Work Text:
A lovestruck Romeo sings the streets a serenade
Laying everybody low, with a love song that he made
Finds a convenient streetlight, steps out of the shade,
says something like: you and me, babe - how about it?
One of the things March used to do when they sat down for a meal was to get everyone to pick a song that they’d put on the phonograph in some hypothetical situation, like the song you’d march down your wedding aisle to, or the theme song of the movie of your life, or the music you wanted to start playing in the second phase of your boss battle (okay, this last one was more likely Mr Yang’s suggestion). Long after Dan Heng last sat down for a meal with March - six hundred years, give or take - he still found himself thinking about songs, shuffling through the music library in his phone, pausing when he heard something playing in the parlour car that he remembered March or Stelle or Mr Yang or Himeko - or the many other Nameless who had come after them - putting on the phonograph, and trying to remember why they’d chosen it. What it had meant to them. Because if it meant something to them, then it meant something to him, too; because they’d meant the world to him, and still did, even if they weren’t in it any more.
Of course, it was possible that other people had put songs on the phonograph to play, too. But they’d had lots of visitors on the Express over the years, and Dan Heng wasn’t sure he could remember all of them by now. And although the Nameless tended to only invite people whom they trusted and liked to visit the Express, Dan Heng couldn’t think of a visitor who’d meant so much to him that a song they’d chosen could make him stop and pause and try to remember who it was, what the song had meant to them.
“You can change the song that’s playing, if you want. Pom-Pom doesn't mind. And no one else is awake to complain.”
Pom-Pom’s voice startled him, but after the initial shock, he found it oddly reassuring to look down and see the conductor looking curiously up at him. It was early, far too early for the breakfast service to run, and everyone else on the Express was likely still asleep. This last bunch of Namelesses were all such incurable night owls. Dan Heng had grown fond of them, of course; it was hard not to care for people when fate smushed you together in its great fist and threw you in a curveball across the far reaches of the universe together. Hard not to cling to each other; impossible not to try to hold on to them even as they were letting go of you, a smile on their faces, an ache in your throat, tears in your eyes.
“Thank you, Pom-Pom,” Dan Heng said. “But I was actually thinking of something else. Could I get the train to make an unscheduled stop?”
“Sure.” Pom-Pom looked up at him, big blue eyes blinking under the brim of his hat. “Huh, are you going on holiday? Did you apply for leave?”
“I’m not going on holiday,” Dan Heng said. “I’m going home.”
“Oh,” Pom-Pom said. “Okay. It’s important to go home sometimes!”
“You’ve never gone home, Pom-Pom.”
“Pom-Pom’s home is the Express. Pom-Pom is always home!”
“I see,” Dan Heng said. “Well, the Express has been my home for a long time, too. But I have to go back to the Luofu now.”
“Pom-Pom remembers the Luofu. It’s been so long. Why are you only going home now, Dan Heng?”
“I wasn’t sure if it would be okay, if I went back before now,” Dan Heng said. “But now - it’s time.”
“Time for?”
“Time for me to go,” Dan Heng said. “And there’s only one place my people can go, when it’s our time.”
Traveling, if you are impatient, can get really frustrating. Dan Heng, who had always been a very patient person, found himself tapping his foot as the starskiff he had boarded remained humming in its dock. But at least he’d managed to squeeze himself aboard this starskiff at all; on the other side of the gangway the queue of passengers waiting to board the next one, that he’d just narrowly escaped, was growing longer and longer, and the Cloud Knights who had showed up to manually manage traffic were getting more and more antsy as the irritable commuters they were holding up began to heckle them. He blinked as a very young girl hurled a particularly colourful adjective at one of the hapless knights like a projectile; perhaps time had eroded his memories, but he certainly didn’t remember the citizens of the Luofu being so, well, outspoken.
“Kids these days,” a lady next to him huffed. “Who’d have dared to speak to an elder, let alone a Cloud Knight, like that, five hundred years ago?”
