Chapter Text
“When will you two get married?” Aunt Ying Nan asks with a raised eyebrow when Katy smiles at Shangqi after he's said something particularly witty over the dinner table during their last day in Ta Lo.
“Wo men zhi shi pengyou,” Shangqi replies, almost exasperated, the same exact thing he told Katy’s Waipo in what feels like ages ago. Katy’s smile wilts slightly.
He hasn’t talked to Katy about it, but he thinks that there’s something she doesn’t want to tell him. Maybe she feels like he wouldn’t be understanding, like her secrets aren’t as monumental and heavy and important as his. Guilt drives into his chest like a brake-less speeding bus. There seems to be a lot of those feelings happening, lately.
He doesn’t want to but he thinks of his dad on the ground, motionless and lifeless as Shangqi was swept up into the sky by the Great Protector and thrown into action and bloody violence without even a moment to exhale, let alone mourn. The body had not even had time to cool before Shangqi was forced to leave its side. He thinks of the tons of rock that would much later collapse onto the warm body, warm and not cold because Shangqi was there; he was there and felt the warmth of life escaping his dad’s pale skin, graying pallor with every passing second as Shangqi pressed against his dad’s throat and face to feel for something, for anything at all, rocks later crushing it into a tomb-like burial worthy of many of the exalted kings of China, their names and titles and years of education pounded into his head harder than his fists into the frustrating wooden beam in the center of the training room slipping from his mind when the only ones he can think of is Fuqin, Die, Baba, Wenwu.
Dad.
The dad whose love for his children died along with his wife, the dad who trained his traumatized seven-year-old to be an assassin and the dad who pretended like his daughter didn’t even exist. The father that Xu Xialing cannot forgive. The dad that Xu Shangqi might have already forgiven.
Xu Wenwu was not the best father.
His dad was not the best father but that was okay because Shangqi was never really the best son, either. Not enough. Never enough for his dad to choose him over those damned rings.
After observing the momentary flash of something across Shangqi’s face, pain or regret or the never-ending pull of the guilt he’s felt but repressed all his life since the day his mom was killed and “you were there when they came for her. You were there and you did nothing. You stood at the window and watched her die...!” and every single living moment after that, Aunt Ying Nan picks up the largest piece of Jianbing from the plate in the center with the clean end of her chopsticks and places it in front of Katy, quickly rectifying her mistake with a distraction. “Are you eating well? Please eat more and help yourself. What does your Muqin usually feed you?”
When Katy is successfully distracted and is tricked into ranting about her family, Aunt Ying Nan picks up the second-largest piece of Jianbing and sets it on Shangqi’s plate, nudging it toward him with a sad but firm smile.
Shangqi nods slightly and eats.
It tastes like the burned ashes of Soul Eaters and the dust from crumbled rocks and pebbles kicked up from the battlefield in his mouth, gritty and tasteless. He chews rigidly but smiles back at his Yima for the food to reassure her.
Aunt Ying Nan’s smile is sadder when they finally leave Ta Lo to return to San Francisco, like she knows what Shangqi is bottling up but for the life of him can’t say out loud.
He knows that if he stays another day in Ta Lo, everything will spill from him like an overshaken bottle of champagne.
This is why he elects to leave under the guise of returning to their normal lives.
Nobody stops him.
Like his dad had said, Shangqi only ever knew how to run away from his problems.
***
“... Shangqi,” he hears one day when he’s taking a lazy Sunday afternoon off sleeping in and hiding from Katy, not even days after Qingming jie. He nearly tumbles off his bed like a clumsy oaf if not for the fact that he’s a fully-trained assassin, albeit with much slower reaction times.
Can’t blame him for being severely out of practice, though.
When he recovers from nearly embarrassing himself in front of no one, he realizes he actually has an audience member of one, sitting on the end of his bed with a familiar judgemental gaze, the very same curl of lip and immaculate hair as…
Shangqi rubs at his eyes until there are dark spots dancing in his vision that aren’t meant to be there, pinches both his wrists and leaves red welts on his skin, punches himself in the thigh close to his knee, hard.
“Ni gan shenma ah?” Shangqi’s dead dad says in that too-familiar overly critical tone of his.
“No,” Shangqi says before climbing back into bed, scrambling to grab at his blankets and covering his entire body with them to block out the visuals of his room that are seemingly playing tricks on him.
