Archive of Our Own ^beta

When he wakes he is cold. The wind is howling and the clothes he’s wearing are all damp. The ground is lumpy and hard beneath him, and for a moment or two he just lays there.

His hand throbs, though, and after a minute he sits up. He’s actually sitting on rocks, he finds out, on the banks of a river. His hair is wet and bedraggled around his face, his clothes only fractionally dry with no sun in the sky. The wind cuts through them like paper. He doesn’t recognise where he is; he barely recognises what he’s wearing. His robes are a dark red and grey-blue, the cloth heavy and fine over his body. He scowls.

When he holds his palm up he discovers cuts, scabbed over but reopened, sluggishly bleeding. There are characters carved into the skin - find Fang Duobing. The blood leaks down his palm, blurring the lines.

He looks around. In one direction, there’s an unending line of tall green trees. In the other there’s only the river. He picks himself up and rises, unsteadily, to his feet. His first few steps are shaky but hold until he trips over something hidden in the rocks.

He kneels down and reaches out to touch it. Shards of a sword, bundled together like firewood - here, he can see the tip of a blade; here, the swirling design of the hilt. He picks it up, turning it in his hands. Blood smears on the metal. There’s a scrap of deep red caught between the edges of two of the pieces. He pulls it out. He isn’t careful enough; more blood drips onto the sword shards. The piece of fabric matches his robes.

He laughs, a little, to himself, though he doesn’t know why. The bundle gets tucked against his side - his body seems to know the weight of it clearly, even if his mind doesn’t. He walks away from the river, his feet seemingly more certain about treading on the rocks now.

Where they take him, he does not know; it is a day later before he reaches any sort of settlement. The town is booming, in that small way towns do, when they are on the outskirts. He wanders through the streets until a street vendor calls out at him.

“Sir, a comb for your girl! Made of the best wood for fifty li!”

He stops. “I don’t want a comb,” he says. “Do you know a Fang Duobing.”

The merchant begins to turn him away but puffs up at hearing the name. “So you’re interested in that gongzi, sir! Well, look no farther, you’ve found the man who knows everything in this town! He’s a hero, Fang-gongzi is. He’s the disciple of the legendary swordsman Li Xiangyi! He’s going to kill the number one villain in the jianghu to avenge his shifu!” He ends with a flourish, as if he hadn’t just restated some gossip. Even he can tell that.

“Where is he,” he asks.

“He’s of the famous Tianji Manor! I hear that Master He is quite formidable, sir, you’d best be prepared. The manor has been closed to visitors lately, supposedly.”

“Which direction is it in.”

For a man who claimed to know everything in the town he is frustratingly unclear about where Tianji Manor is. He ends up with the knowledge that it’s somewhere to the north and the conclusion that the merchant likely never knew the exact location. But this Fang Duobing seems to be quite infamous - it seems like everyone in the next three towns he passes through knows his name and within the week he has accurate directions to Tianji Manor. He barely manages to remember to brush the dust off his robes - once luxurious, likely, and now completely ruined from travel - before he pulls on a rope with a sign hanging from it at the wall of Tianji Manor. It’s etched with the character for bell.

He hears the patter of feet a while before the door actually opens. A girl’s hesitant face is revealed in the sliver he can see. He wedges his foot in the space before he thinks about it. “Is Fang Duobing home.”

The girl gapes at him. Annoyed, he pushes the door open wider. She glares at him. “Stop! Our shaoye isn’t here; just leave!”

“Well,” he says irritatedly, “When is he coming back.”

“It’s none of your business!”

She slams her hand against the door; he twists his foot out just as it slams shut. He can hear something metal moving in the wood. Some kind of mechanism? He doesn’t bother to test the theory.

The girl shouts and almost slaps him when he lands lightly next to her. He catches her wrist and tosses it away effortlessly. “I have time,” he says. “I will wait.”

He leaves her and settles next to a flowering camellia shrub. The grass gives under his weight; the pieces of the broken sword jostle against his side. He had been forced to buy a bag of sturdy leather for it. Above him the sky is shrouded by clouds, though he can’t smell any rain in the air. He wonders how long this Fang Duobing will keep him waiting. With a home this lavish and how the girl had referred to him as shaoye he can’t possibly have many good reasons for staying away.

He hears the girl run into the house a few minutes later. He tracks her until he loses her footsteps among the many faint ones running around. A few minutes later, he tenses at the purposeful stomps that soon begin making their way towards his direction. The woman that comes out of the house zeroes in on him and looks like she’s on a warpath. His hand automatically reaches back even though logically he knows there’s nothing there. It clenches around empty air.

“You!” The woman storms over, jabbing a finger in his face. “What the hell do you want with my son?!”

This must be Master He then. He scoffs to himself. Of course no one thought to mention that she’s a woman. He studies both her and himself as she continues to shout in his face. He’s not scared of her - not anything close to it, in fact - but when he thinks about lifting her into the air and strangling her a fierce wave of something overtakes his chest. Besides, that girl is hovering behind her. He’s not stupid enough to want a witness hanging around. 

The pale blue of her robes and the ornate xiao guan she’s wearing seem vaguely familiar - different styles than his own, to be sure, and much more understated, if not just as high-quality. He sits up to bat her hand away and growls at her. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

It returns anyway. “If you’ve done anything at all to my son, heaven help you, because I will-”

“Niang!” A young man - practically still a boy, his high ponytail waving behind him - crashes through the front gate. “I’m home! I still haven’t-”

Nausea swarms his head as he looks at him. When he had woken up on the banks of that river he hadn’t felt that anything was missing. The habits that were performed jerkily as he realised he didn’t know what he was doing were ignored. But the sight of this young man now - this boy, in his light blue robes with golden detailing, with a matching set of huwan and a belt in a darker blue - carves too deeply inside him, shining a light on a deep, yawning maw of a cavity he didn’t know was there. The feeling only intensifies as the boy stops dead in his tracks, staring at him. His skin is several shades too pale to be healthy, the bones in his face too sharp even with the obvious baby fat still lingering, his eyes too bright in the way of a chronic insomniac. He knows the glint of it intimately; he’s already seen it too often in his own eyes.

His voice is too high when he speaks, wavering and cracking right down the middle. “Lao-Di?”

He stares at him more. Everything buzzes; he can hear every bird for three li, every person moving in the house, every vein pulsing blood in his body, and yet the only noise he can seem to focus on is the rabbit-fast beating of this boy’s heart. He can’t move as he stumbles towards him. The sword shards poke at him mercilessly as this boy falls to his knees beside him. “Lao-Di? Lao-Di?! What’s wrong, answer me!”

He thrusts his palm into his face. He hadn’t even thought about putting internal energy into it, though the angry noise from Master He says that she absolutely thought he had. This confusing boy just catches his wrist and grips him like a lifeline. The terrified look on his face transforms into horror once he gets a good look at his palm.

“Fang Duobing?” He asks roughly.

Fang Duobing cradles his hand. He runs his thumbs over the lines he had repeatedly and painstakingly cut back into his hand every time they started healing. Even with his internal energy he knows it will likely scar. He had wanted it to, every time he had made the blood flow. He thinks he understands why, now, staring at the owner of the name in his palm.

“A-Fei?” Fang Duobing says. “Are you really…”

He watches his throat bob as he swallows. His hand is pressed tightly against his chest; he could rip his heart out right now, and no one would be able to stop him. But not a single part of him wants to do that right now. Instead, he’s unable to look away from this boy, his dark brown eyes as huge as the moon as he looks at him, his mouth wobbling like he wants to cry. The gaping absence he’s now aware of churns in his chest. It throws him a single, vague impression of a memory - a warm and familiar voice, yet one he does not know, calling him A-Fei the same way this Fang Duobing does. What was he to these people? Did he mean so much to them that that voice could call him A-Fei with such affection, that this young man could call him Lao-Di the same way one would say laogong? The feeling of hollowness of being like an empty gourd gnaws on him, chews him into pieces, as he grips the hand holding his as tightly as he can. 

“Who am I?” He asks.

Fang Duobing chokes, a stifled little cry rising out of him, and he suddenly finds that he’s as much in his arms as he is in his. He can feel his face buried in his shoulder, similarly to the way his nose is smushed against his neck. He can smell the sweat and dust of travel, but also sword oil and slight traces of perfume. He thinks of the bundle still at his side, unoiled and uncared for, and wonders if this boy would know how to treat it better than he is right now.

“A-Fei,” he says. It comes out like a sob. “A-Fei, you really can’t have…”

His arms clench around him. Something in him recognises this boy. For the first time since he woke up on the river bank he feels safe.

“Fang Xiaobao!” Master He thunders. His awareness of her flares back up; she is not a threat, he thinks, but he feels the urge to protect this person in his arms anyway. “You better explain this!”

His hand briefly touches his shoulder as he draws back. Looking at Fang Duobing, he can see why one would call him little treasure - he’s as pretty as porcelain, decked out in richly-made clothes, and the way his eyes are red and filled with tears lends him a delicate and fragile air. Had he been precious to him too?

“Niang,” he says hoarsely. “You really don’t need to worry. A-Fei and I…” He casts a look at him, his eyes unreadable to him but filled with emotions that make his tears overflow. He wants to lean forward and lick them away, but he stays as he is and just watches them fall down his cheeks. “A-Fei and I, we’ll be okay.”

“What kind of words are those?! ‘We’ll be okay’?! Fang Xiaobao!” Master He hauls her son up by his collar. His hands clench once in his robes before unwillingly letting go. “Explain! Do you know what kind of rumors have been going around?! They say that you intend to kill him!”

He looks at the finger once again jabbed in his direction, then at Fang Duobing’s angry eyes. The expression on his face is similarly dark. “Niang, do you really believe what people who know nothing of my matters say? What is between Lao-Di and I, what was between us and-”

He watches as his lips press together. Even with Master He’s words he doesn’t think that Fang Duobing has any intent to kill him. He isn’t reaching for the sword strapped to his back - in a makeshift harness, likely only for travel - and the tempestuous qi he can feel rolling off him in waves is heavily restrained. Perhaps it would alarm him otherwise but it rushes around him like a river around a rock, curling around him excitedly like it knows him. Is it normal to feel so attuned to another’s qi?

“What was between us,” he finishes firmly, “Is only between us.”

Master He crosses her arms over her chest and between the two of them, her eyes narrowed. “You’re an adult now,” she says, a little unhappily, “So I will let you settle your own matters. But!” She glares at her son. “I want an explanation by dinner, Fang Xiaobao.”

“Yes, Niang.” Fang Duobing dips his head respectfully. She takes off in a huff, gesturing for the girl who had not let him in to follow her. He watches them leave, still sitting in the grass.

There’s a soft thump, and he turns his head to find Fang Duobing kneeling at his side. “A-Fei,” he says quietly, “How much do you remember?”

Is he supposed to remember anything? All he has is the void in his chest. He decides to say nothing about it; the way Fang Duobing is looking at him is already fragile enough. Instead he says, “Nothing.” After a moment, he adds, “You called me Lao-Di.”

Fang Duobing laughs. “Out of everything, that’s what you choose to focus on?” He scrubs his tears off his face. “Yes, I did. You’re my Lao-Di, even if you’re A-Fei right now.”

“Why am I A-Fei?”

He hesitates. “It’s a little… complicated. More than a little.”

He persists. “There was someone who used to call me A-Fei. I know it; when you called me A-Fei you made me remember. Who was it?”

Fang Duobing’s face shutters a little before it blooms like a nighttime flower with grief. “That’s… that’s even more complicated. But he was special to both of us. Here.”

He takes his hand into his and presses it against his chest. His eyes flutter closed. The power rushes through him like a dam has broken. His strength makes the neili intensify into the heady rush of spring, young new things running wild. But beneath it the neili is warm like the last few days of a dying summer. Unbidden his own neili rises to meet it, the frost of it peeling back to reveal a sliver of that same warmth. They greet each other like old friends.

Fang Duobing pulls his hand away. He looks shaken, staring down at his hand. Somehow he had picked the one with his name cut into it. “I… I think I should take you to my room now.”

He follows him through the open halls of his home. The walkways are wide, perhaps wider than what is normal, and there are grooves in the wood underneath his feet. He puzzles over them as they walk; it’s similar to the ruts in a road made by carts but there are certainly no carts within a manor. Besides, the grooves are too light and too close together to have been made by any sort of cart. In the end he doesn’t ask as Fang Duobing guides him into his room.

“It looks like they cleaned while I was gone,” he remarks idly. “Here, sit.”

He sits on the edge of the bed as instructed. The covers are clean and soft, yet look like they’ve simply been washed and changed. Whatever Fang Duobing means by gone, he was certainly gone for a while. “Why am I A-Fei?” He asks again.

Fang Duobing frowns. He drags a chair over from the low table in the center of the room and sits down in front of him. He doesn’t protest as his hands come up to cup his face, gently turning him this way and that. Those eyes stare at him critically. “You’ve lost your memory, so you’re A-Fei.” He reaches around the back of his neck. He almost smacks his hand away when he feels his internal energy probe inside him but it’s gone as quick as it came. Fang Duobing draws back. “If you really want to know, this isn’t the first time this has happened. Someone poisoned you with wuxin huai. You redirected all of it to your head, and as a result you lost your memory. I called you A-Fei then, because-” Again with the shuttered expression. “He called you A-Fei.”

That explains enough - he was his Lao-Di before but now he’s A-Fei to him. He pulls the sword shards out of his robes. “Were these his?”

As he thought, they do truly look pitiful when Fang Duobing takes them out of the bag. The blades still gleam, but that’s more because of the metal they are made of than any oiling or polishing that he never did. There’s dried drops of blood in various places from when the edges had nicked him that he hadn’t bothered to clean. Even so, Fang Duobing turns the bundle over his hands, staring at it in wonder. He too doesn’t seem to care when he accidentally cuts himself and his blood ends up on the blades. “Where did you get this?”

“I woke up with it. On the river bank. All I had was that, your name, and the robes I’m wearing.”

Fang Duobing opens his mouth, closes it, and opens it again after visibly deciding to say something else. “You should change then. Those robes should be washed if you’ve been- how long ago did you wake up?”

He shrugs. “Maybe a fortnight ago.”

“Oh.” Fang Duobing looks over his shoulder at him, aghast, as he starts picking through his racks of clothing. “Well then, those robes should definitely be washed. It’d be a waste to destroy such nice clothes. Here, you can wear these in the meantime.”

What he hands over is an entire outfit. There’s three sets of robes - a white inner one, a dark blue middle robe, and an ever darker blue outer robe with golden patterns on the hems - as well as a matching set of belt and huwan with detailing in a shade of lighter blue. He sets them carefully on the bed and moves to take his clothes off. Fang Duobing makes a noise. “Wait! Not yet, idiot, I told the servants to prepare a bath for you! You can put them on afterwards!”

His face is covered in a light blush but his ears are furiously red. He feels a smirk form on his face, the movement of it familiar. “Have you never seen my body before?”

“Don’t say it that way, now you’re just making it weird!” Fang Duobing drops back down into his chair. He props his chin up in his hand, arm braced on his knee. He glances down at the clothes he was given and amusedly wonders if Fang Duobing had picked them out on purpose so that they would match. “It seems that part of you doesn’t change,” he mutters to himself.

“What was that?”

