#the post editor kept refreshing when I resized the window to check things AND WOULDN'T LET ME PROPERLY COPYPASTE EVERYTHING

[paradife-loft]

In the blood orange sky

Well. Does anybody remember a couple months ago when I made this post? Because apparently I’ve been thinking about it a fair bit.

And also thinking about... maybe doing a thing? A thing that involves writing various vignettes as I’m moved to, very low pressure, but all in the same continuity, about sequences of various events that are related to one another and a central premise...? So kind of maybe like a “multi-chapter fic” as they call them, but y’know. No particular goals for “finishing” something, or requiring they be in chronological order or any other strict structure binding them together. Just exploring things for fun, and I’ll see where it goes!

But yes, so, I have written a bit this week that I think does what I would like for a first portion of something like this, and... here it is!

1.4k words, Xiyao, post-canon, dark-ish mystery/intrigue/character and relationship exploration I guess?; warnings for injury and general unpleasant body stuff, and also unpleasant mental health stuff, and also discussed off-screen (mass) murder.

*

When he comes to this time, he is sitting - propped up in the gentle rays of early sun against something he can vaguely identify as soft, with enough give to cradle his shoulders. That alone is a departure from each time previous… and Jin Guangyao supposes he ought to be thankful he continues to wake up at all; that his condition upon doing so this one time at least is no longer face-down, body practically smeared into the dirt.

An unpleasant prickling in one of his legs prompts him to open his eyes again, lift his head from where it’d fallen back against a pillow. His neck throbs with the motion. He sees a pair of hands - familiar enough that the distortions between his sight now and his memories cannot help but unsettle him - moving steadily with needle and thread through a deep rent in his left calf.

Ah. That would explain that particular discomfort, then.

Viewing the sight on top of feeling the muted, distant sensation it evokes, gives him the perverse and contrarian instinct to kick out and abort the effort of cleaning him up as it’s only partway done - but he recognises well enough that it would be a waste, and even now he isn’t so far gone as that. And he doesn’t want his leg to remain ruined. And to repair it himself now would be… possible, but far more difficult.

All arguments he has to pull out in front of his mind’s eye, like a text one might recite, to convince himself not to protest this time; but he does hold himself still, does remain for the time being a silent, compliant patient.

(Not entirely still, he must admit: his eyes follow the tiny shifts in those hands, trying to reconcile the absence of both manicured care, and the unique pattern of callused ridges he had memorised once upon a time. And yet more important, more incorrect when compared to the state he is familiar with: Lan Xichen has never known how to sew.)

(And yet. And yet.)

He presses his lips together as Xichen approaches the completion of the task, drawing the words he resents needing to speak up like pitchers of water from a drying well. They crowd his tongue, sour the inside of his mouth.

"I take it you found me quickly this time, after your target was done with me?"

Lan Xichen starts when he hears his voice, head jumping up and eyes round. Jin Guangyao had not taken him to be so absorbed that he hadn't even noticed him waking, but -

(He should have, perhaps.)

Xichen's expression hardens into something resigned after that, the dam holding back a great dredged mass of displeasure. Pain and anger in a hundred or more shades, silt and loam and sand.

"You tore apart the gravesites of three prominent clans, scattering the bones, and then did the same with the bodies of their living families when they came to drive out the robbers who defiled their ancestors' remains. The entire village has been terrified since last night. The news was not difficult to follow."

Jin Guangyao resists the urge to close his eyes, staring down the spray of blood to his face with the same dispassion he once used to with regularity. He is out of practise, however: he can't stop the reflexive flinch in his mouth, or his one remaining hand. It curls stiffly in the blankets pushed to one side of the bed pallet.

It’s not that he hadn't expected something along these lines, from the moment he’d woken up and taken in his surroundings. He hadn’t particularly relished the anticipation of hearing it, and so allowed himself a few moments watching Lan Xichen work in silence before disturbing him, it’s true - but he regrets the pain and exhaustion on Xichen's face and in the set of his shoulders and limbs more than he cares to spend his sympathy on another (inevitable) group of dead strangers.