“This is not happening,” he whispers from under the covers. “This isn’t happening.”
“Your apartment is so small,” Shangqi hears his dad note dryly, passive-aggressive to a fault. “How much do you pay for rent? Do you even have a job right now?”
Shangqi stays there until the voice of his dead dad no longer speaks, then he calls Katy to warn her about how sick he is and not to come over so she doesn’t catch what he has: a mild case of auditory and visual hallucinations that are eerily similar to the way his dad insisted on seeing and hearing Mom, alive and well and calling for him to free her from behind the gate in Ta Lao.
He doesn’t tell her about that part, of course.
It doesn’t bode well for Shangqi that he’s hallucinating in the first place, but at least his dad hasn’t mentioned anything about being locked up and needing to be broken out of his prison.
But—
He wonders. Of all the things he would wish for, would his deepest desire be to see Dad again, the way the Dweller-in-Darkness took advantage of his dad’s desperation to feel love and family again after years of treading down the wrong path?
Would seeing his dad alive again be his most deepest, desperate wish?
He’s made peace with his mom’s death at long last. Even if he was the one at fault for standing there and staring and doing absolutely nothing, he’s at the very least made peace with the fact that she isn’t going to be coming back. That she will be with him forever, through his fighting and his heart.
His dad on the other hand—feels too recent. Feels like an open wound instead of a healed scar, something that stings when exposed to the wind and elements, still festering with undercurrents of hurt and pain.
He tells himself that he’ll go back to Ta Lo and Yima the moment anything about a locked gate leaves Wenwu’s mouth, but for the rest of the night, the ghostly figure of his dad doesn’t reappear again.
Or at least, he has a night of reprieve where he's left alone to wonder if he hasn’t been sleeping enough or eating right and that maybe, just maybe, he should finally see a therapist.
While he’s looking through countless websites on the search for non-blip-related therapy the next morning, he nearly flips his kitchen dining table and everything on it over when he feels a substantial presence over his right shoulder followed by his dad commenting, “Not feeling well? I suggest some high-quality huaqi can cha with dehydrated longyan and dried gouqi to counter the shanghuo.”
“It’s not reqi,” Shangqi says automatically, followed by a, “Shit, I talked to the hallucination.”
“I am not a hallucination,” his dad replies with the audacity to sound offended, indignant even, like Shangqi is the idiot here. Then he goes, “What are you eating?”
The question would sound innocuous to just about anyone else.
Shangqi knows that it’s anything but.
“... Leftovers,” Shangqi mumbles. He shouldn’t feel embarrassed having to explain himself to a hallucination(?) or the ghost(?) of his dad, but here he is anyway.
“Greasy takeout?” His dad is frowning, nose wrinkled in blatant disgust.
Shangqi has never had the displeasure of meeting any ghosts before, but if he did, he doesn’t think any of them would be half as judgmental as his dad, just as cutting as he remembers him to be.
It pains him to admit that he misses it even though he shouldn’t.
“I never learned to cook, but I think you already know that.” Shangqi sets his plastic fork onto the oily takeout container. Then his phone face down on the table. His chest is starting to feel heavy, each breath a little more difficult to take. He searches for his anger, but can’t find anything there other than the flutter of nervousness in his gut and the mourning he hasn’t quite allowed himself to feel yet.
Wenwu tilts his head slightly in acknowledgment. “I never thought it necessary to teach you. If you had stayed in the compound under my tutelage—”
“Stop it.” Shangqi’s voice cracks. “You’re not real. You’re dead. There’s no more what-ifs and what-could-have-beens. That’s how you ended up the way you are right now. I don’t even—” He inhales sharply, then says softly, ”I don’t even know where your body is.”
“You do,” Wenwu says, pointedly. “You simply did not want to haul it through Ta Lo where there lay so many people, dead as a result of my actions.”
“Getting your body would have been disrespectful to everyone who died that day. I still wanted to, anyway,” Shangqi confesses. It’s something he’s always wanted to say but never had the courage or chance to.
“What’s stopping you?”
To that, Shangqi doesn’t answer.
He’s lost his appetite.
He tosses the leftovers out when he’s on his way to the Chinese supermarket closest to his apartment.
The ghost of his dad doesn’t follow him.
Wenwu doesn’t say a word when Shangchi returns with a fresh haul of groceries, or when he brews cheap bagged ginseng tea with longan and goji berries to drink before going to sleep that night.
