth to a lamp too hot. You watch it plume over the counters and spill onto the floor. His house burns. He burns too.

Your father would've killed you for this.

You're tired.

Someday, you want to sleep for sixteen hours. You want to lie there, in your room, and do nothing for the other eight.

The air smells of ash, clinging to your skin. The bullet is still gripped in your palm as you sit at your kitchen table.

You press your fingers against your temples, so exhausted it feels like there's a fracture forming behind your eyes. The sun is silver in the morning. You take your medicine as the light spills into the room, little green pills the doctor had prescribed days ago.

There's only one thing you desire for yourself before you die.

To sleep well. Just once.

[lucius branwen / 10 — fox]

interlude;
霏宇

山峻高以蔽日兮，
下幽晦以多雨。
霰雪纷其无垠兮，
云霏霏而承宇。

Below the sun-blocking height of the mountains,
lost valleys of rain-filled gloom.
And above the high borderless realm of hail and snow,
no sky roof other than cloud swell.

-Qu Yuan, Crossing the River

Your mother wanted to name you Feiyu, for the November you were born.

Nine was softened with a blanket of white, draped over the ash stained streets, over the smoke from the factories and the crumbling homes. The sun came at six. She had already been awake since the pillowy darkness of five a.m. Outside, the light was gold and blue on the fluttering snow, and she watched the cloud patterns change in the morning. It snowed early that year.

"High-spirited but delicate," she said to your father. "The rhythm's like mountains and valleys."

Lulin was the second daughter of four siblings. Her family had expected nothing but marriage from her. Cassian was the oldest of three, heir to the estate. He liked her. Her family was overjoyed.

And she liked Cassian. She liked the relative freedom even more. It was done and over. Her duty to fulfill an economic proposition was finished and she understood this, she was pragmatic about it, never complained once. She wasn't sentimental about love. Her own mother and father – they had probably loved each other at some point. She couldn't remember it. They barely tolerated their marriage now.

People sacrificed every day to survive. That was the nature of life. Something as vanishing as love for this freedom, this wealth, this comfort, yes, she should be very satisfied.

But sometimes she wasn't. Sometimes it felt as if she had left her cage for a bigger cage. Sometimes her wanting felt like an animal, raw and untamed, deep and desperate. It beat against her bones and bit at her organs, snarling to be free.

It scared her, the depth of her unhappiness.

In November, she stood outside in the garden grounds, her breath materializing in hazy mist, enveloped in snow, in sky, in the universe. The world seemed so boundless. Maybe she had given up more than she knew. Maybe it was gone before she even had it. She could feel her skeleton shake with the force of her desire, aching in the cold. Cassian touched her shoulder. She could fall apart from it.

He squeezed her hand and returned inside, but she waited there for a moment longer, skin stinging and tangled with the wind, for the longing to leave her.

"Feiyu," She murmured. "It's perfect."

[lucius branwen / 10 — fox]

An old farmer's horse ran into the wilderness one morning, lost to the sprawling forest. He had been the farmer's most prized possession. His neighbour heard of this misfortune and came to offer his sympathies. "What horrible luck."

"Perhaps," the farmer replied.

A few days later, the horse returned to him in the morning, bringing six wild horses back to the farm. His neighbour celebrated this fortuitous event, exclaiming "That's wonderful!"

"Perhaps," the farmer replied.

The six horses were untamed. When the farmer's son attempted to ride one, he was violently thrown off of the mare. The boy broke his leg from the fall and the bone never healed. His neighbour came again, offering condolences. "What a terrible thing."

"Perhaps," the farmer replied.

Time passed. The country became engaged in a war with a land at its borders. Village to village, they came to draft the men. But the farmer's son was found to be ineligible for conscription due to his leg. He was the only son of the town to have survived that war.

塞翁失马.

Aurelius Xie thought of life in terms of a farmer and his horse.

Life was balance. He would be ruled by nothing. That's what power was, the inactivity, the invisibility of it, the control that came from doing nothing and having everything fall into place. All things were bound to balance. The ascription of good or evil was a human invention.

It was your grandfather who named you in the end.

He maintained the family like this. Diana was very level-headed and the most like him. Titus was intelligent but meeker than his siblings. But it was Cassian he was worried about, hawk-eyed boy with vicious ambition. Usurper, he thought. He had hoped age would mellow him, but that hellishness had only sharpened as the pliable youth shed from his bones. He had introduced him to Lulin for this reason. The girl was prudent and wary, softer and wise.

Because life was balance.

//

And balance could be cheated.

All things happened on the balance sheet. Cassian had to account for every transaction made by the entity, every asset and liability and all equity. And in the end, it must balance. It was the definition of the equation.

Money could not just materialize from nowhere. It would be easy to fabricate transactions; it would completely stupid to do so. It was funny because the ascription of value was a human thing too. All he had to do to manipulate balance was to move the equity from entity to entity and create real transactions from it. He could loan a company its own money. He could create debt that never needed to paid.

