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Shuoyue meows as he turns off the stove and drains the cooked chicken breast, sliding half of it into her bowl once it’s cool enough. Liebing leaps off the counter to glare balefully.
“Aiyah, you’ll get yours soon enough,” Lan Xichen says, holding out an appeasing hand for her to sniff at. He shreds what’s left of the chicken and adds some of the broth to it—out of the two of them, Liebing is pickier with her food, preferring smaller pieces and the kind of wet food that Shuoyue would glance suspiciously at before eating anyway.
He sets down the second bowl, and Liebing curls herself around it, one half of a pair of parentheses. “Eat,” he says, fondly, running two fingers down her spine the way she likes. Evening light pours through the windows. It’d been raining, today, and the sky still holds remnants of stormclouds that bruise the light pale gray and lavender. Petrichor rises off the asphalt like a mirage. Perhaps by tomorrow, he’ll see the green of weeds and other forgotten things pressing through the cracks on the pavement below, spring miracles in their own right. He thinks of his plants, quietly lining the shelves of Gusu, growing all the while. He thinks of the future.
—
These days, Lan Xichen rises with the sun, and Gusu opens not long after. Its floor-length windows and greenery are far preferable to the quiet of his rooms. Even with Shuoyue and Liebing around, the air in the small apartment feels choking sometimes, and on those days, he opens extra early and brings the cats with him to work. They’re docile for the most part when this happens, used to the store by now and content to follow around the warm blocks of sunlight that shift from hour to hour, letting the occasional interested customer pet them without protest. It’s a quiet, mutually satisfactory way of life for everyone involved.
Today is a cats-at-work day. Lan Xichen slips in a full hour before he usually does and gets to work setting up: rearranging the new selection of spider plants he has displayed on the back wall, pruning the ficus that stands next to the door, sorting through orders and to-do lists and old receipts. He flips the sign to open at a quarter to eight, although the streets are still quiet and he doesn’t expect anyone to come in in earnest until midmorning.
Shuoyue naps near his wrists while he types out an email to a supplier. Liebing walks pointedly over the laptop keyboard and butts her head against his shoulders in a clear demand, so Lan Xichen lifts her up and lets her settle around his neck like a particularly thick scarf. When he takes a break from emails to check his phone, he has a message from Wangji—it’s a picture of Bichen with a giant piece of lettuce, his lop ears droopy and adorable. Xichen sends back a photo of Liebing, now sniffing the small lemongrass plant he keeps on his desk for this very reason, and then Shuoyue, who has replaced Liebing on his shoulders and has her head twisted at an awkward angle as she tries in vain to chew on his hair.
“Do you miss my long hair, Shuoyue?” he murmurs, petting the part of her back he can reach. “I’m sorry. I miss it too, sometimes.” He’d got it cut after everything, and then he’d locked himself in the bathroom of the salon building and cried ugly, heaving tears; he still surprises himself looking in the mirror sometimes, seeing how differently the new hair frames his face. Shuoyue begins a rumbling purr, apparently unconcerned with either his hair, or lack of. He closes his eyes for the briefest second to feel the comforting vibrations traveling through her body and down his back. Just enough to make it feel like the semblance of any touch.
—
Nie Mingjue comes in right before the midmorning rush, just as he does every Saturday once he’s finished his first class at the gym. It’s routine by now. He’s become Lan Xichen’s favorite customer, not that he’d ever admit it out loud. Still. Mingjue is blunt and straightforward and devastatingly stern-faced until he smiles, which is more and more often nowadays. He’d come in to buy something for his brother— Huaisang likes pretty things and the one plant he has is a venus fly trap that tried to eat my finger once, can you help —that first time, looking awkwardly out of place in Lan Xichen’s little store full of light and glass and delicate-veined leaves, but he’s now as much part of it as anything else.
“Good morning, Mingjue,” he says in greeting, and Shuoyue slinks hopefully into the room, clearly fishing for treats. “Don’t mind her, she’s hungry and thinks customers will give her things to eat. Xiao-Yue, xiao- Yue, stop bothering the nice man.” Lan Xichen clicks his tongue at her, and she lets out a pitiful mew that he has learned not to be fooled by, pushing harder against Nie Mingjue’s calves in a streak of blue-gray.
