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Trick or Treat Exchange 2022
Stats:
Published:
2022-10-24
Completed:
2022-10-24
Words:
2,000
Chapters:
5/5
Comments:
18
Kudos:
57
Bookmarks:
19
Hits:
530

时光飞逝 / time flies, time dies

Summary:

Somewhen after the festival of ghosts, the fabric of space and time once again stretches taut.

Notes:

  • Extra treat. ♡
  • Gijinka (擬人化) — Humanization of non-human entities. Basically, the characters have been reimagined as Pokémon reimagined as people.
  • This is pretty self-contained, so no knowledge of Pokémon (or even Link Click, I guess!) is necessary.

(See the end of the work for more notes and other works inspired by this one.)

Chapter 1: sketch

Summary:

Concept art. Prose begins next chapter.

Notes:

(See the end of the chapter for notes.)

Chapter Text

Fairy-like person. Smiling expression. Old-fashioned headscarf over messy black hair. Hanfu-style attire. Billowy sleeves, ties and tassels. Backwards cross-collar robes, opening in the back for two insect wings.

Young man with huge, crane-like wings folded around himself like a cocoon. Pensive expression. Short white hair. Forehead ribbon. Long striped scarf. Outer jacket with the suggestion of an opening in the back.

Young lady with unfurled owl-like wings and hands laced behind her back. Cheery expression. Goggles around the neck. Backwards cloak. One half of a button-up shirt, tucked into an asymmetrical striped skirt. One visible foot, clad in a thick strappy sandal.

 

Notes:

Backup links below, in case any of the image URLs break.

[ Cheng Xiaoshi ]

[ Lu Guang ]

[ Qiao Ling ]


miscellaneous thoughts...

  • Cheng Xiaoshi — time traveling
    Lu Guang — time clairvoyance
    Qiao Ling — time management (the most formidable of the three)
  • Cheng Xiaoshi’s wings are based on those of “true flies” (Diptera). In terms of wings, flies are quite interesting. Whereas the majority of winged insects have four wings (two front wings and two hind wings), flies only have two front wings. In lieu of hind wings are tiny spoon-shaped flappy things called halteres, which help with orientation during flight. Now, the thing about halteres is that... I love them. I love them! They are adorable. They are so small. Like the wing version of T-rex arms!
  • Lu Guang’s wings are roughly based on those of a crane. He has the biggest wings of the three, but is also the least likely to use them, so Cheng Xiaoshi teasingly describes Lu Guang as 翼而不飞 — something with wings that does not fly. (A play on 不翼而飞, which describes something that flies without wings. Often used figuratively, like, “Gosh, where did half my socks go? It’s like they flew away, even though they have no wings!”)
  • Qiao Ling’s wings had to be reworked a bit, because Hoothoot is stylized to the point that its wings look more like almond seeds than tools of flight. The redrawn wing shape is less flipper and more IRL owl. One weird and charming trait of Hoothoot is that it is constantly switching its feet when perched. The switching is so rapid that the human eye only perceives a single foot! This is a bit difficult to translate into gijinka form, but I allude to it in the way that Qiao Ling only has one leg visible.
  • Honored requestor! Since you listed trans/nb characters among your likes, I will note that Cheng Xiaoshi is written as nonbinary here. In a very casual way. No narrative weight to it whatsoever!

Chapter 2: baton pass

Summary:

The time-traveler.

Chapter Text

Upside-down, closed-eyed fairy in front of a stylized sun shaped like an incense coil.

 

⁂

 

Autumn, season of windows.

Somewhen after the festival of ghosts, the fabric of space and time once again stretches taut: a knitted scarf in a child’s cruel hands. The gaps widen, and flying through is simple.

If someone wanted to find a person lost to the winds of time, this hallowed evening would be the easiest place to take off, and the easiest place to alight. Cheng Xiaoshi, who has been searching for family for a decade across centuries, knows this well.

When dusk falls, the time-traveler’s eyes flash the color of leaves in descent. Then Cheng Xiaoshi, too, dives.

 

⁂

 

“They aren’t dead,” Cheng Xiaoshi says to Qiao Ling, a friend from the third millennium, in the rain.

