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Shan-Yu's Victory	By : lightbird Category: +M through R > Mulan (Disney) > Mulan (Disney) Views: 16642 -:- Recommendations : 0 -:- Currently Reading : 1
Disclaimer: I do not own the cartoons of Disney Studios, nor any of the characters from them. I do not make any money from the writing of this story.

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Jie was the guardian of General Li Kuang. He was a tiger, and had stood by the general even before he had any rank at all, guiding him in battle and teaching him to be a great leader. The ancestors sent Jie to Li Kuang when he left for his very first battle, which they knew would be a difficult one. Kuang nearly died rescuing his own commander at that time, but he survived thanks to Jie’s guidance. He was awarded a medal of honor for his bravery and given the rank of captain, though it was destined that the rank would have come to him eventually anyway, given the long line of famous Li generals that had come before him.

Jie accompanied Captain Li Kuang in the ensuing battles that he fought, and finally Li Kuang became a general. As the new sword was forged for General Li, he requested that the design on the top of the hilt be a tiger’s face, rather than the usual dragon’s face that everyone had, in honor of his excellent guardian.

Shang sat on the bed in a daze, holding that same sword that belonged to his father and that Mulan had brought back to him, staring toward the door that she had just walked through and thinking about the interaction that had occurred between them.

He knew that he’d acted badly to her. He couldn’t believe what he had said to her about being Shan-Yu’s concubine. She didn’t deserve that, and despite the nasty comment that was almost completely out of his mouth before she slapped him, she had left him the weapon so he could help himself to escape, not holding a grudge.

The passion with which he seemed to hate her astonished and confused him. The truth was she had touched something inside of him when she spoke of how he rose above his own personal grief and led the troops bravely. He didn’t believe that he was really that brave; but he was disarmed as he realized in that moment how much respect she seemed to have for him, and how she really did seem to know him so well. But he didn’t want that; he wanted to, needed to allow the anger and bitterness to overtake him, he needed to fight with her and push her away.

He sighed and his gaze idly moved from the door to the sword in his hands. He stared at the design of a tiger’s face at the top of the hilt, remembering the night that he had heard the story of it.

He was eight years old, tears of relief streaming down his cheeks at the sight of his father, who had come home finally after being away in battle for a year and a half, the longest stretch that he’d been away at one time. His mother had tried to put up a strong front during all that time, but Shang knew that everyday she cried in secret, thinking that he didn’t hear her. He had been convinced that his father wasn’t going to return then.

Upon seeing Shang’s tears, Li Kuang sat down with him and told him that as the young man of the family, he had to be strong.

“Someday you will follow in my footsteps, Li Shang, just as I followed in the footsteps of my father, and he in the steps of his father. You come from a long and proud lineage of great generals and you will be no different.”

Then his father told him of his guardian, Jie, a powerful tiger that had guided him throughout his military career, and he showed Shang the sword with the unique hilt.

“You see this design, Li Shang?” He pointed to the tiger’s face and nodded at him, indicating that he was allowing him to place his hand on the sword. Shang reached over eagerly and pressed his fingers against the hilt, tracing the design with the tips of them as his father continued speaking. “I requested this design when the sword was forged, to honor Jie. There is no other sword like this in the Imperial Army. This battle was a long and brutal one that wouldn’t end until now finally. But Jie was with me. Remember that. He is always with me.”

Shang blinked, waking from his reverie, and sighed heavily. He knew now that it was a superstition; the tiger was the talisman that his father believed in. And General Li Kuang had told this story to a scared little boy in order to comfort him and to teach him that a real man didn’t cry. There was no Jie. If there was, where was he during his father’s last battle near the Tung Shao Pass?

One of his men had brought the sword to him after retrieving it from his father’s body that lay out in that valley with the rest of the fallen soldiers. He had kept it, using his own sword to make a memorial to his father. He still couldn’t imagine how Mulan had gotten her hands on it or how she knew it was his. Had she looked that closely at the sword to note its uniqueness?

He sighed again as his thoughts returned to Mulan. She was trying to help him and she had done so at risk to herself.

‘For the second time,’ he thought.

His gaze fell on the blanket that the sword had been wrapped in and he realized with a start that the guard might have noticed that she came in with it but left without it.

A sense of alarm swept through him. What if she was harmed because she was caught trying to help him? He couldn’t let that happen, it wouldn’t be right. He had to get out of there and help her.

