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The first thing Baizhu notices as he regains consciousness is that it is still far too early in the night - probably not even a couple hours past midnight, if he were a guessing man - to warrant being awake, a hypothesis which is further supported by the complete lack of sunlight and warmth on his fluttering eyelids.
The second thing Baizhu notices - with much chagrin - is that he had evidently overworked himself the day prior, with the obscene amount of patients he had treated around the Harbour having forced him to be actively on the move the whole time; and he knows he is now paying the price for it in the searing, stiffening aches and pains that he feels layered throughout the muscles of his body. Despite the flash of annoyance he feels at the realisation, Baizhu simply lets out a low, shaking exhale and works to force himself to go as limp and pliant as he can, in the vague hope of lessening the strain against his already frail figure.
The third thing he notices is that there is someone else in the room with him.
“Qiqi, child,” he mutters, his eyes peripherally aware of the soft glowing light emanating from the jiangshi’s Vision. Choosing to remain lying in bed instead of sitting up - because he is not interested in inducing any kind of nausea or dizziness from the abrupt movement -, Baizhu instead turns his head to the side and manages to make out the shadowy silhouette of Qiqi’s small shape by the doorway.
The girl is sat kneeling on the floor, with her Vision clutched tightly in her lap, and statuesque in posture as she keeps watch over the older man, seemingly not entertaining herself with anything else.
Baizhu blinks. Momentarily startled by the still attentiveness, he finds himself blinking a couple times more to think of what he wants to say, fatigue clouding his brain, leaving him tongue tied and mouth rendered numb. It takes Baizhu a moment to remember the usual tone and words he uses with his ward when she is acting unusually in his presence.
“Little one, is something the matter?” His voice rasps, low and dry. The desire for something to drink to quench his thirst is suddenly overwhelming, but within seconds it settles down to something of a passing fancy as Baizhu swallows, keeping firm hold of his train of thought. “What are you doing in my room?”
Qiqi stares, unresponsive for a long moment. In that distinctly disquieting way of hers - that Baizhu won’t admit to, but which he has grown strangely fond of over the months he has cared for her so far -, he manages to catch the faint whispers of an order she gives herself, with her Vision light just about shining on the lower part of her face.
He watches the careful beginning of her slow rise and the steady amble she makes to arrive at his side. Baizhu waits, silent and patient, for Qiqi to reach him; sees her grasp - tight, white-knuckled - at the bedsheets on the edge of his bed, and sink to kneel on the floor again. Up closer to him now, Baizhu is able to catalogue the rounded shape of her youthful face and features better, her gaze a little vacant and lost as always.
“Qiqi?” He repeats, clearing his throat. He waits for a moment before reaching out with his hand - delicately, with no sudden movements, for frankly both their sakes - and lightly tugs at a strand of the little girl’s hair that has come undone from her long braid. Baizhu tries to smile something genuine, but knows that to anyone else, it would look as frail and weak and exhausted as he feels.
“What do you need, little one?” he asks slowly, pushing Qiqi’s hair out of her face, tucking the wayward strands behind her ear. Evidently choosing to ignore him again, the child simply leans into his touch, slight and sedate, the coolness of his fingertips seemingly a vague comfort.
Her movements endear him a little, warming his tone by a single degree.
“Ah, I see. Would you like to rest here with me for the rest of the night, is that it?”
Baizhu’s smile grows with faint amusement as Qiqi leans back, wrinkling her nose at the suggestion, like he already knew she would. Whatever facsimile of feverish chill he might be currently feeling notwithstanding, Baizhu intellectually knew that his sleeping quarters were home to hardly more than a gentle breeze, and only on the days he left his windows or door cracked slightly open; Qiqi’s skewed thermoregulation was still far too sensitive to tolerate such conditions for an extended period of time.
“…too much heat.” Qiqi confirms immediately, head shaking in a mechanical manner. “Even if… Baizhu is often cold, it is… too warm for Qiqi still.” The little girl pauses, pensively tilts her head, as if thinking about what her next words should be. “Like… pus. and rot. and death.”
