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Sometimes, when the nights stretched out far too long before him, Song Lan liked to think of the kind of conversations they could have had. The thoughts he wished he could have shared with Xiao Xingchen, back when they were both alive.
Before all of this, he’d been someone else: a corpse, controlled. Before that, a wanderer who was searching for the only thing he was yet to lose. Before that, he was Song Lan, the bite of frost to Xiao Xingchen’s breeze. Before that…
“I wish you could have known them,” he might have said. Xiao Xingchen had, like he did with everything else, breezed in and out of the halls of Baixue Temple, coming only to sweep away their most promising disciple. He didn’t return until Song Lan did, and by then it was already far, far too late.
Now, Song Lan said nothing, and there was no one to hear him. Just a little pouch, containing two souls battered nearly beyond repair.
Still, he liked to think of what he might say with a second chance. A third, since this was the second shot at living; it was just configured in the wrong order, with only him and not everyone else who made his first chance something to be missed, mourned. What was the use of his third chance when there were things he still needed to say to his closest friend about everyone who no longer walked the land?
“My shifu taught me to write,” he would have said. If only he’d known, years down the line, just how much that would mean. How his every encounter would be mediated through a skill taught to a child with shaking hands, repeated over and over until it finally stuck. “Do you remember how it felt to learn?”
Being taught by their respective shifu was something they’d shared, so perhaps Xiao Xingchen would have nodded. He would have described his own loss, the mirror to Song Lan’s own: “She was patient with my lack of skill,” he would have said. Maybe he would have smiled the small, sad smile he reserved for thinking about his home. Maybe he would have laughed, thinking of a moment from so many years ago.
“He taught me the first important lesson of my life,” Song Lan might have said. Xiao Xingchen’s face would soften, listening with the patience his shifu taught him. “In writing, there is only one chance to make something perfect. But as long as you act, every mistake can turn into something beautiful.”
“It’s a good lesson,” Xiao Xingchen would say. “He’s right.”
In Song Lan’s head, that was the moment that Xiao Xingchen’s gaze would tilt upwards, meeting Song Lan’s eyes. The meaning would be clear, unspoken, in the way that everything important between them always had been until that fateful moment, and the way it could never be afterwards.
It was a futile hope. This conversation only could have happened after the ability to speak without words failed them, and Xiao Xingchen would never again refer to Song Lan as the beauty that came from his mistake.
Xiao Xingchen had never called leaving the mountain a mistake. It was only Song Lan who knew it must have been, for all the pain it brought him. It was selfish to think he could be the chance Xiao Xingchen had to turn his life back towards the seamless grace he deserved.
Song Lan could allow himself a little selfishness, maybe. There was no one around to see it right now.
“He stressed my own patience over everything,” Song Lan might have continued. “The end product was important, but there were other disciples whose writing skills were poor too.”
“Not you, I gather.” He could practically see the upwards tilt to Xiao Xingchen’s lips, hear the rise and fall of his tone. “Your handwriting is exquisite.”
Maybe Song Lan would have flushed a little at that. “What it looked like wasn’t the most important part, though,” he said. It was important, the marker of someone with the grace and education to wield more than a brush, but it wasn’t the aim. “That was the focus to apply mind to action, see something through from thought to the moment the brush left the page, with the patience to do it over and over.”
Plenty of people from the town Song Lan spent his earliest years in would send their children to the temple to get an education - still more did it so they could have a stable purpose through their young lives, and then still more so they could learn to wield a sword. His shifu cared little for the aims of all those parents, nor which aspirations their children held onto.
No, his shifu sought one thing from his disciples, and one thing only: that they should treat writing with the care and reverence it deserved, following his teachings through not to get to the sword but for the joy of wielding the brush itself.
“I never had the will to stick with my writing for long,” Xiao Xingchen would have replied. This was something they had discussed, once upon a time, but Song Lan couldn’t remember how it came up. “I breathed the sword from the moment I could take one in my hand.”
