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Yue was a prisoner, for the first time in her life. Some might imagine her a prisoner of the realm, locked into a cage she could not thwart, but the orchid did not feel that was true. She had a great many freedoms, within and outside of the Dynasty – and those freedoms she did not have, were ones she did not want anyway.

No, this was not the typical prisonerhood that came with politicking. This was being unable to move her body, and being grateful he was there to hold her aloft. This was her ribcage restricting the depth of her breaths, keeping them high in her throat. This was a small murmuring of lavisciousness, which felt alive in its own right, ready to leap from her tongue and take flight.

The guard of this imprisonment was the man who dared breathe against her. His exhales were the key, turning the locks that kept her fixed in place. Tortured longing blazed just beneath her skin. The Empress wasn't entirely unsure who held the control, amongst other dichotomies that she didn’t dare think.

Yue had decided to trust Batu once before, and she found that it did not fade under the pressure of his affection. Instead, it flowered – and so, Yue continued her cerebral echo: Why couldn’t she? If Batu was so tasked to her safety, and this was his manner of serving, Why wouldn’t she?

The argument would barely hold in court, but here, it was sufficient.

Was this what it was like to be someone who was not an Empress? One able to kiss freely, and love without consequence? Yue imagined that she would prefer to spend all her life this way, wrapped in the arms of another, and receiving all their focused attention.

It mattered naught that she had scarcely moved, aside from that lifting tilt of her chin. This was exactly the cage the Empress wanted to be in – one that felt as transcendent as when she stood before her altar, immersed in poetic refrain and smoke. Batu was the wind that alighted the flame in an incense, and similarly, her soul leapt and flared. The choice was beginning to become hers,

and it became hers fully when he bade her to stop their momentum. Yue understood, now, that it must be her word, not his will.

Regaining her countenance little by little, her lilac eyes flashed, perhaps catching a reflection of her fur’s own luminescence. Her chin downturned, closing access to the ivory finery of her jawbone.

We must stop, It was not an order, but a statement of fact. Yet her own forelimb reached forward, gathering the folds of the horsepelt that sat across his shoulders.

in a moment.

Then her lips, pursed into a loose ring, placed a kiss upon the corner of his mouth, with all the lightness of a plum blossom on a zephyr current. Her lips parted, allowing breath to intermingle, and she remained there, speaking into his own mouth.

I would not endanger you, she said, susurrus and hushed. If the man threw himself before her, ready to die due to the threat from another, so be it. It would not, however, be at her behest.

Her heart could not allow it, no matter what she felt she deserved.

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