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The day it happens is insignificant, except for the fact that it isn’t. They’re a year into their new experimental living arrangements. It is Xue Yang’s turn at the market, and A-Qing is off playing with a new friend, one of the merchant’s daughters. Xiao Xingchen and Song Lan are seated at the table in the coffin house, doing little else but talking and enjoying each other’s company. It is all very mundane until, earlier than when he would usually have returned, Xue Yang is back at the coffin house.
“Xingchen,” Xue Yang says from outside the door, accompanied by another, stranger sound, just too far away and too soft to accurately make out. “I have a surprise for you.”
Xiao Xingchen can hear Song Lan’s sigh from where he’s sitting, and he knows his face well enough to imagine with some amount of accuracy what his face likely looks like: the corners of his mouth downturned, brows just slightly furrowed. The sound of the chair creaking indicates that Song Lan is hesitating, that maybe he wants to get up and check what Xue Yang is up to before Xingchen can, but the creaking settles back down.
Thank you, he thinks. When Song Lan had first gotten here and they’d ended up in this arrangement, he had tried to overcompensate around Xiao Xingchen and had only stopped after he’d been confronted by Xue Yang while Xingchen was at the market.
“Listen to me, Zichen," Xue Yang had said, that familiar taunting edge to his voice. “You’re making him feel useless. Are you stupid? Daozhang’s capable enough to handle himself; he doesn’t need your help for everything.”
The thin walls of the coffin house hadn’t kept Xue Yang’s voice from carrying outside, where Xiao Xingchen had stood, shocked, still holding tightly onto the shopping basket, heavy with produce. He’d never heard Song Lan’s response, too busy backing up and away from the house, though his heart burned with a confusing mixture of fear and affection.
Now, Xingchen opens the door himself. This close, the sound is more identifiable for what it really is: a strange grumbling, growling noise, yet unlike the noise that would come out of a dog. It’s just below where he knows Xue Yang’s mouth would be and sounds almost like an old man complaining. “What is it, A-Yang?”
“A cat.” He can hear a smile in the proud lilt of Xue Yang’s voice, and it makes the corners of his own mouth twitch.
“No,” Song Lan says from behind him, and he can hear the sound of a chair scraping against the floor and Song Lan’s heavy footsteps towards the door. “That thing is filthy. It looks like an oversized rat.”
There’s a tense silence. Xingchen hates these, like a moment of teetering on the edge of a cliff with nothing to hold onto and not knowing when he’s going to fall.
“She is not a thing or a rat,” Xue Yang says, breaking the silence. Then, his voice directed at Xingchen now, “Daozhang, can we keep her?” He can hear the sound of Xue Yang’s hand scratching at the cat’s fur. It doesn’t make much of a difference, because the cat continues its strange yowling. He wonders just how dirty it really is.
“Of course not. We don’t need another mouth to feed—”
“Wait, Zichen,” Xingchen says, reaching one hand out to catch his lover’s arm. “A-Yang, give us a moment, please.”
There’s a pause before Xue Yang answers, his voice sounding taut. “Yeah, sure.” His natural sing-song is traded in for a staccato beat, each syllable distinct and sharp.
Xingchen lets the door softly close, separating himself and Zichen away from Xue Yang. He leads Zichen by the arm towards the back wall of the house, hoping the distance will be enough to keep their lowered voices from carrying.
“I think this could be good for him,” Xingchen tells him, one hand still resting on his arm, rubbing circles with his thumb over the fabric of his sleeve. “I think he should...develop a connection to another living being that isn’t me.” He pauses, and the air around him feels heavy with words he wants desperately to say and wants nothing more than to never say. In a show of cowardice, he doesn’t. “And I think A-Qing would love a pet as well.”
“You haven’t seen how dirty that thing is, Xingchen.”
“He can clean her.”
“There’s no guarantee that he’ll be able to keep it around.”
“If she runs away, that will solve the problem for you.”
Song Lan is silent for a few excruciatingly long moments. Xingchen is relying on the fact that he has never been able to argue with Xingchen for long before giving in.
“You aren’t myparents, you know,” Xue Yang calls through the door, a bitter edge to his voice. Xiao Xingchen can feel his face heating up and his stomach flipping and souring. He can also hear the creak of the wood door opening again, the scrape of it against the floor. “I can keep her whether you want her around or not. I was only asking Daozhang because he gets upset when I make decisions that “affect all of us” without asking him.”
The implicit meaning is clear in the exclusion of Song Lan, but Xingchen speaks again before he can object.
“I’d love for you to keep her around, A-Yang,” he says, smiling gently.
“Good,” Xue Yang says, his voice sounding a bit tight and softer than Xingchen had been expecting. He sounds relieved and wary at once, and Xingchen wants to reach out and soothe him, but he keeps his hands to himself. “I mean, I was going to keep her around anyway, but I figured I should at least try and seem like I care, so that one doesn’t have more reasons to complain about me.”
Xingchen can imagine Song Lan’s frown as he replies. “I already have plenty of reasons to complain about you,” he says.
Xingchen smiles and brushes the comment off. “Shall we give her a bath together, then?”
