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“What else is there to do?” Di Feisheng said, trying to take the laundry basket from Fang Duobing. “You go home to your mother and build a few machines, I’ll go home to my headquarters and train a few new recruits. We get on with our lives.”
“I don’t believe it,” Fang Duobing said, his voice hollow with disappointment. “After all we went through together…”
“All we went through together,” Di Feisheng echoed, taking a deep breath to preserve his sanity and composure before he went on, “does not give us a say over him. He never made us a promise. Neither of us is married to him. That’s not how this works.”
“You are,” Fang Duobing mumbled. He looked mulish rather than jealous. Spoiled young master that he was, Xiaobao had still accepted that their three-sided relationship was just that: - not just a trio that stood unmovable against all outside threats, or a threesome in which both of them did their utmost to please Li Lianhua in all his complex contradictions, but three very different loves and friendships.
When they were all together, Li Lianhua was still their focus; even when they ganged up on him to make him tell the truth, or take care of his painfully mundane, chronically weakened health, he would smile fondly when he thought they couldn’t see him, knowing that he was at the center of their hearts.
“You drank wedding wine with him,” Fang Duobing went on, grumbling. “Don’t just stand there, A-Fei! Go catch your wayward wife!”
“Who says he’s not my wayward husband?” Di Feisheng said, with a smirk he didn’t feel.
Xiangyi was unpredictable, always had been -- but he’d never left him in the dust before. That had been Fang Xiaobao’s dubious privilege.
“It doesn’t matter,” he said, giving Di Feisheng an eye-roll. “You belong with each other, and everybody knows that.”
“He left me standing at the beach, waiting for him, and everybody saw that,” Di Feisheng said. “But that’s not important. He left both of us this time; he took his dog and his ridiculous house on wheels and just went while we were doing the laundry. There is some reason he decided he doesn’t need us around for a bit, and as we can be fairly sure he is no longer letting himself die, we need to accept that. Perhaps he just needs to feel, you know, feelings. Freedom and detachment and the sunny patches on his weird left-handed path to enlightenment. He’ll pop up again.”
“He could have told us!” Fang Duobing bit out, temper visibly heating up. “He could just have said, ”I need to do something by myself, expect a message in six to eight weeks, I know where to find each of you,” and we would have argued for a bit but let him go. I mean, what else is there to do? But this is…”
He looked at the ground and added, “This hurts. It hurts more because I thought we had moved beyond it.”
“We can ask him what he was thinking when he reappears,” Di Feisheng said.
“Yes, what was he thinking?” Fang Duobing said, his voice growing whiny. “He just up and went; he even left his things with us! We washed his good blanket; now he’ll be cold at night again. He’s not as healthy as he used to be!”
He put down his laundry basket and pulled out the blanket, as if to show to Di Feisheng in proof.
“Here! He will freeze his skinny ass off!”
“Xiaobao…” Di Feisheng started, but Fang Duobing could no longer contain his disappointed rage.
He threw the freshly washed blanket on the muddy ground and stomped on it. That, however, was a very unfortunate combination of wet and slippery, and he abruptly landed on his back, in the mud, looking more like a puppy than a person.
“Xiaobao…” Di Feisheng said again, exasperated. “I get that you’re offended; so am I. But this is ridiculous.”
“I’m not ridiculous, he is ridiculous!” Fang Duobing said, holding back a sob. “He is ridiculous to leave us both behind and not even take his blanket with him. He will be cold; he will get sick. How are we to help him?”
Di Feisheng bent to touch Fang Duobing’s shoulder. “He’ll get back to us,” he said. “He has other blankets. He can use two at once if the night is cold.”
Fang Duobing grabbed his sleeve with a muddy paw.
“He left us, A-Fei!” he sniffled, pulling Di Feisheng into an anatomically impossible hug, which meant that he ended up on the ground with that silly puppy, with an elbow on the wet blanket, a shoulder in Fang Duobing’s lap, and everything else in the mud.
“He left us, A-Fei!” Fang Duobing sobbed again, bending over Di Feisheng and clinging to him.