Let's say money was made where it shouldn't. So you bought a book with it. There was a new company. You needed a new bookshelf. You borrowed money from the new company against the book you own. You never paid it back. They took the collateral – the book. Now maybe you were the owner of the new company. Maybe that was yours too.

Balance was whatever you needed it to be.

//

tw: suicide

Your father died and they left the body in the bedroom where it rotted for five days. They made you sit there and watch it spoil.

It drove your mother to hurl herself out the window when they weren't watching. You heard the glass shattering, the soft wet sound of the iron fence impaling her through the stomach, a metal prong reaching for the heavens, dipped in blood.

They made you watch that too. Her body twitched for what seemed like an infinity. It was springtime. The air was sweet with flowers and rain. The hawthorn tree in your backyard shook in the wind, and the petals fell towards her like snow, tangled in her hair. She looked luminous in the moonlight.

Those four pills were locked away in a box hidden underneath the floor of your room. You tried to grab a gun off one of them. You tried to follow your mother out the window. You tried to throw yourself down the stairs.

But the enforcer dragged you back to life again and again. He got annoyed after your third attempt and threw you against the wall, picked you up and pulled your head back to meet your eyes. The stare felt like an engraving. You've always felt it since that moment, notched somewhere on bone, his voice lingering in you, sinewy and bloody.

"No. You have a debt to pay."

//

The bushes were spilling onto the stone path, through the prongs of the iron fence, lawn overgrown with weeds. You stood in the shadows for a long time, shrouded in a willow tree, gasping in the petrichor and gripping your chest as your hands shook incessantly.

Inside the Xie estate, the shelves had been swept of their valuables, pieces of furniture broken or sold on the market. You touched the fireplace mantle, fingertips leaving a mark in the thick dust, faint tremble still left in your hands. It smelled like decay. Your family portrait loomed over the emptiness. If there was a hell, it would look like this.

Your aunt watched you amble through the halls.

"We thought you were dead," she said flatly, handing you the keys.

There was no bitterness. There was no sadness. An unvarnished statement. You had been fourteen when you disappeared. She stared at you intently, as if you were half boy, half ghost.

You looked at her, her eyes like your father's, and smiled wryly.

Upstairs in your bedroom, you knelt to the floor beneath your bed, fingers running over the wooden floors until they caught on a groove. You pried the board back, reached in, and your hand closed around something small and hexagonal. The painted crane was tangled with the chrysanthemums on the box. Longevity, it read. Four nightlock pills inside, still perfect.

[lucius branwen / 10 — fox]

interlude 2;
moth

In girum imus nocte et consumimur igni.
We enter the circle at night and are consumed by fire.

Vi was sixteen that summer. Her baby brother babbled in his crib, fists grabbing at her fingers as she sat by him idly. Her mother wept in the bathroom. The fan was buzzing endlessly in the heat. A picture of her father was placed on the table with his urn. Two candles burned into the chambersticks by it, pearlescent wax pooling.

It was strange. She was sure she was sad. It sat inside of her, the feeling, like a knife in her chest.

She let it stay there.

Sometimes it would hurt and she'd numbly acknowledge it. Sometimes she thought about tearing it out, blade and lung and muscle and an irreparable hole. But maybe if she started bleeding she would never stop. Maybe she wouldn't be able to handle what would happen next. And maybe it would just be too much of a fucking mess.

So she didn't. In the morning, she went to the district square where the carts were loading up people to take them to the factories. The supervisor barely looked up over the clipboard, wrote down her name, and gave her a uniform that felt two sizes too big.

Two weeks passed. She watched an old woman die of exhaustion. There'd been a loud thud before the red light turned on over the door, an alarm sounding at the disturbance, so loud that it shook the floor and hurt her ears.

Her body was carried out, zipped in a bag, and sent home to be buried. They had her replacement the next day at the assembly line.

As Vi watched it happen, she had this horrible thought. She saw the woman's frail arm slip from the blanket covering her as they moved her outside, her hands blue and veiny.

Nine was made of parts, a district of labour, a thousand hands ready to give.

No one was getting out of here alive.

They met after hours in the basement of a diner on the brink of closure. They dreamed of revolution on the green leather stools, between the peeling wallpaper and cheap gin, dissected their exploitation with bitterness and butter knives, and lived and died countless times in their plans. In the night, they dreamed of a fire that would burn them anew.

Vi was seventeen. The Peacekeepers kicked down their door in the middle of the night. They rifled through their things and threw everything into a pile in the living room. The glass of her father's framed picture shattered as they tossed it. They held her for three hours at the table and interrogated her, her brother crying in the arms of her mother the whole time and she thought her head would split open from it. In the end, they had thought she was too young to know much.

They were smoked out. The group was found and punished. A few survived with blood in their mouths. The revolution became a little less pure. Their talk got a little more brutal. The fire blazed. Vi was eighteen and that knife was still there. Fresh blood in an old game.

[lucius branwen / 10 — fox]

The Forum was barely three decades old, grown from an illegal union in an old plastics and chemicals plant called Knox Factory.

Three decades of relentlessly racketeering and pushing drugs through Panem, they acquired enough funds to start buying the factories of Nine – starting with Knox Factory. Before then, they had been burying their cash, kept in storerooms and safe houses, stuffed in graves of the dead even.