Fang Duobing glares at him. He conveys with his eyes that he knows that he heard him perfectly well. “I said that I can help you wash your hair. I have some xiao guan you can borrow.”

He flicks a look at Fang Duobing’s hair. The xiao guan he’s wearing is simpler than his mother’s, engraved with lotuses and phoenixes. He nods, and they sit in silence until a knock at the door. Fang Duobing gets up to answer it.

“The bath’s ready,” he says. “Grab your clothes and follow me.”

They don’t go far; down the hall Fang Duobing opens a door to reveal a room only holding a bathtub, a dressing screen, and a huge bucket of water. He lays the clothes over the screen and starts undressing. Fang Duobing makes a disgusted noise as he shoves all of his clothes into a pile with his foot.

“Dirty A-Fei,” he complains. He snorts as he moves to climb into the tub. Fang Duobing grabs his wrist.

“Not the bath! You have to go rinse the dirt off first!”

He looks at the bucket. “...with that,” he says slowly.

“Yes, with the bucket. The water should be warm enough. Do it over the drain.”

The water is warm when he pours it over his body with the provided ladle. He watches it run, brown and dirty, down into the drain in the floor. When all of the water is gone from the bucket he climbs into the bath. Fang Duobing makes no objections this time.

He groans silently as he sinks into the tub. The temperature straddles the perfect line between hot and burning, relaxing his muscles like a hot spring. After a couple of minutes that he spends just enjoying the water he reaches down over the side of the tub for the soap. He wets it and runs it over his body.

There’s rustling and out of the corner of his eye he sees Fang Duobing’s outer robe join his over the top of the screen. When he steps around it, stubbornly looking only at his face, the sleeves of his inner robe are pushed up and tied back. His ponytail bounces behind him as he sets a stool down. “Dip your head under.”

“You really don’t have to help,” he says, bemused. Fang Duobing just stares him down impatiently until he does as he says. The water is too hot for his face; he surfaces, certain that he’s flushed red, and says, “You better use the ladle, I’m not going to do that again.”

Fang Duobing grumbles at him but drags the empty bucket holding the ladle closer. He closes his eyes and, after a minute, feels soapy hands start massaging his scalp. It feels good; almost without him knowing it the tension has eased out of his body. It must be odd, because Fang Duobing says quietly, “You’ve never been so relaxed before.”

“Mm?”

“Well, I mean-” Hands run through his hair as Fang Duobing gathers his thoughts. “I’ve never seen you so relaxed before. Not even once I knew who you were and once I knew you.” He pauses - he stores that piece of information in his mind - and elaborates, awkwardly, “I mean, when I really knew you. Not just who you were, but-” He makes a frustrated noise. Briefly his hands tighten in his hair - not enough to be painful, but certainly enough that he tenses. They let go almost immediately and go back to petting his scalp apologetically. “It’s hard to explain. But once we knew each other - really knew each other - even then I never saw you this comfortable.”

“Was it really so rare?”

Fang Duobing laughs. Unshrouded by tears, the sound ripples outwards like the tolling of a bell. “A-Fei, you ate like a wild animal. You were always on guard, like you thought someone was just lying in wait to steal everything you had.” He quiets again. “I always thought it was sad. When I learned why you acted like that it didn’t make it any better. Even when you were asleep you looked like you were always prepared for a fight.”

“You’ve seen me asleep?” He says skeptically. He hears Fang Duobing swallow.

“We shared a bed, for a while.”

He turns to look at him incredulously. Fang Duobing’s hands fall from his head, and he’s unable to parse the look in his eyes. “In the literal sense,” he says. “You hated it at first. I did too. But the longer it went on…” He trails off.

“How long?” He asks.

“Long enough,” he answers. “That was both before and after you lost your memory.”

The rest of his bath is spent in silence, only the sound of water in the room. Afterwards Fang Duobing leaves him to dry off and get dressed. When he meets him outside of the bath room - back in his outer robe - he’s contemplative. He flicks his hand absently and runs it through his hair; when he touches it it’s completely dry. It even feels soft, noticeably healthier than it had been earlier. Fang Duobing waves his questioning look away. “Yangzhouman has many uses,” he says mysteriously. “Here, let me lend you a xiao guan and then we can go to dinner.”

Despite the literal rack of xiao guan in his room Fang Duobing still picks one without hesitation. He’s really being unsubtle about this, he thinks, examining the engravings of dragons and lotuses. For all he compared him to a wild animal he sure is resembling one himself. It’s almost like he’s marking him, claiming him, and he amuses himself with the thought of Fang Duobing biting him like a dog as he does his hair.

Unlike the xiao guan he was wearing before, this one doesn’t have a stick. The patterning, despite not being coloured in any way, is eye-catching simply for how bold it is. Fang Duobing fusses over him up until the moment they walk into the dining hall.

He stops warily, surveying the table. Sitting at the head is Master He, as he had expected, but to her side facing them are two people. The woman next to her has enough of a resemblance to her that he marks them down as sisters; the way she’s looking at him is equally wary. The man on the other side of Master He’s sister is clearly sizing him up. A blade leans against his leg, a clear threat.

“My xiaoyi,” Fang Duobing murmurs in his ear. He had only distantly registered him stopping and getting so close. “And her husband, Zhan Yunfei. You’ve met them before, under… worse… circumstances.”

He grunts. Fang Duobing’s hand settles on the small of his back and gently guides him forward. He wonders what it looks like. Them arriving together, in matching clothes, and - Master He’s eyes widen when she sees it - obviously wearing blatant wedding symbolism; maybe he should be giving Fang Duobing more credit, either for being stupid and not realising it or for being insanely clever. He has bets on it being the latter.

Fang Duobing takes the seat next to his mother. He sits beside him, silently a little bit grateful for the shield. The sword shards settle against his side; he hadn’t begrudged him slipping them back into his robes once he had dressed. Fang Duobing’s sword clacks against the wood of his chair as he sets it down between them. It’s comfortably within arm’s length for them both, which he can’t help but think about as servants bring out the food.

Fang Duobing grabs his hand and squeezes it underneath the table before his other one even moves a cun towards his plate. Wild animal, he mouths. He scowls at him.

Even so, he watches him sweep up the teapot and pour tea for everyone at the table. As the youngest, his cup is the last filled. The scent of it is gentle; as he sets the pot down Master He picks up her cup and sips from it. Then her sister drinks, then Zhan Yunfei. An expectant air fills the room as they avoid looking at him and Fang Duobing. Is this some tradition he’s unaware of, or is it specific to Fang Duobing’s family? Finally he takes the elbow jab to his side as a cue and lifts his cup to his mouth. At the last moment his lips close of their own volition and the tea just barely touches his mouth. He puts the cup back on the table and stares at it in confusion.

Once Fang Duobing drinks Master He begins to eat her food. It proceeds in the same order as before. He lifts up his chopsticks but his hand draws away skittishly before they even touch the food. He frowns and tries again. It’s not that the food looks bad - fish doused in some fragrant sauce, seasoned and cooked vegetables, a bowl of wonton soup, and a separate bowl of plain white rice. He even thinks it might taste good; his nose can differentiate between the individual scents from each dish. Is there something wrong with him?

Wordlessly Fang Duobing hands him his own cup of tea. He stares at him blankly. It’s hot in his hand. Drink it, Fang Duobing’s eyes say. He obeys, taking a single sip. The tea washes through his mouth; despite the fragrant aroma, the taste itself isn’t strong. He hands the cup back to him, acutely aware that the eyes of Fang Duobing’s family are trained on him.

“It’s mellow,” he says quietly.

“So you can taste,” Fang Duobing says to himself, as if that statement explains anything. The cup positioned over the lower half of his face hides both his frown and the movement of his mouth. “Try yours again? Please?”

His hand spasms in the middle of setting his chopsticks down; they fall down softly onto the table with only a small noise. Silently Fang Duobing takes his clenched fist underneath the table. He tenses when he sends questing probes of energy down his spiritual veins via his wrist. But his touch is gone as quickly as it came.

“Fang Xiaobao,” Master He says. He glances over at her. One eyebrow is archly raised in concern, the other going up to join it when she sees how focused Fang Duobing is looking at the space in between them. “Is there a problem?”

“No, Niang,” he says. He watches as he reaches for his bowl of rice. Nonchalantly he splits the portion in half with his chopsticks, taking a bite from one side before setting the bowl down between them. It rests closer to him than it does Fang Duobing. The look that had urged him to try his tea is back in his eyes.

The intensity of his stare only prickles uncomfortably in comparison to how his relatives are practically staring him down with needles in their eyes. He picks up his chopsticks and is once again surprised when he puts a bit of rice in his mouth with steady hands. Fang Duobing nods to himself. “I’ll tell you about it later,” he tells him. “For now, just eat what you can of my food.”

He turns to look at his mother, taking the brunt of his family’s stares with him. “This is A-Fei,” he says. “He’s really not who you think he is.”

He’s aware of Master He’s eyes sliding over to him as he chews. “He certainly looks like who I think he is.”

“Hush, jie,” her sister says. “Let Xiaobao explain first.”

“It’s quite simple,” he says. “He’s lost his memory.”

For the rest of the dinner between bites Fang Duobing handles whatever questions his family asks. He even gracefully takes the few they shoot in his direction. In the meantime he discovers he dislikes both the fish and the vegetables. By the end of the meal he’s only eaten his half of the rice and finished off the last dregs of Fang Duobing’s broth. After Fang Duobing bids his family good night he fully expects that they’re going to bed. Instead he says, “You’re still hungry, right? I’ll make you something in the kitchen. Bring your leftovers.”

He sounds so sure that it’ll work that he allows himself to be led into the kitchen. Servants are cleaning up but barely seem fazed as he breezes by. He stakes a claim to part of the counter and finds a tall stool for him. He watches as he takes off his xiao guan and slides it into his robes. He puts his hair back up in a bun with a zanzi he pulls out of seemingly nowhere. The servants work around him but it isn’t until the last one is gone that he unlaces his huwan and takes off his outer robe. He hands them over as he ties back his sleeves and makes for the shallow bowl to wash his hands in. “Hold these for me, A-Fei?”

He notes that so far Fang Duobing has taken off his outer robe only when they’re alone, and only when he’s doing him a favor. He finds that he’s been keeping an unconscious tally. He clenches his fists in his robe. “What are you doing?” He asks. His voice comes out rougher than he had meant it to.

“What does it look like? I’m making you noodles.”

He raises an eyebrow at the bowl he’s pouring flour into. “Noodles.”

“Noodles,” he confirms with an eye roll. He’s smiling though. “Do you still like noodles?”

He frowns. “I don’t know.”

“At least you’re being honest about it.” Fang Duobing adds salt to the bowl and whisks it all with a pair of chopsticks. He watches him set a little pot of water on the banked stove. After a minute or so he pours it into the bowl and mixes it again. “If you don’t like them then I’ll just make you rice.”

He scowls. “So what will happen to the noodles?”

“I’ll eat them, of course.” He flits over and, taking out a clean set of chopsticks, splits the leftover bowl of rice again. He takes a mouthful of rice and a wonton before handing him the chopsticks. “Eat. It’s gone a little cold.”

By the time he’s finished picking his way through the rice Fang Duobing has kneaded the noodle dough and set it back into the bowl. He slides another stool next to him and begins digging into the fish and vegetables. “I didn’t expect that you could cook,” he tells him. The corners of his lips quirk up.

“Well, just because I’m a little shaoye doesn’t mean I can’t pull my weight, you know.” He grins at him before his eyes go a little distant. “I didn’t know how to before though. Back then, I only knew how to praise and criticise food. But for him, I learned how to cook.”

He pauses. For all that Fang Duobing has done for him he hadn’t thought at all about whether or not he would also be just as caring for this mysterious man. “Could he not cook?”

He snorts. “Oh, he could certainly cook. He just liked experimenting.” His next words are spoken around a mouthful of fish. “It wasn’t terrible to eat, but it certainly wasn’t good either. You know, I never truly decided how I felt about the way his food tasted.”

“Did I eat it?”

“You definitely ate it when you couldn’t taste it at all.” Fang Duobing shoots a lopsided, blinding smile at him. “I actually lost a bet with you because of that. Though it wasn’t like I didn’t eat it either - it was food cooked by him, so of course I was going to eat everything.”

“You keep saying that.” He pokes at the last lonely wonton floating in the soup. “Could I not taste food before?”

“No, you couldn’t.” Fang Duobing takes his last bite and gets up to start kneading the dough again. “I think it was for the same reason you always looked like you were expecting a fight. Some sort of survival mechanism. But you could taste when you lost your memory last time, so I assumed it would be the same.”

He mulls that over as Fang Duobing sets the dough aside again - now cut into eight oiled strips. “So if taste wasn’t the problem, why couldn’t I eat my own food?”

Fang Duobing sits down and looks at him seriously. “Because of your childhood, you never ate anything unless you knew exactly how it was prepared, what the ingredients were, and who cooked it. That’s why you often ate with us.” Quieter, he says, “It was a long time before I learned that about you.”

“But I ate your dinner,” he points out.

“But all the stuff you ate was plain,” he counters. “You really can’t screw up rice or soup unless you try hard enough. And besides, I had some first. So your stupid brain could let you know that at least we would die together if it was actually poisoned.”

He glances over at him. “Was that something I had to worry about? Poison?”

“All the time.” He nudges his hand. “I already told you about the wuxin huai, but there’s countless people out there who want to kill you. Poison’s just the cowardly way of doing it.”

“Who want to kill me,” he repeats. Fang Duobing nods.

“That’s why I’m going to stay with you,” he says. “Until we figure out who did this to you, I’m going to protect you.”

The way he says it has the weight of an oath. He looks at him dead in the eye as the truth of it settles between them. Somehow he knows that he does not truly need protecting - knows how to protect himself, if he needs to - but instead of being stifling the knowledge that Fang Duobing will watch his back settles him. He gently takes his hand and flips it over, again tracing the characters of his name in his skin. “We’re the last ones left of him,” he says quietly. “I’ll be damned if I let either of us die before the other.”

They sit in the silence until he gets up again to finish the noodles. He watches Fang Duobing’s back as he forms the noodles and begins cooking them. His shoulders are broader than he’d thought at first glance, muscles flexing as he moves. He knows without even looking at the rest of him that those are the muscles of a swordsman, built over time by long and dedicated practice. He looks down at his sword leaning against the stool. He knows even now that touching it without express permission makes him feel restless. But he thinks back to how, at dinner, Fang Duobing had put his sword between them without hesitating. Like if he needed it, it could be relied on.

The sauce he’s making fills the kitchen with a scent that makes his mouth water; in comparison to the fish, he likes it much better. The noodles, already out of the cooking water, get put into the bowl of sauce. He even lets them sit in it for a few minutes as he scrounges around and finds a small cucumber to cut up.

“There,” he says satisfiedly. “Chef Duobing’s spicy sesame and garlic noodles.”

In the bowl the noodles glisten, coated in bright sauce. Sesame seeds are dotted around like stars in the sky with the long, thin strips of cucumber to one side of the bowl. He spends a long minute with his eyes closed, just smelling the food, before picking up a mouthful with his chopsticks.

