still fighting dragons with you


Characters: Lei Yao, Jun Li

Summary: To him, she was irreplaceable.

Additional to 'you are the silence in between'

Companion: 'in a city so dead'


He sits on a chair in the ballroom, watches the twirling and circling couples and sighs deeply. He would have skipped this entire farce but this is his brother's ball and he has some obligation to attend even though it only makes his head ache because the ladies use too much perfume.

The corners of his mouth twitch as he catches sight of an overweight man who dances with the agility of a bear before he spots one of the bodyguards who had been ordered to mingle with the crowd to be closer to the assassins. The woman in question has to be a member of the Dragon Warriors, the elite forces because her tattoo shines through but Lei would not say anything against it because the tattoo was known for being nearly impossible to hide.

Painted dragons, scarlet dresses – things he remembers just too well because they would be forever connected to her in his mind. Add that song she has been singing to herself for years and the three things that made her the one he had loved for so long would be named.

Once upon a time, the prince in his ivory tower has met an unpredictable girl with a tongue as sharp as the weapons she wielded. She has been a challenge, shy and reserved at first but with a passionate fire inside. She has become his protector along the years, his friend and lover. And after one point, she has been the only one who mattered, the only one to hold him warm and safe when autumn storms raged, the only one to come with him when he visited his mother's grave in the coldest weeks of winter, the only one allowed to ride his horse when she departed for a war and the only one to touch him, to let her graceful fingers dance across his chest.

He misses her because she would have grabbed his hand and dragged him outside to take a walk in the garden as soon as she had noticed his discomfort and her voice has always been a pleasant one instead of this high-pitched squealing he had to listen to now.

But she has left and no matter how much he wants the opposite, wishful thinking will never bring her back home.

His memory tortures him, replays the better days, the days full of carefree laughter, the days of running across the golden steppes, the days of bathing in hot springs they had just discovered. She is far away now and those days have long passed but even ember is still glowing somehow and so is his heart, the heart her name was engraved on, the heart that refuses to forget her, the heart that glows with love and passion.

Sometimes, when he sits in the gardens, he conjures the memories all over again, always forgetting about the bitter days. He does know that it was not as easy as he tries to make himself believe that it had been always only nice and beautiful but then again, it has been perfect. She has been the number one on any list he had made, the only one he has ever considered to be the empress to his empire, the only one he has ever viewed as fitting to be the mother of his children.

She still is.

She is still the only one he can tolerate to stand by his side, the only one he could imagine to be his wife and she is the mother of his only child, the estranged daughter who clings to her guardian in a way that would make it cruel to separate them.

And this is why he refuses to allow anyone to get close to him and discourages any attempts to marry him off. Some of his siblings have caught on and keep telling him to get over her but how is he supposed to get over it when she is still there, stuck in his head like the bullet of one of those Amestrian firearms some of the guards are experimenting with.

Some people say that a teenager love is easily outgrown but here he is, the living proof for the opposite, and he is sick of people telling him that he is better of without her when – in reality – he is nothing without her calm attitude and the careful way she had guided him, nothing without the weapons she has handed him, poisoned words and the techniques of assassins. He never sees himself as her tool, as her creature because he is not hers but she is his dream, his final goal.

And come the day she returns, he would welcome her with open arms because with the pain gone, the magic can commence once again.