Chapter Text
Youth is it’s own sort of euphoria. This is a truth that the young don’t often notice enough to savor, and that the old only realize too late. It’s one of those things that is on display, year after year, with each class that filters through the doors of the university. Jing Yuan has always thought, with a touch of irony, that perhaps this is the best place for him to spend his life, after all these years. It truly does remind him of a much kinder time.
Even in a body spared from the indignities of physical age, the years take their toll on him, just in ways far less visible than the aching of joints and withering of beauty. Seven centuries is a long time to wear at the mind, and even longer to wear at the heart, and it’s left him weary, heart snowed over with cool melancholy. Not that he lets it on, the waves of adolescents that filter through his classroom knowing him only as an ever-smiling, lazy teacher with a habit of letting them out of lecture early. It’s easy not to let them in on the emptiness that takes over his off-hours. Easy to reassure his students and coworkers alike with a smile and a gentle wave, that he’s simply too busy to spend too much time out and about.
Once upon a time, he’d spent a lot more time among people. Even as he outlived the natural lifetime of a human, and then the natural lifetime of cultivators, he’d spent his days seeking out friends, new experiences, and once he realized that the wheels of reincarnation had begun to turn, old as well. But- but with old faces, came old hurts. He’d learnt over the centuries that it wasn’t worth digging up the hurt.That all it did was add another wound to the scarred over casing around his heart, and injure-anew the reincarnations of those he loves. He’d stopped seeking out his old loved ones, and started viewing people the same way he does the seasons. Lovely, ephemeral, ever-changing. Not worth the ache of attaching oneself to.
It’s not easy to learn to let things pass on by, but once he’d gotten into the habit, it slowly became natural. So many faces became familiar in the years that he’s lived, and he’d learned to continue on past in the street without a second glance. Or at least, he thought he had. Even with all of that practice, he still finds himself standing stock still in the street, staring in the window of a gallery in abject shock.
He’s seen all manner of art come and go, and yet, this is a first. His own face stares back at him through a gallery window, rendered lovingly in oil paints. He’s immortalized in pigment at the happiest time of his life, the days when he fought alongside his companions, when he truly felt invincible despite the fact that he hadn’t yet even approached immortality. The four faces that most defined his life star besides him in the scene, and he’s mesmerized.
He’d found their reincarnations, after everything. One after another, as they returned, he had methodically tracked them down. His teacher remained unchanged, in a grief and madness stricken isolation. Baiheng, she returned differently each time, which he always thought suited her adventurous soul. Sometimes he managed to befriend her again. Sometimes he was too early or too late, or she passed him by completely. He hadn’t seen her in hundreds of years. Dan Feng- Dan Heng, he reincarnated like clockwork, though the spirit of the dragon didn’t always manifest the same. He usually remembered, and he usually didn’t want to. He’d made that clear in no uncertain terms. Jing Yuan had stopped lingering after the first time, instead making a point to meet him once each lifetime, but no more. All the better to let him move forward. He’d faced more pain and imprisonment than just one lifetime could make up for. And Yingxing- Ren, as he’d come to call himself? He was the one who persisted the longest alongside Jing Yuan. Always in pain, suffering from the unnatural and cruel extension to his life. He’d found a permanent end to his torment, eventually. Had ended his own life in a brutal and violent ritual, one that tore his spirit from his body and all but destroyed both. Another painful end for Jing Yuan to bear witness to. Jing Yuan hadn’t seen him since. He’d believed his soul was too damaged to be reborn, shredded beyond repair by the many, many deaths he’d faced.
He steps into the gallery as if in a trance, the sudden rush of warm air coloring his cheeks pink, and barely registers the docent’s greeting as he wanders into the brightly lit space. It’s obviously a single artist’s exhibit, all of the works reminiscent in style, even as the mediums range from paint and canvas to sculptures of hammered metal. Each and every work done in meticulous detail. Each and every work achingly familiar. He spends a long time simply looking, wandering from piece to piece, and standing in front of each in something like wonder. A brass recreation of the Imbibitor Lunae in all its glory, rendered in loving detail. A painting of hands cradling wine cups, each of them hands Jing Yuan intimately remembers the feel and shape of. A familiar, dark blade, shattered and repaired by fine veins of kintsugi. A wall-sized painting, stylized and elegant but featuring a bloody and wretched battlefield. He can’t bring himself to discover who the artist is, at first. It must be someone from then, but he’s not so cruel to himself as to create an expectation. To create hope. He’s never been a person who deals well with a lack of surety, though, and eventually he makes himself look.
