BLACK DAY 6: stars in one hand, sand in the other
Title: stars in one hand, sand in the other
Written by: portaldice
A remix of " Again, Today, I Reach Out My Hand" by metafictionally
Pairing: Baekhyun/Tao
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: Death, illness, violence
Summary: From 1592 to 2011, Zitao moves through lifetimes, and Baekhyun meets him every step of the way.
1592
Here, they call Zitao a warrior.
The man who arms himself last is the one Zitao watches, all frail fingers, sinking skin, brittle bone. His shoulders are set like he is ready for war, but the limp he tries to hide from his step is something else, and Zitao turns to Yifan with soft, low words. “That man isn’t meant for war.”
Yifan passes this on to the man at his other side, and then returns what he gets in reply. “He is supposedly ailing and cursed to die early, even without war.”
As condemned by who? There are no gods among the planet’s men, especially ones with time to idly measure lives. But Zitao holds his tongue, only nodding in reply-
And he meets the pained man’s eyes, blurred, crinkled, but shining and bright.
With a tug on his horse’s reins, Zitao inhales and turns away.
1598
Zitao wakes up in a dim room that smells of rot, and for a moment, he mistakes Yifan standing at his bedside to be an angel passing judgement.
He puts an uneasy, heavy hand to his chest. A piece of the arrow is still there, splintered through bone, and blood is pushing against his teeth like a tide. His nerves are numbing over. Somehow, he isn’t breathing.
“The cursed man searched for you on the battlefield and brought you here, both tasks on my request.” Yifan puts on a small smile that looks unnatural, almost a pained one. “Best that the one doomed to die early be the only one to know where you last were, after all.”
He turns around before Zitao can cobble together a reply, calling someone over with a wave of his hand. Zitao catches sight of a shape stamped onto Yifan’s palm, sharp lines curled into a serpent with wings, and his head flares and pounds.
But what reaches out for him is some other man’s hand, some other palm with another red shape. It settles on Zitao’s cheek like a comforting touch and Zitao nearly succumbs to the pain, body drowning itself from the inside out, but the man runs his thumb beneath Zitao’s eye and makes a tired, relieved laugh. “Thank you, for all of my lives. Each and every one…”
Then Zitao chokes in a breath, as if resurfacing from the sea-
1644
The new dynasty begins, and Zitao outlives all of his family. When his skin never sags and his wounds never stay, everything else seems fragile in comparison, but there is no rebuilding and growing without destruction and Zitao doesn’t want the world to leave him behind.
“Which is why we travel,” Yifan replies when Zitao tells him. “In this lifetime, you are a warrior. Now leave it behind and choose something else.”
Funny Yifan mentions choice. The hourglass now drawn on Zitao’s palm is a responsibility that he did not choose to have. When his vision swims in mortal pain and immortality is dangled in front of his face, what other decision would his instincts leap to?
Perhaps that was why… “That man all those years ago, with the star drawn on his hand.” Zitao loosely closes his fist. “What did he choose?”
“What he chose to spend his lives on?” Yifan squints at the sea before him, searching for their ship, but he spares a moment to lightly shrug his shoulders. “Ink, for the last few of them. He was always busy painting on that inordinately long scroll.”
1736
So here they are, a painter and a scholar. They’re unknown and barely on the rungs of the elite, but it’s comfortable enough, and when the time comes it’ll be easy to pull away.
Zitao has fine control of his body that goes down to his fingers, good for battle and perfect for recapturing the littlest of details in ink. But this is his own way of paying respects to the man he’d inadvertently killed and not much else-if not the battlefield or the barracks, he has no idea where else to go.
“Stop thinking about it,” Yifan says, almost in response to Zitao’s uneasiness. “Your brush is pressing too hard. Even if he died, that man gave you his gift willingly.”
So immortality is a gift. Zitao thins his lips. “Baixian will be arriving soon to claim the finished paintings. ”Please don’t talk about this, he means to say
Yifan’s face sets as if he wants to roll his eyes. Instead, “Baixian?”
“A merchant. He sells my works for me.” Zitao pauses and turns to Yifan behind him, allowing a view of the hand scroll beneath his brush. The Yellow River stretches long even on paper, and on a measure of its shores, the city is alive with Qingming festivities. “I’m working on a replica of the painting given to the Emperor, like you said that man used to do.”
“Unbelievable.” Yifan half-smiles anyway. “Be careful not to let anyone else find that.”
Approaching footsteps start to sound from outside, and the upward tilt in Zitao’s lips grows. “They haven’t for years.”
Yifan’s gone by the time Baixian arrives, and Baixian smiles bright, pale cheeks curving up with his eyes.
1739
Between assorted requests and commissions, Zitao steadily adds to his painting of Bianjing and the river that cuts it in half. He can’t work as fast as a team of court painters can, but he has more time than any of them, never needing to eat or sleep. Perhaps he can finish this in that stranger’s stead.
He still feels the pangs and fatigue, though. Baixian catches him once as he’s dozing off with his hand hovering above the brushes.
“Got some loaves from the West. The bread’s crunchy and different, but it tastes wonderful all the same.” Baixian places a pouch of what sounds like coins on one corner of Zitao’s painting table, then offers an oval-shaped slice with a smile. “Want some?” he says, nibbling on a piece of his own.
Zitao takes it, and Baixian settles next to him, looking at the hand scroll rolled out on the floor. He mutters estimations of prices and values, and Zitao can only dazedly manage to say, “Have you been to Bianjing?”
Baixian pauses and cocks an eyebrow. “The capital? Well, yes.”
Zitao inclines his head in the direction of the unfinished painting. “So that’s Bianjing along the river, right?”
“I suppose so… Wait.” Baixian straightens and fixes his gaze on Zitao’s own. “You mean to say that you’re painting a city you’ve never been to?”
“We paint dragons, yet we’ve never seen them ourselves,” Zitao answers in defense, cheeks starting to tinge.