“Have you been starving your cats, Lan Xichen?” Nie Mingjue crouches to pet her. Her eyes go heavy-lidded with relaxation and she stretches out on the floor with a huff of air. Shuoyue is friendlier with customers in general, more so than Liebing who dislikes strangers more than the average therapy cat really should, but has a soft spot for Nie Mingjue always. Xichen empathizes.
“Xiao-Yue is always hungry. She’s a monster,” he says with another click of the tongue, to which the cat in question does not respond. Nie Mingjue laughs, rises, and slides a takeout cup onto the counter next to the cuttings of apple blossoms that Lan Xichen had put in water this morning. (The first flowers are coming to life now, staining the streets pale and tentative with their blooms. Xichen likes the magnolia tree outside Gusu best, mostly because he’d never seen magnolias back home. They are a reminder that he’s somewhere else now.)
“Coffee for you,” Nie Mingjue says. “Matcha latte with an espresso shot.”
Lan Xichen feels the smile creep up his face involuntarily. That’s another part of their routine—Nie Mingjue will bring in coffee for him sometimes, always completely unprompted, and Xichen will fight back the sudden rush of affection he feels. There are days when feeling too happy feels like a disloyalty, but Mingjue makes it easier to bear. “Thank you. You’re welcome to stay for a while, although there’s probably—”
“—going to be a rush around ten, I know,” Nie Mingjue finishes. “That’s alright, I like it here.”
Lan Xichen turns his head just slightly and counts the spider plants to keep his expression contained. Of course he knows that Nie Mingjue comes here weekly, and that he must enjoy it to keep coming, but it’s different hearing it said out loud. “Of course,” he says, voice almost certainly betraying a smile. Saturdays are good days, more often than not.
—
There are bad days, too.
A-Yao drifts in and out of his dreams. In the dreams, he is always a-Yao and Lan Xichen still loves him. (He’s leaning over Xichen in the dark of their bedroom, very pale, and very beautiful, too. He’s saying something clever, laughing, his hands tying braids into Xichen’s hair. His face goes terrible and blank as the allegations start rolling in— I never wanted to hurt you, I didn’t mean to hurt you.) Love doesn’t just disappear because giving it feels like a betrayal. Xichen remembers reading the news in the papers two weeks after they’d taken him—a-Yao—away for questioning in a flurry of police lights and reporters. Jin Guangyao, heir to Jin conglomerate, found dead in police custody. The headline had joined the pile of clippings he’d kept since the whole thing broke out, as reminder and punishment both: Jin family under scrutiny for corporate human rights violations, financial fraud. Police reopen investigation into workplace accidents of late son Jin Zixuan and wife. Jin Guangshan and Jin Guangyao linked to Xue Yang of Yi City case. Jin Guangyao facing charges for—
The brief investigation that followed had ruled the death a suicide. Jin Guangshan had eventually been given some sort of sentence that Lan Xichen had not bothered to look up, too far into the apathy to even try—but they’d never had the chance to put his only remaining son on trial, and Jin Guangyao eventually disappeared from public consciousness as the whole affair blew over far too quickly for strings not to have been pulled.
They had been living together at the time. Xichen had woken up in his bed every morning and cooked them both dinner on alternating nights, went grocery shopping and furniture shopping and ring shopping with him. Loved him. They could never have gone public with it, but there had been a small velvet box in their top drawer that they both knew about, an unspoken agreement. I never wanted to hurt you, I didn’t mean to hurt you. But the others, a-Yao? a-Yao? Guangyao, answer me. On the worst days, Lan Xichen makes methodical lists of arguments, for and against. Jin Guangyao had killed himself before there could be a trial—guilt is another name for evidence of wrongdoing. A-Yao’s father had been a callous, abusive man even towards his own sons, and something would have had to give. Jin Guangyao had stayed anyway. A-Yao would not have had a choice. Nothing excuses the result of actions taken, or not taken—not misplaced devotion, not love. And that’s the final nail in the coffin, isn’t it?
Sometimes, he is not putting a-Yao on trial, he is putting himself on one.
