Work Text:
Her dreams are not memories, but they are as close to memories as her mind can procure these days: fragments, snapshots, pieces of past endlessly fracturing and flaking away. Over time they become infinitesimally blurred, drifting farther into the distance, but they do not disappear. She can neither remember, nor forget.
In her dreams, Baiheng is waiting for her on the beach. Her dress is clean and bloodless, and her hair is untied, blowing freely in the salty breeze. The waves roll against the shoreline, lapping at her bare feet.
“Will you walk with me?” Baiheng asks.
She nods.
Baiheng takes her hand in hers, unflinching even though her flesh is only slightly above freezing.
The cold is a recent development, she thinks; there is some kind of imbalance within her body, a cancerous aberration seeping into her meridians and turning her blood to slush. But the blessing of the Trailblaze must grant Baiheng some modicum of immunity to the chill, because otherwise she would not stay so near.
She holds Baiheng’s hand, walking along the shoreline side by side. Their time together is precious. The dream never lasts.
It takes a moment for her to find her voice. When she speaks, her voice is hoarse, rusty from disuse. “When are you leaving?”
Baiheng smiles. “Tomorrow morning. I’ve already arranged the transport. The Express will depart by the end of the day, with or without me.”
“I wish you would stay longer.”
“You wish for a lot of things.”
She doesn’t, really. Taking on the mantle of the sword master means being unselfish, putting her responsibilities over her own desires. She has not dared to wish for anything in a long time. She is myth, implacable might, more steel than woman.
What changed, since then?
Their first meeting had been unremarkable. It was but a brief moment centuries ago, and time had already faded the memory into mist. Smudges of recollection surface on occasion—she remembers, distinctly, how she had given the Foxian pilot only a cursory glance before turning away again, her disinterest palpable.
You forget your manners, Dan Feng chided her. Lady Baiheng is one of the most talented starskiff pilots of her generation. I believe you may find more common ground in your work than you realize.
She’s a dead little girl in a line of dead Foxian girls, she sneered. What use do I have for corpses?
Dan Feng frowned but did not reprimand her. This was earlier, before he understood the danger of attrition, inevitability, the pain of endlessly desynchronizing lifespans. This version of Dan Feng had never been in love.
But perhaps he sensed something in her bearing, a haughtiness that belied loneliness.
For years, she had only had her swords for companions. She had grown accustomed to this. That was, perhaps, the crux of the issue: Cloud Knights were long lived but not immortal, and the Sword Champion had lived longer than most. She’d slain legends. She killed planets with her own hands. It was easy to become desensitized to such things given enough time; she had no innate resistance to it. In the grand scheme of things, a single life was no different than a single death.
She blinks. The pilot blinks back, the fan of her pale lashes endlessly splaying into memory.
“When will you be back?”
“Less than a year,” Baiheng says. “We’ll circle back around after winter.”
She is waiting for winter to end. She has been waiting for a long time, now.
Baiheng walks faster.
She hastens to catch up.
The future is ever approaching. A hundred years begets a hundred more. She cannot outrun inevitability but she can keep pace, perhaps, one foot in front of the other, moving forward until her time runs out and she must turn to face her fate.
She does not turn back now. Her right hand is shaking so she holds her sword in her left hand instead. Was there always a tremor in her hand? Later, when she is alone, she will cut it off and wait for it to regrow. The bones and nerves and cartilage will form back into themselves, proximal to distal, and she will be whole again. She clenches her fist. Lets go.
“Wait, Baiheng,” she says.
Baiheng looks back. “Yes?”
Somehow she knows the blind eyes of judges and whims of aeons cannot reach her here. Anything that moves here creaks along in shadow, hidden under the moonless, artificial sky. Footprints fade from the sand. Speech is swallowed by the crash of the ocean waves. For a brief moment, there is no judgment hanging above her.
But there is something missing. Entropy creeps in at the edges; nothing here can stay. The tip of her blade wavers. She is gripped by the sudden feeling that there is something she must do—some action she must take, or a consequence she must prevent before it is too late.
Her chest feels tight. Here it is, the regret, the dread, the knowledge that she could not be alone again, could not be alone without her.
“Let’s run away,” she says suddenly. “Let’s leave together. We don’t have to—to keep doing this. There’s still time. We can leave before it’s too late.”
“We can’t.”
“Why?”
The corner of Baiheng’s mouth tilts. She is still smiling but now she looks sad. When she lifts a hand to touch her frozen cheek, she says, “Because I’m already dead.”
Blood down the side of her blade, soaking her hands. The red sinks into shadow and then into nothing. Time scatters; the air is still and the saltwater frozen, the susurration of waves briefly muted. One breath slides into the next. Mist crystalizes out of the open cavern of her mouth.
When she looks up, Baiheng is waiting for her on the beach. Her dress is clean and bloodless, and her hair flutters in the breeze. She offers her hand.
“Will you walk with me?” Baiheng asks.
She takes her hand.