Chapter Text
“Oi!” Xue Yang hollered, aiming a kick at the fox which had somehow snuck into their coffin home just before the sun started to set. “Who let you in? Get out of here!”
The fox yipped, leaping nimbly out of the way. It aimed a look of consternation at Xue Yang, as if that would make him feel even a little guilty for attempting to give it the boot, before turning tail and running off into the fog.
“Why did you do that?” Daozhang seemed genuinely curious. He either hadn't noticed or hadn't minded when the fox had first entered the house, but he clearly could tell that Xue Yang had tried to violently shoo it out. Daozhang was strange like that - sometimes it was as if he couldn’t fathom perfectly normal reactions (perfectly normal to Xue Yang, at least) even though he really did wish to understand. Maybe that high-and-mighty mountain he came down from had something to do with it.
“What? I didn’t actually do anything,” Xue Yang protested. Mostly because the fox had dodged, sure, but it still counted! “Really, that fox should count its lucky stars I didn’t do anything worse. You know, I had a friend once…”
He trailed off so conspicuously that even Daozhang noticed. Would it be too obvious as to who this friend actually was? Xiao Xingchen had been to Koi Tower before, after all. Perhaps it would be best for Xue Yang to change the topic.
But Daozhang was waiting so attentively, and Xue Yang always did like telling him stories. So he continued:
“I had a friend, once. We often went night-hunting together; I was much better, obviously, but he wasn’t terrible. He was able to keep up with me, mostly by being a clever bastard.”
“Do you always call your friends bastards?” A-Qing piped up, having tapped her way into the room while Xue Yang was talking.
“Well, he’s not much of a friend anymore,” Xue Yang said, the corner of his mouth curling up, caught halfway between a grimace and a big mean grin. “Anyway, don't interrupt. Me and this friend of mine, there was one particular time we went night-hunting. It wasn't a very exciting hunt -” because they'd been running low on raw material for fierce corpses - “so we were about to leave the area to find better pickings, when what should we come across but a little fox caught in a trap!
“It was a wretched beast, the stench of its rank animal fear palpable from ten li away. Really, it must have almost bled out entirely - I think that's the only reason it let my friend get close without being bitten.
“Now, my clever friend, he had a lot of experience with wriggling out of traps. Before I knew it, he had the fox free in his arms. The way its hind legs were hanging, though - no animal survives that in the wild. But my friend was very gentle with it, so gentle that I started to wonder whether he was going to do something stupid like take the fox back home and nurse it back to health.”
“That doesn't sound stupid,” Daozhang said softly. “That sounds very kind.”
“Well, it would've been stupid for him,” Xue Yang retorted. “His home situation was… let’s just say it was complicated. Anyway, he was standing around, cradling this fox, and I was getting impatient. Come on, I said, let's go; I didn't care what he did with that fox, if he wanted to do something stupid like actually show love and care towards it, that was entirely on him. But he just wasn't moving. He had the fox in his arms, and it was slowly starting to settle, nice and easy like, calming down as if its back legs weren’t pretty much gone -
“And that’s when he snapped its neck.
“My friend wasn't very strong; he hadn’t done a clean job. The fox twitched and danced in his hands, and for a moment he seemed to shudder with it; then he went very still. But the fox kept moving, ever more frantic, gasping, snapping its jaws - its little predator’s heart fiercely beating, clinging to life until its blood finally ran cold.
“My friend was silent for a long time after. You know, I’d already had enough of all this; like, alright, he put down this animal, he put it out of its suffering, big round of applause! But besides being a clever bastard, this man could be a real scary motherfucker, so I thought it best to leave him to his thoughts for a bit.
“When at last he was ready, my friend turned to look at me, and in his hands the fox’s broken neck lolled back until it too caught me in its dead gaze. And I could not have told you which were the eyes of the man, and which the eyes of the animal.
“I asked him then what he was thinking.
"Only that it’s easier than I thought, he said, to kill a fox.
“And he set its broken body on the forest floor, and we continued on with the hunt.”
“So!” Xue Yang said brightly, clapping his hands together to punctuate his point. “The moral of this tale is that you’re lucky I didn’t strangle that fox with my own two hands.”
“Ugh, that’s a horrible story,” A-Qing declared, clearly caught between fascination and revulsion. “I guess all your friends are as terrible as you are.”
Before Xue Yang could issue a retort, Daozhang laughed. “Well, I’m his friend. Would you say I’m terrible?”
He didn't seem as unsettled by the story as Xue Yang had hoped or feared; Xue Yang didn't quite know how to feel about this, so he decided to ignore it entirely. Daozhang was strange like that, after all.
“No! You’re too good for him,” A-Qing was telling Daozhang, which of course Xue Yang had to dispute vigorously (the whole point was to drag Xiao Xingchen down to his level, after all).
And so the evening passed like many others in Yi City, witnessed only by the three in the coffin home... and this fox, dear reader, who hopes you have enjoyed my stories - and who is indeed grateful not to have been strangled, so I may continue to walk the path between gods and monsters, between the living and the dead.