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Song Lan feels the spirit-trapping pouch around his neck like a physical weight, even though Xiao Xingchen’s soul is still too fractured to even have any weight.
He’s wandering the woods, trying to stay clear of the cities, though it gets harder and harder every year; cities are exploding everywhere, and people are no longer afraid of the woods.
Song Lan has been discovered a few times already, but since no one seems to remember the ghosts and demons that used to walk the earth, no one remembers to be afraid of people—corpses—like him.
Someone once even complimented him on his “sick make-up”. Song Lan is not sure he likes this advanced world.
He stopped counting the years long ago, the reminder that it has been centuries always hurts him too much to even contemplate for long, because Xiao Xingchen is still not ready to be reincarnated.
Not even after more than three thousand years.
Song Lan doesn’t begrudge him that, but it does still hurt. He knows Xiao Xingchen went through too much to just simply step back into life, but Song Lan misses him more than his own tongue, more than his own life, and every time he checks on Xiao Xingchen’s soul and finds it still fractured a part of him dies, over and over again.
Song Lan wishes he could speak to Xiao Xingchen, tell him how much he misses him, how much the world changed around them, but even that small pleasure is denied to him.
Instead he sighs and presses the pouch close, careful not to crush it in his hand, and he tries to pour his heart and soul into it, though he’s not sure it even reaches Xiao Xingchen.
Song Lan startles when a branch behind him splits and he wonders if Xue Yang has found them, again, like he always seems to, but it’s Lan Jingyi who steps out and approaches Song Lan.
“Song Lan,” Lan Jingyi greets him and Song Lan bows to him, the old customs still too ingrained in him.
Lan Jingyi huffs a laugh at him and then hands him pen and paper.
“How are you?” he asks and Song Lan sighs.
‘The same’, he writes down. Then: ‘How long has it been?’
“Since the last time I saw you? Twenty years maybe, assuming I got reincarnated immediately,” Lan Jingyi says, and Song Lan takes a closer look to him.
Lan Jingyi can’t be older than seventeen or eighteen right now, so he died pretty soon after he saw Song Lan last.
‘How is Sizhui?’ Song Lan wants to know, mostly because he enjoys how Lan Jingyi’s face lights up at that name, though Song Lan can’t deny the jealousy that spreads through him.
Lan Jingyi always finds his soulmate.
In the darker moments Song Lan wonders if maybe he’s simply not Xiao Xingchen’s soulmate, and if he is in fact hindering the healing of his soul.
“He’s fine. He’s with Senior Wei and Hanguang-Jun like always,” Lan Jingyi tells him and Song Lan nods.
He doesn’t resent them their happy lives, even though it stings that they seem to get a happy end over and over again, while he is still waiting for his first one.
“Listen, we haven’t found Xue Yang yet, so you should be careful out here,” Lan Jingyi says.
Song Lan can feel the rising anger in him and he takes a few careful breaths. Xue Yang always gets reincarnated, no matter the horrible things he does in his previous life, and he always comes after Song Lan and Xiao Xingchen.
Lan Jingyi and the others have made it kind of their mission to keep an eye out for him, to stop him whenever they encounter him, but Xue Yang is crafty and evades them more often than not.
And then he always finds Song Lan.
Song Lan never mentions it, but he’s tired of fighting. Tired of going through the world alone. If it wasn’t for Xiao Xingchen’s soul, he would have given up long ago.
‘Thank you’, Song Lan still writes down and then hesitates over the next words.
He didn’t dare to ask last time, or the times before, and he lost count years ago, but Song Lan knows Lan Jingyi always knows which life it is.
Song Lan bitterly thinks it’s easy, counting the lives, if they are happy and spent with the ones you love. It’s harder to do, when all you have is the fractured soul of the love of your life, and never-ending regrets.
‘How many lives has it been?’ he writes down eventually and Lan Jingyi hesitates for a moment before he answers.
“This is the forty-second now,” he quietly tells Song Lan.