He set the blanket aside, rose from the bed and knelt down, sliding the sword under it in case someone walked in. Then he stood up and returned to the spot in the wall where he had left off earlier, bending once again to the task of looking for an entrance that might lead to a hidden passageway.

~~~

“This is futile,” argued one of the leaders in the village. “We are not soldiers. We’re simple villagers and farmers. What are we going to fight with? Our scythes and rice-pickers?”

“Gao is right. All we can do is go about our lives and be prepared to defend our loved ones when the Hun army decides to move through the countryside and pillage our little towns,” another one said.

Bi sat at a table with Jia and the other girls, all of them listening to every word that was said, though making sure to appear as if they weren’t. Mulan’s three friends sat with the village leaders and messengers had been sent in all directions earlier that day to carry the news of the situation in the Imperial City.

Bi silently agreed with Gao. It was a hopeless cause. The army defending the Imperial City had obviously failed, and probably didn’t exist anymore.

As for the rest of the army, they were defending the other borders. As a woman, it was odd for her to have such knowledge as this; but she’d been with enough generals and commanders who talked too much. She always listened to every word and remembered everything that was said.

This was not supposed to be something for Bi and her girls to worry about. Defense of the country had nothing to do with women, especially not women such as themselves. And perhaps things wouldn’t be any different for them with the Huns taking over; only their clientele would change possibly. But things could take a turn for the worse, too, even for them.

“Look, the three of us aren’t officers,” Ling told them, “but we’ve been through training. We can at least teach you some basic stuff. I know it isn’t much, but we have to do something.”

“You three?” Gao asked, incredulously.

“Yeah, that’s right,” Yao told them. “I’m a damn good archer now. I could teach you all. And Ling here is a master at breaking bricks with his head.”

“Well, I guess it’s a start. But it’s going to take time. It will be awhile before we drive the Huns out, if we succeed at all. I fear that this is still an exercise in futility.”

“We still have to try,” Chien-Po urged.

“And we have to help our friend,” Ling added. “She risked her life to get in there and help our captain and comrades.”

“And she was caught,” came a new voice, a male voice.

Everyone turned to where the voice had come from, gawking at the tiny red creature that was perched on the windowsill.

“That’s him!” Jia exclaimed, seizing Bi’s arm. “That’s the lizard that was in Mulan’s room!”

“It’s the snake that bit me!”

“I am a dragon!” the creature retorted. “I’m Mulan’s guardian, sent by her ancestors. She sent me here to tell you what happened and to get help. Shan-Yu caught her! You guys need to hurry and get back to the Imperial City before it’s too late!”

~~~

Mulan hurried back to the room that she now shared with Shan-Yu after she left Shang. She had been there for a few days now and though he let her go wherever she wished in the palace, she knew that he always had her watched by one of his men. Even when she didn't see them, she knew they were there. She was like a bird that, though not caged, nevertheless had its master's string tied around its leg.

She had to wait until she was in her small, private chamber before breaking down. If his men saw her tears, they might guess that something had transpired between her and their prisoner, raising suspicions. And as it was, she was in a precarious position. She had discovered in just a few days that Shan-Yu was sharp and instinctive, and she knew that the minute he found it missing, he would figure out that she was the one that had taken the sword that belonged to Shang’s father. There would be questions. And if Shang got over his stupidity and took the opportunity to help himself and escape, she could easily be linked to that as well.

Shang was so furious at her, so unforgiving, and he hadn’t seemed to want any help at all. In fact, he was acting like a real asshole, to put it mildly, she thought with disgust. His retorts and his scornful tone still rang in her ears, his comment about what she now was to Shan-Yu still stinging, even though it wasn’t officially true yet. That Shang thought it was true was enough to deeply trouble her.

“Back so soon, my pretty one?” came the low rumbling of Shan-Yu’s husky voice as she crept into the room. He sat on the edge of the bed in the large chamber that had probably been the previous Emperor’s bedroom. It was now his.

“He wanted to spend the remainder of the night alone.”

She crossed toward the door leading to her small adjoining chamber and hurried inside, shutting the door behind her and slumping against it, her body sagging with the weight of the sadness and anguish that she felt.

She angrily wiped away the tears that she had allowed to stream down her cheeks now that she was by herself. She didn’t know why she even cared what Shang thought of her. She had more important things to worry about than that.

She knew that one day soon Shan-Yu would just take her. He was a man and could only wait for so long; and though he hadn’t forced sex on her yet, he did place his hands on her constantly, becoming more possessive with each passing day, starting with merely touching her shoulder but slowly venturing to touch her in more intimate places on her body.

She crossed the dark room and sank down onto the bed, not making a move to light the lantern by her bedside, wishing to remain in the dark. She sighed as she thought of the events of that evening.

Shan-Yu had provided her with the opportunity to get the sword to Shang. He spoke freely in front of her, mostly to Batu, his most trusted counselor and confidante; and she knew instantly that the commander they spoke about was Shang, which is how she knew they were planning to kill him.

She went with Shan-Yu into the dining room that evening. His guards had brought Shang there already, and he was waiting for him. She was supposed to serve both of them, but Shan-Yu changed his mind, whispering for her to wait in their room until he got back instead. He would be sending her to this commander.

