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"Cats don't mind if you're dead," Wen Ning says, retrieving his thread from an intrepid paw. "And they don't mean to claw. They can't help it."
A-Yuan watches him, politely bemused, as he wraps the tail of the thread around his thumb to hold it in place and pins the flap of skin he's repairing back down with his forefinger.
Wen Ning doesn't like to do this in front of people. But if not A-Yuan, then who?
He learned to sew when he was young, very young, not yet an orphan. He remembers it distantly, all impressions. Sitting half in sunlight and half in shade, looking for the perfect light. The way a slipped needle prickled and stung like the claws of a startled kitten, and the kind laughter as the blood was wiped from his thumb. The memory of wrinkled seams and his disappointment at them comes woven through with the smell of the jasmine which had flowered outside his window. The feeling of stitching under the fingers when it turned out even, ladder-rung neat, he remembers as red and candle-lit.
Sewing leather came later. It was a bad idea to ask for things, sometimes, in the Nightless City—a bad idea even to ask his sister, who was busy and frustrated and short-tempered as often as she was patient and kind. She had been angry anyway when he took her heavy hooked needle and blunted it on a fraying leather pouch, and the work had made his fingers hurt—but it had looked good when it was mended, and nobody from the main branch of the family had sneered at either of them for not looking after what they had. There had always been resources, then, not like later. They hadn't been poor. But there was a price to taking what you were offered, in that place, and he hadn't understood it at first but he had felt it all the same. Drawn what he already had in around himself like a shell. Hoarded it.
Skin isn't exactly like leather. Leather has already consolidated itself and become durable, but living skin flakes and peels and tears, bleeds—he knows this from his sister, from standing beside and watching and helping. He'd thought, the first time a sword opened a long slit in his thigh after he'd died, that leather was dead skin and so dead skin was leather—got the tension all wrong trying to stitch himself closed, stared at the mess he had made and felt like a child. Clumsy and foolish. It hadn't hurt. He hadn't cried.
His sister had repaired the damage.
Brave boy, A-Ning.
He hadn't cried. Hadn't cried. Hadn't cried.
His stitches are very practiced now, quick and exact. Pull this tight, leave this much space between. His body does weave itself back together, a little—the magic which pins him into it helps, does better now that Wei Wuxian is in the world again, like it still remembers who it owes and works to be ready to pay its debts. But it's slow and imperfect, still.
He tells these things to A-Yuan, when A-Yuan asks him. Because A-Yuan sees this as a part of himself now, sees Wen Ning as a part of a world that he comes from and seems not to draw a sharp line between Wen Ning alive and Wen Ning dead. All of it is what being a Wen means, from his perspective. To be a Wen now is to learn what you can from the dead—maybe.
"Where do they come from?" A-Yuan asks. "The cats, I mean."
"Wherever they like, I think," Wen Ning says. "Ah—Hanguang-jun turned up with this one yesterday. It tried to follow him up the mountain, but, you know."
A-Yuan leans over and tactfully collects the cat in question as it tries to chase the thread again. Wen Ning smiles at him—a smile that would be a quick flash on a more elastic face. He is better at using his face again now, with other faces to mirror, but there's always some clumsiness. He isn't even entirely sure it's a product of his death.
"You're very impolite," A-Yuan tells the cat solemnly. It closes its yellow eyes contentedly and tips its head back until its nose is aimed more or less at the floor, its throat entirely exposed, comfortably convinced that the world will do nothing to it.
It's a small cat, spattered black and grey, dusty-looking by nature and tatty-whiskered. Wen Ning feeds a lot of cats, but only a couple of them consider his little cottage their home. This one already considers Wen Ning's hat in particular to be its home, and wasn't impressed to learn, this morning, that it was going to have to share ownership.
This is the reason for the thread, the stitching.
"It just wants to take part," Wen Ning says. He can buy another hat, he thinks. He does small jobs, and mends what he has, and doesn't need to eat. He can buy another hat and some meat scraps from the market, the next time he's in town.
It's strange to think that the cats make him seem more like he might be alive, if you don't look closely. They make him into a person who buys meat and blankets and bowls. They don't, as he told A-Yuan, mind that he's dead at all. They like, he thinks, that he moves slowly. That he's predictable.
He ties the thread off and slices it short, close to the skin. The shape of the motion is his sister's. He puts the thread and needle away in their little box, which didn't belong to his grandmother, because all his grandmother's things were burned. But it looks like it could have.
The cat wiggles in A-Yuan's arms, and he lets it ooze its way over his hand and down to the floor mat, where it yawns and stretches and rolls inelegantly onto its back with a distinct thud. Dust motes and cat hairs scatter in the sun.
Time to sweep again, he thinks, with quiet pleasure. Keeping a house, like sewing, is a kind of working with your hands. Even sweeping can be sort of delicate work when your hands seem made to break a sword; delicate work is something his body doesn't like, but he does. Hands can break a sword but they can also mend a tear, sweep a floor, scratch the summer-warm ears of a cat. He was a good archer once, though he didn't think so at the time, and he's not half as good now—but he can still repair a bow, fletch an arrow.
There are things people come to him for.
To be a Wen now is to learn from the dead, to remember your lessons, and to be a little proud—but only of the smallest things. Of work well done. It's to feed small animals and not stop them from living their own private lives—to get a new hat because a cat has made a bed of your old one or to determinedly pretend that you don't have a rabbit hiding itself in your sleeve through an important meeting because it was cold out and you didn't have the heart to move it.
It's other things too. There's no need, today, to name them.
"Alright," Wen Ning says. "I'm all done. What did you need to mend?"
Nothing, not really—A-Yuan needs to mend nothing, not now, not as someone who is a Lan as well as a Wen. But he learns his lessons anyway. Comes to Wen Ning with broken straps or dulled edges.
A different needle and a different thread, worked slowly and carefully through leather by A-Yuan's learner's hands.
A cat chews gently on the toe of Wen Ning's boot as the two of them work, their heads bowed together. He lets it.