Fang Duobing’s eyes crinkle as he looks at him, chin propped up in his hand. His sleeves are still tied back but his hair is fully down, the zanzi having been slid back into his robes to rest with his xiao guan once he’d finished cooking. Between the bared whole of him and the noodles he’s rapidly finishing it almost feels like they’re married. The smile on his face is similarly naked, soft and intimate. “You like them,” he says, pleased.

“It’s good,” he acknowledges gruffly. He preens a little bit.

After he finishes they clean up the kitchen. Fang Duobing sweeps errant flour outside and puts everything back in its place before washing the dishes. He dries them with a cloth as he passes them over and distantly wonders if they’ve done this before. It seems almost too easy to be true.

“Here,” Fang Duobing says once they’ve moved into the hallway. His outer robe is draped over his arm as he pushes a door open. “You can sleep in here.”

He peers inside. It’s obviously a guest room, hastily prepared. It has the faintly dusty smell of an unused room that’s cleaned just often enough that it doesn’t accumulate dirt. New sheets have evidently been put onto the bed, and on the table in the middle of the room is a vase of flowers. He looks between it and Fang Duobing.

“I know it’s not much,” he says sheepishly, “But it’s only until we can leave.”

He stares at him and very much does not say that he had been half-thinking that they would be sleeping together, like he had told him they had in the past. There must be something in his gaze that makes Fang Duobing waver, because he says, small, “Do you not like it?”

He looks at him and he’s suddenly struck by how young he truly is. With his hair up in a ponytail and his confident gait he presents as a self-assured young man. Now, with his hair reaching down his back and this unfamiliar, insecure look on his face, he can see how he must’ve been as a boy. He’s beginning to understand just how important his opinion must have been to him.

“It’s fine,” he says. Fang Duobing smiles at him, and beams harder when he attempts a smile in return.

“Good night, A-Fei,” he says. He watches his back as he slides the door open to his own room, until it slides shut behind him. Only then does he enter the room loaned to him.

He undresses until he’s only in his inner robe and lays the rest of his robes on the clothing rack in the room. The belt, huwan, and borrowed xiao guan go on the table. The sword shards he places above his pillow as he lays down.

He finds that sleep does not come to him willingly. Instead he finds Fang Duobing, still looking at him with that soft expression in his mind. He traces his name with his fingertips. Unbidden the Fang Duobing in his mind is replaced with a different one - one tearing a piece of bread in half and offering it to him, one who looks at him with smug surprise when he takes it to eat. He presses his back against the wall, still staring at the door, trying to remember where Fang Duobing’s bed was in his room. Is that his heartbeat he hears, or is he deluding himself?

He has only known Fang Duobing for less than a day, and yet when he looks into himself he finds a near-bottomless well of trust for him. What did he do before to prompt this boy to care for him so? What kind of person was he, that he was so suspicious of the world that he developed habits to ensure his own survival but also developed such a deep and unwavering trust for Fang Duobing? Who was he, truly, to not only have a special relationship with him but also one with the mysterious man he doesn’t want to talk about?

His thoughts leave him as sleep finally overtakes him, as slow as the tides. But he wakes up, sweat-soaked and growling and crying silently, as weak moonlight fights its way through the paper window. The covers are tangled around his legs but even so he viciously struggles towards the window before even thinking to remove them. He rattles the wooden frame in his hands, gasping as tears stream down his face, before he just punches his way through the paper.

He presses his face to the gap. He takes huge gulps of air, feeling the coolness of it on his face. The view outside isn’t anything special - only the view of the treeline, the thin sliver of crescent moon veiled by clouds - but it grounds him. He can barely remember what had terrified him so in his dream, only that the darkness and the sense of drowning had been all too pervasive. There’s a desperate, intense feeling of loss in his chest that he fears more than anything. 

He must lose time, because he’s suddenly standing in front of Fang Duobing’s room, hand half-raised. He drops it uncertainly. Was he going to knock or simply open the door? He doesn’t know, still flushed with heat like he’s feverish, his thin inner robe rapidly cooling but still stuck to his skin, the sword shards cradled in one arm. When had he picked them up?

A little helplessly he slides down against the door, pressing his ear to it. Over his too-loud breaths and the thump of his heart he strains to hear Fang Duobing’s. It takes him a moment to pick it out, sleep-slow, but when he does he has to shove his fist to his mouth. Relief crashes over him like a wave, and as much as he’s soothed by it he’s just as confused. Why was the first thing he sought out after a nightmare Fang Duobing, why is he so relieved to learn that he’s alive? He thinks back to how he had told him that they had slept together and thinks it must be that. Fang Duobing must have become a sort of lodestone for him. He wonders how many times he had woken up like this in the past and found Fang Duobing breathing, safe and sound, next to him, and been reassured by that fact.

Sleep doesn’t come back for him. It isn’t until the door he’s leaning on slides open and he falls over onto what must be Fang Duobing’s feet, blinking at the deluge of light, that he realises that he had slipped into meditation. “A-Fei?!” Fang Duobing exclaims. He sounds panicked. He twists to look at him as he kneels, his hands carefully moving his head to rest on top of his knees. “Have you been here all night?! What’s wrong?!”

“Not all night,” he mumbles. He brings his hand up to touch the pale purple of his sleeve. Fang Duobing is already dressed, his hair pulled up and his sword strapped to his back. “Thank you.”

“For what? No, don’t answer that.” Fang Duobing shakes his head. “You can tell me when you’re ready, okay?” He hauls him up and they stagger together into his room. His legs have long gone numb, and now they’re plagued by pins and needles. Fang Duobing drops him onto his own bed and tucks him in fretfully. He looks up at his face, hidden by his bangs. His features are tight with an emotion he can’t name.

“Hey,” he rasps. Fang Duobing looks down at where he’s touching his wrist. “It’s fine.”

“It’s not fine!” He shouts. He flinches back. The immediate and guilty flash of pain on Fang Duobing’s face makes him grip his wrist tighter. “The first thing I see is you, collapsing onto my feet, nearly naked and paler than a corpse! Do you know what I thought?! I thought you were dead, A-Fei! Dead! ” He bends over him, eyes squeezed shut, and he realises that he’s worried. For him. “When we found you,” he whispers, “You were about to be married to a ghost bride. I paid ten thousand taels for you.” His face forms a snarl. “I will drink Meng Po’s soup before I ever goddamn lose you.”

He reaches up to touch Fang Duobing’s cheek in wonder. He really is staking a claim on him, he thinks. Some part of him basks in this crude, animalistic idea. Unthinkingly he tilts his chin up, baring his neck as he looks at him challengingly. “What did I mean to you?” He asks roughly. “What did you mean to me?”

This close he can see Fang Duobing’s throat bob as he swallows. He can see how his lashes tremble as he holds himself back, as all of his emotions roil behind his eyes. “I couldn’t tell you,” he says. He chokes, pressing his forehead against his temple. “I really can’t tell you, A-Fei. I don’t know how to.”

He touches Fang Duobing’s shoulder blade with one hand, feeling like the situation has changed - now he’s caring for him. His shoulder grows wet, but Fang Duobing doesn’t even shake as he cries. He feels helpless. He doesn’t know what to do to comfort him. In the end he lets him cry into his skin. He circulates his qi and attempts to feed him a little. It makes him laugh, sitting up and wiping his tears away.

“You’re really cold, A-Fei,” he says. He’s smiling through his tears as he says it though, so he counts it as a win. He pries the sword fragments out from between them and puts them at the head of the bed. “Go to sleep. I know you meditated all night while you were out there. I’ll take care of all the preparations so we can leave today.” He adds on, quietly, like he knows what he’s thinking, “I’ll stay here with you too.”

He nods. Fang Duobing sighs and gets up to drag a chair over; he sits in it and intertwines their fingers. Even through that one simple place of contact he’s radiating heat. It takes a while for him to drift off, but Fang Duobing doesn’t let go of him once, even as he quietly instructs servants to begin packing clothes for them and to bring him breakfast. His slumber is peaceful this time, if intermittent. Fang Duobing coaxes him back to sleep every time, sometimes feeding him a spoonful of rice before he does.

He wakes up properly sometime in the afternoon. He keeps his breathing low and his heartbeat slow, taking the opportunity to simply watch Fang Duobing. He’s reading intently from a cookbook with a hand-illustrated cover, his brows furrowed. Besides him leaning against the bed are two bags, packed full to bursting. Something eases in him at the sight of them. He hadn’t realised that, despite all of Fang Duobing’s words, he had still been half-expecting that he would leave him behind. But there’s no way he can leave with those two bags and still expect to carry his sword. And if he came back, there’s no way he would let him off so easily.

He clears his throat. Fang Duobing stuffs his book into his robes and beams at him. “Morning, A-Fei! Come on, I left you a set of robes to change into. We’ll leave after you’re done.”

“That soon?” He says amusedly. Even so he lets Fang Duobing direct him behind the dressing screen, where the robes are hung up. There’s even a wide, shallow bowl of water and a small towel for washing up. He shrugs off his inner robes before splashing his face and perfunctorily wiping the sweat off his body. The robes are black, the embroidery purple. Again they’re matching. The same xiao guan from yesterday is sitting next to the bowl. He sweeps his hair into it and thinks, a little bit, about what it means that Fang Duobing not only has brand-new clothes for him but also clothes that he feels comfortable in.

Fang Duobing glances over his shoulder at him once he steps around the dressing screen, a satisfied look in his eyes as he shoulders one of the bags. “Good. Bring your inner robe too, we can wash it when we get home.”

He raises an eyebrow as he picks up the other bag. “Isn’t this your home?”

He only gets a brittle smile. “Home,” Fang Duobing repeats.

Outside in front of the manor he bids his family farewell. He stands to the side as he does, feeling awkward as he watches him hug his xiaoyi, then his mother. They exchange a few words, lowly enough that he allows them pretense of speaking in relative privacy. He stiffens, though, when he sees Fang Duobing’s xiaoyi beckoning him over. He walks over to meet her, likely looking just as tense as her husband does standing next to her.

“Oh, Yunfei, calm down,” she says. “Xiaobao trusts him.” She turns towards him. “Di- A-Fei,” she corrects, “Take care of Xiaobao, won’t you? I know you don’t remember anything, but he needs you right now. Keep him safe for us.”

He nods, and when she smiles at him it’s so bright he wonders if she’s who Fang Duobing inherited his smile from. An arm drops around his shoulders and a hip knocks into his. “Xiaoyi, are you terrorising A-Fei?” Fang Duobing says mock-scoldingly. “I’ll have to duel you for his honor if you are.”

She laughs as he scowls at him. “I can fight for my own honor,” he mutters. Fang Duobing shoots him a pout.

“Come on, let me protect you this once,” he complains. “I’m sure there’s someone out there you can fight for my honor in return.”

He only scowls harder, which makes Fang Duobing laugh. “Let’s get going before I really do have to duel someone,” he says. He leaps up onto the wall surrounding the manor, turning back around to wave. “Niang! Xiaoyi! Zhan Yunfei! Take care!”

He hears Master He sigh. “Fang Xiaobao!” She shouts, “You better be coming back soon!”

He laughs. “Don’t worry, Niang! Next time you see us, we’ll be bringing him back!” He jumps into the air, already flying away.

He doesn’t hesitate. He bends his knees and pushes off the ground, following him without looking back.

They fly without stopping, even as the sky begins to darken. He tracks Fang Duobing by the rustling of his robes and the faint traces of his perfume on the wind. Somewhere, a dog begins to bark; he’s mystified when Fang Duobing course-corrects towards the sound.

They land in a clearing next to a two-story building. He tilts his head to look at it, unable to place a finger on what’s so odd about it until he realises that it’s on wheels. Fang Duobing laughs, picking up a paper lantern sitting by the door. The play of candlelight and shadow on his face is captivating.

“So he really did come here like I asked,” he says to himself. “Huli Jing, girl, are you excited that I’m back?”

He unhooks a little wooden gate on the side of the house. A yappy little orange blur races out of what must be a dog house, prancing around them. He startles when she runs over and jumps up to paw at his leg, looking at him excitedly. He looks over at Fang Duobing, who is looking at them both contentedly.

“Whose dog is this,” he asks.

“She’s ours, technically. Until her owner comes back.” His voice grows fainter as he opens the door to the house and enters. There’s a thud and he comes back out, sans bag, and hands him the paper lantern. “Welcome back to the Lian Hua Lou, A-Fei. I’m going to go look around.” He stops in front of him, the dog pressed between their legs. He can feel her wagging her tail furiously. Fang Duobing’s lips brush against his ear as he breathes, “Welcome home, A-Fei.”

Just like that, he’s gone; he blinks and strains to see his figure disappearing into the trees. He looks back down at the dog. “Do you know me,” he says.

She lolls her tongue out and pants at him, face crinkled in happiness. He shakes his head and enters the house.

What had Fang Duobing called it? The Lian Hua Lou? Lotus Tower, he mouths to himself as he sets his bag down next to Fang Duobing’s, leaning against a bench. By the light of the lantern he walks around, faithfully followed by the dog. The inside is simply furnished but looks like it’s been lovingly lived in. The small kitchen is chaotically organised. When he opens drawers there seems to be no differentiation between ingredients for cooking and ingredients for making medicine besides the labels stuck onto their jars. Wherever he looks he finds plants - green, thriving, flourishing - growing in whatever space is available. Besides all of that and the table and benches, there isn’t much at all besides a single bed. It’s barely big enough for one person. He bends down to smell the sheets, unmade and in disarray like someone just woke up - there’s no trace of Fang Duobing’s perfume at all. The dog whines.

He goes outside and takes the stairs up to the upper floor. There aren’t even any walls, just a roof and more plants and storage crates. He looks at the singular bed up here as well - slightly bigger than the one downstairs, as if it could fit two people if they really weren’t picky about personal space - and runs a hand over the blankets, wondering if this is the bed that he and Fang Duobing had shared in the past.

He hears Fang Duobing return, clattering around the house. When he goes back down he finds him fussing in the kitchen, three lit candles placed throughout the room in little dishes. The stove burns with warm light as he looks over and smiles at him. “Explored again?” He says. “Can you fetch me the letter in the turnips? They should be on the side of the house.”

“There’s a letter in the turnips?” He says incredulously. Fang Duobing laughs and waves him off.

“Don’t worry about it. I told him to leave it there, now that we’re home they’ll probably start popping up in normal places. Please?”

He retrieves the letter.

Fang Duobing doesn’t read it until they’re sitting down at the table eating rice and meat and bok choy. When he’s done he gets up and throws it into the stove. He raises an eyebrow.

“From my new colleague,” he explains. “I’m sure you’ll get to see him soon enough. Come on, let’s hurry up and wash the dishes so we can go to bed.” He yawns, and adds, redundantly, “I’m tired.”

The dishes are done quickly, with only two bowls, four chopsticks, and the things Fang Duobing used to cook. Afterwards he and the dog herd him into hanging his robes up. He raises an eyebrow. “We’re going upstairs?”

Fang Duobing looks back at him. He’s barely wearing anything, his inner robe untied and open, his undertrousers hanging low on his hips, his hair down and a little wild. He’s stuck a little bit on how much skin is showing. He’s hyperaware of how his chest expands and deflates as he breathes, how the muscles in his legs are perfectly flexed in his position of having one foot out the door. He glances back and says, lowly, “That’s his bed, A-Fei.”

