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It took them a few minutes after they left the freshly-cleansed temple to realise that something was wrong. Song Lan and Xiao Xingchen turned back to the temple, which glowed with the same white fire that flickered around their robes.
“A temple to a truth god,” Xiao Xingchen mused.
Song Lan squinted at the statue in the temple they had just spent most of the day removing small resentful creatures from. He immediately noticed the third eye on the god’s head. “The Eye of Heaven is brightest with the fire.”
Xiao Xingchen nodded, but neither of them drew their swords. This would not be the first time they had been bestowed minor blessings or curses in their line of work.
Sure enough, as soon as the fire faded from around them, Song Lan found a small flower in his hands. As he watched, one of the many petals flaked off and fell to the ground.
“It appears to be timed,” he said aloud. “When the petals are all gone, it will have ended. I hope that it’s not a dangerous thing, and that it doesn’t take too long. What do you think it may be, Xingchen?”
Xiao Xingchen swallowed and then said, thickly, “I think it makes us speak our thoughts aloud. Zichen, can you try to stop talking?”
Song Lan did, but as he had half-expected, he could not force his mouth to stay closed. He told Xiao Xingchen as such, and then lowered his voice so he was mumbling his thoughts under his breath.
Song Lan was managing, tuning himself into a half-meditative where the only thoughts on his mind were those of various texts that he had studied.
And then he made the mistake of looking at Xiao Xingchen.
Looking at Xiao Xingchen was, objectively, not something he had never done before. In fact, it could be said that Song Lan looked at Xiao Xingchen more than he really should.
But this, Xiao Xingchen shining beneath the light of the rising moon, Xiao Xingchen speaking so quietly Song Lan could only make out a few words, his lips moving softly, Xiao Xingchen with his eyes looking softly at Song Lan in questioning kindness and reassurance -
Song Lan swallowed. He was abruptly aware that he had stopped thinking and talking.
Xiao Xingchen stopped on the road beside him. “Are you okay, Zichen? I’ve never known you to say this little while talking this much.”
“I do not want to say anything we will regret.”
“Like what?” Xiao Xingchen asked, and then shook his head furiously. “No! Don’t say anything. I trust you, Zichen, and I’m curious but I don’t want to say anything like that either.”
Song Lan nodded, statements of agreement and thanks pouring out of his mouth. One of the ones worth noticing was his suggestion to “Find an inn room and wait this out. It will be better than doing so out here, as we are distracted, or when we are in public.”
Xiao Xingchen agreed verbally. He added a long and winding statement about meditating, in order to better control what they were saying.
Song Lan nodded, settling back into his repetitive murmuring of mantras and epics and poems. He had always loved things like that; the way words tasted on his tongue, the way characters could make complex word plays on and off the page.
Somehow they made it to the nearest town and inn with no trouble, both of them avoiding eye contact and muttering constantly beneath their breaths.
They got a room without Xiao Xingchen talking the ear off the confused-looking innkeeper, who smiled at them and waved them up the stairs as Song Lan shoved a few silver pieces at him, grabbing Xiao Xingchen by the arm to pull him away from his one-sided conversation about the town.
“Xingchen, can you concentrate?”
Xiao Xingchen didn’t stop talking, but the pace of his words lessened, as did his volume. In the quiet of the room, each of them sitting on one of the beds in the half-dark of night, Song Lan could only make out a few words here and there. “Wonder how everyone… Will I accidentally… Anyone else?”
It all made very little sense without context, so Song Lan closed his eyes and tried to concentrate on something that wasn’t Xingchen, loose-lipped and sitting on the bed opposite to Song Lan.
To distract himself, he ran through a few lines from one of his favourite poems. “The moon, grown full now over the sea, brightening the whole of heaven, brings to separated hearts the long thoughtfulness of night -” 1
He cut off as Xingchen made a choked noise. “Xingchen, are you alright?”
“No! I mean yes! I’m fine. Why is it always the moon with you?”
Song Lan knew he should keep his head straight and his eyes closed and lie, and he told himself that quietly. But it was already too late - he had looked up, and seen Xiao Xingchen sitting on that bed, all dressed in white with trimmings of black, drenched in the moonlight flowing in the open window.
His throat was dry and he had stopped talking once more. Absently, Song Lan swallowed.
He wasn’t looking out the window when he said “Because it is beautiful.”
Xiao Xingchen was silent, but Song Lan had no hope of holding back the words bubbling up his throat, and in the silence of the room even his quietest voice would clearly carry to Xiao Xingchen.
