Liánlí, who was not Xingyi, but who had a similar laugh, and who a similar habit of blushing then looking down and away when faced with matters of great emotional significance, and whose fingers now caressed Yùchén’s elegant black neck when he played, as Xingyi’s fingers had once done.
Liánlí, who was not Xingyi, but had recovered some of his memories, and had heard more about him from Huanxi—here and there, in fits and starts, but ultimately not very much at all, both because Huanxi seemed reluctant to talk too much about the Kaifeng he’d loved before and because Liánlí felt deeply reluctant to ask, as if doing so might upset the Incredibly Nice Thing they’d fallen into since Huanxi had landed on Earth back in mid-September—but also Liánlí, who didn’t really know Xingyi, and knew that he didn’t know Xingyi, and knew that, as a consequence, he was very likely being incredibly unfair to Xingyi in his own head.
Liánlí, who was not Xingyi, but nevertheless wanted to make peace with Xingyi, or with his ghost, or whatever.
As always, Liánlí-Kaifeng’s first stop after dropping into his Wonder had to be the pomegranate tree that he only knew was supposed to be a pomegranate tree, thanks to Xingyi’s memories. Blinking up at its bare, black, tentacle-looking branches—undulating their reach out into all possible directions, as they did—Kaifeng wondered if he’d ever get the poor thing to bear fruit again. It seemed hardier and healthier, he thought, than it had when he’d first come up here. While he didn’t consider himself a gardener by any stretch of the imagination—and however much he yearned for the river to simply fix itself so he could use that water instead of hauling it from the spring over by the nearby town—Xingyi’s irrigation system seemed to work perfectly, keeping the tree well-supplied while Liánlí was away on Earth.
Still, the tree that marked the final resting place of his predecessors’ parents deserved the best care that Liánlí could give it. Xingyi had planted it for them himself, a moment of so-called weakness, of prioritizing his love of them as their son over his duties to all the dead souls buried at Kaifeng. He’d felt so powerfully that he wasn’t allowed to give them this memorial, that someone would surely punish him or hold it as a mark against him as the Knight of Kaifeng, and even thinking of that now made Liánlí-Kaifeng’s heart quiver as if it could feel the individual cracks spreading through its foundation.
He couldn’t begin to know how to relate to Xingyi’s feelings, not exactly. If he closed his eyes and concentrated very hard, he could almost remember what it had felt like to love Huáng Yìchéng and Xiǎo Yùlán, to love Huáng Zhìmíng and Yáng Zǐmei. Only a little bit, though. Only almost. In the moment, when all the childhood memories that came to mind had happened, Liánlí expected that whatever he/Zhìháo had felt toward their parents and grandparents had felt, to Zhìháo, like real love. It was only after meeting Hayden in a freshman orientation “getting to know your hallmates” game that Liánlí had even once considered that real love did not so often come with fear tainted around the edges.
That, maybe, his parents and grandparents—maybe Huáng Yìchéng, Xiǎo Yùlán, Huáng Zhìmíng, and Yáng Zǐmei—had never created an environment that allowed their children to really love them. If love was a rosebush, then at the Huáng house in Boston, there’d been no blossoms, only thorns. Always only the thorns.
In so many ways, though, this love that he more or less remembered having felt at one point? It seemed more distant from Liánlí than the love that Xingyi had borne in his heart for his mother, Xuànyuè Yan of Saturn, and his father, Hishiro Kurogane of Murikabushi—two people whom Liánlí had never met, could never meet. Zhìháo’s parents and grandparents might have had a blood claim on Liánlí, but they belonged even more solidly to another person and another life. For all Liánlí didn’t know about Xuànyuè and Hishiro—which was most things, really, because he knew hardly anything about them—they had been parents to a person who felt more firmly like a part of Liánlí than Zhìháo did.
Where Xingyi was an obscurity with whom Liánlí longed to connect, Zhìháo felt like a hairshirt he’d never entirely consented to wear. Not that he’d never “willingly” participated in the creation and perpetuation of inflicting Zhìháo on people, because Liánlí had done that? But for far too long, he hadn’t known that he’d had the option of refusing, of being Liánlí and not Zhìháo. Certainly, Huáng Yìchéng and Xiǎo Yùlán had never wanted him to realize that. Never wanted to let go of the middle child they’d used as a constant whipping boy and perpetual scapegoat.