That was where their masters had differed, and Song Lan had so often wished to sit down with Xiao Xingchen and talk through the ideas behind it all. Why give a child who couldn’t understand the meaning of their blade a sword? His own shifu had been clear on the issue. “It was something to be earned, in Baixue Temple. It was like writing; there was no use having skill with the sword without the ability to wield it responsibly. We had to demonstrate the honour and dignity required to wield a weapon with a higher purpose.”
If Xiao Xingchen were here now, Song Lan knew he wouldn’t speak those words aloud. Not when his skin was scarred forever in patterns of frost, hidden where no one could see - it didn’t matter. Xiao Xingchen would know that the marks were there, and know that it was how he wielded his sword that caused it.
Song Lan closed his eyes, shaking his head in an attempt to dislodge the image. Xiao Xingchen’s mouth, down turned in disappointment, his face pinched with guilt. It wasn’t a real conversation. Xiao Xingchen would never look at him like that.
“Anyone who played around with their sword had it taken away.” These words would never be spoken, but Song Lan couldn’t stop them echoing in his head anyway. “It wasn’t just a weapon, nor a way to become strong. It was the power to end and save lives, contained in something any one of us could lift.”
And like that, Song Lan understood why Xiao Xingchen was trained as he was. Words that would never be spoken crystallised in front of him in horrible clarity. “We only practised with each other,” Xiao Xingchen never said. “We were never going to take our skills anywhere else.”
Purpose, honour, dignity. What use did those values have, on the mountain almost no one left? The sword could be wielded for the sword’s sake, but not a life’s.
And yet Xiao Xingchen chose to anyway. He took his weapon in his hand and moved with the kind of purpose Song Lan never had to summon up, because it was instilled in him from the moment his hand touched a hilt.
There were benefits to both approaches their masters had taken, in the end; they made such different people, with different strengths. Song Lan wished they could still combine them to one end.
Song Lan opened his eyes and looked across flames he didn’t need into an empty space he wished was full. What was he doing, sitting in a cave for shelter he didn’t deserve to get rest that would no longer renew his body? All he’d managed was to lose track of the thread of a sad conversation with someone who couldn’t listen to words he didn’t speak.
So much for full control of his mind and body. So much for every action executed with purpose and reverence. Where was the reverence in a body disturbed from rest? What use were the teachings of his shifu when Song Lan’s every passing moment defied it?
Song Lan could never be the man he’d been taught to be. He couldn’t hold a sword with the knowledge that he had only saved lives with the weapon in his hand. He could not be a worthy disciple of a temple that no longer existed, nor his master’s final living student. He couldn’t apologise to Xiao Xingchen for all he hadn’t known and all that went unsaid.
All he could do was trace each word into the fabric of a qiankun pouch, his movements slow and steady (with deliberation and purpose, as all worthy things were), as if he had all the time in the world. Perhaps he did; he knew not when his body would crumble once more, nor when his soul would be at rest.
Song Lan was still regaining control of his body, he felt. Nominally, everything was still his, and had been for a while now. But he still felt stiff, like the muscles that locked on death had never unlocked. It made his fingers clumsy when he tried to turn the silence that stretched around him into words.
‘I miss them,’ he wrote into the fabric of the pouch. ‘They’ve been gone for so long.’
There were things he didn’t write, too. It was still too early to think about their meanings, too soon for Xiao Xingchen to know - if he could even feel Song Lan’s touch (it was funny, if such a thing could even be called that. They’d touched so infrequently in their lifetimes that Song Lan didn’t remember what it felt like. Would Xiao Xingchen recognise his hands, with two layers of death separating them? He didn’t know. He wanted to know).
He wanted to be able to say it: I miss you too. They’ve been gone for so long that I don’t know who would even remember their names. There’s something else on the site where they once lived. I miss you, Xingchen.
He missed Song Zichen and everyone who used the name. He missed Baixue Temple. He missed his shifu. He missed when he still had the chance to turn his mistakes into something beautiful.