If Song Lan still had any blood left, he’s sure his face would be drained of it. Forty-two lifetimes. The last time he asked it had been thirty-five. Roughly five hundred more years have passed, and still, Xiao Xingchen’s soul remains the same as always.
Song Lan wonders just how many more years he’ll be able to do this.
He still misses Xiao Xingchen like a limb; his gentle nature and soft laugh, how good and concerned he was, how teasing he could be with Song Lan. But these memories are distant now; too much time has passed for Song Lan to truly remember the curve of Xiao Xingchen’s smile, the way his own name sounded from Xiao Xingchen’s lips and how his presence had felt besides him.
“He will come back, Song Lan,” Lan Jingyi tells him, ever the optimist and closeted romantic, but Song Lan isn’t so sure of this anymore.
Surely enough time has passed now for Xiao Xingchen to find the will to live.
“Do you want me to say anything to him?” Lan Jingyi wants to know, and though Song Lan doesn’t always take him up on it, he always asks.
This time, Song Lan nods.
‘I miss you’, Song Lan writes down, starts like he always does. ‘I’m sorry for what I said to you, for pushing you away. I wish you would come back, if just so you could see how the world has changed. A-Qing is well, living her life without pain and tragedy, I make sure of that’, he goes on, because he does keep a close eye on her.
She was important to Xiao Xingchen, so she’s important to Song Lan as well. She never remembers her previous lives, and Song Lan suspects she won’t until she meets Xiao Xingchen again.
‘I wish you would tell me how to help you. Is it my presence that’s keeping you from healing? I hope you know I would gladly give my own life, if it means you can heal.’
I’m not sure how much longer I can do this, he doesn’t write down. Xiao Xingchen doesn’t need to hear that.
‘Please come back. It doesn’t have to be to me. Just, come back,’ Song Lan writes last and then hands the pad over to Lan Jingyi.
He doesn’t watch him read it, instead he fumbles with the pouch around his neck and carefully, so carefully, hands it over to Lan Jingyi before he turns around and gives him a little bit of space.
Song Lan doesn’t want to hear his words read out loud.
Lan Jingyi takes a long time, longer than Song Lan’s few words warrant, and he wonders what else he’s telling Xiao Xingchen about. He feels the urge to go over there, snatch the pouch back out of his hands, but he lets him talk to Xiao Xingchen. Maybe whatever he’s saying to him is helping.
Song Lan has to believe that something, eventually, will help. It’s the only thing he has left in his non-life.
Lan Jingyi approaches him, hands the pouch back, and Song Lan is relieved to see that he’s handling it with as much care as Song Lan himself is.
Sometimes Song Lan wonders how Lan Jingyi can muster up so much care for someone he doesn’t even know. He barely knows Song Lan, and still he always takes his time to find him, help him out in whatever way he can.
‘Thank you’, Song Lan writes down, but Lan Jingyi shakes his head.
“He will come back, I know it,” Lan Jingyi says with conviction, and Song Lan wonders where he takes that faith from.
Song Lan feels like he lost his forty-one lives ago.
Instead of answering Song Lan bows to him again, and Lan Jingyi huffs.
“Make sure to be there in my next life,” he says, threatens almost, like he has done for a few lives now.
Like he’s worried that one day, Song Lan won’t be wandering the earth anymore, when Song Lan isn’t even sure that there is something out there that could kill him permanently.
So all Song Lan does is nod, and Lan Jingyi leaves him with one last worried look.
It’s almost too quiet in his absence.
But still, Song Lan continues his aimless wandering, never plans further than to find a spot to settle down in for the night.
He takes off the pouch again when he’s sitting in front of the fire, where he can only imagine the warmth it emits, and he hopes the warmth at least reaches Xiao Xingchen.
‘I miss you so much it’s fracturing my own soul,’ Song Lan thinks, but of course there’s no answer, no change, no response.
He’s glad to know that his thoughts are just in his head, and don’t have the chance to spill out. It would only burden Xiao Xingchen.
Song Lan drapes his coat over himself, cradles the pouch and the soul of the person he loves most close, and falls into the nothingness that is his sleep.
When he wakes up, Xiao Xingchen’s soul is gone.