Work Text:
Zhang Hao was playing the opening bars of a gavotte.
The melody went as the fairy tale goes.
Two nights before, Zhang Hao had attended the ball at the palace. He danced with Prince Jiwoong, and the prince now seeks for him. Yet was there no little glass slipper, nor any stepsisters; no fairy godmother, nor any pumpkin ever made into a carriage.
Thus it now goes as the fairy tale goes, or rather, the lack of one.
Unlike the tale, Zhang Hao left nothing behind. Nothing by which he might have been known. It is true that he came to the ball in the guise of a woman; yet, in his defense, he contrived no deception. Nothing was concealed of his masculine voice, only of his short hair. Even so, the prince has nothing to guide him, and therefore he goes from door to door with his guards, knocking upon every house in the kingdom, seeking the woman who had danced with him.
The search continues to its second day, and Zhang Hao has not yet believed it to concern him. The prince seeks a woman; this much is clear, and so the matter appears settled. Whatever Zhang Hao had been at the ball, and whatever the prince had taken him for in the diffused light and the gavotte, these things are rendered irrelevant. Even now as he plays the melody at home. The romance the tale allows is a simple one and not one imagined between a man and another.
If the prince really is guided by the logic of the tale, then Zhang Hao remains safely outside of it. Even when the prince at last comes to his door, Zhang Hao does not think himself to be sought. He sets his violin and rests it upon the escritoire, and goes to open the door.
“By order of His Highness,” one of the guards says. “We inquire whether there resides here a young woman who attended the ball at the palace two nights past.” The poor man already had all the words learned.
Zhang Hao inclines his head and answers, “There is no daughter in this house.”
The guard hesitates, his gaze straying past Zhang Hao’s shoulder, lingering upon the quiet room beyond, before he turns back to his fellow. He looks at Zhang Hao again. “Forgive us, young sir,” he resumes at last, already inclining his head as he prepares to withdraw. The search, impossible as Zhang Hao knows it is, must nevertheless continue.
The guards are already turning away when another voice intervenes.
“Wait.”
It is then the prince who speaks, he who has thus far remained a step behind his men and not yet addressed Zhang Hao directly.
Now he does.
He steps forward, and the guards draw subtly back at his shoulders. His eyes meet Zhang Hao’s own, briefly before they drift, and come to rest upon the scroll which Zhang Hao still grips, quite without thinking, in his left hand.
“You play,” the prince says.
The prince does not ask. The words admit no answer. Zhang Hao, however, is aware that the moment has gone slightly away from the prince’s expected course.
“I do, Your Highness,” he answers.
“May I hear what you were playing?”
This, too, has nothing to do with the search. Zhang Hao is aware of that at once. He considers, briefly, that the prince seeks a woman; therefore the visit is incidental; therefore there can be no harm in indulging the courtesy of so elevated a guest.
Zhang Hao inclines his head once more and steps aside. The prince does not wait to be invited further; neither does he refuse it. He enters Zhang Hao’s lodging as the guards linger by the doorway.
Zhang Hao returns to the escritoire and takes up the violin again. The wood is cool beneath his accustomed fingers. He settles it beneath his chin, raises his bow, and inhales once.
He begins again, carrying on the piece where it had been broken off.
The passage asks much of the left hand. His fingers climb the fingerboard. The shifts are clean, the pressure precise. Zhang Hao does not think of them as he plays; they are habits long since made bodily, inscribed into tendon and skin. He is aware only of the sound as it emerges.
When the final phrase resolves, he lowers the bow and lets the instrument rest against his shoulder.
For a moment, no one speaks.
The prince smiles and acknowledges him with a slight bow before stepping nearer. Quietly then, he says, “You favor the fourth position.”
It is not praise. Zhang Hao is familiar enough with praise, and it is therefore the prince’s restraint that unsettles him more than the thought he has kept carefully at bay: that he is the very figure this search has been ordained to find.
“It suits the piece.”
“Yes,” the prince replies, “and your hand.”
“What of my hand, Your Highness?” Zhang Hao asks. The question is polite enough; he hears nothing amiss in it even as something troubles his chest. He is aware at once of the prince’s nearness, of his own secrecy, of the curious unease born of expectation unmet. He lifts his left hand without thinking. He has seen this hand all his life and thought nothing of it.
“Let me,” the prince says.
He does not finish the sentence, except with his fingers close lightly around Zhang Hao’s hand. Zhang Hao is held there, neither drawing back nor advancing. The prince’s thumb rests, briefly, against the pad of Zhang Hao’s index finger.
It pauses there.
Zhang Hao feels it at once: so distinct his calluses were that the prince knew at once the hand he touched, having touched it before. The prince does not comment. He does not withdraw his hand.
A foxglove comes to mind; its bloom fragile, yet keeping beneath safely veiled. Whatever conclusion the fairy tale might have granted this moment, it is not one he knows.