“Yeah,” Xue Yang says, sounding like he’s a million miles away. Xingchen wonders where he goes, when he gets like that; Xue Yang has rarely wanted to reveal those distant thoughts and Xingchen has rarely pushed, despite wanting to know, so desperately that it burns in the pit of his stomach.
Sometimes he feels impatient like a child, waiting for Xue Yang to open up.
“You’ll strangle that thing if you hold it any tighter,” Song Lan remarks, and Xingchen reaches towards his voice to give him a light, admonishing slap.
Together they fill the tub they usually use to bathe with tepid water and proceed to struggle getting the cat into the actual water for far too long; Xue Yang seems uncommonly patient during the process, although he’s largely silent.
Once she’s wet, some of the mats in her fur seem to come out easily, but not all of them. Xue Yang uses his own comb to try and get out the rest of the tangles and matting while Xingchen holds the cat down, still growling and hissing and trying to get out of the water. Xue Yang makes calming shushing noises, something Xingchen has never heard in all their years together. The sound of his hands moving under the water implies softness. He knows Xue Yang is dextrous, from experience, but had never imagined this particular application. It is surprising that he is capable of such gentleness, but not unwelcome.
He hopes the decision to support Xue Yang’s desire to keep this cat will be a good one. Xingchen wants him to take care of something, to see that he is capable of more than just destruction and death and the same hands that he used to kill can be used to soothe.
Xue Yang, sometimes, seems to have picked up the lesson, but it never sticks around. He’ll cradle Xingchen’s face in his hands and kiss him goodnight so gently Xingchen wanders if he is truly the same man who had once committed atrocities, and then be the same again the next morning: sharp at the edges, jagged like the cut from a dull blade. He has been hurt so endlessly that Xingchen isn’t sure he’ll be able to heal even given the rest of his life.
The problem, Xingchen thinks, is that it’s all for him. Xue Yang cares for Xingchen, but has not yet learned to care for himself, has not yet learned that caring for others is often the same as caring for himself. That he can accept softness and kindness from others and not feel that his acceptance is worthy of contempt.
Xingchen has resigned himself to waiting. He cannot force a change in someone unwilling.
But this is...
He listens to the sound of Xue Yang as he leans over the tub, hands moving in and out of the water and over the cat’s fur and skin. This is change, this is different. This is Xue Yang wanting to care for some other living thing. Xingchen is giddy with it.
He tries not to seem too eager, but his fingers trail up and down Xue Yang’s arms and he leans in often, trying to get a better sense of what’s happening in the tub.
“What color is she?” he asks once she’s relatively clean and they’re drying her off as best they can with the spare cloth they have at hand. She’s stopped growling at them as much, but when he reaches out to scratch her under her chin, she pulls away from his hand with a small sound of discontent.
“A tan-grey,” Xue Yang says slowly, like he’s taking the time to consider the cat’s appearance, “but her ears, tail, feet, and face are a darker grey. Her eyes are blue.”
“She sounds lovely,” Xingchen says.
“Yes,” Xue Yang says again in that same, distant voice.
---
Song Lan is surprised to see the cat stick around for longer than a single day. He is surprised at a week, and then two, and then he loses track and it’s been two months and the cat is still here. It hasn’t done any of the things he was worried about, like dragging dead things all throughout the house, or tracking dirt in, or hurting Xingchen. He’s had to begrudgingly admit that it hasn’t done anything worthy of his initial ire.
(There had been one instance, however, where it had been licking and chewing at its own paws in a way that made a disgusted shiver climb its way up Song Lan’s spine. The long tufts of fur between its toes had made its feet look large and swollen, jarringly disproportionate to its small body.)
Xue Yang has been calling it Mooncake, and Song Lan quietly thinks that the name doesn’t quite fit. It’s a small, fluffy thing, with dusty grey fur that makes it look a bit dirty even when it’s perfectly clean. Whenever it watches Song Lan across the room, its eyes always seem narrowed as if glaring at him.
Despite the appearance of a near-constant glare, the cat doesn’t seem to hate anything but other cats. When other feral cats get too close to the coffin house, it chases them off with that uncommon grumbling noise.
It’s clear, however, how much the cat adores and trusts Xue Yang above all. It sleeps next to him every night, rubs its body and face against his legs, curls up in his lap, and eats food straight from his hand. Song Lan hardly sees the two of them apart.
He thinks he spots Xue Yang cleaning some fur out of a comb out behind the house one day, but the moment he’d been spotted, Xue Yang had dodged out of sight and the comb was never seen again, but the cat’s fur has remained unmatted and, by all appearances, well-groomed.
He doesn’t know what to make of it. It seems that Xue Yang is taking good care of it, but Song Lan has yet to actually see anything other than the results of adequate care. Xingchen promises he isn’t the one doing it and A-Qing pleads her own innocence. (In this matter, that is; Song Lan has seen her sneak the cat extra scraps during meals.) The only conclusion is the one that doesn’t make any sense. He cannot reconcile the man who would care for this creature with the same one who had slaughtered an entire clan and Song Lan’s entire temple.
And yet there is something in Xue Yang’s features that softens when he looks at the thing, like for once he isn’t thinking about 10 different escape plans in case this arrangement goes south for him. He seems content in a way Song Lan only ever sees in the way Xue Yang watches Xingchen when he thinks no one is watching: that relaxed fondness, the curve of his mouth less taunting and more soft.