When Lan Xichen wakes up, it’s three in the morning and the room is pitch-dark. A-Yao had kissed him on the mouth, tender like a bruise, before he left for work that last day. Shouldn’t he have known? Shouldn’t he have seen through the deceptions that he now realizes started years ago, paid more attention to the building case against Jin Guangshan, a-Yao’s tight-lipped stories of work, instead of brushing it off in the name of gentleness? The shadows shift on his bedroom ceiling. Grief doesn’t disappear, either, even when everyone else in the world would call it unwarranted.
—
Wangji’s daily Bichen update comes in at its usual time. Lan Xichen clicks through the pictures and goes through the motions of missing him furiously.
It’s not as if Wangji is gone, of course, but he’s all the way across the country and he won’t visit until he is invited to do so—he respects Xichen’s decisions too much for that, and Xichen’s decision this time had been to ask for space. That’s why he’d left. That’s what Gusu was for, after all, something new to throw himself into while he tried to move on from old griefs and old dreams.
Lan Xichen makes sure to text back before feeding Liebing and Shuoyue, and half-heartedly heats up leftover youtiao for himself. He wanders around the living room with a mug of soy milk in one hand and a stick of youtiao between his teeth, misting the herbs in the windowsill garden even though it hasn’t quite been one week since their last watering. It’s quickly becoming warm enough that he might need to spray them twice every week, anyway. When he leaves for Gusu, the day is already punishingly hot, heat rolling over him in sheets and waves.
“It’s been long enough, Shuoyue, Liebing,” he murmurs as the cats nap in the sun at the front of the store. “It’s past time—leave it alone now, stop hurting, stop loving him, stop lingering.” Jin Guangyao had hurt other people, far more and far worse than he had Xichen. Lan Xichen is aware of the awful, self-martyring position he is casting himself in like a wound he won’t stop clawing at. Leave it alone now. It still sounds like someone else saying these things.
Today is a restless sort of day. He wants to be rid of this inertia, but doesn’t know how. Nie Mingjue doesn’t come in—of course he doesn’t, it’s a weekday—and Lan Xichen refuses to examine his disappointment too closely.
—
The hanging arrowhead plant he’d brought in the week before isn’t doing so well, leaves straggly with bleached-looking patches—needs more light, Xichen thinks. The rubber plant in the corner had been growing steadily taller and is perhaps monopolizing the sunlight from the front window a little too much. Lan Xichen unhooks the arrowhead and moves it over to a slightly brighter location. Liebing shifts like liquid at his ankles, winding around them and tracking the overhead motion of the plant with big golden eyes.
“Xiao-Bing, don’t look like you want to eat it so much. Arrowheads are poisonous for cats,” he chides, more out of habit than anything. Loneliness is a strange companion to have in the middle of a city. Lan Xichen is not discontent with its presence, exactly, but he finds himself holding entire conversations with the cats sometimes, over the most mundane of things—what to eat for dinner, repairs for the shop, his latest run-in with the cafe owner next door—and more serious ones, too. Liebing meows back, licking delicately at a bright paw. She in particular seems to have an uncanny knack for vocalizing when prompted.
“Should I repot the orchid, do you think? It’s becoming pot bound.” Liebing makes a little snorting sound. “The one on the left. I think the other ones are fine.” He pauses, looking at the low shelf of blooming orchids. Moth orchids aren’t really a popular selling choice, and he’s had some of these since the beginning. “They’re still my plants. We all outgrow things. Homes, pots.”
Lan Xichen picks up the one at the end and Liebing hops onto a stool with a mewl as if to watch him. “They are very lovely, Bingbing,” he agrees idly. Flowers dressed up as white as Liebing, heads bowed in a sweeping curve that waterfalls downwards. Their stems are deceptively strong. Bending and bending and never breaking.
Repotting is mindless work. He shakes the plant out of its current pot, and methodically snips off the bits of dead roots at the base, turning it around with his palms to make sure he doesn’t miss any. It’s a kind of monotony he’s grown used to. The new container is made from dull black terracotta, and it is the color of the soil and orchid compost between his nails as he packs down the potting mix. Lan Xichen thinks he likes it; proof that his hands can coax life out of something, can do good. Over time, the act has become less penitence and more simple awareness. Knowledge that he turns over in his mind, not quite sure how to understand it yet, a safeguard of sorts.