He isn’t sure why he’s suddenly so annoyed. It’s either the way Fang Duobing is practically on display or the way he still hasn’t told him anything about this mystery man. He stalks over and, grabbing his wrist, growls, “Are you ever going to tell me about him?”

Fang Duobing meets his eyes, his face only tilted up the barest amount. His expression is twisted with stubbornness and frustration, but there’s hurt swimming behind it all too. He makes no move to hide it. “What do you want me to say?” He says. “That I loved him? That you loved him? That it didn’t matter whether or not he believed us, or anyone else for that matter? That even if it did it didn’t change anything? That he decided to go off and die alone instead of letting us take care of him? That I still look for him because I hope he didn’t? That I’m so goddamn tired of it all?”

By the end of it Fang Duobing is crowded up against him, a little spot on his chest hurting from where he had jabbed his finger with every new point. He grabs his jaw, squeezing; Fang Duobing’s hand comes up and grabs his wrist. He does nothing but hold onto it tightly, his nails pressing into his skin. He squeezes harder.

“Is that why I’m here?” He growls. “Because I make you think of him every time you look at me?”

Fang Duobing’s nails dig into him so hard he can feel the blood welling up. He grabs onto his shoulder, his face stricken. “Is that what you’ve been thinking this whole time, A-Fei?” His eyes dart wildly around his face. “Didn’t I tell you? I’ll protect you until we find out who hurt you. And I’ll keep protecting you after that, even if you don’t need me to. I care about you,” he says, “You. As my Lao-Di, as my A-Fei. Nothing can change that now.”

He looks at Fang Duobing. He’s ghastly pale now that the candles are all put out, only the light of the moon shining on him. It casts unhealthy shadows under his features. He dislikes it. “Tell me his name,” he says.

Fang Duobing tilts forward on his toes. He braces himself on his chest, his lips brushing his ear. He listens as he whispers it to him.

“There. Happy?” He says. “Now, either come to bed or go sleep outside. It’s too late for me to care which anyway.”

When he wakes he is warm. He tenses when he feels the arm wrapped around his waist before groggily remembering who owns it. Fang Duobing is still curled around him from behind, his forehead pressed to the nape of his neck, radiating heat. The wind had made the night colder than he’d liked, and after circulating his qi for five minutes he had been ready to fall into meditation. Instead Fang Duobing had flopped over and settled his arm over his middle as he’d mashed his face into his shoulder.

“Stop it,” he’d grumbled, “Just go to sleep.”

He’s a little baffled now that he did manage to. The dog is sleeping practically on his stomach, both of their hands buried in her fur. He wants, a little bit, to get up and out of the bed. It’s too small - one of his legs is dangling off the side, and he can’t even stretch. Yet there’s two bodies hemming him in, so he sighs and meditates until Fang Duobing wakes up.

He doesn’t seem surprised at all to find him already awake. “Morning,” Fang Duobing says. He can hear the smile in his voice. “I’m going to go wash up. I’ll have breakfast ready when you get down.”

He vaults over him and the dog, stumbling a little as he rights himself. He watches his back as he descends the stairs before rolling onto his back and staring up at the roof. He enjoys the warmth left in the blankets before it fades, replaced with the realisation that, for the first time since the river, he’s okay with being alone with his own thoughts. Everything from last night seems a little more distant in the early morning reality. 

He flies down the side of the Lian Hua Lou and splashes water on his face from the rain barrel. Inside Fang Duobing is heating up congee. One of the bags is open, obviously having been rummaged through. He looks back over his shoulder at him, grinning. His hair is pulled back and he’s fastened his inner rober and thrown an outer robe over it. “Huli Jing still upstairs?”

He blinks. “We have a huli jing?”

Fang Duobing laughs. “The dog.” He takes a slurp from one of the bowls he’s holding before handing it over to him. The other one he sets down on the table as he passes by. “Keep mine warm for me, won’t you? I’m going to go train with Erya for a bit.”

For lack of a better thing to do he eats his congee and cradles Fang Duobing’s bowl in his arm. When he gets up to rinse the bowl he hears tiny little nails click against the stairs. Huli Jing trots down the stairs and sticks her head inside; her tail starts wagging once she sees him. He stares at her. She barks once before jumping down into the grass and prancing away.

Once he’s dressed in yesterday’s robes he sits outside on the stairs leading to the ground and watches Fang Duobing train. He’s running through sword forms without any internal power behind them - he would be able to feel it if there was, this boy burns like a bonfire. His entire body is fluid as he twists between movements, his sword as fast as a snake. He recognises the forms, vaguely, but can’t place them.

Fang Duobing notices him and, beaming, bounds up to him. He thrusts out his bowl and feels smug at the startled but pleased look on his face. “You really didn’t have to keep it warm for me,” he says. He tilts the bowl and swallows a few mouthfuls before handing it back. “If you’re going to watch, I’m going to show off a bit.”

He eases into a different set of forms - more direct, more straightforward. His sword is bold, as immovable as a tree. He observes how the embellishments he’s putting on his movements not only would provoke attack but would also turn it back upon the attacker. His too-fancy footwork allows him to pivot a little earlier, his feet seemingly too sure of themselves to trip even as he speeds up. He snorts.

Something coils in his limbs as he watches. He wants to stand and meet Fang Duobing’s sword blow for blow, to chase him down in the clearing where they’ve parked the Lian Hua Lou. Something in him remembers the fighting rush. But he has nothing by his side.

Fang Duobing ends by bowing with a flourish. His cheeks are flushed and he’s panting, but with fresh blood coursing through his veins he looks happier and healthier than he’s seen him. He plops down beside him, stealing his bowl of congee and throwing it back in three gulps. “I came up with that style myself,” he tells him proudly. “Every master should have their own style, wouldn’t you agree?”

He grunts. “Very shaoye of you.”

“Hey!” Laughing, he checks him with his shoulder. “You had one too. I know you remember it somewhere, because you look like you’re about to pounce on me.” Thoughtfully, he says, “We could find someone to forge you a weapon.”

The idea rankles him a little, but he considers it. “Did I not have one before?”

“You did.” Fang Duobing smiles into his empty bowl. “It was a dao. I know a weaponsmith or two. If you like, I remember enough about it that we could probably make something very similar.” His lips quirk up. “It was a very specific dao.”

They both turn as Huli Jing barks at them, the sound muffled. She wiggles in between them and drops something in his lap, tail wagging. Fang Duobing ruffles her ears. “How’d you get back inside, girl? Do you know qinggong too? Is that your big secret?”

He reaches into the bag she had fetched him and pulls out the fragments of the sword. Carefully, slowly, he unknots the silk cord holding them together. They fall into his lip. He picks up the hilt, rubbing the blade with his sleeve. Dried blood flakes off - likely his, he can’t remember where Fang Duobing had bled over them. He fits it together with another part of the blade. The break is clean, not jagged, and the two parts merge perfectly. This sword was broken intentionally instead of shattering under overwhelming pressure. Fang Duobing leans against him, their shoulders touching over Huli Jing. “He broke it himself,” he murmurs to him. “He was tired too. I think he was just done.”

“A dao,” he says. “You said you can get one made for me?”

“It won’t be the same.” Fang Duobing taps his wrist. “You left it behind for some reason, and I can understand why. But if you want a new one, well.” He smirks at him. “What’s the use of being a rich little shaoye if I can’t spend my money on you?”

He shoves him away even as he can feel the smile creeping onto his face. Fang Duobing shoves him back, grinning, the spoon in his bowl clattering around. Huli Jing’s tail thumps against his back.

“Show me,” he says. “I want to see one of your weaponsmiths.”

They leave the Lian Hua Lou when the sun is high in the sky. Fang Duobing had spent a few minutes squirreling tael notes in his wallet, in his robes, in his pants - everywhere on his person, it seemed, was fair game. On his instruction he’d picked up Huli Jing to take with them, feeling awkward as he’d cradled her in his arms. He had laughed and fixed the way he’d held her before they were off into the sky.

“Here,” Fang Duobing says. He’s finally waded out of the crowd of market aunties, grinning at him. He offers him half a bao, the other half hanging out of his mouth. “Smells good, doesn’t it?”

He takes it from his hand and sniffs it delicately. Nothing about it smells off. In fact, he can smell the pepper and salt used to season the meat, the savory sauce it’s soaked in, and the softness of the bao dough. Huli Jing gets her own piece torn off of Fang Duobing’s, snapping it up happily. He trails in their wake as they start winding their way through the market. The mask on his face sits uncomfortably in a way that the small of the bao can’t cancel out.

“Put it on, A-Fei!” Fang Duobing had said earlier, laughing as he’d shoved it into his hands, “It’ll be fun! Look, I’ll wear one too! We can match!”

Fun, he reminds himself as Fang Duobing flits from stall to stall, oohing and aahing over the wares. It is a little fun, watching Huli Jing gently take his robes into her mouth and tugging when he decides aloud that maybe he does need another comb or bracelet. Slowly they meander to wherever their intended destination is - though not before Fang Duobing purchases a hair clip and fastens it into his hair with a grin. He even takes a moment to tuck the dangling strands of dark red beads away where they won’t get in the way. “It suits you,” he says.

Wordlessly he hands him his untouched bao. It’s gone cold, but Fang Duobing still takes it, beaming at him as he tears off a bite. He follows him again as he skips off.

“Here we are,” he says. They’ve stopped outside a forge, set on the outer edge of town. There’s a woman swinging a hammer at an unfinished blade, cotton cloth stuffed into her ears. He spends a moment watching her critically before surveying a few weapons hung up on a wall - an axe, a jian, even a spiked mace. They all look to be of high craftsmanship.

“Fang-gongzi!” Another woman comes out of an adjacent door, wiping her hands with a kitchen cloth that she stuffs into the pocket of her apron. Underneath it she’s wearing leathers, blood splattered on them anyway, and he nearly yanks Fang Duobing away before he realises the blood isn’t human. He sniffs the air; beneath the intense heat wafting off the forge he can smell pig’s blood. Still, he doesn’t relax even as Fang Duobing links their arms together. The woman raises an eyebrow at them. “New friend of yours?”

“Old friend now, actually,” he replies sunnily. “A-Fei, this is Huang Xinyi. She runs the butchery next door. The one back there is Guo Meiying. She’s the smith who made me my Erya.”

“Your Erya,” he repeats.

“My Erya,” Fang Duobing agrees. He waves his sword in front of his face before glancing back and exclaiming, “Huli Jing, no begging!”

“Oh, don’t bother gongzi,” Huang Xinyi says. She pops a hip out and puts one hand on her waist. “Now, what’s brought you here? Don’t tell me Erya needs repairing again?”

“Huang-nǚshì, do you really think so little of me?” He pouts at her a little. He hasn’t realised how much time he’s apparently spent observing Fang Duobing. Even though his shoulders are more relaxed now than they had been while they were making their way here his stance is still alert and on edge. He sets a hand on his back and sends him a small pulse of qi; he gets no reaction other than his eyes cutting towards him. “I’ve got a custom order; I guarantee that Guo-nǚshì will be interested.”

Huang Xinyi laughs. It’s a large sound. “Well then, you’ve got my interest too. You’re lucky I’ve got no customers right now, I’ll see if I can get her attention once she finishes.”

She wanders over into Guo Meiying’s sightline. He can tell by the slight tilt of her head. “I met them a couple of years ago,” Fang Duobing tells him. “Erya had gotten into a bit of a scrape, and I had to beg Niang to get the address of the right blacksmith. Apparently my birth mother had left notes that if I ever needed a sword it should be from here.”

He looks at him. “Your birth mother.”

“Mhm.” He hums, watching Huli Jing nose around. “She died when I was born, you know.”

He has a feeling that he does know, or that he did, once. Nonetheless, Fang Duobing hands him his sword and says, “Well? Don’t you want to know what Guo-nǚshì’s craftsmanship feels like?”

He looks dubiously at him. Fang Duobing gives him one of his self-satisfied little smirks and cocks his head. “I’m not too possessive, you know.”

“You’re a swordsman,” he mutters. “Of course you’re possessive.” He still waits until his hand settles on his wrist to unsheathe Erya. The balance is perfect, even if it’s a little light for him. It’s probably just right for Fang Duobing. His body sinks into a form and executes a few moves, like it’s been lying in wait, carved into his bones. He comes to a stilted stop and stares at his hand confusedly.

“I knew it!” Fang Duobing crows gleefully. He hops over from where he’d twirled away. “You’re absolutely terrible with a sword, A-Fei.”

He scowls at him. Huli Jing’s warm body winds around his legs. “Is that supposed to be a compliment?”

“I’m just saying,” he says, smiling beatifically, “That you probably had a dao for a reason.”

He shoves Erya back at him, hard; he laughs and resheathes it. He pauses and they both turn a moment before the blacksmith - Guo Meiying - clears her throat.

“What’s this I hear about a custom order?” She says. Like Huang Xinyi, she’s also wearing leathers beneath her protective smithing gear. Her voice is rougher as she speaks. “It better be good, Fang-gongzi.”

“Oh, it is.” He leans his elbows on the counter probably meant to keep innocent guests out of the forge. “Here, do you have paper? It’s probably better if I draw it.”

The two women crowd around the provided scrap of parchment as he sketches lines with a piece of charcoal. He instead turns to keep an eye on the street behind him as he listens in on the conversation. “So it’s a dao, right, except, you see, here, the end’s blunt-” There’s a sharp sound as he makes a harsh mark with the charcoal. “-no thrusting that way, but here, there’s a sharp edge on top, but there’s also a blunt side here, just enough that you could brace it with your hand, and it transitions at some point along the blade. I know it’s kind of a weird design-”

“Weird?” Guo Meiying breathes, “Fang-gongzi, whoever came up with this is brilliant. Brilliant and stupid, maybe, but brilliant. Is this based on an actual dao?”

“Yeah.” Fang Duobing laughs awkwardly. “Kind of misplaced the original, you know, but-”

“Misplaced the original?!”

“-I’ve fought him enough times to remember what his dao looks like,” he finishes. He looks over his shoulder to find that he’s jabbing his thumb in his direction. Like mother, like son, he supposes. “So, do you think you can do it?”

“Of course I can,” Guo Meiying sniffs. “Come over this side. I have some metals I think could work.”

He has to turn to keep Fang Duobing in his peripheral vision, still angled towards the street. It leaves him half-facing Huang Xinyi. “So,” she says, “What brings you here, friend of Fang-gongzi?”

He grunts. Huli Jing squeezes herself between his legs, her tail softly connecting with his calves. He wonders if Fang Duobing knows how to make good bao.

“Man of few words, huh,” she says. “I won’t bother you then. Tell Xinyi when she brings Fang-gongzi back that I’ve gone back to work.”

She disappears back into the butchery. There’s nothing around them but the sounds of the town and the distant sounds of the market slowly packing up. As such, he can hear perfectly well what Guo Meiying is saying to Fang Duobing.

“You are wandering around with a wanted man,” she hisses. “Do you think no one can tell? There’s posters of his face slapped up everywhere! That mask hides nothing!”

“And? What about it,” he furiously whispers back, “I’m old enough to decide who I get to travel with, Guo-nǚshì; I’m well aware of who he is.”

“Then you should be running for the hills!”

“If he decides to kill me with his new dao, then that’s his decision,” he spits. “But we had a friend like a cockroach, and if he rubbed off on anyone, it was us. I’ve dined with him, I’ve fought side by side with him, I’ve even slept with him - oh, don’t look at me like that - so if he decides I’m not worth the trouble even after all we’ve been through, I know he’ll at least tell me first.”