Song Lan doesn’t want to think about Xue Yang this way. He barely wants to think about him at all.
He may have agreed to this living arrangement, but that doesn’t mean he has to want to get along with Xue Yang any more than what makes Xingchen happy. He’s seen the panicked, flighty look Xingchen gets about him when they fight, and since Xue Yang hasn’t done anything except be an annoying menace since this all began, he’s begrudgingly accepted that it may be for the better.
He mostly doesn’t think about the cat anymore, because when he thinks about the cat too much, he thinks about Xue Yang in a way that curls up in the pit of his stomach, warm and satisfied like a pet dog. It makes him too much on edge, the fondness that seems to creep in around the edges of his peripheral.
Like how the first time it caught a mouse, Xue Yang had seemed ecstatic, praising it and sneaking it extra bits of his dinner that night. Something in Song Lan’s stomach had flipped at the sight of it. He hadn’t noticed he was staring at Xue Yang, not replying to something Xingchen was saying to him until Xingchen had politely cleared his throat and smiled at Song Lan with that knowing look on his face that made Song Lan feel naked.
Or once, when he had come back from his turn at the market, basket full of ingredients for the night’s supper in hand, to find Xue Yang asleep with the cat curled up at his side. He paused, thinking for a moment that Xue Yang and the cat almost looked similar, and if he looked close enough, he could see the point of Xue Yang’s canine tooth sticking out below his upper lip, much like the cat at his side.
He didn’t look dangerous then. The cat didn’t look dangerous, either, but he’d seen what they could both do. Xue Yang was a killer, and he’d watched the cat play with mice before killing them, completely brutally and without mercy. They reminded him too much of each other.
He doesn’t want Xue Yang to remind him of a cat. He’s a danger to others; it doesn’t matter how long he goes without killing or maiming someone if the desire is still there. What if he leaves? Will Song Lan and Xingchen be forced to chase after him again while he escapes and murders as he pleases? The blood of those people will be on their hands, will be on Song Lan’s hands, and the thought makes him shudder as surely as if the blood was physically there.
In spite of that, something still softens inside of him when he looks at the two of them, like he’s seeing a different Xue Yang, one he can view as a person rather than a list of his crimes. He doesn’t like it. He likes it. He hates it. He wants to know how Xingchen handles it, but he doesn’t want to ask. It’s too vulnerable and too revealing.
The next time he sees Xue Yang and the cat napping together, he swallows the new feeling rising in his throat and looks away. If he actually pets the cat the next time it comes up to him and no one is around to see, he won’t tell.
---
The cat reminds Xue Yang of growing up without a home of his own. He’d hardly realized what he was doing until he was halfway to the coffin house with her clutched to his chest so tightly it was a surprise his arms hadn’t started to ache. In his rush, he had even neglected to get all of the ingredients for dinner.
Living with Xingchen, loving him, is making Xue Yang soft. He’d taken one look at that dirty, starving creature and wanted to help her, like he’s ever done anything to help anyone else in his life. (He distinctly does not let himself remember how, time and time again, he had helped Xiao Xingchen for no gain of his own. Even now, when he falls asleep every night pressed up against Daozhang’s side like he’s belonged there his entire life.)
Mooncake has never had anything like that in her life. If she had, he doesn’t think she would have been nearly as feral as she was. She’s better now; he can feel the way her body has filled out from being well-fed, possibly for the first time in her life. This has allowed her the ability to hunt for much of her own food and take the burden from their coin purse.
She’s independent, which Xue Yang thinks is a good thing and A-Qing thinks makes her a bad pet. Independence, he argues, is good for her. If Xue Yang were to leave her, like Xingchen had tried to leave him, that terrible day when the truth was revealed, she would survive. She would not be wrecked in the same way Xue Yang had been, a realization creeping up the back of his neck like dread, Xingchen’s blood on his hands in a way that was nothing like how his fantasies had always played out.
(He does love the way she curls up near the end of the bed when they go to sleep, always making sure to touch him. Even if it’s just for body warmth, it’s as comforting as the feel of XIngchen at his side.)
When he names her Mooncake, Xingchen thinks the name is cute, and A-Qing complains that it sounds like a child named the cat. Once he’d gone for the knife at his side, she’d shut up well enough, although the silence was not worth the look Xingchen had given him. It’s better than naming her something like Egg Tart, like she’d suggested. A-Qing just doesn’t have any taste.
Once she’s bathed, cleaned, and given a full meal, she seems to settle down some, and to his surprise, she doesn’t seem to want to leave him alone. She follows him into the market most times he goes, sleeps in his bed, watches him carefully as he moves around the coffin house, when she isn’t pressed against his side.
Her wide blue eyes look up at him expectantly while he’s making their dinner tonight.
“No more food today,” he tells her, as seriously as he can manage. It helps if he thinks of it as mocking Song Lan. He and Xingchen shouldn’t be back for a little while still, so he can indulge in the habit he’s somehow picked up of talking to the cat as if she can understand him. “We don’t want you to get so fat that you won’t be able to catch mice anymore. You can’t just rely on me to give you food when there’s a whole world of birds and rodents for you to kill and eat.”
Mooncake just stares at him, expectant. She doesn’t understand what he’s saying, but it never seems to matter to him anyway. Just the act of speaking with her is cathartic.
