Chapter Text
It was on a dark and dreary Monday illuminated only by the eerie glow of Wuwang Hill that they met.
Plum blossom eyes and cold, clear ice.
---
The girl named Hu Tao was many things. A poet. A prodigy. A playful eccentric with a cheeky comment ever-resting at the tip of her tongue. She was alive in a way that many would envy, somewhere deep beneath the artificial complexities of daily life.
She was alive in this way because she danced with death.
Fire butterflies flicker to ash. Grandfathers give their final farewells without a word. Even the gods erode.
She has long understood this morbidity in all its beauty. That life bears its meaning only because it is fleeting. That regrets and memories are the only true companions on one's deathbed.
She wanted life, she wanted all of it. The memories that would be hers forever, for she was mortal, and limited-time offers are the most catching.
But all too often, she stood watching as others sift opportunities through their fingers like sand, only for the fire of the morgue to smelt them into the glass of regret. An invisible and insurmountable wall, perhaps, or a vessel to drown with alcohol and sweet emptiness.
It was the one thing that made Hu Tao a little sad.
---
The exorcist Chongyun had just one thing he swore to avoid at all costs.
Heat.
It was his fatal and lifelong enemy, for it stole his sensibility and his proof of labor. It drew out a creature with gnashing teeth and gleaming eyes that would surpass him in every way.
Spirits were nothing before that monster which people dared to call a blessing.
They would flee at its mere presence like moths of the night burned by sun flare. Moths with wings so dark and forms so shadowed that he has never seen them, did not even know if they have seen him, or only it.
He and it were not one and the same. It could never know his restless training or desperate treks into so-called 'haunted' nooks at every edge of the earth he could reach. It could never exert the discipline he has fought so long to hone. It could never be deserving of the praise for these struggles he has made…
Nor could he ever accept the praise for what it has dispelled.
So he fought it as if it was the demon instead, and he avoided its hedonistic temptations like the plague.
Anger, excitement, a physical flame—it was all the same danger to Chongyun.
---
And yet here they all stood before him in this single bundle of many things called Hu Tao.
He has heard of her, of course, as most people remotely involved with the dead would have. She was, after all, the director of the Wangsheng Funeral Parlor, no matter how frivolous she may otherwise act.
Right now, for example, she was sitting on a rock beneath floating lazuli lights, pinching the ghost equivalent of a tail between the thumb and index finger of her right hand. Abruptly, she let go, the specter spiraling off like a deflated balloon before it vanished with a squeak under the weight of Chongyun's excessive yang energy.
"Sorry," he murmured, a furrowed brow emphasizing his dim frown at where the translucent white form had just been.
Hu Tao didn't answer at first, instead standing to dust (nothing) off her mahogany tailcoat and affix him with a gaze that was half sizing him up, half incensing an air of unreadability. He finally looked up at her uneasily.
The girl burst out into an abrupt bout of indignant anger. "How could you!? I hope you know you've just gone and dispelled the ghost of my dearest best friend who’d come to see me for the last time," she sniffed, averting her face in a convincing show of emotion. She even brought a wide sleeve up to hide her tearless cheeks.
Chongyun opened and closed his mouth a few times, momentarily at a loss. But he was used to apologizing, albeit not for this. "I'm truly sorry, I had no idea… But your friend will be better off now, don't worry! I mean, I'm sure you know how spirits aren't meant to stay in our world, given your position, so I—I'm sure you can be okay letting go." He was on the verge of rambling now.
Hu Tao sniffed again, eyeing his helpless expression from her peripheral. Her own morphed into a smirk. "Well, you're right about that." She hopped merrily down from her perch with a polite nod, as if she hadn't just been falsely crying a moment before. Chongyun blinked.
"You knew I was faking, right? Even adding that line about my 'position'. Thanks for playing along." She winked, but the gesture may as well have bounced straight over his head.
"You—you faked losing your best friend? Why would you do such a thing?" He stared at her, incredulous, anger attempting to edge its way into his voice. He held his breath, bidding it to sleep.