“You know that’s different.” Baixian chuckles, propping himself up on one arm and pressing the other against his stomach. “It’s just that I’m there rather often; if you have spare time, I’m sure my father wouldn’t mind me bringing one person along.”
Zitao has all the time in the world. “Thank you,” he answers, popping the last of the bread slice into his mouth. He gives Baixian a small smile before again picking up his brush, and Baixian scoots closer to watch, jokingly requesting to be painted into the Bianjing crowd.
1740
“Believe me, the paintings are selling rather well,” Baixian says when he arrives again. “You’re earning a name for yourself.”
Zitao’s brush hand freezes at that. He’s not unknown.
Do they have to go?
But Baixian doesn’t see it, settling on another seat next to Zitao’s table. “As usual, you look as healthy as ever. Oh, I’m envious.” He chuckles, and the sound squeezes itself out of his throat like how his hand squeezes his stomach, pressing as though the laugh might accidentally slip out there and be lost. The corner of his eye twitches. His laugh ends just as it gets strangled.
(Perfect for recapturing the littlest of details-)
“Are you alright?” Zitao places his brush down and moves to Baixian’s side, hand wresting Baixian’s squeezing one from his abdomen. Don’t press it, he thinks he says, but he is more aware of Baixian’s fingers, skin thin like creased paper and knuckles wide amongst his bones. Frail fingers, sinking skin, brittle bone.
Zitao’s throat dries.
Baixian shakes his head, eyes closing in his pained smile. Then they open and Zitao sees them shining with pain and so familiar.
They have to go.
1842
Baixian doesn’t return after that, and Zitao tells himself that it’s for the best.
He visits the capital during Qingming Festival. Yifan is off looking through the stores, but Zitao watches the people instead, all of them sweeping gravestones and offering alms. His family’s graves are in the next province over, so Zitao can only recline against the trees and wait.
“Not celebrating, mister?” a boy asks, accent tinging his words and drawing near with timid footsteps. His small hands nervously grip his kite tighter, and Zitao can’t help a puzzled blink. Why approach, why apprehensive?
Still, there’s no reason to be rude, and Zitao and puts on a small smile. “I’m celebrating in my own way, I suppose.” Remembering a dead man.
“Like me!” The boy smiles and laughs, and they’re all somehow familiar, but not as practised as Zitao’s seen or heard them before. The shape of his eyes is familiar as well, the crinkle of pain in their corners, too, and perhaps his fingers, his voice…
But probably nothing more than coincidence. It’s nothing, nothing, nothing.“What’s your name?”
The boy pauses to think. “In China, my dad says I should call myself Baixian…”
A hand lands heavy on Zitao’s shoulder and Zitao jolts, looking up and behind him-it’s Yifan, grip and gaze firm. “Let’s go,” he says, jerking his head back to the city streets.
Zitao allows himself a moment to breathe. He turns back around, but the boy’s already gone.
1860
Here, they are in hiding.
The world outside fights for China’s poppies, and China is tearing itself with rebellions that stretch for years. Many things fall into decline, like populations, dynasties, morals. Everything is being fought over.
“Suddenly protective of your immortality?” Yifan says, leaning against a railing on the ship’s deck. He has that confident half-smile on his face again, and it’s one that Zitao’s learned to dislike over the centuries; for a being that takes on the appearance of a man, Yifan knows too well the patterns of the world and walks through lifetimes as if a god.
Or perhaps it is simpler than that-riches fill an ego faster than they do any container. They would not be ‘hostages’ on this bandit ship, safely away from the wars and indefinitely out at sea, were it not for all of Yifan’s bribes.
“I am, but probably not for whatever reasons you’re thinking,” Zitao answers, staring down at the ocean. Baixian’s crewmate, all those years ago, said that Baixian died of illness at sea. Maybe his body is somewhere beneath the waves. “If people end up killing for it, then we’d just be making things worse.”
“Maybe.” Yifan only shrugs, and Zitao wonders. If Baixian is among the waters, then where do the millions dead from the civil war go?
And here they are, relaxed on a ship, ignoring the suspicious stares of the crew and living excluded from the rest of the country. Here Zitao is, thinking of a dead man.
Zitao’s lips twist and sour.
1876
Zitao parts with Yifan. He is used to being part of the struggle, not detaching himself when he is completely able.
He journeys to his province just as it falls to famine and returns to a hometown that has forgotten him. Yifan’s last gift of dubiously-obtained money is left to a child descendant of Zitao’s brother, and with no one around able to spare even coins for a salary, Zitao wanders through districts and streets as if a ghost. Hunger keeps him pale. The years make his gaze worn.
His mind summons Yifan’s words just as he feels himself sink to his knees, and then he’s drowning in voices that should be dead. The trade winds are faltering, the waters are too warm. It isn’t a good idea to leave.
I am, but probably not for the reasons you’re thinking. If people end up killing for it, then we’d just be making things worse.
As usual, you look as healthy as ever. Oh, I’m envious...
…half-awake in a merchant’s home, littered with crates and jars. The air is hushed and stale, nothing stirs, and Zitao soon realizes he’s alone.
But then footsteps approach and he almost wonders if it’s-
“Baixian,” his rescuer introduces himself, for what is probably the third time.
1879
As the days pass and Zitao’s skin starts to return to a normal pallor, the house slowly empties of its crates and jars. But they’re Baixian’s things anyway, his alone, and it’s Baixian who decides where they go.
That morning, a crate of fruit disappears from the living room, and only two pieces are left on the nearby table. Baixian offers an apple to Zitao while munching on one of his own, and Zitao takes it, a bright red fruit that just fits into his hands. It’s their food for the day.
“Shouldn’t waste it, right?” Baixian sighs and looks to the boxes in the corner of the room. “I might as well give them away while I still can.”
Sitting next to Baixian on the bench, Zitao hums into his fruit. “The townspeople are lucky to have you.”