Xue Yang looks past the fire to the direction Song Lan and Xingchen should be coming from. He doesn’t see their silhouettes against the fading light of day; with just a hint of hesitation, he scoops Mooncake up in his arms and presses a kiss to her forehead. She looks unhappy about being picked up, but she doesn’t vocally complain, eyes too focused on their dinner to sabotage her chances of getting in on it.
He scratches her under her chin as melancholy wells up inside of him, prickling at his eyes and making the phantom pinky of his left hand ache. She might have died if he hadn’t taken her home with him. He knows that much; she’d been skin and bones, worse once he’d gotten her into the tub and her long hair had stuck to her emaciated frame. She’d likely been out there alone since she was a kitten. Maybe, like Xue Yang himself, she had never even known her mother.
Getting attached is a bad idea. It’s always been a bad idea, been the cause of too much weakness and disappointment and pain. He’d gotten attached to Xingchen, and Xingchen had almost left him.
But Xingchen hadn’t left. Xingchen had stayed, and after some thinking, he had still wanted to be with Xue Yang. Xue Yang, whose own parents hadn’t wanted him.
“You’ll stay with me,” he asks the cat, setting her down again and scratching under her chin and then behind her dark ears, “right, Mooncake?”
The lump in his throat feels a bit easier to swallow now, so he returns to cooking dinner and whistling a jaunty tune, waiting for Xingchen and Song Lan to return home. The waiting is a little less lonely now that there’s someone to wait with him.
---
Song Lan has never been able to understand Xingchen’s fascination with the various creatures that live in the dirt and under rocks and in tall grasses, ones with far too many legs and eyes, whose bodies, so alien to their own, seem to function backwards. He can at least somewhat understand Xue Yang’s fascination with his ugly cat; the thing, now clean, is at least pleasant to touch.
But still, he occasionally finds Xingchen hunched over the dirt, his hand outstretched so some small insect can aboard his hand. He imagines the feeling of those tiny feet against his skin and shivers, but Xingchen is always smiling so softly he cannot begrudge him this small joy.
(Provided, of course, that he washes his hands well before even thinking about touching Song Lan again. Xingchen had laughed the first time he’d made that clear and told him that he wouldn’t have done anything else. Song Lan might have fallen a little in love with him right then and there, before they’d really gotten to know each other, from the smile Xingchen had given him alone.)
This Xiao Xingchen, the one who gets excited about a centipede crawling over his hand and colonies of ants, is the one that most people will never get the privilege to meet. Song Lan’s heart beats a steady rhythm most of the time, but it always speeds up, just a bit, when he watches this Xingchen, childlike happiness shining on his face as he explains some fact about some critter using his hand as its own personal playground. He hasn’t known much contentment in the years of searching for Xingchen, and even now it is harder to come by than before.
Everything changes, but some things remain so close to what he had once known that his heart aches for the familiarity of it.
He is more than a little bitter about having to share this side of Xingchen with Xue Yang. The first time he sees Xue Yang hunched over next to Xingchen in the dirt in front of the coffin house, speaking to him in a soft, hushed tone, his heart had clenched in his chest.
He can handle jealousy. He can handle being jealous of Xue Yang, though the feeling threatens to burn through his patience. He isn’t quite sure that he can handle knowing that the reason for the way Xingchen speaks to Xue Yang, touches him with tender care, is from Song Lan’s own mistake.
He looks at Xingchen with open adoration, eyes wide and glittering. Song Lan is shot through like an arrow with the sudden desire for Xue Yang to look at him that way. It’s shocking, but it doesn’t go away just because Song Lan doesn’t want to want it.
He watches as Xingchen transfers a beetle from his own hands into Xue Yang’s, watches the slight shudder run through Xue Yang’s body, the twitch of his hands as he holds back from dropping the thing to the ground. The look on his face is not one of outright disgust, but there is discomfort present in the tense line of his mouth and the way his brows inch closer together.
Xue Yang had been here when Song Lan was not.
Song Lan is the one who had pushed Xiao Xingchen away. It had been him, even if Xue Yang was the one who had slaughtered everyone at Baixue Temple and blinded him. The guilt of that has been holding him back for too long; things have changed between them, and he isn’t entirely sure how to fix it. But he can, one step at a time.
---
Xingchen’s love of the dirt and all things that live in it separates him from his companions. He supposes that it had started with the way he was raised, up on a mountain, without the same methods of distraction as other children. Even still, those around his own age group were very limited. Most of his time was spent training, but children will be children, and he sought out ways to have fun on his own. He had never been discouraged.
And the thing he’d ended up with was this: a fascination with the things that crawl underneath their feet, things that most people think of as beneath themselves.
Song Lan is averse to all things dirty, Xingchen knows this. It’s natural that this extends to not wanting to root around in the dirt, looking for worms and centipedes and beetles, so he has always kept this hobby to himself when in just the company of themselves.
Perhaps it was foolish of him to expect that Xue Yang would have enjoyed this pastime as well. He’d first realized, when he’d still known of Xue Yang as “my friend,” that he enjoyed cleanliness. Not to the same degree as Zichen, of course, but he would bathe as often as possible, hated the idea that he could be overly dirty or that others would perceive him as such. While it had always seemed like he wouldn’t mind getting a bit dirty in a fight, or even settling next to Xingchen as he searched in the dirt for his skittering friends, he wasn’t as relaxed about the dirt and the grime as Xingchen himself.