***
Later that night Shangqi dreams of the moment right before Wenwu’s soul is devoured.
For all his immortality and centuries of built-up composure, he looks so old and fragile in what must be the longest few seconds of Shangqi’s life. He reaches out to his dad. His dad makes no attempt to reach back, this part of him seemingly unchanged from the last seventeen years of Shangqi’s life.
Ba…! he wants to cry out loud. Maybe he does.
Ten rings and the alertness of a thousand-year-old immortal can’t be overtaken by a few meager tentacles. It’s just stupid, knowing what his dad can do and all the power he has. It’s so stupid, and yet—
Wenwu doesn’t fight back, doesn’t flail, doesn’t kick. He looks down at the rings on his wrists, then at Shangqi. Wenwu relaxes his fists, unclenching them for what must be the first time in seventeen years. Suddenly all the rings flow to Shangqi’s hands, which doesn’t make sense because then how would his dad escape the soul-sucking monster’s grasp without them? How would his dad escape and answer for everything he’s put them all through?
They exchange a look. There is an intensely tragic expression on Wenwu’s face that must mean a thousand words, sketched out with thick strokes and fine lines and splashes of color, a red zhuwen stamp in the corner; I’m proud of you mixed in with sorry and I have failed you as a father somewhere in between the contortion of furrowed eyebrows and thinned lips. Shangqi thinks he’s supposed to understand what his dad is trying to convey in some sort of ethereal revelation moment, but the understanding never comes. Even if he relives that moment a thousand times more, he still won’t understand, not really.
Shangqi wants his dad to open his mouth and say it to him straight. Blunt, honest, scathing.
Instead, his Ba dies without saying a word, and Shangqi wakes up sweating and panting, tangled messily in his bedsheets.
He sits up, propping himself against the wall.
Wenwu is standing at the end of the bed, arms crossed and looking away, nonplussed as ever. “Nightmare?”
“Why did you stop fighting? Why did you give me the rings?” Shangqi’s voice is hoarse. “Why would you do that? You could have escaped!”
Instead of giving a straight answer, Wenwu answers the questions with another question. “Why didn’t you kill me when you had the chance? When you had taken all ten rings from me?”
“How could I?” Shangqi says. It almost feels like he’s speaking to himself. He isn’t even sure if he’s still dreaming or not. “How could I possibly do that?”
“The same way I threw you into the lake and left you for dead,” his dad replies. “The same way I was willing to kill you for every second you stopped me from breaching the Dark Gate in Ta Lo to reach your mother.”
Shangqi’s fists involuntarily clench the fabric of his blankets harder, with enough force to turn his knuckles pale.
He hates it when his dad is cryptic.
Shangqi wants to be petty, wants to hurt Wenwu back.
Instead, he unclenches his fists the way his mom and Yima taught him to. Breathes, to let the wind flowing through his slightly opened window give him courage.
“I didn’t kill you,” Shangqi begins to say, his mouth going dry immediately. He pauses briefly before correcting himself, willing his voice to stop shaking. “I couldn’t kill you because I still loved you after everything you did to us. I can’t say the same for my sister, but… all the years of coldness and all the disappointed and indifferent stares, all the days of bloodied knuckles and dinners alone, of comforting my crying sister and being strong for her when really I was the one who wanted to break down into tears, every single day where I would wish for you to go back to the way you were before Mama died, when you were still warm and reliable… I still loved you even after all that. Even after you sent me to go kill a man. I still miss you even now. What’s wrong with me?”
“You... must take after your mother,” is all that Wenwu manages to say after a short bout of silence. “I…”
Shangqi blinks the emerging tears from his eyes. He hauls himself out of bed and washes his face before going many blocks away to buy half a roasted braised duck from the Auntie that likes his politeness and always gives him extra shao la. Next, he buys plain zhou a couple of shops away and liang gen youtiao to go along with it. Feeling rather generous, he jogs extra far to clear his head, buying a box of boluo si shi at Pineapple King Bakery.
He’s in no rush.
He drops the roasted duck off at Katy’s place even though no one is there, then goes home and eats his congee with a phantom hovering around his kitchen.
“Shangqi.” Wenwu sounds tired “Erzi, I—”
“—Save it,” Shangqi says, in between bites of his food. “I don’t want to hear it right now. Please let me enjoy my brunch in peace. The pineapple buns are gonna get cold.”
