Chapter Text
It took two months for He Xuan to settle on a plan for the new house that he could live with. Another four to build the whole thing because he insisted on pausing after each element was done to make sure he still liked it.
Shi Qingxuan seemed to find this delightful evidence that He Xuan was committed to actually caring about the project and encouraged He Xuan to take all the time he needed. So he did. When the house was finally done, he had to admit that he was pleased with it. It was smaller, in floor space, than the previous manor had been.
“I think it feels bigger,” Shi Qingxuan said. “Because it actually has windows now. And air flow.”
The rooms were very practically set up. A couple separate spaces for sleeping. Rooms for cooking and eating. At Shi Qingxuan’s insistence, a larger room that was supposedly for entertaining, someday. For He Xuan’s use, the house had a library, and a shrine. There were also a few different gardens that they hadn’t populated yet. He Xuan was still deciding what to do with them.
For Shi Qingxuan’s use, the house had a dedicated array set to the capital city. Upon request, He Xuan installed one in the little hut there, too.
“If any of your friends find and use this, I’m taking it down,” He Xuan warned as he made it, knowing that he wouldn’t. It was an unspoken agreement between the two of them that Shi Qingxuan could come and go to the island without asking.
He Xuan wasn’t around much in the first weeks after it was finished. He kept going off to requisition books for the new library. From humans, mostly. Rich ones, who wouldn’t notice a scroll or two going missing from their stacks.
“Aren’t you afraid they’ll notice you and you’ll get a new moniker?” Shi Qingxuan had asked sweetly, one time when she had run into He Xuan returning from a trip. He had ignored this. His collection was coming along nicely.
(This was also thanks to Xie Lian, who had cheerfully donated a pile of books and scrolls that had obviously come out of some unused room at Paradise Manor when he stopped by to see the new house. He Xuan had scowled to accept them but had, later, carefully shelved them with the others.)
So, spending so much time away, it was a few weeks before He Xuan realized what Shi Qingxuan had been doing.
In addition to building the new house, they had created a new and more direct path to the beach, one that bypassed most of the forest and was a short walk. He Xuan wandered down it one day, on a break from his book hunting, and as the water came into view, he saw some shapes standing in it. Well, one standing and four swimming.
“What are you doing?” He Xuan called from the shore. Shi Qingxuan, standing nearly up to his thighs in the waves, turned and smiled.
“I’m visiting them!” he answered, hand stilled as it was petting the nose of one of the bone dragons. The dragon nudged into Shi Qingxuan’s hand in protest at the cessation. He swayed a little at the force and then laughed.
He Xuan waded out to join him. “You shouldn’t come out here alone,” he grumbled. “The surf can get unpredictable.”
Shi Qingxuan shrugged. “I like saying hello to them.”
“At least tell me when you’re going to be in the water,” He Xuan conceded. “I can make sure it’s calm.”
“Oh, I sort of assumed you were already,” Shi Qingxuan said. “The water’s always very gentle here, I’ve never been worried.”
He Xuan looked around at the bone dragons. The water was really too shallow here for them to be swimming, so they were half-beached, resting on their claws in the sand and heads sticking up out of the water. One of them half swam, half crawled towards He Xuan.
“That’s undignified,” he said to it.
“Be nice,” Shi Qingxuan chided.
He Xuan sighed and held out a hand. “They are my creatures,” he said.
“You didn’t seem to be spending much time with them. So I decided to. Plus, they’re cute, in kind of a spooky way. Do they have names?”
“No.”
Shi Qingxuan huffed in disapproval. One of them bumped against He Xuan’s hand; when he obligingly rubbed his knuckles against its jaw, it wrapped its tail around his feet.
“I didn’t think of it, at the time,” he said. “I set them up as defense just before I went to replace the earth master, so that someone would be here when I wasn’t. And then they went nameless for so long, it seemed pointless to come up with something.”
“So what are they now, since you’re home?”
“I suppose they’re just here.” Like me, He Xuan thought, then dismissed it before he could vocalize it. He was trying not to go there these days. It simply wasn’t true anymore. And also, he didn’t want to see Shi Qingxuan make that face. “Thank you for paying attention to them.”
Shi Qingxuan smiled. One of the bone dragons bopped him on the shoulder, apparently waiting for its turn. He Xuan glared at it and it tried again, more gently this time.
***
Shi Qingxuan thought it was lovely to have more places to be on any given day. He spent a lot of time, those first few weeks, doing nothing but walking a little ways into the forest or on the shore, sitting whenever his leg got tired. It wasn’t even about the island itself, but about the wandering. He would never say a word against the temple and his friends, but he hadn’t realized how much he had missed being able to go anywhere he wanted until suddenly the island was fair game.