Baizhu laughs silently, morbidly, despite the instinctive wrinkling of his own nose. He knows he is not careful with the clinical nature of his words when he works, and sometimes forgets of Qiqi’s quiet presence when she accompanies him. Some would say he should perhaps be more considerate to her, the poor thing, but it is in all honesty a small fascination to the doctor, keeping track of what concepts and turns of phrase the jiangshi girl seems to cling onto, even despite her impaired memory.
“Yes, I know, child.” He chuckles. “I remember, I was just making fun.”
Then, almost as if receiving retribution for his teasing, Baizhu’s chuckle turns into a harsh heaving wheeze, the movement jolting at his body rough enough to leave him uncomfortably breathless. The man reaches for his throat instinctively, sharply disquieted, before pausing and uselessly letting his arm drop back down to his side again. It’s not as if there is anything he could actually do in the moment to alleviate it.
Resigned, he lets the coughing fit ride through his body, and does little else but strain to keep his laboured gasps and trembling to a minimum, in a middling attempt to not overly frighten the young girl.
In the midst of his pain-filled haze, Baizhu considers, blankly clinical: it seems his condition has left him far more weakly and compromised than usual tonight, and even worse than he had thought possible at this stage still. He grimaces through his spasms at the thought that he might not even be able to get out of bed later in the day, maybe not even for the rest of the week. Such days were hardly unheard of, but the man was usually careful to keep himself and his body in check, to try and prevent the sort of excessive strain that leaves him miserable and bedridden.
A day of recuperation - not rest, because those days are never truly restful - is a day that his work must stagnate, a day that he must fail his patients. It is never a pleasant experience, attempting to get back on schedule the following days and making humbling apologetic proclamations of regret to those he missed out on. It stings at his wounded sense of pride, leaving him feeling irritable and sullen and inadequate .
If Baizhu is careless enough to make the mistake again, to overwork himself to the point of needing bedrest all over again, he already knows that this acts as no testament to his tenacity or strength of character; he knows that it would significantly worsen his already precarious condition instead. He knows that, eventually, his sickness would consume him whole.
“Like death.” Qiqi says after his lungs finally settle, wide eyed, not having noted Baizhu’s glazed distraction from her presence. It takes him a second to process her words, to realise she repeats herself from earlier.
Like pus. and rot. and death.
Qiqi stands up cautiously, leans and stretches out to splay her chubby little fingers over his chest, palm hovering.
“Qiqi can help?” She glances - gaze for the most part flat and impassive, but with the faintest tells of uncertainty Baizhu has come to recognise - and focuses on his pallid, drawn face. His mouth twists, wry. His voice is faint and hollow when he speaks.
“I don’t know. Can you, little one?”
Qiqi blinks once, then blinks again, slower, like a contemplative little cat. She peers down to squint at him in the shadowy dark and, in a particularly childish manner Baizhu has not seen often from her, she purses her lips.
“I can help… ‘Qiqi is very good at her job’, yes?”
Baizhu thinks her words are an echo of a conversation she probably heard between himself and herbalist Gui. She shakes her head, long braid bouncing over her shoulder. The doctor sees how the glow of her Vision grows as it activates, feels the biting cold that begins to spread through his body, and shudders at its overwhelming power. “Eh…? ‘Ah, yes, of course she is’…”
“Of course, little one.” Baizhu gasps over the simple words, shuts his eyes tight against the sharp and sudden probing of adeptal energy. It is cleansing, of course, and obviously curative, but also harsh, unforgiving and relentless in its pursuit.
Under the control of an untrained jiangshi child, its icy power is raggedly biting at the edges, and it feels like it is cutting straight through his skin and deep into his bones. If Baizhu didn’t know better, he would think bleeding raw welts were somehow forming below his skin and muscle tissue, growing so freezing cold it burns his insides something awful. Perhaps to someone in a better physical condition than he, this feeling would hardly be worth noting, nothing more than a harsh chill, but to Baizhu it is excruciating.
