#hi hello i'm feeling far too emotional about the idea that di feisheng loved li xiangyi/li lianhua

[difeisheng]

一遍一遍來過

They come to Di Feisheng in fits and starts, the way any recollections of the last weeks have, blinks of clarity etched out from indistinct colour slowly coming into focus. The first of them is the last; the final memory a man named A-Fei ever had, before Di Feisheng stormed back into consciousness to take his place. It is short, so short he nearly doubts it happened. But Di Feisheng has always been able to depend on his own senses if nothing else, and so its existence is undeniable.

A-Fei, a boy's voice calls out, fine silk and warmth cradling him as he slumps to hard stone, a split instant before the world fades to nothing. His eyes are already closed, but A-Fei knows who it is, who rushed to his side without hesitation.

Where is Fang Duobing now? Di Feisheng thinks idly, in his spare moments wandering this gilded cage of Jinyuanmeng. Is he with Li Lianhua still, determined to follow that man to the end of the jianghu? For all his fumbling earnesty and pettiness of youth, at least Fang Duobing can be trusted to wear only one face. Unlike others who pretend even now, all rouge-red smile and sickly sweet words, to look after Di Feisheng.

And so the remembering begins.

Next to return, like the first, is a mere flash across Di Feisheng's mind. Of darkness, the even breath of one sleeping falling against his neck, another body rolling over to curl along his back.

What are you doing, xiaozi? A-Fei says, whispered rumble in the night. Fang Duobing, lost in dream, does not answer. His steady weight stills further into slumber.

A-Fei drifts closer to sleep himself with Fang Duobing tucked against him. It will not be the last time.

They shared a bed before, Di Feisheng knows this. Li Lianhua left them no choice. The soft trust of that act, though, is new. He imagines turning his back on someone in sleep, himself and not A-Fei, without even a blade under his pillow.

It is an unsettling thought.

A-Fei, Fang Duobing says in the next memory, A-Fei, and when A-Fei turns at his call he reaches to adjust A-Fei's mask, sword-calloused fingers lightly brushing his jaw.

And—

Do you like this one, A-Fei? Fang Duobing asks, pointing out a bolt of fabric in a dark plum, patterns running across it in an even deeper shade. A-Fei doesn't think he ever came to tailor's shops for robes, like this. He knows no one asked him before what he likes, like this.

He nods, and Fang Duobing smiles in self-satisfaction, sliding Li Lianhua's coins across the counter.

And—

Fang Duobing looks up at him, hand clasped to his mouth after words gone astray, eyes wide and shining. What aspirations do you have, A-Fei? he said, but how far can a man without a past dream into the future?

His gaze is demanding in its curiosity, expecting too much from A-Fei. What does he have left to give to a boy like Fang Duobing, so stubborn in his refusal to ever stop caring?

And then one day Di Feisheng studies the line of his back in a steam-clouded mirror, water from the bath trailing down his skin, glimpsing the faintest of raked marks still yet to fade away—

Fang Duobing gasps into his neck, words half-formed and lost, clawing A-Fei closer by wherever he can blindly reach. The night is a blur of heat and breathless sound, sweat cooling on both of them in the autumn dark, clinging in this village full of ghosts and A-Fei doesn't care. Cannot bring himself to care, driving himself deeper into Fang Duobing, held down to the sheets by A-Fei's grip at his wrist and every snap of his hips.

A-Fei, he hears his name again, caught against the edge of a moan, and A-Fei lowers his head to taste it on Fang Duobing's tongue himself.

In the shadowed doorway, out of the corner of A-Fei's sight, he catches the smear of Li Lianhua's silhouette against the black. Footsteps halted in shock, or maybe amusement.

The wave crests. A-Fei's world tips into blissful white, and Fang Duobing cries out.

Di Feisheng, now, searches for a flower that exists in legends in the name of Li Lianhua. Unwavering, whatever draw toward him it is that Di Feisheng has known , since Li Xiangyi first brought his blade against his own. This has not changed; in this lifetime, it will not.

Yet A-Fei, even in just the briefest of moments scattered like stars, across from Fang Duobing... in all his few months of existence, he could have had a chance to be content.

(Di Feisheng hopes that, at least for one night, the last night of company, he was happy.)

(He wonders, again, where Fang Duobing is, and sacrifices a foolish second to hope for a disappeared man's wish that he might have been, too.)

~*~

(Dear reader, they both were.)