Work Text:
Song Lan fulfills his promise to the young Jiang-zongzhu and Xingchen's martial nephew, delivering Jiang Yanli to her mother's friend in Jinlin Tower, and considers his next steps. He accepts their offer of lodging—ostensibly in gratitude for bringing Jiang-guniang safely thither—but only for one night. A private bath is a welcome indulgence.
As he bathes, he thinks that he's glad that he didn't finish his request in Yiling. Anything he might want Xingchen to know would be better said in person. Besides, the Yunmeng boys have their war to fight, and if Song Lan is not mistaken, Xingchen will not be found where the war is.
He can't let his last words to Xingchen be the ones he spoke in the ruins of Baixue Temple. After this, there's no need for us to meet again. And he cannot give up on their shared ideals. So he bids farewell to the golden halls of the Lanling Jin and leaves the Great Sects to their war, should they choose to fight it. (He sees no sign that Lanling Jin intends to join the fray.)
Jiang Yanli, who forgave him for his part in her removal from Yiling on their second day out, presses bundles of food into his hands. "If you see A-Cheng or A-Xian," she begins and then trails off. Song Lan offers her a wan smile. He knows what it is to have too many things to say, and too few.
"I will tell them I last saw you well." It's not the entire truth, because she is alone in Jinlin Tower with a grief as all-encompassing as his, but it is enough of the truth, he thinks. She nods, once, firmly. They bow to each other. He walks down the steps to the street below.
His choice as he leaves Lanling City is simple in the end. There is no way of knowing where Xingchen is, but if Song Lan knows him—
He must still know him—Xingchen misunderstood him badly but it had been Song Lan who'd told him to go—one horrible misunderstanding can't stand against years of harmony, can it? If Song Lan knows him, Xiao Xingchen will be traveling the jianghu, helping the people again. So Song Lan will do the same, and if the Heavens are kind, their paths will cross again.
He finds the war before he finds Xingchen.
He comes into a village just on the other side of Lanling's border, hoping to resupply, and finds the blackened bones of farms. The inn is still standing and the villagers, most of them, are alive—he glimpses faces peeking furtively from the windows of houses that are still intact. But a black wave of grievance washes against Song Lan's senses; people were killed here recently.
He enters the inn, reasoning that he can best learn where to buy supplies from the owners. He'd thought the fuchen he carries might distinguish him enough from the sect cultivators, but he's met with dark scowls at the sight of the sword on his back.
The innkeeper's frown disappears when he offers silver in exchange for a room—likely the sect cultivators, whoever they were, who burnt the houses had simply appropriated rooms by threat of force—but regretfully tells him that there are no supplies for sale: the last immortals who passed through took everything of use and killed the farmers who refused to give up their goats. Song Lan tries to keep his face impassive even as his grip tightens on the handle of his fuchen. His fury is of no use to anyone here, when those who caused it have long since passed.
"I will see to the spirits of the dead," he tells the innkeeper, "so that they may be freed from their grievance."
"Oh!" the innkeeper exclaims, and exchanges looks with her daughter that Song Lan can't parse. "Oh, thank you, daozhang."
He shakes his head. "It's what needs to be done."
"Those other immortals didn't care what was needful!" the daughter bursts out. "They just left erjiu lying in the dirt!"
"Hush," her mother says, but doesn't contradict the girl's account. "Daozhang, you must let us thank you somehow, if you really intend to help us."
Song Lan hesitates, but he knows that there's a rhythm to this sort of exchange. He's the one who had explained to Xiao Xingchen that it would be rude not to accept hospitality or food or whatever payment ordinary people could offer. It's only that these people have so little now. "I would be grateful for a meal," he offers.
It doesn't take long to draw the arrays to cleanse the land of the violence done there. Song Lan can't help but remember when Xiao Xingchen stood opposite him as they activated these arrays together. He misses the feeling of being one half of a well-known dance.
It takes two shichen and a walk around the outskirts of the village before he's sure that all is clean. After, there is indeed dinner waiting for him. He washes his hands in well water and goes in to eat.
He doesn't mean to follow the path of the warring cultivators, but it is his calling to help the ordinary people, and the remnants of battle are full of resentment. Sometimes, he arrives on old battlegrounds far too late and there are already walking corpses. The war has long moved past. None of the sect cultivators have stayed behind to ease the path of the dead. Song Lan does what he can. He cuts down the corpses for a second time, draws cleansing arrays in the ground, moves on to the next battlefield.
There's an entire town destroyed. The scale of it shocks and sickens Song Lan. It must have been a rout for the Sunshot cultivators because there are bodies in a veritable rainbow of sect colors scattered in positions no living human body would adopt. Some have the telltale black lines and white pupils of ghost puppets, like in the Chang clan's manor. Song Lan wonders if they were killed by their own sect members, Wen Ruohan turning brother against brother. Song Lan imagines one of his martial siblings from the temple, maybe Zhenliang, the veins in his neck gone black and necrotic, snarling with someone else's rage, imagines putting Fuxue through his heart. Then he remembers that Leng Zhenliang is dead, anyway, along with every other member of his temple. He is seized by the sudden urge to vomit and turns sharply away until he masters himself. He's going to be dirty enough from carrying the corpses; if he adds to the mess himself he may as well give up.
