Chapter Text
The last time he has seen this white-haired figure feels like a lifetime ago. In the dim light from the windows, it is but a pale afterimage of the person he once knew at the end of a final memory for them both. The rest of his features are cast in shadow. He stands so still, Jing Yuan thinks that if he blinks, the figure will disappear, confirming that it is a figment of his imagination. A mere, eerie illusion of the night.
It doesn't.
The white- haired figure moves. Tilts up his head like a slow moving marionette. Soundless in the room. Despite not seeing its face, Jing Yuan feels its gaze. Heavy and tracing every shuddering beat of his heart.
Jing Yuan does not know what to think.
The uncanniness of the situation and dark silence in the room feels like a dream. Is he awake or is he still asleep? Who...is this standing before him?
Does he truly want to know?
He swallows as he works up his dry throat. His voice comes out steady and unaffected. "How did you get in here?"
The white-haired figure looks around the room, ignoring his question. Jing Yuan narrows his eyes to see what he is looking at - the rows of weapons mounted on the wall, similar to the ones in his office.
"The general keeps an interesting collection", the ghostly white figure comments, his voice a low, even drawl. Unfamiliar in the moment, sounding far away yet almost close enough to recall should he dare to remove that veil of the past.
The figure walks along the wall and stops at a particular short staff. "To think that I would lay eyes on this one again."
Jing Yuan does not see his face, but he hears the light, almost-laugh. The smallest of scoffs. Soft and cutting. Almost non-existent but echoing to his ears.
His blood freezes even as his heart speeds up. He does not want to believe it.
"You are seven hundred years old and still the same. How childish."
Jing Yuan's lips form the words but his voice trips over it, like rummaging through an old chest of unsent letters, searching blindly for a name left behind in faded ink. Unused and unspoken. Locked away and forgotten.
"Ying..." His voice catches. He stops, and tries again. "Ying Xing?"
The ghost of his past faces him. A pale sliver of moonlight breaks through the billowing curtains, highlighting the man's face. His eyes, so dark in the night, glint a muted red as his lips quirk up at the corners, containing that age-old aggravating lilt when he speaks. Low and on the verge of a tell-tale smirk, dark as aged wine and beckoning like curled smoke.
Jing Yuan’s breath stops in his lungs. It’s the same face, yet so incredibly different. He realises what he’s looking at, who he’s looking at now. Ying Xing’s face, from a distant period in time, unlined and youthful like the other, without the uncanny red-gold glow. Yet his hair remains silver-white as the day he had died. The divergence from memory is familiar, but jarring.
Unbothered by Jing Yuan’s tense silence, the ghost continues speaking.
"You asked me this before when we met. Now, let me return you the question."
"Do you remember me...Jing Yuan?"
Do you remember me?
His own voice resounds in his memory. The same scene plays back in his head. Him, standing above, staring down. And he, looking up with glowing red eyes like that of a stranger's.
How ironic. He wants to laugh.
"Yes...I remember you."
The ghost continues to hold his gaze. Then, he looks away from the light, an odd smile lingering on his lips. "Strange. I thought the general has forgotten me."
Before Jing Yuan can ask him what he means, he has already moved away from him, walking soundlessly in slow, liquid steps to the other side of the room.
Jing Yuan gets up to follow. The floor is cold against his bare feet. More so tonight, but he pays it no mind.
The ghost stops at his table and gently turns over the white wine flask atop it, long, tapered fingers appearing colder and paler than the porcelain it wistfully lingers on.
"Stop."
The command isn't spoken harshly, but Jing Yuan stumbles to a halt as if crashing into an invisible ice wall. No, the edge of a bottomless cavern, looking across at the other side. Feeling as if the moment he steps forward, the white figure on the opposite cliff will step off first and disappear from his sight.
The white figure before him does not look up when it speaks.
"The living should not get close to the dead. Does the general not know that ghosts will disappear at a mere touch?"
"What makes you think I... ...Why?"
Jing Yuan watches as the bone-white hand slowly retracts from the flask. The curtain of pale hair slides forward, hiding his face as he speaks.
"It is best not to touch the things you wish to forget."
But I...
But what? Jing Yuan stops. Wasn't he prepared to forget? To move on?
Lies.
If it were that easy...He would have done so several hundred years ago.
But looking at the sight across him, one so frightfully familiar, in the end, he is sorely reminded of the truth. It sinks into the bottom of his soul, an anchor weighing him down at the end of a river. Left to gaze back past the tall reeds covering faraway waters. Left to look up alone at the cold lights in the night sky.