“Oh, only you would know, dearest,” the Foxian man with her said teasingly, patting her arm. “Come now, times have changed. Even the High Elder swears when she’s off duty and losing at celestial jade.”
“The High Elder?” Dan Heng didn’t realize he’d spoken out loud until he saw the Foxian man and his sweetheart looking, surprised, at him.
“My friend works at the game parlour,” the Foxian man said. “So sometimes the High Elder sneaks in through the back and plays with any of the staff who aren’t on duty. She’s really bad at celestial jade. Been a couple years and she still hasn’t gotten much better at it. But she always buys them a round of drinks and pays up her losses, even if she has to leave suddenly.”
“How times have changed,” Dan Heng said. “Where would I go to find this parlour?”
He followed the directions the amiable Foxian man gave him, and waited in a corner of the parlour, ordering the same drink for a few hours, until a couple of Cloud Knights came in and looked at him, and he looked at them, and from behind them Bailu pushed her way through and shook her head at them. He knew it was her because he'd seen her via hologram a few times since he'd last been aboard the Luofu, so he'd known when she had finally - to her immense relief - physically grown up, and pretty tall at that - but he hadn’t expected her features to look so sharp and delicate in person. So - he could not help but think - Foxian. But she no longer wore her hair in braids, and no Foxian girl worth her lovely legs would have been caught dead in the long, full skirts Bailu seemed to deliberately favour for this very reason.
“I get that you didn’t exactly want to show up and bang on the front doors of the Alchemy Commission,” she said, “but I’m pretty sure you have my number.”
“They let you have a phone now?” Dan Heng asked. “In my day you could only contact the High Elder through an audience with the Preceptors.”
“I have your number,” Bailu said. “You gave it to me, remember? In case the Luofu ever needed you again.”
“I thought the Luofu has everything it needs now,” Dan Heng said, looking directly at her. “Have you not been the High Elder for at least six hundred years now? Imbibitor Lunae?”
Bailu looked at him wordlessly. For a moment there was a roiling darkness and violet lightning flashing ominously in her gaze, and it was impossible to tell if the twin shadows upon her head were bejeweled horns or fluffy fox ears. For a moment Dan Heng forgot who he was looking at, where he was, who he was, and lifted a hand as if he could reach across the wide and insurmountable gulf of time and events that had passed, to cling once again to something, someone who had long since passed from this world. But then Bailu scrunched up her face and stuck her tongue out at him, and he was back in a game parlour in the Exalting Sanctum, nursing a lukewarm mug of milk tea and facing off with the current Vidyadharan High Elder of the Xianzhou Luofu.
“I thought there used to be another way to contact the High Elder before me,” Bailu said. “Didn’t he have friends who did have phones, who he used to hang out with almost every day, even though he was told repeatedly not to?”
Dan Heng looked down into his milk tea and stirred it a bit, to avoid looking at Bailu.
“Just so you know,” Bailu said, taking a seat at the table and curling her tail around her legs, “whenever I had ancestral dreams, I’d do my very best to forget those of your memories that seemed purely personal. I’m sorry. It’s not like I want to invade your privacy.”
“It’s not my privacy. They’re not my memories.”
Bailu sighed. “It’s been at least six hundred years, and you’re still really sore about that, huh?”
“How’s Jing Liu these days?” Dan Heng said, bluntly. “How are you two getting along?”
The thunderstorm flashed again in Bailu’s eyes, but it faded, and he thought there was even a hint of tenderness in her downcast face.
“Touche,” Bailu said. “She’s all right. We don’t talk much. It’s not like I’m someone really special to her, anyway.. No one is. No one can be. That’s how her mara management works. Although she’s actually gotten pretty buddy-buddy with Yanqing.. Maybe, one day, she’ll let him kick her ass back a little bit.”
“Yanqing’s still around?”
“He’s not that old. Got a hundred or so years in him still. Just like me.”