And yet, even so, he works his mouth to move through the nauseating pain and form the sounds to attempt to reassure Qiqi, struggling all the same.
“How, ah… how kind of you, little one.”
Qiqi seems to ignore him then, eyes gone icy white and bright with the glow of her power. The adeptal energy being fed into him is so inordinately forceful that Baizhu can almost taste it, the fizzling hoarfrost reaching his tongue, sticking slick to his throat like dripping icicles and clogging up his windpipe like clusters of congealed snow. He can’t help but gasp wetly, almost choking, when he truly feels the energy enter his lungs.
He tries to settle his nerves, to push through the unnerving sensation of feeling like he is about to be suffocated or drowned, all without a single tangible obstruction existing within his chest.
But try as he might, that instinctually human sort of panic blooms desperately within Baizhu anyway, at Qiqi crude healing without precise direction pulsing through his frame, working on perhaps one of the body’s most fragile and delicate organs. After a frighteningly long moment of icy stillness, Baizhu finally finds the strength of will to lift his shaking arm and take the jiangshi child’s wrist in his hand, to pull her away from his chest, and to squeeze it as tightly as he can muster, calling Qiqi back from whatever trance she’s gone under.
“That’s enough.” Baizhu chokes out. “Qiqi, that’s enough. Stop.”
The girl does not resist Baizhu’s movement, nor does she seem overly bothered by the strength - or lack thereof - of his grip on her. She turns her glazed over white eyes to his own, and blinks.
“‘Stop’.” She echoes. “Is this Qiqi’s new order?”
“ Yes. Enough.”
Qiqi simply nods. She curls her fingers inward, and calls the adeptal energy to return to her. As she does, the light of her Vision dims, and her irises turn back to their usual hue, and her vacantly lost gaze is once more.
Baizhu still feels very, very deeply cold, but when he breathes out it is a clear, and easy, sigh of relief. Then he pauses, and takes another deep breath in, another steady breath out. An interested ‘ah!’ noise leaves his lips.
“Little one.” He says, clearing his voice delicately. “Come, help me sit up for a moment.”
Qiqi considers the man for a moment before doing so, placing a hand at his back, below a shoulder, and taking an upper arm to pull him up by. Baizhu pushes himself, first at the elbow, then by pressing down on the heels of his palms. And even though he is still trembling ever so slightly by the time he manages to sit upright, Baizhu presses a hand down against his chest, exhales quietly through his nose, and smiles.
Staring at him with intensity, Qiqi must decide she sees something she approves of, because she speaks slowly, but with apparent hope, “Qiqi…helped?”
Baizhu hums, similarly pleased. He still feels deeply achey, and sore, and thoroughly exhausted from lack of sleep. There is still a nagging little voice in the back of his mind telling him that there is still no way he will be fit to work and take home calls by the rise of the morning sun. The doctor has no doubt that he will have to take the next day - maybe the next two or three - carefully and with prudence, that he will probably not go beyond the bottom of Bubu Pharmacy’s steps.
But these sorts of scenarios had been more often than not his norm now, and the only reason he had been particularly active the days prior were because of the busy festival season required that of him, Herbalist Gui, and even little Qiqi.
With his mind now clear from the haze of several different compounding forms of pain, Baizhu knows this: he is still sick. He is still an ailing man living with a long-term condition with no known cure, and he continues to have a frail constitution and poor lungs and a weak physique. Despite all the wondrous abilities that come from being an allogene, especially one skilled in adeptal arts and healing, this is not something that can simply be scrubbed out, expunged from a sick body.
But even so, Baizhu also knows that he feels far lighter than he has in quite some time. His aches, instead of being fierce and biting and near nausea-inducing, have quietened down to something more manageable, something dull and thrumming. The source of his exhaustion is no longer overwhelmingly from the stress of simply existing in his mortal body, but from a reasonable lack of sleep, something any average being has experienced, and been able to treat with a simple night’s rest.
And his lungs, if only for a moment, for maybe a couple days, maybe a couple weeks, feel fresh, rejuvenated, and will allow Baizhu to move in the world far more easily than he had even just the day before.
