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The mission didn’t really need them both. Really it was nothing Mu Qing’s deputies couldn’t have handled— a few cases of amnesia, not terribly interesting, even if it was on the border between the southeast and the southwest— but Mu Qing was starting to think that Feng Xin might’ve been onto something all these years and any excuse to get out of the heavens was a good excuse to get out of the heavens. Xie Lian and his ghost king were in the area, for reasons they’d been cagey about; the four of them were not working together, for which Mu Qing was quietly but fervently grateful.
Which was why it came as a surprise when the busker at the corner caught their eye and said, “Oh! Your friend came by this morning, he was looking for you.”
That could only have been Xie Lian. They stopped, and then Feng Xin stepped forward to handle it— sorry, who had he said he was looking for, exactly? His two friends, tall with armor, one with a bow and one with a sabre, he said they’d gotten separated. Were those his words? Yes they were. Right, thank you kindly, yes we know him, did he say where he’d be? He didn’t, but he gave a direction; she pointed them north.
Mu Qing looked at Feng Xin; Feng Xin was looking at Mu Qing. Not saying who he was, but making it known he was looking for them, and making sure they could find him— why he hadn’t used their array Mu Qing didn’t know, but there was only one scenario in which that made any sense.
“If he’s looking for us,” said Feng Xin, hesitant, or like he was hoping Mu Qing would call him absurd and laugh at him.
Mu Qing didn’t laugh at him. They headed north.
The light had gone yellowish with evening when they found him pacing in a clearing— newly made, by the look of it; he was surrounded by still-splintering fallen trees, and leaves that weren’t quite yellow enough to have fallen with the approaching autumn. His hair was undone, and he looked more openly upset than Mu Qing had seen him in a very long time.
His face flickered, looking at them: first overwhelming relief, then a split second of confusion, and then relief again. He was holding himself strangely; not wrong, not like he was injured, but like he was being careful with himself. Mu Qing couldn’t tell why.
“Dianxia, are you alright?”
Xie Lian paused before he answered, watching them like there was something specific he was looking for— neither of them liked that pause, or that look, you could feel Feng Xin getting steadily more worried— before he finally said, “...I don’t know where we are.”
They took him back to their inn, Xie Lian staying close to Feng Xin’s side and speaking uncharacteristically little. He did, at least, relax once they were inside; he sat down, and Mu Qing— hating every motion of it— picked up a hairbrush.
If he’d asked for them he didn’t remember Crimson Rain, and if he’d asked for them he didn’t think they were still estranged. The window, then, was small. “What’s the last thing you remember?” Mu Qing said, trying to be gentle, praying that he didn’t say the war.
Xie Lian paused; whether he was considering the question or what to say Mu Qing couldn’t tell. “...A day or so after the squid yaoguai,” he said.
That put him a little less than two months after leaving Mount Taicang, still almost a year before Yinian Bridge— this was Xie Lian the spoiled prince, not Xie Lian the god or Xie Lian the war idol or Xie Lian the exile. It was the exact thing Mu Qing had been hoping for, which didn’t mean he wasn’t annoyed about it.
Xie Lian’s head was bowed, face behind his hair like he was hiding. More hesitantly still: “I don’t know how long it was that— well, that whoever it was—”
They had a three-way array, which all of them used regularly; they also had a four-way array, which was for emergencies. Dianxia’s with us, Feng Xin said into the latter with no preamble. He’s safe, he’s okay. And, ah— last thing he remembers he was seventeen, do you know what happened there?
More importantly: the squid yaoguai had been in spring. “We last saw you two days ago,” Mu Qing said, “you haven’t been missing for five months.”
Yes, said Crimson Rain, and did not elaborate. I’ll handle it, you’d just be in my way. And I’m coming to get him.
No, you’re not. The words were out of Mu Qing before he’d had time to think about it; he glared at the bits of wood that were, somehow, caught in Xie Lian’s hair.
Xie Lian nodded slowly— bit his lip, released it— leaned back into Mu Qing’s hands. In the array Hua Cheng, audibly seething, was demanding at some length to know why exactly Mu Qing felt he was at all qualified to make that call.
He woke up, said Mu Qing, barely resisting the urge to say it like he would to a three year old child, in an unfamiliar place, with memories clearly missing. He thinks he was kidnapped, and he doesn’t know you. You are not coming to get him.