“Nice,” Dan Heng said. “I hope you both make the most of it.”
Bailu looked him up and down, studying every frayed hem and tear in his battered coat and boots, the scratches Cloud-Piercer had collected on its blade and handle over the centuries, the thin lines of scars across his lip and jaw that he seemed to have deliberately chosen not to let heal perfectly. He still wore the one bracer on his right arm, its original fastenings long since fallen apart and replaced - several times - by new ones, but he had also accumulated a few more trinkets whose significance she didn’t recognize. An unfamiliar symbol pinned to the lapel of his coat, a bell charm fastened just below Cloud-Piercer’s blade, and two worn rings on the same finger of one hand: one silver with a tiny gold orb showing through a crack in it, like a stylized Stellaron, the other a cutesy, delicate band, inlaid with pink and pale blue gems in the shape of a four-petaled flower. He withdrew his hands and laid them on his lap, under the table, when he saw Bailu looking.
“Have you?” she asked. “Made the most of your time, I mean.”
“I think so,” Dan Heng said. “But it still feels like it wasn’t enough. Not my time, I mean. You and I, we get a lot of time. But my time with them.. It didn’t feel anywhere near enough. If I could have given them some of my time, a hundred of my years so they could have had even one more..”
Bailu coughed loudly.
“None of that talk here,” she said. She didn’t say, not after the last time , but they were both thinking it. The same way she didn’t ask about Blade, but they were both thinking about him, looking at the bracer on Dan Heng’s arm. And..
“Someone’s still waiting to see you here, you know,” Bailu said. “Been waiting a long time. Won’t you go see him?”
Dan Heng was silent for a while. Eventually he asked: “He’s still here?”
“I moved in with him some time ago,” Bailu said. “Not in that way. He’s a really nice housemate, you know. And I’m free from the Alchemy Commission! And someone’s got to treat his mara.”
“How is he?”
As soon as he spoke, Dan Heng bit his lip, as if he’d only just heard himself sound far more concerned than he’d wanted to.
“I don’t know how he does it, honestly,” Bailu said. “Jing Liu offered to teach him how to manage the mara, but he didn’t want to do it her way. Didn’t want to have to forsake everything else for the glory of the sword. Didn’t want to have to forget.”
“He has to forget,” Dan Heng said. “The more he remembers, the stronger the mara will take hold..”
“That’s the thing. He does forget, but somehow, he only forgets the bad things.” Bailu stared at her reflection in the table, as if she felt guilty for being one of the bad things. “Some days he looks me dead in the eye and calls me Baiheng. I think he’s forgotten everything bad that happened to her, with her.. Forgotten everything bad that’s happened to him. Sometimes he still thinks he’s a cadet, and nervously asks me if Jing Liu is in a good mood.. Sometimes he’ll tease me and ask me if Yingxing has asked me out on a date yet. But then the next day he’ll ask, hey, Bailu, isn’t the Express supposed to pass by again this week? I know I just went to visit, but do you think I can apply for leave and go again?”
A song came, unbidden, to Dan Heng’s mind, a memory of a tall man fiddling delightedly with the phonograph in the parlour car, his long white hair falling over his red-caped shoulders like clouds descending a sandstone cliff. Asking: “What’s this song about? Who’s Romeo?” And Stelle and March immediately reenacting Romeo and Juliet (the play) for Jing Yuan and Bailu's benefit, reaching out to rope Dan Heng into being Mercutio or Tybalt, but he wriggled away in the nick of time and hid behind a plant to watch March climb up onto a chair as Stelle knelt dramatically below, while their audience of one Luofu general (off-duty) and one High Elder (to-be) cheered them on enthusiastically.
You and me, babe; how about it?
“That was so long ago,” he said.
“I know. Don’t ask me how many times I’ve had to listen to that song,” Bailu said. “But he never gets tired of it.”
“Isn’t it difficult to live like that?”
