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Ziya picks at his food, a habit she never quite broke him out of. Daji snaps at his fingers with her chopsticks.
They're sitting around a pot, doing their level best not to shiver in the cold. Tianshan again, or at least halfway there, somewhere in the Wudang range. It's like an anchor to them, this focal point they're never ever able to leave, just spinning. She's never sure if she's hallucinating it.
"Ziya," Riga says, imperious. That's what he is, Daji supposes. They're sitting around the pot, and she's not sure if being here on Tianshan is a dream or not. The details are blurry. The sequence of things that led them here, is blurry. She thinks— this is after Tseveri. This is after the anchor bond. But that's not quite right, because Ziya is bleeding slowly from his leg and she doesn't feel anything at all.
Maybe it's the cold. Probably it's the cold. Or— and she blinks again, and the red staining his pants is gone. Just snowmelt for water and the raw bloody shoulders of a six legged deer and half a fire under the bubbling pot they're sitting around.
"Can we even digest that," Ziya says, prodding at the browned meat with his brow wrinkled.
"You've eaten worse," Riga says dismissively, which is true enough. His face is blurry when Daji looks for it, turning her head and seeking him. His hands, though, the shape and strength of them that she never could forget. They're nimble on the splintered wood, and he hisses as Ziya drops a piece of bone back into the pot with a splash. "Ziya," he warns.
"What," Ziya snaps, more short-tempered than she remembers him being on this march, but then again she doesn't remember this night either. Too many things too raw to think about. Too many things she'd rather suffocate than touch again, just like the memory of Riga's hands on her in a dozen painful tender ways.
She's not sure she knows which march this is anyway. Her hand stings. Her eyes sting with the icy wind, or maybe it's just the hurt of the memory-dream.
At least its familiar ground. Familiar the way a scar is, or a scab; when you pick the ugly dry thing apart and let the blood gush. "Come on," Riga says abruptly; he's done and so are they now. Daji warms her fingers over the fire one last time before they refill the water in their canteens with the boiling stuff in the pot, barely enough to be broth. Daji had been hungry for the first time in too long when she looked at the fallen deer, too many eyes and horns and legs, and Riga had put a hand on her stomach when she stepped forward.
She's not sure why there's no surprise at the memory. Ziya's packing the deer apart now, horn and bone and meat, bloody heart and three pairs of legs.
She just doesn't know, and that should scare her more than it does now. Her vision is blurry, and she doesn't know if it's a quality of the mountains or if it's because this was never real in the first place.
Probably the second. Riga would've just pushed them onward. Riga would've slapped Ziya for maybe-burning him, or— maybe that's later? But she thinks of the way he had brought down the deer, brutal and cold-eyed, and that seems right.
The thing is— the deer isn't them, so maybe she just doesn't care.
She doesn't know, and she's not sure if she wants to. If this is a dream, or if it's real, and Riga was ever this gentle. If it's real, and Tianshan is just a magnet to them all the fucking time, drawing them back and back and back. And if it is true— that they had this, and lost it.
They should've all just sealed themselves into the fucking mountain the first time.
The memory or dream keeps going; or maybe she really is here and Riga is leading them back to the mountain, that one and only marker of time. Who even fucking knows anymore. If it mattered, Daji might.
It just keeps going, like a tapestry unrolling and never stopping, fabrication upon fabrication. When they stop to camp, the night too dark, a white fox paces in a circle around Daji's bedroll. She watches it go with weary eyes. Its six tails drag behind it, through the snow.
Su Daji, it hisses in her goddess's voice, before it's gone. Ziya doesn't even look over. Riga's disappeared to wash his face, or something.
She watches the shadows it slipped into for a long moment, the way they're never ever the same.
"Daji," Ziya says, finally. Daji rolls over and goes to sleep in the bed she made.