Chapter Text
“Chicken nuggets,” Qi Rong said. “You little bitch.”
Xie Lian ignored him. He strapped himself into the driver’s seat and checked the rearview mirror to make sure that the cluttered stack of blankets and backpacks covered most of his cousin’s lounging body across the backseat; as Xie Lian did so, he caught sight of Qi Rong open a packet of ketchup so aggressively that the sauce exploded all over his face, and Xie Lian winced. Not because of the mess, because, really, the car couldn’t get much filthier than it already was, but because it reminded Xie Lian of the fact that the only reason they were here in this car in the first place was because Qi Rong had torn someone’s head off in a manner much like the tip of this ketchup packet and sent that person’s blood splattering everywhere, in a manner much like the ketchup here.
This was an unpleasant thought to have at five in the morning outside a highway rest stop McDonald’s. Perhaps Xie Lian could never eat at a McDonald’s again. But then again, many things were unpleasant. Most things, in fact. And yet Xie Lian endured them. So really this wasn’t about Qi Rong at all. It was about Xie Lian, and it was about the universe.
And capitalism; most things were about capitalism.
“Hey, cuz,” Qi Rong whined through a mouthful of chicken nugget. “Why don’t you let me drive?”
Xie Lian flashed him a smile in the rearview mirror. “No,” he replied.
“Why not?”
“Because,” Xie Lian said as he backed the car out of its parking spot, “you are a fugitive.”
“So’re you.”
“I am not a fugitive,” Xie Lian said, keeping his voice smooth and cheerful. “I am only aiding and abetting a fugitive.” He rolled back onto the highway and tapped his fingers against the steering wheel for a bit, then added, “But you know what? It’s the same thing, really. It is just that I have not yet been fully dehumanised by the carceral system. If we get caught, however, things will change. So I should amend my previous answer. I am driving because my face is not yet on TV.”
“Oh, I’ll make sure your face is on TV very soon,” Qi Rong replied in his best snarl. “For crimes of not buying your baby cousin the food that he requested.”
The food that Qi Rong had requested from the highway rest stop McDonald’s had been human meat, or, failing that, ‘pork, but only if it came from a real pig, haha, as in a cop, get it?’. Xie Lian had gotten it. There had not been a cop to slaughter and slot into Qi Rong’s burger. Xie Lian had settled on chicken nuggets. If that meant he was a criminal, so be it.
What was crime, anyway? Defined arbitrarily by the law, monitored arbitrarily by the police, judged arbitrarily by the, uh, judges. It was five in the morning, and Xie Lian had had to stop attending his weekly abolition reading group on account of aiding and abetting a fugitive, so he wasn’t necessarily his most eloquent at the moment.
Thankfully, the waking of the curled-up figure in the passenger seat interrupted Xie Lian’s train of thought. “Morning,” Banyue muttered, rubbing her eyes and immediately reaching for the McDonald’s paper bag that Xie Lian had deposited into her lap. “Mm, chicken nuggets. Thanks, captain.”
Xie Lian bit back the instinctive Don’t call me captain. There was no point. Banyue insisted on calling him captain. It was better than a week ago, when she’d called him Captain Hua. He did not know where this nickname had come from, but he was glad she’d dropped the Hua pretty quickly, because it reminded him of certain people that he did not like to think about. And anyway, it was better than cuz, which was what Qi Rong called him; Xie Lian did not like to be further reminded of the fact that he and Qi Rong were related.
This last part was something he was trying to work on, on the inside. Kindness, patience, being generous, and stuff like that. People always thought such traits were innate, but in reality they took enormous amounts of work. A lot of forcing things down, but in a healthy way, like having a little therapist living on your shoulder 24/7 talking to you about processing your feelings in a soothing voice, and also occasionally referencing Mariame Kaba and such.
It was hard, because Xie Lian had also had to deal with Qi Rong 24/7 for the past two weeks. As they drove, Xie Lian let Banyue fiddle with the music and made himself a mental list:
Tuesday – things that make me happy:
Banyue’s playlist
The sunrise
That was it for now. Xie Lian stared very hard at the slow sunrise on the horizon ahead of them, drinking as much of it in as he could before the sun rose too high and got into his eyes, and thought very hard about how much he loved sunrises. Sunrises were things that people loved, unanimously. Sunrises were good.
The world we want is a world built on kindness, Xie Lian told himself. There is no point to revolution without generosity. Abolition is the horizon. Abolition is the horizon.
“I need to piss,” Qi Rong drawled.
Abolition is the horizon.
“Like, now,” Qi Rong said.
“I need to piss too, captain,” Banyue said.
“Why didn’t either of you piss at the McDonald’s?” Xie Lian asked, kindly.