The ghost straightens to face him, his expression impassive except for the shifting play of shadows and light over his eyes.
He gazes straight at Jing Yuan when he speaks.
"That person...is no longer here."
He states it plainly, with no sign of coiling, biting venom in his words. But his eyes say it all, unable to mask the lingering bitterness within.
Unlike Jing Yuan, this person has never cared to hide how he feels.
Treading carefully on uncertain waters, Jing Yuan slowly and calmly replies.
"So...you know that he is no longer Dan Feng."
A slow smile creeps up on the ghost's face, edged in derision. "Yes. I know."
"Are you...still going after him despite knowing this?"
Silence. Then, Ying Xing laughs, the sound of it is eerily spine-chilling – a slightly hoarse melody on the brink of madness, spun in old, jaded hate.
"Jing Yuan...Hah. Jing Yuan." He shakes his head, as if dreadfully amused by something. Small tremors run over his silhouette as he bends over laughing, a cold river of white hair covering his visage, until the sound dies down but the shaking remains in whitened knuckles and enclosed fists.
The sight should alarm him. The sound chills him to his bones. Yet the way he utters Jing Yuan’s name haunts him and makes a long-lost part of him ache.
The ghost raises its head slowly, and steps closer. "The general is mistaking something. Did you think I was unaware of that fact? That I would give up upon realising this?"
A pause, followed by words softly spoken, wrapped around a sharpening knife's edge. Reflecting a thin sliver of the holder's mocking smile. "Does the general remember what he told me, when I was in that prison? You asked if I could forget. But what about you?"
One step closer. He narrows his eyes at him shrewdly, a wild metallic glint like living metal flickering behind a heavy, suffocating stare.
"You say that I am unable to let go of the past. But are you truly able to look past his shadow? You...who stood by and watched on for all those years."
"I-"
"It is not that you don't want to see him as Dan Heng. It is that you simply can't."
"I-!"
Another step. His voice turns dangerously soft, daring him to rebuke.
"Do you know what I see when I look at him? He can reincarnate a thousand times, but every time I look at him, I can only see him.”
The ghost continues. He sounds like a monster shaking and breaking at its seams. Half snarling, half-broken. An arm’s distance away. A feverish rage rising, screaming for him to stay away. He’s one step from being ripped apart.
Jing Yuan does not move. Somehow, he feels like if he does, the one falling to pieces won’t be him.
“We all fought together in the Thalassa war. We once tried to outdrink each other and Jing Liu could still fight drunk. We used to go lantern viewing on new year's eve from Bai Heng's starskiff. And then...all I could recall was that incident and his silhouette...”
He laughs. A broken sound.
“Tell me, Jing Yuan. Do you also remember all these useless memories?
Who else can you see when you look at him?"
Fever-bright eyes hold Jing Yuan at knifepoint like a broken sword to the throat.
"You are not unlike me, Jing Yuan. We had the same swordmaster, the same friends who died, the same person who's left us. We are bound by the same past, the same inner demons.”
The ghost he’s talking to raises his voice. Clearer now. No longer containing the hoarse edge of blood and rust. Its rage burns clear and bright, cutting and sharp on his skin. It bleeds into his soul and he jolts with the recognition of something close to what he hasn’t heard in the longest time across a million dreams.
“You were always the same. You are always the same! I hated him, his betrayal, I hated you, how you stood by and did nothing! I hated it, how even in death I couldn't reach it! All these useless memories...you said I would be better off not remembering, when you had no right to say anything, not when you did nothing!”
He feels each accusation stab deeply into his soul, new wounds reopening from the old.
“You tell me to forget. You say you will forget!”
“And yet-!”
Ying Xing pants, the wild light in his eyes on the verge of shattering. Jing Yuan finds he cannot look away from the heavy way they hold onto him. Anger - he can handle. Apathy - he can smile at. But the dark, rueful sorrow directed at him leaches the remaining numbness from his bones and tears off his mask.
“And yet...
You have lived long enough to forget. But I have known you long enough to know.”
Ying Xing laughs, voice dropping to a threadbare thinness. “I am probably the only one left to know.”
Deep red eyes refocus on Jing Yuan, hazy with unreadable emotions, yet Jing Yuan knows each and every one of them. He’s seen them in the mirror too many times to count. He has always kept them at bay, but Ying Xing brutally reflects them all.