“Author: Ren,” the placard reads, in stark sans-serif font on a white background. Generic and far too anticlimactic for the depth of the void that opens up in Jing Yuan’s chest at the single syllable. There’s a title, and an artist’s statement underneath, but the words blur together dizzily, and it’s a struggle not to stagger at the reality of what he’s stumbled into. He wants to collapse to the floor. He wants to march over to the docent’s stand and demand to know all he can about the artist. He wants to buy every piece of art in the gallery.
He doesn’t do any of those things.
What he does do, is wander the gallery, drifting from piece to piece in a haze, incognizant of time passing, until an apologetic docent approaches him to inform him of the building’s impending close.
“You must really like his work,” the woman says, offering Jing Yuan a smile, which he faintly remembers to return. “You know, we’ll be hosting an artist reception later this week, if you’d like to attend and speak to him in person?” He smiles, and he nods, and that’s his Friday night plans decided.
There is a ghost in Yingxing’s gallery opening. No, that’s not quite right. As far as he can tell, and his long suffering assistant had confirmed him to be correct, there is a flesh and blood man, drifting from piece to piece and examining each one in extensive depth. He’d obviously been handed a drink at some point by one of the more overzealous members of the staff, and it hangs forgotten from his fingertips as he peruses. The man is a perfect stranger to Yingxing, appearing from a distance to be somewhere in his thirties, tall and finely dressed. None of this would be particularly notable, at a publicly open artist reception, except that the man looks exactly like one of the ghosts who’s haunted Yingxing for as long as he can remember.
It’s not that he’s superstitious. He’s always believed firmly in what he can touch, what he can feel, what he can work on with his own hands. Yingxing hadn’t been able to sit still, not without something to fiddle with, and he’s never felt so at home as when he’s creating. He’s also always dreamt. Mostly nightmares, painful and bloody and too real, inescapable. The kind of dreams that had him waking up screaming in the bedrooms of foster families, the kind that made him impossible to live with. The dreams were mostly filled with blood and agony, but sometimes, sometimes, he would be blessed with a bright sun-spot of joy. More like a happy memory than a dream, because they felt just as real as the nightmares. All of them, the dreams and the nightmares alike, had featured the same people. People that his dream-self knew, that the version of him that seemed to live only in those false memories loved and hated in equal measure. One of them was the man standing across the room, seemingly completely oblivious to his scrutiny, fully absorbed in his perusal of a painting that featured his own face.
The face that Yingxing can see in profile, directing an inscrutable smile up at a canvas, is one that he’s seen a thousand times. He’s seen that face grinning in pure joy, scuffed and laughing on the ground, blood stained and full of despair. Most vividly, he’s seen it smiling with golden eyes so full of heartbreak he may as well have been weeping. None of that is on show right now. The man’s posture is neutral, his face placid, hair falling in his face and slightly obscuring the downturned tilt of his eyes, and the mole he can’t see from this distance, but that he just knows he’d find, if he were to walk up and introduce himself right now.
(He tries to put a name to that face in his memories, in his dreams, but just like every time he’s tried before, his attempt to cry out that name is drowned out by the rushing of his own heartbeat in his ears.)
Yingxing isn’t much for social graces, preferring the company of his artwork and the solitude of his studio to the more human pleasures. His temperament is choleric and gruff, and he’s never tried too hard to change it, unmoved by any attempts to gentle him, but now he almost regrets it. How does one approach someone and tell them that they’re a dream-construct straight out of your own head? How does he walk up to a man whose face is plastered across the walls, despite having never met Yingxing before?
The choice is taken out of his hands, because in the time it takes to glance around in an attempt to find his wayward assistant, the man has vanished. Yingxing spends the rest of the night attempting to spot him again, as if he’s hidden away somewhere, in one of the brightly-lit corners of the spacious, open gallery.
Yingxing doesn’t sleep much that night, and the dreams that he has are confusing, flashes of bright sunlight blinding his eyes and keeping him from understanding the scenes that flash past him. He catches sight of golden eyes though, and a leonine smile far warmer than the one he’d seen at a distance.