Baixian laughs at that, and this time, it’s the sound that Zitao’s always known, overly careful not to expose cracks. “It’d be nice if they think well of me before I die, yes. I know it’s a rather selfish reason.”
With a brief, admonishing look and a cocked head, Zitao continues chewing.
“I’m sure you can tell that I’m sickly,” Baixian says in answer, an arm slinging itself across his stomach. “The famine makes my pains worse, so I probably won’t take long.” He chuckles into the tense air. “Then you can keep this house to yourself, if you want to.”
“No. No, I won’t keep it, and,” Zitao swallows, “don’t say that. You’re still young.”
“You say it like you’re not.” Baixian makes a breathless smile. “You said you’re eighteen, too. Like me.” Sidestepping the topic with a line he’s heard before.
So Zitao doesn’t press it, and Baixian goes limp against him gratefully.
Zitao tells himself that it’s only Baixian’s illness that’s moving, like how Baixian only squeezes his hand back because of the pain he quietly bears. Like how the smiles Baixian gives him are bright, because he’s dying soon anyway. He fits his head on Zitao’s shoulder and Zitao accommodates as if it was meant to happen; something like fate, to which Baixian always succumbs while Zitao hasn’t for two hundred years. They shouldn’t fit against each other like this.
By next week, all the boxes and jars are gone, and only one piece of fruit is left.
1895
Yifan only nods when Zitao sees him again, as if to say I always knew you’d come back. Zitao keeps it to himself that while Yifan can predict wars with hundreds of years, Baixian can predict his death with only less than twenty.
The sight of Baixian’s death still haunts him; a quiet morning, an empty room, half-slumped at the table with only a single apple in front of him.
They need a change of scenery. Zitao volunteers Korea, a name that always came up in Baixian’s childhood stories. (The country’s queen is apparently assassinated this year, and even Yifan couldn’t have foreseen the unfortunate timing. Zitao catches his thoughts leaning towards it doesn’t matter.)
“About Baixian,” Zitao brings up as they’re en route to Seoul, looking down at the waves again.
Yifan answers swiftly. “The planet recycles people, too. Reincarnation.”
“Oh.” Not like it could’ve been much else.
“Don’t think too hard about it,” Yifan says in warning, but when Zitao blinks up at him in question, Yifan doesn’t meet his gaze and doesn’t answer.
1907
Here, Zitao is just a man, not a warrior. He fits himself into the struggle all the same, and this time, Yifan doesn’t even try to dissuade him. Battles for freedom are the ones he’s always been on the sidelines of, the ones he’d always be willing to join.
The local language’s syllables still roll foreign on his tongue, so Zitao lets the others make their own declarations. He respects them though, definitely, all of them standing together in this park, surrounded by police and raising placards to their guns. They’re frightening machines that can tear through bone before their noise can even be heard, and then there are all these people facing them of their own will.
He keeps his eyes on the men with guns, and their trigger hands are relaxed. Then he scans the crowd he’d blended himself in, one too quiet to try anything rash and one too small to inspire anyone else to the call. Disappointment wells in his chest the longer he looks around; none of the voices or faces stand out to him, and eventually, the crowd disperses.
“Did you find him?” Yifan asks as they weave through the departing masses.
Zitao furrows his brows at him. “Who?”
Yifan gives him an exasperated look. “Baixian. You don’t seem to realize that you’re setting your lifetimes by him, like you’d do with a watch.”
Just as he’s about to respond, Zitao sends a withering glance at all the people around him. None are familiar, and none of them are-
No.
1917
In the crowd of indistinct students, Baixian is like a marble on a riverbed, rolling along between the stones. Zitao’s the one who sees him first, but Baixian disappears as the demonstration begins in earnest, only to be the one to find Zitao at the end of the morning.
It’s very familiar: Zitao idling away the noontime heat on a bench, and then Baixian approaching to ask, “Not participating?”
“It’s hot,” Zitao answers, local language mixing with a bit of a miserable whine. When Zitao slaps a hand over his mouth a bit later, Baixian-this Baixian, sits next to him with a laugh. Baekhyun, he introduces himself.
Zitao tries the name on his tongue, and it clicks nicely on that juncture between the two syllables of Baekhyun’s name. “Tao,” he says back, looking up at Baekhyun and trying to smile past the sun’s glare. His eyes end up focusing on Baekhyun’s face, and he looks young, maybe a year or two younger than Baixian did at eighteen. Zitao is moving on a countdown. “Nice to meet you.”
1919
He’s used to people dying, but he’s still not used to losing them.
Yifan warns him again, just as Zitao is about to leave for the morning. Too many crowds gathering today, too many soldiers, but he does and says nothing else.
Zitao knows what it means and makes the extra effort to make it to the park, where a crowd bigger than ever before stands huddled in the center. The air is heavy with something like dust about to be stirred, and everyone is quiet, listening to a declaration of independence being read aloud. Baekhyun, speaking like he has nothing to lose. The crowd grows and grows around him, following his voice and eventually meeting his volume as well.
The soldiers shuffle into walls around the park.
Zitao looks up at Baekhyun on his platform, and Baekhyun meets his gaze.
The first shot is just a bit past noon.
Everything bursts-screams, footfalls, red, warm against Zitao’s cheek but not warmer than Baekhyun’s wrist as Zitao pulls him down to the ground. The bullets haven’t reached the center of the crowd but everyone is scattering quickly, so Zitao only meets Baekhyun’s panicked gaze once before firming his hold on Baekhyun’s wrist and breaking into a run.
“They haven’t stopped shooting yet,” Baekhyun breathes fearfully as they make it out the park, slipping his arm out of Zitao’s hand to wrap his fingers around Zitao’s palm. “Th-they normally stop once we scatter, but- “
“Don’t look back,” Zitao replies, conserving his breath. They make a turn into narrower streets along with a few others, but there are still heavy footsteps moving in pursuit.