It’s a wonder. A respite. It’s frankly more than the doctor had even expected, ever dared to hope.
“Baizhu…” the voice of the jiangshi girl brings him out of his daze, and he notices the way she lifts her hand as if to tug at his sleeve for attention. Her fingers don’t quite graze the fabric before Qiqi lets her arm fall. “Eh, Baizhu… I had a question…?”
“Oh yes. I’m sorry Qiqi, I didn’t mean to ignore you.” He rests his hand on her head and pats her hair lightly, his fingers slipping between the thin wispy strands. “You very much did help, little one. Thank you.”
Qiqi gazes up from beneath Baizhu’s arm. Her hand reaches out to pat his thigh, as if mimicking him. The thumps are firm and decisive. She murmurs dazedly, “but Qiqi did not finish… did not cure Doctor Baizhu, Qiqi thinks…” and despite his good mood, Baizhu’s mouth twists slightly.
“No, you didn’t.” he admits. “You wouldn’t have been able to, I don’t think.”
“Qiqi is not… enough…?”
“You…Of course you are, child.” Baizhu mulls over her words, consideringly. He skims a thumb over her forehead absently, trying to think of a way to word what he wants to say delicately, before remembering that Qiqi is a hardy thing, and not easily perturbed by this type of talk. “My constitution is too weak to handle that style of healing in large, continuous doses. Even if you had the training to try and address the root cause,” Baizhu’s smile is blandly morbid, “I most likely would have died in the process. Do you understand, little one?”
Qiqi takes a moment to register his words while remaining perfectly silent and still, like an eerie porcelain doll, before giving a single nod.
“…Baizhu fears death. But Qiqi thinks death will not take Baizhu soon… By the will of the sacred name, the adeptal title… of Fortune Preserver.”
Baizhu stares at the jiangshi child in front of him, mouth gone dry. Although he has not considered himself a religiously devout man for quite some time, Baizhu is still appropriately respectful towards the illuminated ones of the nation of Liyue, and thought himself broadly educated of the various dozen epithets and honorifics by which they go by.
He does not recognise the name Fortune Preserver. Baizhu does not need much time at all to figure out who it belongs to, though.
“‘Fortune Preserver,’” he repeats, intrigued. “Would you rather go by that name?”
The child does not respond.
“Instead of Qiqi,” Baizhu clarifies. He frowns a little, watches her carefully for a long silent moment when she deigns to not speak again. “Hm… perhaps this illuminated one would like to enlighten this lowly one, and explain where he has shown you disrespect.”
Qiqi’s eyes widen. Reaching out, she encircles her small fingers around his thin wrist and tightens her grip. Baizhu holds back his wince.
“No.” The girl shakes her head.
“No?”
“Qiqi… does not remember. I… No. No disrespect.” Her next head shake is slightly more forceful, confused as she loosens her grip. “Baizhu, just Qiqi. Just Qiqi, please… I forgot what comes next.” The usual monotony of her voice has a clear edge of frustration, of some sort of childlike upset. When Qiqi glances back up at him, there’s something expectant and small in her gaze.
“That’s alright,” Baizhu says delicately. “I understand. No need to get upset, little Qiqi. You were very good today, do not worry.”
“‘Good’,” Qiqi repeats quietly. Her Vision, for just a second, glows a little brighter, and then dims. “Again?”
Baizhu makes an appeasing noise.
“Not necessary.” He soothes. “Tomorrow- later today,” Baizhu corrects himself absently, patting Qiqi’s hand still loosely around his wrist, “you can accompany Herbalist Gui, if you’d like, and help him carry the medicinal herbs.”
Qiqi nods in acceptance, then pauses.
“And Baizhu…?”
He smiles wanly.
“I’ll have to stay at the pharmacy for the day, I’m afraid.”
“Qiqi will help.”
Baizhu hums, faintly surprised.
“You’d rather stay at Bubu Pharmacy than go out to the harbour with Gui? It will be a good chance to stretch your legs, little one.”