“Jing Yuan… you…are neither unaffected nor infallible. You…are simply better at pretending than most.”
There's a cracking sound. The sound of broken glass shifting in dust within the tired confines of his heart. Then, a shattering.
Jing yuan knows. He knows everything. He has always known how it would end.
But that doesn't make it easier to accept. To disregard old memories. To completely kill old feelings like cutting off a dying limb.
No. The phantom wound remains. Lingers on cloudy nights.
He is only better at accepting it than most people.
That is all.
Ying Xing stares distantly at the wall full of old weapons. "...Have I ever spoken to you like this before? I do not recall."
...But I do. You were always with him, and he with you.
You don't remember. But I always have.
Jing Yuan hates the constricted feeling in his throat but forces out the question. "Do you blame me? For not doing anything?"
Ying Xing looks at him with light fading from tired eyes. He then looks away, as if seeing their past playout in the distance.
"In not doing anything, you already made a choice.
But...The quintet was doomed to fall. There was no escaping the outcome. It was only a matter of difference in how each of us left. Bai Heng, Jing Liu, and Dan Feng..."
He pauses, looking past the window at the endless clouds drifting across blackened skies.
"You...were always aware. We should have all seen it coming. But all of us made a choice. Dan Feng and I..."
He lets out a dry laugh - cutting and slightly bitter, but lacking none of the malice from before. It sounds like a drop of water, a sigh falling into a dried-out well, where the owner has finally drained away his cold resentment, only to have nothing left to fill.
"I thought we understood each other the most. And you...you could not have stopped us – stopped him - even if you tried."
When he turns to face Jing Yuan, the clouds shift and what's left of the moonlight hits his eyes.
Their gaze pins him into place, forcing the air to catch within his throat. He's forgotten how they used to look, he realises – a clear red untainted by blood, coloured like a blooming sunrise when alive with emotion.
He's seen these eyes before. Many, many years ago, in the face of a youth not much older than him, full of life and passion. Someone who runs like a moth straight into fire. Stubborn, heedless of caution, and burning with a single-minded goal. They used to look to the future. They used to never look back.
Ying Xing continues, his voice a calm and steady beacon in the dark stillness of the room.
"I did hate you. I blamed you. I was caught in a never-ending hell where I could not remember myself or crawl out of no matter how much I bled. All I sought was an ending which I could not reach. All I wanted was an answer, but that person can no longer give. And all I have now is nothing except these past memories, of me, of them, and of you. And in those memories, I finally remembered. ”
His voice breaks on the last few words, the rest of it a struggle to get out.
“I remember…my family,” Ying Xing says hoarsely as he looks away from Jing Yuan. “Why I decided to come here, everything I had sought to do, the people I’ve met, all of it began in this place...”
He breathes out, tension releasing from his body along with his shifting thoughts. A small laugh escapes him, more like a scoff as if recalling an offhand memory. “Do you remember what you did when we first met?”
“Yes,” Jing Yuan says, mirroring Ying Xing’s short, exasperated laugh, bordering on bittersweet. “I do not think I will ever forget you calling me a brat when we were barely a few years apart.”
“The weapon I had made was not meant for use.”
“And yet, you gave it to me.”
“Yes…,” Ying Xing muses softly. “You were the youngest out of us back then…”
He looks back up at Jing Yuan with the ghost of a smile on his face.
“And…you were the one I gave into the most.”
Something stutters to a stop in Jing Yuan’s heart. He stares, unblinking at Ying Xing as the latter continues.
“Do you remember what you asked of me, when I told you I was a short-lived species?”
Jing Yuan mutely stares at Ying Xing.
“You asked me to forge your weapons for as long I lived.”
“It is my oversight,” Ying Xing says. Slow and sure, as if the arrogant young man who only sought perfection in his craft has returned in a mirage. Yet his words are soft and weightless, no longer driven by a will to succeed or bound to heavy resentment.
Something hot and sharp rises in the back of Jing Yuan’s throat, choking his ability to speak. Ying Xing carries on.
“I have not been able to keep my promise of forging your weapon for a hundred years. Thus, I will count us as even with this young general's lack of foresight for his inaction.”
Ying Xing’s eyes are a warm red, his voice light as falling bird feathers when he speaks the next words.
“Jing Yuan, the quintet is gone. And so is he. Everything has come to an end. There is nothing left to chase, blame, or shoulder anymore."