—
The door opens, and Shuoyue perks up, leaping down from a shelf to make a dash at the person who comes in. Lan Xichen is busy packing up an order for a small set of brightly colored air plants in glass terrariums, but he knows who it is immediately.
Nie Mingjue is leaning against a wall with Shuoyue puddled in his arms looking limp and boneless. “Hello,” he says. “This one seems to like me, she comes right up when I open the door now.”
“She likes you very much,” Lan Xichen assures him. “Bingbing does, too, she’s just more finicky in general.”
Nie Mingjue makes a hmph sound, and scratches behind Shuoyue’s ears, earning a swish of the tail draped over his arm. “Mm, I’ll win her over. How’ve you been, Xichen?”
They make idle conversation about business at Gusu, and Nie Mingjue’s part-time job as a sparring instructor. Liebing wanders in and out between their legs as Xichen complains about a particularly demanding customer, then this segues into a story about Nie Mingjue’s freelancing brother nearly being scammed by a client on his latest project.
Lan Xichen laughs. He doesn’t know Mingjue’s brother personally, but he almost feels as if he does with the amount of times the man comes up in dialogue. He finds himself strangely endeared. “How is Huaisang?”
“Just as awful and contrary as ever. I think he’s overwatering Baxia, the menace. She’s been looking a little pale recently.” Baxia is the Nies’ swiss cheese plant, and the singular largest, most threatening-looking houseplant Lan Xichen has ever seen, considering that it’s a swiss cheese plant. She’s well over three meters, leaves as wide as a man’s torso and honestly, the name doesn’t help, either. Nie Mingjue is absurdly defensive against any perceived slight to her.
Despite certain plant-related misdemeanors, he sounds unbelievably proud all the same as he goes on about Nie Huaisang’s accomplishments—“Did you know, he landed himself two new offers with that webcomic of his? Payment per page for a third series and possibly an adaption, the contracting is still in the works”—as Lan Xichen makes encouraging noises at the right moments. After a minute of this, Nie Mingjue turns to him. “Do you have a brother? You seem like an oldest child.”
“You are correct. His name is Wangji,” Lan Xichen says.
“Oh? And what’s he like?”
He has to think about that, his pause a beat longer than it should be considering how off-handed the question was. He finds himself second-guessing his judgements on even the people he loves best, now. “Serious. Stubborn. He doesn’t trust easily, but he’s loyal to the right people.”
“Do you… do you visit him often? Does he live around here?” Nie Mingjue’s voice is suddenly closer, or maybe Lan Xichen had just not been paying attention.
“Hm?”
“Ah, it’s nothing. It’s only that you sound like you miss him. Very much.”
“I do,” he says. He misses Wangji’s steadfast presence more than anything, but he can’t return home. Not quite yet. Nie Mingjue knows the what but not the why, and he doesn’t push now. They leave the conversation at that.
—
He takes out his little record of newspaper clippings to thumb through them; it’s masochistic even for him. Has it really been almost a year? All those old headlines, names and actions belonging to people now dead or disgraced or both. Looking at it like this, the truth is so obvious, splayed out in a paper trail for him to follow.
The narrative is always prettier in newsprint, neater. Only as infinite as the bounds of the paper that holds it. Had they known that a-Yao liked jasmine and hated waiting for water to boil, and had once had a petty argument with Xichen about which side of the bed they were each going to sleep on? Had they known that Lan Xichen was going to marry him, legal or not? Would it have made any difference?
He doesn’t blame the media. Certainly, he is past making excuses—for a-Yao, mostly, and for himself as well. He only wishes he were written in newsprint, too, that someone could flip the page and put an end to the sprawling narrative of his unwanted grief, his lonely rage.
Lan Xichen throws away the entire file, and decides to move on. It’s a bland and underwhelming choice, so he draws up one last list of arguments for himself. Stop hurting, stop loving him.
No, I know it doesn’t work like that.