A horrible, dangerous silence filled up the array, so thick that Mu Qing and Feng Xin went still in physical space. Xie Lian made a soft questioning noise, turned slightly so he could see them both in his peripheral vision; Mu Qing forced himself back into motion, trying not to feel like he’d been caught at something and was about to be called in for it. Trying not to feel like they really were back in Xianle.
When he has his memories back, I’m sure he’ll be thrilled to see you, said Feng Xin, who had apparently designated himself the peacekeeper between them in Xie Lian’s absence.
Crimson Rain left the array without another word. Mu Qing counted that as a victory, marked the whole conversation as successful as it could feasibly have been, and turned his attention back to Xie Lian.
“...is there anything else I can wear?” Xie Lian said.
The spoiled, pampered Taizi Dianxia of their youth had thought linen scratched; of course he would never have tolerated a scrap collector’s hemp. Silk only for the inner robe, cotton acceptable for outer robes, as few seams as possible— Mu Qing hated that he remembered it but remember it he did. Fu Yao’s clothes would be about the right size, and they failed the seams criterion but should fit the others; he produced them from his sleeves, and ignored Feng Xin’s raised eyebrow.
Mu Qing had prepared for Xie Lian to expect to be dressed, had been prepared to grit his teeth and pretend to consider it normal— but instead Xie Lian took the robes and ducked behind the bathing screen to change. Mu Qing didn’t ask why, but he did blink a little and turn to Feng Xin.
At what point do we tell him, he said, this time in Feng Xin’s private array. A butterfly had stationed itself on the windowsill in the three seconds that Mu Qing wasn’t looking. He glared at it; it did not glare back, because it was a bug, but the way it twitched its antennae conveyed the sentiment.
...hopefully it won’t come to that.
Hopefully, Mu Qing repeated, as witheringly as he could manage without actually moving his face at all.
Look, Mu Qing, I cannot fucking live in that world, Feng Xin said, blunt as ever. If it takes a week we can figure out what we’re doing then, okay?
Mu Qing, somehow already exhausted, supposed that was probably the best he was going to manage.
Gods didn’t need to sleep; a prince and his attendants, unfortunately, did. When they were actually teenage wandering cultivators, Feng Xin and Mu Qing would have shared the bed closest to the door and Xie Lian would have taken the other; after eight hundred years Mu Qing had not forgotten the nights he had moved to the floor to avoid being kicked. At least once Xie Lian was asleep, he thought, he could meditate instead.
Except that when Mu Qing sat to take his hair down, Xie Lian froze up. Not subtly, either, although he was clearly trying to be; he stood there half-unfolded with his eyes darting between the two of them and the empty bed.
“I’ll be by the door,” said Feng Xin, quickly, “and Mu Qing can be by the window, and you can share with whichever of us you’d rather— is that alright?”
It did seem to help; Xie Lian’s shoulders lost some of whatever solid tension they’d held. “Yes,” he said. “Thank you, Feng Xin.” Hesitant, like he hadn’t wanted to admit to wanting it. Strange— Xie Lian could be affectionate sometimes, certainly he’d never been one to withhold praise, but if his Highness the Crown Prince had ever been sticky Mu Qing was sure he’d have remembered.
So they settled in, Mu Qing with his back to the window, Xie Lian staring up at the ceiling. He closed his eyes. He waited.
Only Xie Lian refused to keep still. Or possibly was unable to: he’d find a position, stay in it for about twenty seconds, and then decide it wasn’t good enough and move again; sometimes he’d try to be quiet about it, which only dragged out the motion and made things interminably worse. Mu Qing was tempted to put it down to the behavior of a spoiled prince— but Xie Lian hadn’t been like this even back then; he had sprawled out like a starfish but he’d slept easy. Whatever this was, it was new.
Xie Lian shifted again. The sheets rustling against each other should not have been so loud. When Mu Qing opened his eyes they were facing each other, Xie Lian curled up with his eyes squeezed shut and his face taut. The butterfly had stationed itself on the wall beside the door, opening and closing its razor wings.
Mu Qing reached out and put a hand on his wrist.
Xie Lian’s eyes snapped open, wide in the dark. He wasn’t shaking but it looked like it was a close thing. His whole body was so tense.
Carefully, Mu Qing fed a thread of spiritual energy through, tempered until it felt like it had when he was mortal. Watched as Xie Lian’s eyes widened further, and then fluttered shut.