Baekhyun screws his eyes shut. “Yeah.” Another bang from behind them, and the gurgles of pain linger in their ears. Then he opens his eyes again and they’re blurred in pain, crinkled in exhaustion, but still bright and-
He shudders out a gasp, nails digging into Zitao’s skin, and then he’s falling.
“We got him,” a soldier yells over his shoulder, and Zitao snarls.
A few of the other students stop by in an effort to lift Baekhyun up to his feet, but they fall back as the shooting draws closer and closer. A round sinks into Zitao’s shoulder, smashes the bone, but the tissues forcefully regenerate beneath his torn clothes. Another bullet shoots into his ribs and Zitao’s eyes tear as the metal is forced out in a matter of moments.
But since of Zitao’s cells are replaceable, it doesn’t matter.
He struggles to lift Baekhyun into his arms.
A shot pierces through Zitao’s hand as he stretches it out, and drops of blood splatter on Baekhyun’s cheeks. They both watch as the bullet only bites for a second before being forced out and falling to the floor.
Baekhyun’s eyes widen.
“This, I- ”
Baekhyun gasps urgently, pressing a hand to the side of his stomach, and blood is dripping from between his fingers. “Th-they’re only looking for me. If they find someone like you-if they find you, then,” he looks up, tightening his hand next to the scab already flaking from Zitao’s arm, and there is a sharp clarity in his eyes that cuts like a bayonet, “things will only… get worse. Please, go.”
Zitao doesn’t even realize he’s already on his knees. “I can’t just leave you,” he whispers, harsh into the ragged air. He presses a thumb beneath Baekhyun’s eye to wipe the blood there away, and when red starts to trickle from the corner of Baekhyun’s mouth, they all start to mix; Zitao’s blood, Baekhyun’s blood, Baekhyun’s pained tears.
“If you’ve been living with that ability,” Baekhyun closes his eyes, “then I’m sure you can.”
And he goes utterly still.
Zitao falls to his hands and knees, breathes in dirt and dust, a sharp metallic tang of blood. A hand he can’t see or feel squeezes his throat and chest. He gets up and runs.
1945
They sit through the second war that engulfs the entire world, and Zitao has to grit his teeth the entire time to keep himself from joining the fray. At some point he starts finding Baekhyun in random towns as well and knows that at least one of those is probably right, but he remembers Baekhyun in his death and Baixian in his, all of them, like path-lightning lanterns that go out halfway through the journey. Baekhyun is someone he’s seen in so many lifetimes but could never save.
Zitao knows that Baekhyun can’t remember, so he keeps himself guilty instead. It’s killing through inaction, and really, he’s done less for others in two hundred years than Baekhyun has in eighteen.
“I thought I already told you to stop thinking so hard,” Yifan says, voice light but words coming out a bit compressed, like he’s bracing himself.
“I’m not,” Zitao replies. A decision comes to his mind immediately and naturally, like it was meant to be. Something like fate. (Zitao falls to it, too.)
2010
“Your roles keep getting younger and younger,” Yifan tells him over breakfast one day, nursing a mug of tea. “You might have to be born again at some point.”
Zitao’s used to only chuckling at Yifan’s dry jokes, but he’s busy pulling on his uniform, straightening folds and wrinkles. Now, he is a student.
“Baekhyun attends that school, by the way.”
“I know. I kept having urges to walk by its campus, so it must have meant something.”
Yifan says nothing to that, only taking another sip from his cup. He casually tosses a goodbye in Zitao’s way when he’s putting on his shoes at the doorway, but there is a finality and a concession in Yifan’s posture that Zitao only understands once he comes back in the afternoon.
The only other person with him in the apartment is Baekhyun.
Like this, the two of them still aren’t quite friends, but he catches Baekhyun’s arm consciously snaking around his waist again and Zitao holds onto Baekhyun’s wrist to stop it. He remembers them all, Baekhyun, Baixian, leaving him, wonders what must be there in Baekhyun’s stomach, and leans forward to tentatively brush his lips across the fragile skin. He wants to remove the pain.
“Why me?” Baekhyun asks, arm across his eyes and hand on Zitao’s shoulder.
It’s the shoulder that was shot all those years ago, and Zitao remembers the wound like it on Baekhyun’s abdomen, raw and dripping red on the pavement. He finds no trace of it here and brings his lips to where it once was instead, in remembrance of how Baekhyun had already sacrificed so much. For Zitao, it’s enough.
But now he’s thinking too hard. “I don’t know either,” he says instead, in lieu of everything that could have come out like a tide.
Baekhyun mumbles into the back of his wrist. "I just… because I'm so sick…"
"I'm not your friend because you’re sick.” And he’s being honest.
They kiss a few days later, and it happens like it was meant to, a certain pressure that lingers on Zitao’s lips. Baekhyun is meant to be here, and here he is. With him.
2011
“I’ll bury you well,” Yifan tells him, posed as a doctor when they see each other again in the morgue. Zitao can’t even smile this time.
Baekhyun is lying on a bed, draped over with a cloth that obscures him completely. Zitao peels it back, places a hand on Baekhyun’s gown-covered stomach, and then takes Baekhyun’s cold, frozen hand; it feels fragile and precious in his hold, like the quiet, and like the feel of Baekhyun beneath Zitao’s lips.
“Thank you,” he says. For forgiving and forgetting, for being kind and strong, for being there. All the things that never needed to be said and were never demanded.
Zitao closes his eyes and lets himself sink.
The first thing Baekhyun feels is the gentle warmth in his hand, like the radiating glow from a flame. He looks at his palm to find a star imprinted on his skin, to the doctor watching from the foot of his bed, then to his fingers, tangled around Zitao’s own. Maybe he can pretend that Zitao’s just sleeping slumped to the floor, but his hand is cold, and something in him starts to ache.
