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It should be snowing. It’s not really Christmas if it isn’t snowing.
Chiaotzu leaned his forehead on the window, pretending the cool glass was instead the first icy chill of the winters they’d lived through up north. On his lap, thick folded cloth marked with charcoal sat uselessly. The needle fell from his hand, the black thread pulling taut and swinging in small circles beneath the chair. Outside, the sun sank slowly towards the water, a trail of golden light glimmering off the choppy tips of the waves. The gold was broken as the waves crested. Dissolving into shining foam that beat against the small pebbled beach and faded to nothing.
It had been so long since he’d had a warm Christmas. Years faded so far in the past that he had trouble remembering if they were really true, or just an elaborate, hopeful dream. A way to escape the ice and silence of the Crane.
Tien was gone. Somewhere. Chiaotzu wasn’t sure where. He’d vanished one early morning about a week prior, leaving behind a note scratched in scrawling letters.
Back soon. Don’t worry.
But how could he not worry? After everything they’d gone through? After the fear and uncertainty and loss? It had been over seven months since the Tenkaichi Budokai, since they’d left the Crane behind, and they were in many ways still finding their feet. The Turtle students had been eager to train with them: the techniques they had used at the tournament were strange and mysterious, but they were bright and optimistic, and Tien had little patience for that in high doses. It had taken only one cruel comment (something about Yamcha’s leg) around the campfire for Yamcha and Krillin to say their goodbyes and shove off.
Tien had been withdrawing, it seemed. Their psychic connection, once so strong it seemed they shared that superficial layer of their consciousness completely, was now tenebrous and delicate. Chiaotzu could feel it, could almost see it: a silver thread that disappeared into the distance, but was too afraid to connect his mind. What if Tien was truly gone? What if he didn’t want Chiaotzu to find him?
“What if, what if, what if,” he grumbled, his breath fogging the glass in front of his face. “Stupid pointless question.”
If he squinted the fog blocked out the sunset over the beach. Using his middle finger, the way he’d been taught to trace many years ago, he drew little stick figures. One on the beach, three dots for eyes shining orange in the fading sunlight. The other floating above it, the face too small for all the details he was trying to squeeze in. With a sigh, he erased the image and the fog in a squeaking wave of his hand.
“Merry Christmas,” he said, a thin note of bitterness in his voice, and then childishly stuck his tongue out at the last brilliant curve of the sun before it vanished beneath the waves.
The light would linger. It always did here on the coast of Mifan, a soft, flat light that blended seamlessly with shadows. There was perhaps an hour left before he’d have to get up and light some lanterns.
He regarded the cloth folded in his lap. Brushed his thumb in the charcoal marking, and rubbed the resulting black smudge between white fingertips. He was almost done. It was almost finished. And yet the idea of fishing up the needle from the little swinging circle it traced beneath his chair seemed like far too much effort. It took a lot of his strength not to just push it onto the floor.
Of course, this year would be just like the others. Isolated and quiet and lonely. Even though it wasn’t snowing, even though the wind wasn’t howling through the pines, and even though he was the safest he had been in many years, it was just the same.
Shen had been ambivalent towards holidays. He had refused to let them have decorations, to exchange presents, to do anything really. Chiaotzu only knew that these were things commonly associated with Christmas from two years ago, when he and Tien had slipped out of the window and down to the village in the valley. They’d watched, clinging to each other in the cold, marvelling at the festivities that played out through picturesque, snow-filmed windows. The next year, they’d swapped gifts before the sun rose. Tien had scratched a pretty geometric pattern on a small smooth stone that Chiaotzu kept propped by his pillow to this day, and Chiaotzu had patched up a pair of Tien’s favourite wrist-wraps.
And now this year. Freedom. And solitude.
Merry Christmas indeed.
He was so busy ruminating over Christmases past that he didn’t notice the door open. In fact, he only really woke up when the sweet, sharp smell of pine drifted past him. Spinning in his seat, the cloth in his lap crumpling and falling to the floor, he stared at the door.