Maybe it was the familiarity— maybe it was the reminder of what it felt like to meditate together— or maybe it was just Mu Qing, his spiritual power cool and steady. Whatever it was, it worked. Xie Lian went calm like a stone dropped in water, and a few moments later his breathing evened out into sleep.
...Do we have any idea what that’s about? said Mu Qing, in Feng Xin’s private array. Neither of them did.
In the morning, Xie Lian didn’t mention it. He dressed to his inner robes behind the screen again, accepted help with the outer ones without comment. He was quiet while Mu Qing brushed his hair again; he was quiet while the butterfly settled and resettled, and Mu Qing reminded himself sternly that Crimson Rain had not tried to kill him with those butterflies in years. He was quiet until Feng Xin, looking between them as if he could see the awkward silence, volunteered to get breakfast and fled the room.
Then he spoke. “Mu Qing, I—”
Xie Lian stopped, took a deep breath, and set his face. Mu Qing had seen him do this probably thousands of times— going from a teenage disciple like all the others to their beatific crown prince, later on when he was smoothing embarrassment out into firm resolve— but very seldom had it ever been directed at him; the effect was more than a little disconcerting.
“You have my word,” said Xie Lian, with the face of a temple statue and the tone of someone treading very carefully, “that no matter how you answer this, nobody will ever find out I asked.”
“...alright,” said Mu Qing, wary of whatever was coming next on general principle.
He hesitated again, which did not make Mu Qing any less worried about what this question was going to be. He opened his hands; he closed them again. It wasn’t until Mu Qing was about to swallow the awkwardness and actually ask that he said, all at once: “Can I have a hug?”
Mu Qing, feeling vaguely stunned, said the only thing he could. “Yes, of course.”
He knew Xie Lian’s height, knew his measurements, could list without having to think about it the breadth of his shoulders and the span of his waist; he knew that Xie Lian had always been small. But Xie Lian had also always been larger than life— as a prince his presence could have filled up arenas, and as a god he could make a run-down shack feel like a temple. It was easy to forget, or had been easy to forget until now, that those numbers added up to a person who only came up to Mu Qing’s nose. Who, even back then, had only ever come up to Mu Qing’s nose.
Xie Lian pressed himself into Mu Qing’s shoulder. Mu Qing let him, and hoped it wasn’t too obvious that he had no idea what to do with his arms. He could feel Xie Lian’s heartbeat, could feel his breathing, how it had gone shaky like he was trying not to cry. How it went shakier still as Mu Qing moved his hand upward, cradling Xie Lian’s head.
He didn’t know how long they stood there, but when Feng Xin’s footsteps sounded on the stairs outside Xie Lian pulled away so fast that he might have been burned. Gave a quick little flash of a smile, and said “Thank you, Mu Qing.”
As a servant Mu Qing would have bristled at that, and then would have forced his hackles back down— knowing that his Highness was protecting him, hating that he needed it.
But as a god, as an adult— as someone who could think of few things he needed less than protection from Feng Xin, or from the consequences of touching Xie Lian— it was mostly just sweet. “Of course,” he said.
Xie Lian ate one steamed bun— Mu Qing hadn’t really expected Feng Xin to remember which things even a teenage Xie Lian would tolerate, but remember it he had— and picked nervously at a second. Occasionally he would open his mouth to say something, look at the two of them, and visibly change his mind. Do we have any idea what that’s about, said Feng Xin in Mu Qing’s private array; they did not. The butterfly was somewhere in the room and Mu Qing had no idea where.
“Dianxia,” said Feng Xin, the first to break the silence.
“My cultivation is broken,” Xie Lian said, quietly.
Mu Qing went very still. In his peripheral vision he could see Feng Xin doing the same. Of course Xie Lian would have thought that, waking up without spiritual power; of course.
“I don’t know what I’m going to say,” he continued. “But I’m going to have to tell Guoshi, if nobody else, and what if he says I must have—”
Must have wanted it, he didn’t say, and he didn’t have to.
He had, of course, wanted it; Mu Qing didn’t like Crimson Rain much more than he ever had, but he did know that. But they absolutely could not say so to Xie Lian— to a Xie Lian whose last memory was of being a prince known for his purity, to a Xie Lian who had taken nearly a full day to work up the courage to say anything. To a Xie Lian who had wrapped his arms around himself, like if he squeezed hard enough it would somehow help.