When he presses an arm to his stomach, he finds that the pain is in his chest instead.
Written by: portaldice
A remix of " Again, Today, I Reach Out My Hand" by metafictionally
Pairing: Baekhyun/Tao
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: Death, illness, violence
Summary: From 1592 to 2011, Zitao moves through lifetimes, and Baekhyun meets him every step of the way.
1592
Here, they call Zitao a warrior.
The man who arms himself last is the one Zitao watches, all frail fingers, sinking skin, brittle bone. His shoulders are set like he is ready for war, but the limp he tries to hide from his step is something else, and Zitao turns to Yifan with soft, low words. “That man isn’t meant for war.”
Yifan passes this on to the man at his other side, and then returns what he gets in reply. “He is supposedly ailing and cursed to die early, even without war.”
As condemned by who? There are no gods among the planet’s men, especially ones with time to idly measure lives. But Zitao holds his tongue, only nodding in reply-
And he meets the pained man’s eyes, blurred, crinkled, but shining and bright.
With a tug on his horse’s reins, Zitao inhales and turns away.
1598
Zitao wakes up in a dim room that smells of rot, and for a moment, he mistakes Yifan standing at his bedside to be an angel passing judgement.
He puts an uneasy, heavy hand to his chest. A piece of the arrow is still there, splintered through bone, and blood is pushing against his teeth like a tide. His nerves are numbing over. Somehow, he isn’t breathing.
“The cursed man searched for you on the battlefield and brought you here, both tasks on my request.” Yifan puts on a small smile that looks unnatural, almost a pained one. “Best that the one doomed to die early be the only one to know where you last were, after all.”
He turns around before Zitao can cobble together a reply, calling someone over with a wave of his hand. Zitao catches sight of a shape stamped onto Yifan’s palm, sharp lines curled into a serpent with wings, and his head flares and pounds.
But what reaches out for him is some other man’s hand, some other palm with another red shape. It settles on Zitao’s cheek like a comforting touch and Zitao nearly succumbs to the pain, body drowning itself from the inside out, but the man runs his thumb beneath Zitao’s eye and makes a tired, relieved laugh. “Thank you, for all of my lives. Each and every one…”
Then Zitao chokes in a breath, as if resurfacing from the sea-
1644
The new dynasty begins, and Zitao outlives all of his family. When his skin never sags and his wounds never stay, everything else seems fragile in comparison, but there is no rebuilding and growing without destruction and Zitao doesn’t want the world to leave him behind.
“Which is why we travel,” Yifan replies when Zitao tells him. “In this lifetime, you are a warrior. Now leave it behind and choose something else.”
Funny Yifan mentions choice. The hourglass now drawn on Zitao’s palm is a responsibility that he did not choose to have. When his vision swims in mortal pain and immortality is dangled in front of his face, what other decision would his instincts leap to?
Perhaps that was why… “That man all those years ago, with the star drawn on his hand.” Zitao loosely closes his fist. “What did he choose?”
“What he chose to spend his lives on?” Yifan squints at the sea before him, searching for their ship, but he spares a moment to lightly shrug his shoulders. “Ink, for the last few of them. He was always busy painting on that inordinately long scroll.”
1736
So here they are, a painter and a scholar. They’re unknown and barely on the rungs of the elite, but it’s comfortable enough, and when the time comes it’ll be easy to pull away.
Zitao has fine control of his body that goes down to his fingers, good for battle and perfect for recapturing the littlest of details in ink. But this is his own way of paying respects to the man he’d inadvertently killed and not much else-if not the battlefield or the barracks, he has no idea where else to go.
“Stop thinking about it,” Yifan says, almost in response to Zitao’s uneasiness. “Your brush is pressing too hard. Even if he died, that man gave you his gift willingly.”
So immortality is a gift. Zitao thins his lips. “Baixian will be arriving soon to claim the finished paintings. ”Please don’t talk about this, he means to say
Yifan’s face sets as if he wants to roll his eyes. Instead, “Baixian?”
“A merchant. He sells my works for me.” Zitao pauses and turns to Yifan behind him, allowing a view of the hand scroll beneath his brush. The Yellow River stretches long even on paper, and on a measure of its shores, the city is alive with Qingming festivities. “I’m working on a replica of the painting given to the Emperor, like you said that man used to do.”
“Unbelievable.” Yifan half-smiles anyway. “Be careful not to let anyone else find that.”
Approaching footsteps start to sound from outside, and the upward tilt in Zitao’s lips grows. “They haven’t for years.”
Yifan’s gone by the time Baixian arrives, and Baixian smiles bright, pale cheeks curving up with his eyes.
1739
Between assorted requests and commissions, Zitao steadily adds to his painting of Bianjing and the river that cuts it in half. He can’t work as fast as a team of court painters can, but he has more time than any of them, never needing to eat or sleep. Perhaps he can finish this in that stranger’s stead.
He still feels the pangs and fatigue, though. Baixian catches him once as he’s dozing off with his hand hovering above the brushes.
“Got some loaves from the West. The bread’s crunchy and different, but it tastes wonderful all the same.” Baixian places a pouch of what sounds like coins on one corner of Zitao’s painting table, then offers an oval-shaped slice with a smile. “Want some?” he says, nibbling on a piece of his own.
Zitao takes it, and Baixian settles next to him, looking at the hand scroll rolled out on the floor. He mutters estimations of prices and values, and Zitao can only dazedly manage to say, “Have you been to Bianjing?”
Baixian pauses and cocks an eyebrow. “The capital? Well, yes.”
Zitao inclines his head in the direction of the unfinished painting. “So that’s Bianjing along the river, right?”
“I suppose so… Wait.” Baixian straightens and fixes his gaze on Zitao’s own. “You mean to say that you’re painting a city you’ve never been to?”
“We paint dragons, yet we’ve never seen them ourselves,” Zitao answers in defense, cheeks starting to tinge.