“He’s retired. He can do what he likes. Although I think what he would most like to do, he never could, because it involved someone who never came back. But you’re here now, aren’t you?”
Dan Heng pushed his chair back and tried to get to his feet. It took more effort than he remembered, and he didn’t push Bailu away when she reached out to steady him, offer her shoulder to drape his arm around.
“I don’t know if I have enough time to see him before I have to reach the seas,” he said. “Can you..”
“Yes,” Bailu said. “Of course I can. I’m the fucking High Elder. I’d better be able to get hold of one senile old man and take him along with us.”
The ancient sea, if you didn’t know what it was, looked a lot like a normal sea, and if you liked the seaside and sand and taking off your shoes to splash around in the shallows, chase the tide as it rolled out to the horizon and then run, screaming and laughing, as it turned around and chased you back - was actually a lot of fun. Although Dan Heng felt a pang of guilt for horsing around in such sacred grounds that had surely witnessed so many key moments in the Vidyadharan cycle of life. But when he looked at his companions, he felt like Bailu and Jing Yuan had no qualms about this at all, shrieking with laughter as they splashed each other and ran up and down the shore.
“Are you sure you aren’t going to get into trouble for this?” he asked.
Bailu looked up and then spat sand and saltwater disgustedly out of her mouth for a while before she was able to reply: “They only said you need the High Elder as escort to enter here. They never said you can’t splash in the shallows.”
Dan Heng sighed. Then he became aware of Jing Yuan looking curiously at him, through the sopping wet tangles of hair over his face. For all that Bailu kept calling him a dotty old man, he didn't seem to have aged a day since the last time Dan Heng saw him, when he'd come aboard the Express to visit. Perhaps he seemed a little smaller in regular clothes without the heavy armour padding him out, and maybe his luxurious cloud of fluffy white hair seemed a little more wild and unkempt because he didn’t have the image of the Arbiter-General to keep up these days, but next to Bailu, who was almost unrecognizable against the last memory Dan Heng had of her - tiny, pigtailed, chubby-cheeked - Jing Yuan seemed virtually unchanged, until he opened his mouth.
“Sorry,” Jing Yuan said, grinning sheepishly. “I know Bailu just said it, but I’m really bad with names. Who are you again?”
“It’s Dan Heng,” Bailu said. “From the Express. He was hiding behind the plants because he didn’t want to act in the play. Remember?”
“Romeo and Juliet,” Jing Yuan said. “I remember. It’s a nice song. So you’re one of the Nameless.” He cleared his throat and assumed a formal pose, shoulders square, hands behind his back. “The Luofu owes you a great debt..”
“No, no, we don’t! We sorted that all out a long time ago.” Bailu shook her head, hands on hips. And Dan Heng thought, it wasn’t that she now looked very different from the little dragon girl she had been, but that she reminded him so much of a lively Foxian pilot he had never met. “You’ve got to stop bringing that up, uncle. Going to get us into an international incident one of these days.”
“I can say what I want,” Jing Yuan huffed. “I’m retired. So it’s your turn to visit, Dan Heng. Is there anything you wanted to see here in particular?”
His smile was the same as Dan Heng remembered, the same as in Dan Feng’s memories, soft and sweet and a mile wide, so wide his one visible eye crinkled almost shut and the little mark below it seemed in danger of falling right off his cheek.
“I’m here to see you,” Dan Heng said. “I’m sorry it took so long. I didn’t know if it would be good for you.”
“Why not?” Jing Yuan was still smiling, but with a mystified tilt to his head, bemusement wrinkling his brow.
Dan Heng looked over at Bailu, who nodded gently, encouragingly. “I’ll be over here if I’m needed,” she said, hoisting up her skirts with difficulty now that they were full of seawater, and lumbering like a very cute and clumsy jellyfish to the shore where she could wring them dry. Jing Yuan watched her go, then turned back to look quizzically at Dan Heng.