She instantly knew what he was doing. He was giving Shang a woman for the night, his last night alive, and she was the woman. It was perfect. She would be able to at least get a weapon to him then, and hopefully he could fight his way out.

She had returned to the room to wait, as Shan-Yu instructed her, striding directly to the closet where she knew he kept his trademark sword with the jagged blade that had wounded her so nastily. There were several weapons stored there, but one sword in particular caught her eye. She picked it up and looked it over, recognizing it instantly. In its own way, it was equally unique and artfully forged. Instead of the typical dragon’s face at the top of the hilt, this sword had a tiger’s face.

The first time she saw it was at the village near the Tung Shao Pass, when one of the men in the troop handed it to Shang. She knew it was his father’s sword, and though she remembered thinking absently that the design was unusual, there were many more things that she was thinking and feeling at the time, standing in the middle of that devastation. The tiger’s face on the sword was quickly forgotten until she saw it again now.

She’d had to figure out a way to get the sword to Shang inconspicuously. She came up with the blanket idea, praying that it would work and that the guards would buy the idea that as a woman, she was always cold.

She dropped her head into her hands. She was completely alone there. She had sent Mushu off to contact her friends and let them know what had happened, though he went reluctantly, insisting that he needed to stay with her to make sure the ‘yellow-eyed gargantuan’, as he called Shan-Yu, didn’t harm her.

But from the moment Shan-Yu picked her out of the group of fifteen women in the hallway he had been nice to her, which was astonishing. She expected him to kill her, or at the very least to treat her like a conquest, but he didn’t. Rather, he seemed to regard her as a delicate flower, despite the fact that he realized she knew martial arts.

He also treated her like a curiosity. He knew that she obviously didn’t belong there.

It had been foolish to think she could blend in with the women of the palace. Unused to wearing it, she had completely forgotten about the white face paint. The only time in her life that she ever had it on was when she went to the matchmaker, and though she liked what she saw when she looked in the mirror that day, a girl who looked like she could have been a real bride, she hated the way the stuff felt on her face. It never occurred to her to put it on again.

She should have known better than to try to blend in with women who really knew how to act like women. She was a throwback, an oddball, and she blended in better with soldiers now.

Shan-Yu had her pegged immediately as an oddity. Then she had gone and taken a defensive stance that she’d learned at camp, which was really idiotic. It had been instinctive, he had made a sudden move toward her and it scared her; but the moment she did it she realized her mistake. He had looked shocked.

There was no opportunity to run, and she would have been more obvious if she did. So she just went with him silently, trying not to look afraid, while he questioned her in the large chamber he brought her to.

He seemed more interested in figuring out who she was and what she was doing there at that time than in making her a concubine, much to her relief. The only word she uttered was ‘Mulan’ in answer to what her name was. She didn’t answer his questions about whether or not she was really a palace courtesan, about how she came to be there and where she had learned how to fight.

He wasn’t angry when she didn’t answer his queries. He seemed to be amused by her reticence and a low, not unpleasant-sounding rumble of laughter had tumbled out of him. He commented on her bravery and seemed pleased.

“You’re a fascinating little woman and I love a challenge. I will find out all about you,” he had said with a wink. He had reached out to touch her face and she tried to suppress a shudder, unsuccessfully. He saw it and with a kind smile withdrew his hand before it touched her, which took her by surprise.

He brought her to the large, lavishly furnished bedchamber after that and beckoned for her to follow him to a door in the room, which led to a smaller but also lavishly furnished chamber.

He gestured inside. “This room is yours. You will stay here, by my side. That is the order of your new Emperor.”

She had made up her mind that she would treat this as a mission. She was a soldier now, and nothing would daunt her. She would use this time of captivity to listen to the conversations between him and his men and to learn as much as she could about the enemy so that when the opportunity came to fight, she would have as much knowledge and ammunition as possible.

She snapped her head up, startled out of her thoughts, panicking as she heard the rap on her door. She stiffened and her heart raced up into her throat as it opened and he stood in the open doorway, his huge, powerful frame filling it, the lantern light in the large room behind him accentuating his silhouette and casting a faint, giant shadow over the floor of the small chamber. He approached silently and sat on her bed beside her, slipping his arm around her waist in the same possessive manner that he had earlier in the evening, in front of Shang.

She cringed inside, sensing his curiosity as she felt his fingers once again explore the bandage that was wound around her waist underneath her dress. He hadn’t asked about it yet; but she knew that he would when he undressed her and saw it. And if he unraveled it and saw the wound, he might very likely recognize the mark of his own unique blade. Then it would only be a short time before he realized that she was the soldier that stood just a couple of feet from him in the mountains and caused the burial of his army.
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Shan-Yu's Victory