—
Nie Mingjue brings him an iced matcha topped with cream the next time he visits, then just himself the time after that. He stops by more than once a week on Saturday mornings, now, and Lan Xichen finds himself admiring the magnetic lines of his forearms, the easy way he leans onto the register and grins. Maybe it’s the proximity getting to him. Maybe it’s the heat. (It isn’t—he’s been with enough men to know the difference, and know that sometimes, Nie Mingjue is looking back.)
“No cats today?”
“Just me. You only come here for my cats, I knew it.” Lan Xichen sweeps a pile of browned leaves into a dustpan and runs a wet rag over the surface of his counter. One corner of it comes away smudged with dirt.
“Their owner is lovely, too,” Nie Mingjue says. Mingjue’s face is always a study in honesty, broad and bold, and this time is no different. The flirtation plays out over it in unflinching shades, so at odds with his half-coy compliment that Lan Xichen feels the back of his neck flame.
“Do you want to go to dinner?” he asks, which hadn’t been what he had meant to ask at all. “I close early on weekends, and there’s a new dim sum place I’ve been wanting to try.”
Nie Mingjue looks him up and down slowly. The gaze is placid enough, but Lan Xichen feels it like a physical thing. “Dinner?”
“Come back at five, Mingjue. Let me take you to dinner.” He focuses very hard on the motion of the rag over the countertop. Left, right, repeat. Another routine, of sorts.
Mingjue comes back at five. They go for dim sum. It’s a hole-in-the-wall kind of place, with dimly lit booths and bustling waiters in uniform carrying bamboo baskets piled three high, clouds of steam rising thick from the top as their lids are pulled off.
Lan Xichen orders an absurd amount for both of them: xiaolongbao and two different kinds of shumai, hand-pulled noodles, baozi stuffed with mushroom and green pepper, pan-fried fish fillets, sliced pork over white rice. He is being selfish tonight, about hunger and other things. Stop loving him.
All the while, over the rich food that is too much for the two of them to finish, he watches to see if Nie Mingjue is watching him, if that weighted gaze will return. When it does, Lan Xichen bites into a dumpling shiny with soy sauce and chili oil, and tries to think about what it all means. No, he knows what it means. He has to find a way to hold it all in his hands now, indistinct and whole and precious. The noise of the restaurant turns his thoughts soft, smoky, and the summer night opens its mouth around them.
—
Nie Mingjue kisses him on a Tuesday. It’s the end of a slow day without many customers, and the heat is simmering—not quite at a boiling point, but threatening to spill over even as the afternoon draws to a close in a flare of pink and gold light. It’s not unexpected. They’d been heading there, Lan Xichen knows. All summer long, the plants had grown and Nie Mingjue had looked back at him, and Lan Xichen had told him in all the ways he knew how that it was safe, he wanted, he wanted.
Now, Nie Mingjue’s mouth brushes his in the quiet of the backroom where they can’t be seen, just the lightest of touches at first, and then again and again. It’s cool and dark here. Lan Xichen exhales against the kiss. His head tilts back, and Nie Mingjue cradles a hand against his jaw.
It lasts for a heartbeat, or a minute, or twenty, until Xichen, for no reason that he can justify even to himself, draws back and puts his hands on the unyielding slope of Nie Mingjue’s shoulders, holding him not quite at arms’ length, but away. His mouth is bruised dusky, and Lan Xichen looks at it only to avoid looking at his eyes that are surely full of questions. Hurt, even.
“I misread,” Nie Mingjue says simply after a moment, and Lan Xichen doesn’t answer, which seems to be taken as an affirmation.
Mingjue nods once. “I’m sorry,” he murmurs. There is a single, brief touch to his cheek, nothing more than friendly, and then he’s gone. Lan Xichen sits down right there in the backroom for a long, long time, and stares at the patch of light marking out the doorway. He is surrounded by plants—living things, growing things. He has not been touched in so long, and he aches and aches for it. Tender like a bruise.
—
Lan Xichen puts his hands all over himself in the warmth of the shower, trying to pretend they are somebody else’s. His mind trips over names and faces, so for now he forgoes both, just imagines pairs of disembodied hands and nothing more. A catalogue of parts: his mouth, his wrists. The jut of his clavicles. His ribs. His cock, still soft, and the crease at the top of his thigh, the small of his back. The places where grief and desire, those awful extremes, separate themselves into muted things, untouchable against the immediacy of a body. Bearable intimacies are found piece by piece.