Rubbish, he thinks, staring down at Huli Jing. Her tongue lolls out of her mouth as she smiles at him. It’s not like he has anywhere else to go. Fang Duobing’s name must be in his palm for a reason.

He filters the rest of the conversation out; Guo Meiying is stiff seeing them out afterwards but she still sweeps Fang Duobing’s down payment into a lockbox. “I’ll make the dao for you,” she says, “But I’m not responsible for anything after that, Fang-gongzi.”

“Thank you for your concern, Guo-nǚshì,” he says, “But I can look after me and mine just fine. Send a bird when it’s done.”

He takes off into the air without a backward glance. Huli Jing barks at his retreating back before he scoops her up and follows.

When they land back at the Lian Hua Lou Fang Duobing sighs tiredly and scrubs his hands over his face. Huli Jing scrambles out of his arms and runs up to him, an upset look on her face. She’s possibly the most expressive dog he’s ever seen  - though perhaps that isn’t saying much. He doesn’t know.

“Go on,” he says, “Ask me. I’m sure you’re curious.”

“I don’t know,” he replies slowly. It’s already darkening; in the sun’s dimming light, Fang Duobing looks too skinny, too stretched out to be human. He’s no longer on edge - instead, he looks as if he’ll pass out and fall into the grass at any moment. He doesn’t like it. “Am I really a wanted man?”

“I’m not drunk enough to have this conversation,” Fang Duobing mutters. He plops himself down on the steps of the Lian Hua Lou. Huli Jing climbs into his lap and he starts petting her in a melancholic sort of way. “A-Fei, you have to promise me you’ll still stay after you hear what I’m going to say.”

He strides over and sits in front of him, drawing his legs up to his chest. Their knees touch. “Why would I leave? I have nowhere else to go.”

He has to look upwards to see the expression Fang Duobing is making. It’s a mix of sadness, guilt, and resignation. “That doesn’t matter,” he says. “You have to know I really won’t stop you if you want to leave, but please-” He takes his hand into his own, gently, like he’s holding something made of glass, and whispers the rest of his words into his palm. “Don’t make me beg.”

Bent over his hand, he looks like he’s praying. He looks too small, his shoulders curled inward, his hair falling over them. Inexplicably, he feels the same urge to draw him into his arms and protect him that he had felt when he had first met him, when tears had been gathering unshed in his eyes. But he doesn’t act on it. He just curls their hands together and says, “I won’t.”

Fang Duobing grips him tighter as he raises his eyes. “You’re Di Feisheng,” he says quietly. “Di-mengzhu of the Jinyuan Alliance. Number one villain in the jianghu. People think that you- that you drove him to kill himself.”

His face is twisted with unhappiness. It’s clear who he’s talking about; his words call up the bragging of that comb merchant who had first told him about Fang Duobing. “Your shifu,” he says. “People think that you want to kill me to avenge him?”

Fang Duobing rears back. Huli Jing barks in alarm and scrabbles off his lap, dashing off inside the Lian Hua Lou. He can barely see the orange of her disappear through the door. Instead his eyes are fixed on Fang Duobing’s stricken expression. “It’s what your mother was talking about,” he says. “I heard all the rumors when I was looking for Tianji Manor.” The connections are all lining up in his head. “It’s why you had me wear a mask, wasn’t it? Because you were afraid.”

When he leans forward on his knees Fang Duobing scrambles back, his back pressing up against the wall of the Lian Hua Lou. He’s trembling; he can feel the vibrations from where he’s touching the first step of the porch. He’s wearing the expression of a cornered dog, his eyes squeezed shut like he can’t look at him at all. “Of course I’m afraid!” He shouts. “I’m afraid all the time, A-Fei! I’m afraid that when you become my Lao-Di again you’ll hate me! You’ll hate me because I’ve taken advantage of you! I’ve never seen you naked before this, I’ve never spoonfed you or watched over you before, I’ve told you so much about yourself that if you were Lao-Di I never would have even thought of saying to you! I’m afraid that once you remember you’ll leave me, and then I really will be all alone! I’m afraid of being too much, I’m afraid of not being enough, I’m afraid of everything! I’m afraid of everything, okay?!”

Frozen, he can only stare at him, powerless to do anything. Fang Duobing looks like he’s being assaulted - his face is turned to the side, his robes are all messy, and he looks like this is the last place he wants to be. He wants to retreat until his back hits a tree, and then some. The thought of laying a hand on him right now is so repulsive that he feels like he’s going to vomit.

“I’m scared,” Fang Duobing spits, “That I’m going to hurt you.”

He stays like that, looking at him with turmoil in his heart. He doesn’t say anything at all, even when Fang Duobing shakily picks himself up a few minutes later and leaves him. He grabs onto the wooden porch as he fixates on the sounds of him getting ready for bed. His bare feet enter his field of vision and leave as he comes back out and ascends to the upper floor, his footsteps deliberately even in the silence.

What, he thinks, is he supposed to do now?

It could be seconds or minutes or hours later when he forces himself to his feet, stumbling towards the trees. He braces himself against the trunk of one and sticks his fingers down his throat until he gags, eyes watering. He throws up little more than bile - he hasn’t eaten since the bowl of congee for breakfast. When he’s done he makes his way back to the Lian Hua Lou, only slightly more sure-footed.

Inside he finds a large dish of water and a piece of flatbread left out on the table. It only leaves him feeling more hollow; even so, he perfunctorily uses the water to wash his hands and to rinse out his mouth. There’s a vicious bite taken out of the bread which he stubbornly does not think about while he eats it. It tastes like nothing in his mouth, and he wonders if this is what Fang Duobing had meant before.

He’s still chewing the rest of it as he takes his robes off. He opens all the cabinets until he finds an extra blanket that he wraps around his shoulders. It does its job of warding off the chill as he quietly goes upstairs.

Fang Duobing is already asleep, his face furrowed into an unhappy little moue. Huli Jing, pressed up against his abdomen, is still awake, and her tail wags when she sees him.

However small it is, there is space for him left - and left very clearly - on the edge of the bed, where it would be easiest to get up and leave. He wouldn’t be penned in by warm bodies and the railing. Even so, he still sits down on the floor, one arm on the bed to pillow his head. Huli Jing scoots over and licks his fingers before closing her eyes, the soft whisper of her tail slowing down as she too falls into sleep.

He dreams of dark nights, of landing on the top floor of the Lian Hua Lou. He dreams of seeing a younger, healthier Fang Duobing, his features tranquil in slumber. He dreams of bending down and, as light as a feather, sweeping his bangs away to kiss his forehead. He dreams of doing it, again and again and again, his steady heartbeat loud as a stuttering one continues quietly downstairs. He dreams that that too fades away, replaced by Fang Duobing’s growing pallor.

He wakes in the morning to find Huli Jing gone from the bed, just one pair of brown eyes watching him. “Don’t tell me you slept there all night,” Fang Duobing says.

“I wasn’t sure,” he murmurs. He hadn’t changed positions at all during the night; his arm is entirely senseless. He can’t feel it at all when Fang Duobing reaches out and twines their fingers together.

“That I would still want you?” He replies, the flicker of a smile playing across his face, “A-Fei, I’ll always want you.”

“You haven’t hurt me,” he says.

“Yet,” he answers bitterly. “None of us can guarantee anything in this world.”

His free hand winds carefully in his hair, removing his xiao guan; he hadn’t realised that he had left it in. The hair clip from the market yesterday swings down to hang limply in his hair. Fang Duobing removes it with infinite care, a soft yet unreadable look on his face as he lays it between them on the bed. He smoothes the strings of beads out. “I can’t guarantee you anything,” he says. “We can’t know if we’ll ever hurt each other, or even if you’ll get your memories back. But I promised you that I would keep that safe, and I won’t go back on my word.”

He swallows. “Even if I never remember, you’ll still…”

Fang Duobing laughs. “Have you ears been stuffed with cotton this whole time?” He teases. “It doesn’t matter whether you’re my A-Fei or my Lao-Di. As long as you still want me around, I’ll stick by your side no matter what.”

There’s nothing he can say to that in the face of his tender expression. He only curls his fingers into his tighter as he adds on quietly, “Though, that colleague I mentioned, he’s been searching for who might have done this to you. Last I saw him he said he had a promising lead; he’s supposed to have left another letter.”

“In the turnips again?”

Fang Duobing’s lips quirk upward. “Not in the turnips. He probably left it somewhere while we were sleeping.”

His heart lurches at that. Could someone really have snuck in and out of the Lian Hua Lou without him sensing it? He’s a light sleeper; the entire time he was searching for Tianji Manor he slept out in the woods, waking up at every little sound that drifted over from the nearest town. Even with Fang Duobing here he can’t possibly have let his guard down that much.

He must see whatever is showing on his face, because as he gets up from the bed he says, “Don’t worry about it. He’s someone that you trust entirely. He’s told me up front that he would die before hurting you. By proxy, he probably wouldn’t hurt me.”

“Probably,” he repeats flatly. Fang Duobing shrugs.

“I trust him too,” he says. “Though there’s only one reason why he would hurt me, and if that ever came to pass, I’d be the first in line to get to myself.” He flashes a grin at him over his shoulder. “I see why you like him, and I haven’t even known him that long.”

He leaps over the side of the Lian Hua Lou, his inner robe flapping. He blinks. Fang Duobing has always taken the stairs, even last night. Huli Jing barks, somewhere, and Fang Duobing’s laughter echoes as he calls her back. He folds the blanket still tucked around him and places it on the bed before jumping down. Both he and the dog squeeze through the door at the same time.

Fang Duobing is cooking rice in the kitchen, another pot next to him on the stove. He sniffs the air; it’s the wonton soup that had been served for dinner at Tianji Manor. “The letter’s on the table,” he says. “You can read it, if you want. It’s your decision to make, after all.”

He sits down on one of the benches and pulls the folded paper toward him. The wax seal on it is already broken cleanly; evidently, someone has already gotten to it. Fang Duobing’s humming and the sounds of him cooking keep him company as he reads it.

Fang-gongzi, the lead I have been following seems to be the one. There is much to discuss - send a bird at your earliest convenience and I will arrive as soon as I can. I hope you have been taking good care of my mengzhu. This is ultimately his decision, after all.

He touches the paper. There are little spots all over it where it has evidently gotten wet and dried, the paper rough and wavy. The writer must have waited for it to dry before completing the letter because the ink is unblurred. Despite the professional language there’s tangible warmth blended into the characters. Was this another person who cared for him, that he cared about in return?

He’s still fingering the crease in the paper when Fang Duobing sets down breakfast. They dine in quiet. Huli Jing at some point comes and lays over his feet. Fang Duobing bends down to place a dish of rice mixed with pieces of dried meat in front of her. “I can send out a bird whenever, you know,” he says, conversationally, “You don’t have to decide today. You should think about it.”

“Should I?” He says. His hands fold up the letter and place it back on the table. “What’s so hard about it?”

“I wouldn’t know,” Fang Duobing replies. He takes the letter and starts idly peeling the wax off. “But it’s a big thing, isn’t it? I could understand if you wanted to stay like this, without any of the problems of your past.”

He scowls. “Running away is cowardly.”

Fang Duobing laughs. “See, that’s how I know that you really aren’t different. You still say the same things.” He stands, grinning at him. “I’ll go train with Erya now, but just let me know whenever.”

He disappears outside, his robes swishing in the same way they had in the dawn. At least he’s properly dressed now. He finishes the rest of his rice and shoves his sleeves back before piling their bowls into his arms. Huli Jing rises and follows him outside. There’s a bucket next to the rain barrel, a spigot over it. There’s a rack attached to the exterior wall of the Lian Hua Lou; the bowls from yesterday that they had eaten congee out of are still resting there, as well as a kitchen cloth. He takes the cloth and crouches down. The bucket catches excess water as he turns the spigot on and wets the cloth before turning it off. He starts cleaning the bowls, occasionally wetting the cloth again before placing all of them on the rack.

He stares at his hands when he’s finished, a little at a loss. Fang Duobing had said that the two of them had slept together in that cramped little bed countless times. Does that mean that he lived here too? What did he do here, how did he earn his place here?

A wet nose nudges his elbow. Huli Jing pops up from under his arm, grinning, and trots over to one of the garden boxes. He rises and follows her over, only to stare confusedly at her as she goes back over to the rain barrel. It’s only on the third time through of this little dance that he realises she wants him to take the bucket over.

There’s a water scoop laying in the soil near the base of one of the plants, the curved handle hooked over the rim of the garden box. He picks it up, brushing the dirt away, and gets a cupful of water from the bucket. Huli Jing barks at him before it goes anywhere. When he looks over at her questioningly she’s just sitting there disapprovingly.

A hand lands softly on his shoulder, a few moments after he registers the scent of Fang Duobing’s sweat and sword oil. “Smari girl,” he laughs. “A-Fei, there’s directions on how to care for them hung up on the wall. He was very particular about these sort of things.”

He looks up when fingers smooth his hair out of his face; Fang Duobing beams down at him. “Thank you,” he says sincerely. “For watering his plants. For doing the dishes.” He leans down, his breath faint against his forehead. “For staying.”

He’s still, slowly blinking up at him. Fang Duobing smiles and his hand trails over his back as he goes inside. He listens to the sound of his shoes being shucked off, of his soft singing as he starts rattling around the Lian Hua Lou. Huli Jing is smiling at him too when he looks back at her.

“You smile like him, you know,” he tells her. Her tags wags. He sighs.

He finds the directions inscribed onto a wooden plaque hung on the wall above the garden box. The etchings are faint now, smoothed by water, wind, and - likely - time. He can read it from where he’s crouched, and he dutifully doles out the water according to the instructions.

The plants are scattered all over the Lian Hua Lou, the plaques always hanging nearby. Huli Jing follows him loyally around as he waters them all, even the ones inside. He has to go back to refill the bucket more than once. He wonders if they have to draw from a town well once the water in the rain barrel runs out.

Fang Duobing is upstairs reading, laying on his stomach with his feet kicked up on the bed. He waits, at least, for him to finish watering the few plants hanging around before beckoning him over. “Look,” he says.

He sets the bucket and the water scoop down and sits on the bed, bending down so he can see better. Fang Duobing opens the book wider and points at the pages. Each has a diagram of a person, drawn by hand, along with notes written underneath detailing the particulars of the position. He reads the characters and finds that he can easily imagine the positions - it’s a style of qinggong. His is still faster - as he has since discovered multiple times - but this style, despite how elegant he thinks it might be, would definitely give someone who studied it for many years a fair chance at overtaking him.

“This is the one and only manual for Xiangyi Swordplay,” Fang Duobing says proudly. “I’ve learned the sword forms already, isn’t that impressive?”

He cocks his head. “Isn’t this the cookbook you were reading at Tianji Manor.”

“A-Fei!” Laughing, Fang Duobing swats him with his one and only precious manual. “I think he thought it would be funny. He did leave an actual recipe book though. It’s downstairs in the kitchen.”

He rolls over onto his back, staring up at him fondly. He gazes down at him in return. “I have most of the qinggong steps down, but I can’t seem to get it in the air. Do you think you could teach me? Yours is the best I’ve ever seen; you could consider it a favour.”