“I was asleep,” Banyue said, nonchalantly producing a comb from some pocket and beginning to work through her tight curls. She did not look like she needed to piss that bad. Like maybe she could hold it in for another hour or so.
“I’m going to count down from a hundred, and if you haven’t found somewhere for me to piss by then, I’m just doing to do it right here, on––” Qi Rong peered at the label on the cage balanced across his legs–– “on Ruoye’s cage.”
“Right,” Xie Lian said. “Please don’t piss on my snake. She’s traumatised enough as it is.”
“A hundred. Ninety-nine.”
Xie Lian gripped the steering wheel and thought about sunrises. Sunrises were good. Everyone loved sunrises.
“Alright, fine,” he said, turning on his indicator and beginning to swerve toward the next exit. “Please count slower, though.” He hoped the desperation didn’t seep through his voice.
The exit took them onto a flat, wide country road. It was early enough that no other cars were in sight, so Xie Lian sped up a little. He hoped there would be somewhere good enough to pull over.
He glanced at the time on the car dashboard. Only about ten minutes had passed since they’d left the McDonald’s parking lot.
Time was passing very slowly. Like, Xie Lian had never imagined that time could ever pass this slowly. Surely this was something you could die of, somehow.
But then again, Xie Lian’s life had not previously allowed him even to look at the time. Things were different now, of course. He was on the run with a murder suspect and a… whatever Banyue was –– a petty thief-slash-stoner, and probably some other things that Xie Lian hadn’t yet learned about the girl –– and he had nothing to do all day except drive, and think about how things were going rather well, extremely well, in fact; splendid. Excellent.
There were only so many synonyms Xie Lian could fill his mind with. He checked the time again. Only a minute had passed since the last time he’d checked. This was fine. Time passing slowly was good. It meant he could savor life in ways he’d never been able to as a lawyer. He was seizing the day. Things were good.
Qi Rong suddenly said, “Twenty, cuz! Nineteen.”
“There is no way,” Xie Lian muttered. “You’re cheating. It hasn’t been eighty.”
“Sixteen.”
There was a dirt road curving away up ahead, so Xie Lian took it and followed it for as long as he could. When Qi Rong got down to five, Xie Lian pulled over and said, “You can do it here.”
This was not the first time on this trip that Qi Rong had had to piss on the side of the road, and thankfully Qi Rong had run out of the energy to complain. He got out and strode further into the patch of trees and began to whistle, which did nothing to cover the sound of water slapping into the mud. Banyue reached over and turned the volume up louder on the music.
Xie Lian opened his door and stepped outside, too. He looked at the horizon, and the sunrise that was still there, seeping, like water across a tissue. He looked at his surroundings –– countryside, of course, but he forced himself to come up with more words to describe it, as was his main activity on this trip. He’d taken to calling it the Synonym Game, and had wanted everyone to join in, like an I Spy kind of thing. But Banyue had hated it, and so the Synonym Game was a one-man game now. Done alone, like most things in Xie Lian’s life. Just him, talking to himself.
Anyway.
Countryside; hills; green; field; hay?; wheat?; ochre yellow; farming; agriculture; barns…
Maybe Xie Lian needed another coffee. He was not doing very well at the Synonym Game. None of these were even synonyms.
“Hey, Banyue,” Xie Lian called. “Wanna play the Synonym Game?”
“I’ll play the Synonym Game.”
That was not Banyue’s voice. Xie Lian turned, and saw that there was someone leaning by the passenger window of the car. It seemed that Banyue had just been speaking with this person, who had either materialised out of thin air and was therefore some kind of supernatural being, or who had somehow traipsed here from the cluster of barns in the distance without Xie Lian having noticed.
The person stood up straight and met Xie Lian’s eyes and said, “Gege.”
Perhaps Xie Lian was hallucinating, from lack of sleep. But just in case he wasn’t, he said, “San Lang?”
Hua Cheng beamed.
“Wait, you guys know each other?” Banyue said, finally pushing open her door and crawling out. “Captain, you know the commune guy?”
“The commune guy?” Xie Lian repeated automatically, because his mind was definitely melting.
“The commune guy,” Banyue said again. “He runs the commune over there.” She pointed at the cluster of barns.
“The commune guy,” Xie Lian said. He couldn’t stop saying it. Perhaps he’d died just now, and was now having some kind of out-of-body experience right before being transported to the afterlife. He was not sure he was able to move any of his limbs at all.
“I’m so glad to see you here, gege,” Hua Cheng said, grinning. He looked genuinely delighted to be running into an exhausted and stupefied Xie Lian at five-something in the morning in the middle of nowhere, and not even that surprised that Xie Lian was accompanied by two people who were too old to possibly be Xie Lian’s children but much too young to be his friends. Hua Cheng did not even seem concerned that Xie Lian might have kidnapped these people, for instance.