“You know that’s different.” Baixian chuckles, propping himself up on one arm and pressing the other against his stomach. “It’s just that I’m there rather often; if you have spare time, I’m sure my father wouldn’t mind me bringing one person along.”
Zitao has all the time in the world. “Thank you,” he answers, popping the last of the bread slice into his mouth. He gives Baixian a small smile before again picking up his brush, and Baixian scoots closer to watch, jokingly requesting to be painted into the Bianjing crowd.
1740
“Believe me, the paintings are selling rather well,” Baixian says when he arrives again. “You’re earning a name for yourself.”
Zitao’s brush hand freezes at that. He’s not unknown.
Do they have to go?
But Baixian doesn’t see it, settling on another seat next to Zitao’s table. “As usual, you look as healthy as ever. Oh, I’m envious.” He chuckles, and the sound squeezes itself out of his throat like how his hand squeezes his stomach, pressing as though the laugh might accidentally slip out there and be lost. The corner of his eye twitches. His laugh ends just as it gets strangled.
(Perfect for recapturing the littlest of details-)
“Are you alright?” Zitao places his brush down and moves to Baixian’s side, hand wresting Baixian’s squeezing one from his abdomen. Don’t press it, he thinks he says, but he is more aware of Baixian’s fingers, skin thin like creased paper and knuckles wide amongst his bones. Frail fingers, sinking skin, brittle bone.
Zitao’s throat dries.
Baixian shakes his head, eyes closing in his pained smile. Then they open and Zitao sees them shining with pain and so familiar.
They have to go.
1842
Baixian doesn’t return after that, and Zitao tells himself that it’s for the best.
He visits the capital during Qingming Festival. Yifan is off looking through the stores, but Zitao watches the people instead, all of them sweeping gravestones and offering alms. His family’s graves are in the next province over, so Zitao can only recline against the trees and wait.
“Not celebrating, mister?” a boy asks, accent tinging his words and drawing near with timid footsteps. His small hands nervously grip his kite tighter, and Zitao can’t help a puzzled blink. Why approach, why apprehensive?
Still, there’s no reason to be rude, and Zitao and puts on a small smile. “I’m celebrating in my own way, I suppose.” Remembering a dead man.
“Like me!” The boy smiles and laughs, and they’re all somehow familiar, but not as practised as Zitao’s seen or heard them before. The shape of his eyes is familiar as well, the crinkle of pain in their corners, too, and perhaps his fingers, his voice…
But probably nothing more than coincidence. It’s nothing, nothing, nothing.“What’s your name?”
The boy pauses to think. “In China, my dad says I should call myself Baixian…”
A hand lands heavy on Zitao’s shoulder and Zitao jolts, looking up and behind him-it’s Yifan, grip and gaze firm. “Let’s go,” he says, jerking his head back to the city streets.
Zitao allows himself a moment to breathe. He turns back around, but the boy’s already gone.
1860
Here, they are in hiding.
The world outside fights for China’s poppies, and China is tearing itself with rebellions that stretch for years. Many things fall into decline, like populations, dynasties, morals. Everything is being fought over.
“Suddenly protective of your immortality?” Yifan says, leaning against a railing on the ship’s deck. He has that confident half-smile on his face again, and it’s one that Zitao’s learned to dislike over the centuries; for a being that takes on the appearance of a man, Yifan knows too well the patterns of the world and walks through lifetimes as if a god.
Or perhaps it is simpler than that-riches fill an ego faster than they do any container. They would not be ‘hostages’ on this bandit ship, safely away from the wars and indefinitely out at sea, were it not for all of Yifan’s bribes.
“I am, but probably not for whatever reasons you’re thinking,” Zitao answers, staring down at the ocean. Baixian’s crewmate, all those years ago, said that Baixian died of illness at sea. Maybe his body is somewhere beneath the waves. “If people end up killing for it, then we’d just be making things worse.”
“Maybe.” Yifan only shrugs, and Zitao wonders. If Baixian is among the waters, then where do the millions dead from the civil war go?
And here they are, relaxed on a ship, ignoring the suspicious stares of the crew and living excluded from the rest of the country. Here Zitao is, thinking of a dead man.
Zitao’s lips twist and sour.
1876
Zitao parts with Yifan. He is used to being part of the struggle, not detaching himself when he is completely able.
He journeys to his province just as it falls to famine and returns to a hometown that has forgotten him. Yifan’s last gift of dubiously-obtained money is left to a child descendant of Zitao’s brother, and with no one around able to spare even coins for a salary, Zitao wanders through districts and streets as if a ghost. Hunger keeps him pale. The years make his gaze worn.
His mind summons Yifan’s words just as he feels himself sink to his knees, and then he’s drowning in voices that should be dead. The trade winds are faltering, the waters are too warm. It isn’t a good idea to leave.
I am, but probably not for the reasons you’re thinking. If people end up killing for it, then we’d just be making things worse.
As usual, you look as healthy as ever. Oh, I’m envious...
…half-awake in a merchant’s home, littered with crates and jars. The air is hushed and stale, nothing stirs, and Zitao soon realizes he’s alone.
But then footsteps approach and he almost wonders if it’s-
“Baixian,” his rescuer introduces himself, for what is probably the third time.
1879
As the days pass and Zitao’s skin starts to return to a normal pallor, the house slowly empties of its crates and jars. But they’re Baixian’s things anyway, his alone, and it’s Baixian who decides where they go.
That morning, a crate of fruit disappears from the living room, and only two pieces are left on the nearby table. Baixian offers an apple to Zitao while munching on one of his own, and Zitao takes it, a bright red fruit that just fits into his hands. It’s their food for the day.
“Shouldn’t waste it, right?” Baixian sighs and looks to the boxes in the corner of the room. “I might as well give them away while I still can.”
Sitting next to Baixian on the bench, Zitao hums into his fruit. “The townspeople are lucky to have you.”
