Mending

Xue Yang is sewing. Sooner rather than later, the light is going to fade from the coffin home's courtyard, Xiao Xingchen is going to call him and the Little Blind over to eat the watery soup he's cooked, and Xue Yang will have to give it up for the night, but for now, he's stitching the trim onto the robe that's his finest tailoring achievement so far, and he might almost be happy.

He had a couple of changes of clothes in his qiankun sleeve when he got jumped by those Jin idiots, of course, but that was a while ago now, and Xue Yang is hard on his clothing. (Were they even Jin? If they were cultivators, they were weak ones, getting the advantage on him by whatever that snake Jin Guangyao had put in his drink beforehand. Probably they're all dead now, liabilities that were easier to clean up than he was. Xue Yang misses Jin Guangyao more than he'd ever admit to the man himself.) Mending broken seams and patching holes was easy enough to pick up, but this is the first time he's succeeded in creating an entirely new garment and it feels, just a little, like magic.

The less said about the ripped and ruined pieces of cloth balled up in the corner of the coffin home bedroom, the better. Xue Yang will get to those later, when he's less angry with them for failing to do what he wanted the first time. He's not a wasteful man. He just needs to wait until their use becomes clear to him.

Xue Yang is sewing. In the indecisive light of a single candle, the seam he's reinforcing wavers back and forth, merging with his fingertips until the stab of the needle separates them suddenly out: the thing that bleeds and hurts, and the thing that lets the sharp point pass through and through it, apathetic.

Song Lan's milked-over eyeballs stare at him from the corner. Xiao Xingchen lies in state as he has done for months, now, his defensive ring of talismans fluttering in the same draught that catches the candle flame. Three years, and they'd never managed to seal this place up properly. He's going to have to rip all of these stitches out again in the morning.

Xue Yang wipes the blood off on his sleeve, rethreads the needle, and sews.

"Are you done yet?" A-Qing asks, for the third time that morning, and Xue Yang forces the corners of his mouth down before he yells his answer back at her.

"If you want this fixed at all, you can wait quietly or you can do it yourself!"

She pouts, and he lets himself smile, now that she won't hear it in his voice. She's so predictable in her temper; he knows where he is with her, aggravating though she can be.

With a clatter, A-Qing tosses herself down to sit on the same coffin-bench as him. The lid jolts against the coffin body, where the damp of Yi City has warped the wood over the time they've lived here. Xue Yang had carefully stilled his hands when he saw her moving to sit down, wary of the sharp point of his darning needle.

"Oi, be careful!" he snaps nonetheless. "Little blind girls like you should know better than to crash around like that."

"Little blind girls who bring in most of our income can do what we want," she counters smugly. From her sleeve, she pulls a small candy, which she unwraps from its twist of paper and pops ostentatiously into her mouth. She knows he ate his first thing this morning. "You know, maybe this isn't a good idea. If I let you fix all the holes in my clothes, who's going to give me any money when I go begging?"

"It's still not going to look like new," Xue Yang says, tying a knot in the last stitch. He shakes out the blouse and holds it up to check his work from the outside. "You just won't look as though you're running around the countryside with no one to take care of you any more."

"Daozhang takes care of me," she responds around the sweet in her mouth. Xue Yang bundles up the blouse and tosses it at her, purely to hear the squeak of protest when it hits her unprepared face.

"Yeah, and everybody knows he's just as blind as you are," he says. "But the whole town also knows you live with me, and what does it say about me if I let you go about in rags?"

"Like I care what anybody thinks of you?" She drags her fingertips delicately along the sleeve until she finds the repair he made, then feels along it, appraising his work. Apparently it's acceptable, because A-Qing tucks the blouse into her elbow, grabs her bamboo pole and heads inside the coffin home.

"Bring me that outer robe you've got on, once you've changed," Xue Yang tells her. "The hem's coming down all round the back."

"Yeah, yeah," A-Qing says, but she stops at the doorway. "Thank you," she mutters, not looking back at him.

Xue Yang kicks up from the bench and starts walking around the sunny part of their little courtyard, swinging his arms to loosen up his shoulders. He stops in his tracks when he sees Xiao Xingchen leaning comfortably against the wall, a gentle smile on his face.

"I guess you heard all of that, Daozhang?"

"It's good to hear you two getting along," Xiao Xingchen says.

"Pfft, who's getting along? Me and that little nuisance?" Xue Yang protests, but Xiao Xingchen moves towards his voice and puts his arms around him, drawing him in for a hug as if he really had been doing favours for the Daozhang's pet blind girl. The fool. Xue Yang leans into the embrace and closes his eyes to savour his continuing revenge.

It wasn't sentiment that kept him from corpse-poisoning the old woman for so long. It wasn't. Xue Yang is not a wasteful man, that's all, and as long as he had something to gain from her—something to learn from her—there was no point in getting rid of the hag.

Her eyesight's been going for a while. Her memory isn't what it was. Right? And there's obviously something wrong with her mind if she can't tell what a monster he is or what he's done to the town all around her.

Which isn't to say he's doing her a kindness. Xue Yang is not somebody who does kindnesses. He's tying up loose... no, he's just tidying up. Fulfilling the promise he made to Xiao Xingchen, that he'd destroy Yi City and make Song Lan help. When Xue Yang strikes, he doesn't even leave the dogs alive.