“You were always hoping I’d look back at you the way you looked at me,” Dan Heng said. “But I’m not sure I could do that. And I didn’t want to let you down. So I decided not to be here at all.”
“That’s not true,” Jing Yuan said. “I just wanted to see you. To know that you were happy.”
Dan Heng exhaled softly, slowly, his breath hissing between his teeth as the waves lapped around his ankles. “And what would you have done if I hadn’t been happy?”
“Hm,” Jing Yuan said, “that’s tough. I mean, sometimes you’re not happy but it’s part of the path you choose, you know? Then that’s your problem. Sometimes you’re frustrated because you’re trying to do something you really want and it’s difficult, or the people you love make things really complicated and you have to grit your teeth as you sort them out. But sometimes you end up trapped, unable to move forward, unable to even dream of seeking out joy in life, in living.. And if I ever saw that happen to you, whether it was through your own fault or not, I think I would move heaven and earth until you were free, until you could pursue your happiness again, whatever it might be.”
Dan Heng didn’t even realize he was touching the two rings he wore on his left hand until he saw Jing Yuan’s gaze drift to them.
“Did you find it?” Jing Yuan asked. “I really hoped you would.”
“Did you find yours?”
“I’m always happy,” Jing Yuan said. “Bailu says I’m very forgetful. Maybe I don’t remember the exact shape or form of the happiness I was looking for, but I like what I have. I have Bailu, and Yanqing, and Fu Xuan remembers to visit me sometimes. It’s a little sad that Jing Liu doesn’t remember who I am, and Baiheng can never seem to find Dan Feng or Yingxing these days no matter where we look for them. Maybe I would be happier if we could find them. But I can never remember to look for them for very long.”
“You’re very lucky,” Dan Heng said. “I always remember the friends I’m looking for, but they’ve gone somewhere I can’t follow them any more.”
“Which friends?”
Dan Heng hesitated, then, slowly, told Jing Yuan how, somewhere out there in the universe, there existed exactly one more of each of the rings he wore, and with them, two more rings of plain green jade. These four rings had long since left the Express, on the hands of the two people they’d been given to. Dan Heng wondered if they had been intercepted by a comet or some other violent force of nature or man, or if they were still there, drifting slowly through space and time, between the stars. I’ll leave my love between the stars , he remembered Stelle singing, off-key..
The rings had been a joke someone had made, until Stelle came back from shopping on her day off and, grinning, knelt in front of him and March and tugged at their hands. “Remember how I said I could never choose only one of you to marry,” she said, “so I’m gonna propose to both of you, and you can only say yes.” It had been a very Stelle thing to do, and to Dan Heng’s horror, also a very March thing, because March had screamed, knelt down and pulled a jewelry box from her pockets too. The Express had already taken off on another mission then, so he’d had to wait another month before he could even go out and shop for rings, but when he could he decided to do it properly and get the most Dan Heng rings he could find, since they’d both gone all out on theirs.
“That’s a really cute story,” Jing Yuan said. “Now that I think about it, there was someone I’d have asked to marry me, too. Maybe I should have just given them the most Jing Yuan ring I could find, to remember me by. They’re not really the sort to give a cute ring back.”
“It was just something we did because it's something Stelle and March would do. It wasn't that we really wanted to marry each other..” Dan Heng paused, then said, “Well, maybe we did, but not like that. But maybe a little like that. Anyway, I don’t think people need rings to remind them of you. I didn’t.”
“That’s nice of you to say, but you really don’t have to,” Jing Yuan said. “Though I am greatly indebted to you for saving the Luofu, and my life, I’m pretty sure we actually barely spoke. I remember you collectively invited me to travel with you for a while, and I would have dearly loved to, but I had my duties, and now I think I have health issues of some sort, so I can’t really leave..”