It feels like a compliment of the highest order; he feels inordinately pleased. “Perhaps,” he says. “If you send out that bird.”

They get a bird back from Guo-nǚshì. It’s the day after Fang Duobing had gotten his bird back from his colleague, a tiny metal contraption, only vaguely resembling a bird, that he had folded up like paper and slid into one of the cabinets. “He’ll be here,” he had said.

This bird is real, however, and he takes the letter from its leg as Fang Duobing carries on with cooking lunch. “We can pick up the dao whenever,” he says, paraphrasing. “But she would prefer we get it soon.”

“Good,” he says. “Tell her we can grab it tomorrow. We can hammer out our plans today and make it our first stop tomorrow.”

He stops. “What makes you so certain that we will be leaving?”

“Please.” He scoffs as he stir-fries vegetables, the pop of the fire something he has grown used to. “Once you meet him, you certainly won’t doubt his abilities.”

“Mm.” He grinds a little bit of ink and writes what Fang Duobing had said on the reverse side of the paper. It gets rolled up and put back into the bird’s carrier. It flies away from the windowsill without him having to shoo it away.

He cleans up the brushes as Fang Duobing declares that lunch is finished. He looks at him. “So much?”

Fang Duobing huffs and puts his hands on his hips. He’s wearing light green today, the same lotus-and-phoenix xiao guan atop his head. He’s wearing his as well, though he still can’t shake the feeling that he did it on purpose. “What, are you expecting me to not treat our guest? I wasn’t raised in a barn, A-Fei. Bring it to the table, please?”

He scowls at his back but starts picking up dishes: a platter of the same noodles he had made for him that first day, fragrant stir-fried meat and vegetables, bowls of rice, a plate of dumplings, even sweet cups of dessert - he really did go all out, he thinks.

He smells the pine before he hears the shift in the air; however, burdened as he is, there’s not much he can do. Fang Duobing does nothing but wait for the knock on the door, so he cautiously sets the food down and stays standing, rigid.

“You’re here!” Fang Duobing exclaims as he opens the door. “Come in, I’ve made lunch. We can discuss everything over a meal.”

“My thanks, though, Fang-gongzi, you really didn’t have to.”

He stares at the man stepping into the Lian Hua Lou, the breath knocked out of him. They lock eyes, and Wuyan drops into a deep bow. “Mengzhu,” he breathes.

Wuyan. He remembers him. They trained together, fought together. They survived some battle together, one whose details he only hazily remembers. And they survived much more than that. “Get up,” he says roughly. “I’m not your mengzhu.”

He raises his eyes and looks at him. He must be able to read him even faster than Fang Duobing, because he straightens and says, “You remember me?”

He grunts. What more can he say when it feels like something is exploding in his chest? The chasm in him is a little less dark now, like Wuyan is a lantern in his memories. The feeling isn’t like being enveloped in Fang Duobing’s caring aura - he feels exposed standing before him but certain that he won’t tell a soul what he knows.

“Well, this is a surprise,” Fang Duobing says, clapping his hands together. He cuts in between them and sits. “At least you’ve saved me the trouble of making introductions. Let’s eat now.”

After a moment he haltingly sits down opposite to him. He isn’t sure what he expects Wuyan to do, but it certainly both surprises and reassures him when he settles quietly beside him, their shoulders touching. Fang Duobing pours them all tea and distributes bowls and chopsticks. “Let’s hear it,” he says solemnly.

“You weren’t there,” Wuyan says. “Even mengzhu probably-”

“I said I’m not your mengzhu,” he says angrily. “And didn’t I say to you before to consider yourself free from the Jinyuan Alliance? That means you are no longer my subordinate.”

Wuyan, wide-eyed, blinks slowly at him. He can’t help but do the same back at him. “...Di-zun, then,” he says. “There were these two kids that Jiao Liqiao found, supposedly descended from Nanyin blood. She spent some time training them; they ran errands for her and took care of her matters. A boy and a girl - they disappeared while everyone was preoccupied with Shan Gudao. If-” He bites back his words. “I have only seen them in passing. I can guess at some other people who saw them, but there are only two others I can say for certain knew what they looked like, and Jiao Liqiao is definitely dead.”

Fang Duobing frowns. “Who is the other person?”

Wuyan pauses before placing a piece of meat into his bowl. He looks down at it before carefully lifting it to his mouth. “I’m sure you know,” he says steadily. “They watched him while Jiao Liqiao kept him locked up in his dungeon.”

“You knew him,” he says, surprised.

“Of course I knew him,” Wuyan replies. “You knew him.”

Fang Duobing impatiently waves a hand. “Continue,” he says.

“She trained them well, but not well enough,” he says. He can somehow tell that he’s a little smug, despite there being nothing in his voice nor his face to give it away. “They left a trail. Di-zun, you were on your way to find Fang-gongzi. I’m not exactly sure how they ambushed you, though I think it might be poison or some other type of drug. They meant to kill you, I’m sure, but when it didn’t work they instead planted a rumor that Fang-gongzi meant to kill you. They likely didn’t anticipate your memory loss.” His face twists in pain and he half-bows again. “Forgive me. I could have prevented this.”

“Prevented what?” Fang Duobing says sharply. “If they were smart enough to think that they could get the drop on A-Fei they probably had contingency plans. For all we know they would’ve killed you too, and then where would we be? No - better that you avoided them then, so we could have you here helping us now.”

Wuyan blinks at him in surprise; he feels similarly, his hand holding his chopsticks frozen. “Thank you, Fang-gongzi,” he says quietly.

“I know your type,” he says, putting more noodles into all of their bowls, “Don’t be so quick to sacrifice yourself. As A-Fei said, you and him are equals now. Only the heavens know what will happen if he loses someone so close to him again. If you can’t think of yourself, think of that.”

They all chew in silence after that. At some point Huli Jing slips back inside and sits at the table to beg; Fang Duobing gets up and gets her her own bowl of rice, meat, and vegetables before sitting back down. He watches her as she tucks into her meal happily.

Wuyan clears his throat. “I believe they’re hiding out many days’ worth of riding south of here. Where we’re going it would be inadvisable to take the Lian Hua Lou because we’ll primarily be in mountainous terrain and it’ll only slow us down.”

Fang Duobing grumbles. “I’ll send a letter to Su Xiaoyong and see if she’ll be available to look after it and Huli Jing for a while. Tomorrow let’s procure horses and supplies. It’s been a while since I’ve planned for three men travelling.”

“You…” Wuyan shakes his head. “You keep surprising me, Fang-gongzi.”

“Don’t mention it. After all, you’re the one who knows where they’re hiding.” Fang Duobing stacks all their empty bowls together. “I would offer you a place to stay, but the Lian Hua Lou is really small and our bed is already cramped as is. Can I give you some money instead to buy a room in town?”

“That’s kind of you,” he says. “But I have affairs to settle first. I’ll come back tomorrow morning.”

“Good. And stop calling me Fang-gongzi. You don’t have to be so formal.”

Wuyan smiles. “Then I’ll be off. Please take care.”

He pauses at the door, looking back over his shoulder. “And, Fang Duobing? I don’t consider sleeping on the floor adequate conditions for Di-zun. You should keep that in mind.”

The door closes behind him, his back disappearing. Wuyan takes with him the scent of pine that is now newly familiar to him. Immediately Fang Duobing splays out over the table, groaning. “Why did you have to pick such a fearsome and competent man, A-Fei?” He whines. “He scares the living hell out of me!”

“Wuyan?” He says amusedly.

“Was there another man of yours here? Of course it’s Wuyan!”

“I thought you said that he was just your colleague,” he says. “Why is he so scary?”

Fang Duobing looks balefully up at him. “We made a deal when I found you that I would take care of you and he would investigate the matter. I didn’t expect for him to also be routinely checking up on you from afar as well!” He pouts. “And… because he’s your friend… of course he’s scary. Because he’s your friend, I care what he thinks.”

He warms. He likely remembers more about Wuyan than he knows about Fang Duobing, and he doesn’t remember them ever meeting in the past. But it pleases him to know that Fang Duobing cares about Wuyan thinks, and that Wuyan cares in return in his own way - he had been surprised to be taken onto their journey, he thinks.

Fang Duobing sighs. “Hand me the ink and brushes, I’ll ask Su Xiaoyong if she can come watch the Lian Hua Lou.” He scowls. “She doesn’t clean all of the corners. Your Wuyan really has me spoiled.”

“Di-zun,” Wuyan says. “Good morning.”

He grunts. “You can come in, you know.” At his words Wuyan obediently stops hovering at the doorway and steps inside. Huli Jing immediately runs over and sits beside him, on alert. The two of them are practically identical. “Fang Duobing left to buy horses and supplies. He said to tell you that he apologises for not being able to greet you.”

The corners of Wuyan’s lips curve upward into a smile. “He’s a good host, but there’s no need. Is there anything else I can do?”

“Why not. If you want to,” he amends. “Help me decide which of his damned robes to pack; if I hadn’t seen his wardrobe back in Tianji Manor, I would have thought this was it.”

Wuyan laughs and comes to kneel beside him. It’s a sound he realises now is truly rare. He can barely count on two hands the amount of times he’s heard it. “Of course. Tell me how you have been.”

Being with Wuyan feels like wielding a beloved blade after years of not using it, relearning how to use it a process both familiar and new. Between his comments of whether this or that fabric is thicker he tells him of waking up on the banks of that river with a bloody name cut into his hand. As he points out which cloak will retain heat better he tells him of finding Fang Duobing and of the time they’ve spent together since. He frowns when he glances over and sees how tender the look on his face has become.

“What?” He says.

“Nothing much, Di-zun,” he says. “But I like this version of you, even if you don’t remember. You seem more… relaxed. At ease.”

“Do I?” He looks over at him. “I remember you. You never would’ve been so bold to say that to me before.”

Wuyan ducks his head shyly, but he doesn’t fold like he might have years before. Good. “I’ve spent a while away from the Jinyuan Alliance now that it’s dissolved. I even have a cat now. She recently gave birth.”

He blinks. “Dissolved? Cats? Where are you leaving them while we’re gone?”

“A number of months ago, you gave the order to have the Jinyuan Alliance dismantled,” Wuyan says. “There have been sporadic attempts since to revive it but none of them have borne fruit. It will be some time before another organisation rises to take its place - likely when the martial artists of Fang Duobing’s generation start their own sects. My cat and her kittens are staying with an acquaintance.”

He looks at Wuyan again. He’s looking at him and smiling. “I like you like this too,” he says simply.

By the time Fang Duobing returns they’ve packed the bags they had bought from Tianji Manor with a few sets of robes and cloaks. “A-Fei! Wuyan!” He dismounts easily from his horse, two more and a pack mule following behind him. “I ran into Su Xiaoyong today at the market, can you believe it? She said she got the letter I sent yesterday and thought she’d come early. She still has some errands to run but she said she’ll be here tonight, probably after we’ve left. Let’s not stick around if we don’t have to, what do we have left?”

His grin is bright enough that he can see it even from the second floor where he and Wuyan are securing the storage crates. He jumps down, spooking two of the horses. He eyes the one that didn’t scare and mentally stakes a claim. “The provisions are already packed?” He asks, “And the grain for the animals?”

“Of course they are,” he says, patting the saddlebags of his horse. “I checked ahead; there’s a few towns along the way that we can replenish our supplies at. And we’re lucky - at this time of year, some of the mountains will have grass. We can let the horses graze then and save the grain for when they can’t.”

“You’re quite resourceful, Fang Duobing,” Wuyan calls. Unlike him, he’s leaning with his arms crossed against the Lian Hua Lou, having come down the stairs. “Smart of you to plan for the future.”

Even he is unprepared for the force of Fang Duobing’s sunniness, because when it gets turned on him a little of his sharpness drains away. “I’m glad you think so,” he says warmly. “Let’s finish up the last of the food before we go so it doesn’t perish.”

They eat and pack the rest of the food away, ostensibly for a later meal. He pretends not to watch as Fang Duobing coaxes Huli JIng into her doghouse and scratches her behind the ears, whispering, “See you soon, girl. Let me know if he comes back.” She woofs at him. He pretends that he hadn’t said his own silent goodbyes to her in the morning, after he had left and before Wuyan had arrived.

After they mount their horses - Wuyan gracefully lets him pick first, and he’s satisfied to find the one who hadn’t shied away earlier easily lets him swing a leg over onto the saddle - and take off. Fang Duobing leads the way confidently, his posture sure and his grip on the reins confident. His ponytail swishes behind him.

It takes them about the same time as it had before to reach the town he recognises as the one where the blacksmith who made his dao resides. Fang Duobing stops them at the end of the road and dismounts. “Wait here,” he says, sliding a mask out of his robes and onto his face. “I’ll go get your dao, A-Fei.”

Wuyan glances at him as he blends into the crowd entering the town. “A dao?”

“He convinced me to get one made,” he says. “He said I had one before. You know what happened to it, right?”

“I was there when you left it behind.” Wuyan flicks his hair out of his face, a slight air of uncertainty about him. “You still carry that sword.”

It’s not phrased as a question; he takes the bag out of his robes to show him. “How did I get them?”

“Fang Duobing told you it was his?” He nods. “You were supposed to duel him one last time, except that was when he disappeared. It came out that he had shattered his sword, so you went to look for the pieces. You left your dao behind in its place.” He lowers his voice and leans in towards him. “I didn’t like it. You disarmed yourself. A lot of the time, I wasn’t with you to protect you. Maybe if you had had it Jiao Liqiao’s students wouldn’t have been able to hurt you at all.” He shakes his head. “It’s in the past now. And anyway, it comforts me that you are going to have a new one.”

Fang Duobing returns soon, but it’s still long enough to have him thinking about those words quietly. He drops down from the trees, grinning. “Look, A-Fei, I even went and found a harness for you! Aren’t I kind?”

He rolls his eyes. “Don’t think I’ll praise you that easily.” But he dismounts and takes the armful of leather straps from him and hangs it over the saddle of his horse. The dao he slides out of its scabbard, and the sound it makes feels like it makes his hair stand up. It feels familiar in his hands, even if the individual sensations - the brand new leather wrapped around the hilt, the slight heft of the blade - aren’t. He drops the scabbard into the grass as his body executes a move - and then another, and another, and another, all flowing smoothly together like the perfect links of a chain. His body remembers how intimately he knows the dao, even if his mind is still catching up.

When he turns around they’re looking at him - Fang Duobing with hunger, Wuyan with wistfulness, both of them with pride. He strides back over and picks up the scabbard from the ground. His new dao goes into it and he reaches for the harness. Fang Duobing steps in and fastens it around him, his hands smoothing it out over his robes. “Do you like it?” He asks.

“The dao?” He says, mock-seriously, “Well, since you bought it-”

He gets a whack to the shoulder for his troubles; Fang Duobing scowls and turns his back to him. “Hmph,” he says exaggeratedly. He gets back onto his horse. He shares an amused look with Wuyan before they do the same.

There’s a string of towns they can follow before they truly encounter the mountains. Wuyan takes the lead and guides them to the first one as the sun is setting. Fang Duobing goes into an inn to haggle for rooms - but not before he makes him put on a mask. He puts his on as well before shooing them off and telling them to get the horses settled.