Was part of this disparity in acceptance down to Huanxi, Liánlí wondered as he glanced to his right-hand side and the distinct lack of one (1) Huan-ge? ……A little bit, yeah, he had to admit. Huanxi had loved Xingyi so powerfully that Liánlí had felt it even through Xingyi’s memories, and he certainly seemed to like Liánlí well enough. Liánlí, who was not Xingyi, but had gotten to taste what Xingyi never had with Huan-ge because he’d come to incorrect conclusions about the nature of Huanxi and Xingyi’s relationship and acted accordingly, hoping desperately that some other twink in Saturn colors wouldn’t rush in and sweep Huanxi off his feet.
But would Huanxi love Zhìháo? Could Huanxi love Zhìháo? Zhìháo, who was not Liánlí or Xingyi, because Liánlí disavowed every conceivable aspect of that petty, jealous, raging little edgelord, that arrogant little b*****d who made his pain into everybody else’s problem and did heartless things like ruining Qiye’s birthday party by punching Ming-er for just running his mouth like every other s**t-head teenager, that melon-headed b***h’s whelp whose wolf-heart and dog-lungs were drowned and encrusted in so much pig lard that he’d needed to leave town and make himself an entirely new person just to ******** act right around people? That Zhìháo? ******** seemed unlikely that Huan-ge could ever love that ugly little thing.
“Hún dàn,” Kaifeng cursed under his breath, wrinkling his nose as if the mere memory of Zhìháo smelled worse than the rot-water he dredged up whenever he tried overturning the algal blooms that clogged up the river.
Rolling his eyes, Liánlí-Kaifeng glanced to his left-hand side and half-expected to see that Ming-er had somehow appeared beside him—whether in his day-to-day Ming-er attire or perhaps as Selenga—with his arms crossed over his chest and his face screwed up in a Very Frustrated Pout, ready to scold Kaifeng for saying not very kind but entirely accurate things about Zhìháo (mostly) in the privacy of his own mind. Of course, that hadn’t happened. Ming-er couldn’t make it to Kaifeng’s fields without Liánlí-Kaifeng bringing him, same as he couldn’t visit Ming-er’s Wonder without Ming-er taking him; that was simply how things worked.
……Still. Ming-er would have objected, had he been here to do so and equipped with the telepathy to know what Kaifeng had been thinking. Would have pointed out that this was not an example of Kaifeng showing kindness and compassion to the teenager he’d been once, despite knowing that it hurt Ming-er for him to be like this, because without that insufferable edgelord and everything that he’d survived, Liánlí wouldn’t even exist, as the person he was today.
“Wouldn’t exist without Xingyi either,” Liánlí-Kaifeng muttered, unbuttoning and then rolling back one of his sleeves, “but we still haven’t decided if he’s included in this order of protection or not.…”
Regardless, the sharp, skin-on-skin crack burst through the calm around him as Liánlí-Kaifeng slapped his own cheek.
Yes, he was alone, so he could have gotten away with not holding himself accountable for Failure To Check Self About Mentally Disparaging Zhìháo (not to mention having significantly more compassion for an equally edgelord-flavored alcoholic who could’ve saved Huanxi a good thousand-and-three years of anguish if he’d at least written “I love you” in one of his letters, just once)……but what Liánlí-Kaifeng did while on his own still mattered. Habits totally fell apart without consistent practice, including in solitude. Right now, he wasn’t keeping his promise to Ming-er to work on………all of this messy s**t about Zhìháo. For that, he got a slap.
Cheek still stinging, Liánlí-Kaifeng sighed and set off for the tower. He wasn’t in a good headspace. He’d come back to the poor tree later, after he spent some time digging around in Xingyi’s things to try and understand more about him. Xingyi, and even more importantly his parents, deserved better from Liánlí-Kaifeng than such a muddied-up, messy b***h observance as all this.
wc: 1,560.