It was a new thing for Shi Qingxuan, experimenting with being alone on purpose. He couldn’t decide if he liked it, exactly. It was calming, in a strange way, to have that certainty about knowing it was just you, no one else to talk to. Shi Qingxuan, in the old days, would have said that hiding away from everyone else was, well, hiding, a fearful act. But he thought now that there was a kind of courage in it, too, choosing to be all alone knowing that you’d have no choice but to face yourself.
Shi Qingxuan was learning that He Xuan did nothing by half. Not revenge, not building a house, and not establishing a library. He spent the first month or so constantly away collecting books, and then suddenly shifted course and shut himself in the library for hours to sort and catalogue them.
This was where Shi Qingxuan found him the next time she visited. “How’s it coming?” she asked, hanging around the door. She was reluctant to enter the library without permission.
“Satisfactorily,” He Xuan said. To Shi Qingxuan, it looked like a bit of a mess – there were multiple piles of materials and the table He Xuan was seated at was covered in paper.
“When do you think it will be done?”
He Xuan looked up. “Stop just lurking around,” he said.
Shi Qingxuan took that as permission. She leaned on the table, careful not to touch anything.
“Work like this is never done,” He Xuan said. “I intend to make this library my life’s – my death’s – great work.”
The second one, they both didn’t say.
“But it is approaching a good start,” He Xuan finished.
“That’s good!” Shi Qingxuan said.
He Xuan glanced at her and then back at his paper. “I hope you know I’m appreciative that it’s because of you,” he said.
Shi Qingxuan laughed. “You’re welcome, He Xuan.” He smiled a little bit, and she added, “and someday I know you’ll learn how to say thank you.”
He looked at her again, and furrowed his eyebrows. “Do you want to be able to shift again?”
“What?”
He gestured at her dress.
“I’ve gotten lots of practice not wanting things I can’t have,” Shi Qingxuan said, wanting very much to not talk about this.
He Xuan pushed his paper away. “I could give you – I have a lot of spiritual energy. If you want.”
“You’d do that?”
“It’s not hard,” He Xuan said. He stood up. “If you want.”
Shi Qingxuan fiddled with her sleeve. “Will I be able to, like, hold on to it? For the future?” If she was going to be able to shift forms again – again, after so long – she wanted privacy.
“Probably,” He Xuan said. “I don’t see why not. Since we know you can use it now.” He grimaced.
“Yeah, you’re going to be nicer this time, right?” Shi Qingxuan said, because she didn’t know what else to say.
He Xuan held out a hand. “If you want,” he repeated.
Shi Qingxuan wanted.
She laid her fingers over He Xuan’s. His curled up slightly, like he was going to grasp her hand in his own, and then his whole hand sort of – shivered, and Shi Qingxuan was flooded with spiritual energy for the first time in well over a year.
It was overwhelming for a moment; she thought it might explode out of her, that she wouldn’t be able to control it after all. Shi Qingxuan coughed, and the power almost audibly settled. She ached at how familiar it felt, this thing that had once been hers. She hadn’t expected this to make her sad.
She blinked, and remembered where she was. He Xuan was staring at her. “You’re-” he started, then cut himself off and shook his head a little.
“What?”
“Nothing. Come find me when you run out. Now I want to get back to work.”
Distracted, Shi Qingxuan stumbled out of the library. In the hallway, she looked down at her hands. She was very faintly glowing.
***
She slept overnight in the house for the first time not long after that. There was no particular reason to, it wasn’t like there was anything special to do. But she got tired sometimes of having her head spun around in the array twice in one day, and she wanted to see what sleeping on the island was like.
He Xuan kept a well-stocked kitchen, but he was still spending most of his time holed up in the library and she didn’t see him at all that evening. Shi Qingxuan made herself dinner and tucked herself into bed. Just to see what it’s like, she reminded herself. An adventure of sorts.
She woke in the middle of the night to the sound of a door closing. Yawning, Shi Qingxuan tiptoed out of bed and out into the hall. It looked undisturbed. She crept down to the front door and eased it open. He Xuan was only barely just in view, disappearing down the path to the beach.
She hesitated. It wasn’t the most polite thing in the world to follow someone. But he’d woken her up, and now she was curious.
The night air had a bit of a chill to it. She went back to her room, grabbed another layer, and ventured out.
The moon was high and full, so it wasn’t too hard to see where to walk. Shi Qingxuan felt drenched in it, half wondering in her sleepy state if moonlight could cling to a person.