“Why not eat those first, then?” his dad sighs, then goes ghostly silent.
Shangqi pauses, mid-bite. He turns his head around to finally properly look at Wenwu.
His dad is standing, arms crossed, sleeves noticeably rolled up to his elbows out of habit, a space set aside for the rings. Several tufts of hair fall onto his forehead and out of their usual immaculate place, slightly messier but still handsome. Dark specks of ash and blood stain his chin and cheeks like a splatter painting gone wrong. He’s still wearing the same black-blue outfit of armor, still damaged from their fight, looking the exact same as the last time Shangqi saw him, just before he died.
Except.
Exhaustion lines his slumped shoulders where he usually exudes confidence and indifference with his assertive posture, tired eyes are closed in a blink that lasts too long, shutters and blinds blocking the window to the murky soul.
Wenwu opens his eyes and Shangqi finds himself staring at him, straight into that very soul.
Shangqi thinks he understands why their very final exchange unsettled him for days, unnerves him even now, like an irritating itch on the inside that just can’t be scratched.
His dad looks like a man who has given up. This isn’t a look Shangqi could ever imagine him wearing.
Shangqi’s wooden chair screeches when he stands up so fast that he makes himself dizzy. “How… How is this even possible? How are you here right now?”
“Perhaps this is my punishment… my very own personal form of purgatory,” Wenwu muses, glancing upward.
“I know I’m real,” Shangqi says aloud. He lightly slaps both his cheeks to feel the sting of reality.
“And I know I’m real,” his dad adds, sounding amused. “However, I won’t be repeating what you just did.”
“Can you even—” Shangqi cuts himself off abruptly. Thinks for a short moment. He grabs the spoon he was using to eat with, one with a flat bottom, pointed front end, and a short handle, and offers it to his dad in an open palm.
Wenwu’s gaze slides from him to the spoon, raising an eyebrow.
Exasperated, Shangqi lifts it out even further. “Just see if you can hold it.”
When their fingers brush as his dad takes the spoon from him, Shangqi shivers as a cold chill sweeps his body. “It worked,” he mumbles in amazement.
His eyes involuntarily dart to the kitchen and he wonders if he’s going to have to hide all his knives.
“Rest assured, I won’t be stabbing you in your sleep,” Wenwu reassures. He’s smiling gently, which can honestly mean so many things at the same time, much of which Shangqi knows to be the exact opposite of reassuring.
“You won’t be stabbing anyone,” Shangqi adds with certainty, just in case.
“I won’t be stabbing anyone,” his dad repeats mildly, acquiescing more easily than Shangqi thought he would. He moves to hand the soup spoon back over to Shangqi.
His dad holds the spoon like a blade.
“What about…” his dad trails off after the spoon has been set aside. He looks at Shangqi thoughtfully.
Shangqi swallows, nervous. “What about what?”
Wenwu doesn’t answer back, only slowly raising his hand to the back of Shangqi’s head in a familiar gesture, then leans forward.
His zhou is getting cold and his dad is trying to press their foreheads together.
The pricy, fresh pineapple buns Shangqi bought are getting cold and he is trying to hold back a decade’s worth of sobs and gasps when his dad passes right through his body like a ghost, icy, incorporeal wisps spilling over onto the other side.
Uncharacteristically, his dad laughs with his head hanging low, something breathy and uneven and disappointed. Wenwu vanishes when Shangqi blinks, but he can still hear the faint, “Of course not. I can’t have even this.”
***
For the days that follow, Wenwu is there when Shangqi wakes up and is there when he falls asleep, only rarely ever disappearing out of sight on his own whims. He has never spent this much time with his dad under the same roof and doesn’t know how to approach this amicable version of Wenwu.
Shangqi comes home from another day of unsuccessful job-hunting with a short cardboard box of fruit that Katy’s family told him to pick up. It’s some sort of celebratory gift for Katy deciding to look for something more serious than their previous valet job, which her family seems to think had something to do with Shangqi’s “good” influence.
He doesn’t have the heart to tell them that he’s the very opposite of a good influence, even if it appears as if Katy had discovered something about herself from their time in Ta Lo.
He never wants them to learn that he’s killed a man or that he’s almost killed another man very recently before his dad stepped in and then even more recently also nearly killed his dad, too, so he only nods weakly when they ask if he’s sorted out his family problems yet.