“You were what the wind was making with illuminated leaves. Behind the nocturnal mountains, white lily of conflagration - ah, I can say nothing! You were made of everything.” 2
Xiao Xingchen had not said anything.
Song Lan frowned. “That’s concerning,” he said. “That means you’re not thinking.”
In the moonlight, he could see the clear bob of Xiao Xingchen’s pale throat.
“I can’t help it,” he said, hoping Xiao Xingchen would understand. “Xingchen, I can’t help it. I look at you, and I think the moon, and then I think poetry, and then -”
“Whenever you start reciting poetry,” Xingchen said, conversationally, as if he wasn’t about to pass truthful judgment on one of the things that made Song Lan who he was, “I want you to push me up against the nearest flat surface and kiss me, at the very least.”
It was Song Lan’s turn to be stunned to speechless thoughtlessness.
“Fuck,” Xiao Xingchen said. “I told myself not to say that aloud. Awful curse. I’m sorry, Zichen. Would you like me to leave?”
Song Lan stared at him. Then, slowly, he said, the words ripped out of his thoughts, “And I watch my words from a long way off. They are more yours than mine. They climb on my old suffering like ivy.” 3
Song Lan winced, once his own words sunk in. “I don’t actually know what to say to that,” he added, to further address Xiao Xingchen’s statement. He winced and clamped his lips as tightly as possible over the next words that flowed from his traitorous thoughts. “I could do that.” He then dug his fingernails into the palms of his hands in order to give himself something to think about other than Xiao Xingchen, kissed breathless against a wall. That was a path his thoughts should not follow while he was forced to speak them out loud.
Xiao Xingchen didn’t look like he had heard, but he also looked miserable, even shining in moonlight like that. “I don’t either,” he confided. “That’s why I never wanted to say it out loud.”
Song Lan swallowed again. His throat felt like he’d swallowed sawdust. “Do you want me to stop?”
Xiao Xingchen tilted his head, and then drew back into the shadows. Song Lan missed his face as soon as he couldn’t see it. “Not really. I like your voice and your words. Do you want to stop?”
Song Lan shook his head and declined. “Nothing more than words, tonight,” he added.
Xiao Xingchen’s teeth caught the light as he replied. “No. No, nothing more. Nothing ever more, if you don’t want it.”
Song Lan smiled too. He didn’t have the words for what he wanted to say, but… perhaps others did.
“In you the wars and the flights accumulated. From you the wings of the song birds rose.” 4
Xiao Xingchen laughed, a gentle huff that warmed Song Lan to the core. “No more moon metaphors?”
“You are not a saint.”
Xiao Xingchen let out more of a laugh at that. “As someone who has heard the words I use inside my head, you would know.”
Song Lan smiled into the darkness. This was… more than he had hoped for. Xingchen wanted him, even if he didn’t love him in the same shining way that Song Lan loved Xiao Xingchen.
“You do not have to be good. You do not have to walk on your knees for a hundred miles through a desert repenting. You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.” 5 he said, in lieu of any proper answer.
He could feel that Xiao Xingchen was still smiling.
“Every day you play with the light of the universe,” 6 he said, and Xiao Xingchen let out a soft laugh again.
Song Lan felt light, boyed up by this trust and laughter and hope.
“Sometimes I don’t feel like anybody else; not saintly but also not human,” Xiao Xingchen said, louder than the curse necessitated that he say it. It was an offering of trust, acknowledging that they had both peeled back their skins and shown something softer and more easily damaged.
“You are like nobody since I love you,” Song Lan told him, not allowing himself to think about what he was saying past the lines he had long-since memorised. “Let me spread you out among yellow garlands. Who writes your name in letters of smoke among the stars of the south? Oh, let me remember you as you were before you existed.” 6
Xiao Xingchen was silent for a long time, and so Song Lan murmured his worries and his hopes underneath his breath. It wouldn’t do to burden Xiao Xingchen with them, not when he had just been burdened with… with this, with whatever Song Lan liked to call love, with whatever sparked bright and tight inside Song Lan’s chest every time Xiao Xingchen smiled.
“Please don’t tell me that you’re just reciting poetry now,” Xiao Xingchen said, eventually. There was a note of hope in his voice, tucked beneath nervousness.
Song Lan swallowed. He couldn’t think properly. He probably should be answering with a simple yes or no, but he couldn’t stop his mind from running through the rest of the lines of that poem. “I want,” he said, meeting Xiao Xingchen’s eyes across the dark room, “to do with you what spring does with the cherry trees.” 6
“Fuck,” Xiao Xingchen breathed, with feeling, and then fell silent for a while. Song Lan bit his lip and resumed his mumbling once again.