“We barely spoke?” Dan Heng felt confusion, like the salt spray of the waves, smacking him left and right in the face, while Jing Yuan’s gentle smile persisted through the ebbing, swelling lapses of a too-long-lived memory, like sunlight falling through the water. In waves, too, memories of that same eternal smile fell upon him, memories that didn’t belong to Dan Heng. A cocky young Cloud Knight waving furiously to him from an approaching starskiff, a friendly arm around his shoulders as they cheered Jing Liu on in a sword tournament, a solid chest against his back catching him as he staggered and collapsed, exhausted from battle...
“We barely spoke,” Jing Yuan repeated. “I think you’re thinking of someone else. I was, too. But you said you weren’t him.”
It felt wrong for Jing Yuan to say this so gently, so soothingly, as if Dan Heng was the one who had been wronged. As if it wasn’t Jing Yuan who had laid his heart bare and held it out in both hands, as if wasn’t Dan Heng who had walked past him and off the Luofu entirely, far away into the stars.
“I’m not him,” Dan Heng said. “But I remember being him.”
Jing Yuan shrugged. “It didn’t feel like those meant the same thing to you,” he said, without saying what it had meant to him. He looked over his shoulder at Bailu, who had turned away from them and was tapping at something on her phone, then back to Dan Heng, who had turned to face the distant horizon, the infinite waters. “And now it’s time for you to become someone else,” he said, softly. His smile endured, but the downward droop of his eyelashes seemed very tired. “I guess I should say goodbye now. Will you remember this? I don’t think I will. Bailu says I don’t remember anything that makes me sad.”
“She did say something like that,” Dan Heng said. “I think it’s how you keep the mara away. But I don’t know how long you can manage..”
“It’s all right,” Jing Yuan said. “You’re going to sleep for a long time, and when you wake up, maybe Bailu and I will come see you, even though you won’t remember us. Maybe I won’t remember you, either. Or maybe I’ll be gone by then. I know some people say it’s past time that I should be gone. But I’d really like to see you again.”
He held out his hand, and Dan Heng took it without thinking. And held on, as if he didn’t want to let go. He remembered too painfully the hands that had gone limp and then, gradually, cold and rigid in his grasp when their time came, letting them drift away when all he’d really wanted to do was hold on, scream and beg and cry to the gods for a fraction of justice, a scrap of mercy. He caught Jing Yuan looking at him, smile finally faded, as if he understood what Dan Heng was thinking about. As if he was thinking about the last time Dan Heng - no, Dan Feng - had been caught sneaking into this very place, the terrible things he planned to do, the terrible things he had done.
“What you did here,” Jing Yuan said. “What Dan Feng did. If he had known what horrors a simple wish would unleash upon everyone, the full price of such an innocent heart’s desire - if Dan Feng had known how much Yingxing would hate him for doing it - do you think he would still do it again? Would you?”
“Yes,” Dan Heng said. “But I’ve had six hundred years to think about how I would do it differently, in a way that wouldn’t hurt anyone. In a way that, maybe, no one else would even figure out until it was too late to be mad at the person who did it, because he was actually, really dead, not reskinned and made into a puppet for the Preceptors to hang on to. And now that the High Elder seems to be someone no one else actually wants to mess with, maybe no one will even dare to say anything about it, if she can keep it under wraps. And - I wasn't thinking about what would happen to you, the last time. I left you behind. I won’t do that again.”
He grasped Jing Yuan’s hand tight. “Come on,” he said, taking a step deeper out to sea, looking nervously at Bailu in the distance. “When I said the High Elder now is someone you don’t want to mess with, I really mean it.”
Jing Yuan looked confused, but where Dan Heng went, especially looking so urgently at him and tugging on his hand insistently, it seemed that it was not too difficult at all for him to follow. By the time Bailu realized that she couldn’t even hear the distant echo of their voices any more, and looked up, there were only their footprints in the sand, already fading where the tide washed over them, and the unbroken line of the sea meeting the sky like a calmly shut mouth that swallowed all secrets, told no lies and answered no questions.