Qiao Ling hums and waves a blow-dryer over Cheng Xiaoshi’s damp insect wings. Three years ago — one year into her future — she tucked a round memory stone into Cheng Xiaoshi’s palm, and then denied having ever done so. Glowing blue, the stone unspools people’s histories like a haunted film reel.

“They aren’t dead,” Cheng Xiaoshi will say to Lu Guang, many wingbeats later.

Lu Guang’s thousand-mile stare will shift. He will look at the stone in Cheng Xiaoshi’s hands, and say nothing.

 

⁂

 

Two fighters spar under the blanket of Lu Guang’s wings. The battle, like all seven before it, is futile. Cheng Xiaoshi might move through time, but Qiao Ling moves with it, master of its rhythms.

On screen, a character suffers their eighth death.

“Qiao Ling,” Cheng Xiaoshi shrieks, fingers slipping in frustration.

“Cheng Xiaoshi,” Qiao Ling shrieks back, when the game controller shatters. Aggrieved, Cheng Xiaoshi looks around for support. Lu Guang feigns sleep.

Thankfully, it is autumn, season of windows — enough windows to return a needle, unraveling mistakes, knit-to-tink.

Like video in reverse, the controller rewinds to life.

 

⁂

 

“Take a picture of your family,” says Qiao Ling, “so we can help you search.”

Photography thus conspires to visit a world utterly naive to it. (Language plays tricks, too. Qiao Ling describes Cheng Xiaoshi’s childhood home as antiquity, but isn’t it Cheng Xiaoshi’s era that is young, and Qiao Ling’s that is old?)

Blurry memories are safest, so Cheng Xiaoshi picks something that feels like an ink-wash painting. Forest’s heart, first flight. Callow halfwings failing. Strong arms—

Two palms clap around a trusted memory stone. It guides the way to the past like old light from a north star.

 

⁂

 

The stone was wrong, is Cheng Xiaoshi’s first frantic thought.

Cheng Xiaoshi shouldn’t be the one cushioning a tender-winged child’s fall, rewinding their bruises and putting them to bed. But the forest is otherwise empty.

Pick another memory. Try again.

And again.

And—

A truth smiles with rotten teeth: nobody is waiting for Cheng Xiaoshi. Nothing was ever lost. Cheng Xiaoshi is a single tree who mistook its own soughing breaths for company. Who has always, always been alone.

When Qiao Ling asks, “Did you get the picture?”

Cheng Xiaoshi laughs, saying, “I did!” — and then cries, saying, “I did.”

 

⁂

Chapter 3: future sight

Summary:

The mystic.

Notes:

(See the end of the chapter for notes.)

Chapter Text

Upside-down, wide-eyed bird with a radiant halo. It faces a river of stars.

 

⁂

 

“Trick or treat?” Qiao Ling asked, asks, will ask.

One junction. Two tracks. All deceptive simplicity. If Lu Guang traces each route of this branching railway, he will quickly find himself fractaling into the great unknown, tallying externalities to no end. What harm accrues from a trick? What costs hide in a treat? Lu Guang’s life is one giant, never-ending trolley problem, where the least exhausting response is often to do nothing at all.

Qiao Ling prods his right eye with the tips of her primaries. Tap-tap-tap. A metronome with no music.

“A trick, then,” she said, says, will say.

 

⁂

 

Someday, Cheng Xiaoshi will tell him: “I can’t believe this. Your feathers are actually growing moss.”

Lu Guang, who will not have moved for days, will only continue to stare at the stars.

“Just take a picture,” Cheng Xiaoshi will say, as if the night sky isn’t one already. A photograph of the past, hundreds-thousands-millions of years old. Its timelines are as tangled as Cheng Xiaoshi’s own.

This has not happened yet.

This is happening now: Cheng Xiaoshi’s fingers, curling. That hand, a grounding warmth against Lu Guang’s left eye.

Let me be your Polaris, Lu Guang does not say.

 

⁂

 

Temporal anxiety, the sleep-killer.

A solemn moon traverses the skylight. Even with no clocks, time makes its suffocating presence known. October cannot arrive fast enough — Cheng Xiaoshi, who coaxes flowers into blooming out of season, always makes time feel less like a dictator.

“Count sheep,” Qiao Ling suggests, ticking a pen back and forth.

Lu Guang averts his gaze. Focuses on that pen. “Is that what you do?”

Qiao Ling laughs. “I’m always counting. Three.”