“Sorry I’m late,” Tien said. A pine tree slung easily over one shoulder. Lips slanted in a faint, shy smile. He lowered the tree, a single smooth moment, steadying it with one hand and glancing around. “I didn’t get a stand…”
Chiaotzu flew out of the chair and hugged Tien tight. Ashamed of the doubt and bitterness that had filled him so completely. Of the sting of relieved tears. “I thought you weren’t coming back,” he admitted, keeping his voice low and his face pressed to Tien’s shoulder.
A soft laugh, a gentle hand on his back. “Of course I came back. It’s Christmas.”
The silver thread that connected their minds shone and gleamed in the flat evening light. Sturdy and strong. What a relief.
“I didn’t find any decorations,” Tien said, and Chiaotzu laughed at the apologetic tone in his voice.
“That’s okay. We’ll figure something out.”
The fading light of day kindly lingered long enough for them to find some unbroken shells, some clusters of purple and blue flowers, some yellow twisting vines. Not anything shiny or dramatic, but simple and small and understated. Perfect for their first real Christmas.
Back inside, Tien lit the lanterns and Chiaotzu floated around the tree, placing their makeshift ornaments.
“I got you something, too,” Tien said, as Chiaotzu balanced the last gleaming spiral shell on a high branch.
“You didn’t have to!” Secretly pleased that he had.
Tien shrugged, a self-conscious twitch of his shoulders, and lifted a simple cardboard box. It was heavy, Chiaotzu noted when he took it, and something inside slid with a metallic whisper when it tilted. The flaps of the box weren’t stuck down at all, just tucked beneath each other, and came free when he pulled. Inside was a wok, thin curved iron with a sturdy wooden handle. Inside was a sheathed chef’s knife. Perhaps seeing the brief moment of confusion, perhaps sensing it, Tien said, “You seemed to like cooking. In the...past. I thought you may as well have something good to cook with.”
Surprised that he’d noticed, Chiaotzu inspected the chef’s knife. It was true. He liked cooking. The few moments he was allowed in a kitchen were a reprieve from his life, a cool washcloth on a feverish brow. Here it would not be: in this life it would be like a cool drink with a warm meal. A kind of meditation, but not a needed escape from the world outside.
“Thank you,” he said. Wiped away a tear with the inside of his wrist. He spied the cloth he had been stitching on the ground by Tien’s foot, and jolted as he remembered. “Oh, I made you something too!”
He scrambled to his feet. Fished the cloth out from beneath the chair, realised it was the wrong one and dropped it again. What he was looking for draped neatly over a chair in the corner. When he grabbed it, the slightest twinge of nerves squeezed in his gut, a sensation he dismissed with a sharp shake of his head.
“I stitched it myself,” he said, flushing and unfolding the green surcoat, avoiding Tien’s eyes as they widened and flicked up towards him.
It was the surcoat of the Crane. Heavy, thick material. A sign of their past. But the symbol had been unstitched, removed, cleared, and, in its place, embroidered kanji for ‘Ten’, modeled after Tien’s signature.
“I thought...we could reclaim it,” Chiaotzu said. “That we could redefine what it means to be the Crane. Make it mean something...good… I made one for me too, though it’s not finished...”
Tien hooked up the cloth that was lying by his feet where Chiaotzu had discarded it. He unfolded it and looked at the far more complicated embroidery that made up the ‘Chao’ of Chiaotzu’s own signature—half-finished and outlined in charcoal. He rose to his feet, holding the surcoat in one hand, and pulled Chiaotzu into a hug.
“It’s perfect.” Chiaotzu could hear the smile in Tien’s voice. “Thank you, little brother. Now, I’m going to try this on and see if it’s any lighter without that damned mark. You go scour the kitchen for something to cook up in your new wok.”
Chiaotzu nodded. Grinned. Kissed his brother on the cheek. And floated into the kitchen. There’d be flour and water, some vegetables to slice, enough to make a noodle stir fry. The smile on his face was small but luminous.
They’d exchanged presents for Christmas again, but this time beside a colourfully decorated tree— their tree—on their own terms. Next year would be even better, Chiaotzu just knew it.