Baixian laughs at that, and this time, it’s the sound that Zitao’s always known, overly careful not to expose cracks. “It’d be nice if they think well of me before I die, yes. I know it’s a rather selfish reason.”
With a brief, admonishing look and a cocked head, Zitao continues chewing.
“I’m sure you can tell that I’m sickly,” Baixian says in answer, an arm slinging itself across his stomach. “The famine makes my pains worse, so I probably won’t take long.” He chuckles into the tense air. “Then you can keep this house to yourself, if you want to.”
“No. No, I won’t keep it, and,” Zitao swallows, “don’t say that. You’re still young.”
“You say it like you’re not.” Baixian makes a breathless smile. “You said you’re eighteen, too. Like me.” Sidestepping the topic with a line he’s heard before.
So Zitao doesn’t press it, and Baixian goes limp against him gratefully.
Zitao tells himself that it’s only Baixian’s illness that’s moving, like how Baixian only squeezes his hand back because of the pain he quietly bears. Like how the smiles Baixian gives him are bright, because he’s dying soon anyway. He fits his head on Zitao’s shoulder and Zitao accommodates as if it was meant to happen; something like fate, to which Baixian always succumbs while Zitao hasn’t for two hundred years. They shouldn’t fit against each other like this.
By next week, all the boxes and jars are gone, and only one piece of fruit is left.
1895
Yifan only nods when Zitao sees him again, as if to say I always knew you’d come back. Zitao keeps it to himself that while Yifan can predict wars with hundreds of years, Baixian can predict his death with only less than twenty.
The sight of Baixian’s death still haunts him; a quiet morning, an empty room, half-slumped at the table with only a single apple in front of him.
They need a change of scenery. Zitao volunteers Korea, a name that always came up in Baixian’s childhood stories. (The country’s queen is apparently assassinated this year, and even Yifan couldn’t have foreseen the unfortunate timing. Zitao catches his thoughts leaning towards it doesn’t matter.)
“About Baixian,” Zitao brings up as they’re en route to Seoul, looking down at the waves again.
Yifan answers swiftly. “The planet recycles people, too. Reincarnation.”
“Oh.” Not like it could’ve been much else.
“Don’t think too hard about it,” Yifan says in warning, but when Zitao blinks up at him in question, Yifan doesn’t meet his gaze and doesn’t answer.
1907
Here, Zitao is just a man, not a warrior. He fits himself into the struggle all the same, and this time, Yifan doesn’t even try to dissuade him. Battles for freedom are the ones he’s always been on the sidelines of, the ones he’d always be willing to join.
The local language’s syllables still roll foreign on his tongue, so Zitao lets the others make their own declarations. He respects them though, definitely, all of them standing together in this park, surrounded by police and raising placards to their guns. They’re frightening machines that can tear through bone before their noise can even be heard, and then there are all these people facing them of their own will.
He keeps his eyes on the men with guns, and their trigger hands are relaxed. Then he scans the crowd he’d blended himself in, one too quiet to try anything rash and one too small to inspire anyone else to the call. Disappointment wells in his chest the longer he looks around; none of the voices or faces stand out to him, and eventually, the crowd disperses.
“Did you find him?” Yifan asks as they weave through the departing masses.
Zitao furrows his brows at him. “Who?”
Yifan gives him an exasperated look. “Baixian. You don’t seem to realize that you’re setting your lifetimes by him, like you’d do with a watch.”
Just as he’s about to respond, Zitao sends a withering glance at all the people around him. None are familiar, and none of them are-
No.
1917
In the crowd of indistinct students, Baixian is like a marble on a riverbed, rolling along between the stones. Zitao’s the one who sees him first, but Baixian disappears as the demonstration begins in earnest, only to be the one to find Zitao at the end of the morning.
It’s very familiar: Zitao idling away the noontime heat on a bench, and then Baixian approaching to ask, “Not participating?”
“It’s hot,” Zitao answers, local language mixing with a bit of a miserable whine. When Zitao slaps a hand over his mouth a bit later, Baixian-this Baixian, sits next to him with a laugh. Baekhyun, he introduces himself.
Zitao tries the name on his tongue, and it clicks nicely on that juncture between the two syllables of Baekhyun’s name. “Tao,” he says back, looking up at Baekhyun and trying to smile past the sun’s glare. His eyes end up focusing on Baekhyun’s face, and he looks young, maybe a year or two younger than Baixian did at eighteen. Zitao is moving on a countdown. “Nice to meet you.”
1919
He’s used to people dying, but he’s still not used to losing them.
Yifan warns him again, just as Zitao is about to leave for the morning. Too many crowds gathering today, too many soldiers, but he does and says nothing else.
Zitao knows what it means and makes the extra effort to make it to the park, where a crowd bigger than ever before stands huddled in the center. The air is heavy with something like dust about to be stirred, and everyone is quiet, listening to a declaration of independence being read aloud. Baekhyun, speaking like he has nothing to lose. The crowd grows and grows around him, following his voice and eventually meeting his volume as well.
The soldiers shuffle into walls around the park.
Zitao looks up at Baekhyun on his platform, and Baekhyun meets his gaze.
The first shot is just a bit past noon.
Everything bursts-screams, footfalls, red, warm against Zitao’s cheek but not warmer than Baekhyun’s wrist as Zitao pulls him down to the ground. The bullets haven’t reached the center of the crowd but everyone is scattering quickly, so Zitao only meets Baekhyun’s panicked gaze once before firming his hold on Baekhyun’s wrist and breaking into a run.
“They haven’t stopped shooting yet,” Baekhyun breathes fearfully as they make it out the park, slipping his arm out of Zitao’s hand to wrap his fingers around Zitao’s palm. “Th-they normally stop once we scatter, but- “
“Don’t look back,” Zitao replies, conserving his breath. They make a turn into narrower streets along with a few others, but there are still heavy footsteps moving in pursuit.