“What’s in the box?” his dad inquires, leaning closer as Shangqi cuts through the tape sealing the flaps with a box-cutter. “Ah. White fleshed huolong guo. These… used to be your favorite.”
“They still are,” Shangqi admits, looking into the box of bright pink fruit, “but they’re never as sweet as the ones from…”
He sets the box aside.
He knows he’ll probably end up forgetting about them for weeks, but Wenwu watches the box, looking thoughtful.
“Are you living a life you’re satisfied with?” his dad asks, out of nowhere.
“Did you?” Shangqi shoots back. He drops himself onto his bed with a dull thud and rolls over onto his side, sighing. “After a thousand years of being alive, Mom, Xialing, and I were just a blink. A tiny droplet of water in a pond. Did you live a life you were satisfied with, spending so much time building up your criminal organization and treating people the way you did? Manyi ma?”
“I was, when I met your mother. When your mother was alive…” Wenwu shuts his eyes and breathes in slowly, as if reliving the memories, then opens them again. “Hudie xiaoying. That tiny droplet was the cause of large ripples.”
“And after?” Shangqi is almost afraid to ask. “Were you not satisfied after?”
His dad turns to Shangqi, opening his mouth to answer, but Shangqi beats him to it.
“A blood debt must be repaid in blood,” he says slowly.
The corners of Wenwu’s mouth turn downward and his eyebrows crease with conflict. “I learned that day that you can never truly leave the jianghu world.”
“Me neither,” Shangqi mumbles. He wants to sink into his bed and forget about his responsibilities.
“What is that supposed to mean?” His dad’s tone is sharp and demanding, and Shangqi doesn’t have enough energy in him to skirt past his dad’s ability to wring answers from people like water from a towel. “Who wants to hurt you?”
Who wants to hurt me? Shangqi thinks, incredulous. He hopes he isn’t the only one who sees the irony of the one person who hurt him all throughout his life asking this type of specific question.
“No one,” he answers instead. “And even if there were, it’s not like you can do anything about it. Because you’re dead.”
“I can still use a knife,” Wenwu reminds him, moving closer to pressure Shangqi with the hefty weight of his mere presence.
“I was invited to be an Avenger,” Shangqi explains, muffled by the blankets he quickly drags over his head so his dad can’t scrutinize the current expression on his face no matter how close he gets. “And I said yes, but…”
“But?”
“Am I even doing the right thing? Is this too big for me?”
“You are not the hero in this story,” Wenwu says. “You are not the only hero, or even the first. But you are my son. Nothing will ever be too big for you.”
Shangqi wishes this were a conversation of a different caliber. He wishes this was his dad giving him confidence about volleyball tryouts or going on a first date or getting his first job or driver's license.
Not this thing in this odd, messed up situation where he wants to preen under his dad’s indirect praise about Shangqi’s ability to kill other people, a yearning he’s never fully abandoned from his childhood and teenage years.
“This might be,” Shangqi says instead of the thanks he wants to give for his dad even being here instead of vanishing away when conversations cut too deeply.
***
“Where is your American friend?” his dad asks. “Ruiwen?”
“Katy,” Shangqi corrects, automatically, dully gazing out his window. “What you said before… You understand that she’s never even been to China before what happened, right? Her name is Katy and she doesn’t know Mandarin. It’s fine and all to discover your roots, but going to China isn’t returning to a familiar home for her the way it is for me. A huge part of her identity is being Chinese-American.”
“Noted,” Wenwu says. “Are you in a relationship?”
“Katy doesn’t like me like that. She—” Shangqi stops himself from saying anything else.
Wenwu inclines his head, still waiting for more.
“That’s not for me to tell,” Shangqi says, slowly. Then he defiantly adds, “Stay out of my relationships. They’re none of your business.”
“I suppose they aren’t.” Wenwu’s expression shutters, slightly wounded.
Shangqi winces, wishing to take those trivial words back. “... Anyway, what about her?”
“Aren’t you going to tell her about me? Or your sister?” Wenwu idly taps on the postcard on the nightstand that Shangqi still hasn’t thrown away yet, the one he thought Xialing had sent when it was, in reality, a trap set by his dad.