The steam from the water clouds up the mirror so that he has to rub at the surface to see himself again. His face is beyond pale, a moon hanging above a lake, or inside it, plucked from the sky to drown in dark water. These days, wanting comes slowly, or not at all.
—
Autumn sweeps in with a vengeance; outside is rain-slick and windy for days, and the gutters overflow with muddied leaves. Lan Xichen finds himself sleeping more and more, an instinctual, hibernating creature somewhere in the middle of his chest, the dull chill in the air permeating even through layers of duvets and forcing him back to slumber far past when he should be waking up. Shuoyue bats her paws at him. Liebing walks over his arms, and eventually they learn to just curl up at the foot of his bed in the warmest spots on the days he doesn’t get up.
He’d thought he was getting better. He was supposed to be getting better. He had done everything right, and it was falling apart around him.
A-Yao’s ghost sits next to him in every iteration—laughing, angry, scarlet lining his throat in wedding colors and blood both. (There had been no particulars released on the method of suicide, and Lan Xichen had not been keen to dig, so instead, he lets his imagination fill in the gaps with varying degrees of cruelty.) How much of it was deception, and how much was the worst kind of willful blindness? He himself does not know the answer. There is no way to know, which should make him feel better, but does the opposite.
He calls Wangji once. His brother does not answer; only reasonable, as it is later at night than it should be, and Wangji has always been better at keeping to a consistent nine-to-five sleep schedule than him. It is a stupid, impulsive decision. But Lan Xichen is so, so lonely, has been so silently and dutifully lonely for months now, has tried to atone, has tried to forgive and be forgiven, and all of that takes a toll on the boundaries of what can be endured.
When the call rings to voicemail, he hits the button and starts the recording, where instead of talking about himself, he tells stories about Liebing and Shuoyue and the philodendron he keeps in the kitchen that is withering into itself for lack of light. No, lack of watering. Something Lan Xichen himself has neglected.
“How do I learn to trust myself again? I’m so tired, Wangji,” he says, apropos of nothing at all, going from plants to something entirely different, and as he says this, he realizes it is true. He is exhausted of making excuses, of leaving, of thinking himself both intolerably selfish and ignorantly selfless in turns. What would it take for him to put it down?
He doesn’t send it. He doesn’t answer the call that returns the next morning either. A copy of the voicemail stays autosaved in his drafts, stagnant and unobtrusive, like everything else in his life.
—
The gingko leaves are turning inwards, bronze-gold for the last time before they fall. A-Yao had favored gold. A-Yao had—
His thoughts are fractured, these days, jumping from one track to the next as if in an effort to outrun each other, and the sunlight grows thin and watery. All of his plants settle into a peaceable sort of dormancy as the growing period dies with the season.
A blink, and he’s at Gusu, the door sliding open with a creak. A man in loose, dark clothes stares at the wall of medium-sized houseplants with such a naked longing that Lan Xichen feels compelled to talk to him.
“Is there something I can do for you?” he asks, watching as the stranger’s head turns around. His hands fly up to chest level and begin signing. The look in his eyes doesn’t go away.
Lan Xichen doesn’t know how to sign; he began learning rudimentary fingerspelling while at school, but that had been a long time ago, and he can no longer reliably remember even that. “I don’t sign, but—would it be alright for you to write it out, so I can help? I have paper in the backroom.”
A nod. He gets paper and a pen.
“You seem interested in the houseplants on the far wall,” he begins, tentatively.
I wouldn’t know how to take care of them.
“ Ah, well, some of them are quite easy to care for,” Lan Xichen says. “The spider plants on the top shelf, they’re a popular option for beginners because they don’t need much watering.”
The man shakes his head before he’s even finished speaking.
I can’t take care of them. The first three characters are scratched in almost viciously, ink bleeding into the paper.
Lan Xichen pauses. Something about this man’s frantic desperation is deeply familiar to him. “I don’t have an answer for you,” he says.
A scrawl. I know. I’m sorry, I don’t know why I came here.