"Granny, it's me!" he sings out as he kicks open the door to her shop. The brightly-painted paper figures shush against each other in the sudden breeze. She's not in sight, probably in the tiny living quarters in the back.

"Is that you, Cheng-er?" she calls back. What did he just say? He strides forwards, through her little parlour and into the kitchen, one hand slipping into his sleeve.

Granny turns from the pan hanging over the fireplace, ladle still in her hand. "Cheng-er, have you eaten?" she asks.

In lieu of an answer, he thrusts his hand towards her, fingers opening to let the red-purple powder spray into her face. The old woman wheezes and hacks. Corpse-poisoning powder is stuck to her cheeks and lips. It hangs in the air around her.

Xue Yang can't say anything comforting, since he doesn't want to inhale any of it himself, but he takes a step towards her and grabs her shoulder, guides her away from the fire when her knees buckle. After a moment's thought, he swings the pan away from the flames too, so the food won't catch and burn her house down. Granny's eyes are already bleary and uncomprehending.

On the little table in her parlour, she's laid out their project. Today she'd offered to help him with the flying shoulders; he's never quite got the hang of them, somehow. He kicks the table so it turns upside down, the fabric pieces trapped underneath.

His business in Yi City done, Xue Yang stomps back to the coffin home. If Song Lan hasn't finished cleaning up the bloody array in the courtyard—his latest failure—he's going to make him wish he was a real corpse, not just a fierce one.

Xue Yang is undressing Xiao Xingchen. He's taking his time, spinning the moment out, folding each garment with malicious care and narrating every action as he goes. Xiao Xingchen sits obediently on the grassy bank, half-dressed. The blind man is still giggling helplessly but getting more and more impatient to be touched himself.

"Ah, ah, ah, Daozhang," Xue Yang chides him, when Xiao Xingchen grabs at his hands. "Don't pull, you'll make me tear the crepe." He unties the inner robe's fastenings fussily before easing it back off Xiao Xingchen's shoulders. In the moonlight, the skin of his throat shines whiter than any of his layers of clothing.

"You'd mend it, though, if I made you tear it," Xiao Xingchen says, uncharacteristically. He nuzzles at Xue Yang's wrist, trying to pull him in closer. "Come on. What's the point of folding everything up when it all needs washing anyway?"

"The point is for the good Daozhang to learn a little patience." Xue Yang laughs at his own joke—no one would ever call him the patient one of the pair. He rewards Xiao Xingchen with a sweet kiss, licking between his lips but pulling away before he's tempted to give up the game. "As for the washing, we'll be lucky if some of this blood ever comes out."

Xiao Xingchen is down to his innermost shirt and trousers by now. He shivers, clearly anticipating what will be removed next, so Xue Yang kneels beside him and starts unpinning his guan instead. To pull the hair free of it, he needs to separate out the strands that have been stuck together by a particularly explosive arterial spray, earlier in the night.

"Honestly," he says under his breath, more to keep up the patter than anything else, "people see you in all your white, Daozhang, and think you're such a gentleman. No one would believe how much blood you get over yourself with these night hunts." The guan lifts away and he smoothes the hair beneath it. "At least it's mostly from fierce corpses, these days, and not your own."

Xiao Xingchen gasps. He feels a stab of regret for apparently hitting a sore place—and then, belatedly, remembers that's what he's here to do, to cause him pain.

While Xue Yang was distracted, Xiao Xingchen has reached out and caught his face in his hands. He turns Xue Yang towards him and tilts his own head, as though trying to look directly in his eyes. The angle is off, but not by much.

"It's true," he says, a fervent whisper. "Since you've been here, my friend, I very rarely have cause to cry."

Xue Yang is sewing.

Inexperienced—or slapdash—demonic cultivators think it's enough just to sew up the cut in the skin, in cases like this. They're wrong. If you just want to make a walking corpse, a shambling, stinking thing that wouldn't frighten a baby disciple, you don't have to sew up shit. Channel enough resentful energy into the carcass and it'll manoeuvre it about no matter how much it's falling to pieces.

Xiao Xingchen's not going to be a walking corpse, though. Xue Yang had hoped he'd worked fast enough, that he could pull Xiao Xingchen's spirit straight back into his body and his own qi would heal up the horrible wound at his throat, as if he'd never left. It seems this is going to be a longer-term project. That's all right.

He's taking extra care of the body, keeping it in good condition so that once Xiao Xingchen comes back, he won't have to overexert his golden core to revitalise it. The preservation talismans that hang all around him keep his limbs supple, his skin soft, his inner organs ready to restart as soon as they're called to do so. If Xue Yang can seal up the cut that killed him, that will help too.

In this kind of case, you can't just stitch the edges of the skin together. You have to mend all the blood vessels that were sliced through, and do it one at a time, with specially charmed thread. Xue Yang can't do much about the nerves that Xiao Xingchen cut, but there are ways to darn tendons and rejoin cartilage.

It's delicate work. It needs good lighting.

It needs eyes that see clearly, and fingers that don't shake. Xue Yang hasn't slept in days, not since the worst moment of his life, and even he has to admit that he's losing capacity for this task.

With a sigh, he snips the trailing thread and pushes the skin of Xiao Xingchen's neck back together, covering what's still left to be done. He presses a trembling kiss to Xiao Xingchen's cold temple, just above the pristine white bandage.

"I'm not giving up. I'll finish this after I sleep," he whispers. "I don't want to hurt you any more, Xiao Xingchen."