They needed someone to streamline their finances now. They had both legitimate businesses to manage and a waterfall of funds they couldn't account for. They were swimming in ten lifetimes of cash with no way to spend it.

//

The Forum lacked experience. They were young. But they were virulent. And now they were ruthless. And now they spoke of their freedom with practiced vengeance, a hunger with depth.

You drank their wine and blood. The metal rod burned orange in the dark and touched your skin with the sigil.

Sons shouldn't have to pay for their father's sins, Six said to you as the moth cooled on you. She smiled, just their debts.

Lex talionis, she said.

The Forum entrusted your father with their books. He read five years of their records during the day and another five at night. He had them open several fronts, a laundromat, a hair salon, a convenience store, turned over those funds and they bought another factory with it. But he would need more than a hundred of those businesses to launder all the cash collected in storage, buried beneath their feet with the worms and the skeletons.

They asked him to empty their physical vaults in eight months before the yearly production audit. They would pay him seven percent of their total turnover.

Cassian should've said it wouldn't be possible. He never quite learned the temperance your grandfather wanted.

Instead, he asked for half upfront in cash and started moving the funds across Panem. Inter-district travel had been slowly loosened over the years. Papers were not an issue for them to produce. He had them negotiate a deal with a mine owner in Two who came to the plastics plant under the guise of acquiring new machinery parts. The Peacekeepers accompanied them almost the whole time and they had to seal their partnership while hidden in a storage closet.

The bulk of the money had just been deposited to the accounts of the limestone mine when the owner had been flagged by an AML system. Overnight, the whole mine was seized by the Capitol.

The Knox Factory was raided the next day.

Maybe it was bad luck. Maybe it just happened this way. Maybe it was a coincidence. Or maybe, they were set up.

But what did it really matter? In the end, there was no way of indicting Cassian. He was off their books, a third-party with no paper trail. No previous client would testify against him for their own safety. The Forum would be locked in the detention center. And four percent of the total turnover – that was his to keep.

//

It took less than four years. You were their roadman and then their fixer and then you were their financier. You suppose you were prolific.

They let you have your freedom. You were allowed to return to the Xie estate and live on your own. They didn't need to keep such a careful watch of you anymore. They had whole bodies of evidence laid out like a bloody dissection, your hands so deeply knotted into their crimes you could never leave. The sigil of the moth was burned into you. They made you theirs.

Sometimes it's like they've forgotten how they made you so dangerous. You have so much time and power now, tied to them by nothing more than a tenuous tendon of fear. It's like they think you're afraid of the severing. Like you're afraid of the suffering and the dying. The Forum values life. You were eight when you were taught how to die.

You stayed. You're waiting.

You don't like being owned. When you die, you'd like the fanfare of a conflagration, an inferno wrapped around your shoulders. The Forum will be yours in hell.

//

The troupe leader greets you with fake enthusiasm, shaking your hand with an earnest grip and a crooked smile. You're sure he wants nothing more than your death. But here he is, bound by a partnership forged between your father and his all those years ago. It's funny how these things work. The world is made of debts.

When you were thirteen, you sat in this very spot on the balcony with your father. The troupe put on Peony Pavilion, and when Du Liniang sang of the rosy clouds and sweetness of flowers, they slipped away to speak in the dark, not returning until Liu Mengmei had fallen in love with a dead girl. All the funds your father had acquired over the years were funneled through Baishe, paid back to him as a salary. He was listed as an investor.

You notice how the seats have been re-upholstered in soft red velvet. You touch the fabric and smile. So they've been using their funds.

The troupe leader watches you. You watch the stage. God, you're tired, resting your elbow into the arm of the seat, chin leaning against your hand. You haven't been able to sleep much these days.

The restlessness eats at your attention. It aches. It feels like you're always on the brink of blackout, mind over a stark cliff, the air buzzing listlessly.

The opera had become very popular after Victor Adroxis. Apparently new heroes prompted new shows in a wave of district pride. You know of the individuals in the Forum who've been frequenting the venue recently. You want an informant. And you want someone desirable. And you want someone no one would think to question.

The dan actor comes onto the stage again. Consort Yu holds the shuangjian in one hand, the blades resting against her. You stir awake. She crosses them delicately as she turns to her lord. You watch the metal glint underneath the stage lights. His smile is diaphanous. His gaze is iron. The music swells. She doesn't take her eyes off Xiang Yu. You can't look away from him.

They're interrupted. Liu Bang's forces have come.

You lean forward. She wields his sword, pulls it from his waist in one fluid motion. The way he commands attention, he's like a blade and he's like silk. He holds the audience with a gesture of his hands. How can he be both unabashedly magnificent and restrained? She brings the it to her neck. The air stills.

"Him," you say to the troupe leader quietly, in the brief lull before applause. The lights dim, the crowd rises. You feel yourself rise too.

"I want him."

[lucius branwen / 10 — fox]

ripred_bot

[lucius branwen / 10 — fox]

ripred_bot

[k!ah]