She spotted He Xuan as soon as she got to the shore. He was sitting on the sand, hair dancing in the breeze, looking out at the sea.
When she was about ten paces from him, he said, without turning around, “go away. You should be sleeping.”
“You woke me up when you left. And you should be sleeping too.”
“I’m a ghost. I don’t need to sleep.”
“You still should. Going without sleep too long is not good for you.”
“I think I’ve already gone mad two or three times,” He Xuan said. “Don’t worry about me.”
Shi Qingxuan sighed. She sat down on the sand behind him and pressed her back to his.
“It’s just the facts,” He Xuan said.
“Of the past, maybe, but not the present,” Shi Qingxuan said.
He Xuan was quiet. Shi Qingxuan leaned her head back against his shoulder and gazed up at the stars.
“If you can’t sleep, at least sitting down here is nice,” she said. A breeze tickled her nose.
“I don’t understand why you aren’t afraid of the ocean,” He Xuan said at last. “I have never understood that.”
Shi Qingxuan considered how to answer this. If he meant what she thought he did, she wanted to be careful in her answer. If he was truly just talking about waves, this was going to sound stupid.
“The ocean’s been a lot of things to me,” she said. “Right now, I don’t see why I should be afraid of it.”
He Xuan was quiet again, but she thought she felt his shoulders relax. So she went on. “I like how complicated the ocean is. It has a lot of emotions, but so do I.”
“Thank you,” He Xuan said softly.
Shi Qingxuan smiled to herself. Then she yawned, loudly.
“You really should go back to bed,” he muttered.
“And you really should try to sleep. I was being serious.”
He Xuan said, “stop leaning on me.”
She sat up straighter, nonplussed. He Xuan stood up, brushed himself off, and then held out a hand to pull her up. Ah. He just hadn’t wanted her to topple over.
She leaned on his arm as they headed back up to the house.
Halfway up to the house, he said, “I don’t know if I can sleep anymore.”
“I get nightmares,” Shi Qingxuan responded.
He Xuan’s step faltered a little. “All the time?”
“No. Only sometimes. Lots of nights I sleep just fine. But every night I go to bed, there’s a part of me that wonders if this will be a bad one, you know? But you still have to try to sleep. It’s worse if you don’t.”
***
He Xuan did not sleep that night. But he tried. He informed Shi Qingxuan of this when she wandered out of her room in the late morning. He also pointed at the bowl sitting and waiting for her.
“Did you make me breakfast?” she asked, eyeing it.
He Xuan shrugged as he cycled through the various reasons. It had been something to do in the morning. He had met the dawn feeling grateful for her conversation the night before. Also and most stupidly, he wasn’t sure what the protocol should be when she slept over and he wanted to cover his bases.
He ended up saying nothing.
Shi Qingxuan still looked a little confused, but sat down without saying anything else. He Xuan let her eat for a few minutes, and then awkwardly cleared his throat. She looked at him expectantly.
“How long are you planning on staying?”
“I don’t know. I’ll go back today.”
“Before you do,” He Xuan began. He’d thought this all over while she slept, but he suddenly wasn’t sure how to start. Oh well. He would have to just talk. “Do you want to do something with me?”
“That depends,” Shi Qingxuan said slowly.
He Xuan had figured that would be the answer. “The bone dragons need exercise.”
Her eyes flew wide open. “Oh! I mean, I don’t really know what that means, but it sounds fun. I’ll help you!”
“I don’t get it,” Shi Qingxuan said. They were standing in the surf, the bone dragons circling farther out. “How does this work?”
“Ah.” He Xuan hadn’t really considered the logistics of this in-between step. “I’ll have to carry you out there, I suppose. They won’t be able to do it in the shallow water.”
“Do what?”
“Swim.”
Shi Qingxuan sighed. “You’re being very cryptic. Fine, go ahead.”
She held out her arms like she expected He Xuan to pick her up by them alone. He looked at her. “What?”
“What! Well, I don’t know!”
This was wasting time. He Xuan positioned himself behind her, grasped around her waist, and lifted up. Shi Qingxuan yelped.
“It’s not that far,” he muttered. Her hair was pressed up against his face. It smelled faintly of saltwater. Maybe this had not been the best way to do this.
He strode over the water as quickly as he could. Shi Qingxuan squirmed a little as they approached the bone dragons. “You still didn’t tell me what we’re doing.”
The bone dragons circled eagerly around He Xuan. He picked the one that he’d always thought was the calmest and clumsily set Shi Qingxuan down at the start of the neck, behind the head.