No, Shangqi thinks fiercely. His attention will be divided and then he won’t talk to me anymore once he realizes how much more successful Xialing is and how much she has her life put together and—
Guilt erupts in his chest so suddenly at the stray thought that he has to sit down before his legs lose their strength and give his feelings away. He swallows the sickness he feels and settles for asking, “Haven’t you tried to see how far you can go? See if you can appear to Xialing?”
What’s wrong with him?
“I have,” Wenwu replies. Shangqi’s stomach swoops, waiting for more details. “It appears that you’re the only one who can see and hear me.”
“I wonder why,” Shangqi says, wincing when he sounds far less disappointed than he knows he should, even to his own ears. Something like this won’t escape his dad.
“Relieved? I’d have thought you would feel the opposite.”
Shangqi rubs his neck. “Honestly, I don’t know what I feel.”
“Don’t lie to me.” The words are cold and distant. They remind Shangqi of his dad’s icy ruthlessness, and he can’t help when his shoulders tense in response.
How on Earth is he supposed to explain how he doesn’t want to share his dad without embarrassing the hell out of himself?
“Tell me that you hate me. Go ahead,” Wenwu says. He’s trying to sound flippant; Shangqi can tell.
What?
“What?” Shangqi says out loud. “But I—”
His dad stands taller, crossing his arms behind his back like he always would before making a decision, giving an order. “You must despise me. I would.”
“I’m not you,” Shangqi shoots back. “I never was. No matter how much you tried to create me in your image, I was never good enough.”
“Chi de ku zhong ku, fang wei ren shang ren,” Wenwu says.
“Chi ku,” Shangqi echoes. No pain, no gain. He’s very familiar with this saying. He must have heard it a thousand times when he was being trained from sun up to sun down in every possible way to kill a person.
… And to avoid being killed himself.
“This is what I repeated to myself every day I was still living with my father. My childhood was unpleasant.”
That’s… new. His dad has never mentioned anything about his family before.
“All the training,” Wenwu says, soberly, “was to protect you from every possible thing that could harm you. Including me.” He dips his head lower, like he knows and has known all along how wrong his actions have been.
“It hurt,” Shangqi says quietly. “It wasn’t right what you did to me. To both of us.”
“Dui bu qi,” Wenwu apologizes, in a near whisper. It is the most heartfelt thing Shangqi has ever heard his dad say, even from before his mom died. “My childhood was unpleasant… and I imposed the same thing onto you. I could have killed your spirit, but somehow, you’re still here, standing before me a much better man than I ever was. You should have never had to go through that, and I’m not asking for forgiveness, I… I…”
Shangqi shakes his head. His voice quivers. “You don’t have to say it, Ba.”
“I’m sorry.” Wenwu closes his eyes. “I truly am.”
“My dad would never say that.” Shangqi jokes around the burning shape of a frog lodged in his throat and the tell-tale sting of tears behind his eyes. “Now I know for sure you’re definitely not real.”
Shangqi wouldn’t blame his dad if he decided to vanish to save himself from this embarrassingly emotional state of affairs, but his dad stays, and they both stay quiet while Shangqi’s dinner sizzles on the stove.
His dad has been teaching him how to cook properly, lately.
Shangqi wouldn’t trade the sharp remarks at clumsy mistakes, the low mumblings of a thousand-year-old criminal overlord trying to recall recipes even older, the approving hums at decent dishes, and the surprisingly peaceful rhythm of domesticity they settle into for anything.
***
“Have I ever told you, I was anxious for you when I gave you your first and what turned out to be your last assignment?” his dad asks one day even though they both know he has never shared this sort of thing before. Shangqi is washing a dirty pile of dishes that he’s abandoned for nearly two weeks partly because he knows it makes Wenwu’s eyes twitch irritably every time the kitchen sink comes into view, but he doesn’t roll up his sleeves even though the soapy water gets them wet. “There was no particular reason for it. I was confident you would not fail. And then I later wondered, is this what being a parent is supposed to feel like? It was something I hadn’t felt in a very long time.”
Shangqi scoffs. “It’s usually a feeling parents get when they send their kid to college, not when they send their kid to assassinate someone all by himself.”
This subject has become less of a taboo painful memory and more of a go-to topic for banter even though Shangqi still hasn’t completely worked out his feelings about it.
For his dad, though… anything about Shangqi’s childhood makes him go quiet. Contemplative.
“Why bring this up again?”
Bluntly, his dad says, “I want to speak with Xialing.”
