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Xie Lian woke vomiting up soil. It was clumpy and gritty between his teeth, stringy with the remains of dead things. The mildew smell of leaves becoming soil filled his nose, crept in and wrapped itself around the inside of his skull.
He opened his eyes slowly. His vomit was as brown as excrement—an insect waved its legs, crawling free from—he blinked hard, feeling blurry and displaced—
His vomit was yellowish red. Fragments of half-digested food, pieces of spongy tissue.
"Oh," he said, and started to laugh, the feeling of it rasping in his sour throat.
He couldn't shake the smell. He found himself sniffing his clothes, fretting about whether the hangings in the bedroom he shared with Hua Cheng needed to be cleaned. He thought for a time the smell might be coming from his hair, and then considered the neatly sculpted pond in the courtyard outside their rooms.
That hadn't been it either—and in fact being outside felt a little better than sitting under a roof, and so he stayed there, reading, well into the afternoon.
"Just a bad dream," he told Hua Cheng distractedly, when Hua Cheng gave him a long concerned look.
Hua Cheng had missed the moment when he'd woken—had been away dealing with one of the minor problems that he hated thinking about so but fixed diligently anyway—and it was more difficult to name the shape of what troubled him with distance than it would have been in the immediate shaky aftermath.
"Tell me," Hua Cheng said. He pressed a kiss to Xie Lian's forehead
"Not yet," Xie Lian said. "The air's nice. Sit with me."
"What's gege reading?" Hua Cheng asked, slinging himself down at Xie Lian's side, and the fragility of Xie Lian's heart eased. His ribs expanded, with nothing to compress them.
The bed, curtained, was an open mouth. It gaped. Red tongue and rot-dark teeth.
"Let's go to Mount Taicang," Xie Lian said.
Hua Cheng, robe sliding from his lovely shoulder, glanced back at Xie Lian with a small frown. "Now?"
"Now," Xie Lian agreed. "If that's alright with San Lang?"
"Anything gege wants," Hua Cheng said, twitching his robe closed again and holding out one hand—while the other produced, as if from nowhere, those familiar dice.
The sky opened up and the land fell away. Was a mountaintop the opposite of a grave? The wind caught at their clothes and their hair. Xie Lian imagined letting it carry dreams off with it, stripping them away like dust from a rug.
He kissed Hua Cheng with the ruins of his childhood just out of sight, kissed him out in the open. Flattened his palms on Hua Cheng's chest. A ghost, too, might be the opposite of a grave—from a certain point of view.
He straddled Hua Cheng, pushing him down onto his back. A paved path half-remembered itself under them—mostly even but moss-heavy, root-cracked. Xie Lian didn't bother to try and remember which path it was, to which house or temple it had belonged. It was nobody's now—was the mountain's, was the deer's. Xie Lian let himself be the sky, and bent to kiss the earth—Hua Cheng's smiling red mouth, sharp-toothed.
"San Lang, San Lang," he gasped. "Do you want to—like this—?"
Hua Cheng was wide-eyed, but his hands were eager, grasping at Xie Lian's hip, at his thigh. He was deft in undoing fastenings—deft in catching the loose open outer robe Xie Lian had been wearing as the wind tried to claim it.
Xie Lian bowed to kiss him again, laughing into his mouth. The opposite of the grave.
They woke in the orchards. No roof, Xie Lian had said, urgent, and Hua Cheng had agreed. He had carried their sleeping mat out from the little house, and then he'd taken Xie Lian out in the open for a second time. When Xie Lian rode him he went so deep, shatteringly perfectly deep, and if Xie Lian still wasn't content then Hua Cheng could always find a way to give him more. Shift his body's shape by increments until Xie Lian was so full that he didn't need to think any more, or use some toy or other of his own devising.
No roof. The sun spilled across them. Oh, Xie Lian thought—poor San Lang, he won't like so much light.
He pushed himself up to sit, made sure his shadow fell across Hua Cheng's face.
It must have been an anniversary day, yesterday—or close enough. He often forgot those things, but his body seemed to remember—chose the right time of year to feel torn apart inside, to feel suffocated by earth, to feel a noose around his neck that couldn't kill him.
"Will gege tell me now?" Hua Cheng asked. They had gathered sweet summer fruit from trees and bushes, piling it into the cradle of Xie Lian's discarded outer robe to take with them down to Puqi Village.
"Does it matter?" Xie Lian asked. "Ah—sorry—sorry, San Lang."
"The things that hurt you matter," Hua Cheng said. He sighed, glancing away.
"It just isn't anything nice," Xie Lian said carefully. "And it was a long time ago."
Hua Cheng waited for him. Xie Lian picked a small peach from their gathered pile, stroked his thumb slowly across it.
"I'm glad you didn't see me pull myself from that place," he said. "That—the grave. I was cruel enough to you when you were Wu Ming. I might have been cruel then too. Not—not the same way. But I was quite mad."
He held the peach out, and Hua Cheng bit obediently into it—lapped juice from Xie Lian's wrist—nipped him lightly.
"I hope San Lang has never been buried like that," he said, almost to himself.
"Never," Hua Cheng promised.
The inside of the kiln—they were both thinking about it. It was a different horror. A different kind of choking.
"Not breathing was bad," Xie Lian said. His skin prickled with goose-flesh. "The darkness—everything trying to—to cave in. I think the insects might have been the worst, though. Some only care for dead meat, but some don't mind either way."
He tipped his head up to the sky. The crawling feeling of invasion—small lives squeezing through parts of a body that should be sealed. They were trying to exist, only trying to exist—it wasn't their fault.
"Gege," Hua Cheng said. He sounded devastated.
"You see? Nothing good."
Xie Lian looked at his arms. Healthy skin. Nothing crawled under it. Insects here touched him and flitted away, knowing he had little for them and surrounded by so much they could eat.
The half-eaten peach tumbled away down the slope for the insects to have. To burrow into and soften and pick apart. Hua Cheng crushed Xie Lian against him, buried his face in Xie Lian's hair.
"It's alright, San Lang," Xie Lian said. "It's alright. It really was very long ago. I don't mind much any more—it just—it's a little closer sometimes. You know?"
"I know," Hua Cheng mumbled. "I know."
"Let's go inside," Xie Lian said. He patted Hua Cheng's warm head. "Before the sun makes my poor San Lang's skin all tender."