“He Xuan, what on earth--”
“Hold on to the horns,” he said as he let go of her.
Shi Qingxuan looked very pointedly at him, and then the dragon, and then the water. And then back to He Xuan.
“I thought you would like to ride on one of them as it swims,” he said. “It will be exciting, and fun.”
“By myself? In the open ocean, with my air-breathing lungs?”
“I’ll come with you. I’ll make sure you don’t fall off.”
“Did you decide not to tell me all of this in advance as a surprise, or because you knew it is totally insane?” Shi Qingxuan asked. He Xuan was pretty sure that she would be waving her hands around quite dramatically if she wasn’t holding on to the dragon’s horns for balance. For the dragon’s part, it was doing a very good job of being still. He Xuan was momentarily proud of it.
“I didn’t know how to explain it,” He Xuan admitted. Which was true. He had also thought it might be a fun surprise, though. “We don’t have to if you don’t want to.”
He watched her consider it, biting her lip as she thought. “I want to,” she finally said. “It does sound fun. If you promise it’ll be safe.”
He Xuan climbed on behind her. There was just enough room for the two of them to fit before the first dorsal fin. He reached his hands around to hold on to the horns, too, so she was bracketed between his arms. “Promise,” he said. “Ready?”
She nodded.
He Xuan nudged the bone dragon with his foot. Easy to start, he commanded it.
The bone dragon began moving. It stayed on the surface of the water, body snapping side to side as it swam. It moved quickly, but smoothly and in a straight line. He Xuan saw Shi Qingxuan’s knuckle-tight grip relax slightly.
“Okay?” he asked her.
“This is fine! We can go faster!”
The bone dragon accelerated before He Xuan could give the order. It put on a burst of speed, and then whipped them around a tight curve. Shi Qingxuan screamed into the now-very-present wind and then laughed.
“Okay?” he asked again.
“Yes!” She laughed again. He had not heard her laugh like that in a long time.
Shi Qingxuan’s exhilaration was contagious. The bone dragon moved even faster, and then launched itself into the air in a lovely arc.
“He Xuan--” Shi Qingxuan called as they headed back down towards the water.
He Xuan tucked his head over her shoulder. “I’ve got it,” he said into her ear. “Just close your mouth.”
Right as they hit the water, he formed an air bubble around the two of them. Shi Qingxuan’s gasps were suddenly amplified, bouncing around the closed space.
“Breathe normally,” He Xuan said.
Her breathing slowed. The bone dragon had slowed down somewhat and hadn’t taken them down very far; the sunlight still filtered easily through the water. A much smaller bonefish floated by.
Shi Qingxuan looked around. “This is amazing,” she said.
He Xuan had to agree. It had been a while since he’d seen the ocean this way.
Shi Qingxuan insisted on lavishing attention on the bone dragon after she dismounted. This was inconvenient for He Xuan, who was holding her for transport back to the shore. The dragon probably would’ve been able to take them all the way to the shore, but He Xuan didn’t like the idea of it sinking into the sand under their weight.
“You’re going to make the others jealous,” He Xuan said.
She up looked at him, her eyes dancing. “You said it was for exercise. They all need that, don’t they? We can do it again.”
“We’ll see,” He Xuan said.
She scoffed at him. “You’re smiling. I will take that for yes.” She grinned.
He was carrying her differently this time, one arm under her knees and the other across her shoulders, in the hopes that it would work better. It sort of had. Her hair was not obstructing his face. This was good.
On the other hand, when she turned her own smile on him, he was looking directly at her face, and the full force of it made something in his chest flip over. This was not good.
He stumbled, which was not supposed to happen when you were a water demon standing on the water.
Shi Qingxuan said, “hey!”
“Alright, that’s enough,” He Xuan said. “You’ve thanked it enough.” He dragged her away from the bone dragon and sped back towards the shore.
As he set her down, Shi Qingxuan said, “I think I’ll head back to the city now. Are you going back up to the house?”
“I’ll stay down here for a bit,” He Xuan said.
“Suit yourself!” Shi Qingxuan said. She started up the beach.
When she reached the part in the path where it turned to go out of sight, she turned back and waved at him.
Several horrible things happened to He Xuan at once. His chest lurched again, this time feeling like it moved towards Shi Qingxuan’s retreating form. He knees felt suddenly unsteady. And worst of all, he had to bite down on a wild desire to run after her, to offer to do something absurd like carry her back to the house or ask her to stay longer.
He Xuan held out until Shi Qingxuan disappeared from view and then melted to the ground and stuck his face in the sand.
Something must be wrong with him. This was all very, very not good.