“No, you don’t—no, stay, please. What’s your name?”
Two characters; deliberately sketched, but a little loose and untidy nonetheless, as if its writer has not practiced that particular combination of meanings in a while. Song Lan.
“Song Lan,” Lan Xichen repeats. Mist, haze; it’s an elegant name. “Alright. So you want plants. Something growing, but you don’t…” Suddenly, he remembers his own voice fumbling for words into an unsent voicemail, and the breath he’s holding grows stale in his lungs. He exhales. Realizes. “You don’t trust yourself to grow it.”
Not so much a nod as a jerk of the head. The next sentences come out strangely formal, even for a written medium, and Lan Xichen wonders if formality becomes its own kind of distance, if it is something else to call a shield.
I am looking for living things. I have been around the dead for too long.
“I am looking for atonement,” he offers, because it feels as if he should. “If my hands can be good, and kind, then perhaps it would make up for--everything.” Everything else they had been complicit in.
How profound of you. There is something on the stranger’s face close to amusement, not quite rude but too raw to be called gentle. Lan Xichen smiles wanly.
“It is a selfish quest, in its own way.”
Has it succeeded?
That takes him by surprise. Most people would simply tell him to stop. “ I’m not sure.”
Song Lan takes this with the quiet grace of someone who is used to devastating, unwanted answers. Someone I loved hurt me very much, and he died, he writes on the other side of the paper, as if he cannot help it, and they both let that sit for a minute. The first characters to mark an otherwise blank page. Grief recognizes grief in many forms.
Lan Xichen thinks about a-Yao. Every living body has an instinct that forces it to draw breath and keep living; how painful, how alone it must have been to be in battle against even that. How alone it must have felt to win. “It was not your fault,” he says. It’s easier to tell it to somebody else. Song Lan fixes him with a look— it was not his, either, and Lan Xichen cannot quite bring himself to agree or disagree. The truth is rarely ever that simple. He says as much out loud.
And yet we are alive, and they are not.
It is a callous way of viewing things. It is also the truth, and a simple one at that.
Song Lan leaves with a moth orchid—its palm-sized flowers are pure white, and they stand out against the dark foliage. Lan Xichen remembers repotting that very plant, in the spring that now feels like a lifetime ago.
“The flowers bloom through winter,” Lan Xichen says before sending him off. “I think you will do a beautiful job of keeping it that way.”
Bright autumn shatters through the treetops as he watches the man’s silhouette disappear down the street, out of sight. Fall is when the dormant period begins, and most plants withdraw to conserve energy for the winter ahead. To survive. He knows that Song Lan will never come back to Gusu. But somewhere, a moth orchid will bloom through the winter.
—
The midafternoon sun curls over him. He’d overslept again, the day slipping away far too quickly like water on rocks. The next time he wakes up—it isn’t really, but it feels as if it is, because it’s the first time the static has left his head in weeks—he’s lost days to the apathy, and somehow a cold, dry winter is already creeping up the windowpanes.
Winter light is unlike other kinds of light. It’s thin and sharp and sweet, a blade coaxed between the ribs and left to ossify. Shuoyue and Liebing run wildly in it, all around the apartment. This time of year is kind to them in a way it is not for Lan Xichen; they had both been named in winter, and for it, too.
He makes it as far as the couch today, and pulls two layers of blankets around himself as he starts up his laptop to check the Gusu accounts. He’d let things fall apart, again, let them gather dust while he put all his energy into staying present. Survival mechanisms. Minds have a way of outliving their own selves.
Shuoyue pushes her gray head under his hand and yowls, a long, plaintive note.
“I’ve really let things go this time, haven’t I, xiao-Yue?” he asks, quietly. He’ll make amends—Wangji, Gusu. His cats. The plants.
—
It snows early and often that year. Every morning for two weeks straight, the city emerges dusted white, sunglow casting blue shadows over the unsteady piles of last night’s snowfall. Gusu opens its doors to a steady stream of customers despite the cold outside, and its large windows steam up with heat and breath. In the absence of warmth, every stranger becomes a visitor looking for connection.