“He wouldn’t say that,” said Feng Xin, sounding a little bit helpless. Xie Lian looked dubiously over at Mu Qing; their guoshi would and had, and they both knew it.
“He would say it to me,” said Mu Qing, “but, dianxia, he wouldn’t say it to you. What he’d say to you is that you’re his best most brilliant student and the light of his life, or something, and that he’s sure you’ll rebuild your foundation in no time, and then he’d say something rude about Gao-shixiong’s handwriting.”
That worked, or at least it got a wet, startled laugh out of Xie Lian, which was as close to working as Mu Qing was willing to hope.
“But even if he does,” said Feng Xin, “it’s not like you can’t still cultivate.”
“What?” said Mu Qing and Xie Lian at once.
“What?” Feng Xin said, as if he genuinely didn’t know why they hadn’t thought of that. “Dianxia, there isn’t a cultivator in the country who wouldn’t be fucking thrilled to work with you. If your guoshi said that to you, we’d find you a teacher who wouldn’t.”
Of course Feng Xin would say that; of course he would say it to Xie Lian. All-consuming bitterness at the idea of being able to just walk out if the sect wasn’t fair fought a very quick, very quiet war in Mu Qing’s head with the knowledge that Taicang Mountain sect had burned to the ground centuries ago and this was all hypothetical anyway.
“...you’re both so different,” Xie Lian said softly. He sounded amazed; he sounded, again, like he was holding himself back from tears. In Mu Qing’s head both sides laid down their arms.
They looked at each other; they looked at Xie Lian. Silent, helpless. What could you say to that? What could anyone?
The second butterfly, when it came, brought Xie Lian’s lost memories with it in a little white orb.
Xie Lian let it float above his hand. “This is more than a few months of memories,” he said. “Isn’t it?”
“It is,” Mu Qing said. Quiet.
The orb made a lazy orbit around Xie Lian’s wrist, returned to just above his palm. “It feels like more than years, even,” he said. “...decades?”
“...Centuries,” said Feng Xin.
Something in Mu Qing’s stomach sank, watching Xie Lian’s face. “Of course,” Xie Lian said, to nobody in particular. His voice wasn’t shaking but you could tell it was an effort. “That’s why you’re so— that’s why nobody mentioned going home. Xianle doesn’t exist anymore, does it.”
“No,” Mu Qing agreed. The servant’s awareness of his employer’s moods had, apparently, never quite faded.
“You didn’t tell me.” It wasn’t an accusation, except for how it absolutely was.
The sinking thing turned sharp and urgent. “The plan was to tell you if it lasted a week, we—” He looked at Feng Xin.
“You were panicking already,” Feng Xin said. “We didn’t want to make things worse—”
“Was it my fault?”
They both went still. Xie Lian, looking between them, seemed to take that as confirmation. “Right,” he said. “Right, I— I probably wouldn’t tell me either, then.”
“Dianxia, it wasn’t,” said Feng Xin.
“Wasn’t it?” He turned to Mu Qing, looking at him like there’d be an answer there. Like there was only one person he could ask and trust their answer to be honest.
“...no,” said Mu Qing, mouth dry. “It wasn’t. People blamed you, because it was easier to blame you for not preventing it than to look at how things were before you, but Xianle would have fallen with you or without. It wasn’t your fault.”
Xie Lian kept watching his face; Mu Qing couldn’t tell what it was he was looking for, or if he found it. But he said, more quietly, “...And are we okay, still? The three of us?”
They looked at one another; they looked at Xie Lian. “...we found each other again,” said Feng Xin.
Xie Lian looked down at the ball of memory, still glowing in his hand. He looked up at them. “Alright,” he said, with finality. “Then it turned out okay, in the end.”
He closed his hand around the ball and—
“I really am sorry,” said Xie Lian, later over tea in Puqi Shrine. (It was a mystery, Mu Qing thought, how Xie Lian became suddenly competent when it came to tea. Still, he wasn’t complaining.) “I— can’t imagine that was what you had planned to do with your time in the mortal realm.”
Mu Qing made a noncommittal sound. “It was hardly the hardest mission I’ve ever had,” he said.
Xie Lian must have heard what lay behind it; his face went soft. “Well, thank you, then.”
“Mm,” said Mu Qing. “—How do you feel now?”
“Loved,” said Xie Lian. He was smiling now, quiet but warm. “Really, really loved.”