He digs the graves some distance away from the center of where the fighting had been, giving himself a reprieve before he steels himself to touch the bodies of the dead cultivators. He cuts a furrow in the earth with his sword glare, but the rest is spadework. He doesn't know these dead, can't set up memorial tablets for them, but he's not really doing it for them. This is for the common people who would be harmed if they were allowed to linger. He has seen, over the weeks, that soul calming ceremonies or no, the bodies of those turned into ghost puppets refuse to rest and begin to turn against the living.
It is when he is waist deep in the ground that he hears a voice behind him. "Sir" —a light tenor, so familiar that for a moment Song Lan doesn't believe that he heard anyone speak at all, and so impersonal that Song Lan wishes he hadn't heard— "may I help you with your task?"
Song Lan turns around and sees— It is Xingchen, the same white-and-black robes, the fuchen, Shuanghua on his back, but he has a white cloth around his head, covering his eyes. It is as pristine as the rest of him—more, because the hems of his robes are dusty from the road. "Xingchen," Song Lan rasps. He clears his throat, says again, helpless, "Xingchen."
"Zichen?" Xiao Xingchen's mouth widens in surprise. Song Lan wonders what his eyes are doing behind the cloth. His eyebrows draw down and his mouth firms. "That is, Song-daozhang. I'm sorry for disturbing you. I'll—”
Song Lan leaps out of the pit before Xiao Xingchen can do more than begin to turn away. "Don't—” He drops his spade and grabs for Xiao Xingchen's wrist. He catches the edge of Xiao Xingchen’s sleeve instead and winces at the dirty smear his hand leaves on the white cloth. Song Lan tries to push words past the tightness in his throat, but all that comes out is a strangled noise. He wishes he were better with words.
Then he sees over Xiao Xingchen’s shoulder, and the words come easy after all. “‘Ware the corpse!” he cries as Fuxue leaps into his hand. Xiao Xingchen turns with a dancer’s grace, drawing Shuanghua as he goes, and the point of the sword speeds unerringly toward the walking corpse’s heart. Whatever happened to his eyes, it clearly hasn’t affected his fighting skills. Song Lan has a moment to feel relief for that before the wave of walking corpses is upon them. They are clumsy, shambling; the skin surrounding the black veins crawling up their necks is livid with old blood. A single one is no trouble at all, but a whole town of them?
Song Lan lets the rhythm of battle take over. He wields Fuxue and the fuchen in tandem and hears behind him Xiao Xingchen do the same. It feels good to focus on what is in front of him and know that his back is protected. The walking corpses are drawn to the bright spiritual energy inside his and Xiao Xingchen’s bodies, but they hiss and groan in displeasure when that same spiritual energy is directed at them through swords and whisks. Out of the corner of his eye, he sees Xiao Xingchen tangle an oncoming corpse’s legs with his fuchen and send it stumbling into another. He fights beautifully; Song Lan wishes he weren’t busy with his own foes so he could stop and watch. Whatever else has happened, however ugly the world and his own heart have become, this is still true: watching Xiao Xingchen fight is like watching a master painter with his brush.
Song Lan plants himself at Xiao Xingchen’s back, and commits himself to covering his openings. These are few, but it becomes clear as they fight that the ribbon covering Xiao Xingchen’s eyes is no affectation — though why Song Lan might have thought it would be, he doesn’t know. Xiao Xingchen can’t see, and the fact that he still fights like a dream is testament to his genius — the bright moon indeed. Xiao Xingchen cuts through two walking corpses in a single sweep of Shuanghua’s bright blade, and Song Lan kicks away another as it bulls forward, grasping for Xiao Xingchen’s open flank. He follows the kick up with a stab.
“How are there so many?” Xiao Xingchen asks, voice tense but not winded.
More proof that Xiao Xingchen is blind, or he would have seen what Song Lan saw when he first arrived.
“It’s a whole city dead,” Song Lan explains. He keeps his explanation terse. “And these were corrupted by the Yin Iron before they died.” He lunges to stab another corpse, and Xiao Xingchen steps into the space he left behind. The breath that hisses out between Xiao Xingchen’s teeth is as eloquent as a curse.
“You were—” a grunt of effort as Xiao Xingchen strikes out with his horsetail whisk, then follows up with Shuanghua “—burying them?”
“Digging the grave.” Song Lan and Xiao Xingchen have moved away ever farther from the pit he’d been digging as they fought, and now there are fewer walking corpses pressing in on all sides. “Was going to cleanse them after burial.”
Song Lan sees Xiao Xingchen’s firm nod out of the corner of his eye. “Let me help.” There’s a thread of uncertainty in Xiao Xingchen’s voice that leaves Song Lan aching.
“Of course,” he says, after another series of exchanges with the walking corpses. Fuxue is steady as ever in his hands. “Xingchen, of course.”