And so he does it alone. It’s different now that he cannot see, but he can still feel their legs scuttling against his skin, or feel the texture of the worms he pulls out of the dirt. He takes care, always, to put them back, as close to where he found them as possible, not to interfere with their lives.
Now, outside of the coffin home, he sifts his fingers through dry soil and picks up large rocks. There’s not much here most days, but today he finds a long creature, something with numerous legs that tickle against the skin of his palm: a centipede. He strokes a finger down it’s back, feeling the way its body moves on his hand and under his finger, and sits and feels for a while. Eventually, he puts it back down.
There’s a small anthill nearby that he’s careful not to disturb with his fingers, but he can feel a few of the ants nearby and sets his hand down, letting them crawl into his palm. Even something so small has a purpose in the world, even if he does not know what that purpose is.
“Daozhang,” Xue Yang calls to him from the entrance to the coffin house. “There’s a huge spider in here, if you want to catch it for Song-daozhang. I think he’s afraid of it.”
Xingchen chuckles to himself and gently brushes the ants off of his hand, then brushes his hands together to rid himself of as much dirt as possible before rinsing them off before entering the home.
Song Lan is not in the coffin house to be scared of the spider, but he doesn’t let Xue Yang know that he’s aware.
“Where is the spider, A-Yang?” Xue Yang coughs, and then leads him to it.
“I don’t think it’s one of the venomous kinds,” Xue Yang says, but the end of his sentence hangs in the air like there’s an unspoken addendum that he’s too afraid to add. “Be careful,” maybe, or “but it could be.” After a beat too long, he adds onto the sentence, the sing-song quality to his voice trembling a bit too tellingly, “But you should still try not to die, okay? I don’t want to be stuck here alone with Song-daozhang and Littl—A-Qing.”
Xingchen hums his agreement, scooping up the insect with gentle hands and carrying it out of the coffin house without much ado. From the spacing between its legs, it doesn’t seem very big at all, but this he also keeps to himself, setting it free a fair distance away from the house instead and returning to press a chaste kiss to Xue Yang’s lips.
“Zichen is safe from the spider now,” he says.
“Good for him that you’re so willing to dispatch them for him,” Xue Yang says, like this is some biting insult to Song Lan’s character, that he has someone who loves and cares for him enough to make his environment more comfortable.
“Yes,” Xingchen says, sincerely. “It is.” Xue Yang is silent, but the sound of his feet against the wooden floor of the coffin home is unmistakable.
In a moment of rare softness, Xue Yang slides one of his hands into one of Xingchen’s. Curling his fingers around it, Xingchen can feel where the smallest digit is missing. His left hand, then. Xue Yang’s left hand in his own is an even rarer occurrence, like Xue Yang is still grasping onto old habit out of fear that the reminder of who he is will make Xingchen leave.
(It won’t. If he hadn’t had those three years with Xue Yang, his companion’s identity hidden, he wouldn’t be here now. But it had happened, and he had seen Xue Yang from a different angle, had felt love chasing away the hollow loneliness that had lived in his chest near his heart. All things change, even Xue Yang.)
“Your hands are dirty,” Xue Yang says, closer now, like he’s hovering by Xingchen’s side, but hesitant. His hand clutches Xingchen’s own like he’ll fall if he lets go. Xingchen squeezes back. “I still don’t know how you keep those robes so pristine white, Daozhang.”
Xingchen laughs, and the ghost of the smile tugs at his lips long after the laughter itself has faded.
“It’s too easy to make you laugh, Daozhang,” comes Xue Yang’s voice, and he pulls his hand out of Xingchen’s. Its loss makes Xingchen’s hand feel cold and empty, and his fingers clutch around nothing but air. “Back to your dirt and your bugs, then.”
He smiles and nods, but leans in to steal a kiss before he goes.
---
Xingchen is a little odd, but Xue Yang has always known that. After all, he’d taken Xue Yang in, laughed at his jokes, and let him stick around for three years. Longer, still, even after he’d learned of the identity of his companion.
His habit of digging around in the dirt is an extension of that; it adds to his unique charms. When others might seek out the company of a dog or a rabbit, Xingchen seems content to disturb the insects for a while and then leave them where they were.
It’s probably for the better that he can’t really see them, though Xue Yang supposes this isn’t a new habit he’d picked up with blindness, especially considering how unsurprised Song Lan is by it.
(Maybe he had hoped it was something just he’d known about Xingchen, but he’s not able to work up the same amount of venom against Song Lan as he once was.)
Seeing Xingchen like this, as unerringly gentle as he is in all things, Xue Yang wants to drape his arms gently around Xingchen’s shoulder, to press his face into the side of his throat, to be gentle in return. He wants to bite into his neck and make it hurt and get punished for it, wants the pain and the ruin that comes along with it.
He’s working on that. He’s working on the desire to tear apart everything that he’s built up over time. It had been easier when he had been pretending to be someone else. If not someone else, just not Xue Yang.