“He doesn’t make you wear a mask,” he observes as they untack their horses in the town’s lone stable. Wuyan smiles.

“He knows I have different tactics,” he says. “I’m a little surprised you don’t remember that part; I’ll demonstrate when we’re done.”

There’s nothing outwardly to give away what he’s doing until they walk into the inn and he smells that same waft of pine. The bottom floor of the inn functions as a restaurant, but despite the fact that several people are still working none of them seem to notice Wuyan. In fact, their eyes pass over him, focusing on him instead. He ignores them and beelines for Fang Duobing. He already has a table claimed, a wide array of dishes spread out over the table. He watches as his eyes too slide over Wuyan like water before he does a double-take and stares long and hard at him.

“Show-off,” he says. “You’re making my head hurt.”

“Then stop looking,” Wuyan says mildly. The scent of pine dissipates as he pulls chairs out for the two of them and Fang Duobing lets out a breath. He rubs at his temples before gesturing to the food as they set the bags down.

“Eat,” he says. “Was that just for fun?”

“Di-zun asked,” he replies. He raises an eyebrow when Fang Duobing eats a bite of rice only to pass the bowl over to him. “Was that a test for poison?”

“He’s gotten more paranoid,” Fang Duobing confides. He glances over at the two of them as he tucks into his rice. “It’ll probably work with you too.”

“What’s with the pine?” He interrupts. He points his chopsticks at Wuyan. “Your qinggong, that skill that you just did - you smell of pine.”

He gets a little sideways smile from Wuyan as he nibbles a piece of meat. “You still don’t remember everything,” he comments. “It’s a side-effect of my qi suppression. It’s not perfect; when the technique is learned, there are enormous drawbacks. They faded as I grew more experienced with suppressing my qi. But in the beginning it left me physically weak and almost powerless. The manual I learned it from offered a countermeasure strategy of absorbing qi from nature and mixing it with my own, though it warned of leaving a permanent mark.” He shrugs. “At the time, it was imperative that I be on my feet. And I practiced around a lot of pine trees.”

“Qi suppression,” Fang Duobing muses around a full mouth, “I suppose that would have been useful in your previous line of work.”

“It’s why I learned it,” he says. “Don’t think about asking after the manual; I burned it when I was done. Whoever wrote it was inexperienced and most of the techniques were harmful or simply theories.”

Fang Duobing laughs. “I think that says more about you than the master.”

Wuyan shifts a little in his seat, evidently a little pleased despite himself. He and Fang Duobing continue to chat about the various martial art skills they know as he finishes off his rice. One of them hands him another bowl, and he eats that too as he keeps an interested ear on their conversation. The other he habitually allows to keep tabs on everything happening in the inn.

When they’re done Fang Duobing takes them upstairs and to their rooms. He gestures to the doors. “They both have two beds. A-Fei, you can pick who you want to room with.”

He crosses his arms over his chest. “I don’t care.”

And really, he doesn’t.

Fang Duobing sighs. “Then, Wuyan, you can pick first. Here.”

He sticks out his fist. Wuyan puts his out too; they tap them into their palms thrice. He snorts in amusement as they look down at their hands - Fang Duobing, his closed fist representing a boulder; Wuyan, his entire hand a piece of parchment. Wuyan smirks and opens the door to the right. “Looks like you’ll be with me, Di-zun.”

He catches Fang Duobing looking at him worriedly out of the corner of his eye. “Let me know if you need anything, okay?” He says.

Inside the room there are two beds, each in one corner, and a folding screen partially hiding a table from view. Wuyan drops his bag and immediately starts investigating. He sets his bag down too and ambles behind the screen. There are two basins of water on the table, along with two washcloths. Wuyan ducks over and sniffs the water. “All clear,” he says. “You can wash up first.”

He disappears to the other side of the screen. He slowly strips his robes off, waiting for something to happen. For what, he doesn’t know. Wuyan is silent as he lays his robes over the top of the screen and perfunctorily wipes himself clean. He slides back into his inner robe and trousers and picks up the sword shards from where he had set them down on the table. They wordlessly exchange places and he sits on the bed that hadn’t been obviously claimed by Wuyan, working on taking down his hair.

“Do you like him?” Wuyan asks abruptly.

“Like who?” He says.

“Fang Duobing.” He can see the barest shape of his silhouette behind the screen. “Has he been good to you?”

“He’s fed me,” he replies, “He’s clothed me. He’s watched me sleep. Why?” He says suddenly. “Do you not know him well?”

“I don’t,” Wuyan says. He steps around the folding screen and walks over to lay his robes over their bags. His inner robe is tied tightly around his body, a whistle hanging from his neck. His whistle. Wuyan sees him looking at it and places a hand over it fondly, his serious expression unchanging. “I’ve watched him enough times, but before this all happened we had never met. You apparently trusted him enough to come to him blind.”

“It wasn’t blind,” he says. He shows him his hand as a reminder; the characters have long since scarred over now. Wuyan’s face is unreadable as he looks at it. “Do you not like him?”

He sits on the other bed, facing him. “I don’t know,” he says. “He cares for you, that I can tell. But I would still feel better if it was me watching over you.” He picks at the covers, a bitter smile on his face. “It’s a tendency I haven’t been able to lose.”

“Who said you had to give it up?”

Wuyan’s eyes slide over to him. “I’m not your subordinate anymore,” he says carefully. 

“So?” He shrugs as he bends down and sets his xiao guan and his hair clip down on the floor. “As you said, you’re not my subordinate anymore. You’re free to do whatever you please.”

He can feel Wuyan’s eyes boring into him as he settles on the bed. He twists and turns a little bit under the covers before finally laying with his back to the wall. There’s the creak of the floorboards in the room over - the walls are thinner here than at Tianji Manor, and he doesn’t have to strain to hear Fang Duobing’s heartbeat. In fact, he can hear him still walking around. He closes his eyes.

“Di-zun,” Wuyan says quietly. “Do you know what you’ve just said?”

He grunts. “Just don’t kill me in my sleep.”

He hadn’t been sure of how he would sleep without Fang Duobing snoring into his ear or one of his limbs thrown over his body. But in the morning he slides out of a dreamless sleep, not tired at all. Wuyan is already up and fully dressed, inspecting a few sets of blades he has laid out on the bed. The sheets look untouched, and not even in the way like he had remade the bed.

“Good morning, Di-zun,” he says.

The last town they stay in can barely be called such - it’s more of a village, scraping an existence out in the foothills. After that they sleep in the wilderness, bedrolls arranged around the fire as they sleep in shifts to keep watch. Often he wakes in the middle of the night to find Wuyan caring for his various knives or to Fang Duobing tucking his blanket more securely around him. During his awake hours he breathes in the clean air and thinks about chasing down the memories he does remember. On occasion he does, like a fox into a rabbit warren - there isn’t much else to do, as it seems that every possible trouble steers clear of them.

Except for the morning when he wakes up smelling meat. Fang Duobing is already blearily rubbing his eyes beside him. “Why’s it smell so good?” He whines.

“There was a bear,” Wuyan says. He’s sitting by the fire, turning skewers of meat as they roast. “It must have been halfway to starving to death because it kept circling us. It didn’t leave after I tried scaring it off, so I took care of it.”

Fang Duobing looks at him, his eyes more awake now. He says, steadily, “Well, that explains the blood on your face.”

Wuyan stills. “Where?”

“Here, um- let me get it?”

He watches them both until Wuyan slowly nods. Fang Duobing pulls a handkerchief out of his robes and reaches for his water gourd. He wets it a little and approaches Wuyan with the same air as a person meeting a stray cat for the first time. Wuyan stays utterly still and expressionless as he rubs the blood off his face. “You’re practically covered in it,” he hears him murmur.

“Blood isn’t exactly easy to clean, Fang Duobing,” Wuyan murmurs back. “Especially out of clothing.”

He watches Fang Duobing process that, and then realise that Wuyan’s clothes - the same set he had been wearing to bed last night - are free of blood. The hot flash of something he glimpses on his face is gone almost as quickly as it came. He lowers his hand. “None of this is yours?” He asks, “You aren’t hurt?”

“Of course not.” Wuyan turns away from him. “The meat’s done.”

There’s also the day they spend relaxing. Fang Duobing had whoops upon finding the river and declares that they're going to give the horses a break for a whole day. Even though he rushes through his part of setting up camp nothing is sloppily done - except for his bag set hastily down and his outer robes haphazardly ditched as he dashes for the water. Wuyan glances over at him before melting into the trees after him.

He can hear them now, even if he can’t see them through the foliage. They’re talking in low voices, occasionally overshadowed by the sound of Fang Duobing splashing around or the rushing of the river.

“Even if it was under these circumstances,” Fang Duobing is saying, “I don’t regret having met you, you know.”

“I know,” Wuyan’s voice says. “You’re quite transparent, Fang Duobing.” A pause. Then: “Would it kill you to put some trousers on?”

Fang Duobing laughs. “Sure, sure.” He says, wistfully, “He used to make us bathe in rivers like this all the time. Something about saving resources and living in nature.” He sighs. “Such a cheapskate.”

“You aren’t at all like him. Him or Li Xiangyi.”

“That’s a new one. Lao-Di once told me the same thing.”

“Li Xiangyi was naïve. He wanted to be a hero. Mengzhu, at the time - I didn’t get what he saw in him. To some extent, it still confuses me. But him… him I understood.”

“Why?” There’s sloshing as Fang Duobing presumably climbs out of the river, followed by a warm breeze blossoming in his face. He remembers how he dried his hair - Yangzhouman, he thinks faintly - and can’t imagine how it must feel to be standing near that blast of heat. There’s rustling as he pulls the rest of his robes back on. “What made you understand?”

“He meant comfort,” Wuyan says bluntly. “For ten years mengzhu secluded himself. When he left he found the world changed but himself still the same. Li Xiangyi was the only fragment he could reach.” There’s a muffled yelp from Fang Duobing, and of their own accord his feet take him soundlessly closer. He peers around a tree. “You are the same. Perhaps you meant hope to him before all this, something of the future, but now you are just another fragment of his past.”

He watches Fang Duobing breathe, open-mouthed. Wuyan’s hand is tightly gripping his jaw, forcing him to look at him. His outer robe is draped messily over his arms, Erya held loosely in his hand. He’s standing stock still except for the heaving of his chest, as if Wuyan is some kind of predator who will chase him down the moment he even so much as twitches. “That’s fine,” he says breathlessly. “I’ll be whatever he needs me to be. I’ll be whoever A-Fei needs to be until he’s Lao-Di again, and if he still wants me after that, I’ll be whoever he needs then too.”

“Interesting,” Wuyan says. He cocks his head. “You think he wouldn’t want you, after all this?”

“I can’t fathom why he would.” Fang Duobing licks his lips. “He’s never so much as mentioned his scars, and yet I’ve seen them all over his body. He’s so vulnerable, and yet at every turn I can’t stop myself from forcing all of my feelings on him.” He drops his head. “Do you think I’m just redirecting all of my feelings from him onto him?”

Wuyan snorts and lets go of his face to pat his cheek condescendingly. “I think you’re stupid, Fang Duobing,” he says. “I have no idea what goes on in your head. But you need to clean yourself up. I sincerely hope you aren’t writing your own fate into being.”

Fang Duobing watches his back as he leaves. He watches him as well until Wuyan disappears from view. His eyes swivel back towards Fang Duobing when he sighs.

“Damn you, I think you must have spewed enough lies to last me my entire lifetime,” he tells the river. “You’ve left me with all these straightforward men. What am I supposed to do now?”

He slips away and leaves Fang Duobing to his thoughts. Wuyan is already back at the camp, brushing the horses down again. “Did you have a good water break, Di-zun?” He says.

He grunts. He sits down with his back to the river and takes out the sword oil from his pack. He can feel Wuyan’s eyes on him as he unsheathes his dao. “Did you?”

He only gets a pensive hum in return.

If they have any other conversations, he isn’t privy to them. But the results are obvious. Fang Duobing no longer startles when Wuyan appears out of the blue, and Wuyan no longer watches him as closely as he did before. They work around each other, if not exactly with each other - cooking, setting up camp every night, caring for the horses. He can still tell that they’re new to each other, but they’ve hidden it well.

Unfortunately it means that Fang Duobing has seemingly gotten over himself about what Wuyan might think about him for bothering him. He flops down all over his legs after his training, whining. “A-Fei, didn’t you promise that you were going to coach me on Swift-Moving Steps?”

“I did no such thing,” he says. Fang Duobing squirms some more; he grabs his ponytail and tugs. “I only said maybe. Stop pitching a fit.”

“I’m not,” he complains. He rolls off his lap and pillows his head on his arms, pouting up at him. “You just have the best qinggong of anyone I know. Isn’t it reasonable that I would ask you to teach me?”

He removes his xiao guan from his hair just so he can mess it all up. Fang Duobing laughs and swats his hands away. “Hey! A-Fei!”

“Idiot,” he rumbles. “Flattery will get you nowhere.”

Wuyan, watching from his spot where he’s making the fire, quirks his lips at them. “Would’ve thought that Fang Duobing would have already known that.”

Fang Duobing sighs dramatically. “The heavens saw fit to make me travel with the two of you,” he moans. “So mean.”

“Then leave.”

Fang Duobing presses up stubbornly against his leg. His hand is still in his hair; he can feel it when he too remembers that fact and only leans into the touch like a cat. “No,” he says triumphantly, “I don’t want to.”

“Here.” Wuyan slows his horse to a stop. “This is it.”

Fang Duobing raises an eyebrow. “This?”

He dismounts and takes a couple of steps forward, eyes fixed on the huge, ornate house towering before them. They’ve been riding through a bamboo forest since early in the morning, mountains shrouded in mist rising to meet the sky on every side. “Where are we?”

“One of Jiao Liqiao’s secret residences.” Wuyan swings down beside him, his boots sending up little puffs of dust. “She kept them all off the records; I had to search through her personal papers to find the locations.”

“How do you know this is the right one?” Fang Duobing takes all of their reins and tethers the horses to the bamboo, his hands practiced in the motions. He notes that he does it so that if they truly spook they can run. He’s not sure why he expects that it might happen. “Wouldn’t someone like her have, I don’t know, dozens of them?”

“Not dozens, but certainly enough.” Wuyan shrugs uneasily. “This was the one she mentioned the least. It’s the most isolated. And I did some research into this area - these mountains used to be mines. I imagine that she took advantage of all the tunnels.”

“Like that stupid place my mother bought,” Fang Duobing mutters under his breath.

“The tunnels would give them access to any of the mining towns,” he says. “That’s likely how they spread the rumors.”

“I hate tunnels,” Fang Duobing mutters again. He slips ahead before either of them can say anything. Despite the pale, almost white colour of his robes he disappears quickly into the bamboo, only the rustle of leaves to indicate where he is. His qinggong has improved by leaps and bounds; he must be using it just enough so that his feet don’t touch the ground. It’s a little unnerving not to be able to track his familiar footfalls.

Wuyan sighs. “He really couldn’t have let me do my job.”

“He likes snooping,” he says. “And besides, it technically isn’t your job anymore.”

After some time Fang Duobing emerges from the bamboo, frowning. “It’s empty.”

Wuyan’s brow furrows. “What do you mean it’s empty?”