He glances down at the long column of stitches holding the greying flesh of his leg together around the bone, and wonders which hapless, doomed villager from this new feat of resentful destruction had managed to inflict the injury.

"So it didn't require all that much searching, then. Nobody was angry with you, stealing away with the corpse that had killed all those people instead of burning it?"

"Not enough to express it to me. I imagine it helped that I spent several hours in the interim helping right the disturbed graves, and set wards around several of the neighboring houses," Xichen replies. Stress still lines his eyes, flickering more prominent like a candle flame as he speaks. Reconstructing the sequence of events implied, Jin Guangyao feels a twinge of - something - surprise, or hurt? he can't quite say - that Xichen had apparently seen fit this time to seal him away and then leave him, presumably alone, for some significant time afterward, while he tended to the village. Even though it was presumably an effective distraction, not to mention well-deserved.

"I was intending on returning this afternoon, to add more wards to some of the other houses, and suppress any other spirits roused in the process,” Xichen adds. Half an afterthought, half an explanation.

The emotion, whatever it is, crystallizes into a spike of irritation. "Temporary wards aren't going to be enough to turn away a determined corpse-raiser of this strength if he has unfinished vendettas against anybody left there," replies Jin Guangyao, snappish.

Lan Xichen’s lips thin. "I would still prefer to comfort some of their fears, however unrealistically, in the time before the problem has been solved, than leave them with no help or explanation at all after such a loss."

Jin Guangyao knows this. Agrees with it, even; it had been one of many principles they shared in the nighthunts they used to investigate. If Lan Xichen is frustrated at having to reiterate such a thing to him specifically, rather than in general, it doesn't show amidst everything else on his face.

He does stand though, turning away from the bed, tucking the medical supplies he’d been using back into their pouch and going to check on an iron kettle perched over a fire.

“Where are we?” Jin Guangyao asks, preferring the abrupt change of subject to a continuation of the prior topic. Xichen glances back at him - not for long.

“The abandoned house of one of the walking corpses I suppressed a few months ago,” he replies. He pours hot water into a skin, tying it off, and then another steaming portion into a tea pot - drab by Gusu Lan standards, but still likely worth more than the entire roof they’re under. “Don’t get up on that leg yet; you’ll split it open.”

Silence clouds between them, as Jin Guangyao stops shifting his way toward the edge of the bed pallet and lets the leg stretch out in front of him, holding back his weight against his arm. His fingers itch.

He’s asked Lan Xichen before, how long he’s been living like this, although not in those terms; and Lan Xichen has responded only with obvious deflections, despite giving perfectly cogent answers to less savory questions, such as how he’s managed to take a room at an inn with a resentment-spilling corpse in tow. There are many people in need with no one else to turn to throughout the countryside. A simple glamour works well enough when neither the inkeep nor other patrons are cultivators. Spending nights at the house left abandoned after a prior nighthunt certainly sidesteps the minor inconveniences of the latter, but leaves him even less sanguine about the former.

Would you rather neither of you were here at all, and in all likelihood even more people were dead? his own mind poses snidely, while he sits and watches Lan Xichen putting the hot compress over his lower leg, manually drawing up the blood in his body toward the region. He sips the cup of medicinal brew pressed into his hands, despite strong doubt in its capacity to do anything now for him in particular.

When he can acutely feel the spiritual energy circulating through his through him - pushed by Xichen’s intent and core, urging tissue to repair itself in the same way it would in a living body - Jin Guangyao finally admits the need to push on the issue of what they both have surely understood by now.

“I need to come with when you leave,” he says. He doesn’t make it a suggestion.

Lan Xichen closes his eyes, and Jin Guangyao’s still heart seems to squeeze like a vise. Go back to Gusu! he wants to yell; fuck the villagers, and fuck whatever further bloody deaths he won’t be conscious enough to care about causing.

Lan Xichen only nods, like it pains him. “Yes. I suppose you do.”