Tick-tock, says the pen.

“Two.”

No, not pen. Pendulum.

“One,” says Qiao Ling, and—

Lu Guang awakens to morning sunlight, and a plate of fruit.

 

⁂

 

A truth regardless of past, present or future: Lu Guang avoids looking at his friends whenever possible. He cannot turn off his hair-trigger visions, and he’d rather not see too much.

It’s more than just their privacy. It’s a preservation of possibility. Like imaginary cats sealed in boxes and superimposed eigenstates — as long as his eyes take no measurements, these systems need not collapse. He need not condemn anyone who holds any piece of his heart to one iron-clad fate or another.

“More fool you,” says the creature wearing Qiao Ling’s skin, when Lu Guang fails to anticipate their knife.

 

⁂

 

What remains of Lu Guang is locked in a small drawer.

Spiders build homes around him. Dust, the varnish of dead things, drifts in from cracks between paneling. Otherworld barriers grow thin; ghosts squirm at their edges.

“Trick or treat?”

In October’s dying throes, a body snatcher takes half of Lu Guang between thumb and forefinger. They smile, face crinkling into red crescents, at the future.

The other half of Lu Guang, the eye that sees the past, is pressed into someone else’s hands. “A memory stone,” Cheng Xiaoshi is told, in the same delighted tone of: A trick, then.

 

⁂

Notes:

H... happy birthday, Lu Guang??

Chapter 4: hypnosis

Summary:

The owl.

Chapter Text

Closed-eyed owl perched in front of a clockwork moon on a bed of clouds.

 

⁂

 

Twenty-three, fifty-nine, fifty-nine.

Qiao Ling rises with the birth of each day, deep into the hour of rats. Perhaps it’s the hungry owl in her. To be clear, she does not actually ever sleep, but enjoys the ritual of it. Midnight is just the landlady entering her studio; Qiao Ling is the answering door chime.

Every night, seconds to zero, a pressure builds from syrinx to pharynx. The urge to trill — a friendly greeting! Time, like all clients, should be made to feel welcome.

Tonight, Qiao Ling heralds Sunday, and—

All sound dies in her throat when Monday dawns instead.

 

⁂

 

“It’s unlike you to forget karaoke,” says Xu Shanshan, who sings sweetly on Sundays while Qiao Ling screeches.

Qiao Ling pouts. More like karaoke forgot her! Could she be blamed if Sunday never bothered to show up?

Xu Shanshan laughs at this protest. “Daydreaming again, Qiao Ling?”

The tick-tick-tick inside Qiao Ling whirs with the earth and stars. It is 17:23 on March 31st, but she wishes it were October — surely, these ugly holes in time are Cheng Xiaoshi’s fault, somehow. It will be months before she can properly yell at that ridiculous person.

She waits.

(The holes grow.)

 

⁂

 

Time stutters. Qiao Ling counts and counts and counts. She thumbs through albums, scribbles notes, sets appointments. She locks her planner when pages start dog-earing themselves without permission.

Something is in my house, she thinks.

Time stutters. Portraits’ eyes may not move, but other things do — items untouched for years, whose tidy surfaces belie that fact. Isn’t dust a timepiece, too? And unlike clocks, dust tells no lies.

Lu Guang skims the past for her, one moon-blue eye open. Quietly, he says:

“Sister, it’s just you.”

Ah.

Something is in my head, she thinks.

Of course, that’s when time st

 

⁂

 

Understand that all of this has already happened.

(Cheng Xiaoshi, wild-eyed, cradling a round stone with devastating care: “What did you do to them? Who are you?”)

(A monster, red-eyed, holding that stone’s twin brother: laughing, laughing.)

It’s tricky, waging war in absence. Can you fight a nightmare if it’s only present when you aren’t there?

What about a nightmare who holds the right eye of a seer? Who can predict any move before you even make it?

(The creature pauses, peering into the upcoming witching hour. Why, they wonder, does the future seem to dissolve into darkness after th—)

 

⁂

 

Ling-Ling is four, and tiny. Owl-eyed, downy-feathered, half-mittened.

Qiao Ling is twenty-one, and tired. Gently, she picks up a dropped glove and tugs it back onto that tiny hand. Ginkgo leaves flutter overhead like butterfly wings. Autumn paints them gold.