Seeing Xingchen care for something as little and insignificant as an ant making its way across his palm makes him want to crush the thing, beg for that attention to be returned to him, demand and fight for the smallest bit of attention, like he’s had to for his entire life.
But Xingchen has been teaching him that he doesn’t have to; the proof is there in his calm affection first thing in the morning, in the way that he makes sure Xue Yang has enough to eat and is warm enough when they go to bed, in the way he kisses him so sweetly and like he cannot get enough at once.
Seeing Xingchen care for something as disgusting as a centipede covered in wriggling legs and dirt makes him think that he is that insignificant. That Xingchen would have taken in any bloody criminal on the side of the road and welcomed him in and fallen in love with him. That he is only special in the fact that he happened to be in the same place, same time.
But he should not think so callously of Xingchen, that he is so naive as to give his love away to just anyone. Song Lan had said that to him, once, voice sharp as Jiangzai, and Xue Yang had bared his teeth and given a biting remark in return, but it had stuck with him. Xingchen is wiser and smarter than that, knows better than to give his heart away to anyone.
Xue Yang isn’t just anyone; he makes him laugh.
Right now, watching him feel the sensation of a many-legged creature crawl across his dirtied hands, Xue Yang will come up behind him, press his face into the side of his neck, and tell him a crude joke that will inevitably bring that laughter to the surface. He will ask Xingchen what he’d found and he will not have to fight for the smile that he gets in return.
When Xingchen is done, he will take Xue Yang’s hand in his own and they will go inside together. Xue Yang will tease A-Qing until Xingchen admonishes him and he stops, obedient, but not obedient like he had sometimes been for Jin Guangyao. Obedient like he wants to be, like doing what Xiao Xingchen wants will make him happy, make him smile, make him laugh, and there is nothing Xue Yang wants more than that.
---
During this past year, Song Lan has developed a new habit. Before Xingchen and Xue Yang get up in the early morning, he takes scraps of food, mostly bread, outside and feeds it to the various birds that come by their small home. As the sun rises, he watches them peck at the food, trilling and chirping at him. It’s calm and peaceful, something that his days lack once a certain loudmouth wakes up for the day.
This morning, he has a particularly full basket. He sneaks out of bed, making sure that the blankets he leaves behind don’t leave Xingchen cold. The cat looks up at him from where she’s curled up against Xue Yang’s legs as he leaves, and he swears he sees a bit less malice in her eyes than when she’d first attached herself to Xue Yang.
There are small wildflowers growing near the house. He doesn’t think he’d seen those a year ago when he had first come to Yi City to find Xingchen. He takes a handful of stale, torn bread and tosses it out; the crowd of birds that has gathered has already learned when and where to look for breakfast. There’s something calming and peaceful about that knowledge, that he can provide life to something else even when his life has gone so differently than it was supposed to.
Even when his entire temple had been slaughtered and he still sleeps in the same bed as their killer. Even when his anger towards that killer is slowly slipping out of his grasp.
A particularly brilliantly colored bird creeps up closer to his feet, chirping at him curiously as if waiting for the next handful. The cat creeps up next to him, stretching her limbs, blue eyes watchful on the birds as if she’s going to go bounding after them. But after yawning once, she settles against Song Lan’s side where he sits perched at the front of the house.
Tentatively, he reaches out a hand to stroke her head and within a few strokes feels the distinct rumble of her purr. He’s only heard it under the touch of Xue Yang or Xingchen, but here she is: pressed against his side and purring her happiness against his palm.
Song Lan swallows heavily. The cat stays by his side, looking up at him, expectantly, with wide blue eyes. She does not chase the birds, although Song Lan has seen her deposit many a songbird at Xue Yang’s feet in offering.
Maybe she’s too tired, too well fed, to chase the birds. He knows not to give it too much credit to think that she knows how important they are to Song Lan and has chosen not to hunt them. He tosses out his last handful, but like most mornings, lingers still as the morning comes to life around him.
The company of the cat at his side is more comforting than he had expected. These mornings are so often lonely, but it is not an unwelcome loneliness. He had known what bone-deep loneliness was made of in those years without Xingchen; a simple morning without human company will not crush his soul.
Xiao Xingchen is still here. This weight sits, warm and comfortable, in his chest. So he watches the birds go about their morning, hopping around on the ground for the last of the scraps, looking in the dirt for insects and worms, flitting up to the trees and settling down.
His eyes settle on a pair of doves nestled together on a branch as one grooms the other, looking as devoted as a pair of birds can be. He’s still watching them when Xingchen joins him, the sun fully risen in the sky.
It continues. The cat keeps coming outside with him in the morning, and she keeps curling up against his side, and she keeps herself away from Song Lan’s birds. He purrs under his hand. She looks up at him with blue eyes that seem almost full of affection.
Song Lan doesn’t know how to feel about it. He’s grateful that she hasn’t hurt anything precious to him, that she has finally warmed up to him, even if he is the last of the four of them.
“I love you,” he says to Mooncake one morning. The words feel odd in his mouth; he barely says them to Xingchen, despite Xingchen’s own freedom with the words. He used to worry that he wasn’t telling Xingchen often enough.