Baekhyun screws his eyes shut. “Yeah.” Another bang from behind them, and the gurgles of pain linger in their ears. Then he opens his eyes again and they’re blurred in pain, crinkled in exhaustion, but still bright and-
He shudders out a gasp, nails digging into Zitao’s skin, and then he’s falling.
“We got him,” a soldier yells over his shoulder, and Zitao snarls.
A few of the other students stop by in an effort to lift Baekhyun up to his feet, but they fall back as the shooting draws closer and closer. A round sinks into Zitao’s shoulder, smashes the bone, but the tissues forcefully regenerate beneath his torn clothes. Another bullet shoots into his ribs and Zitao’s eyes tear as the metal is forced out in a matter of moments.
But since of Zitao’s cells are replaceable, it doesn’t matter.
He struggles to lift Baekhyun into his arms.
A shot pierces through Zitao’s hand as he stretches it out, and drops of blood splatter on Baekhyun’s cheeks. They both watch as the bullet only bites for a second before being forced out and falling to the floor.
Baekhyun’s eyes widen.
“This, I- ”
Baekhyun gasps urgently, pressing a hand to the side of his stomach, and blood is dripping from between his fingers. “Th-they’re only looking for me. If they find someone like you-if they find you, then,” he looks up, tightening his hand next to the scab already flaking from Zitao’s arm, and there is a sharp clarity in his eyes that cuts like a bayonet, “things will only… get worse. Please, go.”
Zitao doesn’t even realize he’s already on his knees. “I can’t just leave you,” he whispers, harsh into the ragged air. He presses a thumb beneath Baekhyun’s eye to wipe the blood there away, and when red starts to trickle from the corner of Baekhyun’s mouth, they all start to mix; Zitao’s blood, Baekhyun’s blood, Baekhyun’s pained tears.
“If you’ve been living with that ability,” Baekhyun closes his eyes, “then I’m sure you can.”
And he goes utterly still.
Zitao falls to his hands and knees, breathes in dirt and dust, a sharp metallic tang of blood. A hand he can’t see or feel squeezes his throat and chest. He gets up and runs.
1945
They sit through the second war that engulfs the entire world, and Zitao has to grit his teeth the entire time to keep himself from joining the fray. At some point he starts finding Baekhyun in random towns as well and knows that at least one of those is probably right, but he remembers Baekhyun in his death and Baixian in his, all of them, like path-lightning lanterns that go out halfway through the journey. Baekhyun is someone he’s seen in so many lifetimes but could never save.
Zitao knows that Baekhyun can’t remember, so he keeps himself guilty instead. It’s killing through inaction, and really, he’s done less for others in two hundred years than Baekhyun has in eighteen.
“I thought I already told you to stop thinking so hard,” Yifan says, voice light but words coming out a bit compressed, like he’s bracing himself.
“I’m not,” Zitao replies. A decision comes to his mind immediately and naturally, like it was meant to be. Something like fate. (Zitao falls to it, too.)
2010
“Your roles keep getting younger and younger,” Yifan tells him over breakfast one day, nursing a mug of tea. “You might have to be born again at some point.”
Zitao’s used to only chuckling at Yifan’s dry jokes, but he’s busy pulling on his uniform, straightening folds and wrinkles. Now, he is a student.
“Baekhyun attends that school, by the way.”
“I know. I kept having urges to walk by its campus, so it must have meant something.”
Yifan says nothing to that, only taking another sip from his cup. He casually tosses a goodbye in Zitao’s way when he’s putting on his shoes at the doorway, but there is a finality and a concession in Yifan’s posture that Zitao only understands once he comes back in the afternoon.
The only other person with him in the apartment is Baekhyun.
Like this, the two of them still aren’t quite friends, but he catches Baekhyun’s arm consciously snaking around his waist again and Zitao holds onto Baekhyun’s wrist to stop it. He remembers them all, Baekhyun, Baixian, leaving him, wonders what must be there in Baekhyun’s stomach, and leans forward to tentatively brush his lips across the fragile skin. He wants to remove the pain.
“Why me?” Baekhyun asks, arm across his eyes and hand on Zitao’s shoulder.
It’s the shoulder that was shot all those years ago, and Zitao remembers the wound like it on Baekhyun’s abdomen, raw and dripping red on the pavement. He finds no trace of it here and brings his lips to where it once was instead, in remembrance of how Baekhyun had already sacrificed so much. For Zitao, it’s enough.
But now he’s thinking too hard. “I don’t know either,” he says instead, in lieu of everything that could have come out like a tide.
Baekhyun mumbles into the back of his wrist. "I just… because I'm so sick…"
"I'm not your friend because you’re sick.” And he’s being honest.
They kiss a few days later, and it happens like it was meant to, a certain pressure that lingers on Zitao’s lips. Baekhyun is meant to be here, and here he is. With him.
2011
“I’ll bury you well,” Yifan tells him, posed as a doctor when they see each other again in the morgue. Zitao can’t even smile this time.
Baekhyun is lying on a bed, draped over with a cloth that obscures him completely. Zitao peels it back, places a hand on Baekhyun’s gown-covered stomach, and then takes Baekhyun’s cold, frozen hand; it feels fragile and precious in his hold, like the quiet, and like the feel of Baekhyun beneath Zitao’s lips.
“Thank you,” he says. For forgiving and forgetting, for being kind and strong, for being there. All the things that never needed to be said and were never demanded.
Zitao closes his eyes and lets himself sink.
The first thing Baekhyun feels is the gentle warmth in his hand, like the radiating glow from a flame. He looks at his palm to find a star imprinted on his skin, to the doctor watching from the foot of his bed, then to his fingers, tangled around Zitao’s own. Maybe he can pretend that Zitao’s just sleeping slumped to the floor, but his hand is cold, and something in him starts to ache.
When he presses an arm to his stomach, he finds that the pain is in his chest instead.