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Let’s sing those songs today! He’s alive – God – so gruesomely alive. Suddenly children were singing along to their school-time melodies, and the sun swelled five times bigger and no less warm, too. The empty bag his soul once haunted was gone – disappearing into thin air, somewhere else entirely. Maybe below him, pressed into the ground by the very body he inhabited now, or perhaps the wind plucked it from the ground and threw it into the river to wash up on somebody else’s feet instead.
Which, well, for now, was fine. They could trace down that woven fabric another time and untangle it from the water because they were now a them – plural. Two bodies interlaced into the word itself – singular. They both laid in the grass under the morning sun as it rose into the sky, shooting trees down into shadows (relatively speaking, from that point of view, he could imagine how tiny they were too, as a one and as a two).
And they, this beautiful boundless they, limitless they, their coupled coiling they, had nothing to say to each other. Or, Xiao Xingchen didn’t know he was even there waiting to speak, gawking at him with some expression Song Lan wasn’t quite sure he’d be able to name himself, let alone blindly react to. Maybe in his dreams, he had wanted the whole reunion to be sickly romantic and sweet to make up for the crawling years apart; he’d wanted Xiao Xingchen to leap into his arms and burst into tears or return to him over the arching spine of leaping hills during the hushing dusk, or some scene equally as painted.
But this was easy. Waking up – it was surprisingly easy. Just let your eyes open and for everything to come back to you – ha. No eyes for him this time, but Xiao Xingchen’s hands stroked into the grass next to him and seemed to hold his breath like he hadn’t been doing just that for however many years had passed since he last had bones wrapped around his beating heart. Steps away on the grass next to him, Song Lan watched wordlessly. Watched him as he brought a hand to his face and touched it slowly, feeling for the blindfold that still wrapped around the circumference of his head, the strands of hair that fell onto his face, then reaching back to feel for the rest of it, all messy and untied behind him. Xiao Xingchen knotted around himself easily, too.
A reminder of that self-sufficiency time had produced alone, perhaps.
Thus, his list of troubles was consolidated instead into the white hairpiece he must have dropped somewhere. Maybe yesterday, when the rain wouldn’t stop, or last year when he’d been stuck in Gusu on conference invitations, watching diplomatic pinwheels cycle around each other. Maybe he’d never picked the damn thing up and it was long swept under the dirty feet of Yi City. Maybe Xue Yang had swallowed it whole when his grand performance had come to a close, and he burst into a black hole and sucked in everything the light could hit.
This was fine. Don’t let the past chase you – words he remembered with an uncomfortable heaviness. Easy to say in passing. If the hairpiece was gone, then it was gone, and Xiao Xingchen could get another. But Song Lan didn’t breathe anymore because he was dead, so sometimes it’s impossible to let go of that ghostly past. To sit and pretend as though his present and what came before it had nothing to do with each other – surely that was the naïve way to go about things.
And Song Lan didn’t breathe anymore either way, which was decided long in the past. He didn’t breathe, so Xiao Xingchen couldn’t hear his gasp besides him when he woke up. Controllable now, but negotiable. Song Lan also didn’t reach out to touch him, though his hands still worked fine and, if anything, were only a little cold from the wet night before. The fix was easy; reach out and brush his fingers against the palms of his hands or reach a hand over and grab him where the fabric met over his chest or make some loud guttural noise like an animal and watch Xiao Xingchen remember that his thrashing heart had a chain of dead bodies trailing after it.
Right. Okay. Or maybe he could not do that. But to believe in covering the truth was to trust concealment, which he couldn’t anymore. Wouldn’t. Not anymore. He’d only just started to open his mouth, instead of hiding the empty, toothy truth. Only recently had he started to wash in rivers without his clothes, wrapped in the summer heat, and learnt to appreciate the cracks in his skins as ways of looking in, and not some infection climbing up instead. No longer was it the aftershock of horrid lightning grabbing towards his stolen eyes – this is simply what it looked like when one tore away the fickle guise of skin but didn’t quite finish the job.
This time, too, Xiao Xingchen’s blindfold was fresh, like someone had just finished washing it in the running stream and laid it out carefully for the breeze to dry. The pale of his skin underneath almost matched – and how exciting that was, for such skin to be again. Something more than the worn epidermis of the pouch. Something that bled against a knife and rose to a scratch.
In its original form, Wei Wuxian had used a cord to tie it shut. Nothing particularly fancy, and probably ripped off the closest curtain in his reach during its construction, or from a tie holding a dynasty of rice together. It, too, was strewn somewhere on the floor now. Wrapped around the straight blades of grass that only ever folded, bending down in the wind to touch its own toes, and never reaching to the heavens with enough force to mean something to anyone who stood between them. It was Xiao Xingchen’s fingers that wrapped around one lucky little patch, not the other way around, and they weren’t doing much more than being wrapped around, being held beings. Beings amongst beings, caught winding around each other.