“It does not matter to me how much you say it,” Xingchen had once told him, late at night when they were exhausted and drifting to sleep and Song Lan had let his treacherous worry slip. “Only that you show me. I am happy knowing how much you care for me; you do not need to change yourself because you think that will make me happier.” Song Lan had given him a small smile in return and kissed him one more time. Xue Yang, from the other side of Xingchen, had pretended to retch, and even that hadn’t ruined the moment.
(Song Lan had almost become fond of Xue Yang’s unique way of communicating, how he so often says the opposite of what he actually means.)
Mooncake looks up at him as if she understands the words and chirps at him. The brightest of the birds hops up to Song Lan’s feet again, and he feels the smallest hint of a smile curling up his lips. He has been here for a year, and slowly but surely he is sinking into habits and little moments of happiness that make it a home.
He speaks to Xingchen often about the struggle of forgiving someone who has done so much that is unforgivable, about the way that kind of forgiveness changes you to the rest of the world Song Lan would hate to admit that the ice around his heart thaws each time Xue Yang laughs, that he cannot help but feel a bit fonder when he sees how Xingchen laughs at his jokes and puts his arms around him.
Xue Yang made Xingchen happy after he had made him miserable. He has had the time to come to terms with this.
Maybe, perhaps, he thinks, looking down at the purring cat, it’s time for him to come to terms with the fact that Xue Yang has made him a bit happier, too.
---
In the morning, Xiao Xingchen can feel Song Lan creep out of bed on his own. Xue Yang stays fast asleep, his arms wrapped tight around Xingchen’s waist. He hadn’t slept this well when they first stayed together in Yi City all those years ago, often waking up with a shout or a cry, things that had sounded gut-wrenching and painful. Sometimes, when he thought Xingchen was still asleep, he would cry.
Xingchen doesn’t think Song Lan knows that he knows about the morning ritual, but he has noticed that Song Lan reserves a bit of his own meal, things like bread and fruits and raw vegetables, and that it is gone the next morning, has even secretly added bits of his own meal to the basket Song Lan keeps the scraps in.
Once he is sure Zichen has had enough time to himself, he turns over and presses a kiss to Xue Yang’s neck, hears his stir in his sleep and grumble in protest.
“Wake up, A-Yang,” he says gently. “We have things to do this morning, and you told me you would help wash our clothes.”
Xue Yang, most certainly awake by now, pushes himself further into the blankets.
“On more kè, Daozhang,” he says, grabbing Xingchen’s hand with his own and nuzzling up against it, when his ruse of pretending not to be awake yet doesn’t work. Some mornings, Xingchen might be a little less lenient, but his heart goes soft at the sound of Xue Yang’s rough morning voice today and the feeling of his fingers wrapped around his hand.
“Alright,” he says, giving Xue Yang another kiss, this time on the top of his head. “I’ll return soon, and you’d better be ready to get up then. You said you would help wash our clothes today.”
Xue Yang hums in response and relinquishes Xingchen’s hand.
Once Xingchen is properly dressed, he leaves the house to join Song Lan. After years of knowing someone, silence becomes easy and comfortable. That’s how it had been in the years before the massacre of Baixue Temple.
In the time since, their silences stretch between them as if pulled tight. It makes Xiao Xingchen feel itchy, wanting to climb out of his own skin. He’d been good at reading Zichen, once, but now? He often finds himself wondering, and often backing down from asking when he knows he should.
The birds are chirping in the background, and he can hear the movements of Song Lan’s hands as he tosses out bits of food for them to eat. Their feet scratch in the dirt as they go to grab the food Song Lan offers.
Just the sound of it is peaceful enough. Grounding. He could listen to this sound, and the broken bits of birdsong, for hours if he’d let himself. If the birds stayed long enough to let him. If Song Lan let him stay long enough to.
Their relationship isn’t fully repaired yet. Xingchen had harbored more feelings about their last encounter before their runion in Yi City than he had realized, and Song Lan had not known just how much his friend had changed. Neither had stopped loving the other, but things had gotten complicated, and quickly.
A year later, things still aren’t fully repaired. Their silences still stretch on a little too long, Song Lan sometimes says something with a bit too much of an edge, like he’d been holding back something bitter as bile.
He longs for the days when they could reach for each other and know, without speaking, what they each wanted. He misses the days when they could go for days, mostly silent, and feel content. They need to talk, now, and he wants to talk. He might just be too afraid of what he might hear.
“Can I?” he asks, breaking the silence, for good or bad. He extends a hand towards Song Lan, palm up. Years ago, that might have been enough, but because he wants to make sure they are talking and saying what they mean, even in the most mundane of ways, he continues, “Feed the birds, that is.” He pauses again. “With you.”
“Yes.” The reply is so without hesitation that Xingchen feels his heart flip in his chest. This past year has almost felt like when they were courting each other for the first time, if it weren’t for the everything else about the situation.
Song Lan’s fingers brush his palm as he deposits scraps of bread and vegetables into Xingchen’s hand. Xingchen can feel his face heat, as if they are teenagers and this one chaste touch is all they know.
Together, they feed the birds in a more companionable, comfortable silence. When they’re out of food, Song Lan lets Xingchen lean against him and settle his head on his shoulder. It’s been longer than the single kè Xue Yang had asked for, but he doesn’t see the harm in letting him sleep in a little longer this morning. They’ll just have to start the laundry a bit late.