“Not stay. Help.” Qiqi carefully flexes her fingers against Baizhu’s skin and blinks at him. Baizhu tilts his head to the side wonderingly, and frowns faintly once he catches onto the jiangshi child’s meaning.
“It is dangerous for me to receive any more healing, Qiqi. Do you remember me telling you that?” He speaks softly, finally removing her grip from his wrist with gentle movements. “Adeptal arts are taxing on any mortal body, much less one as fragile as mine-”
And then the man stills. Considers her words carefully, mulls over Qiqi’s strange insistence to want to ‘help’. The young girl had shown awareness of Baizhu’s poor condition from the moment he took her in, but this is the first time so far she has expressed such obvious interest in wanting to use her abilities on the good doctor. Perhaps…
Baizhu hesitates.
“Although…” The progress on his - rather fanciful - aspiration has stagnated, he reasons. And Baizhu was not a man to lie to himself: he remembers well the type of thoughts that ran through his mind when Qiqi first became his ward. He pushes onwards. “Maybe not soon, little one. But… perhaps, some other time. If you would like to try again in the future, then…” Baizhu pauses. Qiqi makes a little questioning noise.
“Baizhu…will remind Qiqi?”
“Remind you?”
“‘In the future’…”
“…Ah. You would like me to make sure to remember this for you?”
“To try again… to help.” Qiqi agrees, pleased. The doctor stares at her, this small jiangshi girl that’s all stiff limbs and blank eyes and mechanical movements, and feels the beginnings of a sort of quiet despair start to grow within him.
It is not an easy thing to forget that, despite her otherworldly circumstances, Qiqi is still very much a child. Most days, Baizhu doesn’t let himself think about it too hard. His doctor vows may have hardened him to face sickness and misfortune with calm, steady hands, but if he allows himself to dwell on it, his healer heart beats red and raw and aching every single time.
“Alright. I’ll make sure to do that, Qiqi.” In a fit of soft-hearted sentimentality, he adds, “Maybe we should get you a journal, little one. That way, you’ll be able to remember things by yourself.”
Qiqi tilts her head, pensive but hesitant.
“By myself…? Qiqi’s memory… is not good.”
“I know, Qiqi,” Baizhu assures, “but if you write things down in the journal immediately, then you can read it again whenever you want, and you’ll remember. Would you like that, little one?”
“Oh.” Qiqi blinks, looking down at her hands and then back up to the doctor, slowly nodding. “Yes, please. Baizhu, one journal for Qiqi, please…”
Baizhu laughs, quietly endeared by the jiangshi girl’s mannerisms.
“Not right now, little Qiqi. I will get Herbalist Gui to buy one later today while the two of you are at the market. Right now,” the doctor spares a glance out the window to the silver moon still glowing high in the dark sky, “is time to sleep. It won’t do us any good to wake up in the morning tired, now will it, little one?”
“Qiqi does not… feel tired.”
Baizhu hums.
“Ah, but I do. We have a long day ahead, child. Any amount of rest will be of benefit. Now go on. Do you need me to accompany you to your room?”
The child shakes her head.
“Qiqi understands. Baizhu, sleep. I will rest too…” She pauses for a long moment to watch the doctor carefully, and when she next speaks, her words sound rehearsed, well learned, as if she has heard them many times before. “‘Good night… See you in the morning. Rest well…’”
“Good night.” Baizhu echoes. The faintest tells of a smile plays at his lips. “I will see you in the morning, little one.”
Silently, Qiqi nods with an absentminded air, gaze vacant and still. Baizhu watches as she turns around to finally leave his bedroom, noting her usual sedate pace with gentle patience. He deigns only to lay back down in his bed once he hears the faintest creak of a door being pushed shut.
When he closes his eyes, there is still a distinctive chill Baizhu can feel permeating throughout his entire body. But when he presses a hand to his chest, lets a long breath in and another long breath out with soft ease, the cold hardly seems worth mentioning.
Baizhu slowly drifts away with a sort of frigid stillness, and sleeps the best sleep he has been able to in months.