Di Feisheng tried to free himself and sit up, to pull Fang Duobing into a proper hug and calm him down. Tianji Hall and Jinyuan Alliance could wait; tonight, they needed an inn and wine and each other’s company until Xiaobao had got his bearings.
They were both muddy enough, though, that the attempt at hugging left them both once again prone in the mud, the completely dirt-sodden blanket wrapped around their legs like shackles.
“Heavens, what is this? I leave you alone for one hour, and you start fighting in the mud like toddlers! Is that my blanket? What the hell have you done to it?”
Li Lianhua. Staring down at them, hands on hips like a fishwife. With the bewildered dog by his side, but still completely house-less, like a snail turned into a slug.
“Damn Lotus!” Fang Duobing roared, scrambling to his feet; he fell over again, still stuck to the blanket, and Di Feisheng caught him, and held him tight.
“We came back from the river to find you, the dog and the house gone,” Di Feisheng said to Li Lianhua while holding a slippery, sobbing Fang Duobing in his arms. “I don’t know what you thought you were doing, Xiangyi, but for us that meant you left us.”
“You left us again!” Fang Duobing added. He managed to sit up and turn his muddy, tear-stained face to Li Lianhua.
Di Feisheng forcibly unwrapped the wet blanket, got to his feet, and then helped Fang Duobing up as well.
Li Lianhua and Huli-jing both stared at them.
“Why were you fighting on my blanket?” Li Lianhua asked, shaking his head with an exasperation that he was in no way due.
“We weren’t fighting, we were just having emotions,” Di Feisheng said, “because we thought you left us. Where is the house? What were you thinking?”
He pulled Fang Duobing close and kissed him hard, muddy face, tear tracks, and all.
“You’re really angry?” Li Lianhua said, bewildered, as if only now realizing that his lovers might have feelings about him that went beyond the shared goal of ‘Spoil our HuaHua’.
“I am angry,” Di Feisheng said. “Xiaobao was heartbroken.”
Beat.
“So, where is the house? What were you thinking? If you were struck by a bolt of spontaneity and wished for more pleasant trees to shade our roof, then why did you not leave a note?”
Bemused, Li Lianhua shook his head, as if that would help adjust to the shift in reality he was experiencing.
“One Li up that path,” he finally answered, “on the other side of the main road. The farmer came and asked me to move the house, he needs the water meadows for his buffalo. It’s his land; what else was there to do? Also, each of his three dogs is bigger than Huli-jing. I came back to fetch you at once, but you’re both already completely unreasonable and covered in mud.”
They stared at him. Li Lianhua and Huli-jing stared back.
“There’s a stream by our new camp site,” Li Lianhua went on. “No matter how emotional you’re being right now, you’re not touching me before you wash off all that mud.”
“We’re not touching you for quite a bit,” Fang Duobing said glumly. “We’re still hurt that you didn’t even leave a note.”
“You seem to labor under the misconception…” Li Lianhua began, airily, but Di Feisheng felt the need to immediately stomp on that so they wouldn’t fight in earnest after all.
“We don’t,” he said. “It was a misunderstanding. We need to wash off the mud and wash the blanket again. While we do that, you can make us all dinner, and then we will eat like civilized people. After that, we can drink tea, like civilized people once more, and we can post-mortem this massive three-way clusterfuck, and decide what we need to do. I promise not to grab you by your throat, Xiaobao will not stomp or break out in tears, and you may not jovially smirk at us as if it was bizarre that we have feelings about you at all.”
Beat.
“And after that, we might perhaps touch you again.”
“On the other hand,” Fang Duobing added, “we might not even want to kiss you good-night. We are likely to want to kiss you good-morning tomorrow. But we shall see.”
Li Lianhua looked from one to the other, heaved a deep sigh, and turned towards the road. “Well, okay, then,” he said. “I guess. You will wash, we will eat, and then we’ll talk.”
He shrugged, and the dog followed him up the path.
Di Feisheng and Fang Duobing stacked the laundry baskets and carried them between them, in a bid to not get the freshly washed clothes muddy again. Di Feisheng slung the blanket over his other shoulder; his robes were completely ruined already.
Then, they followed Li Lianhua to their new campsite. This was still uphill work; but what else was there to do?