“ Motherfucker ,” Bailu said to the sea and the sky and a thousand sleeping Vidyadhara eggs high up on the cliffs. “I was going to ask him where the fuck that guy who calls himself Blade is these days!”
She looked up at the cliffs full of glimmering eggs, but she couldn’t remember which had been there before and which were newly spawned. It would take some time to scale every stairway and account for every egg. She sighed. Better get started now, she supposed, before someone else found, and was shocked by, the new egg that had not one but two sleeping embryos inside it, curled around each other.
(an epilogue, some hours previously)
The Nameless who now traveled aboard the Express had never been to the Luofu. Dan Heng would tell them a little about the history of the Express and the Xianzhou Alliance, if someone asked, but he never liked to talk about it for long. “It’s all in the archives,” he would say, “go read it.” He didn’t sleep there any more, so they couldn’t use the excuse that they didn’t want to bother him. He had a feeling that two of them might really enjoy playing celestial jade, and there was someone whom he knew would have loved the sight of the ancient seas… But the stop he asked Pom-Pom to make was at a fairly boring interchange terminal station, in the middle of nowhere. “It should be easy to get a connection to the Luofu from there,” he said. “Don’t worry about me.”
“You want to go now ? It’s still so early. Pom-Pom hasn’t even started making breakfast yet.”
“I will miss Pom-Pom’s special breakfast service,” Dan Heng said. “I just really don’t want to have to say goodbye to everyone.”
“Why not? You should say goodbye to people when you have the chance. There were so many times we didn’t get to say goodbye before someone left.”
Pom-Pom’s head was tilted downward as he said this, and Dan Heng couldn’t see his face beneath the wide brim of his cap. But he knew each and every person Pom-Pom was talking about. And he wondered, with a tinge of guilt, how many more people were Pom-Pom thinking about that Dan Heng had never known? All the Nameless who had come and gone before him, before Stelle and March, before Welt and Himeko, through the long history of the Express; all of the stars that came into view through the windows of the train, only to fade away.
“I wish no one had to say goodbye at all,” he said, “ever. But I guess I shouldn’t think like that. Thinking like that can get you into a lot of trouble, and mess things up for other people.“
“Pom-Pom doesn’t understand.”
“It’s okay.” Dan Heng crouched down, not to try and peer under Pom-Pom’s cap, but simply to be closer to the little conductor, who had his long ears folded over his face like he did when they were watching a movie and a sad scene started playing. “I mean, can you imagine if no one ever left the Express? We’d run out of rooms. You’d be cooking breakfast for thousands of people.”
“Thousands!”
“Tens of thousands. There wouldn’t be enough eggs in the entire universe, even if we found a planet that was only inhabited by giant chickens.”
“That sounds scary,” Pom-Pom said. “But Pom-Pom understands what Dan Heng is trying to say. If you don’t leave, the person after Dan Heng cannot arrive.”
Dan Heng knelt down to give Pom-Pom a hug. Now that he thought of it, he’d never hugged Pom-Pom before. Firstly, Pom-Pom didn’t really enjoy being hugged too much, and secondly, showering cute little beings with affection was a job made for March - or someone else who’d come on board long after March was gone, who didn’t even remotely look like March, but who reminded him of March - or someone else who wasn’t that person either, but reminded him of March and the person who’d come after her. But there was no one on board the Express now who reminded him of March at all, so he figured Pom-Pom had gone unhugged for long enough that he wouldn’t mind it too much.
“You are always welcome back on the Express, Dan Heng,” Pom-Pom said. “And the person after Dan Heng.”
“Thank you,” Dan Heng said. “I’ll let him know. I hope it's okay if he brings a friend or two with him.”
Juliet, when we made love you used to cry
Said I love you like the stars above, I’ll love you til I die
There's a place for us, you know the movie song
When you gonna realize it was just that the time was wrong
Juliet, I’d do the stars with you, any time