“How do you guys know each other?” Banyue said. She was in awe, for some reason.
“There’s a commune guy?” Qi Rong asked as he made his way to the car from his extraordinarily long piss session and looked back and forth between Hua Cheng, Xie Lian, and Banyue.
Xie Lian’s hand twitched as it slowly came back to life. Perhaps he could speak now. He decided to clear his throat; it worked. “That’s my ex,” he said.
Okay, that was not really what he’d been trying to say. But at least he was no longer saying the commune guy over and over again in the same tone like a distressed GPS.
“Oh,” Banyue said. She looked back at Hua Cheng, agape. She was very short, so she had to crane her neck to do so, and her face shone with a mixture of admiration and fear, as though he were the rising sun, or some other sublime thing.
“Hi again,” Hua Cheng said to Banyue. He did a little wave. “Have you had breakfast yet?”
“C-chicken nuggets,” Xie Lian stammered. He was aware that he was now blushing furiously, and this knowledge only made him blush even harder.
“I’m still hungry, though,” Banyue said, still staring at Hua Cheng, even though, from her angle, surely all she could see was the bottom of his chin. “Can we visit the commune?”
“Of course,” Hua Cheng replied smoothly.
He looked back at Xie Lian and tilted his head, just like he used to do ten years ago whenever Xie Lian did or said something that he found funny. That head tilt, and that fond gaze, always used to make Xie Lian freeze and forget everything for a second. It was happening again now, to the extent that was possible considering that Xie Lian had already been frozen and non-functional before Hua Cheng had done the head tilt.
“Um,” Xie Lian said. He knew he was supposed to say something after that, but was not sure precisely what that was.
“Gege, would you like to visit the commune?”
Distantly, Xie Lian noticed that Hua Cheng was wearing overalls. This seemed like something that could be worn by someone known as ‘the commune guy’, and gave Xie Lian an odd, subtle sense of calm and reassurance.
Maybe they could visit the commune. For breakfast, at least.
“Is it okay that these two are fugitives?” Xie Lian asked.
That was also not what Xie Lian had planned to say when he’d opened his mouth. In fact, it was the last thing he should have said. This much was obvious from the way Banyue and Qi Rong were now looking at him, horrified.
Hua Cheng shrugged. “That’s fine.”
“Okay,” Xie Lian croaked. “Let’s go, kids.”
He took a step, then two. When no one else moved, he looked back at them, puzzled.
Right. The car.
“Should I…” Xie Lian began weakly.
“I’ll drive, if that’s okay, gege?” Hua Cheng said.
“Yes,” Qi Rong cut in before Xie Lian could embarrass himself further. He dragged open the back seat door and shoved himself and Banyue inside, but not before shooting Xie Lian a dark look that was probably meant to contain some kind of threatening message, like, Get it together, or, Murder.
Xie Lian gulped, and walked around the car so that he could slide into the passenger seat. Banyue’s jacket and half-eaten McDonald’s was still on the seat. Moving it meant drawing even more attention to himself, so he simply sat on top of it all. If Hua Cheng noticed this odd behavior, he didn’t say; he simply turned on the motor and began to bring the car slowly across the dirt road, toward the barns not far from them –– toward the commune.
This was good. This was fine. This was –– exposure therapy. The longer Xie Lian had to be in the presence of Hua Cheng, the less flustered he would be. He would see Hua Cheng’s new life as commune guy and they would laugh about how silly they were in their youth over breakfast, and it would all be excellent, and splendid.
Right. Xie Lian told himself that when they got to the commune, he’d get out of the car, and that would be a reset button. He was allowed to have this freakout now, but when he got out of the car he would need to be normal again.
He could do that. It worked when he imposed a reset button like this –– like when he used to get panicky before a court session, when he’d still been green.
The car rolled to a stop. Now that they were here, Xie Lian could vaguely see that there were more than barns in the commune –– there was also a large house, and a lot of miscellaneous fences, and a truck. Hua Cheng cut the engine and unlocked the doors. Xie Lian got out of the car and imagined pressing a big red reset button on himself.
He threw up onto his shoes.
That was not what the reset button was meant to have done.
No matter. Things would be fine from here on out.
“Gege, are you alright?” Hua Cheng asked as he hurried around the car to place a (warm, steady, beautiful) hand on Xie Lian’s shoulder, rubbing his thumb back and forth across Xie Lian’s skin absent-mindedly, like a –– like some kind of monster.
“Yes!” Xie Lian said quickly. “Of course.” Even though things were swaying, for some reason. Maybe things swayed at communes.
Or maybe that was him. All of a sudden, he felt his body crumple and cave in, and his vision went black. The last thing he felt was Hua Cheng’s chest against his back as he fell to the ground.