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One of the things Xiao always told her was to be curious, to experiment, to not be afraid to feel. There’s a certain murderous intent in everything, yes, but only if you choose to see it. Not everything has the intention or the right to kill you, and if it does, then you’d be wise not to trigger it. But then came a question: how can grass smother you to death? How can a gust of wind stab through your ribcage and into your heart? The answer came as easy: by opening too much to everything.
Lumine was never afraid to let her blood flow and her heart beat for Xiao, and neither was he, but his caution could sometimes be misinterpreted as distrust or a very distinguished kind of prudery. He wasn’t one to get scared or morally broken, but his heart was crossed and his lips were tightly sealed, not to avoid speaking, but to discourage the extraction of secrets.
But Lumine never had to try.
His dissimulated openness took her by surprise at first, when she asked about his favorite food: that one meal that tasted like milk and almonds and had nothing to do with tofu besides its shape. Somehow, it seemed appropriate: the name not resembling the essence of the being. How Alatus, the Vigilant Yaksha, could stay away from his vigilance for just a minute to enjoy a meal made with heart and compassion.
Lumine started cooking it for him almost every day, and Xiao wolfed it down with the same tender eagerness. To her, he looked like a child enjoying their favorite candy, the one they can’t get tired of even if you feed them a hundred of it. Xiao ate and thanked every meal that Lumine brought him, and simply seeing that thankful face (with no grin, just a twinkle in the eye) was enough reward for her.
It came a moment where simply sitting together and eating tasty meals wasn’t enough for Lumine. One must wonder: why should something be enough when it comes to human interaction? Inside the limits of desire in what one could call a friendship, why should it go beyond that which is already granted? Why should one want more than what’s perfectly enough and makes both parties happy? Simple answer: Lumine wanted more, she just didn’t know yet, or refused to believe herself.
When she asked for an activity out of the ordinary, Xiao asked what. He had no idea himself, of course. What would someone want to do with him? He was no fun for anyone but himself, and those who weren’t spooked by his general demeanor felt enthralled by his presence, but in the way someone would feel interested towards a one-eyed tiger: scientific and soulless curiosity, not the genuine desire of knowing someone, of touching beyond his skin and soul. Lumine, yet again, was a magnificent, sun-colored exception.
She told him they should go to Mount Aocang and maybe bask in the sun’s glory, enjoy the water of the spring, and simply feel a different wind. Xiao perfectly knew that the wind was all the same no matter where it blew, and it only carried different scents: the salt of the sea, the pollen tears of dying flowers, the rank smell of molten blood from long-past battlefields, or the simple aroma of souls and their unheard stories, crying, swerving around the falsely reachable skies. How would Lumine feel any difference from Wangshu Inn’s wind?
Yet Lumine proved she could when Xiao complied and so they went. Her eyes shimmered in a new, miraculous sort of way. The color was the same and their sight warmed the Yaksha all the same, but the way the water rippled upon its gaze, the way silence screamed its perfect song when she blinked, the way the sky shied away from her adoring contemplation, as if unworthy, it all made sense. She could truly warp enjoyment, change the way things were or could be, and she went beyond every limit in nature Xiao knew. That was, to him, the very nonexistent definition of “perfect.”
They spent the day and noon there, and Xiao, for once in a lot of time, felt calm enough to fall asleep. His dreams were filled of chaos, black wind and last breaths torn from innocent hearts, and he woke in a daze, covered in sweat that felt like blood, and his mouth betrayed him as he called for Lumine. Her hand was immediately upon his, and where he should’ve recoiled, he somehow didn’t, and instead steadied his ragged breath. Calm didn’t come immediately, but the sight of those golden eyes somehow made it all better, less heavy, more bearable. It all felt okay. It felt correct.
Xiao knew that was his doom from the beginning. Calm in a pair of eyes, to feel in a different plane just by looking and feeling and not backing down from that single act: to feel and let himself feel. Not that he was sensory deprived or a coward to the many wonders of the enlightened soul, but feeling brought, most of the time, nothing but sorrow for him.
