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It was cold as death. Li Lianhua should know, given how close to it he’d teetered till just a couple months ago. But now he’d been saved; he found that more annoying than usual on nights like these.
He opened his eyes– when had he closed them? – as the stairs creaked. Di Feisheng climbed up to the stair he was sitting on and joined him, shoulder pressed to shoulder. “You’re really clingy, you know,” Li Lianhua muttered. He didn’t have the energy to properly grumble about it either. What a dismal state to be in.
“And you’re cold,” Di Feisheng said in reply, holding out a bundled cloak. “If it kills you, it’s on you for sitting outside on a night like this.” It wasn’t a question, technically, but Di Feisheng was waiting for an answer anyways. Li Lianhua pulled the cloak snugly around himself and waited for him to give up waiting. Di Feisheng, being Di Feisheng, didn’t relent.
“I just thought the moon looked really nice,” Li Lianhua teased, shooting him a sidelong glance.
“Li Lianhua.”
Li Lianhua sighed. “Fang Xiaobao fell asleep inside,” he said, fiddling with the slightly frayed hem of the cloak. “If I stay awake in there, he’ll inevitably wake up and worry and try to somehow get me to sleep.” Again. Ugly and familiar frustration piled up in his chest just thinking about it. “Hasn’t that boy ever had a sleepless night?”
Di Feisheng was quiet for a long moment, eyes fixed on the doorway past which Fang Duobing slept. “He’s had too many,” Di Feisheng finally said. “That’s why he worries.”
Li Lianhua shot him a half-hearted glare, strangely stung and annoyed about feeling that way. What right did he have? He was indeed the one who had left, and Di Feisheng was the one who’d been by Fang Duobing’s side.
“Go back in,” Li Lianhua told him. “I’m fine, I won’t even run away.”
Di Feisheng considered him for a long moment, then looked back up at the sky. “The moon is nice,” he said with the smallest and slyest of smiles. Li Lianhua scoffed at it. Then he unwrapped the cloak and held out one side of it. It wasn’t made for two, and Di Feisheng wasn’t exactly small. They shifted closer. Di Feisheng settled an arm around him, and Li Lianhua pressed fully into his side to fit it around their shoulders properly. Di Feisheng was warm, and probably didn’t need the cloak even if he was dressed in only his inner robes for the night. He still stayed, and Li Lianhua soaked up his heat like Hulijing sitting in a sunny patch.
It didn’t feel quite real yet. This night, the way his breath came easier than it had in a decade, the way the cold was no longer something in his own bones, the way he woke every morning to Fang Duobing fretting, Di Feisheng quietly helping and snarking, Hulijing ecstatic that everyone was together again.
He saw the flipside too– Fang Duobing who carved himself a place in both the jianghu and the imperial court like Li Xiangyi never could have, who mastered Yangzhouman beyond what Li Xiangyi ever had, who was happier than Li Xiangyi ever had been. Di Feisheng, proud and at the top of the world, living enough to make up for the decade he’d wasted waiting for Li Xiangyi, finding new worthy opponents that made him forget all about Xiangyi swordplay.
Instead, here they were, nursing him back to life.
He was so very tired.
“Li Xiangyi,” Di Feisheng called. Nothing more, nothing less. His voice was almost reverent when he used that name. He hadn’t called him by it since they’d found him, saved him. It made Li Lianhua’s breath catch.
“This Li Xiangyi gets way too many chances,” he muttered. He was supposed to have died a long time ago. He’d buried him for a decade before the past had come along and dug him back up. Then he’d once again thrown Li Xiangyi away after tying up every loose thread, and yet, Li Xiangyi lived because there were those who spoke him to life.
Li Xiangyi lived because Li Lianhua couldn’t quite stop answering to the name when it was uttered in this voice.
The arm Di Feisheng had around him jostled him. That too was done gently. “Do you think you don’t deserve them?” he asked in a matter-of-fact way.