Xiao Xingchen had clearly given up on any form of meditation, as by the time he had closed his slack mouth and started talking again, it was a tangled mess of words. “Do you know what I want? I want you to say that again, against my skin. But I want more than that. I want to be held by you at night and fight by you always and go back with you to your temple. I want to share everything I have with you. I want to be allowed to tell you that I love you out loud. I want to hold your hand when you’re comfortable with it. I am not a saint, Zichen. You know this. I can be greedy and I will take anything you offer me, but I won’t take anything more. I can promise you that.”
That hadn’t been a reassurance Song Lan needed. He had known that if he said he didn’t want something, Xiao Xingchen would never even toe near that line again. But the rest of it -
It was once more his turn to fall silent. His head was empty of thoughts, filled only with confusion. “I-” he said, cutting off in his uncertainty. In his hand, the final petal wilted from the flower. Song Lan closed his mouth, and granted himself a few panicked moments of private thought.
“I have walked seas of grass and climbed mountains and viewed the fall of lords,” he said, eventually, slowly, “and all the earth has bowed gently to the moon, who walks true and laughing, who carries a pale sword and my heart in tender hands-”
Xiao Xingchen cut him off with a muffled sob. “Zichen,” he said, voice cracking but filled with something soft and gentle, “you don’t know how good you are.”
Song Lan swallowed. “I’m in love with you,” he told Xiao Xingchen, plain and obvious. It was strange how saying it was easier without his thoughts being pressed out of him.
Xiao Xingchen was smiling, and it was brighter than the moon. “What a coincidence. I’m in love with you too.”
They sat there for a few minutes, smiling like fools, and then Xiao Xingchen shivered. “Do we have to sleep separately tonight? I know we paid for two beds but it’s been a long day and I always sleep better with you there.”
Something in Song Lan was shining, bright and lovely as star dust. He nodded, and moved to brush nonexistent dust off the bed sheets.
They tossed their outer robes to the floor, leaving them in just their cleanest inner robes, their guans following. Xiao Xingchen slung Shuanghua beside Fuxue, the two swords clinking together softly, looking as much like a pair as they always did.
Just like always, Xiao Xingchen smelled clean and warm as he climbed in beside Song Lan. Just like always, he maneuvered them so Song Lan was in control as every point of contact. Just like always, Song Lan had to try hard to not focus too much on how the planes of their bodies slotted neatly into place, comfortable and comforting, but also Xiao Xingchen’s hips pressed his own -
Song Lan swallowed dryly once more and pulled his thoughts away, instead wrapping an arm over Xiao Xingchen as he put his head under Song Lan’s chin. This was closer than they usually got when they shared beds at inns.
Unlike always, Xiao Xingchen spoke softly into Song Lan’s collarbone. “You don’t like touch. Is this okay?”
Song Lan nodded, closing his eyes and resting his head on Xiao Xingchen’s. “I don’t like dirt,” he corrected. “But I know you. You still smell like temple incense and that waterfall. And anyway,” he added, half-shy for some odd reason, “I like you, so it’s ok, with you.”
Xiao Xingchen hummed, the noise vibrating through Song Lan’s bones. “Would you recite something for me, as I fall asleep?”
Song Lan nodded his agreement, and then pressed the words of a love poem into Xiao Xingchen’s sweet-smelling hair. “I fear no fate (for you are my fate, my sweet). I want no world (for beautiful you are my world, my true) and it’s you are whatever a moon has always meant and whatever a sun will always sing is you. Here is the deepest secret nobody knows (here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud and the sky of the sky of a tree called life; which grows higher than soul can hope or mind can hide) and this is the wonder that's keeping the stars apart.” 7
Xiao Xingchen shivered as Song Lan finished the poem. “I’m so glad you can’t see my face right now,” he said after a pause. “I’m afraid that was counterproductive.”
Song Lan smiled fondly. “Sleep, Xingchen. But we will have to talk about this in the morning.”
Xingchen sighed. “I know.”
“I can’t keep walking around knowing that…”
“Knowing that I want you to press me up against the nearest wall?”
Song Lan flushed. “Not now, Xingchen. Sleep.”
Xingchen let out one of his huffs of laughter, warm against Song Lan’s neck. “That’s not a never, Zichen.”
He smiled, helplessly, pressing a kiss to Xiao Xingchen’s hair. “Sleep now.”