The backdrop of the morning is the birdsong and Zichen’s soft breathing; they don’t talk again until Xue Yang wakes up for the day.
---
Xue Yang doesn’t know what’s so interesting about birds. He knows Song Lan gets up and feeds them in the morning; he’d have to be an idiot not to notice the way he squirrels away his scraps and rises before either Xue Yang or Xingchen.
Lately Mooncake, that traitor, has been going with him. Xue Yang thinks that maybe she has a good reason for spending those mornings with him. He thinks that maybe Song Lan is lonely and doesn’t want to say anything about it. Xue Yang thinks maybe he should stop thinking these kinds of things about a man who has been very clear in his disdain for Xue Yang, despite the way Xue Yang’s animosity towards him has been melting away, day by day.
It’s slower than it ever was for Xiao Xingchen, upon whom Xue Yang had been fixated since the first time they met, whether he’d realized the real reason for his fascination and attraction or not.
(And Xue Yang isn’t entirely sure he had realized at the time, as twisted as his feelings have always been. Xingchen has been helping him untangle a bit of it all, and although he still finds himself drifting back towards his old habits, he reminds himself not to do something Xingchen wouldn’t approve of day in and day out. Perhaps, even, he has started thinking about what Song Lan would approve of.)
One morning, Xue Yang wakes up on his own, without Xingchen needing to shake him awake. Mooncake and Song Lan are already out of bed, and Xue Yang mulls over his options for a moment before making a decision. In just his under robe, barefoot, he steps out in front of the coffin home and settles down next to Song Lan, Mooncake sandwiched between them to Xue Yang’s left. Her eyes are watchful of the birds, but she doesn’t make a move to catch them as she otherwise would.
He thinks he can perhaps understand a bit of that, now. He doesn’t mind so much being tamed by Xingchen or even Song Lan. He doesn’t mind the domesticity of his now four years here. The early year feels like a distant memory; the things he had done to sweet, trusting Xingchen, that cannot be undone and can never be forgiven, feel like a dream.
He puts his hand on Mooncake’s soft fur and doesn’t speak a word, stroking her head and scratching behind her ears. He watches Song Lan toss bread to the birds and looks over to watch his profile.
“Do you want to be alone?” he asks. Even a year ago, Xue Yang would never have asked this. Not even to Xingchen. He hadn’t wanted to be left alone himself, and so the idea of an affirmative answer always sat like lead in his stomach. Now, though, he can stomach the idea. Perhaps it’s because he still has Xingchen to keep him company, kiss him lazily in the morning sun as he marvels at the idea that he can have a life like this after all of the things he’s done. He hasn’t done anything to deserve it, but it’s been offered to him, so he takes it. Every day he wakes up and chooses this.
It takes Song Lan a long moment to answer. Xue Yang watches his profile in silence before he does, taking in the way his throat bobs as he swallows.
“You can stay,” Song Lan eventually says. Xue Yang recognizes it as the type of answer he always used to give Xingchen when he’d asked those kinds of questions. Who cares what I want, he’d thought. I’ve always had to take it for myself anyway.
He isn’t sure he and Song Lan have the type of relationship where he can push that anyway, so he lets the answer go. Maybe Song Lan wants him here and doesn’t want to say it, or maybe he does want him gone. If the latter is the case, he’ll just have to man up and fucking say it himself, instead of taking the coward’s way out.
Silence settles over them, neither comfortable nor uncomfortable. It’s somewhere in the middle: Xue Yang isn’t quite sure what to say, or whether he needs to say something at all, but it doesn’t feel entirely out of the ordinary.
He can’t rely on Xingchen to mediate; he’s learned over their years together that Xingchen is not as perfect in composure as he seems. When things get emotionally sticky, he has a tendency to crumble or run away, like he had all those years ago when he and Song Zichen had their falling out. Like he had when Xue Yang had lashed out at him, a year ago, and told him the truth of just whom he had been living with, the fool that had been made out of him.
Seeing the scar on Xingchen’s neck still stings as if it had been inflicted on Xue Yang himself. They’d barely been able to save him; Xue Yang knows he would have resorted to demonic cultivation if needed. He would have lost his mind trying to keep his grip on Xiao Xingchen.
Instead of saying something, Xue Yang reaches out with his left hand and touches Song Lan’s own. Mooncake looks up at him, questioning their new lack of contact. Xue Yang looks steadily away from Song Lan and at the birds he’s so enamoured with. Maybe he can see a bit of the appeal.
He watches their small bodies flit across the ground, looking for more bits of bread and vegetables, even now that Song Lan has run out of things to toss for them. Song Lan’s hand tightens around his own and they continue to sit together in silence, watching the birds until Xingchen comes to retrieve them for the day’s chores.
---
Staying together for the sake of Xingchen was never going to work out long term. A tense year is a lot, drags on and drags the worst out of you. Something has to snap at some point.
That night, for the first time, Song Lan kisses Xue Yang before bed after he kisses Xingchen. Xue Yang hauls him in by the front of his robe and crashes their lips back together, desperate, feral again, as if he had never been tamed. He’ll always be a little bit wild, never really domestic, but he can learn the motions of domesticity. He’s willing to try.
Touch me, touch me, touch me, he thinks. As if reading his mind, Song Lan does.