Jing Yuan doesn’t know if the last words are spoken more for him or Ying Xing himself, but he’s seen that look on someone else’s face before - that same haunting smile of sad relief, lit in moonlight and shadow, when he had wielded his glaive and cut off the remaining ties between them both.
It pierces his heart in a thin pinprick of starlight. He breathes in sharply, feeling his lungs shudder as he desperately tries to hold in the shaking in his chest, and when he exhales, he feels as though a mountain of weight has been shrugged off, years of it pouring off like sand running through the cracks of his fingers, finally letting go of something he no longer needed to hold. Yet, the sudden emptiness in its place sends a faint alarm ringing distantly, like fading stardust in moonless skies.
He stares at the ghost across him.
"...Is there another reason you are haunting my dreams?"
Ying Xing’s lips quirk up slightly at the corners. Unlike the maddening grin of the killer, or the broken bitterness of the living dead. No, it's in an arrogantly infuriating way - bearing the same half-hearted condescension he's always given Jing Yuan when he was a boy asking the youth for a glaive upgrade, or to see the latest weapons being made.
This person would always ignore him and rebuke him, no matter if Jing Liu told him not to argue with a kid, and yet, he would always give in to his whims whenever he sees his eyes flash in delight at the unveiling of a new weapon. Even something as ludicrous as carving a fat sparrow on a short staff.
Yes. He's always enjoyed bantering with him. Always hated it when he's ignored. Always liked to rile him up to get a reaction from that reserved face that comes to life for the other person they both followed.
Why has he forgotten this?
When the ghost speaks, it's in the same chilling words he's heard in the past.
Someone has come calling at his door for his weapon.
The same way he used to gather the broken weapons of the fallen and place them at their graves.
"I have come to check on your weapon. What else can it be?"
Jing Yuan stares, unmoving, as the ghost walks over soundlessly to his glaive.
Pale fingers, free of bandages and paper-white run over the soft gleam of the blade and the carvings on its shaft. Its condition is as good as ever even after a hundred years of blood and dust.
"Good. The craftsmen of this age are tolerable. The glaive I made will last you well until your age begins to show in more than your bones and your hair starts to fall."
He ignores the familiar biting remark.
"...Where is your sword, Ying Xing?"
The ghost turns its back on him. He feels a sudden, desperate urge to call out, reach out a hand, to do something, anything, but he's held back by an immovable force. He can only stare at his back, standing a few paces away from him.
Several paces away from him. A universe away from him.
The ghost stops at the shadowed edge of his balcony and steps into the moonlight.
When he turns, he looks deep into Jing Yuan's eyes, and renders him motionless.
“It is time to let go of the past and the ghosts that linger behind. Your disciple is a promising one, Jing Yuan. Don't die on the battlefield before you retire. I do not wish to see you so soon.”
Ying Xing pauses on the edge and gazes across at Jing Yuan one last time.
“No...of the five of us, may we never see each other again. Forget us all when you wake up and...Live well...Jing Yuan."
He steps off and vanishes into the night.
Morning light streams in from the open windows, bringing with it the scent of early blooming chrysanthemums from the outdoor garden.
Jing Yuan lies in bed, unmoving, blinking up at the ceiling, still caught in the remnants of his dream.
He remembers everything clearly. He remembers the face of his ghost. He remembers every word. Not even the morning sun can wash away the soul-shaking clarity of it.
His heart has been thudding nonstop since he woke up hours ago, already late for his morning duty. Fu Xuan is going to give him an earful again. Yan Jing will start worrying where he is. He has to get up, but he doesn't want to.
The whole of Xianzhou will laugh at him if they knew, their infallible fearless general, shocked into numbness by a single fleeting dream.
Forcing himself to get up, he stretches, feeling lighter than ever on his feet.
Is it really that easy to forget and let go of the past? He wonders, smiling at the idealistic irony. And yet, the lingering shadows weighing on his heart are considerably lighter.
If everyone could speak to the dead this easily, perhaps there would be less painful things to endure in the world.
He walks over to his table to pick up his glaive, smile still lingering on his face, when he stops.
His hand falls, trembling almost unnoticeably, as he reaches out for the single strand of hair on his glaive -
An ashen white two shades lighter than his own.
Hair the colour of starlight that's no longer there shimmering quietly behind the bright light of day.
Yes.
There is nothing left to blame anymore.
There is no one left to chase anymore.
There is nothing left for him here.
He is finally free.