Li Lianhua couldn’t bring himself to play along, to tease and needle. All that was was the fact of that awful day in which years of arrogance and recklessness culminated. All that was was this other world where these scars didn’t exist, where Li Xiangyi hadn’t led so many to slaughter, where they crossed swords by the sea instead of drowning in it.
“Who am I to decide what I deserve?” he bit out. Before he could shift away, Di Feisheng’s arm around him tightened. He was right there, looking at him like he was a puzzle. He always did that these days. The words stopped on his tongue and the silence grew heavy.
“Bullshit,” came the eloquent conclusion to Di Feisheng’s scrutiny. “Stop pitying yourself.” Li Lianhua wanted to scoff. He really did. Only, his nose and eyes stung, and his heart suddenly felt fit to burst. Di Feisheng sighed, dropped his steady gaze to their laps and said, “You fucked up, you did what you could. ‘Deserving’ means nothing. You’re alive now. So live.”
Li Lianhua looked at him– the firmly set jaw, the way his lashes flickered over burning eyes– and felt his heart swell intolerably again. “Is this what you live by?” he asked Di Feisheng in an mortifyingly hoarse voice. With a rare smile, Di Feisheng shrugged, and Li Lianhua chuckled. “It’s stubborn, A-Fei. It suits you.”
“If anyone’s better than me at that, it’s you.”
Li Lianhua felt like a fraud. He was so tired, he caved. Leaning further into Di Feisheng, half his face pressed to the warm shoulder, Li Lianhua lifted his fingers to his sternum. There it was, the ridge of the scar he’d left, felt even through the thin cloth. Di Feisheng didn’t move into the touch or away from it. He merely watched as Li Lianhua loosened his robe.
There were all sorts of scars scattered across his body, relics of wounds that had stitched themselves together without spiritual power to aid them. The one Li Xiangyi had left was the biggest, a brutal line right down the centre. It looked just as cruel as he’d been that day. Something twisted inside him in perfect symmetry with it.
Li Xiangyi’s fingers hovered over the mark. He wasn’t sure what he would have done if left to himself. But Di Feisheng’s hand came to rest under his arm, supporting. It did away with the faint tremor of his hand, and he braved a single slow brush of his pointer finger along the scar. Di Feisheng’s fingers curled the slightest bit tighter into his sleeve.
“We almost killed each other,” Li Xiangyi said. His voice had come out hoarse once more, but it was less mortifying when he couldn’t see him. Di Feisheng’s heart kept a steady rhythm under his ear. “I really meant to.”
“You wouldn’t have managed it, poison or not,” Di Feisheng replied with a smile. “I would’ve won anyway.”
He ignored Di Feisheng’s nonsense and searched for the right words. There were many ways he’d described that old fight to himself. Always awful, something that rubbed salt into his wounds, always a condemnation of himself or them both.
This time, he sighed and finally concluded, “It was stupid.” Part of him unwound like a long-held breath. Stupid, like Fang Duobing over-watering the plants, or these two fools breaking his dining table with a fight. Stupid like Hulijing braking into the pantry and eating too much for her own good. Stupid, like a mistake, like forgivable.
“Is this how you apologise?” Di Feisheng said, sounding judgemental even as he looked down at him with oddly kind eyes. “You’re shit at it.”
Li Lianhua pressed his mouth into a line. “Is your sense of hearing getting worse as your taste improves? I just said that we were stupid. One of us clearly still is.”
“Clearly,” Di Feisheng replied, raising a brow pointedly at him. Shaking his head, Li Lianhua smiled and fell back onto his shoulder. At some point, Di Feisheng’s arm had settled around his waist. The moon slipped in and out behind drifting clouds.
“If either of us came out here to really watch the moon,” Di Feisheng piped up, “We would have some wine.”
With a slow smile, Li Lianhua reached for the shadowed corner between himself and the wall. Di Feisheng scoffed incredulously as he pulled out the gourd and took a swig. “What?” he asked Di Feisheng. “You really thought I came out here without a plan to keep warm?”
“And yet, here you are,” Di Feisheng’s arm tightening around his waist with too smug a glint in his eye. “Am I better than the wine?”