From seven steps away, the ones that fenced between them, he wondered if Xiao Xingchen knew.
If, in this form, he had any recollection of anything. If, when they touched, because they eventually would, each crooked line that bumped across his body would inspire some horror or draw out an unnamed expression only his mouth was allowed to show. If, when they wrapped around each other, maybe that night or the one after, or maybe one so far into the future that they couldn’t even humour the thought now, he would be so nauseated to discover that he was being held by a roaring mob of parts rolled up in one shattered bag of skin.
Maybe. Xiao Xingchen sat in the morning sun and breathed out loudly. The beginnings of a meditation, Song Lan assumed. It was completely unreadable. Strange, because their salad days together were narrated in his openness, and Song Lan had grown to expect cyphers from that little bag instead.
Reminder – of course, Xiao Xingchen didn’t know he had an audience. Song Lan took a fake breath, just for himself. The tradition of filling his lungs was comfortable. Needless, but still reassuring to go through the motions of anyway. The paths for air would always be there, no matter how long they’d be left untrodden.
At some point over the years, travelling along the coastal stretch of, he’d found himself aiding some nameless doctor, acting as hands to hold open severed body parts for his budding gallery of man’s insides. The lung was warm and heavy, body of the soldier still fresh, though it was best he kept his mouth shut when the doctor proved just how easy it was so slice in and around human insides. Such reservations were for tomorrow. The lungs, two of them, were slimy to the touch and tinted his hands with a redness they hadn’t seen themselves in decades. And then, then, then, the doctor pulled a thin silver knife through one of them and falling to either side of his upwards palm. Two to four, juggled in his fingers. Song Lan had always imagined them as empty bags, waiting to be filled and emptied like open banquet halls, the likes of which he’d seen decorated in Lanling. Bursting with life, devoid of it, repeat. He’d always thought of an open, empty space that just didn’t exist – never did – waiting for someone to come and go through the same door. The lung grew and shrank – an inflatable lantern for a flame that pulsated in and out of the world.
But, no. The doctor – doctor? – showed him, making another incision and following one of the tubes down. Alone, it was full, too, tunnels and holes and crevices weaving in and around each other. The air didn’t enter and leave so unthinkingly. It didn’t step in and step back out the same way or push its hands up against the walls of some empty cave inside him, searching for gold. It, too, wove itself into his tunnels, dancing down scattered pathways.
Those were that soldier’s lungs, sure, but Xiao Xingchen had lungs like this too. A seat free but never empty. Maybe if he’d opened the pouch prematurely and let his spirit free, he would have seen something like that too. Some mass of meat and holes, tunnels weaving over and under each other, around and around and around until it was impossible to tell where the body ended, and the soul began. Like this, they were coated in skin, wrapped in their robes. Like this, the blindfold wound around his head, and his hair looped around his neck in disarray.
Like this, seven steps away, Xiao Xingchen was alive and whole and so entwined around and amongst himself. But so was Song Lan, in most of the same ways. And soon, they’d be four steps away from each other. And soon, none. Soon it will be stupid, how Song Lan laid there in the sun and thought about tangling himself in Xiao Xingchen, mulling over the thought, pretending their paths weren’t already built from the same brick. Like Xiao Xingchen’s route away from the mountain wasn’t the same one he was taking towards it. Like they hadn’t leaned on each other in their idealism and hung on still when the sky started to grey.
So, this was – what? A hesitation? Something of the sort, he thought to himself, but not bitterly. What use was regret now? What use was it to hold still when the blessing of a third chance was right next to you – breathing. Let’s give in. We, us, ravelled around each other. Your eyes entangled in my skull and your sword woven around my back. The ribbon in my hair could be yours instead – let’s cut it in two. If it’s cold and there’s nowhere for us to be, I’ll wrap you in my cloak and keep my eyes circled for the first signs of snow. I’ll sew my fingers into your elbow and pull you to shelter when the rain starts, and you can look ahead and plait the paths, path, we’ll trail in the morning coming.
The world was, is, warm and exciting. The warmth of the sun laced itself into the fabrics of Song Lan’s robes, and to think of winter felt stupid now, but wouldn’t in a couple of months so it didn’t feel bad about it. With one finger, no, with two, he reached out to tap the smooth back of Xiao Xingchen’s left hand, skin holding him all together.
And if—if the fabrics of his sleeves formed circles instead of tattered shreds. If ribbons could wrap around each other again. If those Gusu headpieces met and tied themselves into bows, ends trailing to the smalls of backs. If children’s puppets needed something warm and living inside them to dance along to their scripts. If yin found yang, and they trailed after each other. If a bird could learn to sing and never stop. If his empty hand lay on the grass under the new-born day, fresh skin reintroducing itself to the blooming world, then maybe it could find some familiar bed to wrap itself under, around, against, amongst, too.
He could be those clean sheets. Why wait until tomorrow?