Hu Tao merely shrugged. "I dunno, maybe to see your reaction? Why do we do anything, ultimately, if not simply for the sake of doing it before we inevitably die?"
Chongyun couldn't stifle his scoff at that. "For goals! For goodwill! For the respect of the dead I'm sure you should know so well, maybe?" He glared at her, tenets aflame in righteous burning, no longer able to care about quelling his irritation.
She paused, as if she hadn't considered that. Eventually she hummed a noncommittal answer: "Yes, yes, that could make sense."
Each word tossed new fuel to Chongyun's fury. He could acutely feel his control slipping, cracking, like a sweltering glacier.
"I can't believe people say you're so smart!" he finally snapped, "Or if you're so great at your job, why don't you go find some poor soul you clearly must not sympathize with to put to rest!?"
Her face twitched imperceptibly at that, but he didn’t notice. "Maybe I should; I need to check my schedule."
Incredulous breaths and clenching grips were all which composed Chongyun at that moment. Hu Tao blinked expectantly. She was having fun of all things, at witnessing this side of the famously calm exorcist with the 'face of clear ice.'
His tense form finally stilled for a moment, then stormed up to her with heavy stomps as if approaching to set her straight with a fist and—
promptly passed out at her feet.
---
Chongyun's next few conscious thoughts were a jumbled mess.
Wuwang Hill… Funeral parlor… Anger.
He must have passed out. Of course—he’d given in to one of his key dangers. How could he be so careless?
Oh, right. Hu Tao.
He groaned and pressed the heels of his palms against his closed eyes at the sudden light leaking in from behind them. A headache flared at the back of his brain as it usually did right after he would lose his composure. He knew he would have to face reality eventually, but that could surely be put off for a few more minutes.
"I don't think he's okay."
Never mind.
His eyes shot open, and, sure enough, a wicked face he'd had the misfortune of becoming recently acquainted with hovered over him, framed by falling strands of plum tree brown that tickled his nose. He instinctively narrowed his gaze into a bolt of frosty animosity, fired near point-blank across the mere inches between them. Hu Tao just smiled cryptically, never blinking.
"Alright, you can cease the silent teasing, Director Hu." A familiarly slender, silk-wreathed pair of hands split the palpable air between them, shooing her off.
Xingqiu, his savior. For once.
"Chongyun, my dear friend, are you alright?" Blurry navy and cream and gold shapes sharpened into a familiar visage. Chongyun rubbed his temple and nodded slowly.
"I passed out from overheating. I'll be fine in a second."
Xingqiu clicked his tongue with a frown as he passed his friend a glass of cold water. "I guess I bear some amount of blame for sending you out there."
Chongyun immediately broke out into earnest protest. "No, no! You always give me tips on where to find spirits; I'm grateful." Hu Tao snickered and pointedly arched an eyebrow at the boy in darker blue, which was ignored.
"In any case, you should rest for a while before attempting another excursion. I would stay, but alas, I must be getting back before my father and brother realize I've been gone…"
Oh, please don't leave him here with her.
"No worries, my dear friend!" Hu Tao piped up in an impromptu imitation of his style of speech. "I, your trusted accomplice Hu Tao, will watch over him."
Accomplice? Chongyun raised his head just high enough to watch the two exchange identical shit-eating grins. What terrible luck he must have that these two would be friends. So much for his 'congenital positivity'…
---
So it seemed. Though, that being said (or thought), surprisingly little of note occurred after that. Chongyun fell back into a hazy half-sleep while Hu Tao watched him over the spine of a book she was only half-reading. He was a curious case indeed. But she could crack curious cases. The trouble lay instead in his supposed fragility.
Congenital positivity, also known as an overabundance of yang energy. It was an extremely rare condition that could cause a person to possess natural spirit-repelling abilities and an abnormally high body temperature. It did not, as far as Hu Tao knew, directly cause a potentially dangerous loss of consciousness.
Curious indeed.