Ah, he really had walked right into that one. Considering his options, Li Lianhua let his eyes run up and down his face and his bare chest. “How forward, Di Mengzhu.”
“I’m not the one pulling open robes in the middle of the night.”
“Li Lianhua?” came a bleary voice from below. Fang Duobing emerged from the door, rubbing the sleep from his eyes before squinting up. “A-Fei. What are you two doing out here? It’s cold!”
His sleep-rumpled shape made it to two steps below them before he spotted Di Feisheng’s open robes. His eyes bugged right out. “You-! Shameless!?”
“Ah, Xiaobao, it’s just us here–”
“You’re just as bad!” Fang Duobing shot back at him, half-turned away from this scandalous sight. “C-Cozying up like this in the open. Get in before you freeze!” Li Lianhua couldn’t decide if the scolding was more annoying or amusing.
Li Lianhua sighed. After some manoeuvring and grumbling, the three of them headed back in. Fang Duobing, red in the face, made a valiant attempt at not looking as Di Feisheng tied his robe once more. “It’s nothing you haven’t seen before,” Di Feisheng told him, menace that he was when in a good mood. Not for the first time, Li Lianhua watched Fang Xiaobao flush pink and wondered what he’d missed in those few months. He had some unlikely yet entertaining guesses. He should plague these two with them one day soon.
“Did you have to put it like that? Li Lianhua, Don’t listen to him!” Fang Xiaobao commanded after too long a pause to be convincing. Li Lianhua bit the inside of his cheek to not smile, and headed straight for the chair Fang Duobing had put right by the bed. It was a relatively new addition to the place and he’d warmed up to it, even if it took up some space.
“Li Lianhua,” Fang Duobing groaned. “Go to bed.”
“You sleep. I’ll wake you if I need anything.”
Fang Duobing, hands on his hips, stared him down. Li Lianhua busily fished out the culinary guide Su Xiaoyong had got him from under the pillow and went back to it. Just as Fang Duobing took a deep breath and prepared to launch into another lecture, something stopped him.
“Let him be,” Di Feisheng said, and Li Lianhua snuck a sidelong glance at them. Fang Duobing turned his frustrated glare towards Di Feisheng, who made straight for the bed and lay himself down, back to the wall. Not to sleep, but to keep company. Fang Duobing took the cue and slunk over too, perching on the edge of the bed by Li Lianhua’s knee.
Li Lianhua tuned them out as they started bickering about who took up how much of the bed. When he looked up a little later from his reading, Di Feisheng was blinking slowly as Fang Xiaobao idly fiddled with the ends of his hair. The lamplight dimmed over time, and Li Lianhua eventually closed the book when his eyes grew tired.
Fang Xiaobao was sprawled half over Di Feisheng by then, both sound asleep. They stirred as he watched, rearranging themselves without waking like they’d done it a hundred times. Fang Duobing curled firmly around A-Fei from behind, face buried in his neck and their fingers linked over his front.
Li Lianhua had left them to each other not that long ago. They didn’t need him. They were better than him, better off without him.
Stop pitying yourself, Di Feisheng had said. Is that what it was? He reached forward, settling his hand carefully over their joined ones. They were warm with sleep. They sat right over that old scar. A strange weight came and sat in his heart. They shouldn’t need him. But Li Lianhua was coming to the awful realisation that maybe he wanted them. Like he wanted Hulijing, a small garden to grow radishes in, a kitchen to try new recipes in.
A decade was a long and difficult time to spend expecting, learning, and making peace with death. “It’s really not easy to get used to being alive,” Li Lianhua muttered to himself.
Fang Xiaobao stirred a bit, curling closer to A-Fei with indistinct grumbling and a shiver before raising his head and squinting around sleepily. Li Lianhua drew back his hand to drape the quilt over them. Xiaobao settled, drifting off again in the span of a breath.
Li Lianhua stood over them for a few long seconds, then went to pull out his brush, ink and dusted off an old and worn notebook as quietly as he could. As the very early birds chirped in the yet-to-come dawn, he sat down at the table and started writing down some of the recipes that had crossed his mind while he read.