To remember is to evoke, and to evoke is to remind oneself of every sensory process the body and mind once followed, no matter the abruptness of it or how inconvenient a concrete emotion may result. This specific remembrance left Xiao unable to remember what glee felt like, and Lumine’s eyes, her touch and the precious softness of her general presence were enough to bring the memory back to him. It didn’t crawl all around his skin like it once did, but he could force his mind to reenact it, to be how it once was before everything came crumbling down.
All of that, just from a look and a tender grip on his hand. What had his will turn into? What had his soul walked into? What had she just done to him and his unending feeling of spiritual unrest? And why did it feel so… good?
This interaction did nothing to appease Lumine’s curiosity and did even less to let Xiao understand his own newfound feelings. He had once felt the need of people close to him, he could never forget the want of the yearning, but what was this new beautiful thing? Yet he found out that he had always felt it, but it had been so long since it was towards an actual living being that his heart, throbbing and weakened for years of desiring stardust, had nearly forgotten its name.
It would’ve been easy to just call it love, but coming to terms with something that could hurt so much was never easy. He didn’t feel afraid to call it that, it was just his natural caution acting up, but he felt disingenuous when telling himself that he simply cared for Lumine. Her eyes told many stories and none of them were the ones he wished to see or hear, merely because he didn’t want her to feel pain, he needed her to be happy and fulfilled and generally in the perfect mood for living, the one he had somehow avoided until now.
Then Xiao had The Talk about it with her. At the end of it, she was laughing and crying.
Xiao had never been hugged so hard before, and he had never cried tears so sweet.
The days with her felt long and dreamy, like a sunrise coming from the south only to take a lap all the way from west to north to east and back to south and then another lap towards east and then crossing its way to west: days of unending nights and clouds that tricked their way into an extended existence via skydiving into those two pairs of eyes, permanently interlocked with each other, choking the light around them until only they remained. What a beautiful way of being, of loving, of extending an invitation to a life by each other’s side.
But Xiao still had to fight, and he did it hardly, with intent of surviving, no longer with that dormant deathwish of his.
Whenever it came his time to purge the surging demons or any opposing force that threatened his land or his loved ones, his fighting came with some restraint, all because he couldn’t bring himself to think of a second in afterlife without Lumine. He refused to think of her tears for him, of her pain, the general shock and angst that came with loss and grief: a selfish way of feeling towards death, like all the ways humanity feels about having life taken away from the Living’s grip.
This didn’t bring failure, but his near misses increased exponentially. Turns out a cornered enemy, willing to kill until death, is far more fearsome and dangerous that one who desires life more than anything. That made Xiao stutter from time to time, and thus, he became sloppy, soft, slow.
The night before he closed his eyes for good, he asked Lumine to sit next to him. All ravaged as he was, unable to heal by any known means, he looked helpless yet relieved, sad and frustrated but somehow relaxed, as if death was this friend that he was finally able to meet. Lumine went and kneeled next to his lover, and his eyes rested on hers. She had tears in hers, but his smile, that perfect, pained and heartbreaking smile, made it all better.
He told her to stay curious just the way she did with him. He told her to believe in good and the triumph of light over dark, and to always fight for those she loved, and to always be there when they called. She asked who she could call when he was gone. His answer was simple.
Call upon your will.
He faded away after that, and Lumine’s tears could’ve dampened dead seas.
Yet she complied to his desires. She kept living and laughing and feeling just the way she had always done, but her grief and rancor towards evil never allowed her to love anyone as ardently as she once did. She knew this wouldn’t have been what Xiao wanted, but she felt entitled to this burning feeling, and revenge, the fool’s game, was to come sooner or later.
Many nights later, she was raising her sword towards abyss, and her heart beat with that very familiar symphony that he had always claimed to love. His strength, his pain, his fear and his hatred and desire and power, it was all within her. It had always been.
Xiao had told her to remain curious, to be an explorer of the depths and have a flexible animosity towards death, but that hadn’t been his final lesson. He had taught her to be strong, to rage against her enemies, and to let raw emotion take her blade in battle. With a scream, she charged forward, darkness and power raging around her, and light surging from her every pore.
The outcome, of course, was a beautiful wind that eased many sunrises after that one. After that battle, Lumine found peace, and knew that she had helped Xiao find it. Through battle and rage, she had redeemed every soul he could’ve ever possibly failed to save.
Now she looks upon the night sky and says her thanks, to life, to fate, and to the wind. Oh, how it caresses.