After the battle, after they have dragged the bodies into their mass grave, Song Lan and Xiao Xingchen walk a circle around the city, draw the largest cleansing array that Song Lan has ever seen. I could not do this alone, Song Lan thinks. It would take me ages. As it is, it’s well after dark by the time they carve the final characters into the earth. Song Lan stands at the eastern pole of the array and stabs Fuxue into the ground. He senses the moment Xiao Xingchen does the same with Shuanghua at the western pole, just before the visual confirmation of the fact. The flood of their spiritual energies lights up the empty city, bright as the gibbous moon brushing the tops of the trees. Tears unaccountably prick Song Lan’s eyes.
He stands at the eastern edge of the city and closes his eyes, feeling Xiao Xingchen’s presence as a balm.
When the light fades, Song Lan becomes aware of the layers of filth on his body. He’d been able to delay that awareness until the work was done, but now he wants nothing so desperately as to be free of it all — the mud on his clothes, the rotting flesh that he’d touched directly with his hands, the blood of the walking corpses that had splashed onto him. If he could claw his own skin off to be clean of it, he would.
He pulls Fuxue free of the ground and leaps on it, then flies west. “Xingchen,” he shouts, descending toward the white shape of his friend on the ground.
Xiao Xingchen lifts his face toward Song Lan. Song Lan leaps off his sword before it’s finished descending. He steps forward, reaches out helplessly with his filthy hands, pulls them back again.
“Xingchen,” he says again. It seems the restlessness and discomfort have finally jarred his words loose. “I’m sorry. It wasn’t your fault! Don’t leave again.”
Xiao Xingchen’s mouth opens, a perfect ring of surprise. “Zichen, I—”
“If you want to go, I won’t stop you,” Song Lan says. “But don’t think I’ll rest assured without you by my side.” Xiao Xingchen takes an abortive step towards him, eyebrows knitted. Song Lan shifts his weight from foot to foot. “I’m going to find a bath. Come with me?”
At this, Xiao Xingchen smiles at last, the perfect curve of his lips bunching up his cheeks under the eye bandage. “Yes, Zichen,” he says. “I’ll be glad to.” Then his smile fades. “But I can’t fly.”
Song Lan takes a deep breath and steels himself. He’ll have to touch Xiao Xingchen for this, but it’s not like either of them can get much dirtier. “I’ll fly us both.”
Song Lan doesn’t trust the well water in the city, so he flies to a river he remembered passing earlier that day. It's an awkward flight — two grown men on a single sword must by necessity stand very close. Song Lan holds Xiao Xingchen steady with an arm around his waist and tries to ignore both his revulsion and his desire.
They bathe quickly and thoroughly. Song Lan focuses on the practicalities of getting as clean as he can by the light of the moon. He'll bathe again in the morning when he can see better, to get any bits he missed. Maybe he'll offer to help Xingchen as well, if he needs it. The dirty clothes can wait until the morning as well.
Putting on clean clothes after the bath is a relief.
The night is warm and clear. He and Xingchen set up camp with practiced swiftness, speaking mainly to coordinate. Song Lan builds a small fire, enough that they can cook on the coals in the morning. Xingchen lays out his bedroll across the fire from Song Lan's and then sits down on it, facing the fire and, by extension, Song Lan.
Song Lan feeds another stick into the fire and watches Xingchen's face. He seems thoughtful, but beyond that Song Lan cannot read him. Song Lan wishes he could, wishes he knew what else he might say that would ease the strange tension between them.
When they fought and built the array and did the work of living on the road, everything had been so easy. They had fallen into the rhythm that had defined their lives for three years before Xue Yang left Qinghe and made for Baixue Temple. But now that they are still again, there is a distance that had not been there before.
"I'm sorry—” They speak simultaneously and then simultaneously break off. Song Lan gestures for Xingchen to go ahead before he remembers that Xingchen can’t see him.
This time Xingchen beats him to it. “Go ahead, Zichen.”
“I’m sorry,” Song Lan repeats. “I shouldn’t have said those things. No matter how I was hurting I shouldn't have made you feel unwanted.” He watches Xingchen’s face carefully as he speaks and spots the flash of pain that twists his expression before he can smooth it out.
“I’m sorry, too,” Xingchen says. He holds his hands out to the flames, warming them. “I’m sorry I painted a target on our backs. I’m sorry Xue Yang hurt your martial family because he couldn’t touch mine.” Song Lan closes his eyes in pain at the reminder.
“You took me to her, didn’t you? Your shifu?” Song Lan asks once he has mastered himself. “Or did I dream that?”
Xingchen nods once, a jerky motion of his chin. “I did.”
“Then, you broke an oath for me.” Song Lan’s throat feels tight. How did so much go wrong so fast?
Xingchen breathes a long sigh. “It’s late,” he says. “We can talk about it later.”
That means there will be a later. Song Lan has to ask anyway. “So you’ll stay?”
Xingchen’s smile in the firelight is a tiny thing. “I’ll stay.”
Relief washes over Song Lan at the words. “Good.”
He lies down, wrapping himself in his bedroll and hears the sounds of Xingchen doing the same. The crackling of the fire is a familiar sound, and soothing in its own way, but Song Lan has never taken for granted the comfort of a companion on the road. Xiao Xingchen will be there in the morning. With that assurance, he can sleep.