My body is still in Ta Lo. Are you just going to leave it there? They don’t want you to come back and take it… your sister will try to keep you away from me as well…
Shangqi accidentally drops the plate he’s washing into the sink. It shatters and he bleeds trying to pick up the broken pieces to throw away.
“... Shangqi?”
Shangqi fights the rising panic in his chest and clenches his fists involuntarily, forgetting about the broken pieces of glass still in his hands. Blood drips from his palms and down his arms.
Hands abruptly yank the shards of glass away from his, snapping him out of his daze and back into the present where he’s standing bleeding out in his kitchen while his dad has this deeply concerned expression on his face that Shangqi has never seen before.
“Ah,” Shangqi says, schooling his face into neutrality. “Sure! Do you mean right now? Let me call her really quickly— ”
“—Perhaps another time,” Wenwu cuts him off. “You should see to your wounds.”
You should take better care of yourself, my son.
“My… yeah, of course,” Shangqi nods dazedly. “I should take better care of myself.”
“You should,” Wenwu agrees. “Where is your first-aid kit?”
Shangqi glances over at a cupboard by the door filled with shoes and other miscellaneous knick-knacks. Before he can grab the first-aid kit himself, Wenwu takes several brusque strides toward the cabinet, yanking it open, and locating the bright bag with ease. He sets it on the counter and takes out a Chinese branded bottle of hydrogen peroxide and a box of clean cotton pads, and suddenly a rush of familiarity swells to Shangqi’s throat.
Shangqi remembers beating his fists against that damned wooden beam over and over and over again until his dad told him that it was enough even though Shangqi knew it would never be enough for his dad’s standards. In truth, time passed like a blur for him in those long hours of repetitive jabs and punches, and the part that he vividly remembers is the after. After, when Wenwu would mirror the actions of the version of his dad currently standing in front of him.
A palm extended, a fist received. Deceptively gentle strokes of the alcohol-coated end of the cotton cloth over Shangqi’s blistered and torn knuckles. The younger version of himself would always do his best to bite the inside of his cheek, to not hiss and to not let his eyes water like a child at the sting of pain. His dad’s expression would be astoundingly neutral as he tended to Shangqi’s wounds without a word, even though he would exude an aura of disappointment like whenever Shangqi would lose to the Death Dealer.
A palm extended, opened palms received. Shangqi’s hands tremble in anticipation of the burning sensation and he goes stiff as a board before forcing himself to loosen up, but when the cotton pad touches down, he feels nothing. He stares at his dad’s rough, calloused hands and delicate movements. There is no disappointment in Wenwu’s face, no apathy. Instead, he looks like he’s a few seconds away from scolding Shangqi for being so careless.
Shangqi’s dad cares about him.
He inhales sharply as the conclusion settles deep into him, down to the marrow of his bones and into the microscopic pores of his very being.
He loves his father.
If you love me...
He genuinely loves his dad and has never, not even for one moment, stopped loving him.
My body...
The realization comes so simply that a breath of relief escapes his mouth.
Come back to Ta Lo...
Wenwu pauses mid-dab to glance up at Shangqi’s odd and twisting facial features. “What is it?”
Find me again, my son.
“Nothing complicated,” Shangqi replies, giddiness and elation coating his words.
Come and save me…
Reluctantly accepting, Wenwu allows the question to pass, unanswered, and continues to tenderly dab at the cuts on Shangqi's palms.
***
“Can you leave my apartment? Or are you just limited to following me around?” Shangqi asks, sitting at his kitchen table. He’s scrolling through a website for cheap airline tickets, slouched over in a way that expresses his level of comfortability in his dad’s presence.
“It seems like I’m tethered to you.” Wenwu inclines his head. “Anywhere you can go, I can probably follow.”
“Good, ‘cause I think it’s about time we go back to Ta Lo for a little visit.”
“Absolutely not,” his dad bluntly disagrees. “I have ears. Your group of heroes is going to meet soon. That includes you. Missing something like this will not make whoever’s in charge very happy with you.”
“But this is more important,” Shangqi argues, rising to his feet.
“What could be more important than the largest and most powerful hero organization in the world?”
“You.” It comes out in one large exhale of breath. “Your body. Whatever happened to you… we can fix it. I know we can.”
“Absolutely not,” Wenwu repeats, even harsher this time, hardening his eyes.
“Why not? I don’t get it!” Shangqi’s sleeves slip when he throws his hands up in frustration.
