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A-Fei kept observing, mostly.
If you’re not certain of the world, if every corner could be a trap, every smile a lie, then it would be better to hang back, better to wait and see, speak when you were spoken to, act only when you were sure.
A-Fei remembered nothing, just killing and blood in a pit of murder, kids killing other kids. A-Fei only remembered being a kid, but he wasn’t one now. He was a man now, and while his mind was blank, his body remembered.
His body remembered fighting. It remembered flying. It remembered the flow of qi and the zing sound his sword made when it left its scabbard.
It remembered wanting, it remembered anger, it remembered the one who called himself Li Lianhua. Whoever A-Fei had been before he became the A-Fei who now observed the world, he had cared about this Li Lianhua, he wanted this man to not die, to be there for him in order to…
That was where he blanked again.
Li Lianhua, who plied him with lies and bartered with secrets, meant more to him than either man was comfortable saying out loud.
And so, A-Fei waited: for clues, for strands of stray qi, for chances to fly and to fight.
Li Lianhua might have been his mortal enemy, he might have been his lover, he might have been his sect brother, but one thing he certainly was not: his master.
If he could choose among those, A-Fei would pick the lover: he knew very little about himself, but he did know the way he felt looking at men, and the way he felt looking at women, and he knew that even had she been free of maggots and full alive, he would not have wanted the woman the blind man had meant for him.
He would not want the woman in pink who came with good food, trying to charm the man who made bad food; but he would want the man himself. He would even rather want the obnoxious puppy of a very young man who wanted Li Lianhua for himself than the pink woman.
Any woman.
He was sure that wouldn’t change, any more than his qi would change, or the way it felt to ground his being to stillness and lightly leave the ground with his body.
Fang Duobing. The puppy was called Fang Duobing. He snored; A-Fei knew because he had to share his bed at night while Li Lianhua slept downstairs, in his own bed, with the dog. The dog had a dog-house, but she was never in the dog-house for Li Lianhua. He obviously loved her; about the puppy, or A-Fei, you couldn’t be sure.
The dog liked to cuddle; so did Fang Duobing, at least at night. He would snuggle up to A-Fei at night and dig in his nose between A-Fei’s shoulder and neck, and radiate warmth, like a little brazier of qi.
He was young, but his shoulders were broad; he was short, but his hands were big as the paws of a mole. A-Fei didn’t remember where he had seen a mole, but he definitely knew that the puppy’s paws resembled those of that animal.
If the puppy hit something, it would definitely stay hit.
If the puppy loved something, it would definitely be safe.
A-Fei wondered what he could do to earn the love of both these men, the sick liar and the strong puppy, and suspected that the answer was “anything”. He wondered if he had had that love before, and had lost it for no longer being himself.
He wondered what their original A-Fei had been like. He wondered if they had fought for who would sleep with whom in what place, or if they had all cuddled like puppies, the little qi brazier Fang Duobing wrapped around cold and dying Li Lianhua.
And he wondered why they weren’t doing it now.
They were in a dead garden now, and the women were talking; A-Fei wasn’t interested. Li LIanhua and Fang Duobing were planning to sneak into a secret place in the mountains, but they didn’t even consider that they had A-Fei right here. He could just fly the three of them up until they found the right mountain, and then they could just kill whoever needed killing. It was easy, really. A-Fei could do it in an afternoon, if necessary.
“We can get A-Fei to perform in the street until the host gets interested,” Li Lianhua said, and A-Fei said nothing, at first. Of course, he would do it -- perform meant fly, what else? If he showed random strangers in a market town how well he could fly, he was sure they would soon talk about it to other random strangers.
A-Fei knew he could fly better than anybody else; he knew that as surely as he knew that some men made him feel things, and all women were just people. He knew he could dance from roof-horn to roof-horn in the moonlight, and people would ooh and ahh, and then the man who collected the rarest talents in the jianghu would send people to fetch him and his friends.
He knew that once, there had been a man who danced in the moonlight from roof-horn to roof-horn, with a sword, made of white moon-light himself, and that he had made A-Fei feel things; but he couldn’t place the memory. Had that been Li Lianhua before he was poisoned and became sick and cold and weak, or had that been somebody else, the enemy they were chasing, and if A-Fei admitted how he’d felt about the man, Li Lianhua would dump him by the roadside as a traitor?
A-Fei now suggested that they just kill some people; that was the easy option. There was no entanglement with roof-horns and white moonlight, no secrets and lies, treacherous feelings and false promises to trip him up.
“I’ll think of something else,” the puppy said immediately, and A-Fei felt like defending Li Lianhua’s idea: he was the best at flying, and if he did that, all eyes would be on him, and then the lord of the mountains would send his people to fetch them.
He was the best at flying, even his name said so.
He was the best at flying, but until he knew where was up and where was down with these complicated men and their lies and omissions, their smirks and secrets, he’d best stay on the ground.
He would fly anywhere for Li Lianhua, but maybe, his secret was not what A-Fei hoped it would be, so he watched and waited until he understood him.
Then, he would fly -- secretly up the mountainside, or openly on the street for all to see. Whatever Li Lianhua and his puppy needed.