“I mean it’s empty.” He gestures toward the house with one hand. “There’s no servants and no animals. Except for what I think are some mice, it sounds dead in there. I can’t hear anything at all. It’s like they aren’t even there.”

He leans forward. “Are they?”

“I think so. The courtyard looks relatively tidy. I don’t know what the weather is like here but nothing is actively falling apart, so there’s likely been some maintenance.” He makes a face. “Is it possible they’re living in the tunnels?”

“Let’s hope not.” Wuyan pushes off of the bamboo he’s been leaning on. “Don’t follow me.”

He’s back within half a shichen, wreathed in the scent of pine. Fang Duobing scrambles up from where the two of them are sitting on the ground, hastily shoving his Xiangyi Swordplay manual into his robes. “Well?” He demands.

“Completely empty inside,” Wuyan confirms. “It looks like it’s been abandoned but they’ve definitely raided the house for necessities. I found an entrance to the tunnels in the kitchen.”

Fang Duobing blows out a breath. “So the tunnels it is.”

Wuyan reaches into his bag and pulls out a ball of twine. “Good thing I came prepared, isn’t it?”

One end of the twine gets tied around one leg of the stove in the kitchen. Down in the tunnels it spools out behind them. “If we reach a fork, will it matter which way we go?” Fang Duobing asks, holding his tiny lit torch aloft. The light of the flickering flame isn’t much. The tunnel is only wide enough for two men to walk abreast. They walk single file, Erya unsheathed in Fang Duobing’s hand. He can barely hear the soft rasp of Wuyan’s boots against the stone behind him.

“I don’t know,” Wuyan says.

“Stop.” He grabs Fang Duobing’s arm just in time to stop him from walking into a tripwire. He had only seen it because of the light glinting off of it. They step over it gingerly. “Be careful. If there’s one there will be more.”

“It’s crude,” he sniffs. Wuyan snorts, disabling the trap. “I could make something a million times better in my sleep.”

He can’t help the twitch of his lips giving his smile away. “Maybe don’t say that until you know what the traps do.”

Some indeterminable amount of time passes - and they pass an indeterminable number of traps - before they stop for a break. The ball of twine is much smaller; he pulls another one out of the bag he’s been carrying and hands it to Wuyan. They all take sips of water and rest on the ground for a bit before continuing.

“I don’t like this,” Fang Duobing says quietly. “Are we really sure that they’re down here?”

He stops. “Do you want to go back?”

Fang Duobing stops too. “I just-” He lifts his arm to cover his eyes. “I just really hate tunnels,” he says, choked up.

He turns him by the shoulder and eases the torch from his grasp. From the corner of his eye he can see Wuyan standing, facing the opposite direction, watching their backs. Fang Duobing wipes his tears away. “Sorry, sorry,” he laughs wetly. He doesn’t like the sound of it, and he makes that known by squeezing his hip with one hand. “I’ve had some bad experiences being underground before.”

He tugs him closer so he’s leaning against his body. “Why didn’t you say something before?” He says roughly.

“I wasn’t thinking about it before.” Their cheeks press together. He can feel Fang Duobing’s quickened little gasps against his neck. “It’s nothing. I’m fine.”

He lets his silence be his response. Slowly Fang Duobing stops trembling; he takes a deep breath before he draws back. “Thanks, A-Fei.”

“You can thank me later,” he says. He shoves the bag he’s been carrying into his arms and unsheathes his dao. “When we’re back at the Lian Hua Lou.”

Because he’s the one in front, he’s the first to step on Wuyan’s twine when they come to an intersection. He crouches down and picks it up, looking to where it trails off further down the tunnel. He drops it. “We’ve just gone in a circle.”

Wuyan comes to kneel next to him. He too inspects the twine. “Let’s go back,” he says. “There’s no use staying here. We can come up with a better plan once we’ve rested.”

Neither he nor Fang Duobing protest. Wuyan cuts the twine off at the intersection and begins rolling it back up. He picks up the other end and winds it loosely around his fingers as they follow it back.

He recognises it when they get back to where they began because the firelight reveals where Wuyan had scored the stone. But the twine is laying limp on the ground, not leading upward. Fang Duobing swears behind him.

“What is it?”

He lets Wuyan squeeze in next to the two of them and gestures upward. “Apparently they aren’t in the tunnels anymore.”

The entrance they had dropped down from is covered. He hands Fang Duobing back his torch and sheathes his dao. “Step back.”

He bends his knees before leaping up, grunting at the unexpected resistance from whatever is covering their exit. He drops back down and rolls his shoulders before trying again. This time he puts a little of the cold power rushing through his veins into it. Something crashes above them and the cover rattles but stays in place. He touches it with his fingertips; there’s nothing above it now.

“Beifeng Baiyang,” Wuyan breathes.

“Draw your blades,” he orders. He draws his dao before propelling himself upward one last time.

The cover - a sheet of metal - flies away as he bursts into the kitchen. He nearly almost gets impaled by a thin blade. It smells repulsive, some kind of sticky coating on the metal; he recognises it as poison.

“If you know what’s good for you,” the girl standing in front of him says coldly, “You’re not going to move. Tell your friends to stay where they are.”

Her eyes cut through him as she studies him; he does the same in return. Either he didn’t have much experience with children before or he genuinely can’t tell how old she is. Her hair is done in a different style than the one Master He or her sister wore, different even from the hairstyles of the women he had seen in town when asking around for directions to Tianji Manor. The way she’s looking at him is filled with resentment, reflected by the fact her hands are filled with more of those thin, poisoned blades.

“A-Fei?” Fang Duobing yells, “What’s going on?”

“Stay put,” he says. The kitchen door begins to open, and he reacts more on instinct than anything else. He pulls the blade from the wall and throws it with unerring accuracy at the door. The boy who had been entering - perhaps slightly older than the girl - goes deathly still when he sees it quivering in front of him.

“If you know what’s good for you,” he repeats back, “Tell him to stay where he is.”

The girl’s nostrils flare. “Do you know what you did to us?” She says angrily. “When you killed our shifu?”

“What shifu,” he says. It comes back to him then. “Jiao Liqiao.”

The name is unfamiliar in his mouth, yet his muscles know the shape of it. “What shifu?! You must have killed so many that they run together like blood!” The girl spits. “Look at us! Without her we’ve no one! You took her from us!”

He does. He really looks at her; despite how put-together she’d looked at first glance he can see that her robes, though elaborate, are growing threadbare, and she’s only wearing socks, not boots. The boy still motionless behind her, his eyes flashing between them, looks much the same. But his cheeks are slightly more gaunt than hers. He places the look instantly; after all, Fang Duobing wears the same self-sacraficing protectiveness around him.

“Shimei,” he says. “Focus. He’s baiting you.”

“I’m not,” he says. “I’m not who you think I am.”

“Don’t lie!” Another blade shudders in the wall, terrifyingly close to his neck. “Di Feisheng! You will pay for what you did to our shifu!”

Warm air rushes up from below him, followed by the smell of pine. He spares a single mental scowl at whatever those two are planning. “I don’t remember,” he snarls. “Anything. I don’t even know who the two of you are.”

“You wouldn’t know anyway,” the boy says. His lips curl in contempt. “How do we know you aren’t lying?”

“You are the ones who did this to me.” He motions tightly at his own head. “You would know best.”

“What colour,” the girl hisses, “Did our shifu wear?”

He stares blankly at her. “How the hell am I-”

With the kind of desperate war cry he’s only heard in his barely-remembered dreams she launches bodily at him, her blades going for his throat. He knocks her aside with the flat of his dao. Her body snaps to the side before hitting the wall, sliding down into a heap. Blood streaks down behind her head.

He stares at her. He knows in his bones that he’s killed children before, but the crumpled heap of her brings back fresh memories of stabbing anything - a sword, a knife, his own fingers - into the chests of countless, faceless children. His grip tightens on his dao.

The boy appears at her side as he shakes the memories away. He touches his fingers to her neck before turning to look at him steadily. “If you had killed her,” he says, dead serious certainty in his words, “I would have died avenging her.”

He says nothing, his grip of his dao tightening.

“Our shifu didn’t find us,” he continues, staring him down, “She tracked us down and took us in from the streets. She clothed us, fed us, taught us - she cared for us, even if it was in her own way. When you killed her, you made us alone again.”

The girl’s eyelids flutter. It could be either a moment or an eternity later. Both of their awarenesses snap to her as she opens her eyes. “Ge?” She mumbles. Her head lolls toward him. “Where are we?”

He feels sick.

The boy cradles her head in his hands. “Meimei,” he says. His voice is warm.

Her hand raises shakily to point at him. “Ge,” she slurs, “Who’s that?”

He stays motionless as he smoothes her robes. “A visitor,” the boy says. “He’ll be gone soon.”

The girl nods slowly before closing her eyes. He watches as the boy squares his shoulders before looking at him with clarity. The irony of it webs out from his chest.

“Leave,” he says. “If I ever see you again, I will kill you.”

Wordlessly he helps Fang Duobing and Wuyan out of the tunnel. Wuyan eyes the two on the floor before brushing a single hand over his chest. Fang Duobing outright starts checking him for injuries, his eyes scared. “A-Fei? What happened? We heard all of it, but…”

His big dark eyes stare at him helplessly. He’s covered in dirt and dust, Wuyan standing next to him much the same. He can feel the thrum of Yangzhouman rising to fill the room, the crazy intensity of it undercut with pine, stronger than he’s ever smelled it before.

“Calm down,” he says. “Both of you. Go find the horses.”

He shoves Fang Duobing towards the door, then Wuyan. They both look at him before sharing a glance. It seems to hold an entire argument. Fang Duobing has a snarl on his face as he stalks out; Wuyan isn’t much better. He only gets a flatly neutral “Di-zun, you will talk later” before the two of them disappear outside.

“Why?” He asks.

“I wasn’t stupid,” he says. “I remember her hunger and her desire for vengeance. She wasn’t crazy. But she lived for it.” He looks up at him. He knows without a doubt that the expression on his face will be seared into his memories. “I’m going to remember for the both of us. Now get the hell out.”

He does. He leaves him curled over his shimei’s body.

Fang Duobing and Wuyan have already saddled the horses and are waiting for him. Fang Duobing grabs his hand, Erya sheathed at his back.

“A-Fei,” he says tensely, “You don’t kill children.”

“Are you asking me or telling me?” Fang Duobing glares at him.

“Don’t mess around,” he says. “Tell me the truth.”

“I am,” he says. “I didn’t kill either of them.”

Fang Duobing exhales and lets his forehead thunk against his shoulder. “You worry me,” he murmurs.

He turns when Wuyan’s hand touches his shoulder blade. His eyes look at him like he’s searching for something. He doesn’t know what he’s looking for and he doesn’t know what he finds. “Let’s go.”

Late that night, when the two of them are asleep around the fire, he reaches into his throat and makes himself vomit into the bushes. 

The whole of it comes out of him during the journey back, in bits and pieces. He tells them, in the weak morning light as Fang Duobing is scrubbing sleep out of his eyes, that they won’t see those two children again. He tells them, as Wuyan is standing in a river with his trousers rolled up as he catches fish with his bare hands, that the girl hadn’t wanted anything but to take revenge for her shifu’s death. He tells them, as the horses gingerly pick their way down the foothills, that he hadn’t remembered - still doesn’t remember - what colour Jiao Liqiao robes had been (Wuyan tells him, his face oddly twisted, that her robes had been red - wedding red. The tenseness in his shoulders and the way Fang Duobing’s hands clench around his reins tell him everything he needs to know about that symbolism). He tells them, in the first town that had been the last on their journey here, that the girl’s blades had been poisoned.

He keeps the fact that she had had her memories taken away by his own hand - however accidentally - to himself. He cannot decide whether it was ironic or cruel of the heavens to mirror their circumstances so. Sometimes he wakes from nightmares about the grief and madness in her eyes. It draws forth memories of the same grief and madness in different eyes, of cold rain like a thousand small blades, of the warm voice who had first called him A-Fei. 

They get a letter, at the first town big enough to have a truly functioning post, from Su Xiaoyong. Fang Duobing reads it as they eat and hands it around when he’s done, his mouth a little unhappy moue. “We’re going to have to take a detour,” he says. “She moved the Lian Hua Lou.”

He inspects the parchment. Wuyan had held it first to make sure nothing was off - that the ink or the paper weren’t poisoned - before it had even touched Fang Duobing’s hands. Su Xiaoyong has drawn a map, an x marking the Lian Hua Lou’s new location. There’s a few identifying mountains and rivers sketched in.

“Here.” Fang Duobing traces a route on the map with a finger once he lays it down on the table. “We’ll take the scenic route.”

Wuyan leans forward over their bowls of tapioca pudding. “Nothing faster?”

Fang Duobing scowls. “Do you want to go through the rock slide?” He sniffs. “This shaoye is too delicate for such rough terrain.”

It makes Wuyan snicker, and when he smiles, Fang Duobing glances at them both, pleased.

The ‘scenic route,’ once they take a different road out of the town, is an apt description. They pass perfectly blue lakes and trees with green spring leaves. Fang Duobing takes them through the markets when they stay in towns, buying them sticks of tanghulu as they walk and winter apples for the road. He notices him furtively buying a wooden comb as Wuyan critiques the display of a merchant selling knives. When he shyly presents it to Wuyan two days later, there are swirling designs engraved into the wood, obviously and painstakingly done himself. Wuyan accepts it with one startled slow blink at him, the two of them quietly exchanging words. That night he allows Fang Duobing to comb his hair for sleep; he does it in the same trembling, reverential way Wuyan had taken the comb from him. He watches them, feeling like it’s simultaneously too private to look at and also like he can’t look away.

The day the Lian Hua Lou is in sight is just after the pear trees blossom, white petals drifting down through the air like flurries of snow. In the distance he can hear Huli Jing start to bark and the vague but loud scolding from who must be Su Xiaoyong. A little ahead of him, positioned perfectly under a blooming tree that compliments his pink inner robes and his white outer ones, Fang Duobing is laughing. It’s a full, deep, uninhibited sound; he has only ever heard it a few times, though he wonders if he had laughed more like it before. Wuyan, riding at his side, is smiling.

“A-Fei!” Fang Duobing says, grinning, “You should’ve introduced Wuyan before!” He leans over toward Wuyan and says to him, “I hope your sense of humor wasn’t wasted on him.”

Louder, now, he can hear the unmistakable sounds of a little dog rushing joyfully through the underbrush towards them. Fang Duobing must hear it too, because he perks up. “Huli Jing!”

He calls out to him before he can rush on ahead. Fang Duobing twists around to face him as Wuyan turns his head. There’s an impatient scowl on his face. “Come on, A-Fei, I want to see my dog. Let’s go home.”

Looking at him, he can’t describe his feelings; he only knows that the void in his chest is filled with the petals of pear blossoms. He sees Wuyan realise it first, wonder and relief and happiness eclipsing his features. He smiles at him, something warm and real and complete. Fang Duobing must sense it too, because he thinks that the awe and delight and glee that dawns on his face is beautiful.

“Lao-Di!” He cries out.

He can almost imagine someone standing next to him, laughing as he watches over them fondly. Maybe a hand nudges his side where the sword shards rest as Di Feisheng guides his horse next to theirs. Huli Jing emerges from the trees, covered in petals and barking ecstatically as he says, “Lead the way home, Fang Xiaobao.”