Wenwu shakes his head and the disdain in his dad’s expression is far more hurtful than any hit Shangqi’s ever taken. “I know what you were doing in America before I captured you in Macau. Valet driving and nothing else, wasting your life away. This is an opportunity.”
“Low-hanging fruit,” Shangqi mumbles.
“... You’re wearing them,” his dad says, suddenly frozen. He looks scared. “The rings. You’ve been wearing them since Ta Lo and you haven’t taken them off even once.”
“So?” Shangqi retorts. “Why are you changing the subject? I said I’m finally ready to go get your body in Ta Lo and you ask me about the rings? Don’t you want me to come back to you?”
“Are you really ready? Or is something else pushing you to do this?” Wenwu gently slams his fist onto the table and the empty plastic milk tea cup from yesterday trembles with the motion. “We don’t know what will happen if I approach my body… and besides, I’m satisfied with the way things are right now. Why do you want to return to Ta Lo so badly?”
“Has it ever crossed your mind that I’m not satisfied with this?” Shangqi snaps. “I want you to be here, to really be here. Not just as a disembodied spirit, but alive.”
Wenwu’s expression shutters and all the gentleness he’s been slowly revealing to Shangqi over the last few weeks immediately closes off. He shakes his head, slowly. “I thought this would help you understand and cope. Clearly, I was wrong.”
“Understand and cope? Cope with what?” Heavy dread surges to Shangqi’s chest.
Wenwu sighs and explains softly, “With when I’m gone. Permanently.”
The other shoe drops, and it drops hard, like Shangqi has just been physically twisted and torn to pieces from the torso outward like the ultimate move he used on the Dweller-in-Darkness in what feels like ages ago. “Permanently? But…”
“Did you really think this peaceful arrangement would last forever?” Wenwu’s words are harsh, realistic. Every bit of the man he was when he was still fighting with Shangqi in front of his mother’s memorial. “It seems I’ve underestimated your naivety."
“What are you even talking about? I don’t understand, Dad.” Shangqi gestures to his phone on the table, ignoring the hysterical feeling that wants to bubble over and spill everywhere in his heart. “I can book a ticket right now and we can go get your body and reunite your soul with it, or whatever else needs to happen. After that, you’ll be whole again and we can finally be together again as a proper family— ”
“—Xu Shangqi…!” Wenwu raises his voice to a near-shout, his composure as frayed and uneven as Shangqi’s, abruptly cutting his words off like a guillotine blade over his neck. “Can you even hear yourself right now? Do not argue with me. I’ve made a mistake. I should have never appeared before you.”
Shangqi feels his jaw drop open and his mouth dry up. He swallows, trembling where he stands. “Please, don’t say that. Don’t say that you mean that.”
“I do.” Then his dad adds in a quieter mutter, “Somehow I can still make decisions I regret even when I’m dead.”
“You’re not dead!”
“I am. I’ve been dead for a month now, and you have to accept it. I’m still in the process of dying, even now.” Wenwu begins to look more and more transparent with each passing second. “You’re too emotional.”
It looks like this is one of the rare times where his dad will disappear to avoid a conversation.
“I’m being too emotional? You want to stay stuck here as a ghost so you don’t have to deal with the consequences of your actions and all the real people you hurt, and you also won’t move on because you don’t want to face Mom after everything you did,” Shangqi scowls, angrily. “Maybe you’re the one who’s being a coward this time, huh, Dad?” He turns tail and slams the door of his apartment close, loud and on purpose like a teenager with a tantrum, before his dad has the chance to even begin to answer with a retort.
He’s fuming when he runs twenty blocks before hitting Japantown and he’s still fuming after he jogs ten more blocks and reaches Chinatown.
His anger stutters to a halt and withers on the spot when he sees Katy’s wild hand gestures from across the street as she walks with her Waipo. Her brother follows, not far behind, holding four white plastic bags of groceries, two in each hand, nodding intently to Katy’s ramblings. They're happy. Content.
Shangqi quickly ducks away so they don’t spot him.
He shouldn’t let his emotions get the better of him like this. The last time this happened, he came to the conclusion that he had to kill his father by himself, which obviously didn’t work out. Maybe he should ask more clearly why Wenwu doesn’t want Shangqi to return to Ta Lo and bring him back to life.
Yeah, he should do that.
He should…