“Thank you, auntie,” the child says, looking up shyly. Her gaze catches on the leaf held between Qiao Ling’s fingers: a pinned butterfly.

Tick-tock, says the ginkgo leaf, as Qiao Ling weaves her most complex hypnosis yet.

Sleep!

Ling-Ling doesn’t sleep, but that’s fine — the command wasn’t meant for her.

A countdown begins. The timer is set for seventeen years.

 

⁂

Chapter 5: rest

Summary:

The aftermath.

Chapter Text

Upside-down, wide-eyed owl perched in front of a clockwork moon on a bed of clouds.

⁂

 

Precognition comes with a sort of hubris.

Anticipation is not everything. There is power, too, in remembrance. And the monster that stole Lu Guang’s eye and Qiao Ling’s face was too busy looking at the future to defend against an attack from the past.

Qiao Ling blinks into consciousness. She is immune to sleep. Most are not. There is someone in her head who will now slumber forever.

“It’s you again, thank god.” Cheng Xiaoshi’s voice breaks and dips. Two stones lie in two trembling hands. “But, Lu Guang is — I, I’m not strong enough to fix — Qiao Ling, help—”

 

⁂

 

With time travel, sometimes all that is needed is deliberate intention.

The solution is simple, right? If this Cheng Xiaoshi’s healing abilities are not enough, they just need a more experienced Cheng Xiaoshi to visit them.

Qiao Ling has barely finished the thought when someone alights in front of her.

“Ling-Ling,” is this person’s teasing greeting. Deep evergreen voice, paired crow’s feet, silver hair streaks: startling! Yet Cheng Xiaoshi is still recognizable in those silk-spun wings and sun-risen eyes. “Remind me to visit in twenty-four years.”

She nods, and, after a retaliatory punch for the nickname, begins a brand-new countdown.

 

Wide-eyed fairy in front of a stylized sun shaped like an incense coil.

 

⁂

 

As Qiao Ling sketches itineraries, Cheng Xiaoshi sits next to Cheng Xiaoshi with two halves of a fraction of Lu Guang between them.

Several hours of careful re-knitting later, Lu Guang is asleep but whole—

“Not crying, you’re crying—”

“Why’re you crying, you fossil, haven’t you lived through this before—”

Cheng Xiaoshi smacks Cheng Xiaoshi on the arm, and Cheng Xiaoshi laughs — and carefully remembers: you are a single tree who mistook yourself for company—

“Cheng Xiaoshi,” the elder interrupts. “You aren’t a tree. You’re a forest.” Warm eyes meet startled ones. “Don’t you see? You will always have company.”

 

⁂

 

Somewhere below the stars:

“I can’t believe this. Your feathers are actually growing moss.”

Having said this, Cheng Xiaoshi wheedles the moss into growing faster.

Greenery drips all over Lu Guang — an overgrown moss garden. What a mess! Of one’s own making! Cheng Xiaoshi seizes this excuse to begin preening those enormous wings. They are reassuringly in-tact.

“You’re still here,” Lu Guang later says, hesitant, like a question. “It’s mid-November.”

“Mn! I’ll stick around this year.”

“You... said you found your family. You should spend time with them.”

“Yes,” says Cheng Xiaoshi, straightening another feather. “That’s why I’m sticking around.”

 

Closed-eyed bird with a radiant halo. It faces a river of stars.

 

⁂

 

Qiao Ling clutches Lu Guang’s right hand; Cheng Xiaoshi, his left. Both ridiculously tactile, ever since—

“Let’s fly,” says Lu Guang, abrupt. He’s had inertia forced upon him for so long. Why not fly, whenever he can, just because he can?

They alight on one of many sky-scraping roosts. Air cools rapidly past the thermal inversion layer, so Lu Guang folds one person under each wing and closes his eyes.

The pasts and futures pressing against his eyelids go ignored. They are but ghosts compared to this snapshot, this slice of time, Qiao Ling’s heartbeat, Cheng Xiaoshi’s breathing—

Here, now.

 

⁂

Notes:

Thank you for the gift of your time.

♡

Backup links for tarot-themed doodles below.

[ The Sun (Upright) ]
[ The Sun (Reversed) ]

[ The Star (Upright) ]
[ The Star (Reversed) ]

[ The Moon (Upright) ]
[ The Moon (Reversed) ]