Liebing and Shuoyue continue to make the trek to work with him every day; not because he is so terribly unhappy with his home anymore, but because he has gotten used to their presence. The exact sounds of their feet on the tile floor, their small soft bodies draped across him as he putters around the plants. In the evening, he’ll take them both home again and watch them lounge around the apartment before mealtime, coming up to nudge their heads against his legs in an effort to beg for food, now, impatient and imperious in the way cats are. They discover together that, hilariously, neither Shuoyue nor Liebing have any response to catnip whatsoever despite their propensity for bothering all of Xichen’s other plants, so he gets them containers of lemongrass and chamomile and licorice root instead. Liebing likes to roll around in peppermint, so he sets aside a large flat planter of it for her. The kitchen becomes cluttered with pots of increasingly eclectic patterns, and plants jostle each other for sunlight until Lan Xichen finally caves and starts organizing the mess in earnest. Every living body has an instinct that forces it to draw breath and keep living; plants are no different. The thought doesn’t hurt quite as much anymore.
So the lip of the winter passes in increments. Lan Xichen keeps the store afloat, keeps himself alive. Loneliness, like hunger, leaves behind space that can only be filled in pieces.
—
He calls Wangji again after the turn of the year—solar, not lunar—when everything is so achingly new that it feels stilted under its own weight. Perhaps Wangji is looking at the same waxing moon that he is, all the way across the country and on the other side of the line.
“I am coming home. For Yuanxiao, or maybe sooner.” Lan Xichen rushes out the words as soon as the call connects. There are some things which can only be said recklessly.
There’s a sharp intake of breath on the other end.
“Were you afraid I wouldn’t?” he asks, gentling his voice.
“This city hurt you so much, and you were so set on leaving,” Wangji finally says. “I was afraid—” He breaks off, and doesn’t finish the sentence.
“I’m sorry,” he says. He had had his reasons, and they were necessary to him at the time. It does not mean he has not caused harm, or that it had been completely fair to everyone around him.
“Will you stay?”
“I’m not sure. I’ve learned to have a life here.” That, too, feels like a kind of betrayal that will fade with time. “I will come back, though. I won’t just leave you behind.”
There’s a long pause. There often is, with Wangji, who is so set on finding the right words, the right reactions for everything. Lan Xichen adores him.
“Are you happy, gege?”
That is a difficult question. He could do everything right, and never manage to figure out happiness in time. (Wangji has not called him gege in years. For a moment, time crumples onto itself and Xichen is twelve, sixteen, seventeen, and his brother is looking at him with the wide, bright eyes of childhood. Before everything else, it had been the two of them under a single moon.) “I will learn how to do that, too,” Xichen says. “Did you know, the cats were a great help, on the worst days. I haven’t thanked you for them yet.”
“Come home, and thank me there, then,” Wangji orders in his quiet way, an edge to his voice that borders on stubborn petulance; it’s one only Lan Xichen can pick up on.
“Yuanxiao at the very latest,” he promises. “We’ll light lanterns and send off the year.” He sees the scene now: both of them by the riverside with the other festival-goers, dark smudges in a filter of red and gold. Light streaming from both their hands as the new year comes in.
—
There is one more amend to make.
The text thread lies blank on his phone as Lan Xichen goes about his day; opening Gusu, making his rounds first with a mister and then with a pair of hand pruners, attending to the trickle of customers that come in wanting plants and guidance on how to take care of them. He glances over to the dark screen of the phone at regular intervals throughout the day, acutely aware that he is falling back into the old familiar routines of desire and denial.
He sends the picture before he can regret it. It’s a shot of Shuoyue and Liebing, faces pressed close against the camera as if clamoring for attention. They miss you, he types. Both of them.
When he checks again in the evening, Nie Mingjue has replied. I miss them, too.
Lan Xichen forces himself to feed the cats before doing anything else, spooning small pieces of boiled carrots on top of dry kibble in two bowls and watching them eat hungrily. Come to Gusu. The cats will be there, and I will be there, too.
He watches the gray typing… bubble appear and disappear. He wouldn’t know how to answer, either.
Nie Mingjue does not ask the difficult, utterly reasonable questions any other person would have. I look forward to it, he simply says. Lan Xichen imagines him in pieces; soon, perhaps, he will not have to anymore.